UnSpace

We've got three more baby budgies we're raising. The big one with feathers coming in and the dark one are from Spangles and Spitfire, while Leela and Spot produced the one white one. They're cute. The dark one was a little sick when we pulled it from the nest. For some reason, some babies are born with black, tarry stools and splayed legs. We found that Propel Sports Drink with Calcium, used instead of water in the formula, seems to perk these guys up. As you can see, the dark one perked up and is now walking around without splayed legs.

For the record, I'd like to mention that Nancy is very careful with the knife when the budgie is playing on the celery. No parakeets were harmed in the making of this video!

Yesterday, this parakeet was throwing ice out of Nancy's glass and taking ice baths. Of course the camera that takes video wouldn't work. So today, I got a cup of ice and the bird barely played with it. After this video, the bird went into the cup to get a piece of ice. Somehow, a feather got stuck on some ice, and the budgie wound up running all over the place, trying to get away from the pursuing ice!

You'll notice I didn't get a video of that. Sigh. We took the ice off, of course, but it took a while to stop laughing!

Here's a short video I shot last night of Nancy playing with one of the parakeets. The bird was upside down for a while until Chauncey the Moluccan cockatoo screamed. At that point, the budgie had to be on alert, and that meant not being upside down!

This bird is one of the third generations in Nancy's tame budgie breeding program and will be going to a new family soon. The two siblings are just as tame and will be staying with us.

Yesterday, I posted about how unconscionable our treatment of our returning veterans was. Well, I just got off the phone after calling the offices of my two senators and representative about the problems veterans returning from Iraq face. Senator Specter's staffperson handled my call quickly and with no questions. The person who answered Senator Casey's phone took my name and zip code and thanked me, assuring me this would be mentioned to the senator. Congressman Murphy's staffperson stated that she thought this was a very important issue. She took my name, address, and stated that my concern would be passed onto the Congressman Murphy.

I probably got better at the phone call with practice. I've done this before, I don't know why it's still hard. I don't think the practice accounted for most of the response from the person answering the phone, though. Murphy, being elected by a region rather than the whole state, probably needs to be more responsive. For all I know, all three pay some grunt to go "Yeah, uh huh, I'll inform him" and then take the next call, with nothing being done. I am feeling a little cynical today. The best I was realistically hoping for was an additional tally mark on a list of what people are concerned about. I was left with the impression that Senator Specter doesn't intend to run again, Senator Casey's staff might be educable, and Congressman Murphy knows how hard he's going to have to fight next time.

Technorati shows that I'm not the only one talking about this. Remember the Ladies includes the abysmal treatment of veterans in a long post. The Impolitic calls the veteran situation a national disgrace. ThinkFast includes the veteran situation in a "quick link"-like list. I could go on and on…I even came across a very hard left site and a White Power site that were outraged. Nearly everyone agrees on the need for better treatment for our returning soldiers — but will the politicians do anything?

I can't condone the approach taken in the video on Viral Media in Retrospect to dealing with the problem, but there's a part of me going "Yeah, baby!" Come on — do we really have to con society into taking care of those who were willing to serve their country?

This post title might sound like a collection of random words, but it's not. Earlier, I talked about creating a nestbox webcam I finally got a webcam up and running, the Linksys Compact Wireless-G Internet Video Camera, model WVC54GC. By being wireless and able to connect to my router, I don't have to run enormous lengths of Ethernet cable around the house.

Alas and dang it, the camera doesn't seem to permit FTP; I'm not even sure if I can stream video to my website. Linksys has a service you can pay for whereby you can log on to a web page and watch the video, but I'd like to imbed it in UnSpace.

This was just after Nancy fed the babies, which means they're prone to sleeping. Before feeding, they're active in ways I didn't expect. Even the youngest is flapping her or his wings. I'm used to thinking that wing flapping doesn't come until they're much older.

Now, whenever I'm at the computer, I have the babies up in one corner of the desktop!

I'm still playing around with getting this to work. We'll see how this goes. Worse comes to worst, I can move the incubator into the computer room and use a wired camera with FTP capability.

Of course, I can watch other birds with this system, too!