Week 35, 2025

31 Aug 2025

The Sea Eagle babies are getting big quickly! They still seem tiny, but they’ve already grown a lot compared to 2 weeks ago.

I updated my nests page this weekend to add the well-known Collins St Falcons in Melbourne’s CBD, who are back this year with 2 eggs. I’m enjoying seeing Melbourne on the south-facing camera of this nest, especially when it’s all lit up at night. I also added a new-to-me nest of Egyptian Vultures in Bulgaria that I’ve been watching recently.

And I moved the African Crowned Eagle nest into the "current" section, because 2 of its 3 eggs have hatched... although they’re goslings! Apparently an Egyptian Goose snuck in and laid 2 eggs in the nest while the eagle was out shopping or something... there’s a third egg that hasn’t hatched yet which I’m hoping is a Crowned Eagle chick. But I have no idea what will happen to these goslings in the meantime. They’re already running all over the nest, unlike eaglets who lie around quietly and sleep all day at first, so I’m sure the mum is very confused when trying to brood these chicks that won’t stay still!

In work news, we launched our redesign of Exist a couple of weeks ago, hooray! It was a long time coming, and it’s a huge relief to have it out in the world now.

I’ve been working on bug fixes and ticking things off the list that didn’t make the launch, so things haven’t slowed down much, but there is a bit less stress now that the launch is done, at least.

At uni I’m struggling through my statistics class. I’m currently fighting with estimators and CRLB and MLEs. I’m getting it a bit, but some of these concepts are hard work! At least I’m getting a lot of practice taking derivatives of natural log functions, I guess?

I’ve put the latest iOS 26 Developer Beta on my actual phone, because it won’t be long until it’s out in the world for real. I don’t like it. I don’t think there’s any justification for the so-called "glass" style, and I find it makes my phone harder to use because it reduces clarity in a lot of places. The beta is also more buggy than I’d expected so close to release, so I hope a lot of those bugs get ironed out in the next few weeks.

I’m currently reading The Refusal of Work by David Frayne. It’s quite a dense read, and very academic, but so far I’ve made a lot of highlights and have been emphatically nodding along as I read.