Man, Harley was in a *bad* mood tonight. I’ve got two minor bleeding spots, and 5 largish bruises before I became convinced he wasn’t getting out of that bad mood.
There were two other people there that he likes, and he wanted them more than me. Sadly, he isn’t bright enough to realize that they aren’t going to have anything to do with him after they see him clamp down on me.

It was educational – I saw the body language that accompanied an annoyed Harley. His eyes looked different – its hard to say exactly how, but I could see a distinct difference, and now I know it means “Annoyed. Maybe even pissed.” He was also reluctant to do his “step ups”. When I first get him off the cage, we go through a series of 8-10 “step ups” from arm to arm (laddering) while I tell him in a silly voice about how good and pretty he is. My theory is, that puts him in a more receptive mood to listen to me.

The bites don’t feel wonderful, but when it comes to animals, I have a high pain tolerance. I’m already wincing about the next time he clamps down though, since he is almost bound to bite an already existing bruise.

Luckily, I have a book due to arrive soon on dealing with aggression in parrots. Here is hoping I can turn book knowledge into real world knowledge (aka experience) with a minimum of pain.

I can tell Harley is a good bird. He’s just not a perfect bird.

Well, since getting any rest tonight is well and truly shot, I might as well post a bit more about Harley Macaw. He’s not an abused bird – well, not anymore. He wasn’t taken care of at his previous owners, but the lady who has him now takes fairly good care of him. I’ll take excellent care of him.

He is a reformed plucker, and not all of his feathers have grown back in. Before she got him, he was living in a too small basement cage, with very little natural light. He also wasn’t getting much human interaction, and didn’t have enough toys. Now, most of his feathers have grown back in. His tail feathers especially, but he is still missing many of his wing feathers.

The biggest issue with Harley, is that he bites. He is a bit cage aggressive, which I think fuels most of the biting. Since my hands on parrot experience is limited, I’ve ordered The Parrot Problem Solver to go with my other parrot books. I’ve also got a basic parrot training dvd ordered, by the same author. When you don’t have real world knowledge, then the visual aid of a DVD can really help bridge book knowledge to real world knowledge – aka experience.

I’m going to try and enlist my father, and my brother, into helping me keep Harley socialized, and well adjusted. To do that though, I’ve got to overcome the whole “if it bites, wallop the hell out of it” mentality that they have. That attitude works with dogs, goats, or virtually any mammal. Birds however, aren’t mammals.

Anyway, to wrap up a rambling, only semi-coherent post, I’ve got my work cut out for me. I want to improve Harley’s diet, get him bathing regularly, and get him out associating with people on a regular basis.

Harley and me 3.JPG

Originally uploaded by The_Gut.

Woohoo! Harley the Blue and Gold Macaw is coming to live with me in two weeks! He’s a real sweetie, underneath the gruff exterior (he occasionally bites). I’m looking forward to this – gaining a new, lifelong companion, who is so pretty, so smart and just such a clown.

Japanese Fetish Cafes cater to Geeks.

Wow. I love the Japanese.

Teens at Little River Falls

Originally uploaded by The_Gut.

I’m convinced that Teens don’t think like adults. Both because research supports it, and because I was a teen myself. Anyway, last weekend I took a short road trip to Little River canyon in Alabama. There was a big bus load of kids from somewhere at the falls…. church group? School group? I don’t know. I do know that the nuts were out wading in the river, with the temperature below 40.

I love the Roomba. I hate cleaning with a passion, especially the floors. Now, one thing about Roomba’s – they are extremely expensive, because the reliability just sucks. If you can find one with an extended warranty, the warrenty would be well worth picking up.

I’ve owned two, the original, that broke under warranty, and its replacement. The total lifetime of the two units was just 1.5 years. That is for something that costs 180 dollars or so. And yet, I just placed another order for one, this time the Pet model. Why? Because I bloody hate cleaning the floors! And, the things are very, very good at vacuuming hardwood.

Anyway, only time will tell how this works out.

I have the 12 inch Powerbook 1.5ghtz G4. Its a shade under two years old. Its the best computer I have ever owned. Its the first macintosh I’ve ever owned – I hadn’t even played with a mac when I bought it. So I truly jumped in cold turkey.

Recently, for no good reason, I’ve started feeling “the itch”. No, this isn’t the itch of Black Snake Moan. Though I sure wouldn’t mind feeling that itch… but thats a digression. Nope, I’m talking about the itch for a new computer. I’ve been out to Apple‘s site a couple of times, and priced out both a macbook and the macbook pro. I’m not actually going to get either one any time soon, since its more important I get my Credit Card debt eliminated, or at least very heavily reduced. Thats what I keep telling myself anyway.

