Jul 03, 2009
When we were down at the beach on Wednesday evening, the seagulls took a particular interest in us, but were woefully disappointed when we departed for our hotel without leaving even a single scrap for them to eat. This juvenile gull was particularly irked when it swooped down for a landing, only to discover that the potential larder was completely bare and was not going to be refilled by these particular members of the dominant primate species.
—orc Fri Jul 3 23:35:01 2009
Still Life with Flowers & Dust Mite
—orc Fri Jul 3 23:28:36 2009
Jul 02, 2009
A better picture of the brand new United Streetcar Astra (built under license from either Skoda or Inekon; I'm not sure which of them owns the Astra design) that I took while on the way to REI this afternoon.
Every time we go south to Newport along highway 101, we pass this old Portland car that’s been converted into a novelty shop just south of Lincoln City. Apparently there used to be 4-5 carbodies, but there’s only been the one since we moved up here and started visiting places along the coast.
—orc Thu Jul 2 22:22:08 2009
When I was going out for errands this afternoon, I found myself at the north end of Union Station at the exact time that the northbound Coast Starlight was departing for Seattle.
I was waiting at the stoplight at 9th & Naito when the train departed, but the stupid lights there (there’s a turn signal light which, surprise, doesn’t activate for bicycles) didn’t let me through until the train was well underway, so I dumped my bicycle by the side of the road, yanked out the camera, and bolted up to get a few pictures as it came across 9th.
I didn’t realize until I reached the tracks that the 4449 was sitting in the station getting ready to depart for the midwest with the millionaire boys club tour train, so all you get to see of that eng! is a little bit of the pilot and snoot in the background.
(Since I live in Portland twinkies are more exotic engines than GS-4s; when the ORHF builds their new enginehouse down by OMSI, I'll be seeing the 4449 almost every day, but I need to carefully time my rambles to catch a twinkie in action. The amusing thing is that if it wasn’t for the longterm lease to the P&W/
W&P, the last operational SDP40 would be less exotic than the GE units. In any case, the 4449 will no doubt still exist when the last of the twinkies have been converted to razor blades or tucked away in museums.)
—orc Thu Jul 2 21:54:02 2009
A tiny hermit crab on the beach in Newport (discovered by the bears and photographed by yours truly)
—orc Thu Jul 2 21:19:27 2009
Russell and Silas on the beach at Newport, Oregon.
—orc Thu Jul 2 20:04:28 2009
The SP Newsprint switcher pulls a train of newsprint across highway 99W in Newberg at around 11:30 this morning. The best and I were on our way back from depositing the bears with their grandparents for a couple of days at Newport, and we crossed the SP Newsprint lead just as the 3529 came off the Red Electric mainline and headed down Blaine Street towards the mill. A quick 270° loop around the block and we were able to park and watch the train come rolling by before continuing on towards home.
—orc Thu Jul 2 15:12:33 2009
Jul 01, 2009
Just before I quit my last horrible computer job and took up babyherding, I went out and spent a stack of money replacing my broken macbook with a nice new macbook air. Which was fine (the macbook air is, by and large, a lovely machine) except that two months into its life the hard disk started going “tick tick” “tick tick” “tick tick” in a manner that sounded very much like a disk going bad. So I backed up the system, plunged through the wall of flame that is Apple online support, and eventually got them to give the ok for me to take it into the local Apple store and deal with their so-called genius bar, which ran a bad-blocks scan, mapped the offending blocks in the bad blocks table, and gave me back the machine.
I was happy to have my workstation back, so I didn’t pester them for how they mapped the bad blocks. More fool me, because just this afternoon I fired up the machine and listened with dismay as the (now out of warranty) hard disk started going “tick tick” “tick tick” “tick tick” again.
Now that’s a quality hard disk. Excellent quality control, Apple — I've always wanted to spend US$1800 on something that only lasts about a year before parts start flying off.
—orc Wed Jul 1 21:35:05 2009
A tiny little bee (quickly) works some of the new mint flowers in front of the house. Unlike the regular honeybees, these ones come roaring it, grab a morsel, then go roaring out, so if I don’t get the picture right the first time they'll be gone before the Pentax can refocus for a second try.
—orc Wed Jul 1 14:44:17 2009
Jun 30, 2009
The mint is starting to blossom, so I pulled out my remaining autofocus K-mount lens (a 70-300mm rebadged Sigma(?)), plugged it into the *istDS, and spent some time this afternoon waiting to see if some bees would pop on over to the corner store. They didn’t. So before I shovelled everything onto my bike for an afternoon run out to the donut shop, I demacroed the lens and took a few telephotoey pictures of miscellaneous things around the neighborhood.
