Or something.

I am the master of the meaningless non sequitur, if that's not a tautology.

Obliquely, opaquely, I am referencing my lack of productivity here.

It was a busy week. We had guests Friday and Saturday, the place needed to be straightened up, taxes prepared and I have a new hobby/passion/obsession - old transistor radios.

I more or less declared RSS bankruptcy this evening, skimming through more than a couple hundred posts, starring a few in what I expect will be a vain hope of revisiting.

Apologies to one and all who missed the marmot.

So, some updates:

Spoke to mom this morning. She's received three of seven cards I've sent so far. She reported that I didn't have her correct address, despite the fact that I've been shipping radios and little grab-sticks and the like to that address since she moved there. Correction made. Hopefully the rest will find their way to her. Judging by her smile, I think she likes them.

There's a blog post I meant to revisit and link to about how Gen-Z doesn't know how to print. Forget Gen-Z, I've forgotten how to print. I used a different card size for one card, which required a new envelope. That consumed more than an hour of one morning; and entailed a robust degree of salty sailor-talk. I finally got it to work, but I have no idea how I did it and I'm not certain I can replicate it again.

I need to take a more deliberative, investigatory approach to solving these little dilemmas, and make clear notes.

Figure the odds.

Somehow I stumbled into the radio thing again. Cameras, computers, calculators, and radios. Oy. I have a couple of transistor radios from the 60s to the 70s on hand. First was a Panasonic Panapet 70, the "ball and chain radio." Got a blue one for Christmas as a teen. They're ridiculously expensive for what they are today, because there's no price for boomer nostalgia. I bought a white one that looked pretty nasty. Fortunately, it cleaned up pretty well. Still works about as good as I recall it did when it was new.

I have a really bad looking yellow one on the way, with a cracked bottom. Some guy here in Florida was selling the bottom half of a red one. Problem solved.

My most exciting acquisition is a Hitachi TH-841. Mine is in slightly better physical condition than the one in the link. No chips, but a small crack I can fix, though it was advertised with no cracks. I also paid significantly more than that etsy one, mostly because I'm a dumbass. But I'm learning.

It has cleaned up quite well, and it works fine. It's six inches long and three and half high, so it doesn't take much space on a shelf where it looks quite cool. These radios have a much larger ferrite loop medium wave antenna than a more conventional "portrait" handheld. Not always the case, so it pays to check.

I've got a much larger radio, the Panasonic RF-2200 inbound. I will play around with it a bit before I decide whether to send it off for refurbishment. Jay Allen knows more about radios than I do. I can clean, but I don't think I can align. There's a guy who offers a service on ebay, specifically for this radio, so I may go that route. We'll see.

Finally, there's a Monarch RE-760 on the way. Delayed, apparently, by UPS. Probably get here tomorrow. I like the style, but what especially attracted me was the brand name, Monarch. I get kind of a Godzilla vibe with this radio. Might display it with one of these, which I have, because of course I do.

If there's any good news to report, it's that I've successfully talked myself out of buying five, new to me, contemporary multi-band radios in the last several days. None of them offer anything I can't already do with the six I already have, which are some very good ones, to say nothing of the six or seven I gave to my son and his boys.

Anyway, I expect "this too shall pass." But for now, it's an amusing diversion.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 19:36 Sunday, 5 March 2023

Daring Fireball, John Gruber: Josh Marshall: ‘The Deep Archeology of Fox News’ Republican reality is a hall of mirrors. Destroying the mirrors is impossible, for they’re assiduously maintained and new ones are erected at an astonishing rate.

This morning's keeper. Not a great shot, but I hadn't seen a hawk in a while. The OM-1's bird recognition kept the focus off the branches that make this image less than great.

I think I've mostly got the "workflow" figured out. I use Image Capture, which imports the images to an SSD in a folder organized by camera. Each SD card is named for the camera it serves, so the images all end up in the right folders.

