Groundhog Day -- Notes From the Underground

07:07 Wednesday, 2 February 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 14.67°F Pressure: 1028hPa Humidity: 52% Wind: 13.53mph
Words: 104

It's up. Not much in the way of content, yet, but everything seems to be working.

I struggled a great deal this morning trying to figure out why links from the RSS feed loaded correctly, but the actual permalink on the post itself wouldn't resolve.

Well, it's a long URL and a typo can hide. I even made a TypeIt4Me text expansion for the URL to avoid just this problem, then failed to use it.

Haven't wired up the Apple Notes watched folder yet, but that's on the list. Just wanted to get the site up and running on Groundhog Day, so, mission accomplished.

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Coincidence

12:50 Wednesday, 2 February 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 14.67°F Pressure: 1028hPa Humidity: 52% Wind: 13.53mph
Words: 40

The other day, I was visiting with my neighbor and learned that each of us had been ham radio operators as teens. My old callsign was WN2FEB. It just occurred to me then that 2 FEB was Groundhog Day.

Heh.

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Groundhog Day Moon

08:25 Thursday, 2 February 2023

Current Wx: Temp: 60.84°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 305

Woke up about 0130 and couldn't fall back to sleep so I figured I'd try to photograph the Falcon 9 launch. I did, but focus was off and it wasn't a very good shot. While I was waiting for the launch at 0258, I did some shots of the moon with the OM-1 and the 100-400mm zoom.

I took some in hand-held high resolution, some with the 2x digital teleconverter and the last batch with the MC2 teleconverter mounted on the camera.

This is probably the best of the bunch, with the MC2, and I'm fairly pleased with it handheld.

I had difficulty getting the HHHR shots. I eventually ended up with three, and after cropping, they weren't as good as this.

The ones with the 2x digital teleconverter were surprisingly good, better than I'm used to on any of the E-M1s, though they're never really bad. They were nearly as good as this, but just visibly softer.

This is the best one, with the MC2, heavily cropped. I took a lot of frames with the teleconverter on it, and this was the only one that didn't exhibit some motion blur. This is at 1/125s at 800mm (effective focal length 1600mm). This shutter speed is roughly four stops slower than you would use at that focal length without image stabilization. Technique matters and I haven't been practicing much lately. I did lean against a pillar on the house but it didn't seem to help much. Looked steady in the viewfinder, but that's not a real indication.

I could have bumped the ISO to 400 and perhaps had more success with no real noise penalty. I'll make a mental note of that (He said, confidently.) and do that next time.

Until then here's a Groundhog Day moon.

(Larger version at Flickr.)

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Lessons Learned

08:49 Thursday, 2 February 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 62.19°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 1378

It's Groundhog Day, and I did a thread on Twitter that I was thinking about yesterday. I was trying to figure out how to do it here so it would show up there as a thread. I don't think it can be done.

Anyway, my office is still a catastrophe and there are other things I probably ought to be doing, but I feel compelled to do this. The thought of my own mortality has been with me more and more of late. I don't know why. It doesn't bother me, but it does kind of offer some direction. Maybe that's a good thing.

A little background first. I went through some stuff back in the day, more than twenty years ago now. Much of it was unpleasant, but some of it was amazing, transcendental and, ultimately, transformational. It wasn't easy, and I didn't do it alone and some people suffered along with me. But I'm glad it happened.

So now the disclaimers. First, I'm an authority on nothing, I make all this shit up. You're encouraged to do your own thinking, it's the only thinking that matters.

Second, some of this may sound glib or facile, or it may feel like it's minimizing the pain you or others may feel. That's not intended. I acknowledge the pain, and I'm sorry you're feeling it. I think I'm safe in saying, in the case most of you, as it was with me, it will pass. Won't mean the end of pain, but feelings pass. I should have included that in the Twitter thread.

Herewith, the lessons:

The inner voice is an unreliable narrator. It's a habituated recording that mostly plays on a loop. But it's there all the time, and you would be wise not to trust it.

