The log project has prompted some renewed interest in computer stuff. There was a time when I found all of this fascinating, but in the last several years I guess I've grown jaded, or just old, and it's all been just frustrating.

It's still a little frustrating, but it feels as though it might not be entirely out of reach.

Captain's Log has produced Midwatch entries at 01:16 this morning and yesterday morning. Not quite midnight, but close enough for my purposes.

I know I need to create a prototype for Midwatch, because I don't want every "entry" to inherit the "run command" feature. But I can assign the Midwatch prototype the p_Entry prototype (prototypes can inherit prototypes). The only thing the p_Entry prototype does, for now, is set the Displayed Attributes for an entry, including $Created (date and time entry was made) and a couple of $URL attributes, so those are always visible in every entry.

I made plans to go visit Mom in April yesterday, and I was logging all the confirmation emails for the flight, the hotel and the rental car. The 14" MPB will accompany me, so the log is available, though not exactly as accessible as if it were on an iPad or something.

Another idea is to automatically create a weekly "Review" note, in part as a prompt, but maybe it will consolidate some data as well. Maybe as an agent, so it's not a new "entry" every week, but something at the top of the Log to go through. Haven't fully thought it out yet, but it's in mind.

Still casting about for something for the Midwatch entry to do, I decided to see if there was some kind of command line interface to the ARANet4. Seems like there might be, but I have to figure out how to do all this Python stuff. So that's a project for the next few days. Learn about Terminal and Python, maybe get the iMac talking to the sensor. I have the app on my phone, and of course the vendor doesn't offer any Shortcuts integrations. It's not like it's vital information, it's just something for me to learn about Terminal, "run command," Tinderbox, Python and so on. I'd also like to query my Ambient Weather weather station. I'm not sure if that's harder, but it looks harder. Need an API and stuff. Later maybe.

And do I want to download a small GOES image every night? Why? Well, maybe because I can? I don't know. Thinking about it. Which is a distraction from figuring out all the ARANet4 stuff. "Too many mind."

Anyhow, kind of excited.

Oh, I listened to a Mac Power Users podcast last night while the women were watching The Academy Awards. Couple of things struck me. CRIMP, which dates back 18 years or more. Been there, done that. Decided to stick with Tinderbox a few years ago, as it's kind of stuck with me for over twenty years. This Rules thing seemed kind of interesting. Not exactly the same as attaching an Automator action to an event, but it may have some application. The guest, Ryan J.A. Murphy, also spoke about using Obsidian to capture family stories, which was kind of an eerie coincidence ("There are no coincidences."), but I think Phil Nunnally mentioned something exactly like that at the Tinderbox meetup. Maybe it's something going around in the PKM space. (A more industrious man, maybe "courteous" would be the right word, would listen to the whole thing again and find the spot where he thought Phil mentions that, and link to that moment.)

Anyway, cool podcast to listen to at 1.5x speed.

Did a late walk yesterday, in the afternoon. There were several birds overhead, including a vulture and a swallow tailed kite, but these wood storks are always impressive. Only had the 14-150mm on the OM-5 with me. I'm just going to start carrying the 75-300mm with me from now on. Maybe stuff a compact in a pocket if anything wider looks appealing.

Lovely day yesterday.

Yesterday I learned about this site, and now I have several bookmarks in my Climate bookmarks folder.

The peak of our civilization.

Too many ideas, too little time.

Or knowledge.

Wasted a lot of time this morning looking for something akin to a URL for calendar events, like there is for email. I think it's possible, but it's a lot more involved than I want to get into.

So I figured a simple contextual menu kind of thing where you select some text that looks like a date, do a keyboard shortcut and you go to that date in Calendar.

Well, there's almost something like that built into MacOS. When you select some text that looks like a date, 3/11/24, say...

Well, I just learned something else new! I moved the mouse over that text and got the data-detector dotted rectangle. The example date I chosen had no events and I wanted to see what a date that had events looked like. I edited the date to a day I know has events, and now the data detector doesn't work. Weird.

But, what I was going to point out before I got dazzled and then disappointed by MacOS, is that the contextual menu invoked when you select that text has an entry to... OY!

I just went up to select that text just to make sure I wrote the menu item from the contextual menu correctly, and I got the data detector rectangle, this time just around 3/11, not 3/11/24! WTF, Apple??? Maybe it takes a few seconds? I don't know.

