Opossum in a Fig Tree

I’ve had a lot of opossum activity lately. A few weeks ago at night, I let the dogs out and they were barking which they don’t do unless they’ve got something. So I rushed outside and they were barking at a tree. I used the flashlight to scan the tree and there were two faces looking back at me. Opossums about five feet apart in the branches. I thought it wouldn’t be good to take a picture because that might force them to play dead and they would fall out of the tree. Then just the other night we were taking a walk and the dogs perked up about something, but it was near a house where there are outdoor cats. I turned on my flashlight on low to look around and there was something scurrying towards us. It turned and came straight down the sidewalk towards us at a fairly casual walking pace, a opossum. I held the dogs back and it stopped as if it was just noticing us, thought better of its current path and turned to cross the street and away from us. The dogs loved this.

Then tonight I let the dogs out and they went bolting into the backyard. They don’t do this unless they are on to something. I grabbed the flashlight again (I keep one hanging right next to the back door for this kind of thing) and looked all around. Directly under the fig tree I could see out towards all of the canopy, but I didn’t see anything. I got out and went to the side and there was a opossum hanging on and watching us. I went back in and the dogs followed (amazingly) and got the camera. With the dogs shut inside I was able to snap this photo.

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Yard Man, Meet Lawn Boy

When I first bought my house, Mr. Deckbar donated his old Lawn Boy mower to me. It was just like the one we used to have and I used it for several years but each Spring it was harder to get started. Norm turned me on to Starting Fluid which will bring just about any engine to life (it is pure octane, actually ether I think) but even with that it was sluggish. So I checked out Consumer Reports in 2003 and they had a Yard Man mower that they liked and said did a good job of mulching. With the old mower I would bag and compost the clippings sometimes, but mulching is better because it just recycles the clippings into the ground where they help the grass grow.

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JP1 Still Kicking

Five years ago, I got a JP1 cable to connect my computer and JP1-compatible remote control. That remote stopped working (some of the buttons wore out, but I was able to remap those functions to other buttons for a while). I was at Mom’s house recently and wanted to help her JP1 remote learn to run her new iPod boom box. The easiest way is just to learn the signals from the device’s remote into the universal remote by pointing them at each other and pressing some buttons. But because I had done this to learn everything for her HDTV to analog converter box, there wasn’t any memory left for the boom box.

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AJC Discount

I recently let my subscription to the newspaper lapse. They wanted a lot more than I had been paying in the past to resubscribe and their discounts were lousy. Mom showed me a flyer today with a 50% off discount, so I have re-upped. It is for new subscribers, but they had an ominous warning that they would charge for amounts past due (which I have because they always keep delivering the paper after it lapses), so we’ll see what happens with that.

These are 13-week prices, but you can also get 26 weeks for a little less:

7-day: $2.49/wk

Thu-Sun: $2.25/wk

Sunday: $1.47/wk

Just go to ajc.com/discount. You don’t seem to need an offer code, but the one I got from Mom was 2130.

Portable Hard Drive

After ending up with a couple of extra notebook computer hard drives when I did the Archos upgrade, I ordered some cheap ($4.90) cases from China on eBay that would let me convert the hard drives to portable drives. They arrived this morning. I got a blue one and a black one. One will hold the 40 GB drive and the other the 20 GB drive (the blue 40 GB drive is for Nicole).

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To set it up, you just take the end off of the case, plug the hard drive into it, slide it back in place, and screw two tiny little screws into the sides to hold it securely (they include a small philips head screwdriver). They even threw in a cheap looking leather sleeve for it. My computer had no problem recognizing it and I didn’t need the extra USB plug that can provide extra power (the only thing kind of non-standard is that they used the wide USB A end instead of a mini USB or USB B plug for the drive). The connection is USB 2.0, so data transferred very quickly. I moved 3.81 GB of videos over in 3 minutes 39 seconds, so 17.4 MB per second. That is at least a few times faster than the tests I did on my flash drives and way faster than when I connect the USB 1.1 Archos where 3 GB of data would take 20 minutes or so. USB 2.0 will allow faster speeds than that, so the limiting factor might be the hard drive itself or my computer. It is noticeably snappy when opening folders on it, similar to folders on the computer’s hard drive.

Anyway, this is pretty neat and a good use for a hard drive from an old laptop computer.