Yo Peeps,
Today was a beautiful, warm, spring day, so I opened up a bedroom window
to flush out some of that stale ‘Winter’ air. About an hour later,
after I hang up no an IBM conference call in the living room, I hear
this scuffling sound coming from the bedroom. Peering in, I see this
larger than average robin hopping around on my bed! He looked at me
with this look that said ‘What, you never seen a robin before? You need
more worms in this bed!’
Then he ignored me and went on hopping around in his worm hunt, with no
indication that he was going to go back out the window. So I had a
dilemma. How to get him back out the window without making him go bird
crazy. I had visions of those crazy squirrels of my childhood that we
would occasionally lure into the house with trails of peanuts, who would
then go ballistic and bounce of all the walls in the house till they
randomly bounced out a open door.
So I backed out of my bedroom, pondering what it would take to make a
trail of worms to guide this bird back outside. But before I could grab
my worm digging shovel, this fearless bird hops right on into the living
room! For fear of getting in his way and getting bird hopped, I got
out of his way and sat down. With his keen bird vision, he spies some
worm like things swimming around in my fish tank and flaps his wings 3
times and lands on the desk next to the fish tank, sliding to a stop
with his bird beak banging into the aquarium glass.
He then regains his bird composure, then longingly peers into the tank.
The fish, who were startled at first (I really think at that point
they had never seen a Robin before), quickly regained their fish normal
fish composure and inquisitiveness, swam over to within microns of the
Robin’s beak. They then peered back into that Robin’s eyes and said in
unison, in their cute little bubbly fish voices, ‘Do you know what day
it is today?’
At which point the impossibly brave Robin poofed out of existence, and I
sat down to write this letter.
First picture is of Zack and his glorious $4k pile of delicious car
parts. Yes, that is 9 different gages, not counting the ones he
already had. And no, that is not a bottle for Nitrous gas. At least
that is what we would tell the insurance company if they asked. I think
the plan is to say it is a bottle Milk (the N is close to M, and at
least it is colored white).
I sent my hard drive that died last month off to a hard drive recovery
service, but it came back as a unrecoverable. The head that crashed
scoured the disk. Between various computers here, and the replay tv
box that I had some photos copied to, I recovered most photos up to
2004. But lost all the music and ’04 and ’05 photos.
So to protect against this happening again, I bought a new external
storage box, with built in redundancy, so any drive can fail and I do
not loose data any. It is the little box on the left in the 2nd
picture, can hold 4 drives for 2 TBytes of data! And to lift my
spirits, I took the money I was prepared to spend to recover that dead
drive and bought a new computer. A dual AMD Athlon X2 2 ghz with 2 gig
of memory! Amazing what $800 can buy these days.
I also spent $800 on a new tooth. When I was a silly little boy, I
impressed my friend Bill Abel by turning off his basement light hands
free. I jumped up and grabbed the sting to the light with my teeth.
The light went off, and I almost yanked it out of the ceiling. It hurt
for a while, but the tooth (front top incisor) didn’t die till college.
Recently it got brittle, as dead things sometimes do, so needed to be
capped. I’m currently sporting a fine looking temporary plastic tooth
while the porcelain one gets hand crafted by the porcelain elves.
The last picture is a animetronic head I got recently. I hope to hack
it to give it a Robby McDowell like British voice, then use him as a
house greeter. Figure if guests don’t get scared away by this guy,
then they will probably survive the rest of the house.
Birdman Bruce