Halfway

06:10 Tuesday, 14 June 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 78.46°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 129

June 14th? My experience of time is becoming a blur.

I'll note that it's 78°F outside at 6:00 a.m. I'm looking forward to heading up to Cayuga Lake in a week or so.

Spent a good deal of Sunday and Monday playing around in Script Debugger, trying to cobble together a workflow to make posting pics here at the Marmot as simple as it is from a share sheet in Photos. I'm making progress, but it's tricky and often frustrating.

Less frustrating than reading the news though. So that's nice.

Mitzi's up in DC with her newest grandson. I'm looking after my neighbor's dog while they're up in New York, burying her father.

Well, I'd better get a walk in before the sun gets too high.

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Noted

11:39 Wednesday, 14 June 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 86.27°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 70% Wind: 13.8mph
Words: 20

Today is Flag Day. Coincidentally, it is the day, in 1945, Capt. Miller saved Private Ryan.

Which is just movie.

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The Cartographer's Dilemma

19:38 Wednesday, 14 June 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 73.36°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 859

This "mind map" idea, to use the various map views of Tinderbox to depict many of the things that I've learned, has been an interesting exercise. I'm reminded of what I think was something attributed to Poul Anderson, "There is no problem, no matter how complicated, that when looked at exactly the right way, does not become a thousand times more complicated."

Last time I mentioned this, I was thinking about how to orient the various ideas on the canvas. So I was moving things around, somewhat in the general vein of what I described, "self" in the center, "others" toward the outer edge, the "field of time" in between.

As I was doing this, I noticed that the notes really depicted different kinds of ideas, and so I looked for a way to depict each kind. I settled on shapes, using the default rectangle, a lozenge shape, and an oval. There are probably more kinds of ideas, but for now, three has been helpful.

Then I thought about perhaps using color to depict some aspect of an idea. This led to a bit of a rabbit hole on the psychological role of color. I haven't made any firm choices in that regard yet.

Yesterday was a bit of a loss as I spent a couple of hours running to the airport and back, and I get fairly unproductive in the afternoon. I watched some YouTube videos on using Tinderbox maps, and got some useful information but nothing that felt particularly inspiring.

I figured I'd spend some time on it this morning, when I'm generally more productive, less self-conscious about what I'm doing. So on my walk this morning, I thought about the map and got a little uncomfortable, not to say "discouraged."

Maps are problematic in many ways, because they can be misleading. World maps have problems with projection, which leads to relative depictions of size wildly out of proportion to reality. And we associate various unrelated values with size. There's the matter of "privilege," in which "up" seems to be a privileged dimension over "down," what's on "top" versus what's on the "bottom."

Then it occurred to me that putting ideas related to the "self" (subjective) in the center, reinforced the unconscious bias that each of us is the "center" of our personal universe, which is exactly the sort of unhelpful notion from which the "map" is supposed to lead the user away. It biases how we perceive the words and actions of others, in ways that can be erroneous or misleading. ("That guy cut me off!" No he didn't, he just changed lanes. He wasn't thinking about you at all. We could go into a long digression on this, suffice to say, players in the huddle at a football game aren't all talking about you.)

Oy!

I thought I could flip that orientation, and place ideas about the self on the outer portions of the map, which suggests that our subjective perceptions are contained within our conscious awareness. That felt good, seemed to make more sense and might be more helpful or useful, assuming this thing has any utility whatsoever, apart from a thought exercise for me.

Then I thought about whether the "field of time" still made sense as an in-between zone. All "action" ideas belong in the field of time, because time is an essential element of action. I think the idea still works; but it did make my mind wander off (the map?) into how to depict attention, that faculty of consciousness that apprehends our "reality."

Attention can move through space and time, can get "stuck," and is always inherently related to self (subjective). The undisciplined use of attention, unconscious, habituated or hijacked, can be problematic. I started wondering how I could depict that graphically. Which made me think that animation might be helpful in that circumstance, that kind of animation isn't within the otherwise enormous set of tools Tinderbox offers.

But each note (idea) has an associated text field that can be put to good use. The question is how to depict the idea of attention on the map. Belongs to "self," but is intrinsically linked to time and can perform a convincing illusion of time-travel through memory and imagination. (Memory and imagination can elicit feelings, which gives them some aspects of present reality, although they have no genuine existence.)

So maybe include an "arrow of time" in the "time zone" ("Twilight Zone?")? Clockwise or anti-clockwise? Clockwise, of course! So memory resides in the anti-clockwise field, while imagination resides in the clockwise field.

Anyway, the walk ended about that time. It's muggy again in Florida, so I'm sitting here in the office drying out under the ceiling fan. I'll go make my breakfast and try to let my subconscious ponder this some more, then see if I can do anything useful. I thought I could put something together in a few days that I could show off at the meetup, but that seems unlikely now.

