I woke up fat and unrested. Is unrested a word? Apparently not. I will add it to Nedlish!
Day 10 my remaining symptoms are the same, but milder in all cases. The nose is a bit stuffy, the chest feels a bit congested (though no coughing unless I contort into a cough-friendly position) and the ears are just a touch plugged, depending on which way I turn my head.
Despite feeling better in all regards, I had an allegedly poor sleep last night and also managed to gain 1.2 pounds, like secret night gnomes were directly injecting fat into my body as I (poorly) slept.
Hooray for threads. Photo by Wendy van Zyl on Pexels.com
Meta (née Facebook) launched its Instagram-adjacent Twitter-like social media platform Threads this week and at the moment it has proven very popular, picking up 70 million or so users in its first day. That’s nearly twice the population of Canada.
I don’t have any thoughts on it, actually. That makes the title of this post clickbait, probably. Sorry1OK, a thought: I logged in and spent a few moments getting a firehose of random stuff from random people. I failed to see the appeal and logged out. This is one of those “not for me” things. I’m good with that.!
Actual physical threads can be nice, though, if you’re talking about clothes or the string-like stuff clothes are often made from.
Mentally, I feel I am mostly recovered from this flu/hell I’ve been suffering from, and my energy level is mostly back, too. For posterity, here are the lingering symptoms I’m still feeling nine days after the plague hit me:
Nose is still slightly stuffed up
Chest is still slightly congested
Ears are still slightly plugged
It is all slightly annoying, which is a vast improvement over last Sunday where my brain felt like it was in some kind of hell fog, while my body felt like it was alternately on fire or being plunged into invisible ice, all coupled with the ability to only sleep uninterrupted for minutes at a time. That was fun!
Where: Sapperton Landing, New Westminster
Weather: Sunny, 28C
The Outing
Feeling somewhat human again after a week of being sick, I ventured over to Sapperton Landing on the Fraser River and spent an hour or so taking in the sights on a day that was quite warm, somewhat hazy and muggy. The light was a challenge, with high cloud causing light to shift from bright sun to shadow, but this was my first real chance to shoot birds with my adjusted diopter and check the results. Overall, I’m fairly happy with the results.
In terms of birds, it was the usual suspects: herons, crows, song sparrows, geese and gulls. Strangely, no ducks at all were to be seen. The bufflehead duck I’d seen around a few times was also absent.
In terms of people, I didn’t see anyone else for nearly the entire time I was there. Someone finally passed me as I was heading out, over an hour after I’d arrived. It was kind of weird.
Overall, it was nice to get out, stretch and test my mad camera skills again.
The Shots
Geese skip/flying over muddy shallows
Goose quickly skirting over the mud. There were two adults and four juveniles coming from Brunette River and none of them wanted to walk over this muck, but they didn't really want to fly, either, so they basically ran while flapping their wings.
Geese skip/flying over muddy shallows
Harsh light on a crow, but I kind of like the effect
Close-cropped shot of a Lufthansa 747 flying over Surrey on approach to YVR.
Wildflowers along the path
Song sparrow perched and in a contemplative mood
Past the rocks and on the shore, here be herons!
Great blue heron cooling its feet in the Fraser
Another great blue heron, standing, but not fishing
Just as I took the first picture of this gull bobbing on the river, it took off
PROGRAMMING NOTE: This is not actually about programming. I just wanted to pre-apologize for YANP (Yet Another Negative Post). I'm still recovering from a surprisingly long illness and am kind of grumpy about it. I promise to be more charitable, loving, etc. soon™.
The Browser Company, makers of the Mac-only (but eventually also Windows) browser Arc, sends out a periodic newsletter with updates on all Arc things. This is good! The newsletter is full of pictures and animations and is written in a fun, engaging style. This is also good!
The newsletter is written in 10 pt. Courier. This translates to around 13px.
