Not posting from a safari, which would be equal parts exciting and gross (and weird), but posting from the Safari browser on my Mac mini because I can’t stop trying other browsers. Help.
Safari seems better than before, but the fact that it has no Windows version means it is pretty much dead to me, unless I completely give up PC gaming and the Apple silicon Macs aren’t that good–yet.
Because this is largely a content-free post in order to boost my post count for the month, I present another image of an amusing cat:
Something funny happened last Saturday. Well, it technically started before that, so let me back up even further.
We journey way back to the days of 2014, when U.S. presidents weren’t sociopaths and pandemics hadn’t been around for almost a hundred years. It was a simpler time.
In December, I upgraded my 16 GB iPhone 5C to a 64 GB iPhone 6. The new phone was bigger (but not too big), faster and all that good stuff.
We move forward three years to 2017. The U.S. president is now a sociopath, but there’s still no pandemic, so not totally awful. My iPhone 6 is starting to sputter a bit, performance-wise, though the battery is still fine for my modest needs. I decided to upgrade to an iPhone 8. Other than a faster processor and support for wireless charging, it is functionally the same phone.
We move forward again to May 2018 when I get a kidney infection. This is not nearly as fun as getting a new phone. I lose over five pounds. I am forced to walk much slower than normal, because my innards hurt if I walk faster (my usual pace). This leads to a little bit of serendipity.
As I stroll the neighbourhood, I begin to notice more and more details–flower beds, fruit-bearing trees and so on. I take out my phone and start taking pictures.
I take a lot of pictures.
In 2017, I took 510 photos. In 2018 that jumps to 1,149, and it stays that high (or higher) after.
We now catch up to the fall of 2020. My iPhone 8 is about the same age as my iPhone 6 was when it got replaced. Unlike the 6, the 8 still performs well, thanks to Apple’s CPU improvements. The battery, though, has suffered terribly. Is it due to taking so many more pictures? Hijinks related to wireless charging? Just generally a lot more use? I don’t know.
What I do know is that now, in November 2020, the battery on the phone is so bad I can’t go out for more than an hour without needing a power bank to revive it. So I made the sensible decision to replace it and conveniently, Apple has an entire line of new phones for me to choose from (I loves me Apple Watch too much to consider Android at this time).
At this point, you may be wondering, what does any of this have to do with getting a camera? I will explain.
Last Saturday Nic and I went to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary. Knowing my phone was likely to poop out, I did two things:
I brought along an Anker power bank that could fully charge the phone up to six times
I dug out my 12-year-old Canon Powershot point-and-shoot camera and charged it up to bring along, just in case
My initial plan was to use the camera as a backup in case the phone died. The phone did, in fact, die. I found I could tether it to the power bank and still take pictures, though (sort of like having a portable generator for it), so what I ended up doing was taking a lot of pictures with the phone, then the same shots with the camera to see how they’d compared. What I found was:
The camera still takes pretty good photos!
The 3x optical zoom allowed me to get shots that were impossible with the iPhone
Some of the photos from the camera were actually superior to those from the phone (some were not)
All of these–but especially the optical zoom–instilled in me a sudden yearning I did not have before. I wanted a standalone camera again. Surely this is madness, I thought. Do I really need a dedicated camera for most of the pictures I take? No. Would it allow me to take pictures I currently can’t? Yes! Would the pictures in general be better than what I’d get with a phone, even a fancy new iPhone 12? Yes again.
So now I want a camera, and I am starting to research models. My main criteria:
Must offer specs that put it above a smartphone, otherwise what’s the point?
Spec 1: High pixel count (iPhone cameras are 12 megapixel)
Spec 2: Good optical zoom. I’m thinking at least 8x but more is better
Spec 3: Must be capable of good night/low light shots
Spec 3: Must cost no more than around $1,000 because I’m not going full prosumer crazy here
I am starting by looking at point-and-shoot cameras that generally come with a single lens but still offer good quality, then seeing what else may be out there.
Oh, and I’m still getting a new phone, but now I may not need the best camera since a good camera will likely suffice. Look for a rambling long post about the new iPhones soon™.
It’s been about two weeks since my last walk, so it was perhaps unsurprising that I was a bit sluggish on the walking portion. It was also chilly, though thankfully the wind was not blowing. I wore two layers up top and my stylish running pants for the first time in…quite awhile.
I was not overdressed.
