Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Yes, actually, it's a bird.

It's a bird in a grocery store. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.... Is that supposed to be here?

I'm not talking a turkey or a chicken here. It's not a dead bird. It's a little, live, and very quiet sparrow. I think it's infiltrating our supply of crumbs. Not content to just pick up crumbs from outside eating areas, it has sussed out where humans go to eat when it's raining cats and dogs outside, and has made it's way into crumb heaven! That's a smart little bird with a strong survival instinct!

I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't been sitting drinking coffee in the little coffee alcove. It was just a flash of something dark that I saw a couple of times, and then I looked closer. It was very silent! Not a peep, and it's wings are so tiny they don't make a lot of noise. You really have to look to find him.

So do I tell any of the humans at the grocery store? Hmm again.

OK, so bird poop on the groceries would be a bad thing... but you should look closely at the packages on what you buy as a routine step in the purchasing process, and any fruits and vegetables that don't come in a package should always be washed before you eat them anyway. It's just good hygiene, and if you don't do it already you may have built up an immunity to all the junk you have ingested. So I can't imagine anyone getting sick from the little bird.

And you have to admire the survival instinct of the bird. It managed to get inside. It knows enough to be quiet and it's staying mostly hidden, it's not hopping up on tables begging for crumbs the way they do outside. And it is not in the bulk area sitting on a pile of stuff and gorging itself... at least not while the store is occupied by humans. And the ceilings are very high, so it could easily fly out of reach of any humans and hide.

And how would a human manage to get a bird out of the store? I can't see anyone having the patients to lure it out. It may drive them insane. Would they have to resort to violence to get rid of the bird? I don't want to be part of that, it sounds painful for both human and bird.

So the little flutter you thought you heard could have been a bird... don't worry about it, it's not the end of the world, it's just the little animals getting smarter.

Are ideas really antimatter bubbles?

An idea comes to you in an instant.

If you are interested in the idea that just popped into your head, you keep it around and think about it. You make an effort to develop the idea and decide to think about it now or later. If not, it's gone, and will likely never come back.

The researchers at CERN have managed to capture atoms of antihydrogen. They've managed to keep them around for about 2 tenths of a second each. That's a long time for antimatter to exist where we can see it!

So are these atoms - that only exist for an instant - little idea bubbles? Are they fascinating ideas that scientists will suddenly realize they've just had? The nature of antimatter is a puzzle for scientists, and the idea of antimatter had to come from somewhere originally and pop into a scientist's mind. Do little atoms of antimatter exist everywhere for brief moments, not just in the CERN hadron collider? Are they little idea bubbles?

Will there be a renaissance of scientific ideas popping up in the near future because of the successful capture of antimatter? I bet there will be!

Did I really just harumph?

My spouse was shocked and amazed. He told me that I just did the perfect "harumph".

This is a word that will give spell checkers grief, but if you google you will find many good definitions for it - the best one I've found is from en.wiktionary.org: An expression of disdain, disbelief, protest, or dismissal; a huff, grunt, or snort

Yes, I have huffed, grunted or snorted my disdain when I found out there was some great tennis being broadcast right now, but I would have to pay to see it! We don't have cable anymore, and to see tennis online you need to pay for it. I've gotten very used to being able to see most entertainment online for free. Yes I know it costs money to broadcast events, but I thought all the advertising you have to endure while watching the events paid for them! If I do pay for it, do I get to skip the advertising? I doubt it.


But the problem is... a "harumph" is usually performed best by grumpy old men! Have I really mastered the art of sounding like a grumpy old man? Good grief.


And what about "bleurgh"? Can I pull that one off? Or "yeesh", "neener", "argh", or "bleh"? Guttural exclamations, that's my future. I wonder if this is because I've left TV behind? The mind wanders into new territory when not continuously spoon fed drivel, but is this the right direction to wander in?

Looks nice, but does it work?

Websites have been around for ages now, advertising, selling, making money, etc. so you would think that most of the surviving ones would work. Evidently, you would be wrong.

In the past few days I have been repeatedly disappointed by websites that are supposed to allow you to send image files to photo developers to have your photos printed out.

It seems like a simple idea - I have an image file, they have the ink, paper and a machine that reads the file, and they print out a picture for me. Then I pick it up at their store. But I have run into so many problems using this simple idea.

The first site I went to is for a pharmacy that does photo printing. I located a convenient store on the map on their website and prepared to print. I downloaded their version of some software that looked safe that the website needed to make the pictures look pretty online. Only after I had spent time uploading the files and preparing to pick the location I wanted them printed to did I find out that they only print to one shop in the city, and it's not the one I wanted to pick up the pictures at!

The next site I tried was a camera store that prints photos. I located one of their stores that was convenient, and checked that I could send files to be printed there. After downloading an update for Flash, uploading my files, and going through a pretty - but rather silly - interface that made you go through each picture as if you were holing prints in your hands to make sure they were all successfully uploaded, I went to the payment page, put in my credit card, hit enter and... the page blanked out the fields. It didn't let me complete the order.

OK, so I was on a PC (I usually use a Mac) using Google Chrome, a wonderfully lightweight and fast browser which may cause problems for some badly designed websites when their developers have use browser-specific code. So I tried again with Firefox, not my favourite, but most websites support it... many minutes later I had the same problem. So I held my nose and tried it again in Internet Exploder... and had the same problem. So it's the website that is the problem. It has pretty Flash graphics to play with your pictures... but it doesn't work! I can't use it to print my photos. And I'm not a novice who can't use a computer. As an e-commerce site it is a disappointing and annoying failure.

So I went with a site I know and have used before. No special software, no cutesy playing with virtual photos in a hand, just a list of files, thumbnails that can be clicked on to check the larger versions, and it prints at a drugstore about 3 blocks from me. Unfortunately, I wanted to print out the pictures in another city and have someone there pick them up, saving me the effort of mailing them, but that is just not going to happen.

Advice for e-commerce websites: kill the cutesy graphics, and spend your money developing a website that actually lets a customer acquire what they want, where they want it, and pay you money for it. Or it will be a case of:

Nice graphics... shame about the profits.

Is this some kind of message?

Evidence of Sasquatch Suicide
Originally uploaded by Clara Johnson

So, I was in Stanley Park, I was
Just takin' some photos, you see
And I looked up at the beautiful blue sky
And saw this.

So I'm thinking this is really weird.

There is no way a human could have trimmed this tree limb to look like this, it was at the top of a very tall tree in Stanley Park - and trees in Stanley Park are very tall, being part of that temperate rain forest and all.

So is this a message from Mother Nature? If so, I don't like the general gist this is taking...