So when I edited the previous date, it appeared as though data detector would no longer "work." After writing some more text, going back to it "detected" 3/11 and gave me a look at that date and the option to create an event. When I wrote "3/11/24" in the paragraph above, I got the data detector rectangle around the whole date again. (And it works with the quotation marks around it.) And the "3/11" immediately following "detected" works too.

June 17 2024 13:30

Let's see what happens with the date above, which was the date I was "practicing" with before.

Yep, data detector works. Oddly, it doesn't work in TextEdit, which was where I was experimenting. Fortunately, I don't do much work in TextEdit. Just tried it in BBEdit and it doesn't work there either. Don't even get the "standard" contextual menu. Probably a setting in BBEdit prefs I have to enable, I haven't looked.

Anyway...

If you don't get a data detector indication, you can select a date and control-click or right-click, and get a contextual menu item to "Show This Date in Calendar..." Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't work in TextEdit, don't know why. Doesn't work at all in BBEdit. Weird.

You can also go to System Preferences->Accessibility->Motor->Alternate Control Methods->Alternate Pointer Actions and set something like F12 equal to right-click, invoking the contextual menu without touching the mouse or trackpad.

The idea, one of too many, was to be able to be in the log on the phone with someone you need to schedule something with, and have a quick way to get to the calendar for that date to see if you're free.

I didn't know (or had forgotten) that data detectors had that functionality and were enabled by default in Tinderbox.

So, yay! Now you know, and I've saved you a couple of hours out of your life.

So even though it seems like it's hard to get a simple URL to a calendar event, MacOS will let you view your calendar for that day in Tinderbox, which is cooler than switching to Calendar. Solid win. If you do want to go to Calendar, just double click in the popover window. It will create a new entry when you go to Calendar though, so you'll have to delete that blank entry.

So the "Midwatch" entry didn't work. Rather, it worked as intended within Tinderbox, I just didn't fully understand that intention.

A quick trip the forum got a prompt reply from Mark Anderson. The Create command will only create a uniquely named note. All of my Year, Month and Day notes are uniquely named, but to create a note with the name "Midwatch," in every Day note requires a little finesse.

If you add the $Path of the note to the name, and it's unique within that path, as Midwatch is intended to be, then Create will oblige. And to do that we construct it with a bit of Action Code thus:

$MyString=$Path+"/Midwatch";

create($MyString);

Since the Edict had worked yesterday when I first implemented it, it declined to do it today. Once I revised the Edict as above, it worked in Saturday. Of course, it appeared at 10:21 a.m. when I revised the Edict. I'll be interested to see what time it creates it tomorrow!

As regards Research, I'm uncertain and troubled. As I was playing around this morning with the Edict, trying to understand what was happening, I had both the iMac and the MBP awake. The Inspector window was open in both machines, though not necessarily on the same note. On the iMac, I witnessed the contents of the Inspector window change without any interaction from me.

I'm working now with Tinderbox shut down on the MBP. I'm going to create a very small test file and do some more testing. But I think it may be problematic in some way to keep the same document open on two machines at the same time. Maybe not, if I'm not working on both machines within seconds or minutes of each other, which is what I was doing this morning. But a smaller file should be simpler to help understand the behavior.

Jack is worried that perhaps I may be creating "complicated workflows." I think there's little chance of that, relatively speaking. First, I'm not that smart.

Second, I think the automation I'm creating is rather straightforward, certain particulars notwithstanding. And, for now, it's mostly just doing basic infrastructure.

I will be playing with the "run command" action to see if I can reach out to other services from Tinderbox to do something useful. Mostly this is intended to help me learn how to do it, something I've never done in Tinderbox before. And the only way to learn Tinderbox is to use it.

And use it.

And use it.

After that, I plan to build some Agents to gather related notes, if only the "Change:" entries to create a Change Log. But probably something for healthcare or medical and something for travel too. But Agents are usually pretty straightforward.

I also hope to learn more about linking notes within Tinderbox to see what advantages there may be to exploiting that facility.

For now, this is just baby steps. But even at this early stage, I'm quite excited about what document affords me in terms of recall. I used to have a pretty good memory. I'm not leaning into dementia at this point (yet), but it isn't quite as reliable as it once was. This is giving me greater confidence that I'll be able to recall things with some ease when the need requires, and that gives me a little peace of mind.

I am having fun. But I also feel as though this is time well spent. Invested, really.

And it was great chatting with Phil Nunnally in the meetup this afternoon too.

