Author Archives: momdude

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About momdude

Space cadet | Family dude | Photographer | Music lover | Traveler | Science fiction fan | Hugo Award nominee | Writer | 5x NASA Social participant | KC Chiefs fan | LA Kings fan | Senior Director of Finance & Administration for ALS Network | Member & former staff Finance Officer at the Commemorative Air Force SoCal Wing | Hard core left-wing liberal | Looking for whatever other shenanigans I can get into
August 27, 2023 · 23:28

Past Labor Day Travels – August 27th

The end of August. Labor Day weekend approaching in the US. So often that has meant getting ready to head off to WorldCon. Not this year.

Back in the day, the Worldcon trip was the annual family vacation. And when the whole family traveled, it wasn’t just for the convention. There were amusement parks and other tourist attractions to see.

And way, way back in the day, the digital cameras were far more primitive and the file resolutions were much smaller.

640×480 pixels? Really? Pretty sure my watch does about an order of magnitude better these days.

(Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, for the Chicago Worldcon in 2000.)

 

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Filed under Photography, Travel

August 26, 2023 · 23:31

Camo Bunny

We are in the middle of a desert, after all.

Following last weekend’s big storm, this guy’s been out there soaking up sun.

Which sounds like a perfectly good way to see the neighborhood from the air as one of those hawks takes you off to be fed to their chicks, but I’m not a rabbit, so what do I know?

I did notice in the most zoomed pictures that there’s a grey bump of some sort on its neck. It almost looks like a stud or something on a collar, but these bunnies are wild. It must be some sort of wart or boil? Maybe that’s why the hawks leave it alone? It might be diseased or tainted?

My wildlife knowledge is barely at Boy Scout levels, and I haven’t been a Boy Scout for about 53 years.

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Filed under Critters, Photography

August 25, 2023 · 23:15

Camo Lizard

“How are the lizards doing?” I hear you saying. (Well, the voices that I’m hearing in my head are saying something – maybe that’s it, maybe it’s not.) “We haven’t seen them in a while.”

True. One thing I note this year is that it’s been a year or so since I’ve seen them hiding under the card in the driveway. For a couple of years there were often certain lizards who would hid in the shade under the car while still being on that hot concrete. But not this year.

One of the lizards I’ve seen regularly in the back yard this summer is this little dude who is very well camouflaged! Can you even see it in this picture?

There it is! It really blends in.

I spotted it because it ran across the dirt and then froze as I got near. The motion gave it away. If it had just stayed still I would probably have walked right by and not have seen it.

Then it started doing this open mouth pose. Panting because it was trapped in the sun while I was standing there? Or going into a threat mode to scare me off and show me how tough it is?

Could go either way!

 

 

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Filed under Critters, Photography

August 24, 2023 · 22:39

Art – August 24th

Balance. I think about it a lot.

On the one hand I can get really, really focused. Which can be good, it gets things done.

On the other hand, being that focused means that you can miss other problems, other threats, other things that need to be taken care of and might be just as important. Which can be bad, it leads to mistakes.

I sometimes get to where I was an hour or so ago and I have nothing for my daily post and I don’t want to take the time. I’m focused. I have no thoughts to share. I’ve used up all of my current pictures. I’m not going to get into the politics or news of the day because that’s a bottomless well of toxic sludge. I just want to stay focused and get things done and off of my plate!

Then I remember. College. Physics major in addition to working full time plus to make ends meet. Focused. Laser focused. I had to take a breadth class and the only thing I could find at 08:00 AM, when I got off work from the graveyard shift, was an Art 101 class. UC Irvine was legendary for “performance art.” (I’m pretty sure I’ve ranted at length about this elsewhere on this site, so search for it. If I haven’t, someone let me know, it’s a fantastic story. For now, just the summary version.) I was skeptical. To say the least. I wanted instructions to follow. I wanted to learn to draw or paint or sculpt or whatever. Get my “easy A” and get out.

As Coach Corso says, “Not so fast, my friend!”

The short version is that I learned to think. I learned to look at problems differently. I learned a skill that I can occasionally click on in my brain, to see things differently, to “think outside the box,” so to speak. And like the old joke about the guy who tells his guru that he’s too busy to meditate for an hour and gets told instead to meditate for two hours, the fact that I didn’t think I could afford the time to play around and come up with something to post tonight meant that I HAD to stop and make that time anyway.

So I did.

