More Owl Activity

Shortly after sundown on Saturday there was a lot of owl activity at the nest box. Male, female, male & female all in the box at various times over a period of about 30 minutes. That's another good sign that nesting will take place in the box this year.

Picking on Perfectly Nice Squirrels

One part I hate about maintaining the owl nest box cam' is picking on squirrels, critters of which I'm quite fond. Unfortunately, one moved into the nest box yesterday night, though I noticed too late to do anything about that. Tonight, there were two squirrels curled-up in the box, but this time I noticed early enough to go through the drill of unrolling all the cables, bringing down the nest box, opening it up, evicting the squirrels, closing it up, hoisting the box back into its mount in the tree, and rolling up and stowing all of the cables.

No fun for me, or the squirrels.

On the plus side, it did give me a chance to do an extra cleaning of the interior, including a complete replacement of the bedding materials. The metaphorical ball is once again in the owls' court.

Nest Site Preparation in the Owl Box

By chance, I tuned to the owl nest box channel on my TV this morning around 1:20 AM, and noticed a screech owl's head in the entryway. The owl spent a long time there, staring at various things, then jumped onto the perch inside the box. From there the owl did a lot more staring at things, and finally hopped down to the floor of the box. There, the owl began shoving and kicking the bedding material toward the sides of the box, in order to create a depression in the middle. Once that was done, the owl returned to the entryway, and exited several minutes later. The whole visit probably lasted 20-30 minutes.

This screech owl was obviously a female making preparations for egg laying (creating that depression in the bedding is as close as screech owls come to nest building). So, I don't know when nesting will begin, but it looks very likely that there will be nesting in the box this year.

Stay tuned.

Swaying in the Wind

I'm currently in my office on the 25th floor of the U.T. Austin Tower and a thunderstorm is blowing through Austin. According to NOAA the wind is 25-35 MPH, gusting to 50 MPH. The building has begun to oscillate very slowly. Pictures hanging on my wall are moving back and forth, a christmas ornament hanging above my desk is moving in small circles, and the panes of glass in the window appear to be flexing in and out. I've been in the Tower for years, but have never felt it move until now. Wild.

The Original Macintosh vs. Boot Sector Viruses

My discussion of the absence of boot sector viruses from the original Macintosh gets good coverage today over at Roughly Drafted. Since the Mac community is currently celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Mac's introduction, the timing is even apropos.

For those not familiar with my history in the Macintosh anti-virus world, I wrote the Gatekeeper anti-virus system.

True story: As I was working up to the first release of Gatekeeper, I interviewed with Apple for a job. At that time, working at Apple looked to me like the holy grail of jobs, so I went into the interview nervous as hell, but with high hopes. In order to demonstrate the various Mac software that I had developed, I brought along a hard disk, and booted one of their Macs from it. When the Gatekeeper icon appeared on the startup screen, nobody recognized it, so they asked what it was and I explained that it was a generic anti-virus system I was developing that could defeat viruses without any prior knowledge of them, because it watched the behavior of software for actions likely to be unique to viruses, and prevented those behaviors from successfully completing. I was laughed at, and was not offered the job.

The nitwits at Apple notwithstanding, Gatekeeper did work. It wasn't a perfect solution (of course), but it did, among other things, result in the first detection of at least one, and possibly several, viruses. (After 15+ years, I'm a bit vague on the specifics.) And, in the last several years, it has been dusted-off and cited as prior art in order to invalidate at least one software patent.

Nest Box Preparations

To prepare the screech owl nest box for the possibility of nesting by my local screech owls, as of this evening, I've now evicted various numbers of squirrels from the box three times, have opened-up and cleaned the camera compartments, and have repaired a broken wire from the entryway sensor. So, the box is being kept available to, and ready for, the owls, should a pair choose to claim it this year.

Unfortunately, I still haven't setup the A-to-D converter board I bought to replace the one that burned-out a few years ago, so I have no data on whether, or not, the box is being visited. Hopefully, I'll work-up the energy to do that soon. And this time, I really must use an optoisolator in the circuit.

Otherwise, the only remaining problem with the setup is a semi-persistent humming noise on the audio circuit. It has bedeviled me ever since I put a microphone in the box. I assume that it's a grounding issue, but I've grounded everything I can think of to the common household ground and the problem still occurs. The intermittency of the problem makes trial-and-error resolution especially difficult, although I've pretty much run out of ideas, anyway. Needless to say, I'm open to suggestions from anyone with relevant experience.

Black Zones

NASA's Wayne Hale offers a fascinating discussion of the "black zones" in crewed spaceflight - the periods during flight when saving the crew from an emergency is impossible, and how the various types of vehicles we've flown over the years compare. (The original blog postings can be found at NASA Blogs, but SpaceRef has performed a useful service by collecting the multiple segments of the "Black Zones" piece into a single page.)