Photography

I’ve been an amateur shutterbug for years.

Weekly Notes: March 30–April 26, 2026

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Well, it’s been a busy month. I kept meaning to come back to this “Weekly Notes” series and get caught up, and then there were more things to do, and here we are! So let’s just do a quick catch up.

  • March 30–April 5: Norwescon week! I have a half-written post-con wrap-up in progress, but who knows if it will ever get finished, so I’ll just say that it was a really good year. Had a lot of fun with friends, DJ’d a good dance on Thursday, the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony on Friday went well, and my accessibility presentation on Saturday was lightly attended, but everyone who was there was very engaged and expressed how much they appreciated the information they got.

  • April 6–12: A quiet week, somewhat intentionally so, as this was between Things Going On.

  • April 13–19: A busy work week, with a weekend jaunt down to Vancouver, WA for a work conference for my wife, while I took a day to explore the Vancouver area and bounce down into the Portland area to visit my mom.

  • April 20–26: Another busy work week, a lot of which was concerned with the sudden (if not entirely unexpected) delay of the ADA Title II update implementation deadline from this Friday the 24th to a year from now. It could have been a lot worse than a one-year delay, but there are a lot of us wondering what else is going to happen over the next year….

📸 Photos

Each of the following photos is linked to a larger photo album on Flickr. Click on through for more!

Me on stage behind table with my DJ equipment and in front of a large screen with fancy graphics, flanked by two Daleks.
DJing on Thursday night at Norwescon as our security team keeps their eye(stalk)s out. Photo courtesy of Pascale.
Barrels of supplies are stacked in an old pantry, all lit by natural light, looking almost like a painted still life.
A favorite shot from when I was exploring Fort Vancouver.

📚 Reading

I’ve finished four books over the past four weeks:

📺 Watching

We’ve been enjoying History’s Greatest Mysteries from the History channel. It’s about 85% really interesting history, 10% crackpot conspiracy theories, and 5% “ALIENS!!!”

🎧 Listening

As usual, I recorded my set at Norwescon. If you’re looking for some background music to listen to during your day, you could (hopefully) do worse than this! Here’s my First Contact Galactic Gala, three and a half hours of music recorded live at Norwescon 48!

🔗 Linking

  • Brigid Delaney at The Guardian: Expat influencers sold Dubai to the world and were paid to look the other way. Now the dream is crumbling: “The Maseratis are borrowed, the helicopters rented by the hour. But deep down Dubai is a lonely place, built by oppressed people.”

  • Foz Meadows: Politics in SFF: Arguing With Andy Weir: “…just as baffled, angry transphobes can successfully use a variety of pronouns in everyday life without realizing that’s what they’re called, so too can authors like Andy Weir include politics and social commentary in their works without realizing that’s what they’ve done.”

  • Catherynne M. Valente: Blood Money: The Anthropic Settlement: “They took the best work of my mind and used it to build the very thing that is actively ruining just about everything all the time. They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator. ¶ They took my heart and used it to replace me and everyone else.”

  • Eric Eggert: Screen readers are not testing tools: “Screen readers show the symptoms of bad code, but not the actual problems. They are an indirect way to test.”

  • Jonaki Mehta at NPR: These blind students say their college blocked their education. A new rule could help: “Digital accessibility is a major concern for students with blindness and other disabilities — an ever-changing landscape that often isn’t designed with disabilities in mind. ¶ Now, that could change: An update to regulations in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), set to take effect at the end of April, will require public institutions to meet new standards that dictate what accessibility should look like.”

  • Ben Andrews at Digital Camera World: NASA chose an old DSLR as its primary Artemis II camera – here’s why: “There are plenty of premium cameras that could potentially work well for such a special task, but NASA has a long history of trusting Nikon for its photographic requirements, so it’s of little surprise NASA has again picked Nikon for Artemis II. What’s more surprising is the particular Nikon camera bodies you’ll find on board.”

  • Sophie Hardach at the BBC: Wit, unker, git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy: “Tales of love and adventure from 1,000 years ago reveal a dazzling range of now-extinct English pronouns. They capture something unique about how people once thought about “two-ness”. But why did they die out in the first place?”