Being a mid-afternoon on a weekday, I was expecting it to be fairly quiet, but there were quite a few people out, perhaps taking advantage of the dry weather before The Rains begin.
Thanks to my world’s tiniest bladder, when I got to the end of Cariboo Place I did not turn around and head back. Rather, I crossed over to Burnaby Lake, grabbed a few pics (praying it would not kill the phone) and used to Jiffy John™. I ended up having to go three separate times while out, which may be a personal record. Did I secretly drink a lot of liquid before heading out? Did the cold make my bladder “nervous”? Who knows. It’s not a personal record I want to beat, at any rate.
The running part went better and the one full km I was able to measure came in at 5:35/km, pretty respectable after two weeks of marginal activity.
Overall it was nice to get back out and I felt somewhat smart by actually dressing for the weather. The phone survived, going from 100% to around 64% by the time I got home (I did not start listening to music until I was headed back and kept it at a low volume. I also closed out all other apps. These are the things you do when your phone battery decides to play dead).
The stats:
Walk 26Average pace: 8:18/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 8.87 km
Time: 1:13:41
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 5ºC
Humidity: 81%
Wind: light to nil
BPM: 131
Weight: 171.6 pounds
Total distance to date: 201.17 km
Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 8
Nic and I went to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary on Saturday and I took a bunch of pictures with my iPhone 8…and my 12-year-old Canon Powershot SD1100. Why did I have my Canon digital camera with me? Because the battery on my iPhone has gone bonkers and barely lasts an hour. I also took a power bank with me and pretty much kept it tethered to the phone.
As a result, I have a lot of duplicate photos from both devices and the Canon held up quite well, given its age.
I also didn’t dress for the weather. I would have been fine, as it was clear and sunny and not too cold–around 8C–but once the wind picked up, I became jealous of the ducks and their down.
We didn’t see any snow geese, which was a bit of a bummer, but more reason to go back, especially since I now know to wear 15 layers.
View along trail
Ponds
Calm water before the wind picked up
Vibrant berries
Marshland stretching out
Light and shadow
Birbhouse
Duck!
In your face
Golden duck
A pair of herons
This duck followed us, clearly thinking we had duck food.
I suddenly and somewhat strangely fell off the blogging wagon after Inktober (also October) ended, and I am not entirely sure why–but I may speculate in another post.
But let’s talk about snacking. I have had some decent days and some bad days. It’s kind of balanced out but the end result is my weight is frozen right back around 171-172 pounds, instead of under 170 and continuing to trend downward.
Tomorrow is Monday, the start of a new work week, but I have booked the week off, so I am going to make sure I stick to healthy meals and little to no snacking OR ELSE. The good news is most of the snacks have already been consumed, so I just need to avoid buying more when I’m at the store. I can do this.
I’m reasonably sure I can do this.
And the haiku, this time about actual snacks:
Seldom sated by Satanic salty snacks
Potato chips yum
How can you only eat one?
Entire bags gone
Pretty much the same as yesterday snack-wise, so I won’t repeat the full list here. I was a little more active. We’ll see if the scale screams in the morning. I was down 0.4 pounds today, which was nice.
I suspect the snacking will diminish as the week progresses. Really!
Today’s haiku (about National Novel Writing Month, about which I will write more soon) is below.
50,000 words or less
Write a short novel
You have twenty-eight days now
Do this? Good fiction.
Twenty-eight days later (!) I finally came up with something for the prompt BULKY and here it is! This leaves only THROW to complete the set and win the satisfaction of doing an entire month of doodles.
Although the blog posts make for dull reading, it seems that doing a daily check-in on my snacking helps curb it and not doing a daily check-in results in snacking and plenty of it.
So I am back with the daily check-in. I will either try to spice things up by adding a haiku to each, for example, or move the check-ins to a journal program that no one else can see and is thus spared from. I will decide soon.
For today, not an auspicious start but it could have been worse (the brownies are now gone). The snack total:
A chocolate almond
A chocolate almond peanut butter cup (chocolate and almonds were apparently today’s theme)
A few crackers
Some veggie straws
Tomorrow I will try to go snack-free again, for real. For sure.
Haiku:
The Evil That Snacks Do
They fatten your hips
And everything else as well
Yummy snacks are bad
This one took way longer than it should have because I kept reworking the whole thing, adding stuff, removing it, putting it back. And then I forgot to add stars to the sky, but it probably works better without them, anyway. Serendipity!
