At The Wilds With Mom

In the first week of October 2011 (Monday and Tuesday) we returned to The Wilds, this time with Ben's mother, Jean. We hoped this expedition would be a highlight of her visit, as it was back in early May, 2010 for our visitors Serge and Jeanne, even if the weather was cooler this time.

The Wilds is located near Cambridge, Ohio. It is one of the largest conservation centers in the world, nearly 10,000 acres, situated on land strip mined in the 1960s and 1970s and reclaimed in the early 1980s.


We stayed overnight in the yurts of Nomad Ridge, on-site lodging offered by The Wilds.

The view from Nomad Ridge had some changes since our last visit: there is a zipline down the ridge and across the lake. You might be able to discern a pair of towers alongside the road on the far side of the lake.

Here's a zoom-in on those towers. (There was mist in the air that evening.)

After a restful night at the yurts, then breakfast, we met our guide and climbed into the back of the Wildside Tour pickup truck, which has padded benches. My 87-year-old mother was welcome to sit inside the cab with the guide, but she chose to dress warmly and sit in the open with Joan and me. The lesson is that if you can climb up a few steps -- there is a deployable "gangway" for the pickup -- and hold onto a handrail, then sitting in the back, where the view is better, is an option to consider.

Our first stop was to visit the persian onagers and, nearby, the camels, who enjoy the grasslands but prefer the roads to travel from point A to point B. The onagers had youngsters to guard.

The camels (Bactrian) knew we had treats, and they weren't bashful. Our guide sat on top of the cab to dispense the goodies.

This fellow smiled knowingly at us.

One of his lady friends was also curious, approaching the other side of the truck.

Both of them enjoyed using their mouths to explore the truck, which turned out to be inedible.

The next area, separated by a gate, hosted a herd of Przewalski's horses. They are known to be irritable, and we carefully kept our hands inside the truck.

From there it wasn't far to the Mid-Sized Carnivore Center, where we disembarked from the pickup and explored the elevated boardwalks. The cheetahs were very relaxed.

We also stopped at the cheetah housing, but this time I have no pictures to share. For more on the cheetahs, see this earlier post.

The dholes, or Asiatic Wild Dogs, were less skittish than we had seen them before, possibly because we were the only people in sight, possibly because they have now been at the Wilds for a while, possibly both. Their countenance reminded us of red foxes.

Sadly, I have no pictures of the extremely intelligent African wild dogs.

Upon leaving the carnivore center we came across a Grevy's zebra. This animal occupies a middle ground between asses and zebras; some consider it a striped ass. It inhabits a small area: northern Kenya and southern and eastern Ethiopia. This one had something protruding from his flank (click to enlarge).

He had been darted. Contrary to what you might see in the movies, it takes a while for the drug to take effect. This Grevy's looks doleful; perhaps he realizes he must soon suffer through an exam.

We drove slowly by these fringe-eared oryx.

Before driving to the giraffe barn (many warm-climate animals cannot overwinter outdoors in Ohio), we saw this mother southern white rhinoceros and her nursing baby.

Then there was this older child and adult.

Our final stop on the tour was the giraffe barn; it was cool enough in October for several species to have come indoors for the winter. We were each offered the chance to feed one of the giraffes, and in this picture the giraffe has just used its long, prehensile tongue to pull the lettuce out of Mom's grasp.

Despite the chilly weather Mom enjoyed her visit, and we were pleased.

This entry has been posted on March 23, 2012, in honor of what would have been Jean's 88th birthday.

Demise of a Time Capsule

For the last 3½ years we've been using an Apple Time Capsule (TC). It has served as our router, our WiFi base station, and a backup hard drive for Time Machine on Joan's iMac. Then it began to fail.

The first failure coincided with two events, so we weren't positive what to judge as the cause. Time Machine announced that the backup drive was full, and it would have to begin removing the oldest versions to make room for further backups. Then the Internet connection failed, and Joan noticed that the TC status lamp was not on. Not green, not yellow, just not on. She unplugged the power cord and plugged it back, and the Time Capsule resumed its duties, for a while.

Then one afternoon the TC spontaneously turned itself off. We unplugged and replugged it several times, to no avail. Then, coming back a few hours later, it was working again.

Clearly it was time to do something. An Internet search revealed that the early Time Capsules had an abnormally high failure rate, most of which were due to the power supply. Eventually Apple extended the warranty for these Time Capsules, under user pressure, but at 3½ years old, ours was out of warranty even so. We were lucky to get 3½ years; many seemed to fail at about 18 months.

The Time Capsule suffers a lot of heat stress, which is what was killing the power supplies. The device has an internal power supply (turning the AC current from the wall into proper DC voltages), an internal hard drive, the wireless circuits, the Ethernet circuits, all generating heat -- and there is no ventilation. It doesn't even have feet to allow air flow under the unit; here's a picture of the bottom:

I went to our local Apple Store to get a replacement Time Capsule. However, the 2 terabyte (TB) model, $299, was not in stock in either central Ohio location. The 3 TB model could be had -- for $499. Given that we'd been happy with a ½ TB (500 gigabyte) model, I wasn't keen to pay an extra $200 for the larger unit. I went home to order online, but, lo and behold, the 2 TB units had a 1 to 2 week shipping estimate on apple.com. Our old Time Capsule was working today, but buying a replacement with an uncertain shipping date and praying that the old unit wouldn't die completely first did not sound like a sound strategy.

I went back to the Apple Store, now much more crowded than during my first visit, and priced my options. I could get an Airport Extreme for $179, which would take care of the wireless and routing functionality, and there was a 1 terabyte external hard drive available for $129.95, which we could use as the backup device for Time Machine. That adds up to $308.95, or $10 more than the 2 TB Time Capsule -- but much less than the 3 TB model. And having "just" 1 terabyte for backup wasn't an issue; we were, after all, replacing a ½ terabyte model! I brought them home.

The Airport Extreme has an external power supply, and no hard drive, so the heat build up should be tolerable, even though it also has zero ventilation:

I also put feet on the bottom of the Airport Extreme. It may not make a lot of difference, but it was an easy remedy to apply.

 Here is a photo of the old Time Capsule below the new, and more compact, Airport Extreme.

The external hard drive (black) is tucked behind the iMac, beside the (white) cable modem. It connects to the iMac through a USB port.

These replacement devices were easy to install and configure. Although the Airport Extreme is warm to the touch, with the separation of hard drive, power supply, and wifi/routing into three different enclosures, overheating should not cause problems. It was an adventurous time, but appears to have turned out well.