Right now, I'm using RAW Power by Gentlemen Coders to do the initial review, and first edits like cropping and basic adjustments. I like the Lighten and Deepen adjustments under the Enhance panel. I may make some specific color adjustments.

People's experiences seem to vary, with many recommending doing noise reduction first. I've found that there always seems to be some modest color shift with Topaz DeNoiseAI, and if you try to do any adjustments after noise reduction, then you get weird posterization artifacts. I'm working with jpegs, which I know are limited to 8-bits in the color and luminance channels (and I've probably used those terms incorrectly). But if I do my adjustments first, it generally comes back looking fine. The same can be said for SharpenAI. RAW Power allows you to send a copy of your image, since the adjustments are baked in on the return trip.

Sue me, I'm not and never will be a "pro."

RAW Power is like Photos and seems to always want to do its own thing with file extension case, exporting ".jpg" despite the original filename being ".JPG". So I export to a folder on the desktop, watched by Hazel, which changes the case of the file extension back to ".JPG," sends it to Photos, then deletes it from the folder. I only mention this because RAW Power will export directly to your Photos library, but then you have to manually change the file extension case, if you remember to, which I seldom did.

If I have to, I can do minor tweaks in Photos, then run the script for posting here, where Hazel once again changes ".jpg" back into ".JPG".

I still need to reconsider the size of the images I want to post here. They really do seem to suffer on export, being reduced to 1000px width.

Anyway, the beat goes on...

Clouds cooperated yesterday evening. Shot this with the 75-300mm zoom on the OM-1. Could've used the 100-400, but I don't think it would have resolved much more, perhaps another moon? ISO 25,600 shot with noise reduction by Topaz DeNoiseAI. I'm not the most skilled user and I'm afraid it shows. Still, kinda cool.

On Sunday, I joined the weekly Tinderbox Zoom meet-up. (Alternates between Saturdays and Sundays at noon, Eastern time. Link and agenda usually posted in the forum.) Mark Bernstein had emailed users that the topic for this get-together was "What is Tinderbox For?" It attracted a large number of users, including James Fallows who may be familiar to some of you. Writer for The Atlantic, NPR commentator, Tinderbox user. I'm unashamed to admit I'm a fan.

It was an enjoyable experience. If you're someone who's read about Tinderbox, or might be interested in trying it, I think this might be something of a gentle introduction.

Apart from being a remarkably powerful and flexible tool for working with ideas, it also has a generous community of users built up around it, who can make much of that power and flexibility accessible.

Here's a link to the video.

I've undertaken a new project. Along with printing photo books (two completed so far), I'm going to print and mail a card to my mom every day.

Mom's going to be 90 in September. My brother visits twice a week, and she has her meals with fellow residents. My other brothers and I call regularly. I'm usually Sunday at 11:00. But I figure this should give her something else to look forward to, assuming I can keep up the effort.

I bought a bunch of card stock, a few different kinds, from Red River Paper, along with envelopes to mail them. I write a little note about the picture or what's going on here. I mailed the first one on Sunday, so she should have received a couple by now. I'll find out this Sunday.

I also need to look into how images are being exported for this little automation I have going on. I think they should look a bit better than they do.

On a Tinderbox note, the Suggested (links) notes are all image posts, which makes sense.

We have a public radio station within FM radio range of the 'chuck hole, (It's also available as a streaming broadcast, and shows are recorded and available as podcasts.) and it has a morning news, culture and policy call-in show, First Coast Connect with Melissa Ross. The marmot is a fairly regular listener (and sustaining member) and has called into the show once or twice.

Monday's show included a segment on the rise of far-right extremism and increasing public expressions of hate in the region, so I was especially motivated to tune in. The first portion of the segment is an NPR report on the recent projections of anti-semitic messaging on buildings by laser projectors. It's a lengthy report, but if you're unfamiliar with the issue, it's worth your time.

