This is well worth your time and captures what I spend much of my time thinking about these days.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:24 Thursday, 13 July 2023

Got a notification yesterday of another pass this morning at around 0500. They often come in threes. I wasn't sleeping anyway, so I got up and set up the camera on the tripod.

ISS appeared in the northwest and disappeared east-southeast (from left to right in the frame) and max elevation was 51 degrees. Bright spot in the trees is the crescent moon rising. If you're having trouble seeing it, it's in the bottom half of the frame, and most of it is somewhat obscured by trees.

What's interesting to me about this shot is that the light from the stars appears to be dimming. What's actually happening is the sky is growing brighter as morning twilight approaches, and the exposure for each of the shots is fixed, so the contrast between the dark sky of the initial exposure and the bright stars in each subsequent exposure is less, so they appear to be dimming. Sky is actually growing brighter, but the sky exposure is relatively static as the background against which "new" light is added.

Surprising thing to me is the absence of aircraft trails. Must not be much traffic this time of day.

Well, alrighty then. This seems to work!

I shall declare victory and go home.

This is the happy result of some frustration and study, trial and error. I suspect it's too early to declare victory, but initial indications look promising.

I attend a weekly Zoom meet-up of Tinderbox users, and I enjoy the social aspect as well as maybe learning something now and then. Most of the time, the techniques being demonstrated don't really relate to anything I'm doing with Tinderbox, nevertheless, I'm impressed and entertained by watching them unfold.

In the decade or so that I've been maintaining the marmot, I haven't really taken much advantage of the automation frameworks afforded by Tinderbox, Action Code and Export Code, and now, AppleScript. Mostly I just use a bare minimum of fairly static Export Code, and a little bit of Action Code to call the weather stuff, set the various attributes for the permalinks and export files.

My biggest challenge in automating the marmot was in posting photos. Prior to the change, I basically did everything manually, albeit with a lot of "copy and paste" action. The Photos to Tinderbox AppleScript automates nearly every aspect of that now. The only real manual effort is entering the title and caption info, and then hitting the Sync button in Forklift.

It was a pretty fair amount of effort, because Photos didn't seem to allow export from AppleScript. You could do it with Automator, so I had to create an Automator application to call from the AppleScript, and you can't specify a file path for the export. It always exports to folder in the ~/Pictures directory, and it always appends a ".jpeg" file suffix to the export.

After Automator exports the photo, Hazel comes in an moves the image to the marmot's Tinderbox directory and changes the suffix from .jpeg to .JPG, which matches the file suffix for images from my Olympus cameras. Export Code creates the html necessary to display the image from the photo's filename, which is why I have to change ".jpeg" to ".JPG" or I get a missing image icon.

Anyway, that was a fair amount of work, but it works well and I'm happy with it.

But if I want to post a picture taken with my iPhone, then I have to do some manual intervention. The iPhone stores images in HEIC format with a .HEIC file suffix. I could set the iPhone to store images as jpegs, but HEIC is more space efficient and I like that. So the filename, from which the html is constructed, is the original filename from the camera, with .HEIC as the suffix. Photos exports as JPEG (or TIFF or PNG), so the filenames don't match after export. I can't construct the html from the filename attribute I sent over from Photos. I've had to go manually change the .HEIC in the html to .JPG, which is not a big deal, but it's enough friction to keep me from posting images from the phone very often.

This particular challenge is something I've never tried before, manipulating the value of an attribute and creating a new attribute as a result. I wanted to just extract everything left of the file type suffix and make a new attribute I just call "Photo." Then in the export code, I just put the ^ photo attribute in the html and append the ".JPG" in the html from the prototype.

But how do you manipulate attribute values in an note? Well, you do it with a Rule. Up until today, all the attributes I created with Action Code were part of an OnAdd action, which the monthly archive container applies when a new post is created, to every post. Since a photo post is a post, there's nothing wrong with all that code; but a photo post has attributes that only apply to photos, and it has it's own embedded html in the note's $Text, so it uses a different prototype as a post. So OnAdd wasn't really the appropriate way to go here.

