Coral Del Cabo, Florida 26.63° N, 81.93° W
Say what? A social file exchange for designers, artists, DJs, writers, musicians,
researchers, engineers and anyone of interest. I’ve had a content club on the brain for the past few months and just discovered this. I am on the waitlist but from everything I’ve seen so far this will be a blast.
Only one item was damaged during the cross-country relocation and that was my Royal Scrittore typewriter. I was looking forward to using it but apparently these things don’t defy gravity or react well with hard surfaces. I took it apart today to repair it and I have everything fixed so I thought.
The carriage return does not advance but the backspace does. Some of the letter keys stick but that can be poked back down. It may be time to look elsewhere and I do have my eye on this white typewriter from eBay.
It’ll go with the new decor so it’s justified(?) I’ll stew on it for a bit.
The glass tablet in my hand is not just a consumption device but also a creative one. I am limited in talent and funds to explore creating art with a physical canvas and physical globs of paint. And so in their place I am using technology to augment my creative practice.
To put it simply- sometimes I “paint” on my iPad. I’d say half of them are made with an Apple Pencil stylus and the other half by scrolling a finger over the glass. Finger painting minus the mess!
This morning I stood on the Cape Coral beach looking southwest waiting to see a rocket ship fly over us. I was there at Starbase observing the tallest, most powerful rocket ever to be launched up close. 100 yards away we camped on the beach where the Rio Grande emptied into the Gulf with Mexico on the other side. We were asked to leave the beach the next day before the test fire of the 34 Raptor engines. That was delayed so we made our way back home and missed that one. But it was exciting to see!
Still can’t believe how close we were permitted to get. Boca Chica Beach, Texas.
Today I had hoped to see this gorgeous rocket in flight and one day go to the Moon and Mars.
Starship’s fourth flight test launched with ambitious goals, attempting to go farther than any previous test before and begin demonstrating capabilities central to return and reuse of Starship and Super Heavy. The payload for this test was the data. Starship delivered.
On June 6, 2024, Starship successfully lifted off at 7:50 a.m. CT from Starbase in Texas and went on to deliver maximum excitement for the next hour until it arrived in orbit, re-entered orbit and then corrected itself for a splash down in the Indian Ocean successfully.
Liftoff
Alas, the flight trajectory that Space-X typically takes is in between Florida and Cuba. Today, the flight path took it south of Cuba. I didn’t have a chance in hell of capturing it. Not even a trail in the sky.
In the past few years, there have been 353 (!) launches from three launch sites from Cape Canaveral Florida, to Boca Chica Texas and Vandenberg AFB in California. 287 of those launches have been re-flights using rocket boosters that auto-land back to earth (!) No one has been able to do this before including NASA.
My View, Pre-launch, Launch, 33/34 raptors firing, In Orbit! De-orbiting, Re-entry burning through a fin, Splashdown, Success!
I can only hope that Starship 5 will be launched at night. Space-X’s other rockets are launched from Florida at night and we can see those easily.
Huh.
Way back in the early to mid 1980’s, I had purchased a generic, portable cassette player that I thought was the cat’s ass. I had control over what I listened to and could take it everywhere. I could copy our family’s limited albums onto a blank cassette and even record music off of the radio station. Audio freedom never sounded so good.
One day, my father asked me why I use cassettes when records were better? I remember saying, rather wisely I thought, that records were fine but I can’t carry a record player with me everywhere. I received a smirk and probably a “what the hell ever” sort of comment in return. Generational gaps, am I right?
Well, looking back, it seems to have stood the test of time so well, that everyone wants to have a record player now and scour everywhere trying to find those same albums. I know I did and acquired quite a few. However, if you don’t store them properly, they end up getting warped and unplayable. Ask me how I know.
Something unavailable at the time of that past conversation and I think we can both agree on, is the compact disc. Better sound quality, smaller in size, portable and you can even transfer the music digitally. A win/win/win/win.
As consumers, we strayed away from those CDs in favor of streaming our music and audio books. But I think it is time for a comeback. I’ve moved on from 8-tracks, cassettes, records and now, I think I am ready to move on from streaming.
