city ecology

1. We're still picking up Melrose Place, and have tentatively identified its owner via Limewire. We sort of vaguely know one of our neighbours from back in the day going to boom!, and he used to work for John Welling, and his apartment often wafts incense in the evenings and makes rainstick noises at me when I leave for work in the morning. Anyway, his Limewire account popped up on Sean's computer, meaning that he's either the proud momma or he's also stealing it.

BREAKING NEWS: Sean has just discovered that there is going to be a 4.0 edition D&D. On the one hand - oh god not more $50 sourcebooks. On the other, we tend to just download them now anyway, and Sean is salivating at the thought of new feats to break the game with.

Anyway. So while Britain has apparently arrested some guy for stealing his neighbour's wifi, the consensus on CBC.ca seems to be that it's the owner's responsibility to encrypt their wifi, as searching for networks is an automatic process and something 90% of internet users don't really know much about. Also, we're no longer in the age of paying for bandwidth in a major way.
But Sean and I are reasonably moral people, and as this allows us to not pay for our own equipment and/or internet, we're going to have a chat with our neighbour and see about giving him money in exchange for not locking us out. I like it.

2. So I've been celebrating our newfound internet opportunity with lots and lots of catching up on blogs, and webcomics, and so on. I check things furtively at work in the early morning but there's nothing quite like being able to dig into these things shamelessly with both hands. I have a new blog that makes me happy - agirlandaboy.com - and things are just generally brighter and happier with internet.

3. No pictures yet, because I went and bought batteries at the Victory Meat Market and they came pre-drained for my convenience. Boo.

4. Sometimes, if my sleep rhythms are off enough, I wake up when the birds outside start their chirping and cawing. I'm not sure why birds sleep outside here, particularly, unless they are making rock nests in the gravel that always seems to be on top of buildings. Yet, at four in the morning, there are the sounds of everything from standard city pigeons (cooing) and crows (cawing) to more complex trill and squeaks of bird I don't really identify. Today, though, there were weird trillings and chirpings that seemed to me, in my dreamlike haze, to be way outside the normal for Canadian songbirds, especially those that might be interested in sleeping quarters on the roofs of downtown Fredericton. Does someone have a cage of exotic finches and lovebirds in the window of their apartment? or are there possibly escaped exotics lodging with the pigeons up there? Who knows.
Parallax seemed to sleep through it, but Tonks was wide-eyed and leaping about in excitement. It's so nice having two cats again.

Postscript: and by "have a chat with", I meant "Facestalk and send a message":