Well, a note's "Rule" is the way you mess with attributes in only that note. Then I had to figure out how to get everything to the left of the file suffix. There are text operators you can use that involve regular expressions, none of which I have ever used before.

Taking a tip from Dave Winer, I asked ChatGPT, "What is the regular expression needed to extract the text of a filename before the file type suffix?"

This is the response:

=========

To extract the text of a filename before the file type suffix using a regular expression, you can use the following pattern:

```regex

^(.+?)(\.[^.]+)?$

```

Explanation:

- `^` asserts the start of the string.

- `(.+?)` captures one or more characters non-greedily (lazy matching) into a group.

- `(\.[^.]+)?` captures a dot followed by one or more non-dot characters into an optional group.

- `$` asserts the end of the string.

In this pattern, the first captured group will contain the filename without the file type suffix.

========

Not being willing to trust ChatGPT, I tested this in an app called RegExRx and it seemed to work. $1 was just the name minus the filetype suffix, which is what I wanted.

Throwing caution to the wind, I created a new Tinderbox file, created the relevant user attributes ($PhotoFilename and $Photo) and entered the following rule in a new note:

$Photo=$PhotoFilename.replace("^(.+?)(\.[^.]+)?$","$1")+".JPG";

(The +.JPG part I added later when things went sideways a bit.)

In the test note, I got just the part of the filename I wanted.

Then I tried it here. (I just noticed another thing I have to fix, but it doesn't interfere with exporting from Tinderbox.)

I originally tried to add the ".JPG" in the photo post's $Note text. That got all wonky and I don't really know why. Then I figured I'd try to do it in the Rule and that worked fine.

Now I have to test this with a regular photo from a "real" camera. There are usually unintended consequences and breakage. We shall see.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 14:57 Wednesday, 12 July 2023

I post a lot of my pics to Flickr, and I did so with the ISS shot from last night. I export the images to a folder on the desktop that Flickr Uploader watches, and automatically uploads them to, well, Flickr. Hazel also watches that folder and deletes the images 24 hours later. There is no setting to automatically delete images in the uploader app.

Since I posted the ISS shot here in the marmot, I used an AppleScript that first gives the image a title and then a caption. I use the Title for the note name in Tinderbox, which becomes the title of the post in the marmot. The caption becomes the alt-text that hopefully provides some useful information for the visually impaired.

You can enter a name and a caption in Photos in the Info window, but the fields are tiny and it's fiddly to hit them. With the script, I get a little text input bar with the cursor already there ready for input. It's far easier than mousing around to the Info window and trying to nail that little target. There's probably some way to do it with keyboard navigation, but I haven't looked for it. I just haven't given many of my images titles or captions.

Flickr uploader can grab the title and caption and use them in Flickr, as can be seen here.

I think I need to make another little script just for adding titles and captions for images that might make it to Flickr, but wouldn't necessarily be a post in the marmot.

Wasn't a great opportunity because of the light, but it turned out well, I think.

Muggy out there!

Get a text from NASA whenever the International Space Station should be visible overhead, weather permitting. Tonight's pass was at a reasonable hour and I had enough time to prepare. I used my E-M1 Mk3 with the mZuiko 8mm/f1.8 fisheye. Since I wasn't exactly certain where it would appear in the frame (Appeared in the southwest, tracking northeast, max elevation 73°), I basically just pointed the camera straight up with the long axis of the frame along the SW/NE line.

I set everything up in the screened enclosure, because the mosquitos are thick right now, but I still had to do the test exposure to make sure I'd gotten the settings correct. (I hadn't. Needed to bump the ISO.) I was only out there a couple of minutes but I think I got bitten three or four times.

Also visible are at least five satellites (StarLink?) and several aircraft. There are some patches of moving clouds also visible. The small bush was moving in the breeze, which wasn't much of anything to feel!

