Thomsons Lake Crakes

Went to Thomsons Lake last week with Martin Cake for a bit of a look.
With Martin's expertise we saw all three of the common crakes for the area:

• Baillon's Crake (Porzana pusilla);
• Australian Spotted Crake (Porzana fluminea);
• Spotless Crake (Porzana tabuensis).

They were all seen in the typha at the southern end within a few metres of each other!
Also seen was a tiger snake and a feral fox (inside the perimeter fence at the northern end of the lake).

Red-eared Firetail

My first new sighting for the year!

Red-eared Firetail (Stagnopleura oculata) - a small group (about 4) seen at Lesmurdie Falls. I managed to take some photographs but they were for identification only.

Lesmurdie Falls is local to me now - the birding there is quite good. There is still a fair bit of water flowing and most of the (unburnt) vegetation is thick and green. Also seen:

• Tawny Frogmouth (Podargus strigoides);
• Splendid Fairy-wren (Malurus splendens);
• Common Bronzewing (Phaps chalcoptera).

New (to me) MacBook

I am now the proud owner of a 2.16GHz C2D MacBook (2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, SuperDrive).  I purchased it locally.  It is my first Intel Mac (and at the moment I have skipped the G5's completely).  I haven't used it for long enough to form an opinion but so far I am impressed.

Google Picasa for the Mac!

The good news is that it finally exists, albeit in beta form. (1)
The bad news is that it is for Intel Macs only. (2)

(1) Not a big problem really, after all Gmail is still in beta and that works fine.
(2) Mainly an issue because I don't have an Intel Mac.

Hot rod 7500

I have finally finished building (I think) my hot rod Power Mac 7500.  It has:

• 256MB of RAM (using 4 of the 8 slots in case I find some more 64MB sticks);
• An IBM 18GB SCSI disk;
• A PowerLogix PowerForce G3 350/175/512K G3 (Spartan) upgrade card running at 300MHz;
• A fairly generic USB 1.1 PCI card;
• An Apple Fast Ethernet 10/100 Base-T PCI card;
• An iXMicro Ultimate Rez Twin Turbo 128 PCI graphics card;
• An AppleVision 1710 Display.

Everything else (floppy and CD drive) is stock.  It runs Mac OS 8.6 like lightning.

Very Shallow Blue

I can now beat the chess program (Apple Chess) that ships with Mac OS X (as long as the computer is set to the easiest mode). I think it is time to start cranking it up a bit... Most of the time I can beat the computer using less than 40 moves. Sometimes it takes me up to 60 (which is not a good thing).

Also found this site - MacChess - Dedicated to chess on Mac.