For the past few months, I have slowly acquired a ton of digital music burned from compact discs that were borrowed from various libraries stretching from Cincinnati to Tulsa, Houston and now CCFL. Not to mention all of the CDs I have managed to keep ahold of over the years and all of a sudden, I am sitting on gigabytes of music.
There is a point to all of this, and once again, the old man was right. Over the years, I probably drove he, and the rest of our family nuts by suggesting the latest tech trends and tools to try. Since everyone else at the time was using Apple, I was on Android so it was a challenge to find a decent chat app to communicate long distance. Then I went all-in on Apple devices and decided that just plain old Messages app was perfect for our needs.
“Hey Dad, we can communicate on Facebook so you should sign up.” I promptly received, correctly, a “what the hell ever” comment that I waved off as a generational thing. Now I regret ever signing up for the damned thing and deleted back in 2018.
All of that is to say this: I am cutting back, way back on my digital tools, including my website. I want to de-BS my life and live more simply so I am taking steps to ensure this happens soon. Having lost one of my web domain names to a frickin’ casino in Iceland, I will hold on to the existing one with my personalized e-mail address for that domain. The same goes for my photography portfolio’s domain name. The web pages may disappear for awhile, but the names are mine. I own those lots even though there will be no houses on them so to speak.
Instead of a website and portfolio, I will journal using my own server’s database. An analog pen and paper are standing by too.
I’ll read analog books by day and the digital Kobo by night.
Eventually, I will even purchase a dumb phone that costs $100 that will allow me to call and text only. The current iPhone will be relegated to a camera and a portable music player (remember all those gigabytes of music files?)
It’s back to basics for me using the original pillars of the internet. WWW 1.0 brought us electronic mail, SMS messaging, digital journals, .PDF, podcasts, internet browsers and RSS. Speaking of browsers, I am going to remove 95% of all the apps on my iDevices in favor of using the browser instead. Too much personal data is being handed over to those app developers. Using a browser, I have more freedom and privacy.
I went online in 1996 when I purchased my first computer for college and have been an embedded netizen for almost thirty years. While I appreciate and am fascinated by technology and all it’s advances, the tech industry has proven themselves to be unworthy of holding the keys and locking their users in. They have bastardized the very tools designed for us and made us worse. As JOSHUA reminds us, this is all a confusing game. The only winning move is not to play.
So, kudos to my father who was right all along.
Why write publicly? I’ve asked myself this question at least once a year, and my answer gets easier every year—no one cares.
Writing, for me, is a tool to organize my thoughts and process them. It’s also a log for me to remember and look back on to see how I’ve progressed over the years. But writing is a lonely hobby. If there is a limited audience, then what is the point? Put it into an email or a text message and be done with it, right?
Writing online with my domain, my website, and a server can be expensive. It doesn’t have to be, but I choose this over a third-party host and give up all of my rights, privacy, and autonomy.
Social media is not an option for those same reasons.
Social internet is an answer, but it takes too much time to build.
The hardest part of blogging, sharing my passions or thoughts, doesn’t always mean the people closest to you care to read them. Then the doubt creeps in, “Well, if they don’t care, why would anyone else? Why am I doing this, and putting myself out there?”
So, I do what I always do, which is to write for me first, and just hope that maybe someone else might find something of value in there. But over time I just became so frustrated with it all, I am going to close my website down and just go back to journaling for a while.
Why write publicly? I’ve asked myself this question at least once a year, and my answer gets easier every year—no one cares.
Writing, for me, is a tool to organize my thoughts and process them. It’s also a log for me to remember and look back on to see how I’ve progressed over the years. But writing is a lonely hobby. If there is a limited audience, then what is the point? Put it into an email or a text message and be done with it, right?
Writing online with my domain, my website, and a server can be expensive. It doesn’t have to be, but I choose this over a third-party host and give up all of my rights, privacy, and autonomy.
Social media is not an option for those same reasons.
Social internet is an answer, but it takes too much time to build.
