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photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
9
Feb 21

All snow all the time

Had a fair amount of snow overnight. We were supposed to get one to three inches. We’d already gone out, around 11 p.m., to shovel the drive. And then, around midnight, the forecast was updated to four to seven inches. I checked before turning in and the driveway and sidewalks were already coated again.

I didn’t shovel again. This morning I just drove over it. A good refresher for what the roads around here look like.

I don’t know anything about cleaning roads, and I’m not sure who does.

We live in the county, and our road isn’t plowed. But the next road gets addressed, and working up to the main road is a progression. Our road was just snow, the next one was a slushy mess, the following road looked like it had just rained. The big four-lane road was basically dry. And that was the best of it, the closer you got to downtown and campus, the more the quality degraded again.

At home, we received this much snow.

We won’t see any temperatures above freezing for a week or more, so this, our first proper snowfall of this winter, won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. This weekend will be bitter cold. And then, if next week’s forecasts are to be believed, we could add another 10 inches to this. And then maybe spring will show up, he laughed, knowing that won’t happen until April.

April.

That’s a long way away.

There are new images on the front page. The general idea is finally coming together. I am quite pleased with it and this will be the style for a while, and I’ll change the photos from time to time. Until I get bored with this idea.

Anyway, click on this photo and you’ll go to the front page and see what I’m talking about.

Now I can spend more time working on another photo project. Good a way as any to while away the winter.

cycling / photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
2
Feb 21

This one confuses the dot org space-time continuum, sorry

There’s a new look to the front page. And now I know what that’s supposed to look like. Click on the image below to check it out.

I’m really looking forward to the next update of the front page — probably in the next week or so. It’ll really hit the theme’s design.

Last night I did an amazing thing. I was riding up a hill on the bike trainer, turning out more watts than the session demanded, because the session didn’t seem especially demanding, and I had a flat. I developed a little pinhole on an indoor ride. So I stopped my ride because you can’t ride on a flat. It was almost dinnertime, anyway. So I’ll just have to re-do that workout later this week.

I looked it up. You can get a flat on a trainer in the traditional ways. But there’s no debris in my tire or in the wheel rim. So this must have been a trainer flat, which means I was super-heating the thing.

Yeah, there probably was something in the wheel that put the little hole in the tube, but it’s more fun to imagine I friction-burned the thing into submission.

(I wrote this part Wednesday, but it pertains to Tuesday and Wednesday.) I almost fell asleep, three or four times, watching a car chase tonight. Because I was tired, and it was late, and the chase lasted all night, and four hours into the morning.

This is what happened. At 10:19 p.m. we got the notification that NBC LA was in the air following a car. The driver was wanted as a possible suspect in a shooting. The gang division had been following him and he wasn’t going to go easy into that good night. He raced across surface streets, living the charmed life of someone who is ignoring every light, a charmed life until, suddenly it isn’t.

But he managed to work his way through two parts of greater L.A. and onto the interstate system. He raced along the freeways. And then he started going slower. And then slower. And much, much slower. After a time, he would crawl to a stop, the police cars would line up in their traffic stop configuration and he would drive away again.

It was amusing at first, until it became boring. And he did it so much it became amusing again. And then just frustrating. But you’re invested in the thing by then. And that’s the problem, because you figure “I’m invested in this thing now. What’s a satisfactory outcome?” You don’t watch chases for bad things to happen. I don’t want to see any innocent people also on the road getting hurt. I don’t want to see this guy get shot. I also don’t want him to get away. So I, secretly, cheer for a foot chase and then a good solid linebacker-style tackle of the suspect who is, in this case, considered armed and dangerous.

At about 4 a.m., seriously, and after about two hours of slow crawling on three flats, he finally drove the rim off the driver front side of the car. This, as we know, brings the car portion of any chase to its conclusion. Police were content to let this play out on it’s own time because the driver had turned this into a slow-speed chase hours ago. They didn’t want to PIT him, because you don’t want to go nose-to-nose with a guy who is carrying a weapon.

Within five seconds of that rim falling off, and the car going down to its drive axle, the local NBC lost its feed. For about 60-75 seconds NBCLA was offering me one of those video autoplays that play every story other than the one you want.

When I got the feed back the driver was out of the car and standing on the closed highway. He’s got his hands up. He’s facing away from the officers while the cops are doing whatever cops do there. It takes forever. The dude puts his arms down. They command him to raise his arms again, he turns and yells to them back over his shoulder, and raises his arms. Until he lowers them again. More yelling. He raises them. He lowers them. On and on this goes.

