Live from Austin!

One-foot budgie only needs one foot,
To sit on his perch all day.
One-foot budgie only needs one foot,
To relax in an avian way.
He’s got two feet,
He can climb and tweet,
Chew on his toys and play;
But one-foot budgie only needs one foot
To sit on his perch all day.

He wakes up every morning,
Stretches out his wings.
Stuffs his face with bird seed,
Sometimes even sings.
If the sun is out, he’ll jump about,
And use his time exploring.
But if it’s gray, he’ll spend the day
Being rather boring.

[Chorus:]
‘Cause one-foot budgie only needs one foot,
To sit on his perch all day.
One-foot budgie only needs one foot,
To relax in an avian way.
He’s got two feet,
He can climb and tweet,
Chew on his toys and play;
But one-foot budgie only needs one foot
To sit on his perch all day.

Sitting on his play gym,
He preens his fluffy rump.
It’s surely been ten minutes,
Time to take a dump.
He’s got a beak, knows how to shriek,
No training is required;
He may not talk, but he sure could squawk,
Except that he’s too tired…

[Chorus:]
So one-foot budgie only needs one foot,
To sit on his perch all day.
One-foot budgie only needs one foot,
To relax in an avian way.
He’s got two feet,
He can climb and tweet,
Chew on his toys and play;
But one-foot budgie only needs one foot
To sit on his perch all day.

His disco ball is very small,
But still extremely shiny.
Although he is a parrot,
He’s really rather tiny.
He’ll gladly stand upon your hand,
As long as you’ve got millet;
But he’s got a crop that just won’t stop,
So you’d best be sure you fill it…

[Chorus:]
So that one-foot budgie only needs one foot,
To sit on his perch all day.
One-foot budgie only needs one foot,
To relax in an avian way.
He’s got two feet,
He can climb and tweet,
Chew on his toys and play;
But one-foot budgie only needs one foot
To sit on his perch all day.

Lola will eat pretty much whatever I feed her so long as it looks like bird food. Chester, however, is a picky eater. I’d done the research when we got him, and knew I wanted to get him on a pellet-based diet, as it’s healthier in the long run.

With this in mind, I started off with Kaytee Fusion . It’s a blend of seed and pellets, designed to help convert your bird to a pellet-based diet. Result: Chester ate the seeds and mostly ignored the pellets. When the seed ran out and he was left with a pile of pellets, he scraped them out of the food dispenser onto the floor using his beak, and squawked angrily to demand something tastier.

So, I used a colander to sift all the pellets out of the mix and turn it into birdseed. I fed the pellets to the wild birds in the back yard. I got some Zupreem AvianMaintenance fruit blend pellets , which are pricier, but made with natural fruit and vegetables plus supplemental vitamins. I mixed these in with the bird seed. Result: He ate a few, but mostly stuck to the seed, and still threw a lot on the ground.

Next I tried Roudybush parakeet blend, on the recommendation of a local pet store worker and parakeet owner. It’s an all-natural pellet, with no food coloring, unlike the Zupreem. Results were slightly better: a few more pellets eaten, less waste.

I was seeing a trend: the more expensive and natural the food, the more acceptable to Chester. So to replace the seed part of the birds’ diet, I picked up some Ecotrition parakeet blend . It’s a blend of all kinds of seeds and vegetables, plus some egg, and very little coloring. For the pellets, I ordered a pack of extra fine pellets from Harrison’s Bird Foods . They’re certified organic, pesticide free, and the resealable pack recommends refrigerating them to keep them fresh.

So far, results are promising. No beak-scraping to get rid of any of it. Not much on the floor of the cage. Hopefully we’ve found Chester’s brand.

I was enjoying some soft blue cheese on fresh French bread, thinking about algorithms, when I had a sudden revelation. I’ve implemented it as The NSA cheese test so you can enjoy it.

New arrival .

Rothko runs a coffee shop. Each week she needs to calculate how many hours each employee worked, given their clock-in and clock-out times. It turns out that this is a surprisingly painful task to perform using regular tools like calculators or spreadsheets. I built a Mac dashboard widget to make it easier . I’m putting it up for download because I can imagine other people might find it useful. (For example, anyone who has to fill out paper timesheets.)

To use it, enter times in the "start" and "end" fields for each day. You can use 12 or 24 hour clock. For 12 hour clock, if there’s an "a" in the field it’s a.m., if there’s a "p" it’s p.m. You only need to type the colon and number of minutes if there’s an actual number of minutes involved. (It’s all about reducing the number of keystrokes.)

Tab takes you on to the next field as usual, and automatically recalculates everything like a spreadsheet. The individual durations worked for each day are shown, and totaled into a final figure in hours and minutes at the bottom.

So for a standard work day, you’d type 9a [tab] 5p [tab] and it would enter 9:00 am start, 5:00 pm finish, calculate the duration as 8:00, and add it to the total.

The only other control is the Reset button, which blanks out the fields ready for the next calculation. Quick, simple, efficient, and hopefully correct…

Introducing Chester

There’s a US car industry you don’t hear much about. Over 100,000 Camry hybrids have been manufactured in Kentucky. The State of Ohio has cited Toyota Motor Sales for environmental excellence. Over a billion dollars has gone into building a state of the art Tundra manufacturing plant in Texas. There are over 36,000 people working in the USA for Toyota. Yet somehow, there’s a perception that US vehicle manufacturing means Detroit.

