We got a nice 8 or so inches of snow today. Because it tends to drift up in some spots we need to keep the paths to the feeder stations cleaned up. I suppose in year past they would use a shovel or simply keep the feeders where they could be filled with out worrying about trudging through 3 feet of snow.
We chose a spot for the main feeder station that is right outside our bedroom window. This servers 2 purposes. One, we have a nice view of the feeder station and the bushes which form cover around it, and it is close enough for the web cam.
The cam on the other side of the house was hit by falling ice early in the month but we figured that would happen. So in October we built a new station with the idea of moving the camera. One thing has led to another and the cam is still not up but we hope to fix that soon.
We picked up a nice little computer to run the cam. Its a lot like our pavilion media center in that it has a dual core 2.2GHz processor and a gig of ram and came with xp media edition. The model number is s3200t and it is really small. The CD/DVD drive is sideways. Crazy. But it is super fast and does not take up much room. It cost less that $500.00. Our first computer, if I can remember, was a 265 processor with a 20 meg hard drive. I think we had something like 120 megs of ram but I could be wrong about that, after all it was a number of years ago. The point is the stupid thing cost us about $1600.00 and that was with dos 3.1.
The really funny thing is I have a little flash drive used for small files and it has more space than the hard drive on that computer. And it cost 5 bucks but I digress.
We should get the cat 5 cable, yes we use cables, installed tomorrow and then its as simple as setting up the camera and the mike. Then we just wait for the birds.
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