Introspection is a useful habit to cultivate. Consider it interrogating the inner narrator. Likewise, meditation can lower the volume.

All forms of personal transformation involve loss. That means you will grieve. You will suffer. You will experience the five stages of grief, and they will in large measure parallel the hero's journey described by Joseph Campbell.

I know the five stages of grief are out of favor with many, and they've been misused and misunderstood by some, but in my experience they're a pretty accurate description of how we process loss. Campbell is likewise a problematic figure to some, but I think the hero's journey narrative holds up quite well and can provide a valuable context and framework for understanding one's life.

We all want to be the hero's of our own narratives, do we not?

You see this in pop culture a lot. Examples: Groundhog Day, The Matrix, Joe Vs the Volcano, Cast Away, The Legend of Bagger Vance, the list goes on.

Each is a meditation on death. Chuck Noland didn't survive on that island, if you think he did you missed the point.

I was thinking about Cast Away this morning on my walk, and I had a surprising epiphany, I didn't think there were any left in that movie for me. It'll come up later.

If you find the inner voice telling you "It'll get better when...", it's a lie.

"It" never gets better until you do.

"It" isn't the problem. You are.

There's a typo in the tweet, corrected here. We insert our ego in all the wrong places, and ignore it in all the places where we should be paying attention to it. "It" doesn't get better when I get more shelves for all these cameras. It gets better when I stop feeling like have to have them.

The only power we have is the power to choose. That's the only power anyone has. Our character, the meaning of our lives, is an emergent property of the consequences of our choices.

I did a bunch of posts about the nature of power on the old Groundhog Day blog. Suffice to say, this is really the only one you need to understand.

This next one is the epiphany I had this morning on my walk.

When Chuck Noland said, "I had power over nothing," it wasn't a declaration of despair. It was an exaltation of liberation.

We do have power over nothing.

The negation of nothingness, an act of faith, is the foundation of existence.

Pay attention.

The "pay attention" part was directed at myself. How did I miss that?! It's huge! Huge!

"Dear God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life. I forgot... how big!" (That's from Joe Vs. The Volcano. They're basically the same movie.)

All we have are moments to live. Where you choose to allow your consciousness to exist is up to you. The past and the future don't exist. You make your choices in the moment.

Remember that.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Be here now.

You can't own what doesn't belong to you. You can't fix other people. Which leads to perhaps one of the biggest lessons.

Love isn't owning other people. We each own our own shit. Compassion is probably harder anyway. Work on that.

We are not here to "change the world."

The world is here that we may learn to change ourselves.

This is the foundation of Ghandi's "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

The world is here and you are in it to learn to change yourself.

If you're in the world, and you're seeing cops killing black men in the streets and your inner voice is telling you, "They should have complied."

Well, kind of explains why we're in the mess we're in, I think.

As an aside, if the inner voice is telling to become part of a system to "change it from within," it's lying.

You never change the system.

The system, every system, changes you.

Beware, my lobbyist friends.

This is just kind of a converse of the preceding lesson, together with the unreliability of the inner voice. None of us, I think, ever truly escapes all the influences of the systems we're a part of. But we can try to be aware of them, and use that awareness to inform better choices.

Your mileage may vary.

Faith and fear. Love is faith in action, the first derivative of faith for the calculus types. Courage is love in action, the second derivative of faith.

Anger is fear in action. Hate is anger in action.

Balance the equations.

The two aspects consciousness presents to the universe. Yin and Yang. Yes and no. Faith and fear. Haraclitus' binding opposites.

Okay, that's probably enough. Nobody can teach you this, you have to learn it on your own. You have to take the step. You must enter the woods. The wasteland is an unpleasant place, but it reveals much.

It's probably not enough, but it's a good start. Anyway, I'd hate to die without passing those along.

We're all in this together, and none of us gets out of here alive.

I'll put all this together in a post at the marmot, with likely some expansions and diversions.

But I'll close with this:

And here goes...

"May the Lord bless you and keep you:

The Lord make his face to shine upon you,

and be gracious to you:

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you,

and give you peace."

Happy Groundhog Day.

