Had an extra "^" in the RSS template. From too few to too many. Fixed.

I set up two cameras last night. Had a 25mm/f1.8 lens on the 16MP E-PL8 and a 12mm/f2.0 on the 20MP E-M1 Mk3.

I didn't use a CPL on the 12mm because you get weird gradients in the sky with a CPL on a wide-angle lens. So I stopped it down to f22 to get the exposure right for Live Composite. Normally, the cool kids would be screaming "Diffraction!", but this ain't art.

12mm (24mm effective focal length) is really too wide for this shot. I'd have been better off with the 17mm.

On thing I learned is I seem to have one dust spot on the sensor, which is disappointing since it was just cleaned. I'll take a stab at shaking that off, blowing or brushing it if that fails. Not a huge deal in this shot, I just cropped it out.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:11 Monday, 16 January 2023

It seems micro.blog can't ingest some html in an RSS feed, or I'm not doing something correctly.

The block quote html didn't render properly at micro.blog, and the subsequent Mastodon and Twitter posts were mangled as well.

This calls for some investigation, though a simpler fix may be to simply avoid block quotes. We'll see. I'm not happy with the appearance of block quotes here, but that's just a CSS matter. "Just" doing a lot of heavy lifting there, since I'm not very good with CSS as should be obvious.

Anyway, we press on.

🌎 January 15, 2023.

Author: Heather Cox Richardson

Date Retrieved: 1/16/23, 06:25

<blockquote>Excerpt: You hear sometimes that, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, America has no heroes left. When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought.</blockquote>

Number of Words: 697

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:26 Monday, 16 January 2023

It was still twilight when Falcon Heavy USSF-67 Mission lifted off. This was from an Olympus E-PL8 in Live Composite mode. I put a circular polarizing filter on the 25mm/f1.8 prime lens, which cut down on the sky glow.

Quick edit in Photos and Topaz Sharpen AI. I'm not sure where the weird colors came from, but editing made them worse. A little more effort might have ameliorated it, but I'm an instant gratification sort of guy. Alas.

You can see the two booster descent burns, which is pretty cool I think.

No matter what happens next weekend, Jacksonville and the Jags organization can be proud of what this team has achieved. You can feel the transformation in the culture. A huge share of the credit goes to Doug Pederson, and Trevor Lawrence; but every player is responsible as well.

Another modification to the post export template for posts without titles. This omits the wx data. Since the template affects every post for January, the two previous blog posts, which formerly included the wx data, will now be posted without it.

This post may be an example of why I might use title-less posts. Kind of like tweeting a link. This was an encouraging read this morning. Subscribed.

This is a test post for untitled RSS posts.

If this is working correctly, I'll modify the template to get rid of the # in the html blog posts.

Fingers crossed.

Follow the James Webb Telescope's Flickr account, get cool wallpaper. Click through to the official link in the description for larger images.

I used to subscribe to the New Yorker because I like it and I wanted to support it. But since I was paying for it, I felt as though I had to read it, and I couldn't keep up. So it felt like I was wasting my money. (As if I don't waste money in many more useless ways.)

But they have my email address now, and I hear from them regularly. This morning, for instance.

The article they commended to my attention is this one, The Objectively Objectionable Grammatical Pet Peeve, by David Owen.

I'll almost always read an article about grammar or writing because, well, I'm a blogger. On my desk is a book that arrived Monday called Writing Tools, by Roy Peter Clark, because someone mentioned it in another blog that I subscribe to. ("To which I subscribe?" This stuff will make you nuts.) Maybe I'll blog about it.

I'm not a writer, writers write. I blog.

But I'm conscious of the fact that what I'm doing involves writing; and I have two fears when I'm doing this, neither of which has had the good effect of compelling me to stop. I'm afraid that I'm writing badly, and I'm afraid that it's boring.

Yet I keep doing it. It's some kind of compulsion. Especially now, since I'm not satisfying my itch by issuing regular doses of snark on Twitter.

