EUTC 2013, Amsterdam

Well, it's almost over.  EUTC for this year finishes tomorrow and we all go back to work. 

Well, some of us have been working all the time, of course!

The European Utilities Telecom Forum is the prime get-together for Utility Telecom Managers across Europe.  This year, we met in Hotel Krasnapolski in Dam Square, Amsterdam. 

For more information, go to www.eutc.org and look for the 2014 conference, which will be in Monaco. No, we're going there in the off-season, so it's not going to be as expensive as it first appears.

A new season and we have a camera set up in the box.
You can see it here: http://www.covington.org.uk/camera/birdcam.shtml
Right now, there are six eggs in the nest. Perhaps seven, but it's not the best camera in the world!

8 Chicks

OK. It's been a week now and we still have 8 chicks in the nestbox.
A steady supply of mealworms from the fridge has managed to keep them all alive despite the lack of insects "in the wild" due to the very dry weather.

A new season in the bird boxes

We've had a Great Tit sleeping most nights in the camera bird box since before Christmas. I didn't notice this and cleaned it out in January, much to it's annoyance.
I put some dry moss and other nesting material into the box and it sorted it out and carried on sleeping in there, but this weekend it threw the whole lot out of the door so the box is now almost completely empty!

Tits!

Great Tits in the bird box....
I have a box set up with a camera. Over the last few weeks we've been watching various pairs of prospective inmates surveying the box and a couple of weeks ago a pair of Great Tits moved in and started redecorating. They worked on the front door for a few days (at about 5AM) - hammering away at it with their beaks until it was big enough, despite it being big enough anyway.
Now we have 8 eggs in the nest and, after a few days of leaving them all day on their own, the mother is finally getting around to incubating them. I just hope they're still viable!

Emley?

 

Oh, Ubuntu!!

Ever had one of those days?
Suddenly, normal users on my trusty Ubuntu 9.10 box can't resolve local network machines. Root can, but normal users don't seem to be able to resolve anything in the /etc/hosts file.

Having a quick look around reveals that the access permissions of /etc/nsswitch.conf have been changed to 600. Well, I didn't do that. It can only have been the update I set off just now.
- Why did they do that? What possible reason could there be for an update script to do that?

Sheesh. What a waste of a lunchtime.