This also doesn't get old, though the mosquitos do keep me from doing it as often as I might like.

Preceding test was unsat. I have two versions of an Export Photo Automator application, and the script was calling the one I hadn't modified. Let's see if this image is too large.

Test post to check script modifications.

The gator wasn't the first time we had an uninvited guest on the patio. From September 2021. In this instance, I just waited until it moved on. Wouldn't kill a human, but it can kill a small dog or incur several thousand dollars in vet bills.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:19 Saturday, 8 July 2023

Another view for size perspective.

Neighbor texted me this morning, "David, there's a gator on your lanai."

Looked out the kitchen window and didn't see anything, so I went out to the screened enclosure and it was up on the step leading to the grill, out of my line of sight from the kitchen window. When my neighbor saw it, it was in her yard making its way to the patio.

Not a huge gator, maybe four feet long? But not something I wanted hanging around the yard.

Mitzi was just getting ready to go mow the lawn, so I had to step back to the garage and give her a heads-up. I put on my Timberland boots and grabbed a push-broom. Figured I'd just encourage it to head back into the swamp.

Well, it wanted to fight the push-broom. Thought about it, then decided to see if maybe water from the garden hose would have the desired effect with less stress on both the gator and me.

Back to the garage to recover the garden hose. Keeping one eye on the gator, who was keeping both eyes on me, I had to untangle the hose and connect it to the bib. Turned the water on and commenced to hosing my uninvited guest. Seemed to do the trick far better than the broom. I worried that it'd find it just a refreshing amenity. Chased it all the way back into the swamp.

Hopefully it stays there, but I don't expect this will be the last time we'll be dealing with gators. The "preserve" behind the house is a swamp, and they were here long before we were. I think if it was anything much bigger, I'd probably call for some professional help.

"Sudden surge of broken heat records is scaring scientists."

Now, I'm no expert, no genius, no trained climatologist, but I've been scared for quite some time.

I've never been convinced that our climate models are doing us any great service. Although, in any rational world, they would have been enough to compel radical changes long ago. But we don't live in "rational" world, we live in a capitalist one.

Again, I've just been assuming these guys and gals all know a hell of a lot more than I do. You don't often hear earth's climate system described as a complex, non-linear dynamic system; but I think that's what it is. It has feedback mechanisms that introduce non-linearities in the system outputs. But our models, at least it seems to me, have been mostly treating it as a linear system "If you increase CO2 in the atmosphere x-amount, you get y-amount of global temperature increase."

And somehow, we've concluded that 1.5°C of overall warming is somehow "safe" or "acceptable." Why?

Complexity implies that the system is difficult to predict. The system outputs exist in a "phase space" that can be somewhat well defined, but how and when it gets to any particular point in that phase space can be very difficult to predict. And many, if not almost all, of those points in the climate system phase space are likely incompatible with our present civilization and population numbers.

I think the assumption has been that for small increases in temperature, the system will behave mostly linearly. But we haven't seen small increases in the composition of the earth's atmosphere, we're trying to predict where the climate system will end up if we double atmospheric concentrations of CO2.

To my, limited, profoundly ignorant, way of thinking, that seems to suggest that that places us well inside the realm of non-linearity already, and that predictions are largely meaningless at that point. Complexity.

Anyway, I hope I'm just dumb and this is all going to work out.

But I've been scared for a long time. More scared now.

Not that being scared does anyone any good.

Originally posted at Notes From the Underground 07:50 Saturday, 8 July 2023

The Florida legislature (Republican controlled for a generation), enacted a sales tax "holiday" on Energy Star appliances below a certain price. Good.

But it included gas stoves regardless of price, in a typically performative, shoot us all in the foot, short-sighted, foolhardy, irresponsible, adolescent act of posturing on "wokeness" or any measure that these ignorant, intolerant, narrow-minded, asinine "legislators" deem as insufficiently worshipful to their blinkered notions of "freedom." (New York banned gas stoves in new buildings. This is Florida's reaction.)

