Category Archives: GeekWorld

Colorado, GeekWorld, Health, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Mr. Atom and Back to the Treadmill

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Imbolc                                                                             Settling Moon II

62 here yesterday. A record warm spell for Denver, not sure about up here on Shadow Mountain. Kate and I went out in shirtsleeves, looking at plants in the front, trying to decide what they were. Bearberry, I think, or kinnikinnick, which it turns out is used as a tobacco by Native Americans. A small, evergreen shrub that lies low to the ground, kinnikinnick is a ground cover I tried to grow in Minnesota but could never make last. It grows on the edge of Montane forests where it’s sunny. Just where this is.

Had the Geowater folks here yesterday testing our water from various spots in the house.Looking mostly at corrosivity and radionuclides. We have a radon mitigation system in place so the latter is not out of the realm of possibility. Corrosivity will test the ph of the water, specifically to see if our well is the source of the acidic water in the boiler.

Started my exercise regime yesterday evening. Painful. I have detrained aerobically and in terms of resistance, plus there’s the effect (complicated) of altitude. I started over after a 7-week layoff during our cruise and this is about the same length of time away, so the difficulty getting back to it is familiar, if not welcome.

 

Colorado, GeekWorld, Weather +Climate

Sun As Snow Remover

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Winter                                                  Settling Moon

Rug down. Chair in place. Many boxes yet to open. But I’m over half done with the initial phase, the unpacking. Putting up bookshelves, then reordering my library still to come.

Colorado plates came today. I’ll put them on tomorrow.

Hunting for the box in which I put many of my usb cables, my webcam, the microphone and headset. Unfortunately no way to distinguish it from all the other boxes.

Coming from Minnesota, I didn’t believe this, but it happened today. The temperature rose and melted the snow off our driveway with no intervention by me at all. Amazing.

Meanwhile in Minnesota it’s been very cold and the flu season has taken a heavy toll, especially among the Woollies.

The painter called today and said he’d finished. This is the repainting of the Andover house. The new carpet goes in tomorrow. Then, a clean-up, staging and the house will go on the market when the weather cooperates. Exciting from our vantage point.

 

 

Colorado, Family, GeekWorld

Fair Science

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Winter                                                  Settling Moon

We pulled into the Swigert Elementary School parking lot at around 6:25 pm, parking by coincidence just ahead of Jen, Gabe and Barb. Jen gave me a hug, said she was glad to see me. A bit of a thaw.

The science fair idea seemed tired to me. Some kids obviously put a lot of thought into their entries, others less. One of my favorites in this latter category discovered “how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop.” After dogged experiment, the conclusion: 360, not the 334 hypothesized.

There were more serious entries. One investigated barriers to wifi reception. Another bacteria in meat purchased at King Sooper. The most were in some organic turkey. One kid created a homemade tornado using dry ice and a small exhaust fan.

Perhaps it’s time for a new way to engage children around science projects. Not sure what it would be, but perhaps one limited to children who really wanted to put some time and thought and effort into their work. It was obvious there were kids at Swigert who could have done something more substantial and even more who couldn’t be bothered. Both strike me as ok. Just different.

Colorado, Dogs, GeekWorld

Cardboard and Dogs

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Winter                                                                                        Settling Moon

One real marker of being here: driver’s license, my Colorado driver’s license, came today. A new state identifier. The license plates will follow. Then, we’ll be indistinguishable, at least at first glance, from other folks who live here.

More: boxes, opened. The ledge over the fireplace, a long one, is clear now. The small oriental is down in the living room with the coffee table on it for the first time in years. The coffee table was our television stand for the last 6 or 7. Found the amplifier and the dvd player, though playing dvds seems anachronistic. The little Roku hockey puck has replaced coaxial cable, receiving our television over a wireless connection to the internet.

Closing in, today, on freeing up space in the loft, especially around the window that overlooks Black Mountain. Working first to podcasts, then to youtube videos of the Band.

Kate takes Gertie in to the vet tomorrow. Gertie has an arthritic knee and needs pain pills to be her usual happy self. On the human medicine front we’ve located a Medicare specialist here to discuss our options. We have until February 20th to shift plans, but this is something I don’t want to do too near the deadline.

Still working on energy cranked up last month. Pack. Load. Unload. Unpack. Get this done. Get that done. As more and more gets done, I can feel relief waiting to break free. But, too, I can feel a sag, a slump coming after so much push. Time to collect myself, be non-productive, non-task focused. Not yet though. Not yet.

GeekWorld

Connected

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Winter                                      Christmas                                     Settling Moon

First entry from the loft on Shadow Mountain. Computer, monitor, printer, phone all connected and working. Resolved an early problem with the gas heater. I turned it off and couldn’t turn it back on. Read the manual (RTFM) which didn’t help. Got it anyway.

Now that the various computers have found their way to the internet: laptop, cell phone, I-pad (Kate’s) and this computer which sat in my study in Andover, the next electronics related task is to connect the TV’s and see if they survived the journey. That will be after my nap. Didn’t sleep too well last night, though I slept very well the night before.