  • Christopher Weber at the AP: From Early Nirvana To Phish, A Chicago Fan’s Secret Recordings Of 10,000 Shows Are Now Online: “Aadam Jacobs has secretly recorded over 10,000 local concerts since 1989. Now, they are cleaned up and ready to listen to for free online.”

  • Clifford Winston at the New York Times: Where Did All the Affordable Cars Go?: “While politicians and economists scratch their heads at voters upset about affordability in a decent economy, they seem to somehow miss the fact that for most Americans, the purchase of a car has become a debt sentence.”

  • Spencer Mortensen: Email address obfuscation: What works in 2026?: “Here are some of the best techniques for keeping email addresses hidden from spammers—along with the statistics on how likely they are to be broken.”

  • Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism: AI Use Appears to Have a “Boiling Frog” Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns: “In a new study, researchers claim to provide the first causal evidence that leaning on AI to assist with ‘reasoning-intensive’ cognitive labor — mental tasks ranging from writing to studying to coding to simply brainstorming new ideas — can rapidly impair users’ intellectual ability and willingness to persist despite difficulty.”

  • Colleen Gratzer: Can You Create Accessible PDFs in Affinity?: “I hope that Affinity will continue adding the basic and necessary accessibility features that designers need. But, sorry to say… Affinity just isn’t there yet as a full-on replacement to InDesign for accessibility work.”

  • Oliver Schöndorfer: Dyslexia friendly fonts: Are they any good?: “TL;DR: So-called dyslexia friendly fonts perform worse than other typefaces, while conveying an either broken or playful aesthetic that might not fit to your project. As a rule of thumb, prefer more common typefaces with a looser spacing, open shapes, and distinct letters.”

  • Emily M. Bender and Decca Muldowney: Why you should refuse to let your doctor record you: “So what’s the big deal with ‘AI’ charting? Here are nine reasons why we recommend refusing to consent to the use of scribing tools in healthcare settings.”

  • Shri Khalpada at PerThirtySix: How The Heck Does Shazam Work?: “How audio fingerprinting and a connect-the-dots trick lets Shazam identify a song in seconds.”

  • Newcastle University: Accessible conferences and events: “These guidelines that we have produced are intended as a checklist for use when planning and running an event. It might feel slightly daunting at first as you are having to rethink aspects of your approach to planning these events but please be reassured that doing something is better than nothing and any attempt to improve accessibility will be welcomed.”

  • Chris Klimek at NPR: Before sci-fi was everywhere, this pioneering magazine championed ‘scientifiction’: “His portmanteau never quite made it into port. But Gernsback’s innovation of collecting previously-diffuse bits of literature ruminating on scientific discovery or technological advancement in one place proved to be an idea with staying power. The evidence is all around us, on all your streaming services and movie marquees, if not your bookshelves.”

  • Michaeleen Doucleff at NPR: The surprising origin of 4 features that superglue kids — and adults — to screens: “During the trial in California, the attorney bringing the case accused Meta and Google of designing their apps to behave like ‘digital casinos.’ That’s an apt comparison, according to Schüll’s research, because major design elements of social media have surprising roots in the gambling industry.”

Weekly Notes: December 22–28, 2025

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Happy holidays (part one)!

This past week was, of course, Christmas week. One of the really nice things about working at Highline is that this entire week was designated a work from home week, and Wednesday and Friday (the two days on either side of Christmas) are considered “personal development” days, with a pleasantly broad definition of “personal development”. Email was monitored and work was done, but it definitely makes for a comfortably low-key week.

Our Christmas day was quite nice: Slept in as late as we could, had a fun breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes with chocolate-infused butter and chocolate whipped cream (there was a bit of a theme there…), a comfortable walk around the neighborhood, opening presents, and a lot of relaxing and reading.

📸 Photos

A Nikon Z5II camera sitting on a green cushion with a Christmas tree just visible in the background.
My big present this year was upgrading my camera to a Nikon Z5II mirrorless camera, with the 24–50mm f/4–6.3 kit lens and the FTZ II adapter to allow me to continue to use my existing lineup of F-mount lenses.
A Nikon Z5II with an old 500mm reflex lens attached.
I did make myself laugh by half-seriously wondering if the Z5II is still a mirrorless camera if I attach a 500mm reflex lens to it (if you’re unaware, this is a catadioptric or mirror lens which, as the name implies, uses a pair of mirrors to pack a long telephoto range into a physically short lens).
Me aiming my camera at an odd-looking tree in a planter; the tree is bowed over into an arch shape, and there is a large holiday bauble hanging from the top of the arch.
Taking the new camera out for a first test run around our neighborhood. (Photo by my wife.)
Art installation of around 35 identical very cute little clouds with smiling faces hung evenly spaced and symmetrically from the ceiling of the Seattle Art Museum's lobby.
On Saturday we went up to the Seattle Art Museum, partly because it had been a few years, and partly as a good opportunity to take the new camera out for a spin. I posted a small set of photos from the museum to my Flickr account.