One of the first callers, and the subject of this post, was Mark from St. Augustine. You can listen to his comment beginning at the 13:47 mark in the show. Since I'm not going to embed the recording, and I'm only going to paraphrase his comment, I'd strongly urge you to click on the link and listen to him in his own words. The portions in quotation marks are direct quotes.

Mark's comment was prefaced by his assertion that he doesn't condone, believe in or subscribe to the racist messaging being discussed. (It was anti-semitic messaging.) He then gives child-raising tips about not trying to reason with a toddler throwing a temper tantrum, that ignoring them is the smart way to parent, so as not to give them "satisfaction."

He then refers to a guest that had been on a month or two ago who made a similar comment to that effect, that she wouldn't give these groups the satisfaction of even using their name.

He then goes on to describe NPR as a national news outlet that highlighted what was going on in Jacksonville, pointing out that the piece even mentioned that the subject of the report said they started out with three members, and now they're up to twenty.

Mark said he didn't think that was huge, and in his opinion, they were all "idiots." He said that the group even admitted that the large projections made the group look bigger than they even are.

He then asserts, "I understand the topic that you're discussing." (After conflating anti-semitism with racism, but I guess bigotry is all the same to him.) But he thinks that "we're giving them what they want, by even having this discussion in the first place."

He then goes into some word salad about what the effect would be if the news simply didn't give them the coverage. "You can't make stupid thoughts illegal."

He ends, "I just wouldn't give them the satisfaction of even havin' a discussion like this. But that's just my $.02 worth."

And I got well and truly pissed off. So I tweeted some replies, (Yes, I'm still on Twitter. I know, I suck.)

And then I called in, and you can listen to my comment at the 22:50 mark, "Dave in Ponte Vedra."

I'm happy that I sounded far more composed than I felt. I went live just as I was trying to take a deep breath and relax.

If you don't listen to the recording, what I said was that ignoring the group legitimized remaining silent about them. It validated the "do nothing" response. It made complacency acceptable.

Mark from St. Augustine would have been a "good German." He would never have espoused those awful Nazi views.

But he never would have spoken out against them either.

Consider this, was Mark from St. Augustine roused to speak out against the hatred contained in those anti-semitic messages?

No.

What roused Mark from St. Augustine to pick up his phone and dial into the show was the NPR report, the national correspondent reporting on what was taking place in Jacksonville.

What truly offended Mark from St. Augustine, what exercised him so much that he spoke out, was "the media."

You can ignore them all you want. By the time it's impossible to ignore them, it's too late.

It's darker here.

Growing darker by the day.

This morning’s birds. Not necessarily “of a feather.”

Venus and Jupiter nearing their closest appearance in the sky. May not see them tonight, when they'll be reversed and Jupiter will be below Venus, because of clouds.

It was a busy week. Mitzi and visited the Cummer Museum and Gardens on Thursday to view a new installation by Anila Quayyum Agha, "Flight Patterns". I brought along the OM System E-P7 with the little Lumix 12-32mm zoom. (Flickr album here.) I liked that little combo enough that i've decided to go ahead and offer my E-PL10, E-PL7 and E-PL6 to KEH.

We expected company, my daughter and her family, on Saturday. So Friday was spent trying to finally get the office cleaned up. Mission mostly accomplished. Of course, cleaning the office somehow led to cleaning the workbench in the garage. That project is unfinished, but it's vastly better than it was.

We had an e-cycling day in the community on Saturday. I brought over a bunch of stuff, the biggest item being my old Power Mac G4 MDD, dual-867MHz G4 processors. Thing weighs a ton. It's a drive-thru operation, we popped the hatch and this teen girl who probably weighed all of ninety pounds grabbed the G4. I told her to be careful, but I needn't have worried, she handled it like a pro. Had a laugh when I heard another kid say, "What's that?"

A gentleman who I presumed was the owner relieved the young lady of the G4 and carefully placed it in a large rolling bin of some sort. I assume it's likely to end on up ebay in whole or parted out. I stuffed the CDs inside the body cavity.