True, General Motors employs a lot more people. In fact, they laid off 34,000 people between 2006 and mid 2008. During the same period of downturn, Toyota laid off… zero workers. Even while production has been halted, they’ve kept workers on payroll and used the time to train them. Ford, meanwhile, continues to shift production to Mexico.

True also, Toyota is non-union labor. All Toyota employees get medical coverage from day 1, plus tuition assistance, 401(k), paid vacation days, flextime, short-term and long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and an on-site medical center with $5 co-pays and free generic drug prescriptions. With all that and no layoffs, I wonder why Toyota workers aren’t rushing to join the UAW?

For years, GM and Ford ignored the oil markets and the growth of environmental concerns, and filled dealer lots with huge gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. They lobbied for fuel economy standards to be relaxed. Chrysler actually opted to pay fines rather than comply with the standards, and classified the PT Cruiser as a truck so they could get away with 20MPG fuel economy that requires premium gasoline.

GM killed their EV1 electric car program. Ford pushed ethanol fuel, which was economically unworkable, and fuel cells, which require a hydrogen infrastructure that won’t work with current technology. Yet here we are, with GM and Ford angling for billions of dollars of taxpayer funds as a reward for their stellar work over the last decade or two, and Toyota to get nothing. If I were Toyota–or one of their employees–I’d feel a little aggrieved.

As with the $700 billion banking bailout, I don’t believe for a moment that the proposed auto industry bailout will actually solve the problem. I’ve seen what happens when government props up a motor car manufacturer; we called it British Leyland, and it was a running joke for a decade–albeit not a very funny joke for people like my dad who bought one of their cars and several of their gearboxes.

I think GM and Ford need to be allowed to file for bankruptcy. Maybe they can be restructured, the idiots in management can be removed, and a workable business can be salvaged. If not, then we should just let them shut down; there’s no point artificially propping up a business that makes cars nobody wants to buy. Shut it down and use the proposed bailout money to pay unemployment benefits to the workers while they find other jobs.

YouTube has started offering HD video. I’m not sure it’s really HD, but it’s way better than the crappy pixelated video they used to offer.

I re-encoded the video of our new parakeet meeting Chester for the first time. I’ve uploaded it in HD. The result is much clearer. Now to re-do all my other movies…

For anyone else hoping to do the same, the magic settings for QuickTime / iMovie are: 1280×720 progressive, MPEG-4 H.264 1024kbps, AAC 224kbps. It takes a while for YouTube to work on the video before the "watch in HD" link becomes available.

The ‘keet now has a name: Lola.

Chicago Tribune:

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama’s election.

But this isn’t just any normal political theory. After Internet blowhards started circulating rumors that Obama was born in Kenya, the Obama campaign published a scan of his birth certificate.

So the wingnuts moved on to claiming that the scan was a cunning Photoshop fake. They said that the black rectangle covering the certificate number was deeply suspicious, as was the lack of a state seal.

So factcheck.org had their people personally inspect the birth certificate, and take high resolution digital photos showing the embossed state seal, and the redacted certificate number.

The Director of Health for Hawaii has issued a statement saying that she and her deputy also personally inspected the state’s copy of Obama’s birth certificate, and found it to be genuine.

People have even tracked down the birth announcement published in the Honolulu Advertiser, available in the microfilm archives in Hawaii libraries, and published a scan of that.

All of which puts the lawsuit into hilarious tinfoil hat conspiracy theory territory. We’re asked to believe that not only did the Obama campaign fake a legal document and sneak copies into the state archives, they also went to the libraries that have copies of the Honolulu Advertiser in their archives and made sure the microfilm was replaced with edited film images, no doubt carefully aged to look genuine. Or perhaps Barack Obama immigrated from Kenya and took the identity of the real Barack Obama, murdering him and disposing of the body–that would explain why he doesn’t look like a Muslim, right?

Yeah, that’s the kind of theory the Supreme Court may decide to evaluate on Friday. So for maximum amusement value, let’s hope they take on the case, then lay the smackdown–because obviously that would prove that even the Supreme Court has been inducted into the conspiracy.

Baby girl had her first bath, after Chester showed her how.

Although she’s hand-tame, she still has trust issues–if she’s in the cage and doesn’t want to come out, she’ll run away and hide in the corner when you approach. Ah well, eventually she’ll learn that I don’t do the "grab the bird and make it come out" thing.

I got another play gym, a larger one. I also cleared enough space on my desk that I can put both of them next to each other. I’m hoping both ‘keets will spend the afternoon with me.

She’s eating well; in fact, she seems to spend a lot more time eating than Chester does. She already looks larger than when we got her, especially in the evenings when she’s content and fluffed up.

She has reintroduced Chester to the joys of sitting on my shoulders, which was wonderful until they decided to stop preening each other and preen me instead. I guess I need to carefully remove any random neck or ear hairs, and make sure I’ve shaved recently…

We still need a name for her, so suggestions are welcomed. Something cute and slightly comical, that works well as a counterpart to "Chester". Perhaps a name related to green-and-yellow-ness, or to climbing and clowning.