There was a screech owl in a brooding posture on the floor of my box a few hours ago. A male would be unlikely to adopt that posture, in my experience, so I assume the owl was a female whose mate must have recently claimed the nest box, and talked her into trying it on for size. (I heard a male in my back yard calling quite persistently one night last week.) She's gone now, but this is an
It can hardly be a coincindence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "as beautiful as an airport."Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk
The following is the slightly corrected text of a comment I submitted to whichever part of the government was studying network neutrality, and requesting comments from the public, back in mid-January. I submitted this comment as a private citizen, but, of historical necessity, it references my employer. Let me be perfectly clear about this: I in no way speak for, or represent, my employer.
He phoned the BBC and asked to be put through to his department head.“Oh, hello, Arthur Dent here. Look, sorry I haven’t been in [the office] for six months but I’ve gone mad.”“Oh, not to worry. Thought it was probably something like that. Happens here all the time. How soon can we expect you?”“When do hedgehogs start hibernating?”“Sometime in Spring, I think.”“I’ll be in shortly after that.”— So
Our Moon, Third Quarter, February 5, 2010.©2010 Chris W. Johnson
While I’ve had my back turned in recent weeks, the Obama administration announced the scrapping of NASA’s Constellation program to return astronauts to the moon, explore asteroids, service distant space telescopes, and lay the groundwork for human exploration of Mars. I’ve since read several articles about this, and still have no
NASA is offering the book X-15: Extending the Frontiers of Flight by Dennis R. Jenkins as one of their small library of free e-books for most popular viewers. (Thanks to NASA Watch for pointing it out.) Personally, while e-books may indeed be the future (at least until civilization next stumbles, and they – trapped in their unusable viewers – all become inaccessible for a few centuries, if not
NPR’s All Things Considered ran their story on my friend David Bamberger yesterday. They've provided a nice page to go along with it containing what I presume is the text of the story, photos, and a link to the audio. I haven't had a chance to listen, yet (I’m operating on a weird schedule), but I encourage anyone so much as curious to have a look/listen.
It's a shame that it can be considered “
I'm happy to see my friends at the Preserve getting some more well deserved publicity, and to pass along advance word of it. This time, the publicity is from National Public Radio. Thank you, NPR.


Moonlight refracted in a passing cloud at about half-past midnight. The moon is too overexposed to be distinguished, and the cloud is blurred by its own motion during the moderately long exposure required to capture its subtle colors, but the rainbow of colors in the cloud is clearly visible. (A little saturation enhancement helped, too.)
I can’t recall having seen this phenomenon before. Maybe


Maze Wars SVG, version 1.0b3, has been released. This version began as a minor revision to eliminate an asymmetry between the rules applied to the bots and to the human players. Specifically, for lack of a check to prevent it, bots were able to move and turn at the same time, which human players could not do. Making the bots separate their move and turn operations seemed like it would be a
The conversion of my old bird roosting box to a squirrel box is finally completely complete. It’s one thing to finish the box itself; it’s quite another to iron-out all of the miscellaneous, but critical details, like how to mount the thing at a particular place in a specific tree, especially when the tree doesn’t have even one purely vertical limb. Also important, and thoroughly interrelated:
As usual, I'm doing this later than I should have, but fans of Chris' Eastern Screech Owl Nest Box Cam' will be interested to know that—better late than never—I am in the process of preparing the box for owl occupation. At the moment, the major work is on fox squirrel eviction. As always, I hate kicking out the little mammals, especially when the weather has been so bad, and pups may be on the


Twenty one years ago today, on January 2nd, 1989, I released version 1.0 of the freeware Gatekeeper anti-virus system for Macintosh. It would have been better to note its twentieth anniversary a year ago, what with twenty being a big round number and all, but, frankly, I forgot.

Anyway, it was 21 years ago today. For reasons now obscure, it wouldn't appear in "comp.binaries.mac" until the 13th
Maze Wars SVG version 1.0b2 has been released. The closest thing to a functional change is the addition a partial work-around for a Firefox 3.5.x SVG rendering bug that made the eyeball on the game’s first web page render incorrectly. No code changes, other than the deletion of some old, commented-out material. No changes in game play.

Also, the beginnings of a web site for the game can now be
Early this morning, Maze Wars SVG version 1.0b1 was released. This retro multi-player first-person shooter had a couple of the inevitable bugs that always seem to be discovered only after a product is announced to the world. But they were exceedingly minor bugs. And they're gone now.

Enjoy.