Remember, way back when, on the day before yesterday, we touched on the mid-50s weather and blue skies. That was an outlier. Since then, it has looked like this, with variations of wind, rain, flurries and cold.
There was sun in the forecast today, but it was not to be. Give it this, though, late in the day there were at least low clouds, creating some sense of distinctiveness to the sky. Usually it is just … gray.
Ninety-three days until spring arrives.
The day wad full of email. Want to hear about that? I had several running conversations via email. Some of them quite enlightening. Others required multiple drafts, just to get the tone right. The highlight of the day, probably the week, was that The Yankee came by and sat in my office for lunch and typed up notes for her next meeting. An extra hour with the best company on campus. Sure, her office is one floor above mine — directly above it, in fact — but she spent the time with me instead.
I rode 22 miles this evening. At first there were technical difficulties with the Bluetooth. We have two smart trainers. Sometimes, when we’re using them both, they aren’t so smart.
She was doing a precise and measured watts exercise, see, and I wanted to go fast. And between the computer, the iPad and the two Bluetooth connections to the trainers, she went fast and, for the first half of my workout, I went slow. At least I got to see a (virtual) sunset.
When The Yankee finished her workout I continued for another 12 miles before dinner. Still slow. So maybe it was just me, after all. Seems odd, really. I realized last night that I was due a ride really wanted to ride my bike. I hadn’t turned a pedal since Monday. Explains why my legs felt so light and airy yesterday and today — ready to conquer anything! And then, tonight, *comical deflating sound.*
But a slow hour on the trainer is still an hour on the bike.
It was a shame that Robby Novak had to grow up. (He’s 18 or so now.) They ended that amazing series so he could concentrate on being a kid, and that makes perfect sense in every respect of course. Still, you might have found yourself hoping that they’d pass the torch. You could have written a storyline about that — a storyline of positivity, of course.
I remember when I was first introduced to this interview, some 12 or so years ago, perhaps. It came to me as part of a conversation about the larger message, the work incomplete, and the issue at hand. All of that was, and is, true. And the interview is remarkable. The first thing you notice is the composition of the shot. But it won’t be the last thing you notice.
This was an important interview, absolutely worth your time. Go ahead and bookmark it if you can’t watch it all right now, but do watch it. And then, maybe, like me, be grateful that we have places available to dip our toes into such important source material.
The world needs more three-day weekends. I say that with all of the respect today deserves. There are a great many important people and ideas to celebrate. We could only benefit by having more opportunities to acknowledge and learn, and our communities would be better for the service. Having a few more four-day work weeks would be a nice byproduct, sure, but that’s not the point I’m after here. I figure one a month, March through October, would be a fine civic contribution.
And, on some of those days, we’d even have nice weather. Law of averages and all that. Saturday we had some sun early. It was gray and cold all day Sunday. It rained most of today. The next seven days we’ll be between 28 and 53 degrees. We might get some sun two or three of those days. We might get some snow or rain on three of those days.
Ninety more days until spring.
We played a few hands on dominos yesterday afternoon. The cat, who only swatted at the tiles one time, managed to eek out a win.
Which makes this as good a place as any to put this week’s installment of the most popular feature on the blog. It’s time to check in with the kitties.
A few days ago I was able to catch Phoebe in shadow and light. It’s a moody image, both dark and mysterious and bright and shiny. Also, stay away from her tennis ball.
Poseidon has placed an order online for a deliver, and he’s spending a fair amount of time waiting on the delivery guy to bring it to him.
I guess he didn’t spring for the overnight delivery. Smart cat.
He got a bit trapped the other night. This cat, that always wants to go outside — they’re strictly indoor pets — has to have his under-the-cover time to keep warm, you see. And if a fuzzy blanket has been deployed Phoebe will find her way to sit on it. So Saturday night …
He looks thrilled by that development, doesn’t he? Look at those eyes. He’s positively delighted to find his blanket time being intruded upon. He allowed me to take three quick photos before he left in disgust.
This is the section where I’m sharing things that, judged too good to close, have been sitting in open tabs for far too long. Today’s first tab features a poem. I ran across it near the end of 2021. That’s a long time to have a tab open, in my estimation. (But I’ve got older tabs, though, as you’ll eventually see.) Lovely poem though.
Keep your faith in beautiful things;
in the sun when it is hidden,
in the Spring when it is gone.
And then you will find that Duty and Service and Sacrifice—
all the old ogres and bugbears of —
have joy imprisoned in their deepest dungeons!
And it is for you to set them free —
the immortal joys that no one —
No living soul, or fate, or circumstance—
Can rob you of, once you have released them.