I'm not much of a religious person. Mitzi and I were in Ireland and we stopped by the church where Yeats is buried. We went into the church and the Priestly Benediction was on a wall or something. I'd heard it, of course, but not often and certainly not the decades since I'd stopped going to church. Mitzi said that it was a Jewish prayer. The priest came out and we had a nice chat and Mitzi recited it in Hebrew.

For some reason, it spoke to me. Still does. When I was so angry about my congressman, John Rutherford, lying to me and his other constituents a few years ago, I closed a blog post with it as kind of an appeal for myself.

Anyway, we're all in this together and none of us is getting out of here alive. I wish you good luck in your journey.

Happy Groundhog Day.

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Another Moon

19:39 Thursday, 2 February 2023

Current Wx: Temp: 75.15°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 65% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 380

I did remember to try again, bumping up the ISO. This one is at 400, and the shutter speed is 1/640s, probably because I also dialed in -1ev exposure compensation. It looks so bright in the viewfinder, even spot-metered. I could have kept it at about -.33ev and been fine.

Exported a TIFF from the RAW (.ORF) in OM Workspace because when I crop a jpeg so closely and then sharpen, I'm picking up some of the jpeg artifacts. Edited it in Photos only. I brightened the TIFF, added a little contrast and definition and some sharpening. Dialed back the highlights to keep the crater rims from looking so bright, but that's pretty close to how they looked in the original. Exported that as 1,000 pixel jpeg and voila.

(Update: There are a few changes I need to make to this process. The filename in Photos has the .tif extension from the original export from OM Workspace, because that's what it is. When I later export it from Photos, it's a jpeg with a .jpeg (or .JPEG, can't recall) file extension from Photos. When it hits the export folder, a Hazel folder action converts that extension to .JPG to match what normally comes from the camera.

The AppleScript that creates the note in Tinderbox pulls the original filename from Photos in order to create the html for the URL. In this case, it has a .tif extension, which isn't correct for what I ultimately exported. So I had to manually edit the filename in the Tinderbox to match it.

If I'm just working with jpegs imported from an SD card, everything's fine, mostly. The cameras use a .JPG extension; but, inexplicably, OM Workspace uses a .jpg (lower case) file extension when I export a jpeg of a jpeg! Why?! I can't seem to find a setting to change that.

So, I need to add a Hazel action to change file extensions from .jpg to .JPG when I export from OM Workspace to the Photos import folder on my desktop. I also need to add an action to delete those photos after a day, because they're starting to add up.

I don't use TIFFs very often, so I'll just perform a manual intervention. Geez.)

Larger version at Flickr.

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Praetorian Guard

11:19 Friday, 2 February 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 61.86°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 57% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 115

I should probably dust off Notes From the Underground for this, but until then I have to wonder what morale and retention is going to be like in DeSantis' Praetorian Guard after being deployed to Texas?

I wonder how much they appreciate being used as political props for a failed presidential candidate still seeking a national media spotlight? Is that what they signed up for?

Where are they staying? Motels? Tents? I assume Florida tax dollars are being used for this stunt. In a state where we supposedly "can't afford" to expand Medicaid to help provide healthcare for uninsured Florida citizens.

Anyone who thought DeSantis would become less extreme after his public humiliation was dreaming.

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Woulda Coulda Shoulda

13:29 Friday, 2 February 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 52.74°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 67% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 199

This seems to me to be the earliest "modern" recognition, at a significant level, of the potential for climate changing effects due to rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

The year of the conference is important, 1963. This was before widespread adoption of the "Green Revolution." It is also after early significant development of system dynamics, which was the basis for the analysis behind the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth.

All of which is to suggest that we did know, and that we knew in time.

There are still people who deny the existence of genuine limits, the Green Revolution being one of the most frequently cited examples. They believe our ingenuity will change the game. We'll find resources off-world. Nanotechnology will yield a world of abundance! Fusion is almost here!

If only that were so.