In an effort to make room in the garage for stuff formerly in my office, I pulled a large fishing tackle box from the cabinets above the bench. I'd acquired the thing over a decade ago and have been fishing exactly zero times since. My son-in-law is a surfer and saltwater fisherman, so I planned to offer it to him. Mitzi had a small tackle box and little freshwater rig she'd acquired when she was dating another guy who fished. Likewise hasn't used it since. So that was offered as well.

When they arrived I told Pat, my firefighter son-in-law, that I had something I'd like to give him if he was interested. Figuring if he didn't want it, I'd just run it over to Goodwill today. He looked it all over and decided it was worth taking, especially the freshwater stuff. His youngest has been asking to go fishing, and they have some ponds in their community.

As we were heading back to his car, he said, "Look dear, more stuff for our garage." Apparently they'd just been through a similar effort to bring order out of chaos. I've seen their garage, so I understood the unenthusiastic look Melissa gave Pat.

We had a nice visit, but as the evening was winding down, my youngest granddaughter asked if she could look at my cameras. Not really sure where this was going, I said of course. I have about a dozen compact digital cameras. They've all seen some hard use, so I'm not inclined to offer them to KEH. The money I'd get is worth less than the utility the cameras still represent. Wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do with them, but that was about to be partly resolved.

I don't recall if she asked first, or if I offered, but Alden expressed interest in getting a camera. I'd given cameras to my daughter and my son, so it was easy to decide to give one to Alden. I had two Olympus XZ-10s, tiny advanced compacts with 1/2.3" sensors. One was in rougher shape than the other since I used to carry it in my hand when I was running. Most the anti-reflective coating was removed by the sweat and oil of my hand. I gave her the nicer one, along with a little case and a USB cable, since those Olympus cameras use a proprietary connection.

Pat was with us and I asked if this was going to be a problem with Jenna, not getting something?

Hearing her name, she appeared. I ended up giving her my XZ-2, a 1/1.7" advanced compact of roughly the same vintage. It's a bigger body with at tilt-screen. It was still in good shape, but the rubber thumb grip had long since come off and disappeared. I'd replaced it with one of those stick-on silicone rubber feet or bumpers you can buy anywhere. It'd adhered well and gave some purchase for my thumb. Found a little case for it and another USB cable.

Of course, in the middle of the night I woke up worrying that they wouldn't know how to use those cameras, be unhappy with the results and lose any potential enthusiasm for photography. So I ordered a DK book that I used to own, which is heavily illustrated and explains much of the fundamentals of digital photography and had it delivered to Jenna's house. Should arrive today. Included a note to share it with Alden.

Sunday morning, I made a couple of shared albums in Photos, one from XZ-10 images, the other from the XZ-2. I sent them links and hoped they'd see what the cams were capable of. I also sent along pdfs of the manuals and suggested that they just use iAuto, Scene mode and Art Filters for now. In those modes, the camera does all the thinking, they just have to frame the shot and push the shutter release.

All you can do is all you can do. Hopefully they'll get some enjoyment from them, learn a few things and perhaps develop an interest in photography.

Meanwhile, my collection of compact cameras is slightly less insane. I sold my Fujifilm X20 to a young petty officer, Mitzi has the XQ1, I'm offering the Lumix LX-7 to KEH. (Love that little camera, but I never cared for Panasonic's jpegs.) It's still a popular little device, so I'm guessing they'll offer me more than $20 for it. I could probably sell it for 10x that amount to an individual buyer, but I don't need the hassle.

Anyway, the beat goes on. Hope to make some additional progress this week, as we have company again next week!

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:30 Monday, 27 February 2023

I don't think this evening's is as dramatic as yesterday's. Shot this with the E-M1X in handheld high resolution mode, just for grins. Really didn't need to. Larger version at Flickr.

Stepped outside yesterday evening to go collect the mail and was greeted by this. Having some appreciation for how quickly the scene changes, I stepped right back inside and grabbed the new E-P7, which had the Lumix 12-32mm/f3.5-5.6 mounted. Not the brightest lens in the box, but it was mounted.

