I have tweaked some of the fonts on the site again (but not all of them, so there is a bit of a crazy quilt effect going on here).
Specifically:
Body font: JetBrains Mono
Heading 2 font (used for post titles): Ubuntu Mono
As an added bonus for me, because WP doesn’t “see” JetBrains Mono in the editor, it is using Bold Segoe UI at 17px instead.
I’m all about the monospaced fonts. For now. For today. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
EDIT: I have already changed the Header font to Barlow Semi Condensed, mere minutes later.
EDIT 2: I've now changed the sidebar to JetBrains Mono and also made the background colour of the site blue, and the sidebar a greenish-yellow. Or a yellowish-green.
I remember tech news being about neat new ideas, inventions and technological improvements.
Now it’s just a showcase for how the richest and worst people in the world are destroying everything in pursuit of power above all else.
It’s sad and depressing, and I doubt it will get better in my lifetime.
On the plus side, I’m in the process of dropping most of the usual tech news sites I follow, and this frees up time and headspace to pursue more positive things, which I will do!
Finally, since it’s sort of technology and a cat, I present, yet again, cat typing on a keyboard:
Yeah, I already posted photos. Here’s more! These are scenery shots from today’s walk.
Brunette River, with lingering bits of snow.See where the river bends in the first photo? This is the view from around that bend.This tree bridge is a bit more slippery than normal.Snowy trail. Not as slipery as it looks!
I tried fixing the trees in this drawing, then just removed them and swapped in an ocean, along with a cloudy-looking sky instead of a star-filled one.
I’m not sure that this is better so much as different. But I like messing around with the different elements.
I’ll, uh, draw other stuff, too, rather than iterate on this one forever. I swear!
An interweb pal suggested the perfectly stupid name 7-11’s Big Gulf as a substitute for the real life and even more stupid renaming (for Americans) of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Because I am easily amused, I created this as it might look in the web version of Apple Maps:
Where: Green Timbers Urban Forest Park (Surrey), Tlahutum Regional Park (Coquitlam), Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake (Burnaby) Weather: Sunny, 0-3°C
The Outing
Green Timbers Urban Forest Park
Green Timbers Lake: Frozen and mostly duckless.
We started out a brisk weekday birding at Green Timbers, which we haven’t been to since November 2023.
It was cold, as expected, and the trails were snow-covered, also as expected, but they were also very icy in areas, which for some reason I did not expect. We were careful, though, and stayed upright the entire time.
In terms of scenery, we got good shots of the frozen lake and environs, but birds were scarce–a few mallards gingerly walking on the ice, a fox sparrow, a few song sparrows and an elusive Bewick’s wren made up most of what we saw. to be fair, only one tiny portion of the lake was not frozen (we even saw someone skating on it, despite the THIN ICE signs).
With not much to see, we moved on, this time electing to skip the sham known as Big Hill.
Tlahutum Regional Park
A snowy field. We actually didn’t get much farther than this today.
We gambled on Tlahutum next, hoping we might see something in the community garden (negative, other than a lot of snow covering everything), though I did spot one towhee (see what I did there?) We consoled ourselves with getting some nice shots of the wintry Coquitlam River, except they are replacing the bridge deck Monday to Friday, which includes Wednesday, which is today, so we couldn’t get onto or across the brisge. Thus ended our trip here.
Piper Spit
Just some of the dozens of gulls at Piper Spit, plus a crow.
Moving on to Piper Spit, we saw lots of actual birds to go with the frozen scenery. That was nice.
What was not as nice was me taking all of two shots before a bird pooped on my left shoulder. I had to go to the washroom to de-poop my hoodie, return, have Nic point out poop I missed (the washrooms there have no mirrors), de-poop a second time, then return to the spit and hope all pooping on me was done for this visit (it was).
A few species were especially plentiful today: crows in ever-increasing numbers, as they seem to be adopting the area as a stopping point on their trip to their nightly roost not too far away, gulls by the dozen, spread out over the land mass and further onto the frozen part of the lake, and, curiously, a lot of green-winged teals.
There was coot drama, gull drama, crow and gull drama (one gull had parked itself on the ice near some kind of crumbly human food, and a crow came up, yoinked on the gull’s tail, and the gull decided to just let the crow have the goods). The geese once again honked and took off to parts elsewhere.
The highlight (?) may have been two pigeons on the pier, who were very into each other, pursuing passionate pigeon play, with the male grooming the female copiously before, uh, following up with the rest. You could almost see the cigarettes being smoked afterward.
And of course, as usual, the gulls were pulling everything they could find out of the water, including pine cones, what appeared to be a yellow cloth that totally intrigued one gull, and something we could only determine might have been organic. No golf balls this time, though.
We both got some nice shots, including some very nice sparrow shots at Green Timbers, which was a pleasant surprise, given the scarcity of birbs there. And despite the cold, it never felt that cold. Overall, a perfectly pleasant outing.
I’m ready for the next one to have no snow, though.
The Shots
Soon?™
The Birds (and other critters). Rare or rarely-seen birds highlighted in bold.
I didn’t do a workout yesterday, on my usual workout day and felt bad, so I did a workout today. Problem solved!
I started today’s workout at a speed of 6.5, but curiously, my times were lagging behind the speed the treadmill was set to. This annoyed me, so at roughly the 2.25 km mark, I cranked it up to 9 and jogged for the remainder. Jogging still feels much harder than it should, stamina-wise.
However, I managed to get through 3 km and called it good.
I am now thinking I may try regular runs again next week.
Stats:
Speed: 6.5-9.0 (6.0-6.5) Incline: 1 (1)
Pace: 8:36 (9:35/km) Time: 26:05 (30:01) Distance: 3.03 km (3.13 km) Calories burned: 273 (271) BPM: 130 (137)
Parenthetical numbers are from the previous treadmill run.
I was reading Phil Plait’s newsletter today (I highly recommend it if you’re a science/space nerd) and he happened to mention the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s about 100,000 light years across.
And I know the universe is big. We all know that. But think about this: Our own galaxy, which is just one of anywhere from 100 to 200 billion estimated galaxies, would take 100,000 years to cross end to end, and only if you were travelling at the speed of light, which we can’t do.
That is very big.
It makes you wonder how weird the universe can get, because it is so vast we will never see most of it.
This concludes my cosmic deep thought for the day.