However you celebrate the seasons much joy and peace to you and yours.

GeekWorld, Health

TTT

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Samain                                                                                     Moving Moon

The ritual of the oil change was performed upon the Rav4 this morning and its tires too were rotated. As if they did not rotate enough each time they carry us. We acolytes of the Toyota oil change cult sat in our waiting room with the holy messenger disk near us so the technopriests might summon us in case our wallet was needed. Fortunately this day no summoning came and only the normal charges applied. Thank thee Toyota. TTT

After that I lay back in the dental chair and allowed Stacey into my mouth with short pointy instruments, rapidly oscillating water and. Floss. Clean teeth. Fresh oil. I’m ready to hit the road for the Rocky Mountains.

 

GeekWorld

much better now

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Lughnasa                                                         Lughnasa Moon

Remember when you used to have to go to the store, pick out items, stand in line to pay and then pack them up in your own car and take them home? Of things I recall as emblematic of the past-dial phones, transistor radios, cold winters-this is something I miss not at all.

When the Sears and Montgomery-Ward catalogs came (speaking of things of the past) to rural areas of the U.S. back in the early 20th century, it must have been a similar feeling. Without a long trip to a city an order could be placed by mail and the train would deliver it right to the station. I imagine a dray man would bring it on out to the farm for a price.

Today I got moving supplies: bankers boxes, plastic file boxes and specialized boxes for moving art. The UPS guy brings the boxes to the doors, rings the bell to let me know they’re here and all I have to do is bring them inside. So much better than that old fashioned trip to the mall.

 

GeekWorld

PKM: Personal Knowledge Management (Isn’t that terrible?) I found it in an article.

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Lughnasa                                                   Lughnasa Moon

Content curation. This will be a quick one because I’m going to have to devote some time to this to get anything from it. Isn’t that always what happens?

Here are a few takeaways from four articles I read about this relatively recent activity.

1. Define what it is you want in your information stream.

2. Find sources for it and use one or more of several curation oriented programs to help you aggregate them.

3. Create your own compilation of materials according to the thematic decisions made in #1.

4. Comment on, critique, summarize.

5. Repeat

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Wheel

Green Day

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Lughnasa                                                                Lughnasa Moon

Out this morning to harvest collard greens and chard. Kate’s going to use the pressure 500P1030729cooker to can them so we can move them with us next year.  A few more garlic should be ready and perhaps more onions.

We’ll have a year without a garden, most likely, next year. If we can get out of here by April, not impossible, we might land in Colorado soon enough to get raised beds made, new soil in place, and a 2015 garden in. Remains to be seen.

(collard greens and chard + onions in May)

Today is Lughnasa and that post will come, appropriately, after I bring in the greens. August means the downside of the summer has well begun as my round calendar tells me graphically at a quick glance.

There will be today, too, a post on what the web calls content curation. I was not the first sun calendarto think of that term relative to the information firehose analogy. There are several strategies for curating content, but the first and most basic one is to know what kind of information you want. I’ve made baby steps in this direction with Feedly, the links listed on the right here, bookmarks and an uneven deployment of hashtags.

(note: we are at about :20 to the hour if this were a wall clock)

But more on Lughnasa and content curation later today.

 

Commentary on the news, GeekWorld

Streaming

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Summer                                                                          Lughnasa Moon

Turning up the nozzle on the firehose. I read three newspapers daily: the NYT, the Denver Post and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. In addition I read several magazine articles a day, many from the New York Review of Books, but many from other sources discovered through web-site aggregators. The one I currently use is called Feedly. Wired and Foreign Policy are the two other paper magazine subscriptions I have, only recently having canceled my long-time subscription to the Economist.  I’m also always reading at least one book on my Kindle, sometimes two.

We live in the golden age of science fiction television shows, as I said a while back, but we also live in the golden age of information access. The plethora of good science fiction means some get missed; the plethora of information available has created a perverse problem geometrically more complex than the science fiction one.

On Feedly I have eight categories of websites: stuff, technology, politics, science, magazines (the information aggregrators of the 20th century), philosophy and climate change. I could have double that with no difficulty. Feedly allows me to quickly browse topics and articles to see if there’s something I want to read.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I could spend all day, every day, simply staying abreast of the things I care about. Obviously, this is a problem. It leaves no room for action, no room for work or domestic life. I can only absorb information at some finite rate, whatever that rate is. And I can only absorb, retain and understand an even smaller amount.

This leads obviously to a need to curate (overused, I know, but apt here) information sources and within them categories of information. How do I do that? Frankly, I have no good solutions. I’m often left at some point during the day deciding to quit reading to do something else: Latin, garden, pack, write my own information to add to the flood, think. But when I decide to quit it’s because there is always more, and more easily available. I don’t have to wait a month for a magazine to come, or a day for a newspaper to come. I don’t rely on hourly news digests by radio nor any of the various TV news broadcasts. These latter two are far too broad and shallow for my tastes.

This needs a solution, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.