I liked Twitter from the standpoint that it was usually just a 280 characters. I'd go on a thread rant now and then, but most of the time it was just 280 characters in which I would offer a creatively cynical take on the feckless fools who think they govern around here. Or a dark preamble in a quote tweet of some disquieting climate news.

It was short. I could fuss over it a bit, but never very long. Spelling and typographical errors were my bane, and I'd often reply to myself with an *correction to show that I'm not, you know, ignorant.

Blogging is different. It's almost like writing. Much more anxiety.

When we watched Hallelujah, I was struck by how much Leonard Cohen labored over his lyrics. Whenever I hear or read about how writers or artists struggle with, or refine and hone their prose, I feel bad.

I pound this stuff out, kind of listening to it as it's going on the screen and keep going. Occasionally something will grate and I'll fuss with it a bit, but I'll keep moving. If I can't keep moving, I'll quit. If it's something I liked or cared about, I might stick it up in the Drafts container, hopefully to revisit it. I almost never do. Usually I just delete it.

So, whoever reads the marmot has my gratitude and my apologies. I'd like to say I'm doing the best I can, but I'm certain that's a lie. I just can't help myself.

(It's 7:54. The time-stamp for this post shows it began at 7:20. 34 minutes for 500 words. 2170 characters. 7.75 tweets. There's a certain amount of overhead copying and pasting links.)

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:20 Friday, 13 January 2023

Mitzi sent me a link to this article in the Washington Post. (No subscription required.) She said something about me feeling good about it.

It's worth the read.

When I was single (separated/divorced), I developed the habit of eating a relatively "big" breakfast. Whether it was me making something at home, or buying one on the way to work. When I was running and training, I'd do my run early in the morning, then have a protein shake with frozen bananas and nuts. And I'd have a pretty high-calorie lunch, not especially healthy either. If I hadn't run that morning, I'd make something with eggs and cheese and whatever else might be in the fridge. Frittatas and omelets were my thing.

I loved going to Fire House Subs ("Medium Hook on wheat, fully involved, make it a combo.")

I seldom made anything for dinner, or went out to eat at night. Occasionally my buddy the ex-chef would have me over and I'd have dinner at his place, and we typically ate late at night. But that was maybe a couple times a month.

Together with the running, I was 30 pounds lighter than I am today.

Mitzi came from a situation where dinner/supper was the big meal of the day. And she likes to cook. She watches cooking shows, likes trying new recipes, etc. I tried to explain, without the benefit of scientific research, essentially what the article describes. You're better off eating the majority of your calories earlier in the day.

Early in our relationship, as I began to gain weight and she began to struggle with hers, I tried to persuade her to abandon the big meal at night. That didn't happen. It was too much a part of who she was.

And I really enjoyed making breakfast. So I basically stopped paying any attention to when I ate. I did pay attention to what, sometimes how much, but gave up entirely on the time.

And now I'm obese.

With endemic COVID and the risk of long-COVID, living in a state that doesn't seem to care about looking out for one another, and obesity being a risk factor for having a worse experience with COVID, I wanted to do something to shift the odds a little more in my favor.

I've been reading that intermittent fasting of almost any kind offers benefits with regard to weight control, and, more importantly, insulin response (inflammation).

So as I mentioned yesterday, I started this thing where I consume all my calories between 1:00 PM and 7:00 PM. Sometimes Mitzi doesn't have dinner ready until 8:00, sometimes later; but all I can do is all I can do. And I'm seldom up past 10.

She's protested that I don't have to eat dinner. I don't think she understands how I'm present while she's cooking a meal, and I'm going to sit there and watch her eat it alone?

No, it's easier for me to just not eat breakfast.

So far, since the 1st, she's been pretty good about having dinner ready before 7, so that hasn't been an issue yet. I figured if I ate later than 7 now and then, it wouldn't kill me.

Then she read the article this morning.

She's going to try to have dinner read by six from now on.

Set and drift is a vector quantity. The magnitude may be a little smaller now.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:22 Thursday, 12 January 2023

Since I was up early, I did do a bit of sitting. I'd installed an iOS app called Oak on my phone some time ago, when I was thinking about (or struggling with) getting back into a practice.

