Tag Archives: Austin

Baby bird of a different kind

This evening I went out for a walk; partly for exercise, partly for relaxation, and partly to take a package to the UPS drop-off. As I rounded the corner onto Oltorf Street, I walked under a large tree which partially overhangs the street. On the ground I saw the unmistakable shape of a partially crushed dead baby bird. A few steps on was a second baby bird, as dead as the first, with ants crawling over it.

I tried to put the scene out of my mind and continue with my walk. Moments later I heard a plaintive tweet to my left. I looked over, and saw a third baby bird, very much alive, in a small depression in the grass. I walked over to investigate.

I wasn’t sure how it had ended up over in the grass away from its nestmates, but that had probably saved its life. The grass was soft, and the small hole it was in had probably kept it out of sight of any predators. I crouched down to take a close look; the bird saw something moving overhead, and started tweeting and opening its beak for food. It looked like a young grackle fledgling, covered in partially-opened pin feathers.

I stood up and considered what to do next. The branches of the tree were out of reach. Theoretically it looked climbable, but not without entering the nearby property—and that was surrounded by a wall-like fence about my height, with big warning signs on the outside saying “Beware of the Dog” and “This area under 24 hour video surveillance”.

Obviously the bird’s chances of survival in its current situation were negligible. If it didn’t starve to death, it would probably be finished off by a passing cat, possum, raccoon, or other predator.

Now, it has to be said that Austin is not short of grackles. Not even slightly. Nevertheless, they are a protected species, and this particular grackle had done nothing to deserve his perilous situation. I gently scooped him up with a postcard and placed him in my courier bag. He was my problem now, at least until I could find someone who was licensed and qualified to look after him.

A couple of grackles on the telephone cables overhead became very agitated. They were obviously the parents. I looked around again, and saw the nest on the sidewalk about four meters from where the baby bird had been, back over by the two dead ones. I took one last look around to make sure there really wasn’t any way I could get the nest back into a tree, then regretfully picked up the nest and walked home.

Once I was home I grabbed a suitable size shipping box from the recycling, cut a hole in the top, and put the nest in it. I then put some soft gardening gloves on and carefully moved the baby bird back into the nest. He seemed uninjured, but tweeted anxiously. Once he was back in the nest he settled back down; I’d taken the nest because I figured it would be the least disturbing place to put him. After a minute or so he closed his eyes and started breathing in a slow, relaxed way.

I quickly searched Google for information on baby grackles, and found the site of a wild bird center in the Florida Keys. The instructions said not to give the bird any water, and I didn’t have any suitable food, so I just left him to rest. Another Google search located a licensed wildlife rehabilitator in Austin. I called for advice.

After discussing the situation, I left the bird safe at home and went back to see if I could locate the homeowners with the big fence. The plan was to ask them if they might be interested in climbing their tree and putting the nest somewhere secure, putting the fledgeling in the nest, and watching to make sure the parents stuck around to look after him. It would be significant work, but it would obviously be the best thing for the bird. Unfortunately they were quite definitely out, as evidenced by a package waiting for them on their doorstep.

Dusk was approaching, so time was short. I called the rehabber again. She mentioned that she already had a young grackle in the incubator, and could take another. I offered to bring him to her immediately, and she agreed. Pausing only to take a couple of photos, I set out.

It was a scenic twenty minute drive out west; not how I’d expected to spend my evening, but quite pleasant all the same, even with the occasional loud tweet from the passenger seat. Stephanie the rehabber weighed and inspected the fledgling and confirmed that he seemed uninjured, and a healthy weight too. The prognosis was generally good. I filled out the paperwork and left a donation.

So that was how I spent my evening. Rescuing a grackle. If all goes well, maybe this summer he’ll get to sit in the trees outside H-E-B and crap on my car.

Home improvements part 1: New deck

It occurred to me that I haven’t written about the epic home improvement odyssey we’ve been on for the last few months.

The story really started in the fall of 2005, a few months after we bought the house.