Nothing fancy, taking a bit of a generic photo from earlier in the week, transforming it, twisting it, transmorphing it, playing around for a while with this and that, listening to some weird ass music (Erasure, John Michel Jarre, and Enigma primarily) until I got to something that looked cool.

Balance.

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Filed under Art, Paul

August 23, 2023 · 23:16

A Special Level Of Hell

There truly should be a special level of Hell reserved for software executives who make major upgrades to perfectly functional software with zero warning.

I’m looking at you, Adobe Acrobat.

A program that I use dozens and dozens and dozens of times a day. If I’m churning out reports, easily 100+ files a day. I’ve used it for years, it’s all muscle memory for 99% of what I do, and for that other 1% I’ve got a pretty good grip on how Acrobat is organized so it doesn’t take long to figure out where to go to get something new done.

Until it’s…not.

Until I get a bunch of windows telling me how *new* and *wonderful* and *user friendly* the new version is and how it will make my work so much faster!

Maybe. Maybe once I put a few hundred hours into using it. Maybe once I sit down with some tutorials or “play” with it to first learn how to do the same tasks I already need to do a thousand times a day, then figure out what the *new* and *wonderful* version has that will let me do things so much more efficiently. Design my own menus? Great! (Later!) Set up custom commands and macros? Fantastic! (Later!) Design my own pages! Amazing! (Later!)

Right this second? I need to get my work done and I’m already under enough time pressure so I could swallow a lump of coal and shit out a diamond. So when tasks that normally take 3-4 minute now take 8-10 (or more) minutes, I’m not happy. When I have to stop and think and hunt and learn with almost every keystroke to do even the most fundamental tasks all freakin’ day long, I’m less than impressed.

The one and only saving grace, and thank god I glimpsed something about it and I remembered seeing it so I had a chance of hunting for it and finding where it was hidden, was a command something like “Turn off new version.” Hit that, pray for the best, and suddenly my fingers don’t feel broken and useless and misguided anymore.

So today went better, at least on that front. And then when I was working through something this evening my screen was hijacked and Adobe wanted to know if pretty please, wouldn’t I like to take a short survey to tell them *WHY* I was foolish and blind enough to roll back their interface, why I was so much of a Luddite that I would abandon the spectacular, new, and wonderful benefits of the new version? This was critical! They needed to know!

Boy, did I tell them!

They had limits on how much text I could put into the response boxes, so they didn’t get ALL of the comments above. Just the highlights. Maybe a little more swearing.

Do I want to leave them my phone number and email address so they can contact me if they have any follow up questions? Sure.

I’m praying they have follow up questions!

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Filed under Computers, Freakin' Idiots!, Paul

August 22, 2023 · 23:38

No Context For You – August 22nd

When attacking a problem it’s important to be able to judge when you’re in way over your head and need to call for help.

It’s a skill that I’m working on. I tend to wait way too long. Maybe this will help me learn.

Calling for help was almost an accident today, triggered by me doing something stupid that made me think the problem had suddenly gotten much, MUCH worse. It hadn’t and I soon realized that, but I also realized that I had run out of ideas on the original problem. Since help had been called for by that time, so be it. Let the experts do their work and hope that they didn’t find it was something simple that I had completely overlooked.

It wasn’t. Instead they found a Sarlacc living under the house.

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Filed under Castle Willett, Paul, Photography

August 21, 2023 · 23:41

Skyscapes – August 21st

The emergency alerts on the phone for being in a flash flood watch zone went off three times last night. Tough night. There was flooding out in Ventura County, but nothing near here. Better safe than sorry, I guess.

What’s responsible for the weirdness for the rest of the day? Who knows? The weird sleep detritus? Leftover ions from the hurricane? Leftover aftershocks from the earthquake? Mercury in retrograde?

 

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Filed under Photography, Weather

August 20, 2023 · 23:49

Passing Through The Storm

We’re fine. In our particular neighborhood we haven’t had anything particularly threatening going on, fortunately. Other folks in other areas have been less fortunate, but overall, so far, it seems as if the impacts have been within reason. I haven’t heard of any fatalities or serious injuries due to the storm beyond a couple of traffic accidents probably caused in part by the rain – but that happens any time it rains in SoCal.

I got going early this morning and went out to get our weekly groceries and our Sunday breakfast. It was just starting to rain here, even though it had been raining for several hours further south in Long Beach, Orange County, San Diego, and Mexico.