I went out this morning with the E-M1X and the 40-150mm/f2.8 Pro with the MC14 1.4x teleconverter mounted. There was one swallow tailed kite, but it was pretty far away. It seems like the teleconverter adds a bit of chromatic aberration. Shot wasn't compelling enough to share it.

Thought I'd be shut out when I saw these cedar waxwings flock to this tree. Had kind of hoped I'd get a shot of them all going airborne, but they didn't seem like they were in any hurry and I wanted to get home.

It's a much heavier rig than I normally carry, so I used the Cotton Carrier G3 vest. At least I got more of a workout. I couldn't have carried this setup for 3.3 miles on a sling without getting a painful knot between my shoulder blades. As it was, I felt it a bit in my quads, and toward the end in my calves. I wasn't booking along by any means, but I wasn't sauntering either.

OMDS recently released a 150-600mm/f5-6.3 IS zoom lens. It's only $2600!

Normally, the weight and the price would combine to prevent any GAS ("gear acquisition syndrome") pains.

Then I read a blog post like this, and click on all the pics.

It's still in the "very unlikely" realm, but we'll see how I feel toward the end of the year.

I'm kinda diggin' this 14" MacBook Pro and so I want to be able to move back and forth between the iMac and the laptop without a lot of futzing around with open files and so on. So I'm trying a little experiment.

I duplicated Captain's Log and renamed it iCloud Test copy on the iMac. The AppleScript automations won't work, but that's not important for this test. I wanted to see what happens when I have the same document open on two instances of Tinderbox on different machines.

I repaired to the recliner and launched Tinderbox which had been closed with all windows closed at quitting. I opened iCloud Test copy and made three entries. Then I closed the MBP and went and watched Jeopardy!

I got the Final Jeopardy question about Ephesus right, only because BAINBRIDGE (CGN-25) made a port visit to Antalya, Turkey in like, 1989(?), and we had a Navy chaplain on board who was also the tours coordinator and we shared a stateroom. He went to Ephesus. I vaguely recall him telling me why he went to Ephesus, something about an apostle or something. It took me the whole jingle time to dredge that memory up from the mists of time, but I was quite pleased with myself.

Anyway, came back to the iMac to see what might be up with iCloud Test copy.

I was surprised to find that my Tinderbox window had shrunk in size and moved to the bottom left corner of my iMac's screen. But there in the iCloud Test copy tab was the document I'd edited on the MBP, and there were the three entries I'd made!

I'll leave both versions open tonight and see what kind of contention arises when both create a Saturday container, and each Saturday creates a Midwatch entry. I'm guessing things will get pretty fouled up at that point, but we shall see.

I recall a Bloom County comic with that really smart kid doing something the others didn't understand, and the punchline was "You can't argue with research!"

Words to live by.

I'd added the idea of creating a Midwatch entry to each new day's entry in the log. Worked on it today. At first I thought I'd have to check the time, etc. Did a bunch of reading at aTbRef about date and time comparisons.

Finally the lightbulb went off. Who cares?

Wrote a simple Edict in the p_Day prototype,

$MyString="Midwatch";

create($MyString);

Once it's "created," it won't do it again. One and done. Keep it simple, dumbass!

Then I recalled I wanted to create a change log to document how it's been evolving. So I logged that idea.

Then I solved it by deciding I'd just enter "Change:" (with the colon) in the $Title of entries documenting changes to the log.

An Agent can gather all those as a separate "Change Log."

So then I entered, "Change: Added Edict to p_Day to create note Midwatch". Put the code for the Edict in the text.

Tomorrow I'll work on something for it to do, but it already has one nice use. With the first entry already created, if I'm going to create a manual entry all I have to do is hit Return. If there is no first child in the Day container, I either have to remember to hit Shift-Return to create a child, or make the entry and then hit Tab to make it a child. The scripts will create a child in the container automatically.

One of Dave Winer's favorite mottos. Since this blog's mascot is a large ground squirrel, and I spend a lot of time running down rabbit holes, I figured it was appropriate.

I spent some time reading about LaunchBar and its clipboard manager. Not because I care about rtf links on the clipboard, but because I have two utility apps that do the same thing, only LaunchBar does a lot more. So I've quit UnClutter and I'm going to try using LaunchBar as the clipboard manager.

I got an email today from my healthcare provider saying I had an overdue balance of $39. I'd called about that bill when I first received it, and the rep I spoke to said she thought it was a coding error and she was going to "send it back to coding."