When it rains in Austin, it really rains. You can hear what a typical storm sounds like by downloading a recording I made. (It’s binaural, so listen with headphones for full effect.)

In the aftermath of our first couple of storms since moving in, I noticed that water had pooled up on the lower front deck of the house. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but when it was still there the next day, I realized that the builders hadn’t left any gaps for drainage between the planks of the deck.

Months passed, occasional downpours struck, and I started to notice the paint peeling. Closer inspection revealed that the exposed wood was soaking up the moisture. This was not good.

We were still paying off the cost of the refrigerator and various other expenses, so I looked around for a quick temporary fix. I found a company that made a waterproof industrial PVC covering, and called some guys who lived near Dallas who would install it. They did a pretty thorough job, carefully sealing the gaps at the bottom of the pillars with industrial strength caulk. I thought the immediate problem was solved.

It wasn’t.

The next problem I noticed was some discoloration at the base of the vertical supporting pillars at the front of the house. Prodding at it revealed soft, pulpy, rotting wood. I got a contractor to patch it up.

By this spring, things had gradually progressed to a point where further patching wouldn’t be sufficient. Fairly large patches had rotten away at the base of two of the pillars, revealing that the pillars were hollow untreated wood. They shouldn’t have been used as load-bearing pillars at all, they were just decorative for use indoors. An indentation of the PVC and caulk around the third pillar revealed that it was sinking into the deck.

It was time to call in a professional. A realtor friend had recommended someone to take care of some random yard work, and he knew a guy who specialized in decks. I interviewed him, talked to him about the job, took a look at some pictures of his past projects, and decided he was someone I could work with.

The first stage was exploration. What exactly was underneath the PVC, and how bad was the damage by now?

To cut a long story short, the builders had constructed the deck using untreated interior tongue-and-groove planking, laid on top of untreated plywood. The plywood in turn rested on the main joists of the deck, one of which was upside-down, which was why the water was pooling. (Deck joists usually have a slight camber.)

Around and beneath the deck was a concrete wall, which they hadn’t put any ventilation grilles in. The walled off sub-deck area was then separated from the rest of the house foundations by a solid wall of cement blocks, with two small holes in.

So even once the water stopped leaking directly through the deck, moisture would get in via small cracks at the edges of the deck and via the front steps, and would collect in the unventilated area. The plywood was partially rotted, the planking was rotting, the pillars were rotting, water was getting in via the rotting hollow pillars and causing more rot, and the middle pillar didn’t have anything under the deck to support it. Oh, and the steps weren’t to building code–too steep. Basically, everything including the railings needed to be torn off, right down to the main joists, and the whole thing rebuilt–including redoing the steps from scratch, adding ventilation grilles to the walls, and putting a support in for the center pillar.

That was just the downstairs front deck.

The upstairs was the same basic construction–untreated interior planks on untreated plywood, hollow decorative pillars just about supporting the weight of the roof. The builders had actually bothered with some plastic sheeting to stop water from dripping through to the deck below–but the plastic stopped about 10cm short of the edge of the deck. So again, it was all pretty much a write-off.

Fixing all this was clearly way beyond anything I could have attempted myself. On both levels, the roof had to be jacked up and temporary supporting beams put in while the rotten pillars were removed.

So several months and thousands of dollars later, we basically have a whole new front deck. Some of the handrails were salvaged and reused, but that’s about it. No corners were cut, because the last thing I want to do is ever have another problem with this.

The deck surface is now thick treated wood planks, held down with galvanized deck screws. There are gaps between the planks for drainage, and three vents allow any moisture beneath the deck to evaporate away. The pillars are 15cm solid pressure-treated pine. They’re separated from the decks by surprisingly expensive galvanized metal spacers, which prevent water from pooling up and soaking into them at the base.

Upstairs required some inventive thinking. Normally you’d put what amounts to a miniature metal roof inside the floor of the upper deck, draining out of the front. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough vertical space for that.

