I have not been keeping up with my runs, plus I’ve been sleeping poorly and stressing out and stuff, so this morning I checked the forecast and it looked like it would stay dry until at least 2 p.m. so I changed into my jogging clothes and set out to just do a brisk walk to the lake and back.
Which I did!
On the way back, I ran probably about half the distance (around 2 km) and got some good burns a few times by running up the stairs at Hume Park and the one block uphill stretch of Kelly Street. The stats below reflect the difference in pace between the two walks quite nicely.
The water fountain has finally been re-opened at Burnaby Lake. I took advantage.
Drink all you want until late October or so.
I went from Detraining to Maintaining on my watch, too, which was a nice bonus.
The weather was mild and though I wore long sleeves in case of rain, I would have been fine in a t-shirt.
Overall, it was nice to finally get back out, touch trees, and sweat a little. If all goes well, I’ll do a short 2.5K run tomorrow.
A slightly different view from Cariboo Dam, between walks.
Stats:
Walk 130 and 131 Average pace: 9:10/km and 7:49/km Location: Brunette River trail Distance: 4.02 km Time: 36:51 and 31:29 Weather: Cloudy, some sun Temp: 15°C Humidity: 66% Wind: light BPM: 110 and 134 Weight: 168.9 pounds Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Total distance to date: 934.98 km
My iPhone 12 apparently couldn’t handle these flowers, so I had to adjust the vibrancy down to get it closer to what a human eye would see:
And then the phone, with no horizon line for reference, rotated this photo from its landscape orientation to portrait, so I had to set it back, then tamp down the ultrabright white of the petals. At least doing these things makes me feel I’m contributing to the photography process, beyond just aiming the camera lens at something.
On Mastodon, someone linked to a full set of icons used in BeOS, an OS that tried to make a splash late in the 20th and early 21st century, failed, but still lives on as Haiku.
I really like them. Warm, slightly cartoony, psuedo-3D. It’s the latter that one of my interweb gaming pals described as “the Zaxxon angle”, which is a great way of describing it. Today’s icons in Windows, macOS, and most Linux distros are generally flat, with maybe some slight bevelling or something to hint at 3D, but nothing is close to what BeOS did. And that’s kind of a shame to me. It’s not just nostalgia, either. The icons are distinctive and have style, they feel of a piece, not just random whatever.
I know, I am typing this on a blog, which means I have the vast collected knowledge of the web available to me and even with Google flailing and AI slop overrunning everything, it’s still pretty easy to search and find out that SMH is short for Shake My Head (expressing mild disgust, disbelief).
But for whatever reason, my brain refuses to remember this, and I don’t want to search every time the term pops into my head, because it reminds me my brain can’t remember this specific abbreviation. I can remember LOL and IANAL (lol anal) and IDK and lots of others, but this is one that just never sticks.
But instead of wondering what it might mean, my brain always offers up the incorrect, unhelpful, and weird: Smell My Hand.
I want to say it still kind of works, but it really doesn’t. It’s just weird.
Clem Burke, one of the original members of Blondie, a favourite band of my youth (and still today), has died at age 70 after battling cancer.
Burke was always fun to watch in concert footage or music videos, because of his maniac style. I will be listening to Blondie tonight and checking out some of his spastic moves in various videos.
Looking at the specs for one of Samsung’s Odyssey S9 ultrawide monitors, I noticed this particular feature:
This seems to imply that if you have Eye Saver Mode OFF, your eyes will not be saved. They will be lost. Why would you not want to save your eyes? Apparently, real gamers do not need to concern themselves with such things. Their eyes are like eagles or something. Until they hit 40, after which they retire and switch to Eye Saver Mode ON1Eye Saver Mode reduces blue light and brightness, so I guess if you’re playing a very blue-lit game, you best be prepared to sacrifice yourself for maximum deets, or whatever the kids are saying now that we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century..
Also, the G9 is a 49″ ultrawide monitor, which seems absurd until I realize it would take up less total desk space than my two 27″ monitors. The curved screen still weirds me out, though.
