Mokka mit Schlag

I joined Paul Keim this morning for the Brooklyn Bird Club’s Fall walk in Prospect Park. It was a nice morning with various warblers: American Redstart, Magnolia Warbler, Northern Waterthrush, Black-throated Blue Warbler, Black-and-white warbler, and so forth. We started around 8:00 A.M on the Northwest edge of the park and circled back around to the Vale of Cashmere.

Around 10:30 we had reach Rick’s Place in the Midwood, when Rob Jett came riding by on his bicycle. he told use that Rafael Campos and Philip Pane had spotted a Connecticut Warbler by the zoo. This would be a life bird for several people, myself included, as well as a good bird for anyone, so we revised our route and headed down to the road.
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Unison didn’t take long to rule itself out. It’s essentially a command line application with a weak GUI shell, and full of errors like these:

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After evaluating Chronosync for a month, the evaluation period is up and it’s time to make a decision. To buy or not to buy, that is the question. I think the answer is no. Chronosync is too slow and too complex to justify paying for.
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All my recent trips to Jamaica Bay for shorebirds added quite a few species to my semi-official Queens County list at eBird. For the first time, my Queens list actually passed my Brooklyn list, so I decided to head out to Floyd Bennett Field Thursday to see if I could even up the score. (I suspect my real Brooklyn life list is actually quite a few species beyond Queens, but since I’ve only been reporting to eBird for about a year, the lists there aren’t complete.)

I hopped off the Q35 at the base of the Marine Parkway bridge and made the circle along the beach around Dead Horse Bay. The Jamaica Bay side wasn’t very birdy–just a few gulls, starlings, and the like–but I did pick up both Common and Forster’s Tern as well as a couple of Least Sandpipers. However, once I rounded the point and started walking along Dead Horse Bay itself into the marina, the shore birds picked up. I got almost all the common ones for this time of year including Semipalmated Sandpiper, Black-bellied Plover, Semipalmated Plover, Ruddy Turnstone, a likely Long-billed Dowitcher (not 100% certain about that one), two American Oystercatchers, a half dozen or so Sanderlings, and a few Greater Yellowlegs.

I had one brief moment of excitement when I thought I might have a European Golden Plover, but closer inspection turned it into just another Black-bellied Plover in weird light seen from an unusual angle.
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What software are people using for designing book covers these days? Right now I’m using Adobe Illustrator 9 for Mac OS 9, but that’s not going to last for very much longer, since I’ll probably upgrade my main system to an Intel Mac that won’t run Classic in the new year. Should I just upgrade to the latest version of Illustrator or should I look at something else?
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I’ve become increasingly concerned about Google’s storing of search data. I use various cookie blockers, page rewriters, and other tools to limit the information Google gets about me. Nonetheless I still have a static IP address that’s only shared with a few other people; and if any company has the skill and talent to aggregate search requests to build profiles of people and invade their privacy, it’s Google. Consequently, I’m switching over Firefox to use a different search engine. I thought I’d start by trying generic.a9.com which promises not to track me. (The regular www.a9.com does track users.) Here’s how:
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