Be here now. Begin where you are, and so on.

Did the opening ten minute guided meditation. Went well, I sat a few minutes longer.

Prepped the drone for flight, just in case there was a red sky.

Took care of my inbox, went through my RSS feed. Checked the sky, didn't look promising. It may have been 48°F wherever my weather data comes from, but it was 42°F here. Popped the drone up anyway and took a look around, nothing remarkable. Red horizon, not much of a gradient.

Came back to the computer and took a look at Twitter and saw the FAA issue. Started scrolling that, but decided that was not what I needed to be doing.

Put on some warmer clothes and strapped on the OM-1 with the 100-400mm zoom, hopped into the golf cart and went down to the kayak launch point to walk around a bit.

Put a few pics up on Flickr.

I don't know how they do it these days, what with GPS and automated helms and so on, but back in my day, when you wanted to get from one place to another at sea, you put down a track on a chart, this gave you a course to steer. Your desired time of arrival determined your speed, and from your course and speed you could determine your position of intended movement, or PIM.

Before electronic aids to navigation, navigators relied on the stars, and during the day you could shoot a couple of sun lines at known times (which is why accurate timekeeping was so important), and you could construct a running fix from a pair of consecutive sun lines. (Running fixes were less accurate than a star fix, but better than nothing, an estimated position derived from dead reckoning.)

These navigation fixes would tell you where you were, whether on PIM or off PIM. If you were off PIM, you'd have to make a course correction. There were a number of reasons why you might be off PIM. Compass error, inaccuracies in measuring speed by the pit sword, the influence of wind and current. Combined, these were a vector quantity called set and drift, and you'd alter your course and speed to cancel out a calculated set and drift. You'd do this every day. You'd try to take a fix by the stars morning and evening when you could see a horizon and get the most accurate results, and shoot a few sun lines during the day.

There's set and drift in life too. The things that kind of get you off track from where you intended to be.

That's mostly due to poor navigation. We don't take fixes often enough, we aren't paying attention to the track, our PIM. We can't see the stars, we know local time but not sidereal, and maybe it's later than we think.

Anyway, all of this is just preamble to another insomnia insight. I'd intended to establish, or re-establish, a pattern of regular meditation. I'd also intended to try a new kind of intermittent fasting. And I also intended to get off Twitter and stop playing so much Call of Duty.

Perhaps that was too much.

As regards intermittent fasting, I seem to be on PIM. I used to do the two days a week fast, which is how I learned, quite painfully, my gall bladder was shot. I didn't try again after having it removed.

I liked to have breakfast, it was the one meal a day where I really cooked something for myself. Mitzi likes to cook dinner. And there's always lunch. And snacks.

There's just too much opportunity to eat too much. So I figured I'd try the six and eighteen form, a variation on the "fast five." I eat between 1300 and 1900 and nothing in between. I'll make breakfast at 1300, or a more typical lunch if I feel like it. Mitzi makes dinner, or supper, depending on where you're from I guess.

So far, that's on track. It was a bit disorienting, having that additional free time in the morning; and then there are the hunger pangs. Those are diminishing and are fairly easily dealt with by drinking water and distraction.

Distraction is where the trouble lies.

When you're trying to change one addictive behavior, Twitter, eating, you often wind up substituting another. Twitter took over for Facebook and Instagram when I left those platforms. Now it's YouTube, because I turn to it for distraction from a transient feeling of hunger.

Except it's not the social interactions, it's watching videos of people waxing rhapsodic about old video games. Games I used to play, and games I'd heard of but never saw before because YouTube wasn't a thing.

Last night, Mitzi was watching the Golden Globes and I was sitting on the couch with her, with my AirPods in my ears watching YouTube videos on my MacBook Pro about the best Game Cube games, and switching over to eBay on my phone. After spending a few hundred dollars, I kind of became aware of what I was doing and put the computer away and went to bed.