This is in Phil Plait’s newsletter today, and it’s too beautiful and weird not to share. You can view it on the original site with full text here: Spying a spiral through a cosmic lens
This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a rare cosmic phenomenon called an Einstein ring. What at first appears to be a single, strangely shaped galaxy is actually two galaxies that are separated by a large distance. The closer foreground galaxy sits at the center of the image, while the more distant background galaxy appears to be wrapped around the closer galaxy, forming a ring.
Check out Phil Plait’s newsletter here: Bad Astronomy
What the title says. I didn’t plan it out, it just happened while I was experimenting with brushes in Procreate. I am hoping to do more quick sketches like this going forward.
Where: Reifel Bird Sanctuary (Delta), Burnaby Lake (Burnaby) Weather: Cloudy, some sun, 11-16°C
Reifel Bird Sanctuary
Endless marshland and a hazy blue sky.
The weather was downright pleasant today. Nic wore shorts! I did not. Maybe next time the weather is nice.
We got to Reifel early and given the weather, it was pretty busy. Among the many people was local bird photographer Liron Gertsman, who I recognized as he and his groupies/friends walked past up and went to the top of the viewing tower. I spotted him due to his adorable baby beard. He probably won several awards while at the top of the tower for photography, these things just seem to happen to him.
Meanwhile, on the ground, we saw a good mix of birds. The shoveller numbers seem to be thinning, but we encountered many a YARG (Yet Another Random Goose) as they were scattered all over the place.
The tree swallows are back, looking like shiny little penguins and setting up home in assorted bird boxes. Marsh wrens were singing their little hearts out and a few of them appeared long enough for us to get some decent shots. The even harder-to-shoot golden-crowned kinglets were also flitting about and amazingly, several stopped long enough to make up for the hundred or so blurry or not-quite-there shots. It’s always nice to be reviewing your photos and encounter a good shot only a few photos in.
We saw two Sandhill cranes, though they were apart–one adult and one rather vocal juvenile. I wonder why the family is split up.
The drama this time came courtesy of a cantankerous coot, who took umbrage to a duck, stretched up to full height (and looking very chicken-like) and doing a kind of karate kick with one of its impressively freaky feet to a nearby mallard. It ended after that, but yeah, don’t mess with coots, I guess.
The geese were relatively well-behaved, and all of the ducks gave us good pose.
Burnaby Lake
Increasing green adjacent to Still Creek.
We weren’t at Burnaby Lake for too long for reasons, but the main objective–to find recently-sighted mountain bluebirds–eluded us. Instead, we came across a large murder of geese (that’s what I’m calling them) on the athletic field, except, upon closer inspection with both eyes and ears, these were not Canada geese, but the smaller and honk-free Cackling geese. We’d never seen a large group of them before. They’re kind of adorable with their short necks and stubbier beaks. And they don’t honk, they kind of peep-honk (it doesn’t sound like cackling to me).
There were chickadees here, too, but they were one of the birbs I failed to get any really good shots of today, alas. It was a fine outing otherwise.
I saw this on Mastodon and it is perfect. Context provided below.
Context: A few weeks ago, OpenAI released an update that allowed people to generate images, including in specific styles, if they so chose. One of those styles is Studio Ghibli, after the well-regarded Japanese animation studio. This, predictably, led to a bunch of people turning personal photos into pseudo Ghibli images, but others used the style for less tasteful purposes, to showcase terrorism and other violent acts.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, changed his avatar on X to a “Ghiblified” version of himself. A lot of people–rightly, I think–took this as being Altman’s way of saying AI companies can appropriate (steal) art and art styles as they see fit and no one can stop them. It’s at the heart of much of the criticism of AI: that the output it produces is largely built off of stolen works, that the companies behind AI simply don’t care (or even feel entitled to the stolen works) and comes at great cost to the environment, too1Some of these costs are coming down, but it ain’t exactly efficient yet..
But yeah, for a beautiful moment in time, we turned everything into a Ghibli studio movie.
The original New Yorker cartoon, which also remains perfect:
