I’m sure the blog doesn’t look any different on your end, but it does on mine, since I’m now typing on a new 13” Macbook Pro! My old laptop had served me pretty well for about 4 years, which I guess is about their typical lifespan. The old one still works more or less (sometimes more, sometimes less), but I decided to be proactive about getting the new model so I didn’t have to deal with a dead computer somewhere particularly inconvenient, like, for example, a trailer in Wyoming.

I’ve also moved forward with hosting for my website. I’m going to wait until I’ve got something up before I pass on the url, but it will be through LMI.net (the great local ISP in Berkeley). I’m also going to be tackling WordPress. Ideally I will have at least some of it ready to go by the time we head to the field. I think a likely scenario might be to shift the blog portion over to WordPress and wait on the static parts until after I get to the field. Those might benefit from some re-working rather than a wholesale copy-paste job, both in terms of the content as well as potentially distributing some of the media files to other hosts (e.g. linking all the videos to Youtube).

We had a great quarter in the lab. Lots of great students working on a few different projects, and it feels like we actually got some stuff done! We’ve made good progress on the analysis of our alarm call playback experiment. Preacher Lek is finished, and the Monument Lek data are coming in rapidly in spite of the challenge of having to work with data from a camera on the hill and a camera located in the playback blind diagonally behind the lek. Definitely requires some mental gymnastics to sort those out.

Most students were working on the female approach project. With our former student/current technician Becca, we wrapped up the female position data for one of the peak breeding days in 2007, which should complete our male strut rate data for that season. We have two remaining days from 2008 and one from 2006 that are in the finishing stages. Michelle, Tawny, and some others have been working on completing the lateralization dataset. That is really close to being done as well. And Becca has finished data collection on the mechanical sounds project. Cool! Now we just have to analyze these great datasets and write up (is that all?)