I have a pair of monitors that run at 2560×1440. 13px type looks like this relative to the screen size (it may look larger or smaller depending on the resolution of the device you read this post on, but for reference, it is, on my displays, SMALL):
Most of the email I get is in some sans serif font, like Arial, and in sizes ranging from 14px up to 18px. The reason why most email uses these settings is because it makes the text clear and readable.
Tiny Courier is the opposite. It’s also ugly as heck. It’s not 1986. Stop trying to be cute and “retro.”
And yes, I did complain (tactfully) to Arc about this.
It was hot today. But if I had to choose between 40C and -40C, I’d go with 40C.
I mean, really, I’d choose something nice in-between, but if I had to pick because of an important movie plot or something, I’d go with the warmer. I dislike being cold.
Anyway, the haiku:
The warmth of the sun
Just like a beach boy
The warmth of the sun calls me
Rays of light and tan
If I do a search for “the best” on engadget.com, I get 10 results in the portion of the site that is revealed without further loading:
The best iPad accessories for 2023
The best laptops for 2023 (twice)
The best early Prime Day deals for 2023
The best 2-in-1 laptops for 2023
Fisker gives the best look yet at its 600-mile range Ronin EV (twice)
The best wireless earbuds for 2023
The best projectors you can buy in 2023, plus how to choose one
The best budget wireless earbuds for 2023
The story in bold doesn’t really count, as it’s using “best” differently.
These are the exact kinds of articles you find on pages that exist solely to be SEO results in Google web searches. And engadget is now stuffed with them.
What makes this funnier (or sadder) is that engadget has recently started recycling a number of these SEO-friendly articles, constantly bringing them back to the front page, often with few or any updates, seemingly to push this kind of SEO stuff to the top (I can’t say what their actual motives are, of course, this is just my best guess).
For example, their article on running watches, cleverly titled Best GPS running watches for 2023 does recommend the current Apple Watch Series 8 (though keeping in mind it’s nearly a year old and one might argue the Apple Watch Ultra is better for running), but then it recommends the Garmin 745 for triathletes. The problem here is while Garmin does still sell the 745, it’s now an old model that is not getting replaced with a newer one. The Forerunner line has been simplified and the upper end, once held by the 245/745/945 is now represented by the 265/965, with the 265 (and the 255 before it) absorbing features of the 745. Any of the 255/265 or 955/965 are better options for triathletes, in terms of price, functionality and longevity (the 55 and 65 series are mainly differentiated by the display, with the 65s using AMOLED).
The story has a byline of June 9, 2023, yet the first comments date back to March 2022, belying its recycled history. The comments are almost uniformly critical of the choices, too, pointing out issues of comparing old Garmin vs. new Apple. And the article is by the editor-in-chief, so there’s no ambiguity about whether engadget is okay with this sort of thing.
It’s transparent and kind of gross and makes engadget seem less interested in being about quality news and reviews and more about ranking high in Google search for the $$$. Which is a thing, I guess.
It’s 2023 and that means the big thing is AI (that’s Artificial Intelligence, not some guy named Al). If you are reading this in some other year, you may be wondering what the fuss is all about from your tiny, climate-ravaged hovel. Or you may be wondering the same as a gleaming machine built on AI yourself! Who can say what the future holds?
As for the present, it started in 2022 when AI-generated art became a thing. That’s still ongoing (see the controversy over Marvel using AI-generated art for its opening credits to Secret Invasion), but things kicked into high gear right near the end of the year when OpenAI unveiled its ChatGPT website to the public, allowing you to query an AI built on all kinds of data scraped from the internet through 2021. You could ask for recipes, have it write haikus, or generate code, or just write your crappy books and list them on Amazon for you. There are concerns, as you might imagine.