Which suggests some thoughts on motivation and sustained attention, and the power of intention.

Well, I'm hungry. We'll see how it goes.

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Hell And High Water

09:34 Friday, 14 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 83.28°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 492

I hope you can read this article in the Miami Herald. Might be behind a paywall. It's a good look at what reality is like today in Florida.

One homeowner who has now been flooded three times said he is selling his home and moving. Another guy who's been flooded twice declared that he wasn't going to "give up paradise for a little bad weather."

It's insanity.

Part of my struggle with the cognitive dissonance that is the normal state of mind in Florida is due to my career in the navy.

When you're out at sea and there's a catastrophic event, there's no place to run. You fight to save the ship. The navy learned a lot from accidental fires and disasters, as well as combat or near-combat actions (STARK) and made sure it trained and equipped sailors to save the ship.

We would hold "mass conflagration" drills. These were all hands efforts. The entire ship would go to general quarters to maximize the watertight integrity of the ship, bring all of its firefighting capabilities to their maximum state of readiness. Fully man all the repair lockers, get people out of their racks and into their spaces where they were alert and informed and ready to take action when directed to.

There is a fire aboard spaceship earth and it has reached the life support system, and the officers on the bridge are debating what the best liberty port will be.

You can't blame Republicans for the catastrophe we're facing. It's been a couple of centuries in the making and we've all played a role in causing it.

But you can blame Republicans for our failure to do ANYTHING about it.

We just passed a law to delete the words "climate change" from the state's statutes.

It's madness. MADNESS!

This wasn't a named storm. This was just weather. Ordinary weather. You can't call it a "1000 year event," when it happens two years in a row! (And please, no lectures about "that's not how statistics work." Go learn physics and meteorology and then come talk to me.)

If we have one major hurricane strike Florida this year, we will have an unprecedented, catastrophic insurance crisis in this state.

The "reforms" the legislature enacted chiefly made it harder to sue insurance companies, and made it easier for them to deny claims. And they will still lose money and leave the state, and their clients and customers will not be made whole and will not be able to sue to be made whole. Blue tarps and property values in the toilet. Tax base collapsing. Let's see DeSantis reject federal money then.

He'll be begging for it.

This issue has been well known and well understood for decades. Florida has been exclusively governed by the Republican party for more than a generation, and they have done nothing to prepare this state for what has been foreseeable, predicted and now experienced.

It's insanity. Stupidity.

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Maybe Some Good News?

11:02 Friday, 14 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 84.94°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 76% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 67

This is a video of the blog post I mentioned last week.

Stick around to about the 12:40 mark for maybe some good news?

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We've Got to Stop Meeting Like This

07:15 Saturday, 14 June 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 73.58°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 543

The world is going to shit, but I'm too busy to pay much attention. Unsure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Mostly the former, I think.

Lots on the plate again today, but some recreation. There's a cardboard regatta down at the lake we're hoping to check out if the weather cooperates.

This is the same doe I saw last month. We have a fenced area behind the house that the previous owner used to corral his dogs. It has an opening in it, as the dogs had long since passed, but it's over 90% contained. Somehow the fawn gets inside the fence, and mom tags along.

Yesterday, Mitzi got the delight of seeing the fawn come up to the sliding glass door and look inside. By the time I got there with a camera, it had headed back up the hill into the grass. I tried to get a better shot outside the house, and mom decided she'd had enough and jumped over the fence. Little fawn couldn't make it and was running back and forth along the fence line on the opposite side from where the opening is. This shot is of mom looking anxiously at me with her fawn still inside the fence. (Derp. Nope. Fawn's right next to her. You can barely make it out. So this must have been just before she jumped the fence.)

Mom stayed nearby, but obviously couldn't help. I put the camera down and went out to kind of coax the faun toward the open side. That didn't seem to be helping.

The fence is chicken wire mounted to t-poles. I'd just spent over an hour removing eight of them adjacent to the house on the driveway side. I watched a few YouTube videos on how to remove t-poles and bought a t-pole driver at Home Depot yesterday. The first three were much harder than the YouTube videos suggested, to the point where I figured I'd have to hire someone to do it for me. But the next five came pretty easily because the ground was so wet. So there was a much larger opening in the fence; but it was on the same side as the existing opening, which was only wide enough for the neighbor to get the mower through.

I tried removing the fence from a couple of the t-poles on the opposite side, but the wire kept breaking, so I had little luck. I thought maybe I could bend it down enough for the fawn to jump over, but then I worried it'd get its legs caught in the fencing if it didn't clear the whole thing.

In the end, I went back into the house and doe and fawn figured it out eventually.

That was yesterday's excitement. More t-pole pulling today before we head into town. I want to get the whole thing down before I call the surveyor to come out and stake the property with me. The fence is partly on our neighbors' property because they were family and didn't care about such things. We need to have a clear idea of where the lines are so we can begin to develop a site plan for a new house.