The hardest part of blogging, sharing my passions or thoughts, doesn’t always mean the people closest to you care to read them. Then the doubt creeps in, “Well, if they don’t care, why would anyone else? Why am I doing this, and putting myself out there?”
So, I do what I always do, which is to write for me first, and just hope that maybe someone else might find something of value in there. But over time I just became so frustrated with it all, I am going to close my website down and just go back to journaling for a while.
Recently, I discussed how my photography is now more of a documentary style rather than a portrait or landscape genre. But now that I have some time, I want to dive in and play with the existing images to create something entirely different.
Long ago, I purchased Pixelmator Pro, the alternative to the expensive Adobe Photoshop, but rarely had a chance to use it. So now I’m going to dust it off, take it out of the toy box and start to play.
The first step was to add two different images, one black and white and the other full-on color blast as a stark contrast. After manipulating both images individually as I needed, I then merged those separate layers into one and added some fine-tuning. It isn’t perfect. It doesn’t have to be since it is a first attempt, and I am playing. Learning as I go.
After three years of owning this MacBook Pro with the M1 silicon chip, I got to hear the internal fan for the very first time. This machine can take quite a lot, but while I was importing images into Lightroom from an external hard drive, I was also uploading other images to the photo archive site all while typing up some notes. Impressive.
After three years of owning this MacBook Pro with the M1 silicon chip, I got to hear the internal fan for the very first time. This machine can take quite a lot, but while I was importing images into Lightroom from an external hard drive, I was also uploading other images to the photo archive site all while typing up some notes. Impressive.
Parsing an exported .json file into something readable like a plain .txt format is proving troublesome. These are old posts that need to be translated and then migrated over to the Archives site since they were not imported due to these .json errors.
Unfortunately, there has been no easy solution. It is all copy/paste and manually removing the gratuitous code, then format it properly and then copy/paste and date manually into the Archives.
I can’t tell you how many times in the past ten years that there was a desire to build and maintain a map as a photo gallery of places I have been and things I have seen in all of my travels. No, it’s more than one map. I have wanted to build my own map(s) displaying all the images of hidden and discovered geocaches across the country. A separate map showcasing all the neon signs I have documented from Miami to Portland and all points in between. Another map to display all the locations of documented wall art from New Orleans to Chicago, you know, up and down the length of the Mississippi River.
Thanks to careful documentation in the past, I tagged GPS coordinates on to images to look them up later. Then, with incoming new technology, GPS coordinates were built in to the EXIF data of every image, making it so much easier to locate. But what does one do with that information? Build a map to document your travels, of course.
Previously, I relied on Google’s “My Maps” which allows you to enter these in and attach photos to them, but I do not like Google. Unfortunately, they are one of the best, free sources (free as in they will hoover all of your data for their use, of course.) But I’ve always known there exists open-source mapping programs to help me build one myself. After all of this time, this may be a good opportunity to build and ship one out, allowing me to lovingly document these locations. You know, as a photo diary.
So, I downloaded Visual Studio Code, an IDE, installed Python inside and went to work creating a photo gallery that works with ArcGIS, a mapping software tool. Then created an account on GitHub to keep all of my code in the cloud and act as a virtual server, ready for me to pull requests down when needed. Well, I discovered that the costs to maintain these wouldn’t be a solution, especially ArcGIS (Geographic Information System.) Enter QGIS, an open-source tool that allows me to do this at zero cost.
Then I went to work in Python, coding out the framework and processes to make these maps a reality…and then hit a brick wall. Do I really want to do this? I do, yes, but currently I can’t be arsed. It isn’t laziness, it is restlessness. What else could I be doing instead? But wait, I have the time to do this now because in the near future I may not.
So frustrating is this internal debate that I upload what little code I had to GitHub and then decide what to do with all of this…later. Maybe the reason is I just spent the last few weeks in code building this website and the Archive website and writing articles on here, and creating newsletters and podcasts and and and I just need a break. I’ve lost my way and my desire.
Speaking of breaks, I am going to relax and finish listening to this album that was playing in the background while typing this up:
Delta Kream by The Black Keys