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adventures / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on I got a sticker today
26
Oct 20

I got a sticker today

Saturday was probably the last fine day for the foreseeable future. Certainly it’s the last time the weather service has had cause to use their sun graphics in the longterm forecasts. So we are settling in for the long grim winter. I guess we’ll be happier about it in mid-April.

I mean, we’ll be pleased with the change to better weather in mid-April, but you, of course, know I’ll look for new and inventive ways to say the same tired things about this gray place, and why it takes that long to burn off the winter here.

Anyway, we enjoyed the sunshine, and the chilly temperatures, that Saturday offered with a nice little bike ride. Here’s some video from the later parts of it:

The sun was nice, and will be missed.

Today we stood under the gray sky and performed our patriotic duty to vote, or as the kids these days are saying, “We did a democracy.” I’ll be working next Tuesday, and we are afforded some time off for the process, but if you can avoid the lines in a fashion that is presumptively more convenient, you avoid the lines in a fashion that is presumptively more convenient.

It started out under a very attractive maple tree:

And it wound up at a door like this:

Along the way some other things happened:

They meant more than the guy who would randomly go “Whoooo! WHO IS READY TO VOTE?!” It’s not a pep rally, friend. But thanks, I guess. Anyway, it took just about an hour. It was easy and inside the office space was a bit perfunctory, practiced, like the last night of a haunted house’s performance, but without the scary part. Aside from a few Boomers, who need to up their mask games, it was well ordered and stress-free.

Early voting in Indiana runs through Nov. 2nd. You can find out the rules for where you are at this link. Then, go educate yourself on the issues — up and down the ballot! — that matter to you, put on a mask and go pull the lever, punch the chad, fill in the bubble or whatever system your local government uses. You, too, can do a democracy!

adventures / cycling / hobby / IU / photo / television / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Sometimes you can get a lot into a Wednesday
21
Oct 20

Sometimes you can get a lot into a Wednesday

Attended a virtual meeting today were the future of the future was definitely not decided. We did hear about other meetings, however. Seminars here, movies there, presentations and workshops from near and far. Everyone is keeping busy as best they can.

After the meeting I recorded some audio. And after recording the audio I took it to the office to edit. And then some of it was uploaded. It is a cycle and it has its place. Keeping busy.

The afternoon was a bit slower than the morning, then. I was able to catch up on email and the news and many of the other attendant things that make up normal days. Even in abnormal times, they’re always there. Always there.

Returned to the house after work and went for a bike ride. It was an easy hour. I pedaled alongside The Yankee as she condensed two days of webinars into an hour of highlights. I could ride like that all day. She talked, I tried to keep up. Usually her training rides are designed to be more brisk. She rides harder and I … try to keep up. So it was a pleasant thing to do, riding along, listening to the conversation.

It was gray and humid and moist. Yes, both adjectives are required here. It was 64 degrees when we left and 61 when we got back in and for some reason I could see my exhalations. It was the first “I can see my breath!” ride of the year. The dew point was very high.

This evening I tried working on three projects. And two of them went nowhere. I need to replace the button on a pair of blue jeans and that’s harder than it should be, apparently. There are a few methods to this, the Internet tells me. One destroys the denim, which seems besides the point. Another is poorly described. The third is pretty straightforward though: Grab the button on either side with pliers and unscrew the thing.

Well, that didn’t work tonight. I managed to ruin another button from a pair of ruined jeans, and since it was dinnertime anyway, I put that project once again on the back burner. We’d cooked everything on the front burners anyway.

I wanted to make a little carrying sling for a small bottle of hand sanitizer to keep in the car, but the initial plan didn’t go according to … well … plan.

So, back to the drawing board, which I don’t have. Maybe that’s the problem. I shouldn’t draw things up in my mind. The specs are never that good up there anyway.

But my third project, it has real potential.

I have to use my university ID for various things on campus. It’s a key, it grants printer access, you check out books with it and so on. I’ve recently decided that maybe I don’t want to carry it around in my wallet. Maybe I don’t want to pull my wallet out every time I need the card. Too many cooties, and who knows how repeated hand wipes will treat the leather.

So I’ve had in mind a few different things I could make as a minimalist card holder. And I’ll probably wind up trying several of them out before I ultimately settle on one. So tonight I started working on the first idea which will be a slimmer version of my homemade business card holders:

I had some leftover wood from those projects which were already perfectly cut to size. To create the depth I ran the jigsaw over the thinnest paint stirrer I could find. Now the glue will cure overnight. Tomorrow evening I’ll sand the thing down and try to find some way to make white alder wood look interesting. And, when it’s done I’ll show you this solution. Because every project comes down to having material to put here, for you, dear reader.

