Month: November 2022

There’s a Bat in My Basement

I was removing a window unit air conditioner today and saw this on the sill in the unit’s absence:

Bat in the Sill

It was a bat; this much I knew.

So what are you supposed to do with a bat that you think is injured? Two things:

  1. Call a wildlife rescue expert and,
  2. Give the critter a bat box.

My younger son willfully donned gardening gloves and a dishtowel, and moved the bat from the sill into a Clark’s shoebox into which I’d put a plastic dish with some water and drilled holes. Son #1 snapped this picture:

Bat in a Box

I left a voicemail with Shaw Wildlife Sanctuary and Crystal Shaw called me back within minutes. She offered to take a look at the bat, but that would have been a bit of a ride.

A friend sent me a list of of rehabilitators from the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife, and from there I texted Jackie Kashmer of the New Jersey Bat Sanctuary. She texted me back within seconds asking for a picture of the bat.

Jackie said that it’s a Big Brown and that they are “pretty hardy.” She advised that I release him at night, from a high point, as he would get eaten by a bird if relased during the day, and that he’d crash into the ground if released from the ground. (I don’t know if the bat is a “he”.)

So the bat remains, for now, in a box downstairs, until it’s time to say farewell.

Update: The bat took wing on Nov 14th in the early evening.

Raycast on The Sweet Setup

Matt Birchler talks Raycast:

The uninstall action is one I’ve really grown to appreciate. It will show you all the files it will delete from your system, and it does a pretty good job of finding the right files and purging your system of whatever app is causing you grief (not Fantastical, of course 🙂).

I haven’t tried the uninstall option yet, and that’s what’s kind of neat about Raycast: features and functions hide out and await your discovery.

Raycast for Mac. The Next-generation Alfred?

Raycast Does Window Management Too

There are a handful of great utilities on the Mac for managing how much of your screen a window takes up: Moom, Mosaic, and BetterSnapTool, to name a few. (I use Mosaic on my Mac at home, and BST on my work MacBook.)

Here’s a short video showing how I use Mosaic regularly to split my display’s real estate between two applications.

The ever-evolving Raycast, interestingly, can be used for the same purpose. There are a number of pre-configured extensions that you can invoke by typing the name of the action, including splitting the open windows between the right and left halves of your display.

Raycast

Misunderstanding Brokeback Mountain

At a recent Halloween party, an attendee (who was ironically dressed up like a cowboy) reeled in horror at the mention of Brokeback Mountain and that someone there, whom he’d never met, liked the film.

It was evident why he didn’t like it: to him, it was a movie about gay cowboys. That’s too on the nose, though, and a gross simplification.

Roger Ebert:

But it’s not because of Jack. It’s because Ennis and Jack love each other and can find no way to deal with that. “Brokeback Mountain” has been described as “a gay cowboy movie,” which is a cruel simplification. It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only great passion either one will ever feel. Their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups–any “forbidden” love.

He was an artless turd and proud of it.