Twister Twister Twister
So. That was something a little different. Last Friday morning, Tallahassee was hit with a very strong storm front that came on very fast, that isn’t the new part. The front produced tornadoes, that isn’t completely new either, we are used to Hurricanes but we get occasional twisters also. What was new, was there were three of them all in the span of about an hour and all isolated mostly in the South part of the city. When you live in Florida you understand the destruction that low pressure fast winds can make. You pray for minimal damage, no serious injuries (or deaths) and cope with the loss of power get to cleaning things up. This was different.
Tallahassee is a very beautiful tree loving city… we are kinda famous for our canopy roads. We tend to even build sidewalks around the trees instead of cutting them down. While that does make living here like living in a forest, it does come with downsides when big storms hit. This one was bad. It took down so many trees and with it power lines and poles. The City Utilities reported that the damage was worse than the last three hurricanes to land in the area combined. Those crews, along with neighboring counties and states lending their crews, have been working non stop to restore power to so many people.
We were fortunate to have minimal damage to the trees near our house, bunch of small limbs, a few big ones but nothing too bad. We will need a utility crew to take care of a large limb resting on our power line to the house, but we have our power back after 36 hours. Small blessing to have my Parents home to shelter (and save our food) in while the utility crews did their thing. Sadly, there has been one reported death and a number of injuries. The damage to the Railroad Square art district is near castotrophic, it may be years recovering. Both FAMU and FSU suffered significant damage to buildings.. the FSU Circus had their big top tent destroyed. It will be a long time before that part of the city is functioning back to normal.
A shout out to the efforts of the City of Tallahassee Utilities and the crews helping from other utility companies. Thank You.
Will be listening to rain a little differently now.
Icro for Micro.Blog
Been playing around with some different blogging software. Icro by Martin Hartl is really well made and I like the way it works for iPad. There something nice about posting from a beautiful sheet of glass.
Tuve unas vacaciones increíbles visitando España.
Translation… I had an amazing vacation visiting Spain. With what I hope will be a regular occurrence, I recently traveled with my Wife, her Sister and her Husband. A few years ago we took a trip to Indonesia with Viking Cruise lines. That trip was incredible and if you have the opportunity to travel with Viking, I highly reccommend them.
This time, instead of the other side of the globe, we only went half way around and had my first visit to Europe. I sometimes will do a lot of research leading up to a vacation and try and learn about all the things to do or not do. This time, I consciously chose to only do a minimum of reading or viewing with the intent of being surprised a little as I experienced things. I thought it worked quite well, there were genuine moments and locations that I knew nothing about ahead of time and the impact I think was greater to me.
I began a draft of this post, and it was turning into a travel blog chronicling all of my itinerary. I decided to scrap that and instead just write a bit about my overall impressions. Spain, like most countries, can feel very different depending on where you are, that was the case for me anyway. We started in Madrid, had a day trip Toledo, took a high speed train to Barcelona and then a day trip to Montserrat. Each one of those places had some similarities, but the feeling and vibe were very different to me. Madrid had a very bustling large city feel, we were only really exposed to a very touristy part of the city but I got the same feeling I get when in Atlanta or New York. Toledo, however was like stepping back in time to the Middle Ages, some of the buildings literally. It is a UNESCO World Heritage location and I really loved how well they took care to preserve this very Old World city. Barcelona, the heart of Catalonia, was almost the opposite of Madrid, while just as big and with maybe twice the tourists, things felt so much more relaxed and laid back and I could see returning to visit here again and exploring more. While Barcelona is a very coastal city, it is not far from a very significant mountain. Montserrat was a place on this trip that had the naturalist in me full and happy. It’s an amazing place that is famous for the monks that built the Benedictine Chapel and Monastery there but it also is a haven for hikers and climbers who enjoy the outdoors and the spectacular views.
Spain was everything I hoped it would be, and like most vacations, my time there was too short. I look forward to another adventure with my travel buddies.
Qui no s’arrisca, no pisca! (Nothing ventured, nothing gained!)
Another Trip Around the Sun
So yesterday’s Eclipse went by and the Apocalypse was apparently postponed. I have always loved Space and any celetial events are cause for me to geek out. Where I live gave us about a 70% coverage of the Sun but really happy for those in the totality band that got to experience the full impact of a rotating piece of rock casting a shadow on to a larger rotating rock. ;-)
Speaking of rotating rocks… the one we call home completed for me another trip around the Sun and I have now made 56 successful laps. I am (like all of us) a work in progress and as I grow older I do try and acknowledge the end goal is maybe less important then the pursuit of the goal.