It was written by Roy Rolfe Gilson, Spanish-American War veteran, newspaperman, author and, finally, an Episcopal rector. Born in Iowa, in 1875, Rev. Gilson died in 1933, and is buried in Maryland, where he had served in a parish. He wrote for papers in Michigan. He’s quoted in his obituary. “The best known of my works is ‘In the Morning Glow‘, and is not a child’s book, but an attempt to preserve in words something of that exquisite loveliness of the American home as it has been in its simplicity, and never more beautiful than when seen through the eyes of a little child, to whom the father is a hero and the mother a heroine, and even the toy soldiers have an identity and name.
“It is never the bizarre or unusual that makes me wish to work, but the poetry and comedy in everyday life, in the common lot … If my stories are idyllic, it is not because I wish to write pretty things, but because I have a friendly eye for those secret quests on which we pass each other disguised in foolishness, but wearing beneath a lovely raiment of dreams.”
You can read the entire book, which he published in 1908, at that link.
(So I guess I’ll have that tab open for a while … )
(I just read the first chapter — sweet and innocent and charmingly sentimental, but you knew what was coming. I’ll be reading the rest.)
If memory serves, I googled this because of something I read in a Quora answer about some job interview techniques. I’d never heard of this, neumonic, or seen the concept spelled out, and so it seemed like something to learn about.
The STAR method is a structured manner of responding to a behavioral-based interview question by discussing the specific situation, task, action, and result of the situation you are describing.
The STAR method is an interview technique that gives you a straightforward format you can use to tell a story by laying out the Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
Situation: Set the scene and give the necessary details of your example. Task: Describe what your responsibility was in that situation. Action: Explain exactly what steps you took to address it. Result: Share what outcomes your actions achieved.
By using these four components to shape your anecdote, it’s much easier to share a focused answer, providing the interviewer with “a digestible but compelling narrative of what a candidate did,” says Muse Career Coach Al Dea, founder of CareerSchooled. “They can follow along, but also determine based on the answer how well that candidate might fit with the job.”
I suspect this structure is useful in some circumstances. But in others, well, there are a lot of odd interview … let’s call them techniques … out there.
And now I can close these two tabs, meaning on one of my phone’s browsers I now only have … 40 tabs open. Progress!
I had a 30-mile ride on Saturday, including some outrageous (for me) power numbers. To be honest, I am not yet clear on how to interpret these things. Occasionally my watts look more impressive than others, and I’ll google them, just to see how they all measure up. On those days, I have almost-weekend-warrior sort of numbers.
For instance, Saturday I hit 1,048 watts on a sprint. What’s that mean? It means I was standing up and going hard while simultaneously trying to keep my bike in the trainer. That’s pretty close to my recorded maximum. Apparently world-class sprint track cyclists can touch 2,200 watts. So … I’m not that guy.
But then I was going up a hill and looked at the watts in the HUD graphic and …
That’s on a climb and, for me, impressive. I am in no way a climber, but I have lately been getting over small punchy hills in an almost-timely fashion. I’ve just had brief moments of good legs the last few days, basically. There’s something to be said for riding a lot. And that something is “Your legs will feel tired all of the time, but when you get them moving … ”
2023 Zwift route tracker: After today’s 25-mile ride I have completed 34 of the routes on Zwift, and there are 86 to go.
cycling / Friday / video — Comments Off on Riding my way into a three-day weekend 13 Jan 23
I had a meeting first thing this morning. The regular monthly meeting deal. At least I can attend virtually. Pretty much downhill from there. That’s Friday heading into a three-day weekend for ya.
What the world needs now is more three-day weekends. It is a thing that there’s just too little of.
I saw a job ad today, because I spend a little time each week looking at job ads for students, that was remote, but in Washington D.C. And you had to be in the office the two core days of the week. I didn’t know what those days were, but this operation defined them as Tuesday and Wednesday. You also had to be in the office every other Thursday.
And, probably if you got into the interview process, they’ll tell you to be there twice on days heading into a full moon. But you can report to the auxiliary office on days after the stock market closes even.
Who is keeping track of these comings and goings?
Our stated policy, admittedly in a line of work that requires some human interaction, is that you can work from home one day a week, but it has to be a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. There was also a lengthy process that you had to work your way through, a policy meant to make HR happy and, possibly, to discourage the effort from anyone else. Some people take advantage. Others need to be there all of the time. There’s no equitable solution, but at least there was the effort.
Happily, the honor system is still in place, and we can all be professional about these things. Everyone wants to do the work, everyone is findable. Everything gets done. All the boxes get checked off the list, like that meeting, for instance.