Given the recent implosion over at Twitter over what Elon “Galaxy Brain” Musk has called “extreme levels of data scraping”, I wondered, might my own humble blog be subjected to the same? It is, after all, a treasure trove of my collected thoughts and wisdom, stretching back 18 years! In internet time, that’s like going back to the dinosaurs. Or at least mastodons (not to be confused with the social media platform). What can I do to protect my sacred words from evil, exploiting AI? How could I stop some young lad from going down the wrong path by using text from creolened.com to, in some small way, help write his homework, leaving him bereft of critical thinking and writing skills, and therefore destined to a life of petty crime and indolence?
I have the answer.
I’ll fill every post with words I’ve made up. Eventually, Nedlish will become the universal language Esperanto could only ever dream of becoming. This is a perfect plan. Let’s get started.
narnar
flembock
poddle
wistern
lugpuppy
droofus
edumatainmentification
yubbo
More to come. Get to work, AI, on the glorious Nedlish future!
I searched for images for “sick” and this one made me laugh, so it wins. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com
As noted previously, being sick sucks. I had forgotten how much through the benefit of not being sick for a long time, but now that I am reminded, here are a few aspects of the misery I wanted to record for posterity.
5 Worst Things About Being Sick
Lousy sleep
Nose gets sore from all the sneezing/being stuffed up/runny
I went out with a minor bit of trepidation. A few days earlier I’d caught a bug from Jeff, but on Friday I was feeling fairly decent and got a lot of stuff done, so I was hoping some birding on Saturday would be fine.
I was mostly right. By the time we got to our third and final stop, Crescent Beach, I was beginning to flag. Despite asking really nicely, Nic refused to carry me out. I managed to get out on my own two feet.
As for the various locations:
Sunnyside Acres Urban Forest: The name is a bit of a misnomer, because most of the area is shrouded in semi-permanent shade due to the abundance of very tall trees. It’s great for that forest vibe, and is neat to walk off a street and into the middle of fairly dense woods. The Merlin app was going cuckoo, reporting as many as seven different species at once, yet we actually saw very few birds, most of them remaining high up in the trees or away from the trails. My shots here were not great, though I did get a couple of nice shots of some fungus and then, right as we were about to enter the parking lot to leave, a junco came out and did a bunch of posing for us. What a nice junco!
Serpentine Fen: It had been a while since we’d visited here and the weather was ideal–sunny, but not hot. It was very pleasant, and the area was lush, though the river was very low. We did see more birds here, including an abundance of geese and herons in the river. Songbirds were more elusive, but we caught sight of a wren, a Savannah sparrow and a few song sparrows. Strangely, no ducks at all–not even mallards in the ponds. Again, my shots were not great.
Crescent Beach: We arrived here around 3 p.m. and given that it was:
Canada Day
A Saturday
Gorgeous weather
The beach was very crowded. We could not find parking in the usual lot and ended up parking further away, near a café, and had to walk in from there. As we trekked across the beach and through the trails, I began to flag, but managed to stay upright. We again saw no ducks, but there were song sparrows, some herons and purple finches were in abundance. A cedar waxwing also made an appearance, as did some Savannah sparrows.
Yet again, my shots were not great. As we left, I pondered this. A lot of the birds were far away, and the lighting was often not great (shadows or bright sun), but there seemed to be more to it than just the specific conditions of the shoot.
Later, when Nic and I talked about it, I mused that my shots had been getting worse–blurrier–for some time now. I am cleaning the lenses and contacts regularly, so I didn’t think those were the cause. As Nic looked over my camera, he noticed that the EVF (Electronic Viewfinder) was blurry. I concurred, but had always figured that it was my eyes and not the EVF (my prescription for lenses is about two years old now). Nic consulted the internets and discovered where the diopter1In this context it’s the control under the EVF that sets how sharp the image is in the EVF is located. I’d known about this before, but had completely forgotten about it. Fiddling with it brought the EVF into sharp focus. It is very possible this was at least one of the major culprits of my shots not being as clear as they could be. I will find out more the next time I go out and aboot shooting birds.
In the meantime, and as a bonus, I have also discovered how to make quick exposure and ISO changes. I’m finally learning to use my camera two and a half years after buying it! Go me.
As for the outing, I put in 25,000+ steps, which was probably way more than my body was in condition for, but the weather was nice, and I was glad to be out.
The Shots
Upward view of forest at Sunny Acres Urban Forest. Shot with iPhone 12.
Fungus the first, Sunnyside Acres. Shot on iPhone 12.
Fungus the second, Sunnyside Acres. Shot on iPhone 12.
Scruffy dark-eyed junco, probably a juvenile, Sunnyside Acres.
Great blue heron on the shore at Serpentine Fen.
Serpentine Fen, shot on iPhone 12.
Idyllic, if empty, pond at Serpentine Fen.
One of several bald eagles cruising over the fen.
Metallic bird. Strangely, the advertising on its belly didn't survive post.
Lorquin's Admiral butterfly
Savannah sparrow experiencing the power
Purple finches flapping furiously
Verdant field at Serpentine Fen
Bumblebee to flower: "I love you so much!"
Great blue heron on remnants of a pier, Crescent Beach
No one ever looks this happy at a computer. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com
For future reference.
Problem: When setting a different wallpaper for each monitor in a dual-display setup, Windows 11 will arbitrarily change both wallpapers to another random wallpaper (in my case it often chose one I was using last winter) or it will change the wallpapers to a solid colour (the same for both monitors).
Solution: There is no solution! At least not one that I found that worked reliably. The fix is to simply stop using a different wallpaper for each monitor. Once I went with the same wallpaper for both displays, the problem went away. I assume this is a bug/quirk in Windows 11 and will be one of those things some people may never encounter and others, like me, will never have fixed.
Alternate Solution: Buy a Mac. This works without issue on Macs, you just have to live with the other multi-monitor weirdness, like “Why can’t the dock stay on both displays at the same time?”
The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Murmur (1983) are two albums I own and enjoy, but neither of which I listened to when they were new. As they turn 40 (!) and 50 (!!) years old, I thought I’d reflect a bit on each.
When The Dark Side of the Moon came out in 1973, I was only nine years old and didn’t listen to any specific music or bands yet. I was gravitating toward The Beatles and The Beach Boys, though (in 1973 The Beatles had only been split up for three years). I came across this album years later, getting it first on CD in the mid-80s. The transfer was so bad (or good, depending on your perspective) that you could hear the analog hiss during quieter parts of the album.
Of the two, DSOTM is more famous, of course, but I feel it’s more dated or, to be more generous, of its time. In particular, the instrumental “Any Colour You Like” sounds very early 70s to my ears. That said, the rest of the album is sleeker and more timeless, and while it isn’t a concept album in the purist sense, all the songs connect together through themes and sound collages in a way that makes it feel like a single piece, a real album album (kids, ask your parents what an “album” is!)
DSOTM is also the sound of a band coming into its own with confidence and newfound maturity. It was Pink Floyd’s eighth album and was one of the last where all the band members fully participated.
Murmur, by contrast, was R.E.M.’s debut. Listening to it now, 40 years later, it still has a weird kind of freshness to it. I mean, it doesn’t sound anything like what you hear in contemporary pop music (which I can’t address without jumping straight into “old man yells at cloud” territory), but if you sought other albums with a similar sound recorded today, Murmur would effortlessly fit in with them, because Stipe’s vocals (not as murky as legend would have it) and the band’s early experimentation in style, going from jangly pop to simple acoustic numbers, remains vibrant and clear. It’s a fun album, an early adventure, and a great example of a group that fired on all cylinders right from the start.
Although I could have picked up Murmur when it was new (I was 19), like many others, I didn’t discover it until after getting brought in to R.E.M.’s music by a later album, in this case Document (1987) and specifically, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”. In retrospect, I wish R.E.M. had done more zany songs or lighter songs. Some of the best on Murmur are these, like the appropriately propellant “Catapult”. Ah, well.