I checked reviews of various wood sealants designed for decks. I quickly came to the conclusion that while some of them claimed to have an 8 year warranty, none of them would actually last that long. Consumer Reports concluded that all the transparent or translucent sealants were basically worthless unless you were prepared to re-seal every few years.

I did more online searching, and found a company called Ames Research. They sell various rubber compounds which can be used for waterproofing, and are applied in liquid form. Their Super Elasto-Barrier dries to a pretty much untearable sheet of gray rubber, around 2mm thick. It’s usually used for waterproofing flat roofs. I figured if it was up to that task, it would probably cope with any rain that blew onto the deck and dripped through the gaps between the planks. As an added bonus, it’s water-based, so we didn’t have to worry about lots of noxious volatile chemicals harming the parakeets.

So, the treated plywood was coated with rubber; then some spacer joists were fixed to it; then the whole lot was given several more coats of rubber. The result is a flat, ribbed, rubber-sealed surface that slopes gently towards gaps at the front of the house, and drains away any water that falls through the upper deck.

I had also checked Consumer Reports and a few other sites to find out what would be appropriate for paint. Valspar and Behr got good reviews from CR after the equivalent of 9 years of exposure. There seemed to be a lot of people online with assorted grievances about Home Depot and Behr, so we went with Valspar and bought it from Lowe’s.

I’m completely happy with the end result. It looks much nicer than PVC, restores the original look of the house, and the steps are more comfortable to climb now.

The story isn’t over yet, though. Stay tuned for part two.

Headphones, spectacles, headsets and music

A couple of weeks ago, I realized that my trusty full-size headphones were incompatible with my glasses. It wasn’t the fact that they pushed my ears up against the arms of the glasses and made them sore that clued me in, though you might have thought it would have. No, it was when they pushed my glasses sideways enough to push a sore spot onto the side of my nose. I suppose I could wear different glasses, but I really like these.

Anyway, a few weeks before my nose issues, I had bought a new headset for the PlayStation 3. There’s a bit of a story behind that.

The PS3 is weird, in that it has two sound output channels. The game sound is sent out via standard RCA jacks on the rear, as well as via HDMI. The voice chat is almost an entirely seperate system, and its sound is routed either via Bluetooth or USB. The two never mix–unless you have no headset at all, in which case the voice chat audio is mixed into the game audio, but of course you can’t reply.

I’d started off with the Logitech PlayStation 3 Vantage USB Headset. It worked fine for a few months, but when I eventually knocked it from the coffee table one evening it broke. Also, it only handled voice, so the game sound still came through speakers–and was picked up by its mic. That was tolerable with games like Team Fortress 2 where you need to push a button to talk, but didn’t work out so well with games like Burnout where the mic is always active.

For a while, I tried a Bluetooth headset–a cheap old Motorola that takes replaceable AAA cells. The problem was that, like the Logitech, it picked up game sound from the speakers. Not much, because it was also really crap at picking up sound, but it did succeed in convincing me that I didn’t want to try the official PS3 Bluetooth headset. That product may have better sound, but still has the game crosstalk issue. It also has the additional issue of a non-replaceable battery, which means that you have to worry about charging, and eventually end up with a nice piece of e-waste once the battery gains a memory.

I don’t know what Sony were thinking here. The official solution basically doesn’t work, and you can’t use a regular gaming headset or a regular USB headset.

Finally, though, I discovered the Turtle Beach P21, a headset specially designed for the PS3. They’re now replacing it with the Turtle Beach Ear Force PX21 (sic), which adds Xbox 360 compatibility. Since I don’t have an Xbox and never will, that wasn’t an issue for me, so I bought the P21 at clearance price.

The P21 actually solves the PS3 audio problem. You plug in both the RCA jacks and the USB, and an inline amp mixes the two audio streams together. You have separate sliders for the mix levels, too, and there are passthrus on the RCA jacks in case you need to pass the signal on to your TV or amp. Turn the speakers down and rely on the headphones, and you can hear everything–and people can hear your voice too, and only your voice. The only downside is white noise from the crappy badly-shielded inline amplifier, but as soon as you start the actual game you stop noticing it.