I didn't have the log then, so I only have a vague recollection of when this call took place. I know it was after the date of service, naturally. So I called today, immediately after I got the email. I "logged it," and made the call while I was still in the note. Shelby was my rep this time, because I asked for her name and wrote it in the log entry, told me that the charge had been resolved yesterday and just cleared from my account this morning, but I got the email at 11:10. Anyway, I checked my account in the portal and it does appear that I have a zero balance. But if it comes up again, at least I'll have a better idea of the history!

Yesterday I got a call from a neurological diagnostics provider, I'm to have a nerve conduction test or something. I was supposed to have it before my neurology follow-up (my toes are numb - probably muscular-skeletal) later this month, but they don't have any openings until May. So I booked the May appointment and noted in the log that I had to contact my provider to reschedule the follow-up.

After speaking with billing, I called the neurology people and rescheduled the appointment. Logged it. I'd entered the appointment in Calendar while I was on the phone, because I had to check for conflicts.

In reading about LaunchBar's clipboard manager, I also read about its facility with scheduling appointments. That seemed like something that might be worth learning.

I've mentioned before that I'm a pretty regular blood donor here, and I received an email that the bloodmobile will be here a week from Tuesday. I don't need the car for that, and I know I'm not doing anything on the 19th, so I logged it, clicked on link to go to the web site to book the reservation. Then I tried that fancy LaunchBar action to add it to Calendar. Worked pretty well after I consulted the manual again.

Anyway, I'm diggin' the log. I think it's going to make things a lot simpler for me. I've entered some "old" information from past emails that I've been kind of tracking "mentally." Now I don't have to worry about that.

I got an email yesterday from the president of the North Florida Land Trust, but it was one of those blasts to the membership. As it happened, he wrote about the annual meeting I mentioned the other day:

As with any meeting, I played ‘the tape’ back in my head and realized that I perhaps did not articulate the three things that we need going forward in as simple a way as is my typical style. So, let me try as a follow-up. We need three things: money, members, and land.

...

So, we aren’t quite as flush as we seem.

My, what a coincidence. Especially since a sentence in my email criticizing their presentation was, "It also isn't clear to me, at all, why you would ever need any money from me if the state has made NFLT so flush with cash."

Anyway, logged it.

Now I've blogged it.

Some lingering antipathy to that whole situation made me go to the Matanzas Riverkeeper merch page today and buy a new ball cap, a shirt and that "buff" thing. They're a small organization, they deserve more support, and I wanted a new hat. I wanted the tan shirt, but they didn't have it in my size. They had something I'd never seen before at check-out, "Track with Apple Wallet." I selected it, but nothing has appeared in my wallet. Maybe I'll get an email receipt with a link or something.

Speaking of coincidences, ("There are no coincidences."), in that March 2023 archive is a post called The Marmot Goes Down Rabbit Holes.

What can I say? Spring is in the air or something.

One of the things that came up in the Tinderbox Forum discussion on using AppleScript with Tinderbox and Mail, was getting a rich text formatted link into the text of a note.

If you used AppleScript to get the URL for an email and placed it on the clipboard, it appeared in UnClutter, my clipboard manager, as clickable link. That is, click on it and it opened that email. But if you then pasted that same link into the $Text of a Tinderbox note, it was just text, not a clickable link.

It turns out that if you enter a space after that text, Tinderbox would automatically make it a link. It just needed something like a prompt.

It became irrelevant for my purposes, because it was also easy to use AppleScript to populate a URL attribute in a log entry, and that is, by design, clickable. And it kept the raw link out of the text as well.

One of the most experienced Tinderbox and AppleScript users posted an AppleScript that would get the email URI and then run a terminal command to convert it into rich text format with the subject of the email being the clickable text, and place the result onto the clipboard.

While that wasn't required for my purpose, I tried it out to get some more experience with AppleScript and the Terminal. Well, the only thing that appeared on the clipboard on my machine was the text of the subject line.

Thinking I may have omitted something obvious, I rather foolishly asked if that were the case. The answer was "No," but then I got a six paragraph commentary about using third party apps to do things that MacOS is perfectly capable of doing itself. Example:

Those can provide benefits in some situations, and can be fun to play around with. But when I’m trying to think and get work done, as opposed to play with the process, I’ve found they can be more trouble than they’re worth.

I didn't want to get into it with the guy in the forum, I'm certain he intended to be helpful, but I could have done without the commentary.

There's a certain personal attraction to various types of "purity." In my case, in the matter of blogging, it's the use of static html on a server at a URL that I have some control over, as opposed to some of the other approaches to blogging where your "content" is served up "dynamically," and woe be unto you if you don't keep up with the security updates.