Walked around and struggled to frame it a bit with the street lights. Finally found a spot where I could use a tree to block it. I could have also zoomed in a bit more, as this is a crop of a 17mm (35mm effective focal length) shot. Of course, zooming in means a smaller aperture too.

The E-P7 seems to share the same 5-axis image stabilization as the E-M10 Mk.4. The E-PL series (7 and later) have an improved 3-axis stabilizer, which is good for about 3 stops. Shutter speed on this image, at f4.5 and ISO 3200 is .3s, is about three and a third stops slower than what might be conventionally considered wise for a 35mm focal length. Right about at the edge of what my E-PL10 might have achieved, but easily handled in this case.

Cropped it a bit, did some noise reduction, and I'm pleased with it. Took about 30 frames, imported 2 to Photos.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 13:31 Wednesday, 22 February 2023

It's funny, the things I think of in the shower.

While we may recoil at the spiritual hollowness of the kinds of people who are attracted to tyrants and bullies, we shouldn't forget that it doesn't mean they're incompetent.

Some are, but most who survive in an autocrat's inner circle have some level of talent or ability.

Albert Speer could probably have taught Tim Cook a thing or two about supply chain management. And Speer also should have been hanged at Nuremberg. He knew better than most, and kept the war going longer than it otherwise would have.

Likewise Goebbels, an educated man with what can only be described as a gift for understanding mass communications and propaganda.

Himmler? He was a chicken farmer, but he had an eye for talent and he was ruthless. Heydrich was his man.

Borman? Murderously efficient gangster. Not an especially bright man, but possessed of a keen sort of low animal cunning.

Leni Riefenstahl definitely knew how to use a camera. Like Speer, got off too easy. Should at least have done time. Like, 30 years or more.

Ernst Röhm was kind of a wild card or loose cannon. Useful, until he wasn't anymore. Not especially smart, but ambitious and he had something of an army at his command. Perhaps didn't understand how to "stay in his lane."

Goering was mostly a prop. A drug addict and a man of limitless appetites. He was pretty good at the internal politics, and unencumbered by a moral conscience. Just someone to add an air of legitimacy in the early years. He wasn't a brilliant strategist either, over-promising and under-delivering as head of the Luftwaffe.

No, what people like this all have in common is some enormous spiritual defect that attracts them to "strong men." Some emptiness that they try to fill by endearing themselves to bullies. Someone who enables them to pursue their own twisted agendas. Gives them license to be their own bad selves. Get rich through fraud and theft. Murder people. Manipulate and intimidate people. Elevate their professional or artistic reputations. Receive social status and rank they otherwise never would have had. (Looking at you, Dr. Ladapo.)

All they have to do is tell the boss what he wants to hear.

Eventually, the boss fails, because there was no one to prevent his worst excesses, rein in his worst instincts, and the whole enterprise collapses with him.

Then, like roaches, they all scurry for the dark corners. The rationalizations begin. The excuses. The denials.

The whining.

Will DeSantis go too far soon? Feels like it. Some murmur that he already has. If so, I guess it'll be up to Casey to right the ship.

Whether it's now, after he's a candidate, or after he's in the Oval, DeSantis will be another Trump in more ways than a few. He'll step on his dick and fall on his face.

And all his toadies with their heads up his ass will have to see a chiropractor for an "adjustment."

The only question is, how much damage does he do to the rest of us?

On Not Taking Money for NetNewsWire. I love this.

I played with the Suggested Links feature of Tinderbox this morning, looking at what it surfaced as related to this post, which I've linked to before.

Intrigued by the title, because I don't recall what any particular post is about from the title, opened one that was posted to the Marmot over eight years ago. It delighted me to note that it was a recapitulation of some very rewarding email correspondence from February 2002, 21 years ago almost to the day. I should see if I can reach Dave Golding and see how he's getting on.

