Dead Battery

June 21st, 2006

I think my Powerbook battery has died. I’m plugged in right now, but the time “until full” appears to be monotonically increasing. I wonder if it’s possible to buy a Powerbook battery in Bangor? Does Wal-Mart or Best Buy stock them? I don’t think there’s an Apple store up here. Amazon has both Apple and third party batteries, though they don’t seem to be the cheapest.

Marsh Wren Split

June 21st, 2006

This morning I took Donald Kroodsma‘s Singing Birds workshop at the ABA convention. During the course of the morning he let out one bombshell. “Unequivocally, there are two species of Marsh Wrens.”
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Maine Pelagic with the ABA

June 21st, 2006

Yesterday I took a six-hour Pelagic trip out of Bar Harbor on the Friendly V with the American Birding Association. This was my first East Coast Spring pelagic, and it paid off: eight life birds out of roughly 24 species total.
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Maine Roads

June 21st, 2006

There seems to be one special rule for driving in Maine. Whatever road you’re one, whichever lane you’re in: left, middle, or center, it will eventually turn into a right turn only or left turn only lane. You cannot drive straight in this state.

Fink on Intel

June 16th, 2006

Version 0.81 of fink, the Unix package manager for Mac OS X, has been released. fink is critical software for all of us who bought PowerBooks because they run Unix with a decent GUI and promptly added the terminal to our docks. This release is the first to support Intel Macs, though a “number of packages (particularly packages in the ‘unstable’ tree) either do not compile, or compile but do not run. Work to improve this situation is ongoing.”

Notes from NY PHP Con

June 15th, 2006

Today I’m at the New York PHP Conference. It’s interesting. I wish I had a little more time to spend here this week, but I have to get ready for next week’s ABA conference in Bangor.

I’d hoped to do some live reporting about this, but the wireless here at the Hoel New Yorker is quite flaky. It keeps coming in and out. This is often a problem at some of these old New York hotels that are full of iron in the walls.
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