So True

18:33 Wednesday, 23 August 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 76.23°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 0mph
Words: 25

Looking at southern California, Maui, Canada and I'm reminded of William Gibson, 20 years ago: "The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed."

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!Bird of Paradise

21:36 Wednesday, 23 August 2023

Current Wx: Temp: 83.84°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 101

Shut out on birds yesterday and today. This morning the second of Mitzi's three bird of paradise plants flowered. She's had these plants for two years, and this is the first time they've blossomed. The third plant had a stalk(?) that would have become a flower, but it seems to have died. Two out of three ain't bad, I guess.

Shot this with the E-M1 Mk3 with the 75mm/f1.8 in 25MP handheld high-res mode, which is why the framing is a bit off. Should have backed off a bit to allow for camera motion and the frame blending.

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This Morning's Moon 8-23-24

08:45 Friday, 23 August 2024

Current Wx: Temp: 76.03°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 89% Wind: 4mph
Words: 631

I'm sore. No walk this morning. Yesterday was mostly spent getting the stuff going to New York into the trailer. We hired a couple of guys for the big stuff and they were great. They do this all the time, and they were able to get everything packed in "high and tight," since we pay for the amount of space we're using by the foot.

I don't know that everything will survive, but I'm too tired to care. I think it'll be okay, the guys really seemed to know what they were doing.

I stuck an AirTag in my toolbox, even though the company gives you a link to track the trailer. "Trust but verify?"

Of course, this morning Mitzi noticed on the "fine print" that they only deliver on paved roads. I told her that I didn't think that was a problem, the roads are all paved to the house, though the driveway is gravel. It's also pretty long and starts between a lot of vegetation on either side. Hopefully the driver will be able to back into the driveway! Too late to worry about it now.

The Apple //c arrived yesterday. It's in better shape than I anticipated. Some plastic yellowing, but not as much as it seemed in the photos. The right arrow key does not work, as described. I put some DeOxit into the switch, but it didn't seem to fix it. I've ordered a couple of replacements, but I'll play with it again today and see if letting it sit overnight made any difference with the DeOxit.

I opened it up and it was very clean inside, no crumps, dead bugs, etc. And judging by the amount of torque it took to remove the screws, I don't think it's ever been opened before. I could check, but I think the seller was an estate sale vendor, albeit one who knows their way around checking the condition of old computers! I can easily believe this was someone's //c that sat unused in a box for 30 years or more. For the most part, I've been remarkably lucky with Apple II hardware I've purchased on ebay. I only had one really bad IIgs, where the battery had leaked and did a great deal of damage.

I was excited to plug it in and play with it, but discovered my composite video cable is only four feet long! (It's the one currently plugged into the TV, that connects to the HPIL video interface.) I was able to connect it to the computer and check out the video and run the self-test (all good), but there was no way to comfortably situate myself to actually play with it.

And, as these things go, I used to have dozens of those simple RCA cables of varying lengths. Could I find one last night? Do you have to ask?

I had to get a new filter for the BlueAir purifier, so I ordered one and added a 10 foot RCA cable to the order. It'll get here tomorrow.

The Floppy Emu arrived the other day and I put all that together. I've got a ROM modification coming that allows to you upload various ROM files and selecting one to boot into, along with a utility that allows you turn an application into a ROM file, no disk required. Looking forward to playing with that. The USB-C power connector/adapter is here and I'll test that today and see how long I can run the //c from a power bank, no outlet required!

Got up late this morning, but early enough to get a picture of the waning gibbous moon. I don't know about any of my readers, but it never gets old for me. Hope it's so for you too.

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DeOxit FTW

10:40 Friday, 23 August 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 82.67°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 106

I plugged in the //c and tried the keyboard again. The right arrow key worked for a few dozen characters, then stopped again. So it seemed likely that there was just some gunk in there that still needed to be cleaned out.

Took it back out to the garage and gave it a couple of more squirts, then worked the switch quite a bit. Let it set for a while, as I looked for an RCA cable.

No joy on the cable, but I took the //c back in and hooked it up to the TV. Right arrow key works fine.

Gotta savor the little victories.

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"It's full of stars..."

06:18 Saturday, 23 August 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 60.03°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 7.14mph
Words: 896

The sky was clear again last night, so I tried to prepare a bit for going outside after dark and seeing if I could get the Milky Way. I used Live Time for this shot. It's basically bulb mode, the shutter opens and remains open until you press it again. (So, not like bulb mode in that respect.) You can get a certain number of display updates, depending on the ISO setting, the higher the ISO, the fewer the updates. This isn't a tutorial, and I'm not certain I really understand how to use it, but this was the second of two efforts, this one at ISO 1600. It's a 48.5s exposure, so there's some trailing in the stars.