Some people fetishize "plain text." A "note" can only be a plain text file, and then you use the file management and automation facilities of the OS to organize those files into whatever structure you feel best supports your needs.

There's nothing really wrong with that, except I think it gets a little tedious sometimes, proselytizing about it. I suppose when you have the "floor" in a "forum," and a great example of the superiority of your view is made manifest by the preceding question, well, it's an opportunity that is simply too hard to pass up. They can't help themselves.

Anyway, I'm fortunate in that I'm not trying to "get work done," because I'm retired. And I suppose my thinking is impaired by any number of personal flaws and failings, the least of which is perhaps my affinity for third party apps.

It did cause me to dive down a rabbit hole, trying to understand what was going on with my clipboard. I ran the terminal command in Terminal, minus the part about putting it on the clipboard, typing in the values of what had been variables in the AppleScript. The output was a lengthy bit of text that I took to be rtf markup. When I ran the command again, this time with the clipboard bit, what seemed to appear on the clipboard in UnClutter was just the subject of the email, as before.

Then I went for my walk.

I really don't know why it doesn't appear as an rtf link on the clipboard in UnClutter. I'm not sure it matters, as the amount of stuff I "don't know" about Unix and AppleScript and terminal commands could fill volumes. I'm usually content to know how to do something without really understanding why it works. This limitation is exposed when something doesn't work, despite employing the seemingly correct "how."

Sometimes I pursue it, as with Tinderbox. Other times, well, life is too short.

When you ask for help, I guess you can't be too particular about how it's delivered.

As for third party apps, there are a ton of clipboard managers. There's one built into LaunchBar, a third party app that I use that could probably be replaced by Spotlight and AppleScript and Terminal. I suppose I could read about the clipboard manager in LaunchBar and get rid of UnClutter. I don't use the Files portion that much, and the Notepad is really just where I stash a bit of text I may want to use later that might scroll off the clipboard history.

But a clipboard manager of some kind is invaluable to me. I can copy a bit of text from a web site that I intend to quote in a blog post, then copy the URL, all in Safari, switch to Tinderbox and write my blog post, switching to whichever bit of text I need in the clipboard manager. No need to switch back and forth between Safari and Tinderbox. (Yes, I know CTRL-Tab makes that trivial.)

I suppose someone could point out to me that there's a clipboard manager built into Mac OS, I just don't know about it.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:50 Friday, 8 March 2024

Whelp, I guess I should learn to just go with my first instinct.

I thought about bringing the 40-150mm/2.8 Pro with the MC14 teleconverter mounted, which would have given me a 56-210mm/f4 (112-420mm efl), which would have been useful for birds. I'd seen a few yesterday with the 14-150mm/f4-5.6 and it's not ideal for birds.

Well, it was getting cloudy and I thought I might have better luck with something as a landscape composition. Dumb move.

As I got toward the end of my street I heard some birds calling that sounded vaguely like ospreys, but not same as an osprey. It wasn't a "chittering" call either, which might have been bald eagles. I finally saw them above the trees and they were swallow-tailed kites!

I think I've only seen them twice before around here, and then just a single bird. Here were three or four! And all I've got is the 14-150! The 100-400mm zoom would have been best, but I don't do my morning walk lugging that thing around.

So, "The best camera is the one you have with you," rules applied and I did the best I could.

Thought about appending another paragraph to the previous post, but decided against it.

Read the entire linked article. It's not scare-mongering.

There is a bill coming due in Florida. When that will be, this year or a decade from now, I can't say.

But it is coming.

And you don't want to be here when it does.

I don't know what we're going to do. More importantly, I don't know what my kids will do.

But a reckoning is inevitable. Decades of denial, deceit and dereliction of duty won't be denied.

Someone's gonna have to pay.

It's not like you're not welcome here. It's just that it's probably not a good idea going forward. Like, forever.

“Florida is one of the riskiest places from a climate impact standpoint that you can live in,” said Rob Moore, director of the flooding solutions team at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

And we have a state legislature, ruled by one party for more than a generation, that is in climate denial; and believes that "resilience" will solve everything.

Of course, the marmot isn't going to stop anybody. And if it were easy, I'd fill in the 'chuck hole and find a field somewhere safer to burrow. Somewhere way north of here, at a higher elevation, with a reliable source of clean drinking water.

No, the marmot's probably stuck here until a disaster makes the decision for us. But if you don't live here yet, you're lucky.

You don't have to.

