Week 36, 2025
7 Sep 2025
As always, news from the bird world first:
The "seaglets" in Sydney are getting bigger so quickly! No doubt it helps that they often have crops way bigger than their heads—plenty of food to go around in that nest. Which is good, because SE35, the bigger sibling, is still bonking on SE36 at meal times and forcing the little one to not eat until 35 is done. They're pretty adorable, though, despite their arguments.
More good news: Mum & Dad Ospreys in Port Lincoln finally have an egg!
It seems like ages since they started mating all the time, so it's a relief to finally see an egg in the nest. These two are a really cute pair, because they spend so much time together in the nest. Dad's been having lots of turns to incubate the egg so far, and I'm guessing another egg or two will be on the way soon.
The Egyptian Goose chicks that hatched in the Crowned Eagle nest last week are gone. The poor chicks and the eagle mum were all very confused and stressed for several days. The eagle couldn't feed the chicks, because they don't eat meat, and they didn't have access to water or appropriate food, and they didn't want to sleep all day under the eagle's brood patch like eagle chicks would, because they're precocial—they're ready to run and forage for their own food right after they hatch. So the goslings ran around all day, jumping on mum's back and thoroughly confusing her, while she snapped at them and tried to push them underneath her. Eventually one of them jumped out of the nest, and a day or two later the eagle lost patience and ate the other one. She's still incubating the last egg, and we're all hoping it's going to hatch into an eagle in September sometime, for everyone's sake.
Outside of the bird world, I got my marks back for my first statistics assignment: 62.5%. Not too bad, considering how hard I found the assignment. I'm hoping to do better on future assignments, to reduce the pressure on my exam marks (I think the exam is worth 70%), but I'm happy with that as a starting point.
I got a new MacBook Pro this week. Mine was 6 years old, and had been obviously struggling for a while, running hot and loud while I was working, and grinding to a halt when I did anything intensive like running SwiftUI Previews or just booting up an iOS simulator for testing. It was slowing me down and making it difficult to work, so it was time to stop holding out on upgrading. I was able to get an education discount this time, because I'm at uni, which helped, but I also chose to get more storage and RAM this time around, which I'm hoping will future-proof me for a while.
I went for a 14" since I mostly use my MacBook as a desktop computer attached to an external display these days. It really makes my old 16" MacBook seem massive now! And I've definitely noticed the difference already—the new Mac is handling most of my work tasks with ease, and I've literally said to myself, "wow" multiple times as it shocked me in how quickly it could do some things, like building my Xcode projects. It's so nice to not have to context-switch all the time because I'm waiting multiple minutes for my computer to be usable again after indexing or building a project, and to not have to look for ways to free up memory or storage because I can tell it's struggling. It's also super nice to not have to turn up my music so I can hear it over the noise of the computer's fans when I'm trying to work. It's a big upgrade, and I'm very grateful for the improvements.
I decided to set it up from scratch, because my old Mac was so full of cruft after 6 years that I liked the idea of starting over. I'm pretty much done with installing and setting up stuff on the new computer now. It only took 3-4 days to stop running into things I'd forgotten to adjust or set up on the new machine all the time, so I think starting from scratch worked out well.