General

Echo Beach

Martha and the Muffins is a great bad name, and also a pretty good band based out of Toronto. I remember them mainly for the above-titled song, “Echo Beach”, which was a radio hit in Canada back in 1980. It’s a great little pop song and captures a sense of longing that hits me right now. Plus sax!

There’s a decent write-up on the song on Wikipedia, where I learned that Echo Beach is a real beach, and it’s in Saskatchewan, and that the B-side to the single was a song called “Teddy the Dink.”

Enjoy! (They’re a good live band, too)

Bonus:

Echo Beach as seen on the Map application included in Windows 11:

November rain

It’s a run day, but it is also a rain day on this, the first day of November. According to the Windows weather app, it’s rained 19 out of 30 times the past 30 years on this day. That seems about right.

I’ not actually complaining (mostly). Sometimes it’s fun to even go out in stormy weather, as I did a few weeks ago. But it is not fun to run in the rain. It’s low-key horrible, as the kids say. This IS me complaining.

With the rain expected to go all day, I look at my treadmill and ponder. I may have to take advantage of it later.

And think about going out to buy discount Halloween candy. Kidding! I am totally being good for November! Really! Haha.

No, really.

For sure.

You’ll see.

I am not going to spam 14 posts tonight

14 posts is how many I’d need to post in the next four hours in order to get my desired monthly average of 2 posts per day.

I mean, I could cheat and do it pretty easily:

  • 14 one-line posts
  • 14 posts of cat pictures (so tempting)
  • 14 posts highlighting a “best of” post from this blog, based on my own arbitrary criteria
  • 14 letters from the alphabet
  • Breaking up “The 12 Days of Christmas” and adding two brand-new things, like cows a-mooing or crows a-cawing or whatever.
  • And so on.

But I am doing none of that.

Probably.

Happy HallowChristmas!

With today being October 31, which is to say Halloween, we witness the unique retail ritual of store managers deciding when, precisely, to start shifting over the Halloween candy to make room for the Christmas candy.

To be clear, the Christmas candy showed up weeks ago, but now that we are at HallowChristmas, there is a new tension in the store air, as managers ponder exactly when the bat-festooned Snickers must make way for the mistletoe-festooned Snickers.

Speaking of, here is a Halloween cartoon for you. It doesn’t even have a cat!

Atmospheric river + actual river = River++

This past weekend, October 19 and 20th, an atmospheric river passed through the area, bringing a whole lotta rain and the attendant issues that accompany a whole lotta rain, like flooding and such.

Over both days I went through Lower Hume Park and the Central Valley Greenway that follows the trail next to the Brunette River, getting shots of local flooding and water, water everywhere.

I’ve collected the most interesting shots below.

For the record, I prefer my rain light.

There’s something in the air

Specifically, an atmospheric river. It seems like just a few short years ago I’d never heard the term, now it pops up every fall. I live in a region known as temperate rainforest. Rain is right in the description, so rain is not unexpected.

But rivers of rain? In the sky? That come down to be with the land I walk upon?

I do not like this.

But until U.S. Democrats can perfect their weather machines (topical joke), there’s not much I can do but put on my big boy booties, jacket and suck it up. Well, not literally suck it up. That would be a lot of water. And it would probably taste funny, too.

Here are cats in the rain:

Circle beats the squircle: A Birchtree dream

Last night I had a dream featuring Matt Birchler. I have never met Matt. He is a celebrity of sorts in the Apple tech scene, who has a YouTube channel (A Better Computer), a blog (Birchtree), a podcast (Comfort Zone) and probably half a dozen other projects. He writes articles for various tech sites. He also has an unrelated full-time job in UI/UX.

He is a busy guy.

I came across him via his blog and follow him on Mastodon, where much of the former Mac community from Twitter has migrated to.

One of his passions is UX and design (which works out well for him, because it’s also his job). In the dream, we are hanging out in a living room (?) somewhere and discussing design, as one does. Specifically, we are nodding in agreement over how circles provide more space for information over squircles (the rounded-off square icons you see everywhere on Apple devices these days). This is, of course, nonsense. Literally the opposite is true, but in the dream we were right, and the world was wrong.

Then I suggested we play something on “Game Center” on an Apple TV nearby and the dream ended, or at least my recollection of it did.

I’m not a big squircle fan, so I think the dream was just trying to accommodate that. Thanks, subconscious!

That whole WordPress drama, again

An update from my perspective, having blogged on WordPress for just under 20 years:

  • I turned off the WordPress news widget in my WordPress dashboard, because it is now filled with unhinged posts from the co-founder of WordPress.
  • I am still actively looking for a place to move to, away from WordPress. It’s now a question of where I’ll land, not if.
  • To that end, I realized I had been consistently mistaking the name of a possible new platform as Blogtastic, when it is, in fact, Blogstatic. I am smart.
  • I have backed up everything on this blog, including all one billion images, of which 990 million are cats.
  • When you have an entire website (not hosted by WordPress) devoted to every time you have “lied, misrepresented or behaved in a questionable manner”, you may not be charting the best course forward possible.

I expect to make a decision on a platform soon™.