Bird

We had an unexpected visitor in our backyard this evening. I was walking out to check the mail and heard a screech and saw the flutter of wings.

I popped inside the house to get Z and we started breaking through the snow in the backyard, looking up in the trees. We were both startled to see a large hawk, almost within arms reach of us!

We admired the bird for a while, and then I sent Z in to get a coat and grabbed my camera. Happily, the bird decided to hang around for a bit longer (although on a higher branch).

The photos aren't amazing, but I did get a few passable ones - mostly from the same angle, so I'll spare you the repetition. The hawk had 'treed' a few squirrels in an adjacent pine. They were making crying noises, and understandably, were both scared witless.

The bird eventually got bored of my picture taking and decided to fly away, squirrel-less.

Christmas App

Last year, Jim and I used the Rovi Data API to build an app that lists all Christmas albums in the AMG database.

Songs (by frequency on Albums)

I put a fresh coat of paint on the site and re-launched it at christmas.cloudapp.net. The site was only up in December 2012. Now that the holidays are over, I have pulled it down. As usual, the site was built on Python/Flask, but this time I used an Azure VM as the host.

Most Prolific Artists (Ranked by # of Tracks on Albums)

It allows you to sort the most popular songs, most prolific artists, and find songs by genre or subgenre (there are 25 Polka albums, and 33 Disco records - don't miss Christmas In The Stars.

The images above are some tag clouds I built from the data - made with the excellent Wordle. I did the design/styling on the actual site. It's... less polished. Keep an eye open for the site next year during the holidays!