It has some relevance today, as we find ourselves in Florida governed by (mostly) men who are lost.

The weakness of "strong men."

Just because I'm excited, not that you should be, a short post before I take my walk.

I picked a post from 2018. Should have done it in another tab, because it's not open anymore. This facility is going to alter the way I use Tinderbox.

Suggested notes populated instantly. Number: 10. But it went back to 2013, the earliest days of the Marmot. It also went forward in time to 2021. So there's no chronological limit, it appears to be the ten most relevant, "relevant" as determined by whatever the algorithm is.

I'm loving this.

Recently I mentioned that Spotlight wasn't behaving as advertised in my install of MacOS Ventura. (I'm waiting to see when Suggested surfaces that post.) And I wrote about using LaunchBar as my choice of keyboard launcher.

I've been doing some searching and installing various LaunchBar actions, and trying to wrap my brain around many of the more sophisticated features that I haven't been taking the most advantage. There's little progress to report on that front. As it goes with many of these sorts of endeavors, at least for me, there have been numerous digressions, to include installing Homebrew and consulting ChatGPT for assistance in that effort. (It's helpful.) But my interest continues, nevertheless.

So yesterday, during the Tinderbox Zoom meetup, someone mentioned that Dominique Renauld had created an Alfred workflow to take notes in Tinderbox. Someone also posted a link to a video and a forum post (I didn't save the chat, but the tabs are still open.) With LaunchBar not many registers deep in the stack, I clicked through to see what the deal was, thinking I'd try to replicate it with LaunchBar. (Gazing at the Action Editor being another of the aforementioned digressions, though perhaps not too far off the trail.)

The link to the forum post included a link to his blog regarding the Alfred workflow, which turned out to be dead with regard to that particular post, but did get me to his blog. So I poked around to see what Dominique had been sharing of late. I confess, I don't, or rather, haven't read Dominique's blog in the past. He speaks and writes English far better than I read French. Je parle un petite peu. Je suis tres désolé. I happen to believe he reads the Marmot from time to time.

I found this recent post, from November of last year, where I spotted a screenshot of Tinderbox.

(As an aside, sometime in the past few minutes, Tinderbox has posted 10 Suggested posts. The earliest is from November 2021. This suggests there's a limit to the number of related posts Tinderbox displays, as it has been 10 in each of the three (small sample size, I know) notes I've investigated so far.)

I'm not fluent in French, but I do recall making some translation settings in MacOS or Safari, so I suspected there had to be an easily discoverable way to translate the page. Sure enough, in the address bar was an icon that looked like a pair of cartoon speech bubbles that seemed to suggest language. I figured it was either going to read the page aloud, or translate it for me, and fortunately it was the latter!

The topic was Tinderbox in the context of all the relatively recent buzz about PKM. I'm in agreement with his views, but what was also a "surprise and delight" was the link he posted in the context of Tinderbox as a blogging tool. It was the session I did with Michael Becker a couple of years ago!

The Marmot doesn't look or work exactly like that anymore. In fact, as I've been slowly absorbing more knowledge about Tinderbox, chiefly through osmosis, I've been thinking about refactoring it once again. I likely won't undertake a complete redesign, but there are some additional changes I think I can make without breaking too many things.

I don't know if the Suggested notes are ranked by relevance, but the second note is this post from just over a year ago. (First is the preceding post, Serendipity, naturally.) Reading it, and looking over the others, I get the strong impression I do tend to repeat myself! Or at least, struggle with the same issues. When I was writing the Ephemera post, I was trying to recall when I last wrote about deleting photos from the library. I had the impression it was only a few months ago, but it was just over a year. I think this speaks to the subjective experience of the passage of time accelerating as one gets old. An insight that often intrudes on my thoughts these days.

Anyway, all of this perhaps amounts to nothing, but it did make me smile; and that's a noteworthy event in these times.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:19 Sunday, 19 February 2023

The marmot is made with Tinderbox, the tool for notes. It's a remarkable application, very powerful. I've been using it for about 20 years now, and I've only ever really mastered maybe five percent of it's capabilities.

