{"id":194,"date":"2006-04-01T22:52:00","date_gmt":"2006-04-01T22:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box5265.temp.domains\/~brucewi2\/photos\/2006\/04\/01\/news-from-mn-4-01-2006\/"},"modified":"2019-09-02T21:18:36","modified_gmt":"2019-09-02T21:18:36","slug":"news-from-mn-4-01-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/news-from-mn-4-01-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"News from MN, 4\/01\/2006"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yo Peeps,<\/p>\n<p>Today was a beautiful, warm, spring day, so I opened up a bedroom window<br \/>to flush out some of that stale &#8216;Winter&#8217; air.   About an hour later,<br \/>after I hang up no an IBM conference call in the living room, I hear<br \/>this scuffling sound coming from the bedroom.   Peering in, I see this<br \/>larger than average robin hopping around on my bed!  He looked at me<br \/>with this look that said &#8216;What, you never seen a robin before?  You need<br \/>more worms in this bed!&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Then he ignored me and went on hopping around in his worm hunt, with no<br \/>indication that he was going to go back out the window.   So I had a<br \/>dilemma.  How to get him back out the window without making him go bird<br \/>crazy.  I had visions of those crazy squirrels of my childhood that we<br \/>would occasionally lure into the house with trails of peanuts, who would<br \/>then go ballistic and bounce of all the walls in the house till they<br \/>randomly bounced out a open door.<\/p>\n<p>So I backed out of my bedroom, pondering what it would take to make a<br \/>trail of worms to guide this bird back outside.  But before I could grab<br \/>my worm digging shovel, this fearless bird hops right on into the living<br \/>room!  For fear of getting in his way and getting bird hopped,  I got<br \/>out of his way and sat down.   With his keen bird vision, he spies some<br \/>worm like things swimming around in my fish tank and flaps his wings 3<br \/>times and lands on the desk next to the fish tank, sliding to a stop<br \/>with his bird beak banging into the aquarium glass.<\/p>\n<p>He then regains his bird composure, then longingly peers into the tank.<br \/>   The fish, who were startled at first (I really think at that point<br \/>they had never seen a Robin before), quickly regained their fish normal<br \/>fish composure and inquisitiveness, swam over to within microns of the<br \/>Robin&#8217;s beak.  They then peered back into that Robin&#8217;s eyes and said in<br \/>unison, in their cute little bubbly fish voices, &#8216;Do you know what day<br \/>it is today?&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>At which point the impossibly brave Robin poofed out of existence, and I<br \/>sat down to write this letter.<\/p>\n<p>First picture is of Zack and his glorious $4k pile of delicious car<br \/>parts.   Yes, that is 9 different gages, not counting the ones he<br \/>already had.  And no, that is not a bottle for Nitrous gas.  At least<br \/>that is what we would tell the insurance company if they asked.  I think<br \/>the plan is to say it is a bottle Milk (the N is close to M, and at<br \/>least it is colored white).<\/p>\n<p>I sent my hard drive that died last month off to a hard drive recovery<br \/>service, but it came back as a unrecoverable.  The head that crashed<br \/>scoured the disk.  Between various computers here, and the replay tv<br \/>box that I had some photos copied to, I recovered most photos up to<br \/>2004.   But lost all the music and &#8217;04 and &#8217;05 photos.<\/p>\n<p>So to protect against this happening again, I bought a new external<br \/>storage box, with built in redundancy, so any drive can fail and I do<br \/>not loose data any.  It is the little box on the left in the 2nd<br \/>picture, can hold 4 drives for 2 TBytes of data!   And to lift my<br \/>spirits, I took the money I was prepared to spend to recover that dead<br \/>drive and bought a new computer.  A dual AMD Athlon X2 2 ghz with 2 gig<br \/>of memory!  Amazing what $800 can buy these days.<\/p>\n<p>I also spent $800 on a new tooth.  When I was a silly little boy, I<br \/>impressed my friend Bill Abel by turning off his basement light hands<br \/>free.  I jumped up and grabbed the sting to the light with my teeth.<br \/>The light went off, and I almost yanked it out of the ceiling.  It hurt<br \/>for a while, but the tooth (front top incisor)  didn&#8217;t die till college.<br \/>Recently it got brittle, as dead things sometimes do, so needed to be<br \/>capped.  I&#8217;m currently sporting a fine looking temporary plastic tooth<br \/>while the porcelain one gets hand crafted by the porcelain elves.<\/p>\n<p>The last picture is a animetronic head I got recently.  I hope to hack<br \/>it to give it a Robby McDowell like British voice, then use him as a<br \/>house greeter.    Figure if guests don&#8217;t get scared away by this guy,<br \/>then they will probably survive the rest of the house.<\/p>\n<p>Birdman Bruce<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yo Peeps, Today was a beautiful, warm, spring day, so I opened up a bedroom windowto flush out some of that stale &#8216;Winter&#8217; air. About an hour later,after I hang up no an IBM conference call in the living room, I hearthis scuffling sound coming from the bedroom. Peering in, I see thislarger than average&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2277,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions\/2277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucewinter.net\/photos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}