Turkey, USB Experiment, and Cam Info
Let's start off with big ol' Tom Turkey...
Beautiful creatures... they truly are. But note the toes and claws - not things to be taken lightly. This one by the way is just one of a rafter of seven that visit us almost on a daily basis. (Did you know that Ben Franklin preferred the turkey over the eagle as our national bird? Here is a link to a fascinating letter Franklin wrote to his daughter in 1784 arguing his case. The only input I might add is that a person doesn't have to be dressed in red to be attacked by one of these monsters.)
The next bit of business is a particularly silly USB experiment... Mrs. CCA and I got to wondering why the max USB cable length was only apx. 16 feet. (I'd looked at a ton of Web sites and got conflicting info. The issue seemed to be that of signal delay vs. signal deterioration. We figured that if we could get our cheap but colorful USB cam out back by the feeders, well then we'd really be "cammed up and streamin' large". After all, we could live with delay as long as the signal quality didn't suffer.) Sooo... We bought five sixteen footers and hooked them all together for a total of 80 feet.
(Why is it that you just know that this ain't going to happen?) And not happen it did. The computer wouldn't even boot. My guess is that the added resistivity of all those cables flummoxed the USB port, which in turn yacked at the initial hardware portion of the PC's boot sequence. We unplugged the mess and hooked it back to the way it was with the single short cable and all was well again... Sigh... And that leads us to the screen shot of the two cams below...
The live streaming puppy on the left is our eBirdseed.com bird cam. The one on the right is our front lawn USB cam. (If only we could have gotten the latter out back and outdoors... Dang!) Anywho, it's late now, and those cameras offer strange company. (Ok, so the USB rascal ain't exactly enthralling in the PM with the shade down and a motionless note.) But the one on the left is ghostly in its camaraderie. It's almost as if a creature will come hulking out of the woods in the background. Did you ever see the Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"?
Hmmm... That's enough for tonight...
See you by the feeders,
CapeCodAlan
Cornell Ornithology Laboratory: Inside Birding
Cornell Ornithology Laboratory: All About Birding
