Fruit Bats

Lots to write today, so I’ll split it into two and do the blip first:

Identification - Cynopterus brachyotis, lesser short nosed fruit bat.

Today, I did my first proper bug safari in six months, visiting my old blipping ground that I refer to as ‘the stream’. The day was rain free for a change, so it was an opportunity not to be missed.

Amazing how the place has changed in a relatively short time. The rains have had a severe effect, with large chunks of the path collapsed into the stream, making the first half of my route impassable. The farmers now have a new route, through the land owners property. He greeted me with a handshake and I gave him a brief synopsis of where I had been. He gave me permission to cross his property to continue my quest.

Only six months and I have forgotten how to do this thing. I forgot to pad my knees, forgot the mozzy repelant, forgot my monopod, shoe scraper and couldn’t find any bugs! This is going to take a few goes to get back into. However, I did find something that I have not seen before and so I present to you, the lesser short nosed fruit bat.

I found them sleeping under a banana leaf. Well, they were not doing much sleeping, in fact I had to go to 250th sec in order to freeze the motion, as they jostled about continuously. The light was obviously bad, positioned under a canopy of trees and I couldn’t get very close, so a fair bit of cropping had to be done, which brings out the grain. But a pretty good find for 10am in the morning I think.

Diary - The rain held off yesterday, so I went computer hunting. I decided on a laptop. The specs were not exactly dazzling, even on the more expensive units, so i decided to go for cheap. Quite amazing how the prices have come down. I spent a thousand pounds ten years ago, this time, it cost 175 pounds.

Name – ASUS
Speed – 1.5GHz
RAM – 4Gb
HD – 500Gb
OS – windows 7

None of the laptops had more than 3 USB ports which was disappointing, but I bought a hub which seems to be working just fine. Also bought a 10m USB extension cable and an 8Gb memory stick.

Back home – it is all working fine, but I can’t find how to rearrange the short cuts how I want them. Do any of you know how (windows 7) - found it in the end.

I plugged in the internet modem and there was no signal, so I plugged in the extension cable. Got a low signal at the window, which was promising. My landlord allowed me to tie it to the upper balcony and a good signal was acquired without having to rearrange the furniture to accommodate.

The bit speed is registering up to 2.9Mbps, but I don’t think this is a true number, more like up to 300Kbps as indicated by the VUSE program. This is well fast enough, but the connection is lost far too often, which is a tedious problem. But still much better than having to sit on the floor at the cafe and listen to all the screaming of the kids and the gun fire.

I am no downloading all the software that I use. Photoshop CS6 and Catia V5 are the two main programs. Not sure what RAW program to use, I was not happy with NX2 last time, so any suggestions are welcome.

Update – CS6 is loaded and running. What a joy, to process images at such hyper speed. Not since I was on my son’s computer, back in the UK 20 months ago, have I seen speed.

Bike update – the mechanic was right, it was the battery, but didn’t need a new one. He fixed and cleaned up the ground terminal connection and all was good. $2 and a pack of cigarettes as a tip.

Dave