Unimpressed by gulls

I am not much of a fan of birds. Small ones that tweet are not too bad but then there are the larger ones that are more like squawking, flying rats, having babies in inconvenient places that they then aggressively defend when they are not instead aggressively stealing our food or carelessly raining their fecal matter down on us and on statues of us and on all manner of other things. I doubt their general necessity. Foxes might like to eat chickens and hedgehogs eat eggs but overall birds do not at all endear me toward them. I am certainly fine with efforts to prevent their suffering but I care less that they exist at all: that any gulls in any jurisdiction are a protected species makes me wonder who might care to arrest any decline in their numbers.

People do care about gulls and that makes me curious. Perhaps birds are far more important than I realize, especially to people's happiness. Do some of the larger common birds actually look cute to some people? Are people simply more tolerant than I? At best I concede that in terms of vomit and feces around our property it is the neighborhood cats that are the largest culprits and I bet those cats are not even doing anything useful like depleting the local bird population. I suppose that I can see the attraction of bird feeder table apparatus that is designed to attract and support the smaller birds so long as they are well away from where I park my car or might choose to linger. I do seem to be missing some bird-liking capacity that many others have.

Wifi trouble workaround

My laptop computer has an Intel 7265 wireless card correctly detected by iwlwifi which recently took to falling offline. Power-cycling the access point would get the computer back online. When the connection broke then Linux would report that the access point had changed bandwidth. Changing the access point's settings to lock the channel width down to 20MHz appears to have fixed the problem. Although the access point talks 802.11n it works only down at 2.4GHz, not 5GHz, though my memory of 802.11a is that higher frequencies have noticeably less range anyhow.

Order in the House

A rendition of the Anthem of Europe, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, broke out in the House of Commons during the vote at third reading of the bill that enables Theresa May to invoke Article 50 of the EU treaty thus commencing the Brexit process. I like the live coverage from the Palace of Westminster because one can often see the members of the Houses acting almost like real humans.