Archive for September, 2009

Great Meadows

Monday, September 7th, 2009

We chose to celebrate Labor day with a stroll through Great Meadows. There were plentiful birds – including a Merlin I didn’t get a good shot of – and of course there were plenty of Herons and Egrets:

Great Egret

Great Egret

[caption id="attachment_111" align="aligncenter" width="150" caption="Great Blue"]Great Blue[/caption]

This fellow was perched on the edge of the small channel that still runs through the right-hand pool. The water levels were pretty low on both sides.

Great Blue

Great Blue

It was a lovely day to be outside:

A beautiful day at Great Meadows

A beautiful day at Great Meadows

On the way out we saw some frogs – here’s the bigger one:

Frog at Great Meadows

Frog at Great Meadows

and we also saw a turtle:

Turtle at Great Meadows

Turtle at Great Meadows

Pushing buttons

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

The setup: I have a PC that’s a MythTV client (kind of like a Tivo, but open-source) in my living room. All the recording is done on the server in the basement, but to add verisimilitude I wrote a little script that polls the server, and when the server is recording, it turns on a blue LED on the client – actually it flashes a few times, then turns on solid.

The rest of the setup: M is a confirmed button-pusher, and always likes to know how to make the little lights go on and off.

So M was sitting near the MythTV – listening to music – and a recording came on. She noticed the little blue LED flash and turn on, but how to turn it off? She pushed the RESET button on the MythTV, rebooting the PC, and of course the light went off. In a little while, the PC had rebooted, and my script ran again, and noticed that a show was being recorded downstairs. So it flashed the LED, and so M pushed the RESET button.

PC: LED off, reboot, run script, flash LED. M: push RESET.

This went on for a while before I redirected her…