But that was a massive digression. The point is, the Turtle Beach headset is circumaural–that is, it has old fashioned full size earcups which go all the way around the outside of your ears.

I hadn’t had a set of headphones like that since the 1970s, and had forgotten what it was like. What it was like: comfortable. Or at least, more comfortable than full size earpads, with my current glasses.

So I decided it was time to swap the trusty 10 year old Sennheiser HD445s for a pair of circumaural headphones. I read a bunch of reviews, and now I’m in another situation I haven’t been in since the 1970s: I have non-Sennheiser headphones. Specifically, a pair of Shure SRH 440 headphones. They’re a slightly cut-down version of the Shure SRH840s favored by studio engineers; fully enclosed, DJ style, designed not to leak sound in or out.

So far I’ve been checking them out using the Mac, with audio routed through an external M-Audio 24 bit D/A. The main thing I notice is the incredibly clarity; they resolve details the Sennheisers didn’t, like the individual guitars on the final track of Grace Jones’ Slave to the Rhythm, a good test for that kind of thing because of Trevor Horn’s exacting production at Sarm West.

Another good test track is “A Mile Long Lump of Lard” from The Orb’s Cydonia album. The Orb are tough for audio systems at the best of times, but this track in particular seems to be a real challenge for audio systems, sounding like a vague formless mush on the car stereo or through cheap earbuds.

Then there’s “Two Days Off” by KiloWatts (MP3 for download here), from the rather awesome album Problem/Solving. Reminds me most of Speedy J; some awesome production work, and I’m surprised he hasn’t received more attention. Apparently he’ll be in Austin at the end of the month, I should probably do the live music thing… Anyhow, it’s a good test of headphones’ ability to resolve a wall of sounds without turning them to pulp. Try it.

Vacation

So, I’m back from a one week vacation in Virginia. We stayed in a castle on a mountaintop in the Appalachians, near the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a pretty amazing experience. The place was like an English stately home–except that instead of being roped off and littered with “DO NOT SIT ON CHAIR” signs, we actually got to live there for a week.

It was the most relaxed vacation I’ve had in years. Lots of reading, gazing at the scenery, chatting with friends, and some hiking up mountain trails to break up the lazing around. People took it in turns to cook for the group, and we ate well.

While we were away, the budgerigars were looked after by friends. The birds apparently had a good time, as they didn’t seem to want to come home. The journey by car was quite hard for Chester; he’s a nervous bird, and took out his fear on Lola by pecking at her. Meanwhile, she was more interested in watching the outside world go past. They were both quite flighty when we got home, but the next day they were back to their usual selves–in fact, they were both very affectionate. It’s good to have them back, I missed them a lot.

The mountain weather was misty at first, and even when the sun came out the temperature didn’t go much above 20°C. Austin, on the other hand, hit 39.4°C in the shade this afternoon, and it’s humid too. Nice and warm, in other words.

IBM server hardware seems to have a vacation detector circuit, but people were kind enough to keep a few disasters for me to return to.

Dangerously convenient Thai food

A couple of weeks ago I saw a new Thai place had opened up a few blocks from our house. Today I was bored of my usual lunch fare, and decided to check it out.

It’s called thaifresh and is at 909 West Mary, in the same block as Café Caffeine. One wall is occupied by Thai groceries. Opposite that is the kitchen area, and in front is a cabinet with the dishes on offer. It’s cafeteria style, you can buy a 1- 2- or 3-item plate, or get takeaway. Apparently they also offer cooking classes.

I tried the red curry with summer squash and tofu, with brown rice. It was good–rich and creamy, and just hot enough to give a gentle afterburn.