One might also be inclined to point out the amount of mass starvation that would have occurred absent the Green Revolution. Yes, tens, maybe hundreds of millions may have died. But billions, that never would have been born, are going to die before the end of this century because we failed to acknowledge the myth of "growth" as an unalloyed "good."

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Blast From the Past

08:38 Sunday, 2 February 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 54.72°F Pressure: 1024hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 113

If all goes according to plan, there will be a page in the sidebar called On This Groundhog Day, which will be all the posts written on this date in the five years or so Groundhog Day existed.

I'm sorry to say that many of the links in the posts will be dead, and so much of the context will be missing. But it might be worthwhile to drop in now and then to see what the topics du jour were almost two decades ago.

I'm going to post this, and then see how it all turned out. May be a hiccup or two, but I think I have most of it sorted.

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A Couple More Niggles

09:06 Sunday, 2 February 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 58.21°F Pressure: 1024hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 26

Mostly working. I need to add some stuff to the Groundhog Day page for navigation and so on. But for now I need to make breakfast...

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Now It's a Party

10:12 Sunday, 2 February 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 63.36°F Pressure: 1024hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 160

We're hosting a little open house today, in honor of Groundhog Day. These are the door prizes.

It's something I did starting about 18 years ago. It ran for about five years, until it got so large that we had to move it to the condo clubhouse and I had no idea who the majority of the people were who attending. "Too much of a good thing," and all that.

Anyway, we're having some friends over. We're going to print some business cards up with quotes from the movie on them, like "Don't drive angry. Don't drive angry!" (That was one of Groundhog Day's taglines for a while.) And we'll put one of the gifts on some of the cards. Guests will draw a card, read a quote and maybe win a prize. There's a Blu-Ray copy of the movie in the prizes as well. About a third of the guests will win a prize.

"Too early for flapjacks?"

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Groundhog Day

06:23 Monday, 2 February 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 9.57°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 3.4mph
Words: 436

A couple of days ago, historian Heather Cox Richardson posted something that links Stephen Miller's racist rhetoric to the views predominant in the Confederacy. It's a great read, so I strongly commend it to your attention.

I was familiar with South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond from reading Erik Larson's most recent book, The Demon of Unrest. If you're unfamiliar, suffice to say that Hammond was a racist pedophile Democrat, in the mold of Southern Democrats of the day. Today it's fair to say he would be a Republican. And you should definitely read Larson's book.

I'm currently reading a few books, one of which is Hitler's Wartime Conversations: His Personal Thoughts as Recorded by Martin Bormann. It's not exactly compelling reading, except insofar as Hitler fancied himself an expert in nearly everything, and his cult of personality compelled Bormann to record his dinnertime "conversations."

They're more like soliloquies, because there are no recorded interrogatories, just Der Fuehrer going on and on about whatever has his attention at that moment. But one thing is clear, he definitely had some opinions about the character of the various "races." One can easily imagine Hitler on Truth Social.

In the reviews on Amazon, some reviewers were apparently quite impressed with Hitler's knowledge and "intelligence," which is sad. Because Hitler was neither knowledgeable nor intelligent. He, like Trump, has a unique form of low animal cunning. He can be charming and obsequious when he needs to be, as Hitler was to Hindenburg, and Trump was to, oh, I don't know, Bill Maher? But he also had political instincts that were unbound by concepts of "norms," also like Trump. And supreme confidence in his own intelligence and abilities, at least publicly.

I think the one thing that may prevent Trump from being a monster equal to Hitler is his age. He's not far from ordering mass executions. He surrounds himself with people who wouldn't object to it, and indeed would probably relish the idea of rounding people up and killing them. Guys in boats, citizens in the streets, detainees in concentration camps. Trump is aware of his mortality, and for now his attention is divided among the various monuments and projects he wishes to inflict on the landscape of Washington, DC.

I don't have any heartburn whatsoever comparing Trump to Hitler, and people who reject such comparisons as being hyperbolic, uninformed or unserious simply aren't paying attention. Or wish to imagine some psychological distance between the chief executive of the United States of America and Nazi Germany. And it is merely imaginary.

We keep reliving the same bullshit over and over.

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