Cygnet

I'm no ornithological expert, but I would have thought it's a bit late (early?) in the year for a young swan to be at this stage of development. I vaguely remember learning at some stage that, quite apart from the obvious difference in size, the not-white plumage is an indication that this is a cygnet rather than a mature swan. Whether it's confused or a late developer or whatever, this was the best of a crop of photos I came home with after a trip this afternoon to one of my favourite blip haunts - the swans at the estuary near Swords.

I almost didn't get there, because a new purchase was burning a hole in the car boot. I was becoming increasingly concerned about the small amount of free space on my MacBook's hard drive, and had been promising myself for some time to invest in an external drive for storing my music downloads rather than have the MacBook's drive clogged up. So off I went this morning to Harvey Norman's (never thought I'd end up getting anything there despite their utterly appalling TV ads, but they did a good deal on my recent printer purchase and the staff are helpful and knowledgeable). I hadn't done my homework, and just planned to get a one terrabyte drive from a reputable manufacturer. As it happened I was too early getting to the store and they weren't open yet. So I came back home and did the research I should have done to begin with, armed with which I went back later on with the intention of getting a Buffalo drive (a brand unknown to me before, but which got good reviews on the internet).

I marched right up to one of the salesmen and told him I was interested in external drives. "They're behind the counter", he said. "We don't keep them on the floor any more." I asked for the Buffalo drive and he took it down from the shelf. Before closing the deal he said I could get 2 terrabytes for 20 euro more. "Huh?", I thought to myself. "What's the catch?". Still, twice the capacity for just 20 euro more sounded too good to refuse, so I took it. It's a Seagate, which I hope won't be as unreliable as the ones Carl had fail on him.

Having resistied the tempttaion to go straight home, unpack it, set it up and begin clearing out the MacBook's drive, I didn't spend as long at the estuary as I should have (though at least I parked the car on the far side from the swans and walked the rest of the way), and rished home afterwards. I had a temporary moment of panic when there was mention on the box of being Mac compatible. Still, it mounted just fine when I connected it, and re-formatting was easy-peasy with Disk Utility, so before I knew it I'd dragged over some 180 GB of music files and waited for it to do its copying thing. I need to work out a sensible backup strategy, but for now at least I've cleared out some breathing space on the MacBook and have the peace of mind of having a secure backup of my music.

The rest of the day was lazy and uneventful.