The thing I love is that I could see the Milky Way when I stepped outside, so I knew where it was. Now, it doesn't look at all like what's in the photo, and the jpeg SOOC doesn't look like this at all either. Someone more knowledgeable about post-processing, using an application that supports layers, could get rid of that ugly sky glow at the bottom of the frame, but this is just me wrenching the levers in Photos to get something a bit more dramatic.

I'm looking forward to having more opportunities to practice.

I wanted to get some star trails looking toward Polaris, so I set up to do a Live Composite shot. At some point early in the process, my neighbor drove his truck down his driveway, and so there's some nasty flare. The image is up at Flickr.

In the future, I can avoid that by setting up behind our house, farther up the hill. It'll put some trees between his place and the tripod, so I shouldn't have that issue again. I'll have to dig out my headlight to make sure I don't stumble walking up the hill.

But I do love it here.

Yesterday's errands went smoothly. We hit Target, Best Buy and Home Depot. It's nice when you can knock out a bunch of errands in one trip. I exchanged some CO2 cylinders for my Soda Stream and bought some syrups. Mitzi got another door mat for the side door. My kids had given me a gift card for Best Buy years ago, and I finally decided I needed to quit letting it just sit there in my desk drawer. I didn't have anything particular in mind, but I ended up getting a DJI Osmo Mobile 7. It was a $50 gift card, so it was only $30 out of my pocket. Now I'm only a few videos away from my second career as a YouTube influencer! Can fame and fortune be far behind?

At Home Depot I got another 8', 12" pine board for another shelf in the garage, and the necessary brackets. We have a couple of end tables with metal frames as their bases. Because they're never quite square, and floors aren't necessarily even, they have four adjustable screw feet to level and keep them from rocking. One of those went missing on the move. Looked like quarter-twenty (.25" 20 thread per inch), so I bought a couple of those, and they did the trick. Bought another quarter sheet of .5" plywood, because why not?

Mitzi did some shopping at Kohl's while I was fumbling around Home Depot with one of those carts for lumber that always seems to have a mind of its own.

It was a stunningly beautiful day yesterday, a priceless thing we can't take for granted anymore. So the drive was pleasant, we weren't in a hurry and traffic was very light outside of Ithaca.

Got home, put everything away, had lunch and then went back out in the yard to keep making progress at the roadside. Cleaned up a lot of little stuff that the bush hog missed or couldn't get to. Found another Morrow's Honeysuckle and took the sawzall to it. We'll have to keep cutting it down until the stump dies, which may be never I guess. There are grape vines over two inches in diameter we've been cutting back, and many small vines entangled in the sumac bush. I'll have to get on a ladder to get them out. We made quite a pile of debris that we'll have to call someone to haul away.

After a couple hours of that effort, I repaired to the recliner. I began to notice the shadows of birds flying above our roof against the hillside behind the house. I looked out the front window and there were hundreds of birds perched on the power lines at the road. Which was nothing compared to the dozens of birds flying low in front of me in the yard, seemingly oblivious to my presence. It was like something out of The Birds. There were dozens more on the roof of the garage.

I took some shots and discovered they were barn swallows. I'd never seen them flock like that before. ChatGPT informed me that barn swallows are famously social when they're not raising young. They gather in huge flocks to roost together, eventually migrating south for the winter. That was pretty cool, if a little disturbing.

(Also heard coyotes howling last night while I was outside with the camera.)

Anyway, beautiful, productive day yesterday. Amazingly, my back isn't screaming at me this morning.

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Elites

09:33 Sunday, 23 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 65.71°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 9.44mph
Words: 1328

I like listening to Sarah Longwell's Bulwark podcasts about focus groups, because I like to hear what the people in the focus group are saying. You don't get everything, obviously, but you do get to hear nuggets that Sarah or her team felt were illustrative.

Yesterday I listened to (watched mostly) this one. It struck me because of something that came up in my feeds recently regarding Frederico Viticci and MacStories. Jack Baty had one view, while Rob Fahrni expressed what is probably the consensus view.

These things resonated because of the focus group discussion.

Now, I may not have been paying close attention, so maybe I got this wrong. These were Trump voters, may have been Biden voters who went for Trump, and they're unhappy with Trump, but they're also unhappy with "the left."

It's not the politicians on "the left," it's the people in their lives on "the left." They don't like the self-righteousness, the shaming, the shunning. They feel that we on "the left," think we're smarter than everyone else. (Truthfully, I considered posting a snarky comment that 50% of the population has below-average intelligence. But then I reconsidered.)

So here's the thing, our performative virtue signaling seems to be alienating the very people we need to persuade to come over to our side.

