Dons Blog

Our office is in a heritage building. And heritage buildings often have lots of homes for flying rats, aka pigeons.

We are blessed with windows on all 4 sides, and one of the sides in particular is fascinating to our fowl friends. As the sun hits just the right angle, the ledge becomes pigeon central. And, the battle for ledge supremacy begins. There is a lot of loud thumping and bumping as they push and pull each other from the ledge. Pigeons of higher social status come in, and the pigeon plebes are pushed out.

Now, the key pigeon wars times changes over the course of the year. If you know the time of day, you can calculate the time of year. If you know the time of year, you can calculate the time of day. Its like a pigeon sextant, astrolabe, and sundial. All in one.

Now I know you are thinking of these pigeons as some sort of nice warm cooing doves. They are not. They are essentially flying rats, gnarled and mean. But, they entertain me.

ps, this is the vertical pigeon picture. The horizontal ones on the other windows are where the real action takes place.

6 hours later, the bike is still there. Zoom. Enhance. Hmm, that lock could be better.

So, i guess I did manage to shake the thief off. Or, its a bait-bike.

(https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bait+bike) . You owe it to yourself to watch one or more of those bait bike videos.

This was new to me. Someone using the standard tool https://mxtoolbox.com checked my domain, found that my DMARC record is marked to report-only (rather than quarantine). So they assume I have money to spend on this as a monetary reward for the bug hunt.

For a personal domain? FOr someone who has blogged about DMARC already? Nice try.

As a PSA, while I have you here, make sure your own DKIM and DMARC are enabled. Don’t let the spammers scam you or others on your behalf.

This morning as I’m walking down King St just past Queen I happen upon this fine upstanding individual, bolt cutters in hand. He’s using them in an unusual way, as a twisting device, bouncing the bike up and down and trying to get the u-bolt + cable lock off.

I make contact. He insists its his bike and that 1 of the locks is his, that some fiend has placed a second lock on. I point out that the u-bolt goes through the loops in the cable lock. He tries to insist that is how they do it. Uh uh, they have the keys and you don’t? I ask if he’s alright with me calling the police, he says sure. So i do. While i’m going through the voice mail settings (???) his friend arrives. His friend insists I am wrong as well, but, after a few minutes of my argument about how both locks are the same brand, and were installed by a person with a key (and them maybe assuming the police auto attendant was a person), they decided to leave.

Have you ever looked at the spectral analysis of your own voice? I started down this rabbit-hole after watching a video by Curtis Judd (below) on EQ for dialogue.

So I recorded a quick sample of my voice on my BLUE Yeti Pro. And then took a quick look at the spectrum in Audacity. And after that… uh, Curtis makes it look simple 🙂