Bird Song

30 March 2024

The alarm sounded at 5:40, way too early when you normally wake up at about 8:00.  We have to be in Norsey Woods for the Bird song walk at 6:30.  It doesn't help that the freezer suffered a minor malfunction, but we got there.  Binoculars and phone app to hand to identify the birds from their song and if possible to see them as well.  

The guides and the other enthusiasts put us to shame with their knowledge and easy identification.  It will take me a long time to be that proficient.  The app (Merlin) identifies birds in real time, allowing me to watch the bird come up, just as the song starts.  It is very helpful.  We walked around for about two hours, and I am slowly getting used to locating birds with binoculars, that's another skill I have to learn.

There is a great-spotted woodpecker at the top of this tree - you'll have to trust me because I only had my phone with me, and even zoomed in it is just a blob.

The sound of the birds was amazing, and I remembered an incident from school life.  One of the teachers in junior school asked if someone could get up early to record the dawn chorus.  A boy called Andrew volunteered, and was very enthusiastic.  Unfortunately, he couldn't get up early, so we never did hear the dawn chorus from his house.

From our house, it was amazing, but I was never an early riser, so probably missed the best of it.

Today's walk in the woods, and the birds we heard, was very impressive, but I suspect it would have been better 50+ years ago.

We definitely heard Chiffchaff, Robin, Great Tit, Blue Tit, Wren, Wood-pigeon and the sound of woodpeckers pecking.  We also disturbed a Muntjac.

Back to the bad old days?

I've had a Nokia smart phone for a while now. Its a C30, the reviews I have read suggest that it should be a great phone. It was relatively cheap, and was intended to be an introduction to smart phones. There are several problems with it. Most notable amonst them is the problem of getting it to use wireless when available and 3G when not. It just doesn't work very well, in fact it doesn't work at all, unless you have all the settings set to automatic. I'm on pay-as-you-go, so a random app using my data is bad news. The browser (Opera mini) is the worst offender, I cannot persuade it to connect through a wireless connection. There are two browsers, and I have added a twitter app. There is also a Communities app, it is next to useless because the white text is on light blue background (whose brilliant idea was that I wonder?). The apps in general are pretty poor. The twitter app regulary hangs and will not work again until you either logout/login, or take the battery out and restart. One or the other!

For Christmas I was given a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 tablet. Very nice it is too, BUT ... Just like the phone it has some little quirks, generally the hardware seems good. So does the operating system, I have just let it upgrade, and all seems OK, although I don'l like where it displays messages now. The apps are another story. I downloaded a key board with cursor keys, but its horrible because it won't go away. The browser Skyfire, supposedly the quickest, is certainly quick when it works, which isn't that often, I'm now trying Firefox - various sites don' load or don' always load, and now I'm trying chrome -not too many problems so far. The default browser is slow, but most reliable until the reload is touched, then I invaribly get an internet page not available message. Polaris, the office app, doesn't load all Word documents, just most of them! I've tried OliveOffice, but haven't got very far yet, it has a peculiar approach to typing.

This takes me back 15 or more years to the early days of the PC. Applications that don't work, or don't work reliably. I hope we get better development with the newer devices more quickly than that. There is another BUT ...
The tablet IS pretty intuitive, and the bits that aren't, are easy to learn, its OK for browsing but has a long way to go for more serious work.

Dabbling with D.A.B (ecologic-6)

Very soon (2012?) the government will begin switching off the good old analogue radio signals. Long Wave, Medium Wave and Frequency Modulation will become a thing of the past. DAB has been around since 1995.  As I'm generally a leading edge adopter of technology(??!!??), I soon began investigating what DAB was all about.  Early reports were dismal.  The sound quality was poorer than FM, the coverage was poorer than just about anything else and the energy consumption of the devices could easily offset the change to energy saving light bulbs.  Then there's the digital delay.  The broadcast has to be encoded and decoded.  This take time, so when switching from an analogue channel to a digital channel you hear the last three or four words repeated.