Partly to learn more about Tinderbox, partly to add some social interaction during the time of COVID, (I know, it's still "the time of COVID.") I started attending the virtual Zoom meetups held on alternating Saturdays and Sundays at noon Eastern US time. It's an eclectic group of really smart people, and it's usually hosted by the developer Mark Bernstein and coordinated or stage-managed by a Tinderbox virtuoso, Michael Becker. Always in attendance is Mark Anderson, perhaps the only other person who rivals Mark Bernstein or Michael Becker in his intimate knowledge of the application.

The user community is very helpful, and I always come away having learned something new about Tinderbox. It's not always something I can use, given my application is mainly the marmot, but I can appreciate the power and flexibility the tool affords.

One of the "big fucking deals" about PKM (personal knowledge management) is linking. I get it, mostly. "It's all about the graph, baby." (Insert Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme here.) But I don't do much linking within the marmot. I'll occasionally link to something I posted on the web, if it's still at the top of my mental stack, or not too many registers deep; but mostly if I link, it's to something someplace else on the web and never an interior link within the file.

There's a sophisticated facility for internal linking within Tinderbox, and it gets a fair amount of attention at the meet-ups. I've appreciated watching the demos, but never felt very excited about anything until today.

In the screenshot below is the view one is afforded of a note when you invoke CMD-7, which is listed only as Links in the Window menu. (I think this should go in the Note menu, but what do I know?) I've seen it demo'ed before, but I've never used it until today.

As the meet-up is going on, I'll often be "multi-tasking," doing something else while Becker is demo'ing a feature at Mach 5. He'd asked attendees to make notes in the chat about things they found interesting or useful, to help him when he wrote up the summary that will accompany the video when it's posted. Someone typed CMD-7 in the chat. I didn't know why that was interesting, so I popped over to the Marmot and hit CMD-7. This is the result:

Holy guacamole! I had never seen that before! Or never made the connection, because I never think about internal links. To be clear, I had seen this note view before, but I'd never seen "Suggested" populated with anything that "suggested" it would be relevant to me. Hah! "Little did he know..."

The Marmot, and it's antecedent, Groundhog Day, are basically a stream of consciousness, a "river of views." I seldom revisit a note or a post, with some exceptions. Not because I don't want to, just because what I do here is quick and dirty. Except when it's not, which isn't often. I have an itch to blog something, I scratch it and move on.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

This "Suggested" column is interesting! Amazing! Wonderful! I was actually compelled to click on those posts. They open up in a little window of the notes text. If you click away from them, they disappear. If you move them, they open up in their entirety in their own little window! You can have as many of them open as there are in the list if you have the screen real estate.

This facility was something of a revelation to me, and it's possible I'm making too much of it. But I think it's tremendously useful in suggesting to me that some of the things I've blogged about before may be relevant to this post. And by clicking on those notes, I get a chance to "see what I thought."

The Marmot is just a blog, it's not a journal, not an intimate conversation with myself. Though, if it were, I could see where this feature might be even more useful as one develops a corpus of some size. The Marmot, as of a few paragraphs ago, was this size:

(The "links" are all web links. Nearly all of them outbound.)

377,000 words or thereabouts, it's possible I may have mentioned one or two topics more than once!

Anyway, just surprised and delighted this afternoon. Something that is rather unusual of late, so a happy occasion.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 14:18 Saturday, 18 February 2023

Florida faces genuine existential threats from climate change and sea level rise, which require long-term planning and investment. What is Governor DeSantis focused on?

Certain eastern spiritual traditions adhere to the notion of "the transient nature of all phenomena." Things arise, and they pass, like feelings. Like us.

They also counsel against "attachment," some emotional connection to something that you value perhaps out of proportion to its actual worth.

I've been reminded of these things the past few days as I've struggled with what to do with my image library. I spent a couple of days and deleted over five thousand images. And I still have over 105K images.

