Photos of a Cooper’s Hawk

Tags

birds, cooper's hawk, hawk

A Cooper’s Hawk visited our house today. We have several bird feeder on the property, which attract seed eating birds. And these birds attract hawks. Food chain, you know. About a year ago a hawk or falcon caught a dove in mid air a few feet from our living room window. Both crashed into the widow, we ran outside and saw the predator fly off with the dove in its talons. No photos 😦 of this.

Today I spotted the hawk stalking our bird feeders, and grabbed my D80. I got these images. The hawk did not kill any prey this time, perhaps my presence interfered with the hunt.

Cooper's Hawk in Flight

Coopers Hawk in Tree (look closely)

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Some Toxic Windows Malware

Tags

computer virus, malware, rootkit, windows

A friend of my step son came out of the Phoenix heat to vist. He brought with him an older windows pc that has been transformed into a door stop by malware. Guess who was expected resurrect the thing? Yes, me. I do earn my daily bread working with computers, software, etc. But I really don’t care for the desktop stuff. Oh well. All of us in this field get to be the uncompensated support staff for relatives, friends, friends of relatives, etc.

I expected the usual viruses, adware, and spyware that plagues windows pc’s which are not armored with firewalls, virus scanners, constant os updaters, etc. This one had a few viruses and spybots, but it also had a rootkit. I have never encountered one of these, though I have read about them. I had to peel back layers of malware just to be able to boot into safe mode command line. After a while I decided to just reinstall windows, replacing everything.

Makes me appreciate our Apple MacBookPro and iMac even more!