It's the same thing I did with HP calculators. And, um, some TI ones too. Only I was doing it at a much faster pace.

All of this to satisfy some dopamine induced craving for novelty and acquisition.

Desire is the source of all suffering.

I got up around 0330 this morning to have a glass of water (mouth was dry, I wasn't hungry). When I go to the refrigerator, for whatever reason, Cast Away ("I have ice in my glass."), the war in Ukraine where people are without lights and heat and probably often water, the fact that we're likely in the early stages of the collapse of this civilization, I embrace some feeling of gratitude. I tell myself to appreciate this, because it wasn't always so, and may not be again.

Anyway, doing that put me in mind of the nonsense I was doing the night before. And that made me think about not doing the thing I'd intended to do, practice.

Because I'm not in control. I'm not on PIM.

I didn't want to be more "effective," I didn't want to "get things done." I wanted to make meaning. I didn't think I just wanted to buy more shit, and video games at that.

So this is an accountability moment. I've fixed my position. Entered it into the log.

I could just not toggle the export button and leave this post here. Because this is something of an embarrassing disappointment.

I remember though. I've been here before.

It's been worse. I've done worse.

I remember.

Back to work.

Walked back to the kitchen and saw a red sky for the first time in a while. Hustled back to get the DJI mini 2 aloft. Had to get some shoes on because the pavers are cold. Then had to fuss with the DJI Fly app. Just seemed to freeze, showed no GPS satellites and wouldn't even let me take off "with caution." Forced quit it twice and it finally decided it would go to work.

By then, the big show was over. So we hung around up there long enough to observe sunrise.

I'm planning to buy the mini 3, not the Pro. Since I mostly use it as a compact camera with a very tall tripod, I don't think I need the obstacle avoidance. I would welcome the larger sensor and the ability to tilt the camera above the horizon.

The gimbal is wonky, and apparently this is fairly common with the mini 2. It starts out level, then develops a tilt as you rotate the aircraft. Not a huge issue for stills, so I haven't spent any more time on it.

I think I should add that without the drone, there'd be no photo. Or, a much less interesting one. (Not that I find this one especially interesting.) From my backyard, I have no view of the horizon and I can only see the red sky through the trees. That's one of the downsides of Florida being so flat, there's often no horizon to speak of, and it can feel claustrophobic sometimes.

This is two images stitched in Affinity Photo 2. If you happen to look at the html, ignore the filename. Meant to type 1-10 and typed a 7, no idea why. Also meant to fix it, but got distracted when I noticed that Affinity Photo exports jpegs with the .jpg file extension, not .JPG, so I had to fiddle with that. Le sigh.

Anyway, shot the images so I figured I'd post something. I share your disappointment.

Things you don't see every day. Vocalizing like crazy. Seems to have lost its mate. Shortly after I shot this, it flew off. Neighbor said it sounded like there was another one behind his house, so hopefully they're reunited.

Gregory Sampson is a teacher in Duval County Public Schools, and he has a blog called Grumpy Old Teacher. I follow Greg on Twitter and now Mastodon (@grandgraffiti on mastodon.social)

His most recent post is about the growing chill in the Sunshine State, and it's not because winter is here.

A couple of relevant web pages:

National Coalition Against Censorship

American Civil Liberties Union

It's the cowardice of administrators, who justifiably feel as though they're under attack, that facilitates this slide into authoritarianism.

If you don't assert your rights, you don't have any.

One of the new (to me) blogs I found recently is John P. Weiss. I enjoy his writing and his photography. This post appeared in NetNewsWire today, and I enjoyed it.

I have felt the attraction toward minimalism, but I haven't made any effort toward achieving it. I think I understand "the liberty of constraint." And I struggle with the affliction of acquisition.

You don't own your stuff, your stuff owns you.

I find a new passion, and because I'm fortunate enough to possess the resources, I begin acquiring stuff.

I got into retro-computing, because it recalled the joy I felt with the Apple II when computers were new and wonderful (and mostly useless), but full of potential. I started living on ebay, buying machines, software, books. I had a pretty nice collection, content to limit myself to machines after the //e.