"Florida. People are dying to live here!"

Really should be the state motto.

I came to believe, some time ago, that we inhabit what I call a "responsive universe." That as our thoughts and wishes go, somehow too goes our reality. If we pay attention.

I haven't been paying a lot of attention in recent years.

When I spoke to my friend yesterday, one of the things she mentioned was how little she knew about her brother, how much he was loved and valued by the people he served. Since his death, they've been reaching out to her, telling her stories of the kind of man he was.

She seemed sad that she didn't know, but it's clear he led a meaningful, valuable life. And even learning it now, I suggested, ought to be of some comfort.

In the way of a responsive universe, I happened upon this today in my RSS feed. I've mentioned John P. Weiss before, and I subscribe because he writes about the things I think about and I find his thoughts worthwhile. I've shared this with her.

If it's an accident or a coincidence that this should appear today, it's a happy one.

But as a wise tortoise once told a red panda, "There are no accidents."

Yesterday was a day unlike any other day, for me, if only as a witness to pain and sorrow, joy and hope.

I have a friend that I've known for many years here. A friend who I've cared about very much. Her life was touched by tragedy long before I met her, her husband being killed in a plane crash.

Since I've known her, she's gone on to endure new injuries. In her marriage, and in her health. She's always been resilient. She struggled, of course, but she carried on as much the same person as I've come to know. Those struggles are ongoing, unresolved.

Most recently though, she's been visited by another tragedy at an occasion that was meant to be a happy event, a family reunion after the death of her mother during the time of COVID, when family gatherings were not always possible.

I've known about this for some time, but I haven't related this before because it's not my story to tell. I do so now, because this most recent event has really affected my friend, as I've come to witness.

About six months ago, her youngest brother, a 52 year old man, was killed at the hands of the police in a jail in Texas, where he'd gone for a family reunion. Arrested for nothing more than sitting on the porch of the home they'd rented, in the morning, drinking a beer by himself. This apparently aroused the suspicions of a passing neighbor who called the police, which set in motion the course of events that were to take his life, violently, in custody at the jail.

My friend and her sister were there, tried to intervene, tried to get their brother out of jail. Because of changes in visitation due to COVID protocols, they were unable to visit their brother in jail. Apparently they had to schedule a video visitation, and one wouldn't be available for a couple of days, by which time he was dead.

The jail didn't notify my friend and her sister of his death, they learned of it from an attorney they were working with to try and get him out of jail. He was able to look at the population and had the unfortunate duty to tell them their brother was dead, with no explanation why. She'd learned of the death of her husband from a reporter, decades before. There is no good way to deliver bad news, but this just seems unfair.

Since then, his death has been ruled a homicide. The family is being represented by a nationally known civil rights attorney. Help found her from unexpected quarters, to include a nationally known public figure you might never think of; but learning of it, you think, "Of course." A figure who has indicated that they don't wish their name to be known, and who is doing this work for many families in similar circumstances. So I'm not being coy to be clever. I would love for their name to be known, but I think I understand why they might not.

Despite this high-powered help, this particular loss has brought my resilient friend low. She's carrying on, of course, but she's confused, lost, angry, hurting and grieving. Familiar feelings by now, but this time it seems to have broken her.

And reaching out by asking for help with printing labels.

I didn't learn of her brother's death right away. We were very close once upon a time, and then we weren't so close for a long time after. We'd speak once or twice a year, more frequently since her diagnosis.

She'd called me on another subject a couple of months ago; but the real reason was to tell me about her brother. It was a long conversation and it hit me like a blow. Of course, we read about these things all the time. Among the privileged, we likely never think it's the kind of thing that could touch us. Until it does.

And to be clear, it didn't touch me. It touched my friend. I'm just relating how that has affected me.

I called her a couple of weeks later to check in and see how she was doing, let her know she could reach out anytime. I hadn't heard from her again before yesterday, but I'd been meaning to call her anyway.