A day is a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles. River Tam of Firefly
Opening Day
Baseball stands the test of time...
Of all the major sports leagues, baseball’s opening day is so much more special then the others and their first games. Not sure why that is. I guess for me, it just has this timeless feeling of winter ending and summer beginning. An eternal hope for your teams chances, no matter how bad they were previously, there is always something hopeful about opening day. Baseball is a different kind of sport for fans, its a much more relaxed atmosphere in comparison to football, hockey, or basketball. There is just something special about a day at the ballpark and it doesnt matter if its the major leagues or your local minor league or college team. Batter up and Go Braves!
Kindle vs iPad
One of my personal goals is also to get back to reading more. I have a Kindle and enjoy it but the battery is really failing. I am going to start experimenting with using my iPad Air and the Kindle App and or Apple Books App. It weighs more but the color screen and responsiveness is way better. A big pro for the Kindle is the dedicated focus in reading is all you can really do with it. I will have to maybe use iOS Focus Mode to make sure the other features of the iPad don’t take me out of my novel. Stay Tuned.
A Thought on RSS
Like a few other million (billion?) users of the iPhone, I have come to rely on it for a great many things. One of the things I find I have improved from pre iPhone, is keeping up with news. I have worked for three different newspapers in my life and have subscribed to more than a few different magazines as well. Today however, the digital convenience of being able to read thousands of news sources from the palm of my hand is simply amazing.
I do not however like having to launch an app for this news source, then a another for that source, than another for something else. It’s tedious and takes up way too much hard drive space to have all those apps installed. I currently have one app, I launch and it provides me with news posts and article links from twenty different sources and at any time I can add or take away from that number as I need. The app is NetNewsWire (iOS App Store link) and it’s just one of many iOS apps that take advantage of a fairly old bit of technology called RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. If you are also a podcast listener, RSS is the backbone technology behind that as well.
This web technology has been around since the late 1990’s but didnt really get widespread adoption till aroud 2005. Wikipedia actually has a very well written summary you can check out here RSS. A great feature of a dedicated RSS feed reader, in addition to it’s customization, is the ability to read articles without all of the web fluff of ads, popups and auto playing distractions. The artices are formatted for easy reading and the font can be modified and sized to your liking. The sources can vary widely from blogs like this one, to mainstream news organizations like NPR, or the Associated Press.
A have tried a few other feed reader apps, check these out in addtion to NetNewsWire and see if any might work for you. Pocket, Inoreader, and Reeder.
Happy reading!
I Am a Runner
To be clear, it is a recent activity for me, I played some soccer and baseball in high school and mostly kept in shape over the years with various other activities like racquetball and tennis. But I was never a long distance runner.
A few years ago there were a few friends who were doing some fitness group runs and invited me to come along. These were just a mile or two nothing too crazy. I enjoyed it and decided to try and do an actual organized race. I did some training runs with this group as well as some runs on my own then ran in my first 10k. I had a great time and decided to try another race a few months later. Eventually I set a goal to run my first Marathon.
Running was never something I did that occupied a lot of my time. I went for short 3-5 mile runs once maybe twice a week. Not really a very regimented training routine. I entered more fundraising 5k and 10k races throughout the year and enjoy the community of them. Eventually I built up enough endurance and I entered and ran my first half marathon. I remember barely being able to finish and if you had asked me at the finish line if I would do one again I would have answered hell no.
However… recovery does amazing things and I found the experience so enjoyable I set my mind and body to actually train and do my original goal of running a full marathon. When I say train, I don’t mean with an actual trainer or even a structured running scheduled. I just tried to gradually build up my weekly miles till I was able to run closer to the full 26.2 miles.
The big day came and Mother Nature decided that the long distance wasn’t challenging enough for me, she decided to add a very cold windy downpour to the equation. I ran on and managed to complete the distance just under the 6 hour cut off but, I did finish. It was miserable and I can’t believe how sore I was. It was however a goal that I set for myself and that I completed it.