Had a nice ride this evening. Sometimes I wonder if I do this just for those few minutes right after you’re done. The heart rate is still up, the endorphins are moving, but you can breathe again, and nothing has gotten sore yet. Those 10 or 12 minutes are pretty special. Anyway, I pedaled through 31 miles to start the weekend. (What a great sentence.)
My avatar was doing about 30 miles an hour there. I don’t look hardly as graceful, for whatever that’s worth. The most important thing is that I crossed off six more stages from the Zwift list. (There are 121 stages, I’m going to do 120 of them. Hopefully most of them during this offseason.) Just 92 to go.
Zwift is funny. Some of these course are realistic. Some are former world championship courses, or other famous locations in the world. Some are in the city, some in the countryside. Sometimes you see things designers included for a bit of ambiance. Like, for instance, this little stretch of one of the Makuri Islands routes. There’s that mountain off in the distance, and then, suddenly, a wild boar is running alongside.
And then, on another course, it just gets absurd. You’re riding through …
I don’t know what the legal system on the fictious Makuri Islands are like, but this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. On the tracker maps, the Makuri Islands use the Solomon Islands as a stand-in, for whatever reason. Tomorrow, I’ll be riding in the North of England.
Pretty great weekend plan, if you ask me. What are your weekend plans?
We had the fog earlier, the snow tomorrow, the rain today. This was the view looking back up the street. I had to wait several seconds to get a shot with the road empty. And then I waited for this guy trudging up the street. You wonder where he’s going, and how he feels about it in the rain. But you only wonder for a moment, because he’s blurry and still something of an abstraction.
You’d think more on it if you could make out details of him and his trudge.
The composition, then, was entirely a choice.
Anyway, I like the way raindrops sit on glass. They both emphasize and distract from what’s going on in their background.
Did a quick bike ride this evening, just ticking off stages on Zwift. (Twenty down, 101 to go.) There’s no point to this, other than to do it, which is the point of everything.
I’m presently working on two cycling goals, both integral to waiting out the winter and rainy weather.
I have made a spreadsheet, you see, to chart my bike riding progress this year. It shows that I am, right now, well ahead of my daily projections, which is to be expected, frankly. It’ll only be later in the year when the daily trendlines become a challenge.
The other challenge will be in riding all of those Zwift stages. The ones I ticked off the list tonight were the first ones with slight climbs in them. They’ll only get longer, and more challenging from here.
Easy night, otherwise. Just trying to glide into the weekend. There’s only Friday to go!
And I will see you then. Until then, check out my Mastodon count. There’s always something useful there. For example …
A new semester began today. A new semester is underway. I am counting them on the access panel in my office. Each trident marks a semester. There’s a lot of memories and successful students in each. I wonder what sort of successes we’ll pack in the newest addition.
That’s a lot of semesters!
Had a nice bike ride on Saturday. One of our friends joined us on Zwift and that made us fast. Somehow I had 13 mile splits averaging 28+ mph. That’s just silly.
And while I was working hard trying to keep up, I had this idea …
Now I can capture videos of my virtual rides! Aren’t you thrilled?
Anyway, I got in 36 miles on Saturday. I didn’t ride yesterday, but I should have, so I did a quick 20 miles immediately after work, today.
More importantly, it is time for the most popular feature on the site. It’s time to check in with the kitties. (They had a busy day napping and cuddling yesterday, by the way.)
Here’s Phoebe, beating up one of her toys. Grab it in your front paws and kick it into submission by your back paws. Excellent strategy, for the most part. And it looks cute, but those little feet and claws will give you a beating!
It was a poor substitute for her favorite spring, which has been lost for a few days. I found it last night. She chased it around and under a chair. I rescued it for her. We started talking about mimicking it with other springs, maybe it has the right number of loops or something. While we wondering about that, she promptly lost it again. No idea where it is, as of this writing.
I know where it isn’t. Poseidon is, very helpfully, looking for it as well. He tells us it isn’t in the dryer.
Every day I open a thing — a closet, a cabinet, the refrigerator or some other appliance — and then close it. Then I open it and close it again, just to make sure that guy didn’t sneak in while I blinked.
It isn’t that I blink slow, but he moves fast.
I’m trying a new thing. I’m closing tabs. (I know! Crazy, right? Next you’ll find me cleaning out under sinks and vacuuming beneath bookcases … )
Anyway, there are a lot of tabs open in my browser(s). I bet you might have a similar problem. Some of them have been open for ages, and ages. Rather than lose them altogether, I am bookmarking some and closing them. (Novel!) And others should be shared, and then closed. So here we are. Today’s contenders.