📚 Reading

  • I’m on a bit of a Star Trek binge to wrap up the year. Last week (though I forgot to include it in my weekly notes) I read Kij Johnson and Greg Cox’s TNG novel Dragon’s Honor; this week I’ve been working my way through the TOS “New Earth” series, getting through the first two of the six books, Diane Carey’s Wagon Train to the Stars and Dean Wesley Smith and Diane Carey’s Belle Terre. I thought I might get through the third book in the series today, but didn’t end up making it.

  • I also “finished” one I’ve been working on for a few months now (since this year’s major gift wasn’t a surprise), Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon Z5II. “Finished” is in quotes because as it’s something of a reference book, there were sections that I skimmed, and this is one that I’ll be sure to keep on my iPad to refer back to whenever I need.

📺 Watching

  • As befitting the season, we’ve binged our way through two seasons of The Great American Baking Show: Holiday Edition, which is just The Great British Baking Show but with American contestants. It’s a little jarring to be in the GBBS tent and hearing American accents, but it’s also really nice to see Americans in a competitive baking show actually being nice to each other (as is the standard for GBBS) rather than being snarky and rude to and about each other (as is the standard for, well, virtually every American reality show out there).

We’ve also watched several movies, two from the stable of holiday favorites, one new holiday favorite, and a couple that we’ve been looking forward to seeing. This week’s lineup was:

  • The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which is always good.
  • Violent Night (2022), which was new to us, but which we enjoyed more than we thought we would. It lives up to its title, but it’s a very fun holiday action/comedy.
  • Die Hard (1988), our annual Christmas Eve tradition (along with many others).
  • Fackham Hall (2025) has been on our radar for a while now, and it just became available to rent this week. It’s Downton Abbey meets The Naked Gun, and we laughed a lot — it will definitely eventually be going in our home collection once it’s available on physical media.
  • Wake Up Dead Man (2025), the latest Knives Out film, is excellent. Continues the twisty mystery fun of the prior two, and incorporates some really neat political and religious commentary as well. Rian Johnson is so good at what he does (I need to go back and watch Brick again at some point, too).

🔗 Linking

  • Walter Chaw at Film Freak Central: Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025): Absolutely devastating zero-star review of James Cameron’s latest “Dances With Ferngully” film. “The indigenous people, the Na’vi, are giant blue cats who literally meld with the natural elements on their planet, Pandora, through their naked mole-rat tails, and boast of a harmonious existence that nonetheless requires a warrior class because those are the two things indigenous people in white fantasies are allowed to be: ferocious warriors and children of the Earth.”

  • Randall Munroe’s xkcd: Funny Numbers: “The teens picked a new funny number.”

  • Ben Keough at The New York Times‘ Wirecutter: The First Nikon Z-Mount Mirrorless Lenses You Should Buy (archive.is link): Now that I have a new camera, though I can use (and absolutely will be using) my existing F-mount lenses, eventually I’ll be adding newer Z-mount lenses to my collection. Time to start dreaming!

  • Barry Petchesky at Defector: What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?: The annual report! “This is the time of year to be grateful for not having things stuck in our asses, and to think of those less fortunate than us. So spare a thought for those Americans who misjudged the capacity of their own orifices.”

  • Lorraine Boissoneault at Smithsonian Magazine: A Civil War Cartoonist Created the Modern Image of Santa Claus as Union Propaganda: I had no idea about any of this.

  • Infinite Ball Drop: “On New Year’s Eve, the Times Square Ball drops for only 60 seconds over a measly 139 feet. What if we extrapolated from that and covered the entire year?”