There's an old saying in politics, "People will never remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel." And I think that's kind of true in life as well.

I think a lot of this "piling on" is an artifact of social media, and people being online too much. I used to think that we said things online that we would never say to someone's face. Now I think that some of that is bleeding over into "real life." That we've fashioned these notions of who we are by the positions we've taken online, and that identity is sometimes asserting itself offline to the people around us.

We never should have been that way online in the first place, but now it's spreading.

Frederico isn't a neighbor. That is strictly an online sort of thing. It's unfortunate, and unhelpful, but it's not alienating a neighbor.

But we all have neighbors, and friends.

Back in May I went to Pennsylvania to have a little get-together with some of my classmates from the Naval Academy. We spent four years together, all in the same company, Good Times Ten.

Of the four of us, I'm perhaps the most liberal, the furthest "left." Two of the other three guys are more middle of the road, though I think I'd say one is closer to the left and the other is closer to the right, but it's not a huge difference. The fourth guy is a hardcore MAGA Trumper.

He was also my roommate and one of my best friends at the academy. He's also super-smart, very funny, generous and usually fun to be around. But he has a problem that many people in my life seem to have with regard to politics. They want to have a "discussion," except it never seems to be a discussion, it almost always turns into a debate and then an argument.

I suspect, though I don't know, that this is an emotional/psychological need. I think these guys are addicted to right-wing media, and that their interior experience is one of habitual outrage. When they're in a social setting, Fox News isn't on, they're not scrolling Truth Social or X, and there's this stimulus that's missing in their immediate experience and it makes them feel uncomfortable. So they have to generate it by engaging with the people around them.

This doesn't have to be people that disagree with them. I'm sure they would welcome validation from like-minded people. Perhaps that's what they would prefer, but when they know they're with people who probably disagree, they must invite a discussion, knowing that there will likely be some disagreement, because they need to nurture their interior experience.

It happens all the time with two of Mitzi's brothers-in-law, and it happened with my classmate last May. We knew where it would go.

A few years ago we were all together with a few more of our classmates in a similar setting. At one point my former roommate was talking with a like-minded MAGA type, boasting about how he attended a Black Lives Matter protest and carried a sign that said something like, "Burn Loot Murder," and they were both laughing about it.

We were in a public setting, but it pissed me off and I came up on the governors and turned and confronted him right there. I asked him what the point was of his sign? What view was he expressing? What did he hope to achieve? He had no real answer, other than it was his form of "counter-protest."

Things were pretty tense for a while after that.

So last May, perhaps foolishly, we tried to make a good-faith effort to engage with him on whatever it was that wished to discuss. I think it was trans athletes. And I don't think that trans athletes really affect him, but it definitely is a topic that nurtures this inner experience of outrage. It inevitably led to a "discussion" of women in the military, and "standards," and whether or not women can do the job.

It remained mostly civil, bordering on heated, until it got to whether or not women can do the job, because one of my classmates was married to a Navy diver, and they have two daughters. Then it got a little intense.

I don't remember who or how we got it dialed back, but at some point I told my friend that I simply wasn't going to argue with him anymore. That he had his opinions and we didn't agree; but there was no further point in arguing about it, we weren't going to change each others' minds, and our friendship was too valuable to risk hurting by raising our voices.

We were able to remain in each other's company and enjoy ourselves, but I suspect my former roommate was still struggling a bit with this lack of stimulation.

I'm going to hasten to add that this same phenomenon occurs on "the left." We are online too much, consuming too much media. I don't think it's unfair to say that we have genuine issues to be alarmed about, unlike the manufactured outrage of trans athletes, white replacement, and Sharia law. But saturating ourselves in this stuff all day, every day, can't be healthy.

My neighbor next door is retired, and I gather he spends a lot of time watching Fox News. He helps his son with the build from time to time, and we chat a bit. Mostly about what growing up was like around here, things he did in his youth. But, trans athletes came up. I didn't engage and just tried to change the subject. I think he was looking for a little validation or stimulation, more than a broader examination of the topic, and I didn't see any value in offering that.

"Both sides," have their problems with too much media in an economic system that competes for attention and focuses on "engagement" by hijacking our amygdalae. Our technology and our economic system are making us ill. It's a systemic problem, and I don't know what the solution is, other than it has to be a kind of "public health" response.

There was a time when people threw their excrement out their windows into the streets. Or poured it into the adjacent canal or river. We invested significant sums of money into sanitation infrastructure. We taught people about "personal hygiene," the importance of bathing, washing our hands after using the toilet, brushing our teeth.

We have nothing like that for this "social media" infrastructure, and it's making us all sick.

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