Here are some TV shows the TV people did. This is the morning show, and they are on location, and that seems like an early time of day for a spot like that …

All the stories came together for the news team this week. I believe I counted seven produced pieces within the episode and 10 or 11 different voices all told. This is the pace we’d like to keep for every episode. Sometimes we’re more successful at it than others.

And there’s a really cool little feature in the pop culture show. Carillons are oddly fascinating, once people are reminded to think about them. And a student who has an abiding interest in music sought out the story of the impressive instrument that you can hear on the IU campus.

And that should be enough for now.

More tomorrow, though. And, until then, don’t forget to catch up on Catober, since Phoebe and Poseidon are putting on quite a show. And did you know they have an Instagram account now? Phoebe and Poe have an Instagram account now. Keep up with me on Twitter, and don’t forget my Instagram. There are also some very interesting On Topic with IU podcasts for you, as well.

cycling / history / maps / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on The heights of things
19
Oct 20

The heights of things

This was the sky on Saturday. We were at the post office and I shot this through the sunroof.

Some days you feel like you can reach the clouds, and some days you feel like you need a great big ladder.

Some days you feel like you can reach the clouds, and some days you feel like you need a great big ladder. After lunch we went for a bike ride. I include this picture because I love this face. It’s her mean face, and it’s so stinking cute. Also, it means she’s going to ride fast; that’s a very aero mean face.

It was hard and windy and would have been fast, except it was hard, and windy. I was grateful for the turnaround spot, because we stopped to take a picture, and I could briefly catch my breath.

On the back half of the ride the air started to feel a bit cooler. No weather monitoring station reported it. All the numbers I could consult stayed at a steady 62 degrees, but I was out in it; I could tell the change. I got to the house and was happy to get inside, which was instantly when the bronchoconstriction began.

It was painful to breathe for a few minutes. The worst of it was “Would getting on the ground be better for this?” and “How can I tell if this is getting worse?” But it did not get worse. It hurt to breathe fully in, but I could get air. My heart rate was fine, considering the bike ride. I did not have any muscular or cognitive problems. I had a shock to the system, which began improving by the time I made it to the shower.

By last night it just hurt a bit to breathe all the way in, your classic this-was-irritated-yesterday feeling.

Watched this, with some interest, today. It’s New York, 1896. And not all of this is gone.

The upload and upscale is using a software treatment called neural networking. Mathematical functions, artificial neurons, are transforming the lower sourced input values into a higher quality output. The parameters can be altered because the networks are trained with high-res images that are down-sampled. Eventually, photo pairs, thousands of them, get analyzed and the process helps restore lost details. The information is filled in from what the network has learned. The network sees a face because it has been taught “that’s a face!” and it can flesh it out. A low-res building can show off individual bricks. Definition and depth comes with experience and exposure, just like the rest of us.

Then you speed it up, add some sound for ambiance and give it a little post-concussion color and you’re suddenly back in time. Sorta. Almost. It’s tantalizingly close to close.

Here’s a digitized version of “the original footage.” That’s Trinity Church in the background. By 1896 it was the second tallest building in New York City. It was built in 1846 and held the top spot for the best part of five decades. It gave up tallest building honors just before this footage was made to the New York World Building. (The World Building would come down in the 1950s for better car access to the Brooklyn Bridge.)

You can’t even see Trinity Church from that location today.

If you back up, down Broadway, you can guesstimate where, apparently, Alexandre Promio himself was standing when he filmed that.

Now, this footage was shot in New York City just five years later, in 1901. I think all of this is gone. But as interesting as the buildings and the signs and the carriages can be, the people — the guy that walks into, and then out of, the shot, the kid who isn’t yet sure if you’re supposed to mug for the camera, and then the couple at the end — they are what you’re here for.

… Someone will dig up some social media company’s servers in 2140 or so and figure out how to hook up real technology with this stuff we’re working with and then pioneer a way to extrapolate holograms from 1080 and 4K phone video. Won’t that be revealing …

Probably we’ll never know for sure, but I’m going to assume this camera was set up just to the left, on the sidewalk here. There’s a subway stop at this intersection, but just to the left are a series of those air grates there.

If the date on YouTube is correct, New Yorkers are between the first and second American car show right about there. The New York baseball Giants were bad. That September, William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, and Theodore Roosevelt would become president. The subways were coming along nicely. Everything was beginning to really surge. This is what Manhattan looked like from out in the Hudson about that time. A few blocks back downtown you’d find the city’s tallest building in 1901, the Park Row Building, a proud 391-feet tall, is still with us.

Today, 391-feet puts you … nowhere near New York’s top 100 buildings, of course. Some days you feel like you can reach up and touch 391-feet, and some days you realize you’d need that ladder. Harry Gardiner, the human fly, needed no such help to climb the Park Row Building in 1918. He did it in a suit, too.

