I’ve been enjoying the Regional Park adjacent to our friends’ property here in the greater Durham, North Carolina area. I had a nice hike amongst the evergreens today. It was easy to find my center amongst this greatness.
I love evergreen trees. I love their resiliency, the strength, and the song they sing when the wind passes by.
Here in the woods they stand above the maple and other trees that have not yet reached the heights of the evergreens.
I’m currently at our friends’ house in North Carolina. I’m traveling solo this weekend, as evidenced by my flight photos from Thursday evening. The opportunity to travel like this, and keep working at my day job simultaneously, is something I enjoy about the New Economy. I have always wanted to live a “digital nomad” lifestyle. This weekend’s trip approaches that concept. I head back to the desert on Tuesday evening.
Jeff and Mark live in the Raleigh-Durham area. Their home is surrounded by woods. It’s peaceful. It also has one scrap of copper DSL line feeding Internet to their home and home offices. Cable TV is not an option for them, it’s Frontier DSL or nothing.
This type of DSL isn’t know for its blazing speeds. I’ve discovered I’ve been spoiled by excellent Internet access in our last three homes. In the desert we get nearly “gigabit speeds” over our connection with Cox Communications. This Frontier DSL connection here in North Carolina is reminiscent of the connection we had back when we first moved into our home in Upstate New York back in late 2003.
Editing video and sharing content here over their Internet connection is reminding me of some of the challenges I may have with connectivity while on my Storm Hiking Trip next month.
I guess I’ll just spend some time enjoying the Zen like atmosphere in these parts.*
(It took 4 minutes to upload that photo).
Apparently the birds have been going back and forth to a local rooftop. Truman has often stationed himself on Earl’s desk to watch the action. He complains if the blinds are not opened a sufficient amount so he can see what his flying friends (or foes?) are doing.
I really enjoy Jeff Geerling‘s YouTube channel. His geek related content is awesome, he seems like a nice guy, and his videography skills are top notch.
Like many others in North America, Jeff had a stunning view of the recent the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse, and shares his experience through his latest video.
There’s one line at the beginning of his video that particularly captured my attention, “make the videos you love”.
Now that’s inspiring.
I am off to the Raleigh-Durham area for a couple of days. I’m currently sitting in Tucson International Airport waiting for the first flight of two; I’m connecting through Denver this evening.
The gate agents keep asking folks to remain seated until their group number is called and she is basically being ignored. A woman in a wheelchair is making loud noises asking people to move out the way as her companion pushes her to the gate, as the gate agent called for “folks that may need some extra assistance”. I would say her wheelchair qualifies her for this category.
The budget airlines, with their herding-cattle-through-chutes-by-number shtick, have really destroyed any remaining semblance of class and intelligence when it comes to airline passenger comfort. It’s bad enough that everyone has a carry on the size of a small Subaru, which of course must either be hoisted by a man, because chivalry when it’s convenient and all that or shoved under a seat the size of table side coaster. Now we have to endure people fighting like it’s Black Friday at the Walmart to get to the seat they already paid for and no one else will occupy. Because as I understand it, on the budget airlines you just get a ticket to get on an airplane and then you scratch, bite, and claw your way to a window seat with no window or a seat closest to the self service beverage machine in the back. Buy yourself some M&Ms.
Capitalism really does suck in this regard and it’s just going to suck more and more because no one will do anything to change it. A selected few count their billions and the rest of us are treated like cattle. It’s that simple.
For some reason, the American mindset is endless growth. Everything must get bigger, everything must get better, and more, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it. But the truth of the matter is, nothing natural undergoes infinite growth, other than some cancers. Even our sun, the one thing we all need to live, will only grow for so long before it collapses upon itself and becomes a mere speck of its former self, destroying all life around it in the process.
Wait your turn until your number is called.
I’m writing this blog entry while my work laptop goes through its fourth update since the beginning of the week. This is not unusual, though the frequency of updates has increased since the “Windows Desktop Specialists” upgraded this underpowered laptop to Windows 11 a few weeks ago. I guess productivity isn’t particularly important when it comes to work computers, at least where I work.
Speaking of updates, I made some changes to the underlying infrastructure for ye ol’ ancient bloggy thing I have going on here. If you see something amiss, please advise via email or something so I can fix it. I know there’s a bit going on with pictures sometimes facing the wrong direction. The hosting company has to install a new PHP extension to the shared server to get everything kicked back upright. Hopefully that will be fixed within 24 hours of me posting this entry.
I noticed an owl stationed in a nearby tree during my evening walk. They were just hanging out looking over one of the many washes in our neighborhood. Every once in a while they’d make an owl “whoo whoo whoo” noise and I found it fascinating. So calm and confident. I like that.
I couldn’t get a great photo, as I did not want to disturb the owl while they were looking over the wash. I suppose their demeanor made disturbing them something outside of their concern, but nonetheless, they seemed like they deserved a good deal of respect.
We were nowhere near totality with today’s eclipse. While the sky darkened, it became chilly and some of the morning birds sang their morning song. That was rather neat. I went for a walk during the eclipse, which achieved about 75% totality in this part of the country.
Here’s raw time lapse footage from our rooftop. It’s interesting to see how the clouds moved in as it got darker. Coincidence?
I vastly admire the wildly talented folks that script, light, record, and produce video on the channels I enjoy. I admire even more the folks that use Linux-based tools to do all the editing and post-production work. Either I’m not geeky enough to figure out how to make cinematic magic using Linux tools or my tricked out PC running Linux isn’t tricked out enough. Perhaps I’ve grown accustomed to the sheer speed of Apple’s series of Apple Silicon chips.
All of my videos in recent weeks have been edited on my Apple M2 MacBook Air. This computer will continue to pull its weight in this arena, as I’ll be editing video while on the road during next month’s storm chasing trip. I was telling my husband Earl that if I get as much footage as I hope to grab while chasing storms, I might need something with a little more oomph when I get back and start building “recap” videos.
Years ago, when I worked for a radio station owned by an advertising agency, the video editors used a powerful Mac of the era running Avid software and they did some amazing things with editing videotape. I was thoroughly impressed with what they could achieve with a Mac back then. Here it is 30 years later and I still find my Mac based tools the best way to edit video quickly, accurately, and to my production standards. This is nothing against Linux-based tools, Veronica at “Veronica Explains” does an AMAZING job with kdenlive on her Linux rig. Jay at LearnLinux.TV produces equally amazing results.
I just don’t think I’m wired to sit down and learn the ins and outs of Linux based editing tools right now. I’m too antsy to pop in and pop out and show clouds and waterfalls and mountains and small towns and the like.
The best tool for any computer user is the tool that gets the job done. And I’m sticking to that philosophy.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!
