an infrequent repository of mostly new stuff
View from the Veranda
After a short night of sleep, morning came a little early. The first thing I heard after daylight – besides whippoorwills, gulls, bobwhite quail, crows, turkeys, crickets and cicadas – was Ken’s outboard chugging up the creek. Kevin M and Ken were already putt-putting across the water in LIttle T and the O’Day with everyone else on board.
Seventeen Year Cicada, midway through transformation
A few days ago, the hatch of Magicicada Brood II began here in Virginia. These are the periodic cicadas on a 17 year cycle. It’s pretty amazing how many there are. They’re everywhere.
They’ve only started tuning up on their “singing” – in another week the noise will be deafening. Almost literally. At close range, a cicada can pump out 120 decibals. That’s enough to do permanent damage to your hearing.
Emily in her kayak
One nice thing about a big loop in a river… It doesn’t take much driving to set up the shuttle to float it. Saves a lot of time.
On Sunday, we left Emily’s car at the ramp at Four Locks, then loaded up the boats and headed over to McCoy’s Ferry. It’s a short trip, but we passed through tunnels under two canal aqueducts and a really high train trestle to get there. The ramp at McCoy’s Ferry isn’t in great shape, but we got loaded and launched without too much trouble.
But it’s not just TVs. Who really likes the “software” in their car, microwave, or blu-ray player?
All of this software is terrible in the same handful of ways. It’s buggy, unresponsive, and difficult to use. I actually think the second sin is the worst one, especially when it comes to appliances and consumer electronics. Dials and knobs respond to your touch right now. Anything that wants to replace them had better also do so.
Amen.
via: Daring Fireball
I’ve made my living by hanging around the leading edge of technology for over 40 years. What I have learned is this: When software sucks, it sucks on a whole nuther level that analog stuff just can’t. And software is showing up in more previously simple things every day.
It’s probably why I like 19th century technology so much.
Duly noted.
Off the tip of Windmill Point and Stingray Point in the Chesapeake Bay, at the mouth of the Rappahannock River, is Wolftrap Lighthouse. It’s a well-known landmark, or rather seamark, for watermen and boaters in the area. I’ve passed it many times, myself. It was decommissioned and auctioned off by the Coast Guard back in the ’70’s, and moved into private hands. It’s up for sale again. For $288,000 you get the lighthouse and a piece of marshland on shore a mile away where you can launch a boat to get to it.
Now this is my idea of a dream home.
A job well done.
I once had a job digging up the bones of dead monks for room and board. The pay wasn’t great, but it was a good job, and I liked it.
On the first day, a portly, pompous Frenchman named Bernard, the foreman, lined off a big grid on the ground with string, making six foot squares separated by one foot borders. Each digger was assigned a square. The job was simple: Dig the six foot square eight feet deep. You could not, however, use a shovel. The only tool you could use to remove 288 cubic feet of dirt was a small mason’s pointing trowel, which you had to supply yourself. Furthermore, you could not dig with the point of the trowel – doing so would be grounds for immediate dismissal. Instead, you had detect and carefully scrape away slight variations in colored layers of dirt with the edge of the trowel, a thin skin of soil at a time, like peeling an onion, scoop that into a pail, then empty it onto a spoil pile 100 feet away. We had three months to finish.