The low angle light makes for some interesting shots. This is "society garlic," and it is kind of stinky.

Absolutely gorgeous morning today. Air was cool and crisp and sweet. I got started earlier than I have recently and there were no lawn mowers or leaf-blowers, few cars, low angle light. Saw this rabbit and it was quite accommodating with having its picture taken. Then I noticed the other one. It's not uncommon to see rabbits here, though I haven't seen one in quite a while. Perhaps because I wasn't out early enough.

Progress has been rapid on my little "personal log" (plog?) project, Captain's Log. I can log email entries with a link to the specific email automatically included with whatever my thoughts were that prompted me to log it.

I've learned some things about Mail URLs or URIs - the bits of text that become links to the email in your Mail app.

Much of that has been documented in the Tinderbox Forum, and I figured I needed to get some of that recorded here. At least a link to the forum.

The advantage of Captain's Log over the marmot, is that Captain's Log isn't intended to be published (or exported, in Tinderbox terms). It functions best as a Tinderbox file and so I can take advantage of every feature Tinderbox offers without worrying about how it interacts with html export, specifically links to other notes.

Similarly, I can record things far too trivial to mention in the marmot, which is not to say that the marmot isn't filled with trivia.

I have a lot of ideas that I kind of think of and then forget. That's probably a feature and not a bug, as I'm sure I have far more ideas than I have time or ability to implement. But some of them re-occur to me at intervals, and so they must be something I want to do, so I should find a way to kind of help resurface them instead of just relying on some random external prompt.

Captain's Log is, itself, one of those ideas. I'd started similar efforts before, and got quickly discouraged and they fell by the way. It was working on the marmot and the Blog Test Platform in preparation for the Blogging With Tinderbox meetup that made me realize Captain's Log was achievable.

Right now I'm in the process of building the basic functionality of Captain's Log. The key feature was learning how to let Tinderbox take care of all the basic structure. It builds the outline by itself, once I created all the prototypes. So there's less infrastructure maintenance I have to perform (or recall), less chance for frustrating errors that have to be chased down, corrected and, hopefully, re-learned.

The other key element was getting information into the appropriate day's container automatically. The chronological structure of the outline makes that simple. Each log entry is identified by this present moment, and so it goes into "today's" container, which made it relatively straightforward (I had to have some help) to create an AppleScript that would create a new log entry.

So I can be in a completely different app when an idea occurs to me, and I can quickly add it to the log without leaving that app.

(I just added one right now, here in the marmot, without leaving the marmot. It occurred to me that I could have a "midwatch" entry automatically created each day. It'd have a "run command" action that would query some AI service for a knock-knock joke, or something. Maybe an inspirational quote. Who knows? Just a silly feature. I'd probably forget it if I didn't log it.)

If I was working in email or browsing the web, an idea would occur to me and I'd kind of make a "mental note" to do something with it, and then promptly forget. There must be some corner of my brain just filling up with forgotten mental notes.

Once I get functionality to an appropriate level, then I'll be working out the process. The most elementary function is as an aide memoire, to help me recall things like the last time I replaced the filter on the air handler.

But there will be some "review" process, where I look at ideas I've recorded and then think about next steps, if any. If there's an idea I want to pursue, that effort doesn't take place in Captain's Log apart perhaps from some long-form, journal-type entries where I "see what I think" about the idea. But I do need to identify a practice and periodicity of review. I'm not there yet, and it's secondary to getting the file and the supporting scripts tuned up — "Running light without overbyte," to quote a certain fictional orthodontist.

But there is an emotional component, a "sparks joy" element to having this come together with relatively little difficulty. And the help and suggestions from the community add a welcome social dimension to the effort.

Pretty cool, I think.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:23 Thursday, 7 March 2024

I wondered how much text I could paste into that little one-line dialog box you get from AppleScript. Turns out, more than will fit in that little slot.

I copied a fair amount of text from a web page, invoked the QA, pasted the text into the Entry field and didn't get an error. I also couldn't see the text. I hit return and got the notification from Automator, "Logged it!"

Switched to Tinderbox, and there it was in the $Text field. All the text I'd selected. I turned on the WordCount attribute and made it a KeyAttribute of the p_Entry prototype. 58 words were pasted into $Text. That's a pretty fair amount, I think.

Having too much fun. I should rest. 😜

Coincidences are either just happy accidents, or maybe a clue that you're on the right path. Toward what? Who knows? Your next life maybe.