  • Robin Buller at The Guardian: How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very: “From emancipation to women’s suffrage, from civil rights to Black Lives Matter, mass movement has shaped the arc of American history. Protest has led to the passage of legislation that gave women the right to vote, banned segregation and legalized same-sex marriage. It has also sparked cultural shifts in how Americans perceive things like bodily autonomy, economic inequality and racial bias.”

  • Doug Henwood at Jacobin interviews Émile Torres: Tech Capitalists Don’t Care About Humans. Literally.: “…there’s also a kind of capitalist influence, the idea that human beings do not matter in and of ourselves. In this worldview, we matter for the sake of value, rather than value mattering for the sake of us. ¶ …we are just means to an end. The only end is value, this abstract yet quantifiable concept that should be maximized to the physical cosmic limits. We matter only as the conduits through which this value can come into existence.

Complete Guide to the Nikon Z5II by Thom Hogan

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Book 65 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Really, this kind of needs two ratings: Five stars for the content, and two stars for the editing. Thom is incredibly knowledgeable about photography and Nikon cameras, and this book is an incredible deep dive into the Z5II, how it works, why it works the way it does, what all those settings mean, and suggestions on how to get the best results out of the camera. However, as he has obviously (and quite transparently; he mentions some of this on his website) adapted large swaths of this book from very similar books on other cameras in Nikon’s Z series, there are a lot of instances where the shift from one camera to another wasn’t caught, leading to everything from the wrong camera model being mentioned to slight errors (I’ve not come across anything major or that would cause a problem, though). Still very worthwhile, and I’ll be sure to keep this easily available on my iPad so I can reference it whenever I need.

Me holding The Complete Guide to the Nikon Z5II on my iPad

Summer 2024 Vacation Photos (Long-Delayed)

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I’d let this project fall to the side for a while, but I started coming back to it last week, and this morning before work, I finally finished processing and uploading my photos from our summer 2024 vacation up to Victoria, B.C.

If you’d like to scroll through someone else’s vacation photos, I have them split into two albums on Flickr: 2024 Summer Vacation 1: Sequim and Port Angeles and 2024 Summer Vacation 2: Victoria, B.C.. Otherwise, here’s a one-shot-per-day sampler.

My wife and I on a hotel rooftop deck, with green fields under a blue sky filled with fluffy grey clouds.
Day 1, Sequim: At our hotel in Sequim.
A Nikon camera with an old reflex telephoto lens attached.
Day 2, Port Angeles: While wandering through antique stores, we stumbled across this very cool old lens, a Nikkor 500mm f/8 reflex telephoto, still with its original carry case and filter set. If you’re into quirky old photo gear, I have more shots of and by this lens.
Flat stones on a sandy beach, in a nearly monochromatic image.
Day 3, Klaloch Beach: Playing with the new lens while walking along Klaloch Beach. The out-of-focus rocks in the distance show the characteristic “donut” effect caused by the mirror setup of the reflex lens.
A whale's flukes break the surface of the sea as water streams off of them, with forested hills visible in the distance.
Day 4, Whale Watching: A whale watching tour on the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Port Angeles and Victoria.
A snow-covered mountain in the far distance, rising above marshlands and out-of-focus driftwood in the foreground.
Day 5, Dungeness Wildlife Refuge: We took a nice, long, slow wander about a third of the way out along the spit at the wildlife refuge. Lots of birds and gorgeous views of Mt. Baker.
A dimly-lit basement with a gigantic spider sculpture.
Day 6, Port Angeles: On our last day in Port Angeles we went on their “underground” walking tour. Not as much underground as Seattle’s, but historical walking tours are generally fun, and this one was occasional enhanced by Halloween decorations that never got removed after the 2020 pandemic shutdown; apparently when the tours started again, enough people were amused by them that they’re just year-round decorations now.
A man wearing a keffiyah and waving a Palestinian flag stands next to a row of people holding an elongated Palestinian flag on the steps in front of Victoria's Parliament building.
Day 7, Victoria: We ferried over to Victoria, took a carriage ride tour through one of the historical neighborhoods, and then happened to be walking by the Parliament building when a protest against the Palestinian genocide was getting started.
On a hilltop with Camelot visible in the distance, a tiny knight in armor on horseback raises a sword in salute.
Day 8, Victoria: The Miniature World Museum was a fun treat, with lots of intricately detailed miniature dioramas of scenes past and future, real and fantastical. Our day also included high tea at the Empress Hotel and an evening walk along the waterfront.
Water drips from a bamboo pipe into a circular basin with a square indentation in the center. It's visually satisfying in an incredibly generic sort of way.
Day 9, The Butchart Gardens: We bussed up to spend most of the day at the Butchart Gardens, which are beautiful. Lots of pretty landscapes and flowers…and this, what I think is probably the most hilariously “should be sold with the generic artwork in frames at Ross or T.J. Maxx and hung in a mid-tier hotel somewhere” photo I’ve taken yet.
A 1960s stereo on display in a museum. It's made of two wooden cases, one on the right to hold LPs, the other on the left, twice as wide, to hold the turntable and central control panel. Black spherical speakers are on either side. The whole thing is probably about eight feet wide.
Day 10, The Royal BC Museum: The museum had an exhibit with a lot of mid-century-modern items as part. There were several stereos like this one that I’d love to have (if I had the space and budget to ignore practicality, neither of which I do).
A narrow brick alley, strung with lights and round red paper lanterns.
Day 11, Victoria: For our last day in Victoria, we took two walking tours: a food tour in the morning, and a ghost walk tour in the evening. Both were a lot of fun.
A snow-covered mountain in the distance under a clear blue sky and with flat blue ocean in the foreground.
Day 12: Heading Home: And then we hopped back on the ferry, caught a nice view of Mt. Baker on our way back to Washington, and drove back home.

