The Ringtail

Just over a week ago my wife and I were in Oxford. Full of the joys of the New Year we parked at the Park and Ride to walk in to town. We were just coming up to the huge roundabout at the top of Banbury Road when we heard a miaowing from the verge. We noticed a tiny kitten was in the verge, and was about to make a break for it across the road. Another couple had stopped but we offered to stay and call the RSPCA to sort things out.

My wife managed to get hold of the kitten and pull him out. A shocking site. He had horrific build up of gunk round his eyes that had left him blind, was covered in ticks, and was so underweight you could barely feel him. We phoned the RSPCA who asked us to take him to the local vets where we were told his chance of survival was less than 50%. The vet had never seen so many ticks on a cat before, and thought that the eye discharge was likely to be a horrible case of cat flu. Coupled with the diarrhoea and weight loss, she was not hopeful that he would pull through.

I’m pleased to say that I collected him from the vets this morning, and he has made a full and complete recovery. He’s full of life, playful and making up for lack of food by piling on the weight he had lost. It’s unbearable to think that anyone could have dumped such a tiny animal at the side of the road, but the vet couldn’t see how else he got where he was. Still, he’s safe now, and we look forward to welcoming Virgil into our house as our new pet – it’s going to be a lot of fun!

I’ve been wanting to try and extend what I do with PHP development for a while. I’ve been coding in it for a while, and I think its time that I put something out for others to look at and use. I’ve been working on an application to manage tasks and projects, thinking a lot about what I need the app to do, and building a framework in which I can develop the code to deliver the functionality. This is ready to go – more on this in another post.

This is all well and good, but the process has been long and the changes very many. Not something that I could put together and write up as great example of developing and delivering software. My idea is to push through and build some of the other apps I’ve been thinking about and keeping a journal here to document my thoughts and processes. I’m doing the work in quite small chunks on the train which gives me a good amount of stuff to write up each day.

The project

The first app I’m building is a tool to help birders keep tick lists and journal entries. I’ve had a look at software available and there doesn’t seem to be anything available online, and the installable software seems to be mainly for PC (not suitable for me as a strictly Mac/Linux user). The core features need to be:

• All British birds are maintained in a database with details on names, categories and other non-changeable (or rarely-changeable) data
• lists for users to keep a record of which birds they’ve seen – life lists, year lists, garden lists, county lists, etc. – some already in place but users can add their own. Each record can be linked to dates so that the user can build up a picture over the years of migration patterns for birds in their areas of interest
• main page will show the list of birds with ticks to show which have been seen on which list
• Detailed pages for each bird will allow users to upload their own photos, notes and audio to build their own record of information for each species
• Journal allows users to record detail for individual birding trips, with links to bird species pages where applicable

These will form the basis of the design spec and screen layout, and I’ll build the architecture in such a way that I can easily extend and add features once it is all up and running.

Watch this space…

Post script: Anyone reading this who wants to have a look at my task management application and give me some feedback – please drop me a line!

I wonder where the best places to go birding are in London? I bike from Vauxhall to Euston every night and, while I like to think I’m observant and take an interest in my surroundings, I’m sure I miss out on seeing a lot of interesting stuff that’s only just off my beaten track. Must get the map out and see if there are any potential little spots to discover. There’s always the pelicans in St James’s Park, but I don’t think that counts as a proper tick…

As promised, the first photos from my latest fishing trip.

Looking down the back water from the footbridge:

Detail of the river and bank:

Wide shot of the river, I like the ramshackle look of this:

I noticed there is a pair of moorhens on the canal at Wolverton who have just had another brood. The chicks looked to be about a week old when I saw them on Monday this week and this seems like a very late brood to be having. That said, I didn’t see the chicks when I ran past on Wednesday, even though one of the adults was out and about. I wonder if the new building work is protecting the canal stretch from the worst of the elements?