One approach I'm considering is printing books of events or subjects, some to give away, others to hang onto. The question I'm trying to resolve is whether to then delete those images from the library, because they're reified into a physical artifact; or should I delete all the images not in the books because they weren't valuable enough to print? Hang onto the digital originals of the printed ones in case someone wants a copy?

The point is, I think I'm spending a little too much time thinking about what to do with this library. This is the snare we get trapped in.

When I was in BAINBRIDGE (CGN-25), we made a port visit to Alexandria, Egypt and I took a tour to Cairo and the pyramids. Took a bunch of 35mm pictures. When I got home, my daughter took them to school to show her friends and lost them.

It's harder to lose things today, which may not be a good thing. Nevertheless, we still lose some. I spent much of yesterday nursing a limping 1TB 7500rpm 2.5 in. disk drive, trying to recover the masters from an old Aperture library. Once upon a time, I had the brilliant idea of uploading only reduced images to iCloud, thinking I could always access the full resolution images locally. Somehow, I seem to have managed to lose most of 2012. But sometime in 2018, I just started letting iCloud have the "originals." I had been maintaining my system library on an external drive, so I wasn't worried about storage and I still had the "original-originals."

In 2019, when I got the iMac with a 1TB SSD, I started using the internal drive, allowing Mac OS to "optimize" storage, keeping only thumbnails locally, while the originals upload to iCloud.

Well, the first book I printed was a 2018 wedding, and I can't find any full resolution originals. Fortunately, it's a book, I'm not printing large. There was only one image I wanted in the book that the software objected to, but I included it anyway. We'll see how it turns out when the book arrives. It's supposedly on its way.

Part of yesterday's effort was to see if I could recover those 2018 images. Alas, no. But I think I've found most of 2012! I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

I've been printing some at home as well. I just received a large order from Red River Paper. I hope to be printing a lot of cards. I made a couple of large prints of panos I stitched together from drone shots. I think they turned out pretty nice. The question now is, what do I do with them?

My plan, itself a transient phenomenon, for now is to print books of significant events with people I care about. Perhaps one or two of images that pleased me in some way that aren't necessarily associated with an event or people.

If I can accomplish this in a year (and afford it), I think my intention is to simply archive the Photos library on an SSD, stick it in a drawer and forget about it. Get rid of my 2TB tier of cloud storage with Apple. Process every day's images, share them with whomever or however I would share them. And then delete them.

We'll see. I'm not optimistic, but it feels right.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:28 Saturday, 18 February 2023

An otherwise unremarkable shot, but I'm refining my process. (Fumbling around with it is a more apt description.) OM-1 bird subject detection, ensured focus didn't grab the grass in the foreground or background.

It was cloudy and breezy on the walk this morning. Brought along the E-P7 because I didn't think I'd see many birds and I wanted to get familiar with the camera. This is with the Dramatic Tone II filter, which makes the otherwise mundane scenery a bit more visually interesting.

Nice Sunday read for creatives.

It's so commonly known, it's nearly a universal trope in narratives about bullies and bad bosses.

I can understand someone having a fragile ego, an insecurity, combined with generous doses of luck, that drives them to some level of achievement, some position of power or control. Likewise, I understand their need for constant praise and validation and hostility to criticism.

What is somewhat more puzzling to me is the nature or character of the people who are attracted to this type. The toadies and sycophants, the enablers and lickspittles who compete for proximity to someone in power, someone in control.

Some, I'm sure, do it for their own selfish ambitions, seeking favor or advantage over others. But some are just attracted to it, who seem to derive their own sense of self-worth from receiving the attention of someone they view as powerful. They have no desire for power or control of their own, they just want to bask in the glow of their chosen hero. They derive their sense of self-worth from somehow being of service to a "great man" (or woman).

There is never any shortage of these needy people, and so bullies and bosses find a ready source of adulation, validation and approval.

And it's never a surprise what happens to those who speak the truth.