I can't relate to you the depth of what she's experiencing. I can try to tell you how helpless and inadequate and frightened it makes me feel. And how sad I feel for my friend, who has never done anything to deserve this much pain in her life. Though I must say, I know I've read about women, families, with similar amounts of injustice and tragedy visited on their lives. I'd just never been so close to see what it does. And I hope you don't ever have to do so either.

We have power over nothing. Surrender. "Let go, and let God." Also, inadequate. So just breathe.

And love one another, as best we can. And we can definitely do better.

Which brings me to the joy and hope.

I got home from the label trouble, and we watched a couple of movies. I picked the latest Luther movie, because I needed to see a good guy beat a bad buy. Mitzi wanted to watch The Philadelphia Story, which is one of my very favorite movies. If you want to know what my friend is like, she's very much like Tracy, very much. Not a redhead though.

Before we went to bed, I recalled another friend (I don't think she'd object to me calling her that) was sworn in as mayor of Jacksonville about the same time as I was navigating Avery's product offerings.

I went looking for local news coverage on my phone, and found her inaugural speech. You can find it here. It's worth a listen. I think it truly is, no matter where you live.

I can't be certain, but I think I hear the winds of change beginning to stir. I think the power of love may be beginning to make itself felt, in a way that it seems like it hasn't in a long time.

The pendulum swings both ways.

It's a beautiful day. Let's make it so.

Our wireless, remote, off-site fusion reactor power solution went live on May 12, 2020. We have 7KW of rooftop solar and two Tesla Powerwalls. Since then, we've been 91% self-sufficient in our electricity needs, with 10MWh of net positive energy production overall. (We've generated 10MWh more electricity than the house has consumed since we installed the system.) The 9% of energy drawn from the grid since installation is due to cloudy weather, high demand or some combination thereof.

Overall, I'm pleased with how our system was designed in terms of production and storage. In a perfect world, I'd like to be 100% self-sufficient; but that would require additional capacity (and cost). "Perfect is the enemy of the good."

Since we installed the system, we've added a plug-in hybrid vehicle (RAV4 Prime), and a mini-split heat pump to cool the garage. We're still doing pretty well with production exceeding demand, but it's a smaller margin today than compared with the lifetime totals.

At some point, six or seven years from now, I anticipate we'll be buying a fully electric vehicle, which will place greater demands on the system. It's hard to quantify that, though I suppose I could use our gas consumption as a surrogate. I haven't done a deep dive into how Toyota calculates lifetime fuel consumption, or if indeed it does at all. There's a report on the dash that gives our effective mpg, but I suspect that resets with every fill-up. The last figure I saw was 73mpg.

Our choice to live in Nocatee has placed a high demand on personal transportation. There is no public transit anywhere nearby, though light rail that would run between St. Augustine and Jacksonville with a stop in Nocatee is rumored to be on the horizon. For day-to-day stuff, we're well served by the RAV4's 43 mile EV range. But to go to Jacksonville, we're hitting the tank on the way home every time.

In any event, at least in Florida, it's become clear to me that our vehicles are our greatest energy consumption devices, gas or electric. The house is a fraction of what the car uses, how small a fraction depends on how much driving we do. If we were commuting to work every day, it'd be tiny.

So I'm planning on up-sizing the power system when we get an EV. I spoke to one of the company techs some time ago, and it's possible to simply add to the array. By the time we do this, the Powerwalls should still be near 80% of their rated capacity. So unless there's some big economic incentive to replace them outright, I'll be looking to just add additional battery capacity.

With hurricanes and climate change, and a political climate that is increasingly hostile, this may be all somewhat uncertain, but I think it's wise to plan ahead. So I'm setting up an account now to hopefully save enough to pay cash when the time comes, rather than borrow again. We'll only be a few years from paying off the mortgage by then, so a loan won't be out of the question, but I'd rather not.