I run now for physical and mental health and still run many fundraising 5k and 10k through the year. I also run that same marathon but only the half now. My life, health and calendar has limited even my regular runs lately. Yesterday, I still showed up and ran that same half marathon. I had it in my head that I could complete it but that my time would be very slow. I was pleasantly surprised by my result and it genuinely brought such a smile to my face. It wasn’t close to my personal best but it was so much faster than what I thought I would do.
It is funny sometimes what our brains will tell us about expectations that sometimes our bodies will exceed. And yes, I know it can happen the opposite way as well. Yesterday however, my body thumbed it’s virtual nose at my brain and had a great day.
It’s The Little Things
It’s The Little Things
As of iOS 17, Apple introduced Animated Cover Art for album art in the Apple Music app. So now when viewing the album art while playing a song from the album, the artwork will animate creatively. Artists can design their own animations and submit them to Apple for use in listeners libraries.
I have only now noticed it since for the most part I will begin a playlist and then put the phone away in my pocket or set it down on the desk.
Here is a snippet of the Album animation for Van Halen’s album 1984. Check the cigarette smoke and the angel wings.
Very Clever.
To Sideload or Not to Sideload
There are a lot of articles and opinions out there right now about the new App Store policies they are implementing due to the new EU ruling going into effect. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a really nice take on a Wall Street Journal report, you can read it here. The Wall Street Journal On Apple’s Plans For iOS Sideloading In The E.U.
As a long time user of both the MacOS on Mac computers and iOS on iPhones and iPads, my opinion is this. Keep the current policy for the MacOS where you can use the App Store to obtain software both free and paid but if the use really needs software that is not available on the App Store, allow the installation but with a warning dialog about the security risk that entails. On iOS I prefer to only use software that has been vetted by the App Store. I really appreciate the iOS sandboxing that apps have to be installed in with iOS that insures that an application has no access to other applications unless explicit permission is granted by me. I can see the argument for “unlocking” the iPhone or iPad and allowing for installations from any source but the vast majority of user of those devices do not need this kind of access.
Will be interesting to see how this all works out.
The Macintosh at 40 Years
This January marks 40 years since Steve Jobs unveiled what he believed to be the future of the personal computer. It was expensive and underpowered but the paradigm shift it introduced is unmistakeable. Instead of command line interface with directories you had pictures of folders that contained pictures of documents and all you had to do was move this mouse thing and click on them. Crazy.
Recently the Upgrade podcast had a few guests and they went through an informal ranking of various Macintosh models, including their first models, their favorite models and also models that were duds. If you are of a certain age, ahem, then a good bit of their conversation will resonate with you, it did with me.
For the record, the Apple Performa 6116CD was my first personal Macintosh that I owned. I was exposed to Macintosh computers in my last year at the Art Institute and I knew I would want one for myself. Thinking back on that computer, it was nothing really special in comparison to what was available at the time but it started me down a path that continues today of an Apple evangelical. I definately drank the kool-aid as they say.
I am currently writing this post on an Apple Mac Mini that contains an Apple M2 processor that roughly clocks at aproximately 3.49 GHz and contains 16 GB of RAM and storage on an incrediably fast 500 GB SSD internal drive. That Performa… had a PowerPC chip that clocked at 60 MHz, contained 8 MB of RAM and files stored on an internal 700 MB SCSI hard drive.
Happy Anniversary Macintosh and I look forward to see what your next 40 years have in store.
Apple Vision Pro First Steps
Apple Taking More First Steps
I am very curious to see how well received/reviewed the new Apple Vision Pro being released by pre-order from Apple starting today. It looks amazing and yes, there have been VR glasses out for a while now but Apple as usual takes what is out there and usually makes a new version that does things the others just don’t. I am particularily intereted in the productivity aspects and features.
Let also all remember, this is the first version and whatever shortcomings it may have, remember the first iPhone didnt even have cut and paste.
Workflow Testing
Still working out a work flow for making posts, especially from any device. Would like to be able to make short spur of the moment thoughts as well as longer form ideas.
I am trying out MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software, have always heard good things from bloggers and developers I read and listen to.
Give it a try and see if its something that can work for you.
Hello - Bonjour
This may be a site only for me, this may be a site for a few friends and family, or it may be a site for anyone. I haven’t decided yet. For a little while now I have been wondering what it would be like to write a personal blog. I follow a few different blogs and there is something appealing about haveing a space that I control (with hosting by micro.blog) that is personal and uncluttered for the few musings and occasional deep insights.