Fourth of July

A friend from New Zealand celebrated her first 4th of July as a new US Citizen by throwing a big "white trash" themed 4th of July barbecue. Having completed 10 years of US residence in January, I’d been considering throwing a red, white and blue stars-and-stripes overkill party, but events had conspired against it. So when the invite to the barbecue arrived, we said "Hell yeah!" Continue reading →

Subprime meltdown

The mainstream media coverage of the US subprime mortgage meltdown has mostly been about all the folk who have lost their homes, and various plans the government has come up with to try and ease the problem. Thinking about it more carefully, though, doesn’t it seem a little odd for the US government to interfere in the sacred free market merely in order to save a bunch of poor people from ruin?

Well, the SF Chronicle has an interesting article that explains this curious situation. It’s not about saving people from losing their houses, it’s about saving the banks.

During the housing bubble which was fueled by the subprime lending, banks sold mortgage-backed securities. For those who don’t know, mortgage-backed securities are basically in-place mortgage agreements, packaged for resell between financial organizations, or between financial organizations and investors.

The key is to view a mortgage in the abstract, as a promise by person A to pay an amount X for N years. That promise has a value, and can be sold.

For example, we arranged our mortgage through a small financial firm in the Austin area. Once all the paperwork was done, they packaged us up as an asset and sold us to GMAC. GMAC took on the business of extracting money from us over the course of years, and paid the small financial firm a lesser amount in compensation for the value of us as a customer.

This is generally a good thing. Because GMAC does administration for millions of mortgages, they can provide convenient billing and payment services, and reduce per-customer overheads. For the small firm, the benefit was immediate cashflow and no ongoing overheads.

A similar process can be used to package a mortgage and sell it to investors as a bond. The bank gets to remove the liability from their balance sheet; they can then use the cash to provide mortgage funds to more homebuyers. Hence, allowing the transfer of mortgages as mortgage-backed bonds should allow more people to buy their own houses.

For example, suppose John Smith owes the bank $1000 a month for the next 20 years. That’s a total of $1,040,000. The bank could sell that mortgage to an investor as a bond for (say) $750,000. The bank would get the $750,000 immediately, reducing their liabilities. They could use the money to finance some new homebuyer’s mortgage. Meanwhile, the investor would get $1,040,000 over the course of the next 20 years, making a nice profit. And the whole thing could be treated like a regular bond or stock market investment–the bank could continue to process the collection of the actual mortgage payments, just like it would process dividends on a mutual fund investment.

The problem is that since the banks expected to sell off the mortgages to eager investors hoping to cash in on the property boom, they didn’t really care too much about checking that the mortgages were sound; and the investors didn’t really have any way to check on the actual person paying the mortgage.

However, there’s language written into these mortgage transfer securities stating that if there’s fraud, the bank which sold the mortgage is legally obligated to offer to buy it back at the original price–which is now often ten times the actual value likely to be extractable from the homeowner. Fraud like, say, people lying on their mortgage applications, or inflated property appraisals, or e-mails on bank computers suggesting that they knew the market was a bubble that couldn’t last. Then there’s the issue of companies like S&P, who helped the banks to structure the subprime mortgage securities to look as good as possible on paper.

So if too many mortgages fail, and investors start demanding that their junk bonds be repurchased by the selling banks, those banks will go under. At that point, the FDIC and the government will have to step in, and we’ll basically have a taxpayer-funded bailout of a bunch of big corporate banks who defrauded investors. It’ll be the Savings and Loan crisis all over again.

How about pressuring the investors not to call in the cops? Well, unfortunately a lot of the investors are in foreign countries. Some of them are foreign countries. With the current state of US diplomacy, a conversation that starts with “Hey, we were wondering if you could eat a few billion dollars in losses to fraud so that we don’t have to bail out our rich corporate buddies in full public view” might not go too well.

But never mind, it may not come to that. A crack team of financial experts are trying to come up with a way to salvage the situation. We know they’re experts because, as the Chronicle points out, they’re exactly the people who got us into the mess in the first place…