Merry Merry Month of May
09:58 Sunday, 7 May 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 76.12°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 66% Wind: 12.66mph
Words: 498
Figured I'd better drop by here and flip the calendar. Did a couple things over in 'chuck hole, but haven't been tending to the flagship.
Got my name in the paper, and my picture too! The pic's from a couple of years ago, the beard is gone.
Not much to be merry about though, another May mass murder yesterday. Won't be the last. Can't figure out a reaction that makes any sense anymore. Somewhere between dumbfounded and despair, I guess.
We watched Otto last night. I loved it. I haven't read any reviews, but I'm certain it has been criticized for sentimentality. It was fine with me.
I think I'm going to watch Joe Versus the Volcano, Cast Away, and Otto all again, in that order. I think these three movies all deal with the same theme, and I wonder if Tom Hanks did this deliberately, with some intention. Faith and fear. The struggle with control. Life and death.
If I can muster the courage, I may watch Saving Private Ryan as well. I've only seen it once, and after I saw it, I didn't think I could ever watch it again. Haven't either. Had the same reaction to The Deer Hunter, and haven't seen it since I saw it in the theater. But I think Saving Private Ryan may have something to say that aligns with the other three.
My respect for Tom Hanks has grown immensely over the years.
Headed up to New York and Pennsylvania next week. Spending a few days with some Naval Academy classmates, and a few days with Mom. She's been putting some of the cards up on the wall outside her door and getting comments from her neighbors. Seems cool.
Bought a few more radios. There's a Grundig Satellit 800 inbound. Not sure what kind of shape it's in. Looked ok in the photos, but it's from the first year (2000) and there were some QA issues. Got a Sony ICF-2010 from 1985. Seller sold it for parts or "not working." Works fine, and really nice cosmetic shape. I'll look into getting it re-cap'ed. And just paid for a Grundig Yacht Boy 400 from about 1994, back when Grundig was kind of still Grundig and not Eton. I think.
Bought a Black & Decker Workmate a couple of weeks ago. Had one long ago, when I was married. Stayed in the garage when I moved out. New ones do seem to be built from lighter gauge steel, bamboo top. Anyway, needed it to hold some plywood while I cut it. Worked fine. The charger and cord hook for the RAV4 were screwed into drywall in the garage, and an unfortunate accident pulled them out. So I cut a piece of plywood, screwed it into some studs and mounted everything on that. Should be fine.
Anyway, that's probably enough for now. Lights are still on. Gotta call Mom in a few minutes, then a Tinderbox meet-up.
Back soon.
Or, eventually.
✍️ Reply by emailBig Day
06:37 Tuesday, 7 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 69.71°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 325
I'm looking forward to today's announcement from Apple when the iPad finally gets a calculator.
My brother recently got took his 2017 10.5" iPad Pro in for a "battery replacement." Essentially, Apple sends you a refurb one for $119. I have one of those as well. I'm thinking I should do the same. The only mistake I made in buying that iPad (in 2019), was in not going for more storage, I think I got the base model with 64GB. That's the consistent mistake I make with Apple products, but I make it because Apple charges such a premium for memory and storage.
If you pay the "tax," you've got a machine that will last years and years and years, and I suppose that's not in Apple's interests. That's why I bought the M3 14" M3 MBP with 2TB of storage and the maximum amount of RAM for the basic M3, 24GB. I have 128GB on the iMac and I never have RAM issues. But only 1TB of SSD storage, which is why I moved the Photos library to external storage.
I bought a 9th Gen iPad WiFi with 256GB of storage, because both the 2017 Pro and the 6th Gen mini only have 64GB, and Photos eats most of it. The 9th Gen is showing 65GB used of 256GB, and the bulk of that is Photos.
Anyway, I don't think there's an iPad in my future anytime soon. I am planning on getting a new iPhone this fall, mainly for the improved cameras and a USB-C interface. I think the 2019 iMac is good for a few more years, assuming security updates keep coming. After that, we'll see. I wish I could use this 27" display as an external display, I'd just use the M3 MBP as a desktop. But Apple removed that capability for their own self-interest. Maybe I'll just take it offline, and use it without internet access. Who knows?
✍️ Reply by emailInspecting the Array
Current Wx: Temp: 71.19°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 4.61mphWords: 154
Did a series of "before" pics this morning. Supposed to have a crew out here this afternoon to clean the array. First time I've paid to have it done. Not cheap at $400, but worth it in terms of performance and longevity of the array. I'm going to guess we'll see about a 10% increase in output, but that's just a guess.
"Rain" was supposed to be enough to keep them clean, but the pine pollen is pretty sticky. On the closeups, I can still see where I couldn't reach a couple of years ago when I used an extendable RV washing brush to clean them the last time. Ideally, I'd get on the roof and do it myself, but I'm getting to the point where I feel that discretion is the better part of valor, and I'll let someone else do it.
I'll take another series this evening and see how they did.
✍️ Reply by email"Freud might explain it." or, "ICE, ICE baby"
09:28 Wednesday, 7 May 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 78.85°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 85% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 188
In a conversation with a British embassy official that occurred at about this time, quoted in a memorandum later filed with the foreign office in London, Diels delivered a monologue on his own moral unease: "The infliction of physical punishment is not every man's job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the freudian side of the business, and it was only after a number of instances of unnecessary flogging and meaningless cruelty that I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not know themselves that they had sadist leanings until they took part in a flogging. And finally it had been actually creating sadists. For it seems that corporal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently normal men and women. Freud might explain it."
Erik Larson
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
✍️ Reply by emailSomething New
11:07 Wednesday, 7 May 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 84.61°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 3.96mph
Words: 472
I need a bit of distraction these days. There's plenty of work to do, but that gets dizzy after a while. What stays here? What goes there? Do I need this?