Looking at other ways to reduce consumption, I think I'll also be buying a heat-pump dryer. The dryer is a huge energy demand, and it'll be about 10 years old then, so about the time we'd probably be thinking about replacing it anyway. Likewise with the HVAC system overall. Ten years isn't necessarily "end of life" for a heat-pump, but Florida is a harsh environment.

I'm hopeful/optimistic about significant gains battery technology performance and pricing; and more modest gains in HVAC, though our developer-installed system is the minimum to meet building code, so we might make some significant gains there. We've already installed an induction range, and I expect that'll last for several years past this overall upgrade.

I'll be in my early to mid 70s by then, so it'll likely be the last "home improvement" project I'll have to undertake, though there's probably a roof replacement in there somewhere as well. I hope to try to minimize my overall "footprint" in my last years on this planet, short of becoming an ascetic. I recognize the sunk costs of resource extraction, manufacture and transportation kind of stretch out any ROI in terms of karma, but "You do your best, the rest isn't up to you."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:52 Thursday, 29 June 2023

A few years ago, I participated in something called the Northeast Florida Regional Leadership Academy, a program sponsored by an organization called the Northeast Florida Regional Council, an artifact of a time when Florida was actually a leader in managed development.

Anyway, once a month the class would attend a seminar hosted in one of the seven counties making up the region. I enjoyed it, I learned a lot. I think there should be more efforts like that, offered to more people, but whatever.

Anyway, the session in Flagler County, the one just south of me here in St Johns County, was held at Princess Place, which I'd never even heard of before. It's basically an Adirondack lodge built in 1887 on Pellicer Creek. Rich people, ya know?

I loved the place and figured Mitzi would enjoy seeing it. When we drove down to Kennedy Space Center earlier this month, I was reminded of it again as we passed it headed south on I-95. We have a friend who lives in St. Augustine Beach who we don't see often enough, and I mentioned we should make plans to pick her up and visit Princess Place.

So that's what we did last Saturday. Picked up Mary, had a nice lunch and headed south. It's not that far from here, it was only 25 minutes from where we had lunch. The lodge is only open for tours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and there's only one tour at 2:00PM, so we timed everything around that. We got there early enough to walk around the place a bit before the tour started.

Enjoyed the tour, drove a little around the preserve where they now have some cabins you can rent. Headed back up to St. Augustine Beach and had ice cream at some new place. One of those fancy places that doesn't have many flavors you expect, but a lot of weird ones. The chocolate brownie was very good.

It was at the tail end of that weather pattern that delivered severe thunderstorms with alarming regularity, and we managed to get everything done before one started. A very pleasant day, altogether.

Cumberland Island has more of that sort of thing if you're interested in how the rich vacationed or wintered in the southeast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Princess Place is a little gem anyway.

Pics are here.

We've reached that time of the year when it's warmer outside first thing in the morning than it is in the house. Even more so these days, since I've started lowering the thermostat to 75°F when we go to bed to help facilitate sleep. (It seems to help somewhat, more for Mitzi than for me.)

This just means we're actively cooling the interior 24 hours a day now, and there is no time of day when stepping outside isn't something of an unpleasant experience resembling stepping into a sauna, one that has biting flies and mosquitoes and can give you skin cancer.

Florida, in other words.

It also means that my camera lenses will fog when I go out, until they warm up above the dew point, which is 77°F at the moment, while it is still 75°F in the house.

I'm thinking about how much "news" I consume. One of the things I didn't enjoy about Twitter was the constant stream of "alarming" messages. It's possible to replicate that experience in Mastodon, although somewhat diminished simply by virtue of the fact that I "follow" fewer people; and also by the fact that I spend less time on Mastodon. Less "engaged."

It seems I've filled that time with other digital media, like RSS feeds and Apple News.

In terms of RSS, the Miami Herald has a pretty good RSS feed of their news coverage. Which isn't necessarily what I'm looking for either. Much of their coverage includes wire reports of horrible things going on in other states. Murders, car wrecks, babies left in hot cars, dogs killing people. A ridiculous number of stories about lottery winners.

