drplokta

( Still more photos of birds. )

The score now is 35 birds (needing photos of chaffinch and kingfisher) and two mammals (no photo of a fox).

To help me keep track: 1. great crested grebe, 2. mute swan, 3. coot, 4. lesser black-backed gull, 5. blue tit, 6. tufted duck, 7. blackbird, 8. stock dove (actually, I'm dubious about this one), 9. black-headed gull, 10. Canada goose, 11. pied wagtail, 12. cormorant, 13. magpie, 14. carrion crow, 15. mallard, 16. moorhen, 17. common gull, 18. feral pigeon, 19. grey wagtail, 20. woodpigeon, 21. robin, 22. great spotted woodpecker, 23. house sparrow, 24. goldfinch, 25. starling, 26. coal tit, 27. great tit, 28. herring gull, 29. greylag goose, 30. long-tailed tit, 31. wren, 32. chaffinch, 33. kingfisher, 34. greenfinch, 35. great black-backed gull

Oh, and 1. grey squirrel, 2. fox -- but that's easier to keep track of.

My coal tits are looking dubious, so I'll remove them from the list for now. But I saw (and failed to photograph) not only a chaffinch (hardly rare or unlikely) but also the mythical Russia Dock Woodland kingfisher (only a flash of blue across the pond, but there's not exactly anything else it could have been).

I did get a couple of much better photos of birds that are already on the list(  behind the cut. )So the score is now 34 -- 32 birds (wren, chaffinch and kingfisher not photographed) and two mammals (fox not photographed).

This seems useful enough that it should be better known. It allows you to use space on Amazon's S3 simple storage service as a locally mounted disk, on Windows, Mac or Linux clients, and has a basic backup program built in. It encrypts all your data, either using your Amazon private key (so that you can retrieve the key from Amazon, but they could theoretically snoop) or any key of your own choosing (so no one can snoop, but if you lose the key you lose your data).

I have my 20GB Documents directory backing up right now. A couple of catches. First, it's going to take about 10 days, but that represents over ten years' accumulation of files, so it will be fairly easy to keep it updated once the first bulk run is done. That's on a 256kbit/sec upstream ADSL connection which I've throttled back to 200kbit/sec (an option on the software) so that downstream performance (web browsing etc.) is not impaired during the backup. Second, S3 is not free. But for 20GB of data, Amazon will charge me US$4 to upload it, $3 per month to store it and another $4 if I ever have to download the lot to restore it. Doesn't seem too unreasonable. And I had a $50 amazon.com, instead of .co.uk gift voucher for Christmas and was wondering what I could spend it on.

Whoops, looks like I counted lesser black-backed gull twice. I thought one of them was a herring gull, I think. Fortunately, there's a genuine herring gull below.

( Photos behind the cut. )

So the score is now 33 -- 31 birds (all photographed except the wren) and two mammals (fox not photographed).

An update on this post.

( Long and full of image thumbnails )

That makes 24 so far, already beating ajshepherd and armb's votes.

This year, I thought I'd see how many different species I could spot on the Rotherhithe peninsula, which has pretty diverse habitats for 2/3 of a square mile of Inner London.

A few ground-rules:

1. The area is bounded by and includes the River Thames, Plough Way, Lower Road and King's Stairs Gardens. The far shore of the Thames does not count. See map here.
   
2. Air-breathing vertebrates and butterflies only. Fish are too dull and hard to see, and invertebrates are too numerous and hard to identify. Amphibians at a non-air-breathing stage count, but will probably also be hard to identify.
   
3. Domesticated animals, including homo sapiens, don't count, but escaped or released animals do (e.g. the turtles living in Canada Water).
   
4. Dead animals don't count, even though that's the only way I'm likely to find a hedgehog.
   
5. Photos to be provided where possible, but it still counts if I can't get a photo.
   
6. Hearing but not seeing does not count.
   
7. Updates to be posted behind a cut tag for the benefit of those people who don't want to download large numbers of blurry thumbnails.
   
8. Herring gulls, lesser black-backed gulls, yellow-legged gulls and Caspian gulls are different species. Whether or not I can tell the difference is another matter.
   

[Poll #900960]