Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

Made curious by yet another search term, I checked. At this moment in time - subject to change without notice - DoaMNH is result number one when you feed ‘teckelmania‘ into google. Time to break out the champagne!

On the topic of search terms, this screencap from April 30 makes me happy:

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Eclectic! Funkadelic!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Um, not quite - but it does seem like I’m up on a new platform. Will shake stuff down - there will likely be a burp or two over the next couple days. Loyal readers, please bear with me!

Update1 - RSS is back, but the feed address is a little different than the one I was using - http://www.hawkdog.net/wordpress/?feed=atom is working for me.

Update2 - I seem to have lost some comments (everything after Jan. 24?) - I’ll try to get them back this evening - time to hack away at the XML export file I used to restore the posts/comments.

Good news - the blog is mostly updated to Wordpress 2.3.x. XMLRPC (a component that allows me to post from other blogging clients - see post below for an example) is functioning properly; it wasn’t working on the 2.0.x software I was using.

Bad news - RSS, comments and direct links in to posts still aren’t working. I’m working on it… If you see anything else boogered up and would like to let me know, I’d appreciate it: dr.hypercube at gmail.com.

Trying to see what I broke w/ the unsuccessful upgrade attempt this AM…

Update - looks like I screwed up RSS.

Harbingers of the still distant thaw:

The sap is running.

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The sump pump is pumping.

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And Girl Scout cookies have made their appearance.

My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives. - Hedy Hedley Lamarr

Between self-publishing, ubiquitous computing, Martin Picard (and F1), birds of paradise, LOEG and a dozen other things, my head feels like Grand Central station on a busy day. Still, curiosity is way more fun than being a lump. I need to go for a long walk - hooray - tomorrow is Saturday.

A storm is supposed to arrive here sometime late tonight. It’s making the local weather forecasters slightly frantic; depending on the precise track it takes, things might get a bit interesting. If we experience one of the possibilities - freezing rain followed by high winds - power failure is likely. No power means no DoaMNH - rest assured, we’ll be back as soon as electrons are once again available.

I just discovered (via Make:) that one can now embed Google maps. By way of a test, here’s a local landmark - the old prison over at the Navy Yard.

View Larger Map

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My dad served in the Navy - his recollection was that Portsmouth was the end of the line - it’s where people served serious terms for serious crimes. On the other hand, Jack Nicholson headed to Portsmouth with a sailor convicted of pretty minor offense …

A recent comment clued me to the fact that I haven’t provided much background info on some of the things I do (and post on) - assuming that both people who read my blog are already in the know. Seems like I may have more than a handful of readers, so I’ll try to fill in some of the blanks.

I’m a falconer. Click here for a good definition of what falconry is. I have a six year old male Red-tailed Hawk and a sixteen week old female Peregrine Falcon. Brick, the Red-tail, hunts rabbits, snowshoe hare, squirrel and pheasant; I plan to fly Luz, the Peregrine, on ducks on the salt marsh. My falconry bullet point list:

• Falconry. Look at the word. Notice it does not contain the letter “d” or the letter “t”. I don’t know if it’s a local thing or not, but if I hear someone pronounce it falcundry one more time…
• Q: You let the bird go? A: Yes. Q: And it comes back? A: So far. Every time we go hunting there is the chance that - if I haven’t prepared properly - I could come home without the hawk. Lost birds are no joke - falconers try like hell to find them - but that risk is a necessary part of the sport.
• Q: So it’s a pet? A: NFW. I’m not all that sure what a pet is, to be honest with you. I have dogs - they work for/with me every fall when we go bird hunting and the rest of the year have duties around the house (basically, do as I ask) and are demo dogs when I teach dog obedience classes. There are periods each year when they are in charge - if they tell me there’s a woodcock in the alders I damn well believe them. Pets? I guess, but I don’t think of them that way. The birds? Definitely not. I make myself useful to the hawks when we’re out hunting; we strike a bargain - if the human produces slips (opportunities on game), then the hawk will stay interested.
• Q: It brings the game back? A: No. (We’ll put aside some of the things I’ve heard you can do with Merlins). Carrying (flying off with the game) is a vice - a bad thing. They stay put and allow you to approach them (it’s called ‘making in’).
• You may have gotten the sense already that falconry is a vocabulary-rich undertaking. True. Even better, much of the vocabulary has been essentially unchanged for hundreds of years - rich gravy for lovers of good words.

If you are interested in finding out more about the sport, permit me to recommend Stephen Bodio’s A Rage for Falcons. It’s a fantastic overview - not a how-to (those exist too), but a why-to.

Folks who don’t know from falconry, please understand that writing the paragraphs above was more than a little stress inducing. Folks who do know - if there’s something you don’t like, or that you’d like to add, please comment.

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My nom-de-blog, Dr. Hypercube - what’s up with that? First, I’m neither an MD nor a PhD. Also, not multidimensional (beyond three + time). A year ago, as I was starting to blog, I was also setting up a test network. I needed a bunch of host names and rather than do something boring, I decided to use monster names. It was a decent sized net (VMWare rules!); I went to the Kaiju Big Battel web site to replenish my monster supply. From there, it was no leap at all to Dr. Cube - my first modification, Dr. Tesseract, was just too obscure. Hey, presto - Dr. H!

Hooray for Kaiju: professional wrasslin’ moves + crazy monster suits + cardboard buildings in the squared circle = hilarity.

On the subject of anonymity - I thought originally that it might be a good idea. As I did more and more blogging, I cared about anonymity less and less. At this point, if you want to know my real name it’s about four clicks away.

Update - ‘The squared circle’ is the way pro wrasslers refer to the ring. Real wrestling (no make-up, completely trashed ears) is done on a mat within a circle. The pro show is done in a (modified for bounce, I think) boxing ring- a square. Those two factoids plus high school geometry yield a great phrase for the likes of Mean Gene Okerlund.

Heavy inbound linkage from BibliOdyssey - welcome! If this is your 1st visit, you might want to check the Greatest Hits link farm over on the right margin - some of the more popular and/or commented on posts.