A decade and a half later many of these problems have been solved. Coverage is being improved by switching off the old analogue transmitters and converting them to digital.  This also improves the sound quality, although whether it will ever be as good as stereo FM is open to debate.  There are also now some digital radios that run on solar power.

It is time to upgrade.


On New year's Eve I bought an ecologic-6 to replace my aging clock radio.  It looks very stylish, and meets with the approval of my youngest son - who knows more about style than I could ever. There are a number of advantages to this new device.  The time is set automatically from the digital signal.  That means we have one clock in the house that is always correct when the power is on.  It picks up the DAB signal for Radio 4, which is unaffected by the other things in the vicinity, the old clock would frequently pick up distortion and the signal become loud and difficult to interpret - then I would have to turn over, sit up, or lay down to listen to the radio. It has a much smaller footprint.
There are disadvantages too.  To put the radio on for a while I used to just press sleep - the radio would operate for 59 minutes.  To put this on sleep I have to press the on button, press the sleep button, select the time I want (it starts at 5 minutes and goes up), press the select button.  That is really unnecessarily complex. My old radio showed the time in large numbers in 12-hour format.  It had an auto-dimmer - when the light was switched off the display dimmed automatically.  This modern 21st century device has a manual dimmer, with a number of fixed settings!  On the lowest setting is generates enough light to do more than just read the time - which is all I need the light on for in the night.  In the daylight or with the lights on the illumination of the dial is not visible - so I forget to switch it off!

There are some things I haven't worked out yet - how to set the alarm volume on the radio above 15 - which is just too quiet.

My old Bush clock radio, purchased in the late 1970's was the the longest serving piece of technology in use in our house until new years eve, I have no idea what is the oldest now.

What should I call this post?

Blogger Arrrrrrrrgh! was my first thought. Perhaps I should stick with "Sunday, April 15th @ 10:00am at Christ Church". The story is of technology and buses.

We arrived at church early, because I was helping with the technology, and Jo was doing Tea/Coffee and Singing. The Tea/Coffee went well, so did the Singing, but the technology was awful. The DVD player I was given doesn't do timed indexing, and it creeps on pause. That's probably a way of stopping me frying the track. Our projector is next to useless, and the clip was of a man in a cave - all very dark. However the talk was interesting, if only that it highlighted what tradition does to our beliefs. A very good point. Thomas, far from lacking faith, was merely refusing to trust his friends when they told him something that sounded entirely unreasonable. Look at his reaction when he met the risen Jesus.

Anyway back to the story. As the prayers were led a sunflower seed was given out. It caught the imagination, and hopefully should be a good was of reminding us to pray. A few jokes about Sunflower cam, and the blogging idea came out. Take a look at http://sunflowerprayers.blogspot.com. In a conversation over coffee I said, "Oh yes, I'll just add to the Tanzania Blog". Simple! Login, ceate a blog - 2 minutes - doddle! Couldn't be easier.


RUBBISH

Hadn't reckoned with Blogger. (yoda voice required for the next bit) Moved it to the new blog they have. Very unhelpful it is. ( OK, back to normal) So I have to sign up with a new gmail address, which seems to be the only way to make it work. All that's done - but what a waste of time. Haven't they heard of "migration script".


Any way if you've got this far - Well done! Here I hope is the good bit. I have been trying to get Christ Church people into blogging. We should add the blog addresses to the A-Z. I'd like to run multiple Christ church Blogs, one for each of the organizations we have. Let people create their own content. Thats what the web should be about. Lets hope that has started.

Buses
So there I was, finally getting on with my meeting minutes. I've had a busy week, of four official working days the shortest was 11.9 hours. So, I've not been doing all I should. The phone rings. I answer it "Hello."
"Dad, What are you doing?"
"Talking to you on the phone, Mike"
"Yes cut the sarcasm. Are you busy?"
"Of course. What do you want?"
"If I give you some money will you pick us up from Lakeside. The bus hasn't come"
"When's the next one?"
"Tomorrow"
So I do the return trip to Lakeside (about 15 miles each way). The last bus should never be cancelled - cancel the one before if you have to, but never the last one.



I haven't had any money yet.