Covid-19 / friends / IU / television / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Human beings! We saw some!
14
Oct 20

Human beings! We saw some!

You have to like the colors. The colors are rather glorious in this, our peak time of the leaf turn.

It turns colder tonight, and we’ll have a few cool days. At some point, eventually, it has to rain — there’s a moderate drought on just now — and then the rest of the leaves will fall and it’ll be stigs and twigs and the long, boring sigh of a gray, drab winter.

But those colors are something else today!

We visited with our friends Mike and Kate for a few minutes this evening. I dropped off a bunch of milk jugs that they’ll use to start some container planting project. They’ve got a quiet spread out beyond the suburbs and we stood in their driveway and enjoyed the waning sunlight and the nice warm air and a view of a few acres of trees and their company for a few minutes. Many jokes were made! Some of them at my expense!

Even their neighbor came over to say hello. He said his wife had recently retired from 45 years at the university library. Nice fellow, the neighbor. I see him when I ride through that area on my bike. He’s always outside puttering around with something. That might be the wife’s doing.

After he left we stood around and talked about their upcoming trip to see family. What an exotic adventure they will have this next week. I wonder what that’s like. Going places. Staring at different walls. Hearing different creaks in the floorboards. Pitching in with some little project at their place, rather than your own. Seeing people.

Sometimes it is nice just to see people. Well, some of them. You’d like to see them more. In limited and carefully controlled doses. But, as they say, 2020.

This came up in our visit. Why is this the hip thing to say? Why do people think that January 2021 is going to be any different from Apritoberember 2020? And what do New Year’s Resolutions even mean anymore?

Something to think about, alas.

Here are some shows the news team produced Tuesday evening. New anchor, a first-time interview and other fun stuff:

And here are some programs the sports gang put together, that I forgot to include late last week:

Tomorrow they will produce more sports. I’ll be there. I’ll share them here. Tonight, I don’t have anything else to share, except for the dishes. If you’re interested in helping there, come on over. I’ll be sure to give you plenty of social distancing.

cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on Leaves and a ride
12
Oct 20

Leaves and a ride

I am filling the internet with colorful leaves. Flooding your bandwidth with reds and yellows and greens, before they all turn to burlywood, burnt umber and other shades of … brown. And if you don’t like that, just scroll down, and you’ll find another short story about a bicycle ride.

This is a panorama. If you click the image you can see the full size. It’s part of our view in our backyard.

It’s a nice enough view for most of the year:

And look at this maple, blowing it’s last trumpet of the year:

We went for a walk this weekend and I saw this hole in the woods. I’m sure I’ve been through there, but it looks like a tunnel to Narnia or some such just now:

We had a nice time on our little path:

It eventually leads out to this maple, which is having a moment of its own:

And at the end of the path, where it returns to the road, and an empty field opposite:

And we saw this comparatively modest little thing on a sidewalk in one of the neighborhoods we walked by on our way back:

As I wrote here last week I had the 4,032nd flat of the year on Wednesday. I didn’t get a chance to ride again until Saturday. This is how that process worked itself out.

I decided to blame the tire, so I blamed the tire, and threw it out. Gave it a speech and everything. It was … perfunctory.

So I had to put a new tire on the back wheel of my bike. This is why you keep spares in your bike room. Did you know that bike tires come in different sizes? I did. Did you know that I managed to purchase the wrong size tires the last time I bought them? I did not. You can’t put a 650c tire on a 700c wheel, and I knew better than to try.

But! I found an old 700c tire I could use. So I started the process. Tire on wheel, tube in tire, start working it all togeth — oh, that’s why this is an old and used tire. This giant blistered bruised area. Now the mystery is: why did I keep this one?

So I threw out that tire, without a perfunctory speech. I figure it understand the sentiment.

I have still more tires. And they are all my wife’s, and they are racing tires. I considered putting one of those on. They are lighter and aren’t designed for the durability that I so clearly and obviously need.

So I thought about that, because anything worth doing is worth agonizing over for a few minutes. And then I remembered: I have an entire wheelset on my old bike I can cannibalize. So, off came a 700c Gatorskin, which has sat still enough to show off a little indentation. I put it on the good bike, put the new tube in, said a little prayer to the gods of vulcanized rubber, which is probably Vulcan, the god of forge and fire, and pumped it all up.

Well, I have an in with Vulcan. The new tube inflated, and that took care of the shape of the tire. And it all went back on the bike and out we went for a bike road of undetermined duration, because, hey, who knows at this point?

So we rode around our most usual route because, hey, who knows at this point? And we spent our prescribed amount of time pedaling away and I got in 25 miles with no problem.

And I’m climbing up the ranks! This weekend ride put 2020 third in my list of compiled mileage.

Now I’ll just have to see about setting a new high mark. We should be there in just a few more weeks.

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