Until the helicopter had to leave again for fuel consumption. (This was their third helo of the chase, mind you.) So after a six hour chase, about 5:40 of THAT being on camera, NBCLA couldn’t even get the apprehension.

Their story this morning notes he had two outstanding wants for felony burglary. No weapon was found.

Guess who’s dragging around tired eyes today?

IU / podcast / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
26
Jan 21

Light day around here

Web work today, and if only I meant Spider-Man work. But I updated a lot of pages I update around the web for work things, leaving only many of these pages un-updated. There are two glaring areas on this site to deal with, and I’m going to get into one of those this evening.

I did add one thing to this site, on the front page. Careful observers will note one of the old photos has been replaced by a new photo. Check it out. Maybe you’ll see it. You’ll definitely see it. There are only so many photographs to look at in that display. Maybe you’ll notice it.

So there’s a new student loan grace period in place thanks to an executive order President Biden signed last week. So I talked with Phil Schuman, who is the executive director of Financial Wellness and Education at Indiana University, to see what this means for alumni, students and potential borrowers.

Dozens of people will listen to this, and you should, too.

On Topic with IU · On Topic with IU — Student loans with IU's Financial Wellness and Education office

Nationally, student loan debt reached $1.6 trillion dollars last year. Average monthly payments are between $200 and $300 and the U.S. Department of Education says about 20 percent of borrowers are in default. Tough economic times, to be sure.

And I spent part of the afternoon looking for the next podcast idea. And that’s the day. Some days are more fruitful than others, what can you say?

Friday / photo / site — Comments Off
8
Jan 21

A mediation on …

There was a peculiar color in the air — is a phrase that has never been crawled across the web by Google’s spiders. It’s also wrong, in the sense of how we use language, which is why it’s never been written, one supposes. But it is particularly accurate in how we use science.

Color is, you might recall, the range of wavelengths based on how matter behaves in light, each substance’s combination of atoms and electron configuration send signals to the inner bits of the eye. Those signals work their way back to the command center for processing. Rods and cones, brain interpretation. And the brain says “There was a peculiar color in the air.”

So, really, it should be, my eyes and brain were detecting odd things brought on my the angle of the sun and various atmospheric considerations.

What I’m saying is that this usually green shrub held an unusual yellowish hue. So, yeah. There was a peculiar color in the air.

And it just hung there, for much of the day, or at least as long as I stood at the window looking at things, nodding ponderously, re-considering, not for the first time, how light works.

Photons, bouncing off things. What a concept! Once you can wrap your mind around that, the sky — with it’s shorter, smaller wavelengths — is the limit.

I changed the photos on the front page of the site to more generally reflect the season. Three of the photos in the set, including the one below, are from this year.

So click on over to the front page to check out the new look. And check back often, those do get updated.

And have a great weekend! Check back on Monday, when we’ll look in on the cats, and see if we can’t make up something interesting that did or didn’t happen over the weekend.

In the meantime, visit Twitter for more, and check me out on Instagram. And, hey, did you know that Phoebe and Poseidon have an Instagram account? It’s full of timeline-beautifying cuteness. Check them out.

cycling / photo / site / Thursday / video — Comments Off
10
Dec 20

I got in a ride today

It was a spectacularly beautiful day today. The rarity, the miracle, which that can be here this time of year. It was sunny and clear and almost warm. I’m not used to the cold being the norm, but it is the norm for here. I’m used to this being the norm here. It was in the 50s. You could see the sun, and the blue. That’s the way it should be. It’s an unexpected gift here. That’s just sad.

But you take advantage of it. And I did with a late afternoon bike ride.

I rode in shorts! With no gloves! Sigh.

Here’s a clip from a neighborhood part of my route, and the trail I added on at the end just to tick up the odometer a bit.

Kmart closed their two stores here in 2016 and 2017. I don’t know where motorists have been getting their licenses updated since then, but they’re all due a new road test. They were brutal today, so, in that way, it was usual.

This is from a different ride. It took place two or three years ago, and also it was during a different season. Everything was so green! And warm!

Anyway, we’re now essentially caught up with the county’s historic marker series. I ride around and take pictures of the signs and what they’re commemorating. One new marker has been installed recently, and another has been re-installed since I went by it last. So I have two more weeks of this we can still look forward to in this county. And then, perhaps next year, I’ll start riding to the markers in the neighboring counties.

Anyway, click this image to see this post.

Two things: I hate taggers. There’s not enough community service in the world to deliver on taggers. Second, have you ever noticed how every bridge is always the biggest or longest or highest or heaviest? Why must every bridge be superlative? Can’t we just acknowledge the brilliance of the engineering and what they mean, rather than an assessment of their constituent materials?

Anyway, to see all of the markers, just click here.