Ciaran’s Random Writings

Last year, we got involved in hatching chicks by accident, after I thwacked a mother pheasant off the nest by swinging some shears. She flew off and never returned, but we got hold of an incubator and hatched all 10 eggs which went on to become healthy pheasants. This year, with Fred the cockerel in residence, it’s on purpose - a batch of eggs have been in the incubator (a more sophisticated one this year that slowly rocks the eggs) for three weeks.

Seven chicks hatched yesterday and one today. There are five yellow, two brown and one black, and three possible mothers for each, but only one father. They’re all set up today in a new pen, complete with heatlamp, and all eight look healthy and very cute and fluffy.

This may sound odd, even relative to some of the other stuff here, but I have found myself on many occasions to be embroiled in a discussion with people who don’t know the difference between a swede and a turnip. The reasons include apathy, ignorance, and differences in the way the terms are used both regionally in the UK and also internationally. Anyway, if you’re one of these people in future, this is one of the pictures I’ll be directing you towards. It’s a picture of some turnips.

Observe, (a) there is some purple to the skin, but also some white - more commonly they can be white only, or white with green, and (b) the flesh is as white as a goth on a ghost train, (c) the size, which you can’t really observe from the picture, but take it from me that they’re a bit smaller than tennis balls.

These turnips are actually quite swede-like in appearance, I have to admit, but turnips they are.

These particular turnips went into what I call a ‘vegetable pot’, which involves throwing loads of different root vegetables into a giant casserole dish with a little bit of stock and cooking slowly in the oven.

I’m testing an interesting service called IMified at the moment. It’s basically an Instant Messaging bot that provides access to various functionality by sending and receiving messages via your usual client. It works on all the major networks, although I’m only really interested in XMPP (Jabber).

IMified provides a framework where new ‘Widgets’ (essentially bot applications) can be plugged in. There are a range of Widgets already available, covering things such as reminders and todo lists, as well as support for blog posting to a range of different platforms such as Wordpress and Livejournal (which I used to post this message).