September 1, 2023 · 23:06

Past Labor Day Travels – September 01st

The 2008 Worldcon was in Denver. Opportunities abounded. The Long Suffering Wife had relatives there and others could come out at the same time to visit and see their first convention. There was a trip to Pike’s Peak and a day of white water rafting. (Both were fantastic!) We visited the Garden of the Gods. (Also fantastic!)

The convention center and our hotel were right near downtown Denver and the state capitol building, so we played tourist for a while.

Gorgeous architecture!

All in all this was one of the better family vacation trips. Denver’s a nice place, even if they could use a little bit more oxygen sometimes.

Leave a comment

Filed under Photography, Travel

August 31, 2023 · 22:53

Past Labor Day Travels – August 31st

Some years the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) is held outside of North America. In those cases, because like it or not, the majority of fans who attend Worldcons come from the US and Canada, there’s a second convention, the North American Science Fiction Convention, or NASFiC, somewhere in North America. For example, this year the Worldcon is in China, so the NASFiC was in Winnipeg. Both Worldcon and NASFiC are run by the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). NASFiCs tend to be smaller in terms of attendance than Worldcons and they don’t give out Hugo Awards or other awards – they’re Worldcons’ baby sibling for those who can’t afford the time and/or the money to travel overseas.

In 2005 the Worldcon was in Glasgow (where it’s going to be again in 2024, we really hope to be there this time) and the NASFiC was in Seattle. We took a family trip to Seattle in August, but NASFiC was in July, so we missed it.

In 2006 the Worldcon was in Los Angeles (easy! right?) and I was there for about a half hour, literally. The family attended, but I was in the middle of my MBA at Pepperdine University and couldn’t afford the time even if it was just down the freeway. I’m told that I was also suffering from a severe case of shingles, but I have absolutely no memory of it. Which means it must have been really bad, so thank goodness my brain short circuited and didn’t retain those memories!

In 2007 the Worldcon was in Japan, so we were back off to NASFiC. It was held in Colinsville, IL, a small suburb of St. Louis. Normally we might have skipped it, but our son was stationed at Scott Air Force Base just a few miles away, so we got to kill several birds with one stone by attending.

I don’t remember the convention as being anything spectacular, but some of the sightseeing was. I remember fondly my visits to Hannibal, MO as a kid and I’ve always been a huge fan of Mark Twain and his works. It was great to take the family there.

Leave a comment

Filed under Fandom, Photography, Science Fiction, Travel

August 30, 2023 · 23:05

Orange Super Blue Moon Rising

We interrupt our traipsing through past Worldcon trips to bring you today’s “Blue Supermoon” rising!

You couldn’t possibly have missed all of the hype. But the short (and factual) description is that tonight the Moon was full (happens every 29.5 days, more or less), it was a tiny percentage closer to Earth than average (its orbit is an ellipse, not a circle, so sometimes it’s a bit closer, sometimes it’s a bit farther away, perfectly normal and routine) which means it was a tiny percentage brighter than average, and it was the second full moon in a calendar month (which happens on average every couple of years because our calendar is weird and irregular and lumpy), and tonight all three of those things happened more or less simultaneously. The press had a field day.

First of all, the camera (and hidden image processing software) in the iPhone 13 doesn’t quite know what to do with an bright orange super blue Moon on a dark-ish, dusk-ish background. It does its best.

The good news is that it did better this time on focusing on the Moon instead of the telephone pole and trees. Not great, mind you, but better.

The good camera (Canon Rebel XT DSLR with a 300mm Tamron lens) is lousy in full auto mode being even older and more computationally primitive than the iPhone. But put it in manual mode and shoot a series of pictures with varying exposures and manually focusing, then something in that series is going to get close.

This is a LOT like what it looked like in terms of color and contrast. And yes, just coming up through the turbulent, hot, pea soup atmosphere over downtown Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley it does look that distorted and misshapen.

As it gets up a bit and we’re not viewing it through quite so much icky atmosphere, the Moon rounds up and starts to get bright. Like really, really bright.

Which confuses the crap out of the camera, which sees all of that black and wants to do a 1/2 or 3/4 second exposure. Knowing (a little bit) better, I overrode it for a 1/250 second exposure. Still too bright! Should have gone for 1/1000 second. Or shorter.

The iPhone never gets over that and constantly overexposes the scene. But it does a decent job of catching the city spread out down below.

Now that it’s way up overhead, even a 1/1000 second exposure would be way, way too long. I don’t think my older (13 years? 15 years?) DSLR will do an exposure short enough to show detail on any full moon, not just a super duper blue Moon. Not without going to some sort of neutral density filter to cut down on the light.

Regolith is reflective as all get out, especially for just vacuum cured grey dust and pulverized rock!

Leave a comment

Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space

August 29, 2023 · 23:42

Past Labor Day Travels – August 29th

The family trip to the 2004 Worldcon was memorable for some good reasons but also for a handful of lousy ones.

Worldcon was in Boston, a city I dearly love visiting, having spent a lot of time there when I was in high school in Vermont. Prior to going to Worldcon we stopped in Vermont and saw family, which was great.

In between there was a trip to Montreal, which was fine right up until the moment when we came back to our rental car, found the windows smashed out and my briefcase and our luggage gone, and had to deal with the French-Canadian authorities and rental car folks to get a replacement car. Not the greatest first impression with the family for Montreal. (For what it’s worth, Worldcon was in Montreal five years later, in 2009, and we were back and had a great time.)

This bridge, the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge, familiar to anyone who’s driven through Boston, is infamous in our family. We’ve driven across it over, and over, and over, and over, back and forth, trying to get from downtown to Logan International Airport. “But Paul, I’m very familiar with Boston and you don’t go over that bridge when going from downtown to Logan,” you’re saying.

I know!

Thus, the problem.

Leave a comment

Filed under Fandom, Photography, Travel

August 28, 2023 · 22:33

Past Labor Day Travels – August 28th

Favorite author John Scalzi had a nice post on his website today about his first science fiction convention, twenty years ago today.

As I was recollecting yesterday, Labor Day weekend has quite often been our family vacation weekend at Worldcon, and it turns out we were at that convention in Toronto as well.

In addition to just traveling for the convention, we also go for ballgames, amusement parks, and other touristy activities. If you go to Toronto and get down by the ballpark, look up!

You never can tell who might be heckling you.

While Mr. Scalzi was reminscing on twenty years, I started thinking about my first convention. It was fifteen years earlier than… No, wait, it was twenty-five years earlier?

That can’t be right! I’m not THAT freakin’ old! That would be forty-five years ago. 2023 minus 1978 is … forty-five years.

Shazzbott!

At least three years later I had a better camera.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Fandom, Photography, Travel

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.)

 

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

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!

 

 

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

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!

4 Comments

Filed under Computers, Freakin' Idiots!, Paul