Weekly Notes: October 20–26, 2025

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  • ♿️ Another quite busy week at work. Tuesday through Thursday mornings were the WAPED fall meeting; on various days this afternoon there were meetings with artists who are working with some of our visually disabled students on some tactile public art for the soon-to-open light rail station near the college, two training sessions on creating screen-reader accessible math equations in documents, and two public information sessions with a representative from the Secretary of State about Washington State’s accessible voting options.

  • Sunday afternoon, we went down to Federal Way to see the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s Snow White. It was cute! It was definitely solidly in the realm of “how close to Disney can we get without getting sued” territory, and it had more endings than Lord of the Rings (the audience was actually getting confused), but it was still an enjoyable performance and made for a good afternoon outing.

Reading

Finished two books this week: Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, and a Star Trek manga.

Listening

I indulged myself with a silly idea I had a few weeks ago, and created a 40-minute mix of mashups based on Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”. Definitely a mix that will either really work for someone or drive them absolutely up the wall.

I also picked up two new albums on Saturday that I’ll start listening to into this coming week:

  • Synthetic. Facts. Eight, the latest in a compilation series from Infacted Recordings.

  • Astral Elevator, the first album from The Tear Garden (Edward Ka-Spel (The Legendary Pink Dots) and cEvin Key (Skinny Puppy)) since 2017. I was first introduced to The Tear Garden (and Legendary Pink Dots, for that matter) in the mid-90s, and I’m glad they’re still working on this project.

Linking

  • Pat Saperstein in Variety: Heaven 17 Plans New Version of ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ Calling Out Trump Instead of Reagan: ‘It’s Not Going to Get Any Less Relevant, Is It?’: “…the band plans to release an updated version of the song, which has become an unofficial anthem of the resistance to Donald Trump. At a recent protest sign-making party in Los Angeles’ Echo Park, it was part of the anti-fascist playlist that got neighborhood activists dancing. A few days later, the fast-paced, incredibly catchy ’80s standard could be heard blasting from speakers at the Downtown Los Angeles No Kings protest.”

  • Lisa Bonos at The Washington Post: Meet the people who dare to say no to artificial intelligence: “Some tech workers told The Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp. Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, turning off Google’s chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones.”

  • Peter Wolinski at Tom’s Guide: How to disable Copilot in Windows 11: “Disabling Copilot in Windows 11 is a straightforward process, and this guide will walk you through the steps to do so.”

  • Mauro Huculak at Pureinfotech: 4 Quick ways to permanently disable Windows Recall on Windows 11: “Recall is designed to function as a photographic memory, powered by a local AI model, making it easier to locate past activities, including documents, websites, messages, images, and apps. […] Recall automatically takes snapshots of your screen at regular intervals (around every five seconds), which can capture sensitive information, such as private conversations, financial details, or personal images.”

  • Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Knowledge is Worth Your Time: “What matters in your courses, even in many cases within your major, isn’t the topic. You’ll probably forget most of what you learn, especially if you don’t end up using it repeatedly in future. What you will always have, though, is the mind that taking the courses made.”

