Monthly Archives: May 2021

Creature Feature 2021 #4

My plan to take advantage of this holiday was to get out on the lake early. But, the weather continues to be screwy and this morning I awoke to a tempeature of 12C (54F). I decided to wait a bit until it warmed up a some. Even then, it was a cool, overcast morning. In fact, it stayed overcast almost all day, contrary to the forecasts. This was another one of those cases where the TAFs keep getting updated to match the reported conditions.

Even the wildlife seemed to be keeping a low profile under these conditions, but the Geese were keeping watch over their gooselets:

As were the Osprey (well, keeping an eye on their osprats, they wouldn’t care about the gooselets):

This Osprey was soaring way up high under a rare break in the clouds:

From there I made my way all the way up the eastern arm of the lake without much to write home about. Arriving at the northern end of the lake, though, Nature threw me another curve ball. I hadn’t seen Egrets around here until late summer and into early fall, but here was one in late Spring:

I’m always interested in how these large birds get around, in particular how one might do something that looks difficult like landing up in a tree.


Made it! And made it look easy…

Killdeer were hunting around the shallows:

For a while anyway, then time to go!

I didn’t see any turtles on my way up the lake, maybe they figured it was warmer in the water. On the way back though there were a few out.


And, of course, the obligatory Great Blue Heron picture:

Creature Feature 2021 #3

I’ll kick off this creature feature in my back yard. I went out back doing a couple of chores and something caught my eye. There, under a couple low branches, was a small fawn in the grass. He was so small I could probably have picked him up with one hand (not that I’d try of course):

They grow fast though:

There was plenty of “lawn maintenance” going on this morning. These geese were
working on the lake dam:

And crows were working the other side of the lake:

The new nesting platform that was put up for the Osprey looks to have had some activity since I was last out there a few weeks ago. Seems kind of late in the season to be starting a nest, but I’m sure the Osprey know what they’re doing.

And, of course, the obligatory Great Blue Heron picture:

Plus a bonus!

More on Fluffy

Fluffy had a home here,

and she still does:

Visitation by appointment please.

There’s one more story about Fluffy that needs to be told.

Many years ago now, at work we were putting our first web site up on the wild Internet. There were two groups of people involved with this.

There were the web site developers, sort of like the playwrights and scenery designers. They do all the stuff that you see when you visit a web site: the graphics, text, forms, etc…

The other group, mine, was the system administrators. We were charged with all the stuff you don’t see: making sure the sound and lighting work, the stage doesn’t creak, and making sure everyone comes in through the front entrance and no riff-raff slips in through the stage door.

Normally, for a web server, that stage door is blocked off from the street: you have to go in through the parking garage and through multiple security checkpoints to reach the stage door. You can’t just walk up to the door from the street.

Well, the developers wanted to be able to get in quickly and correct any problems with their web site, and so wanted to have access to that stage door from the street (Internet). The system administrators said that was a Really Bad Idea, because everyone would be trying to get in that door, trying all sorts of user IDs and passwords. A compromise was reached and we left that door accessible for just a few days, in case there were some early problems with the web site that needed to be corrected quickly.

But we watched that door carefully. If someone snuck in there, it would be game over. And as we expected, we saw people trying to log in to our web server with all sorts of known-powerful user IDs: system, admin, oracle, dba, fluffy, root, administrator… Wait… WHAT? Someone was trying to hack into our server with the user ID “fluffy”??

Fast forward to 2012. My Dad and I adopt a cat, whose name just happens to be Fluffy. That started the legend of the l33t hax0r (elite hacker, in the lingo) Fluffy.

Last year as fiber was being run down the road in front of the house, Fluffy watched the crews with great interest, no doubt eager for more bandwidth to support her hacks in to the NSA and Russia and who knows what else…..

After I began working from home due to the pandemic, Fluffy would sometimes come into my home office for something, and I’d have to explain (again) “Fluffy, I’m at work now, if you need something, you need to put in a help desk ticket.” Apparently she didn’t like our ticketing system any more than the rest of us, because she never did hack that system to enter any tickets. Not that I have any doubt that she could.