I’ll probably go with a macbook when I get a new laptop. I love the small size of this sweet, sweet machine I’m typing on. Which the new Macbook pro’s are just too large, being at minimum a 15 inch screen. But the Macbooks can have a 13 inch screen, which is a much nicer size.

But I’m not getting one for a while anyway, so its not an issue. /grin

Well, it appears that the new dollar coins are debuting. Maybe the third time will be the charm?

Anyway, I think these coins are a grand idea, and I plan on collecting them. Now, whether they actually catch on, and start being spent, that I don’t know. One reason is that its too hard to tell what you’ve got without pulling the coins out of your pocket. If you can easily tell these coins from a quarter, by feel and sight, then they will stand a greater chance of being used. People are reluctant to spend dollar coins, for whatever reason. I’m not. I’ll often ask for them at the bank, along with two dollar bills. They are a good tip item, especially for teens, who often have never seen them.

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

Sherlock Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet”.

Now, I don’t know that this is literally true. I don’t know if it even has any scientific basis. But, it has a ring of value to it, nonetheless. Sadly, I suppose, I’m the fool with the big stack of lumber. I’m coming more and more to realize that I know a lot, but that I think little. I can vomit up stuff quite well, but I can’t bypass the vomit and produce something useful with what I know. Also, many times it feels like my brain is so stuffed full of trivia and inanities, that the mere act of thinking is like moving through a thick, clinging fog. I suppose everyone feels that way on occasion.

I’m tempted to do a Thoreau, and live in a simple hut for a while. Me, my dogs, my parrot, maybe my hermit crabs, and the wide world. To be a computer geek, I’m an amazing technophobe. That might let me organize my little mental workshop, and actually produce work with it.

Now, one of the tricks that Holmes doesn’t mention, is how to figure out what is useless, and what isn’t. For Holmes, it was easy, because he had his passion. For most of us, it isn’t so easy. My passion used to be computers. At that time, knowing the intricacies of batch files would be important. Now, not so much.

Life isn’t as cut and dried as old novels.

I love this article. Especially the image of dogs as social parasites, who have manipulated their way into human society to their evolutionary advantage. And make no mistake, while a lot of dogs live fairly poor lives, on the whole, the species is doing far better than most species on the planet. I know that my three are manipulative little bastards.

Its pretty much acknowledged too. In the movie Children of Men (Go see it!), the human race has gone sterile. No new children have been born in 18 years. But dogs are all over the place. And, there is a particularly touching scene, where

Spoiler alert!
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Spoiler alert!!

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Minor spoiler for Children of Men!!

Anyway, an aging man who is about to die, mercy kills his mentally damaged wife (who had been tortured into total withdrawal from the world) and he also kills their aging dog. He uses drugs from a government issued suicide kit. Its a good movie.

Note: I talked about Children of Men before I went to see it, here.

I overheard a conversation at work the other day, that hits on a pet peeve of mine. The present snowfall hammering New York was blamed on global warming, because the lake should be frozen over this late in the year.

This might or might not be true, but it is most likely not true. That area has been prone to lake effect snowfalls for its entire existence. Make no mistake, its getting hammered hard right now, but its not something that is totally new to the area. And while global warming might have contributed to it, thats simply an unknown at this point. You won’t be able to say for sure until you’ve had several years of unusually heavy lake effect storms, correlated to a temperature increase or other weather phenomena.

Update:
Almost immediately after posting this, I found this great article from AEI – which is being much maligned at the moment. A small sample

In any event, it has never been true that we ignore mainstream science; and anyone who reads AEI publications closely can see that we are not “skeptics” about warming. It is possible to accept the general consensus about the existence of global warming while having valid questions about the extent of warming, the consequences of warming, and the appropriate responses. In particular, one can remain a policy skeptic, which is where we are today, along with nearly all economists.

Okay, I was reading a combination book review over at Slate last night, and ran across the word risible. I’ve seen it before, but never bothered to look up the meaning. It means laughable, or ludicrous.

I know that having a variety of words is a good thing. But this word annoys me. It simply seems to be a high brow word that has no good reason for existence. Now, I could be, and probably am, wrong, but that doesn’t change my annoyance.

On an unrelated note, I apologize for the gap in my posts.