Oh? There's an alarm from the hot water heater? Yikes. Weeping union. $190 and all should be well now. Wait for everything to dry out. Of course, just as we're trying to sell the place.
I have this Tinderbox file with about 500 quotations in it. Last Saturday during the meetup, we talked about how to facilitate "discovery" in Tinderbox. That reminded me of something Beck Tench had mentioned in the Forum, six years ago! (Oy!). So this morning I figured I'd try to implement one of the solutions offered to automate selecting two notes at random and presenting them within a container.
It worked, and I've run it a few times. It does offer some stimulus for thinking.
Here's the most recent run:
I was so full of sleep at the time that I left the true way. Dante
And
It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic, and symbol rather than a reason by which men are moved. Irwin Edman
The first is from Dante's Inferno.
(Summary from Safari: The article describes a journey through Hell, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. The narrator encounters various mythical creatures and souls, including a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. The journey serves as a metaphor for the human experience, highlighting the challenges and temptations that individuals face in life.)
Irwin Edman was an American professor of philosophy who died relatively young, at 58.
So, inspiration? Thoughts?
Of course, our present crisis informs my reaction to these two quotations.
The Right's "War on Woke," is the path to Hell. We get failed game show hosts as presidents because men are moved by myths and fables and symbols, which is pretty much Trump to a "T."
But myths and fables and symbols can move people in any direction. Depends on who's putting on the show, I guess.
We may prefer sleepwalking through life. Dreaming, we can't turn our conscious attention to ourselves and our shortcomings.
What I want to do now is to modify this, perhaps turning it into a function that runs each day, copying the $Text of each quotation into a new note that I can copy and paste into the marmot and then riff off of whatever surfaced.
Gives me something to do.
The preceding post was one of the quotations I added to the file when I was reading In The Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson. Diels was Rudolf Diels, former head of the Gestapo. Something to be said for his observation, given our experience with the number of people dying in custody in jail, and deporting children undergoing cancer treatment.
✍️ Reply by emailFurther to the Foregoing
12:00 Wednesday, 7 May 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 86.43°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 66% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 57
This has been in the news locally lately. It's not the first time. And I know someone whose brother was murdered in custody in Texas. And it's been in the news in New York recently too.
As human behavior goes, it seems to be fairly universal. Abu Ghraib.
Seems like we'd have this figured out by now.
✍️ Reply by emailThis Morning's Moon 5-7-26
Current Wx: Temp: 33.55°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 2.1mphWords: 726
Had to hunt around to find my mZuiko MC20 2x teleconverter. I've had the 100-400mm zoom mounted on the OM-1 for a while now, taking pictures of birds out back. Tried to take a hi-res shot of the moon yesterday, but I couldn't get it to work with at just 400mm focal length. There weren't enough pixels in the frame to properly align all the images.
But with the 2x teleconverter there are plenty of pixels and I got three decent hi-res shots. It was later in the morning than I'd have preferred, but I did have to hunt for the teleconverter. It was dark in the drawer, dark in the room, and their black. Should have done it by feel.
Yesterday was a bit of a loss. We had a tub-shower enclosure in the bathroom here, and it's mounted a step up so the plumbing could run underneath. I don't know why. So we had to step up onto a step, and then over the tub to take a shower. I had a couple suction-cup grab bars mounted, just to give us something to steady ourselves. Probably wouldn't stop us if we started to slip and fall, but reduced the chances of starting to do so.
Anyway, Mitzi wanted a walk-in shower and so that began yesterday. Two guys and sawzalls, lots of dust, traffic and noise. I basically just put my AirPods in and watched YouTube all day.
Of course they'll be back in about an hour to hopefully finish the job.
Can't focus on anything while they're here, so today will be another loss for anything productive. I'd go to the gym, but I can't be assured of a shower when I get home. It's looking pretty sunny, maybe I should just go for a walk somewhere.
We received what should be the penultimate set of drawings before they go to engineering yesterday. Discovered two discrepancies we should have been aware of from the beginning. The designer was using scissor trusses in the vault, which changes the pitch of the ceiling from that of the roof. We thought we'd told her, more than once, that we intended to use parallel chord trusses. She kind of pushed back on it that it'll make the windows bigger in the peak, which, okay, good!
The other problem is that she designed the basement for eight inches of concrete, and we intended for the whole house to be six inches. The designer maintains that eight inches is a code requirement for backfilled basements in New York. Brad disagrees, but he's going to call a licensed NY structural engineer and get a second opinion. It's not the end of the world if it turns out she's right, but it does add some complexity and expense.
The designer is on Mountain time, so we have a couple of hours this morning to get this sorted out before we have to give her an answer. The issue is that if she re-draws the plans for six inches and their engineer says it has to be eight, then there will be a charge for reverting back. ("Their" engineer is one of the engineering firms they have a relationship with, which is licensed in New York, though they may not be located in New York.)
In our last meeting she mentioned that it takes their engineers about four weeks to go through the plans and mark them up. She said we could find our own if we wanted to, so that's what prompted Brad to reach out to an engineer some of his peers have worked with before. He indicated he'd be interested in the job, but we hadn't sent him any drawings yet, waiting for this set. We should get that all sorted out this morning.
We hope to sign the contract for the construction driveway tomorrow. Our neighbor, Brad's brother-in-law, is probably going to do the job. He's in that business and offers a number of advantages that should save us money, not the least of which is hauling away excess fill. We may need to use his driveway get the large cement pump trucks up onto our property, so keeping them onboard may facilitate that.
Depending on weather, they'll start on the driveway in the next couple of weeks.
✍️ Reply by email