Anyway, because I have a short attention span, I got attracted to an idea that I had while building the Tinderbox Blog Test Platform, and that was a daily log. Now, "daily notes" have been a topic of conversation in the PKM/Blogging/Outliner/Text files fetishist community for a long time. For the most part, I didn't see their relevance for me. I'm retired, I don't do much (by choice), and I just didn't experience the attraction.

But I do enjoy looking back in the marmot and recalling some events. There are some chores I perform that I have some hazy recollection of the last time I did them. There are things I think about that I don't post in the marmot that might deserve the "see what I think" treatment in a kind of journal.

So, my "Captain's Log" idea was born. In my hyperphantasic internal experience, when I read the words "Captain's Log," I "hear" them in William Shatner's voice. Not a volitional thing, just some phrases are encoded with actors' voices. "Little buddy," is always the Skipper. "Work!" is always Maynerd G. Krebs. I still hear my therapist ask, "David, what's going on inside you." It's exciting in my head, when it's not a nightmare. ("Who knows? Your next life maybe," sounds like the Oracle.)

I digress.

So the idea is to have a Tinderbox that exists to keep a chronological record of ideas, thoughts, events, interactions and so on that may have some utility in later recall. Something quick and easy to do, though longer-form text entries, a la "blog posts," are contemplated as well.

I put together the basic outline and then thought I could re-purpose some AppleScript from the marmot to make it possible to make an entry in any app I happened to be in, without switching to Tinderbox. That sorta-almost worked, and last night I asked for some help at the Tinderbox Forum at Eastgate Systems.

Help was quickly delivered, and I'm happy to report that I have a nice little Quick Action that I can summon from Mail or Safari to record a quick log entry. I don't know how much text you can enter in an AppleScript dialog box, but I don't need much I think.

Anyway, to the title of this post. Shortly after getting the QA up and running, thanking everyone involved and asking another question, I started going through my RSS feed where I happened upon this post.

And laughed out loud. Are we on the same frequency or something?

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:32 Wednesday, 6 March 2024

I received a reply to the feedback I offered on the event I attended on Saturday.

In the email I sent, I was very critical of the manner in which some information was presented to those in attendance. Not to be too elliptical, NFLT received some $400M in state revenue to purchase land or conservation easements. That was an astonishing amount of money for an organization that, to my knowledge, normally operated with an annual budget that was less than 5% of that figure.

Ordinarily, this would be good news. It wasn't the news, per se, it was the anecdotal account of the reaction to receiving it.

After describing the degree to which the president is connected in Tallahassee, one of the officials that accompanied him described the gales of laughter in the car on the drive back from Tallahassee, saying that he felt like they had made out "like pirates." After this official inexplicably offered his annual report in the form of a number of very bad haikus, the president corrected him and said that they'd "made out like privateers, and therefore, legal."

I had a visceral reaction to this. The program continued, and I couldn't immediately put my finger on what was so revolting about it.

It was on the ride home when Mitzi and I discussed that part of the program, her reaction was similar, that I was able to put my finger on it.

What was clear to me was that I had witnessed an account of the culture of cronyism in Tallahassee. Paul Renner, Speaker of the Florida House, represents a district in north Florida, not far from here. It was clear to me that this was a means of securing a legislative legacy for himself that is somewhat more redeeming than a record of performative legislation supporting Ron DeSantis' presidential ambitions, promoting division through culture wars, voter suppression and attacking marginalized citizens. All of that might be overlooked one day, given the unprecedented amount of money he was able to deliver to conserve undeveloped land in the region.

This is the same legislature that has steadfastly refused to expand Medicaid for more than a decade, leaving tens of thousands of Floridians without health insurance, and leaving billions of federal dollars on the table, which would go a long way toward alleviating many of the staffing challenges Florida is facing in its healthcare industry. (Florida faces a growing litany of challenges. "Parental rights" and "stop woke" not being among them.)

In any event, by the time I got home, I was angry and almost immediately began to write an email to the organization.

But I decided to sleep on it, and see if I still felt as strongly in the morning. Anger is a feeling, and feelings pass.

As these things go, I woke in the wee hours, still angry, and began composing the email in my head even as I tried to go back to sleep. Unlike the last time this happened, I didn't get up and just go write.

Well, I'm not sure it helped. It was the first thing I wrote that day, and I did go over the draft several times, trying to temper my remarks. Basically it followed the outlines of what I've related above, and that I found it inappropriate to the point of being offensive that they would relate this story to the members in attendance. I could go on at length about what that suggests to me, but I didn't and I won't.