By late afternoon it had started raining much harder and the wind had come up, but again, nothing disasterous. We got a bit over two inches of rain so far (it’s still raining and expected to continue for the next 10-12 hours) and we saw winds in the 20-25 mph range, but none of the 50-80 mph gusts that were possible. No power outages. A few flooded intersections around town, but we weren’t going out! The National Weather Service said “Stay!” and I did my best golden retriever imitation and stayed!

Of course, in the middle of all of this there was that magnitude 5.1 earthquake about fourty miles from us that rattled me from side to side for about ten seconds and shook up some stuff on the shelves behind me. Who had that on their SoCal Disaster Sunday bingo card?

Meanwhile, there’s street flooding and swift water rescues going on out in Ventura, some very near Camarillo Airport where I’ve spent so much time over the last few years with the CAF SoCal Wing. Today was supposed to be the second day of the Wings Over Camarillo airshow out there (do a search, there are a dozen more posts full of pictures over the years from that show), but that got cancelled last night. Out in the desert and in particular around Death Valley National Park there was some massive flash flooding, but the park had been evacuated over the weekend so no word of any casualties. It might just have the park closed for repairs for a while.

All in all, it could have been a lot worse. And while it still is unstable out there and could still be worse tonight, I think the odds are that SoCal dodged a bullet on this one. I just doubt that it’s going to be another 84 years before it happens again.

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Filed under Los Angeles, Video, Weather

August 19, 2023 · 23:12

The Approaching Storm

The clouds were starting to roll in by sunrise this morning, and it’s been mostly cloudy all day.

Just around sunset, enough clouds broke up to let some amazingly golden rays through.

The storm track has continued to shift a bit to the east, so while we’re still under an official Flood Watch and a Tropical Storm warning, we’re now expecting about 24 hours (roughly noon tomorrow to noon on Monday) of high (but not hurricane force!) winds and a decent amount (3″-ish, probably on the higher side) of rain over that time.

We won’t flood, we’re on top of the hill, but it’s possible there could be some local flash flooding. But we’re not going anywhere, so that shouldn’t be an issue. The biggest threat that I see might be a power outage, but spoiled freezer and refrigerator contents are the worst consequences of that.

Inland in the deserts? Flash flooding is a huge possibility. Places like Death Valley could get more rain in twelve hours tomorrow than they normally get in three years. Flash floods in the past have taken out bridges over dry riverbeds on the interstates heading toward Arizona and Nevada, so that’s a concern. Lots of folks are stuck living near burn areas from brush fires, and with these kinds of rain mudslides are a possibility and they could cause significant damage. Storm surge could cause serious coastal flooding and damage along the coast and out on Catalina Island.

In short, it’s a BIG area and I don’t expect too many issues HERE, but Hilary is a major, powerful, HUGE storm and elsewhere in SoCal it could get really nasty. Let’s hope that it doesn’t.

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Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather

August 18, 2023 · 23:52

Social Media

Obviously, if you want to hear me rant and rave and share pictures and so on, there’s this site. It’s never going away if I’ve got anything to say about it, and I’ve got a ton of control over it. So – always – here.

But other than that? Well, I’ve been on Facebook for years and years and years – that’s more for a lot of exchanges with personal friends from high school, fandom, and these days, work. But you’re welcome there if that’s your thing.

Twitter? That’s been a primary social media outlet for news and political rants and all sorts of daily stuff, but it’s become so toxic that I’m pretty quickly shutting down my efforts there. I’ll still crosspost the daily links to these blog posts, but I don’t think there will be much more.

With Twitter’s destruction, I’ve now set up accounts on Mastodon, Post, Spoutible, and (God help me) Tribel. About 99% of what I’m posting on those sites is that daily crosspost to this site. It might stay that way for a while, I just don’t have the time for much more.

I’m also on Threads and Bluesky. Bluesky is where I’ve started to actually go looking for folks I know and follow from Twitter. The primary reason for that right now is that I’m getting the kind of timely information sharing regarding Hurricane Hilary that I used to get from Twitter regarding breaking news and current events. That might be critical in the next three days or so.

So if you’re on social media, look for me in just about any of those places. But if you have to pick just one, Bluesky’s probably the best bet right now.

If you’re in SoCal or Arizona or Nevada, particularly in the desert where the flash flooding is so likely and the really high rainfall amounts are expected, stay safe!

And now, because you’ve been nice enough to read (or at least scan through) this, here’s a picture of fireworks!

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Filed under Fireworks, Photography, Social Media