Newsletter #96

Fairy Tale Saturday

What a wonderful weekend we just had. On Saturday we took friends who live in Canada to Altos de Cerro Azul, and stopped in to visit Smitty and Rachelle. Our Canadian friends Tom, Corrine, and Elu are from Calgary and though they started off as clients, they have become friends whose company we very much enjoy.

Smitty and Rachelle own a delightful home with one of those million dollar views where, on a clear day, one can see the Pacific and parts of the Panama City skyline, Madden Lake (Lago Alajuela) and the Atlantic. Not content with two dogs, two birds, and two cats, they have opened up a welfare center for the local wildlife, and the daily menu is unlimited hummingbird nectar, birdseed, bread, and bananas. We settled in with a bottle of wine and cold beer and snacks to await the arrival of swarms of hummingbirds and whatever wildlife came to the buffet. Before long, hummingbrds were flitting from feeder to feeder, squabbling over whichever feeding hole they had decided looked most appetizing and flying within inches of our heads. Corrine was fascinated with them and spent long minutes within a few feet of one feeder watching them come and go.

Later in the afternoon, having seen many varieties of birds at the seed feeder and banana platform, we spied a troop of Capuchin monkeys working their way through the trees to the banana platform. The banana platform is fairly isolated from the surrounding trees, so Smitty ran a rope from a nearby tree to the platform so the monkeys wouldn’t have to descend to the ground to get there. Just watching them negotiate the rope was a show in itself. Frequently two would meet, one going to the bananas and the other leaving. Sometimes one would climb over the top of the other and sometimes flip upside down.

Then we saw a Toucan perched on a limb near the banana platform. Toucans are fairly shy and it is unusual to see one perched. Usually you just catch a glimpse of them flying through the treetops. This one never got up the courage to fly over for a banana, so we had to be content with taking picures of him/her sitting on a limb. Seeing this bird and all the rest of the animals in the wild, coming and going at their will, is so much more satisfying than seeing them in a zoo.

Finally, we saw the highlight of the day. The Tayra is a little known reclusive animal rarely seen near settlements. Most Panamanians and almost no foreigners have even heard of the animal. We were privileged to observe one for about five minutes while he raided the banana platform. I’m a bit surprised at how little known this animal is, because it is apparently often domesticated in some societies and kept for rodent control.

If you would like to see pictures of these animals and birds, go to our 'Pictures' page on the website. htp://www.panamaretire.net You will find a video of the Tayra on the 'Living in Panama' page.

To cap a perfect day, we stopped at La Posada de Ferhisse Restaurant on the way down the mountain for a delicious meal of Mahi-mahi with patacones and beer. Right now, I can’t think of anywhere else in this world I’d rather be than right here in Panama.

Product Review

I've been downloading public domain movies from the Internet Archive ( http://www.archive.org/ ) and while everything I download plays OK on the computer, I prefer to relax in bed to watch movies. Putting some of these movies into DVD format and burning them to DVD has proven to be a challenge (impossible with the tools and skills I have). Quite by accident, I discovered external hard drive enclosures with built in AVI, DVD, mpeg, etc players. I've been using a USB port IDE enclosure for backups for a couple of years, but on the theory that you can't have too many gadgets, I went to Yoytec Computers ( http://yoytec.com/ ) and bought their Movie World Enclosure for 3.5" IDE hard drives, Código: CJE-GER-026 for $68.10 plus tax. They also sell a smaller 2.5" enclosure for less money, but since I already had a couple of spare 3.5 drives, I got the more expensive model.

Now, right up front, you need to know a little about computers to make this work. First, you MUST format the hard drive for FAT32, because the player can't read NTFS or Linux/Unix file systems. I went to a lot of trouble decyphering the Chinese-English instruction manual before realizing that the directory names they list are not necessary. I finally backed up my home directory to the external drive and then found that I could play any file capable of being played by the Movie World Enclosure just by navigating to that directory with the included remote control and selecting that file. If you select the first file in a directory, it will play them all in sequence. Select a directory of picture files (jpg, etc) and it will create a slide show, on the fly. A few of the .mpg movies wouldn't play properly, or had no sound, but in most cases, converting them to .avi with ffmpeg cured the problem.

I'm very pleased with this device, and would give it three thumbs up if it was a simple plug and play device, but because of the skill and tools needed to set it up, I give it two thumbs up.

Bring Back the Magic