  • Anil Dash: ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web: “OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let’s talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.”

  • Margherita Bassi at Smithsonian Magazine: See This Year’s Hilarious Finalists From the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards, From Gossiping Leopards to Breakdancing Foxes: “Founded in 2015 by two professional photographers, the awards merge skillful wildlife photography with the “positive power” of humor to promote wildlife and habitat conservation, per a statement. The competition is free and open to novices, amateurs and professionals.”

  • Ella Glover at The Guardian: ‘I get to do whatever I want in the moment’: why more people are going to gigs, festivals and clubs alone: “Some research suggests that the average age of festivalgoers is increasing, and older people are still going out frequently, which may account for the increased number of people attending solo….”

Weekly Notes: September 1–7, 2025

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  • 🇺🇸 Monday we recognized Labor Day by heading into Seattle to participate in one of the local protests. It was a small but enthusiastic group; my one slight disappointment was that though held on Labor Day, it was more generally anti-Trump than specifically pro-labor/union. (Not that anti-Trump is bad, of course. It just seemed to dominate the sentiments, and the day itself was just relegated to being a convenient day to protest because some people had the day off of work.)

  • 📷 I did post an album of photos of the day’s adventures, before, during, and after the protest. I had fun playing a bit with these; the only lens I brought was a Pocket Dispo, a disposable camera lens mounted in a 3-D printed fitting. It gives the images a fun bit of distortion. Definitely not an everyday lens, but fun to have in my kit for when it feels right.

  • The rest of the week was a pretty standard week, with no particular stories of note.

📸 Photos

A metal firefighting hose pipe fitting on a brick wall, with sticker graffiti that says, 'destroy monotony write on walls'.
Somewhat ironically, this is sticker graffiti, not written.
A curved grey brick wall with graffiti that reads, 'those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won't teach them to love society', surrounded by more graffiti of cat heads and text that says, 'bigots beware' and 'trans hearts run this park'.
I’m kinda digging how the Cal Anderson Park gate house has become a point of trans solidarity and resistance.
A woman sitting on a brick wall and smiling, holding a sign that says, 'Palantir is how Númenor fell'.
The intersection of geeks and political protest always results in some great signs.
A crowd of people, many hoding protest signs and some holding U.S. flags, gathered in a brick plaza and watching people speak.
Some speakers were better than others, but our current state Attorney General Nick Brown spoke well and was the highlight of the rally. At this point, he seems good. Of course, our former AG, Bob Ferguson, was great in that role as well, but has not been nearly as impressive as Governor, so…who really knows?

📚 Reading

Read one Star Trek novel, Gene DeWeese’s Into the Nebula.

📺 Watching

  • We finished our rewatch of Scrubs; our first time watching all the way to the end, including the Scrubs: Med School ninth season/spinoff. The first few seasons of Scrubs are definitely the best; much of the latter seasons are very hit-and-miss, but generally still at least amusing.

  • We also watched Murderbot, which was a really good adaptation of the first book in the series, and even got my wife, not as much of a sci-fi fan as I am, invested and enjoying (most of) the show. The one disappointment was a section in the final episode that fills in a period of time that’s skipped in the book, and which was tonally very different from the rest of the show, enough so that we skipped forward through a chunk of it. Still, overall, really good, and I’m looking forward to the second season when it shows up.

🔗 Linking

  • Micah Lee: Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater: “Joshua makes strong claims about the security and privacy of his app without backing any of them up with technical details. Many of his claims are false. He also chose to target only iOS, and not Android, because of a misunderstanding about how Android push notifications work. And even worse, during the Q&A, he made it clear that he didn’t understand terms like ‘warrant canary,’ ‘reverse engineering,’ or ‘security through obscurity,’ which doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  • Jason Aten at Inc.: After 18 Years, This Is Still the Most Useful macOS Feature You Probably Forgot Existed: “…one of the most underrated features in macOS is also one of the oldest: the Guest User account. It’s been around for more than 18 years, first appearing in Mac OS X Leopard in 2007. Yet most Mac users barely remember it exists.” It’s a very clickbait-y headline, but honestly, I’d not thought about the Guest User account in years, and it’s worth keeping in mind.

