Bromeliads are common here at Xanadu — here are a few examples. Many are considered noxious weeds in Florida because of their mosquito breeding potential.
More on Bromeliaceae at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromeliaceae
Twenty-two degrees C, light rain, humidity 93 per cent at 8:00am – just another Sydney summer day. Great conditions for the garden which is alive with flora and fauna.
And on another matter
For great oratory check out Obama’s State of the Nation speech at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLYphVUutTs
A single, subtle bloom outside the back door.
Something clicked in both of us this week and gardening has resumed – principally weed clearing from the vegie bed. The worm farm is producing many litres of ‘worm tea’ and weeding precedes distribution. And there are barrow loads of manufactured soil from the compost bins to be spread.
Light rain overnight and early this morning, and we have our voracious frog calling for a mate. As it becomes warmer, the chorus increases in numbers until we get the annual complaint from a new neighbour about the peculiar noise. This morning’s caller:
The original tadpoles came from Garden Art in Five Dock and took three years and a number of return trips before Beryl coaxed them to maturity. Cooked lettuce was the successful tadpole food. We didn’t know what they were until I took a recording into the Frog and Tadpole Society meeting at the Australian Museum (worth attending to observe very keen frog lovers). Soon we noticed a dramatic fall in snail numbers – this frog will attack and eat anything up to its own size. Marrickville Council established a Golden Bell Frog sanctuary at their nursery – wiped out by the Striped Marsh invasion. During my early morning summer dog walks I hear them, spreading wider and wider, and have been told it is a very favourable sign that our local ecology is encouraging a return of fauna and flora species that were wiped out in the 20th century.
A large wetland-dwelling frog and voracious hunter, this frog eats almost any animal smaller than itself, including small frogs. Its distribution extends along the east coast from Queensland to South Australia. It is most commonly associated with wetlands and permanent water and shelters among reeds and other debris. Males call from the water concealed in vegetation or sometimes concealed under the egg masses. The call is a single short soft explosive note … a “tock” or “poc” with similar inflections to a hen’s “cluck”.
Male frogs of many species do fight, particularly in species where good calling or breeding sites are more likely to result in success. Males also tend to fight more often when females are uncommon at breeding sites. Many species of marsh frogs (Limnodynastes) are known to engage in ‘male-combat’- and that might be the reason that male marsh frogs tend to be larger overall, and have much bigger, more muscle-bound arms compared to females. Larger individuals tend to be more successful in these wresting bouts, and the puffed up bodies many be an attempt to look as large as possible, and hence maybe scare off the competitor.
I have begun clearing some of the over-growth and intended to work on our vegie bed this morning but too wet. Maybe tomorrow.
The azaleas are, as every year, breathtaking. The yard is in need of maintenance but laziness is currently ascendant. I have a first draft of ‘Exophonic writing’ posted and an early comment pulled me up:
You have opened up a fascinating topic and I am sure that others will join this conversation. … My first impression reading this is it contains some gems but seems loosely connected. You don’t seem to have found your own point of view yet.
I not sure about the ‘loosely connected’ so will seek guidance. As for my ‘point of view’, I probably need to stress my wonder at how resilient and flexible English has been and still is – a growing language. I have yet to begin a Conclusion.
I am converting to digital, an old cassette tape of Bet and Bill Coote reminiscing, and to then edit and post in the Memoirs – first snippet sounds great. Having shed all of my analogue sound gear I have to play it in the car – the only tape machine I have and it sounds terrible. I will have to seek out a sound pro.
Other than strata inspections during the day, I have been reworking my essay ‘Discovering English’. A discursive ramble through what I know about my only language, and how I, and others, communicate in English. I will post this in sections as I am satisfied with the text.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/artworks/stories/2011/3296728.htm
Have you wandered about town and been surprised by a piece of knitting adorning a lampost or a tree or a car? If so, you have stumbled upon a growing phenomenon known as yarnbombing. It’s a kind of knitted graffiti, where the grandmotherly art of knitting has been given a punk edge.
I have been passing this interesting piece every day – it has been there since Christmas and now realize it’s street art. More photos on Artworks and the podcast is well worth a listen (the Vatican was yarnbombed!).
I have always been an advocate of regular backups of my various computers. When I ran the computing facilities at CQU Sydney, we backed up to tape every night and were competent at restoring files. At Unilodge with an array of servers, this discipline continued and despite some awful disk crashes, we never lost any critical data.
When I dropped out of these activities and had a couple of Macs to tinker with, I continued backing up using Carbon Copy and again, never really lost a file. With OS 10.6.x came Time Machine, which backed up every hour to a dedicated desktop hard drive. Very cool! However, when my MacBook Pro fainted and I needed to move files to my MacMini, “Sorry, this is a different machine. No can restore!”. I finally got the MacBook back up and immediately returned to Carbon Copy and backed up the hard drive. Nothing like a failed restore to shake one up.
Planning ahead of the replacement with a 27 inch iMac and a 13 inch MacBook Pro, I bought a 3Tb Seagate GoFlex desk drive which worked twice then bombed. Seagate support was, despite the stress of having stored irreplaceable images on the drive, laughable. Their recommended dagnostic was Seatools – Windows ‘Yes, DOS ‘Yes’, Mac ‘NO’ even though the drive was Mac specific. DOS? – where have these people been? They basically refused to help other than replacing the drive without my data. I eventually got it working (dud power supply), and duplicated the critical data on to a LaCie desktop drive.
The current config is Carbon Copy backing up to the Seagate at 04:30 and the LaCie at 05:30 every day. The automatic backup occasionally fails so I check the logs regularly. I synchronise the Imac and the Macbook regularly so the Macbook files are safe.
The point of this note is to strongly recommend testing your backup (if you are doing one) with a restore. I note that one of my highly respected technical Facebook friends (they shall remain unnamed) lost their hard drive and publicly grieved. It can happen at anytime – an analysis by Google of their many thousands of hard drives found that 10 per cent failed in the first 12 months. I also note that Apple had a recall of MacBook Pro machines with failing Seagate drives – it can happen to anyone.