When we got ready to move to our new place here, I realized it wasn't going to be possible to relocate all that stuff to the new place.

Wiser people (people with more patience anyway), would have put it all up on ebay. I gave it all away. I didn't want to spend any more time thinking about it, so one insomnia filled very early morning, I posted on the Apple II group on Facebook (this was in 2019) that the first person who replied who could get to my house on Saturday could have it all for free. Within literally seconds, I had replies. First guy said he was interested. Second guy said he'd be there. Second guy got the lot, because of reading comprehension. (Then criticism ensued about how I handled getting rid of my stuff and my responsibility to "the community." Sigh.)

Turns out it basically filled a Ford Explorer to the gills. Kid drove from Tampa all the way to Ponte Vedra on bald tires. Hope he was able to make good use of it. Thousands of dollars of stuff.

If you can't be a minimalist, you have to maximize non-attachment.

Today I'm sort of in the same mess, what with my new-found "free time." I read a piece about how a Nintendo Wii is now officially "retro", and Mitzi had a Wii in the garage, and now it's in my office. My Wii U plays Wii games, but the Wii can play GameCube games! And the packages have been showing up at a pretty good pace of late.

The liberty of constraint in my case is my office. It's rather small, and we are approaching that limit. May have exceeded it.

As to photography, I have, in the main, constrained myself to one camera manufacturer: Olympus (now OM System or OM Digital Systems, not sure which). I have two Fuji compacts (an X20 and an XQ1), which I've been thinking about selling. I wanted to see what the fuss was about with the X-Trans sensor and Fuji film emulation. It's nice, but it doesn't speak to me. Mitzi likes to sell stuff on Facebook, so maybe I'll give her a 20% cut. The two of them should bring a few hundred bucks combined, based on what they've sold for on ebay.

I have a ridiculous number of Olympus bodies that use the four-thirds sensor, most of them using the micro-four thirds lens mount. I'm not a "completist" as a collector, though. Some of them I like the form factor of the body (E-PM1. Worst shutter sound ever though.), some I liked the color (Red E-PL6. So red. Yeah, you're not stealthy with that one.) Anyway, I have more cameras than I could possibly need. I shoot regularly with five or six of them; chiefly OM-Ds, but also the PEN-F and the E-PL10.

My lens collection is similarly absurd, but perhaps somewhat less embarrassing. I have dupes of some because they came with cameras. I tend to favor the small primes when I'm out socially. I like the big, heavy f1.2 primes for low light or subject separation.

It's nice to have choices, but I know if I had to pick 3, it'd be the Lumix 20mm/f1.7, the mZuiko 45mm/f1.8 and the mZuiko 14-150/f3.5-5.6 zoom. I'd miss the 300mm focal length for birds, certainly 400mm on the big 100-400mm zoom. If I could add one, I'd probably add the 8mm/f1.8 fisheye because most of the OM-Ds can de-fish in-camera with 3 choices of angle of view (not the E-M10 Mk4).

You know what they say, "A cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind." I have clutter everywhere. I suspect I have undiagnosed ADHD, because my brain is almost always running around like Golden Retriever with a bad case of the zoomies. I have learned that the inner voice is an unreliable narrator, and I am working on being still; but I'm like Popeye, "I am what I am."

I don't pursue minimalism as an aesthetic, either in art or in life. I'm verbose, I like color, contrast, shapes and shadows. I don't know what I'm doing, I'm making all this shit up as I go along. I try to pick up good tips where I can, and I've had some success with that.

But I can appreciate and admire minimalism.

When it's done with restraint, of course.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:48 Sunday, 8 January 2023

I don't intend for the marmot to be a meta-blog about the marmot. I suppose it looks like that at the moment. But I do intend to spend more time here, so I'm trying to get everything dialed in so I can be productive and not frustrated and fiddling with things.

