Dave's Journal, May2020
Bored bored.... watching Youtube videos last night, fidgeting with a camera, had a Hexanon 40mm on there and a Zeiss Soft #1 filter.... what the heck .... point it at the TV and ... jees, that didn't come out too bad !!
The filter softened the TV scan lines !!
The singer is Tatiana Eva-Marie from the Avalon Jazz Band. They have a "swing" style that's cool and easy for these modern times.
Below is Blue on the stairs - same lens setup. This lens/filter combination works nicely together.
My "new" computer - MacPro, 2014 vintage. Never had a Mac before, been using Linux for 20 years. Big change. Linux makes it easy to do whatever you please, but Macs embed their procedures in the Apple Universe and you gotta switch off all the default behavior and that's all buried in the most unlikely menus.... it's a pain .... been at it for 3 days. But I do like it a lot at this point. The screen is beautiful for pictures and movies. Comes with lots of software that is pretty useful (and some you need to push out of the way.
The sound Bluetooths into my ear implants.
The Mac will be my porch entertainment & web surfing unit and the Lenovo (I am on that one now to write this) remains the Linux workhorse.
Planning to use a 2Tb external drive as day-to-day mp4 and photo storage.
Not much going on. Still under "lockdown".
Here's the rabbit that lives under the shed out back.
Blue went to the vet's yesterday and won't be back until Monday with a final diagnosis. Tests are pointing to liver failure, which has no nice ending.
Well, I am happy to tell that Blue does not have F.I.P. , which is a fatal liver infection. But lab results say he does have a liver infection (treatable and not usually fatal). It's actually one of the coronaviruses, but has not mutated into a fatal form!
So we stepped back from our "we have to put him down" thinking and we're just going to pump pills into him for a month or so.
St. Francis (the animal guy) may have got involved here - we do have his statue among the hostas under the tree. Counts for something, I'd bet.
Well, it took Luka (on the left) 4 days to stop hissing at Blue (full of hospital odors), but they are again best buddies, watching chipmunks outside.
Pretty sad when the most interesting thing going on is your cats' lives.
Glossy Mambo Pink is what they (Lowe's) called this color.
Well ..... yeah ..... okay with me. So I bought some cans and sprayed away.
Well it's the last of May (28th exactly) and we're still in semi-lockdown due to the COVID19 virus and I've not got out to do anything worth writing about here. But I must carry onward, so let's see what comes to mind, shall we?
Why are so many things in 3's ?
Father, Son, Holy Ghost
Heaven, Purgatory, Hell
The 3 Musketeers
The Pythagorean theorm
Fork, knife, spoon
Reading, 'riting, 'rithematic
Faith, hope, charity
Past, present, future
Beginning, middle, end
Morning, noon, night
Sun, moon, stars
Larry, Moe, Curly
Peter, Paul, Mary
Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Blue (the semi-recovered cat) disappeared inside the house and didn't even come to dinner. So I knew something was up. I poke around, see his tail sticking out behind the couch. We play dodge-cat a few minutes when I notice two small legs and a tail sticking out of his mouth. Aha !
I traded him a handful of kitty treats for a dead mouse. It was a win-win deal.
I am becoming more dyslexic (sp?) by the hour. When I'm reading, my eyes grab all the letters in a sentence and my brain makes up its own sentence using the letters. To hell with what was actually written. Most times I don't figure it out until 2 sentences later when I think "That doesn't make sense, does it?" and go back for a reread.
And remembering names of things - not a chance. I need about 10 minutes per noun when I'm trying to finish a sentence.
My brain is shrinking, I can feel it sloshing around in there.
I am learning to like my Apple Mac Pro laptop (2014 vintage, but latest OS).
Apple is a cult mentality. Their system has its own way of handling you files and secret places it creates behind you back and stores your stuff there. I personally hate the computer doing things I don't ask it to do, so I basically hate the way the Apple default settings work. Took me about 10 days to hunt down what it was doing and turn stuff off. Sending my files to the iCloud ????? Who the ### asked you to do that ??? and what exactly is the iCloud ? and why ???? Automatically move all my photos to some filder I did not create ? Allow me to downlaod applications but can't run them until I go into system folder A>B>C>security>Privacy and tell it that I want to run the program I just installe myself !! Of course I want to run it you moron, I installed it didn't I ???
I could go on.
But the screen is glorious and so is the keyboard and battery life is fantastic.
My mode of operation is I keep all my files (well, not literally all of them) on a 2Tb external drive. Movies, pictures, music. Very few files are on this laptop. I just plug the ext drive in when I need something. It's quick and easier than I expected. And it looks like Apple does not move those external files around.
Had a similar experience today with a picture editing program called Capture One. Before you edit anything, you need to create a Session, a Catalog under that, an Album under that and a Group under than. Then you can open your picture. They say it helps keep your pictures sensibly organized, but I say leave my #### files alone, I will organize them, what I need is a picture editor, not a file management system.
I don't understand why people buy into this mentality. It's like selling your soul to the Devil. Why ???
Then again, the screen is really really nice. (there, I ended on a high note.)
"I Don't Know" - - back in school we had an engineering professor who taught us a very important lesson. When he graded our tests, if you left the answer blank or wrote "I don't know", you got zero for that question. If you answered the question but got the answer wrong, he gave you a negative grade for that question.
He was making the extremely important point that "Giving out the wrong information is 1000X worse than giving out no answer", because the wrong answer will make someone else do the wrong thing or believe in the wrong idea because you gave him bad information about something or someone.
I forgot exactly what made me think of this recently, but I wish that everyone would learn to say "I don't know", rather than make up some BS to sound like they know what they're talking about.
Sadly people rather fill the empty spaces in their head with bad information than leave the space blank and say "I don't know".