Yesterday evening, about 36 hours later, I received a reply from the president. It was a lengthy, densely written piece that mostly defended his background and character, offered some flattery toward me and an invitation to get together over coffee someday. He did include a scattershot explanation of the nature of the $400M appropriation. (It was so large that before I wrote the email I was doubting that I'd heard the official correctly, and I had to do some online searching to learn that indeed, that was the correct amount.)

I think I expected one of three things in the way of response, ranked in increasing order of probability: A "You're right, we blew it. We'll do better next time. Thanks." Or, silence. Or, something along the lines of what I received, which never addressed the fundamental criticism.

My sister-in-law is still with us for a couple of more weeks. She's a social worker with a lot of experience. She said he was defending himself because he felt attacked.

I guess when you're at the top of an org chart for as long as this guy has been, when you walk the halls of power with a constellation of political luminaries (as dim as those may be), when you're feeling pretty full of yourself for landing a $400M appropriation, you're probably not accustomed to being criticized, and that it likely did feel like an attack.

So last night's insomnia was about my reply.

This is it.

Judy mentioned that I wasn't going to change him, and I know she's right. There's little point in responding to him directly.

The North Florida Land Trust does do important work that I support. The president was, as I understand it, specifically recruited for his connections to replicate the success he had in south Florida. He is a political animal, and this is the nature of the political ecology, and reality, in Florida.

I'm an insignificant donor. If I decide not to give to NFLT this year, the money will go to a similar organization doing related work.

If I remain a member, I don't think that I'll ever attend another annual meeting. What would be the point?

In an ideal world, receiving an appropriation of that magnitude would be a humbling experience. It would suggest a degree of trust and confidence in an organization's ability and integrity that, to me, might cause me to feel some trepidation. Gratitude, certainly, but a lot of humility too. And it would sober me, knowing the scale of the opportunity cost. That there are many deserving and underserved needs in Florida that will go on being underserved because that money was given to one mission.

I think there should be some awareness, some acknowledgement of that. And that any public mention of the appropriation would be made with the degree of sobriety that that awareness should engender.

But I don't live in an ideal world.

I live in Florida.

"We made out like pirates!"

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:12 Wednesday, 6 March 2024

Overcast today. Uninspiring. Brought along the Oly TG-6 and shot a bunch of frames with the "Grainy Film" filter, might put a couple up at Flickr.

This caught my eye. Used the OM-5 with the 14-150. SOOC.

Mostly this is to verify the workflow again. It's installed where the AppleScript calls it, and I've already checked to see if it moved the image to the correct folder, and it did. The real test will be in 2025, but at least I'm not getting any errors.

I'll be working in the Blog Test Platform TBX today. I have a few Buckaroo Banzai gifs that I'd like to post from time to time, so I'm going to borrow an idea from Jack Baty and see if I can get that set up in the BTP today and then bake it into the marmot.

Guess that's about it for now.

Yesterday's event was troubling in a way. I support the work of the NFLT, but I didn't appreciate the way some information was presented yesterday. I've offered feedback to the organization's president, but have heard nothing back. I don't know if he's seen the email or not, so I'll give it a few days.

But, in better news, I did get the Automator workflow to function "automatically." That is, on January 1, 2025 I should be able to run the Photos script and have the image moved to the correct folder without having to modify the workflow to update the folder path.

I didn't figure out the solution, I had help from the kind people at MacScripter.net.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 17:37 Monday, 4 March 2024

One of the things I look forward to each weekend is the Tinderbox Meetup. I've gotten to know a little about many of the participants over the past couple of years, and it's a pleasure to see and hear from them each week.

Today, however, I'll be at an event for the North Florida Land Trust. The sun has come out again, after a night and early morning of thunderstorms, so the weather should be nice. (Part of the event may be outside.)

Anyway, just a shout-out to the TBX crew in case anyone misses me!

If it's good enough for Taylor Swift...

This came up in the DP Review Micro Four Thirds forum. Initial report was that it was an E-M1. More research revealed it's the E-M10, though I don't know which mark. I think the Vintage Art Filter has been around since the II. And it looked like a lot of the shots she posted in the 'gram used flash, which the 10 has built-in and the 1 does not.

My daughter hasn't sold her 10 Mk2 yet. Maybe I'll send her this. Not sure she's much of a Swiftie though. Maybe?

I do things in the test platform, get them working, then forget to build them into the marmot.

Fixed.

Apologies for anyone who clicked through to a 404.