Legacy lenses and a bit of privilege

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(Collecting and editing together a Mastodon thread. Nothing new to see if you follow me there.)

This past weekend I went down to Portland to visit my mom, and all the photos I took were shot using lenses from her dad’s (film) Konica Minolta, attached to my Nikon D750 using a lens adapter. The lenses date from sometime after 1976, according to what I’ve been able to determine from a little web research), and require shooting all manual (which is a good skill to brush up on from time to time anyway), and it was a lot of fun to do.

A Nikon D750 DSLR sits on a coffee table. Attached to it is an 1970s Konica lens, while a Vivitar lens from the same era sits nearby.

The weekend’s photos are now in a Flickr album. I really like the quality of these; they’re definitely not as “clean” as I get with more modern lenses, but the flaws of the older glass produce some neat effects, particularly in lower-light situations where I’m shooting wide open. Not an everyday lens choice, to be sure, but definitely worth bringing out from time to time.

Portland Weekend July 2024

And finally, a funny-but-serious (to me, in retrospect) story about this photo:

A pane of shattered glass, with cracks radiating out from a central impact point; a smaller impact point is just to one side. Behind the glass and artfully out of focus are sparkling pieces of jewelry.

After spending the morning at the Pittock Mansion, mom and I needed lunch, and wanted to find someplace air conditioned, since it was a 90°+ day in Portland. So we went to a close-ish mall, the Lloyd Center, not knowing that it is virtually abandoned — I’d be surprised if it was at 30% capacity. Empty space after empty space, with just a few stragglers trying to hold on, mostly grouped around the ice rink at the mall’s center.

After eating some mediocre Orange Julius chili dogs and watching a bit of a Willy Wonka on Ice production on the ice rink (because, sure, why not toss some random Roald Dahl in), we were wandering on when we passed a jewelry store. One of the display case windows of the store had been shattered by something, leaving a very prominent starburst pattern in the glass. This caught my eye, and I figured I’d see what kind of shot I could get, with the cracked window and the sparkle of the jewelry behind it.

Being in “absent minded art brain” mode, I didn’t even think about what this might look like until, through the viewfinder, I noticed the store employees looking at me and gesturing in my direction. Suddenly very conscious of the situation, I put the camera down as a pleasant looking lady came out to talk with me. As it turns out, as soon as I apologized for not thinking about the optics of the situation and explained what I was doing, it turned out that she was also a bit of an amateur photographer, and we had a nice little chat about the window, how the shatter effect looked, and what sort of shots I might get. And then, after another little laugh about the whole thing, we all moved on.

But as we walked away, I couldn’t help but think about the rather stark privilege in the experience. Wandering through a down-at-heels mall, passing a jewelry store that someone had likely tried to rob, blithely taking photos of the damage, and walking away with a pleasant conversation and funny story. I have to think that would have turned out differently if I hadn’t been a 51 year old white man wandering around with his disabled mother in a powered chair. But in the moment? I just thought it would be a neat photo.

Year 50 Day 158

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Me sitting in a hospital waiting room, masked, and with an IV line on my right forearm. I have bags under my eyes and look exhausted.

Day 158: All is fine now, but the day started with a late-night/early morning trip to the ER due to localized pain on my left side. The doctor thought perhaps kidney stones, but after bloodwork, peeing in a cup, and a CAT scan (my first…now there’s a milestone for you), I came back medically “unremarkable”. Apparently it was just severe gas. The photo was taken about 4:30 am, after four hours there, and an hour before we finally got to leave with a prescription for some medication. Today is completely blown for anything other than lying around in a sleepy, cranky daze.

Year 50 Day 93

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Me standing in front of a wall; on a shelf mounted on the wall is a Lego pirate ship, shark, and small desert island with a castaway.

Day 93: We have a silly Lego nautical theme above our fireplace. On this side is a Lego pirate ship sailing through shark-infested waters by a small desert island with a castaway in his shack. We’ve decided that he was more interested in protecting his treasure chest than being rescued.

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Year 50 Day 18

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Me standing in a grocery store, wearing a grey cap, black t-shirt, black KN95 mask, and dark sunglasses.

Day 18: Forgot to swap sunglasses for normal glasses before heading into the store, and thus inadvertently fulfilled my personal “creepy old white guy in the grocery store” quota for the indefinite future.