“We believe we see the world as it is,” she writes. “We don’t. We see the world as we need to see it to make our existence possible.”
The same goes for fish. Only the top layers of the oceans are illuminated. The “sunlight zone” extends down about seven hundred feet, the “twilight zone” down another twenty-six hundred feet. Below that — in the “midnight zone,” the “abyssal zone,” and the “hadal zone” — there’s only blackness, and the light created by life itself. In this vast darkness, so many species have mastered the art of bioluminescence that Widder estimates they constitute a “majority of the creatures on the planet.” The first time she descended into the deep in an armored diving suit called a wasp, she was overwhelmed by the display. “This was a light extravaganza unlike anything I could have imagined,” she writes. “Afterwards, when asked to describe what I had seen, I blurted, ‘It’s like the Fourth of July down there!'”
Bioluminescent creatures produce light via chemical reaction. They synthesize luciferins, compounds that, in the presence of certain enzymes, known as luciferases, oxidize and give off photons. The trick is useful enough that bioluminescence has evolved independently some fifty times. Eyes, too, have evolved independently about fifty times, in creatures as diverse as flies, flatworms, and frogs. But, Widder points out, “there is one remarkable distinction.” All animals’ eyes employ the same basic strategy to convert light to sensation, using proteins called opsins. In the case of bioluminescence, different groups of organisms produce very different luciferins, meaning that each has invented its own way to shine.
[…]
Scales, like Widder, worries that the bottom of the ocean will be wrecked before many of the most marvelous creatures living there are even identified. “The frontier story has always been one of destruction and loss,” she writes. “It is naïve to assume that the process would play out any differently in the deep.” Indeed, she argues, the depths are particularly ill-suited to disturbance because, owing to a scarcity of food, creatures tend to grow and reproduce extremely slowly. “Vital habitat is created by corals and sponges that live for millennia,” she writes.
And if we’re going to learn anything — we’re not, but if we were gonna — it ought to be that there’s an interconnectedness to all of this that is fragile, and important. Even among all of those different zones.
Unlike some services (looking at you, iCloud), Gmail is pretty lenient with its free tier. You get 15GB of storage between Gmail and Google Drive, and for many people, it’s good enough. But a lot of people have been using Gmail for a decade or more now, and it’s not hard to accumulate 15GB of data over that kind of timespan.
Once you do hit the 15GB cap, you won’t be able to add files to Google Drive, and eventually, emails won’t hit your Gmail inbox. If you’ve been finding it harder and harder to avoid paying Google for more storage, here are some of the best ways to quickly free up space.
It is a slide show, but it is one of the more useful slideshows, if you’re in a space saving mode.
There. One of my phone browsers is now down to 43 tabs. It is good to make progress.
And we continue making progress in the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my CDs in my car. In order, that is. Not all at once. That’d be … noisy.
But some of it would sound good! That’s why I’m listening to them individually and, here, I’m just writing a few notes. These aren’t reviews, but just for fun and filler, he said 1,075 words into this post. Anyway, this installment is a greatest hits, and it seems weird, somehow, to go on and on about a record that was full of charting hits.
So let’s get to it quickly, then. Greatest Hits and their massive success aside, some of these Tears for Fears tracks were juuuuust a tiny bit before my time, initially. Oh, the big ones I know well, and you do too! But there was a sense of achievement in discovering new-to-me and thoughtful and quality Tears for Fears songs. “Woman in Chains” peaked at 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. Lovely song.
“Mad World” was not a hit in the 1980s, which was why I listened to it for the first time in 1996-or-so, but it did get some spins in 2004, reaching number 30 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and topped the Adult Alternative Songs chart. Then it landed in a video game commercial, was the subject of a few successful covers and appeared on a game show. It’s become something of a standard filler, I guess?
“Laid So Low” was the single off the actual greatest hits. And, sure, it was released in 1992, but this is quintessential 1980s. It was a top 20 Euro hit, settled in the top 40 in Canada and elsewhere. The song was a top 20 hit in the UK, France, Italy and Poland; a top 40 hit in Canada, Germany and the Netherlands; and reached the top 10 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart.
Curt Smith wasn’t in the band at the time, so that song was a Roland Orzabal special. He kept the band name active during the rest of the 1990s, but 30 million unit sales means you get back together, eventually. After nine years of silence, they started talking, playing and writing together again.
“The Tipping Point” was a project that took seven years to produce, but it came out to good reviews in 2001 and made the top 10 in a lot of national charts, including the U.S. It also hit number one on the US Billboard’s Top Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums and Top Album Sales charts.
Not bad for two guys climbing into their 60s, he said, hopefully, from halfway through his 40s.