I went down to the kayak launch on Friday morning before sunrise. The sky was clear, so I wasn't expecting anything in the way of a spectacular sunrise, but I wanted to get out of the house.

The road down there is a mess, so it was a slow drive. When I got there, I thought I had the place to myself. Then I heard faint music. Turned out it was a guy fishing, he parked in the trees near the river, so I didn't see his truck. We exchanged a few words about the cold and went about our respective endeavors.

If you happened to visit the my flickr photostream (I gather it's properly spelled with a lower-case "f"), that downed tree really was that red. That's what first caught my attention, then the slight mist on the still water. The Tolomato River is part of the intracoastal waterway, it's also more of an estuary than a river. It's extremely tidal. I didn't check, but it seems as though I might have been there around slack water, and there was no wind to speak of, thankfully.

I took the DJI mini 2 along with me. I don't "fly" it very much, mostly just use it as a very tall tripod. Got some shots and made a pano. The image above is just a single frame. I'll probably buy the mini 3 for the better camera. Florida is flat, so gaining a little elevation really offers a better perspective.

I think I'm going to turn off the Flickr integration with micro.blog. The images are tiny, at least on my 27" iMac. Probably works well for a phone.

I usually export images I want to share to Flickr anyway.

I'm going to have to look into how to change the appearance of the page at micro.blog. I know everyone loves the "clean" look of acres of blinding white space, but it doesn't seem to serve photos well, especially of the moon.

Because I've forgotten how this looks, I'm copying the embed code from Flickr.

This is one of a series of shots I made on Friday morning.

Just because it's there, right outside my window. I never get tired of doing this. Handheld high resolution from the OM-1. Cropped and tweaked in Photos.

Yesterday, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Jacksonville City Council's request to stay a court-ordered district map.

I was excited to read this, and I wanted to get on Twitter and join in mocking Jacksonville City Council and the city's incompetent Office of General Counsel. I even downloaded Tweetbot back to my phone to see what the people I follow were saying and perhaps join in.

That's the power of habit.

I was disappointed because it seemed most of the people in my "local" list were tweeting about Kevin McCarthy and the Jaguars, two narratives with the power to swamp local politics.

So I didn't get the usual rewards I experienced when people I respected on Twitter validated my opinions by sharing ones similar to mine. I'm excited about the Jags, but I really don't give a shit about the Republican clown show in Congress.

To me, the most exciting news of the day was Jacksonville City Council once again being publicly humiliated and losing in court. That didn't seem to register over the then ongoing clusterfuck in the House of Representatives, and the contest for the AFC South.

The good news was Jacksonville will have new city council districts! They're not revolutionary by any means, and they won't overturn the Republican super-majority in a city that's roughly 50-50 in party affiliation. But they were drawn by citizens groups, not the faithless, selfish and self-interested Jacksonville City Council.

People talk about Twitter being the "public square," as if it's someplace where people discuss the news and events of the day. Maybe it is.

But maybe it's just a place where people like to get their opinions validated. The issue in question is secondary to experiencing the emotional satisfaction of feeling seen, or being part of a desirable in-group.

I remember when I left Facebook and Instagram a couple of years ago, it was something of a struggle at first because I felt disconnected from a lot of people it turned out I wasn't really connected to very much at all. Those connections consumed a lot of my time and attention, but what were they really serving?

Well, Facebook and Instagram mostly.

I felt those pangs of disconnection yesterday when I read about the court decision. And when I succumbed to habit, I found the connections I sought were all connected to something else.

As a political post, this would normally come from the underground. But it's mostly a personal post, so it's here.

I learned something yesterday, I think. Something I probably already knew, but had forgotten.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:33 Saturday, 7 January 2023

Shot with #Olympus #E-M1X in handheld high-resolution mode, #HHHR, with the #mZuiko100-400mm zoom.

(Playing with hashtags. They don't seem to propagate to Mastodon via micro.blog.)

International Space Station as it flew overhead Ponte Vedra Florida this morning. #ISS #Olympus #LiveComposite #E-M1Mk3

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:17 Saturday, 7 January 2023