Intrusion detection
Zelda had a brilliant idea the other day.
To combat the intrusive squirrel's access to my birdfeeders, she sprayed the poles with nonstick cooking spray. She and Lovett and Dora spent a riotous morning watching the squirrels repeatedly jump on the poles and slide back down to the ground. I was both impressed and pleased with her ingenuity as I heard their report at the dinner table.
The next day, after an apparent predawn war council (intelligence is sketchy on this), the squirrels stepped up the attack. They went after my suet feeder.
The cake was about three-quarters gone (the woodpeckers and nuthatches devour it), so I attributed the squirrel's success to that and bought a new cake on my lunch hour.
This morning I went out to fill the feeders, and the suet feeder was lying on the ground. Open. With the cake missing. The whole cake. AND THE CHAIN.
Boy, was I miffed. A pox on you, squirrels, and your progeny! I cried into the woods. I hope the little buggers get ptomaine poisoning or their peanut allergies kick in or a hawk grabs them as they struggle with the weight of the cake or they get so sick of suet cake that they vow never to touch the stuff again much as I did that Christmas long ago when I devoured one of those huge Hershey's Kisses in a single afternoon and swore off the stuff for many subsequent years.
I feel violated. They took the chain?!?! What an insult. Makes me feel like an idiot.
Speaking of which, I worked for parts of three days this week to update my virus scan subscription.
Perhaps you are familiar with the scenario. Subscription about to expire. Explore renewal options. See updated version of software for a price comparable to the renewal expense. Choose that option. Have internet connection crash during purchase verification. Verify that no purchase was actually made. Attempt purchase again. Download setup. Get error message that you are missing the proxy server info that you just finished typing. Spend twenty minutes on the phone and follow fifteen levels of phone options only to have a prerecorded voice scream a phone number that you frantically write down and call to find it no longer valid but another prerecorded voice directs you to the website that you are looking at but can't find contact information on. Finally send a desperation e-mail to somebody somewhere to get a response thirty-six hours later that is irrelevant to your error message. Then by divine inspiration decide that maybe turning the proxy server off on your connection is the answer and by Gates it is and the sixteen terabyte download begins with a countdown clock that you figure it will be finished about the time your yet-unborn grandchild graduates from high school but you realize your sensitivity to the process and patiently clean the house while the download continues, jiggling the mouse every time you pass the computer so the screen saver doesn't kick on and kill your session. The download finally completes and now you are faced with installing and activating the new version but only after you try five times does it occur to you to uninstall the old version and finally, FINALLY, you have new virus scan software, but wait, you must download the updated definitions, blah, blah blah...
...all because some squirrels somewhere have nothing better to do than write malevolent software with the sole intent to intrude and disrupt your computing environment.
A pox on you, squirrels, and your progeny!
To combat the intrusive squirrel's access to my birdfeeders, she sprayed the poles with nonstick cooking spray. She and Lovett and Dora spent a riotous morning watching the squirrels repeatedly jump on the poles and slide back down to the ground. I was both impressed and pleased with her ingenuity as I heard their report at the dinner table.
The next day, after an apparent predawn war council (intelligence is sketchy on this), the squirrels stepped up the attack. They went after my suet feeder.
The cake was about three-quarters gone (the woodpeckers and nuthatches devour it), so I attributed the squirrel's success to that and bought a new cake on my lunch hour.
This morning I went out to fill the feeders, and the suet feeder was lying on the ground. Open. With the cake missing. The whole cake. AND THE CHAIN.
Boy, was I miffed. A pox on you, squirrels, and your progeny! I cried into the woods. I hope the little buggers get ptomaine poisoning or their peanut allergies kick in or a hawk grabs them as they struggle with the weight of the cake or they get so sick of suet cake that they vow never to touch the stuff again much as I did that Christmas long ago when I devoured one of those huge Hershey's Kisses in a single afternoon and swore off the stuff for many subsequent years.
I feel violated. They took the chain?!?! What an insult. Makes me feel like an idiot.
Speaking of which, I worked for parts of three days this week to update my virus scan subscription.
Perhaps you are familiar with the scenario. Subscription about to expire. Explore renewal options. See updated version of software for a price comparable to the renewal expense. Choose that option. Have internet connection crash during purchase verification. Verify that no purchase was actually made. Attempt purchase again. Download setup. Get error message that you are missing the proxy server info that you just finished typing. Spend twenty minutes on the phone and follow fifteen levels of phone options only to have a prerecorded voice scream a phone number that you frantically write down and call to find it no longer valid but another prerecorded voice directs you to the website that you are looking at but can't find contact information on. Finally send a desperation e-mail to somebody somewhere to get a response thirty-six hours later that is irrelevant to your error message. Then by divine inspiration decide that maybe turning the proxy server off on your connection is the answer and by Gates it is and the sixteen terabyte download begins with a countdown clock that you figure it will be finished about the time your yet-unborn grandchild graduates from high school but you realize your sensitivity to the process and patiently clean the house while the download continues, jiggling the mouse every time you pass the computer so the screen saver doesn't kick on and kill your session. The download finally completes and now you are faced with installing and activating the new version but only after you try five times does it occur to you to uninstall the old version and finally, FINALLY, you have new virus scan software, but wait, you must download the updated definitions, blah, blah blah...
...all because some squirrels somewhere have nothing better to do than write malevolent software with the sole intent to intrude and disrupt your computing environment.
A pox on you, squirrels, and your progeny!
posted by Chris @ 6:44 PM
1 Piquant Remarks:
At 7:02 AM,
Rurality said…
At our old house in the suburbs, we discovered that suet gone missing during the night meant raccoons instead of squirrels. They are especially fond of dragging whole feeders off into the woods, so the missing chain really says "raccoon" to me.
At our new place, the coyotes eat most of the raccoons and squirrels I think. They bring a whole new set of problems though.
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