It's probably not essential for me to be aware of all these things, but I can't see a way to filter them out. I don't usually click through to the entire story, but the headline and the first couple of lines in the RSS item are usually enough to give you that sense of alarm.

Apple News is algorithmic in an intrusive way. Bookmark an article you want to refer to later, and next thing you know, you're getting those kinds of stories all the time. Dopamine, for instance.

Plus, I subscribe to Apple News+, which means I'm paying for this service. Well, I've blocked Fox News, the NY Times and CNN. Rather than simply not show stories from those outlets, the layout, although it is algorithm-driven to be personalized for me, always includes a big, ugly square that says in large letters, "You blocked this channel," like an accusation.

Just omit those sources from the presentation, Apple.

I'm thinking about how I can manage that. Maybe just look at it once a day, between 1800 and 1900, like we used to get the TV news. Get it off the home screen and bury it somewhere a few screens back.

All I know is I'm reading too much news, and it's not making me better informed, it's making me ill. So, I'm thinking about that.

Out loud, it seems.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:02 Wednesday, 28 June 2023

Good morning gator. 🐊

I feel ya, bird.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:44 Monday, 26 June 2023

Found a new blog I like via Mastodon. This is one of the redeeming features of social media, that it can surface people who are thoughtful and interesting in a way that more "mainstream" (Whatever that means today. Corporate?) channels can't.

I can't reconstruct the complete sequence, but I believe I saw someone I follow repost or reply to Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror@infosec.exchange). I think I followed Jeff on Twitter, the avatar and handle looked familiar. Anyway, clicked on his profile and checked his posts and gave him a follow.

That, in turn, led to Steve Makovsky (@mako@mastodon.makoism.com) and this post, which is right up my alley at the moment. Has an RSS feed, so subscribed.

A lot to digest there, but I'm looking forward to catching up.

Finished Collateral last night. It's only four episodes. More polemical than procedural. Ambiguous ending, requiring you to guess how it turned out for some of the characters. The clues aren't encouraging.

I'm sympathetic. I think it's worth a watch, but it's a bit of a slog.

I listened to outgoing Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry's "exit interview" on First Coast Connect, the local public radio station. Probably not worth a blog post, but a few impressions:

Lenny hasn't changed. I think he mentioned no less than three times, "I've never lost an election."

This is a man who is incapable of viewing politics and governance in any way other than as a zero-sum game. And an ego-centric one at that. It's all about Lenny.

He was not forthcoming about JEA, though I didn't really expect him to be. He complained, rather bitterly to my ears, about "lies" that were told about him or people who worked for the city or with him, but offered no specifics.

From my point of view, many people had opinions about what Lenny, Timmy, and Bri-bri were up to with their henchman Aaron Zahn; and in the absence of transparency, offered their interpretations of what they were observing. Many of those interpretations were unflattering to "the boys," and perhaps some of them were mistaken.

But, from my point of view, nobody was "lying" about what Lenny and his crew were up to.

Perhaps he's projecting.

He largely laughed off his history with social media. Because of course.

He did say he needed to take some time off. That he had no immediate political ambitions. He lacked "the fire in the belly." I think he said something about working on himself and his relationship with his family. That's about the only encouraging thing I heard.

I expect we haven't heard the last of Lenny, Timmy and Bri-bri. I know Timmy will still be around, in the "private sector," stirring shit up. I'm sure Bri-bri (City administrator Brian Hughes for those just tuning in. Official member of "the boys," the "misfit mafia.") will either be a "consultant" or a "lobbyist" in the "private sector." I'd be surprised if he didn't have his next gig already lined up.

But for a little while anyway, Jacksonville will be far better off with them at least temporarily sidelined.

I did see the Delta 4 Heavy, about two minutes after launch. Bright orange dot in the sky. Took some shots, but really very little to see. Didn't set up for a live composite, "long exposure" image because of the rain. It was only visible for about 20 seconds or so, in a layer of clear air I guess below the clouds.