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No Way Out

14:40 Saturday, 14 June 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 83.88°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 12.66mph
Words: 171

I removed another twelve feet of fence and four t-posts and whacked down the weeds. This time on the other end of the house, so the deer could find their way out more easily.

Nope.

Took several minutes and a lot of running back and forth along the fence line before she finally found her way down to the opening.

It's a lot of work getting those posts out, so I do what I can and then give it a rest. I'll take down another bunch of posts and roll up the fencing tomorrow. I should have the whole thing down by the end of the week. I can store the t-posts, but it's hard to roll the fencing up tightly, so it's taking a lot of space. I'm disinclined to throw it away, but I need to find a better way to store it.

60°F today and cloudy. It was perfect weather for pulling those posts. We didn't make it to the regatta. Oh well. Next year.

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Reckless

14:25 Sunday, 14 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 72.93°F Pressure: 1007hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 11.59mph
Words: 866

Throwing caution and sense to the wind, I'm downloading the MacOS 27 beta. It's 32GB, so that's going to be a while. (Software Update says about four more hours.)

Little Snitch seems to be incompatible, but I've installed a nightly beta that's supposedly compatible.

Mitzi wanted to change the top of the bathroom vanity, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Well, the new vanity that fits the new vanity top arrived on Friday and after posting yesterday morning, we proceeded to install it. Figured it'd be a two-hour job, tops.

Took more like five.

A large part of the problem was a certain kind of blindness on my part. The cabinet was going over an existing plumbing setup that we couldn't disassemble, the drain and supply lines. The supply lines are Pex tubes with shutoff valves attached. When I looked at the problem, all I seemed to see was the drain line.

I carefully measured the diameter of the drain pipe, its distance from the back wall and so on, also the distance to the center of the cabinet. I then used a hole-saw drill attachment to cut a hole precisely large enough to pass the drain line through, and used my jigsaw to cut an opening in the side of the cabinet so we could lower it over the drain line.

When that was completed, we tried to lower the cabinet over the pipes, and it wouldn't go! I thought I must have made an error in one direction or another in cutting the opening in the side of the cabinet. Pulled it out and cut a bit more material out on either side, "just to be sure."

Tried again, still wouldn't go all the way down to the floor.

Then we saw the Pex tubes!

In all that effort, it never occurred to me that they might be a problem. There should have been enough space below the drain line for the Pex to pass under the cabinet, but there was no way to manipulate those pipes. In hindsight, perhaps I could have duct-taped them to the bottom of the drain line.

But when we realized the Pex tubes were keeping the cabin from reaching the floor, we also realized they had to come up through the bottom of the cabinet along with the drain!

Took the cabinet back out and cut an even larger opening in the side of the cabinet (none of this is visible) to accommodate the Pex pipes, and enlarged the opening in the bottom to do the same.

New problem! Pex pipes just kind of flop around. How were we going to get them to come up through the bottom of the cabinet?! I thought of using some para-cord tied off to each of the shutoff valves.

So we try again with para-cord tied to the shutoff valves and a larger, squared off opening in the back of the drain pipe opening to accommodate the tubes. Somehow we managed to get one of the supply lines in front of the drain pipe in such a way that we couldn't get the pipe to finish going up, nor the cabinet off!

Now I needed to make the hole bigger again, only now there are two soft plastic supply lines in the hole with the drain. I'm not going to be able to use the Makita multi-tool to do that! Back to the garage for a small wood chisel, and I'm down on my knees carefully carving a larger opening around this stupid Pex pipe.

Finally we get that free, get the pipe up the back side of the drain where it belongs and lower the cabinet, only to find that the cold water line continues on to be the supply line for the toilet, which was all there in plain sight the entire time! I had to cut another opening in the other side of the cabinet.

So we pull the cabinet off again, back out to the kitchen to cut another opening, and finally get the whole thing finagled in again with the para-cords and it was in!

I was sweating like a pig, tired and frustrated.

How could I not see those Pex pipes? What was going on in my head that I never took them into account when thinking about how I had to modify the cabinet to accommodate the plumbing?

It's very troubling.

I mean, I'd used graph paper to figure out how to locate the drain pipe openings. We created paper templates which we used to test whether the measurements were right? The Pex pipes were there the entire time, I kept shoving them out of the way, and it never occurred to me that they would require being taken into account.

Am I becoming cognitively impaired somehow? Is this an early sign of dementia?

Well, we got the cabinet in and the vanity top mounted, the plumbing connected up. Minor leak with the drain pipe fixed this morning with teflon tape. All's well that ends well, but wow. It's really shaken me.

Which makes me wonder if deciding to install Golden Gate is especially reckless.

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