(The amount of crud on the lens and sensor is getting pretty amazing — I had to spend quite a bit of time with the iPhoto touchup tool before the sky didn’t look as if an early summer dandruff storm was passing through. I'll probably do a full clean-off this weekend, since I suspect I'll be doing a lot of flipping between the 300mm zoom and my handful of screw-mount primes in the next month and a half.)
—orc Tue Jun 30 23:49:49 2009
Jun 29, 2009
When I started breaking up our driveway and “planting” grass to replace the concrete, I scavenged clumps of grass from every source I could find, up to and including digging them out from between cracks between not-yet-removed concrete slabs. Some (and by “some” I mean “many”) of these clumps of grass included other plants. Mainly broadleaf weeds, of course, but this spring saw this tiny violet growing up alongside the mongrel horde of grasses that I'm colonising our ex-driveway with.
(The biggest problem of breaking up the driveway is what the devil to do with the broken up concrete. I've had people come by asking if they can take it for fill, and I've gotten rid of 3 tons of it that way, and I put a couple more tons to use as a wall at the front of the property, but I've still got half a ton sitting in a pile which I have to get rid out before I can break up a couple more 4' squares. I was thinking of building a rubble foundation wall along the front of the ex-garage, but that would require quite a lot of gravel to bed the rubble wall on, and a fairly substantial amount of concrete to make a level stem-wall to build the frame for the front of the building up from.)
—orc Mon Jun 29 23:22:56 2009
A Mud Dauber wanders the lunar landscape of a pile of muddy gravel in search of the proper construction material for her nest.
—orc Mon Jun 29 22:56:14 2009
Jun 28, 2009
I went out for a moderately long loop through Clackamas County (and southern Multnomah County) this afternoon, and when I reached Rugg Road I spent some time attempting to get pictures of the bees working the Himalayan Blackberry bushes there. No luck with the bees (poor vision, a manual focus lens, and the crappy built-in p-ttl flash on my *istDS combined to make all of the bee pictures either out of focus or wildly overexposed) but I did get some nice pictures of the blackberry flowers on the horrible invasive weed.
—orc Sun Jun 28 22:15:26 2009
Jun 27, 2009
discount has been rolled up to version 1.4.4 after a cleanup of the test suite (which wasn’t portable to plan9 due to grep differences between the Unix®©™ world and the Plan9 world), a few bugfixes for things that weren’t working and which weren’t being caught because the grep jungle was tripping me up unawares, and some cleanups of the autolink code to make it look more like the reference implementation.
The list of (mis?)features is:
- Add
<map> to the html blocks we know about.
- Redo most of the test cases so they won’t
use
grep except in exceptional cases.
- To prettify the test case output, modify
cols.c so that it more-properly handles
utf-8 characters.
- Make autolink hew closer to the reference (reddit)
implementation.
- Fix a bug in generate.c where
MKD_NO_EXT was not being handled.
- Add -fext to the options for the markdown program
- Plan9 documentation corrections from Josh Wood
- Find and fix a bug where a url with an embedded double quote
is printed out with that doublequote in plaintext.
- Some more code primping to make anal-compulsive pseudo-C
compilers stfu.
- Redo
puturl() and the url grabbers to do debackslashification
in puturl()
This posting shows that I've not put any horrible new crash-causing bugs
into the mainline code, so it’s perfectly safe to use, and thus the ideal candidate for the late night New Code! release of the week.
And maybe 1.4.5 will see the documentation being properly updated, too.
—orc Sat Jun 27 01:06:55 2009
Jun 26, 2009
A female mallard duck wonders if my camera (or my fingers, or my face) would be good to eat.
—orc Fri Jun 26 23:58:45 2009
Dust Mite attempts to blend in with the crowd.
—orc Fri Jun 26 23:52:29 2009
Two different forms of transportation meet just north of the Milwaukie Marketplace.
—orc Fri Jun 26 19:26:24 2009
Jun 25, 2009
Amtrak helps make me be late on my return home from today’s short trainspotting loop in East Portland (I wasn’t really that enthusiastic about going out for a bike ride, but doing a 36 mile loop of various eastside places-with-trains was a different matter.) My plan was to get home at 6:00pm, but that plan was rudely crushed by (a) stopping at Trader Joe’s for a mass of fruits and nuts, and then (b) being late enough so that I could stop at the Bybee Blvd overpass and take pictures of a southbound Cascades scampering south as fast as GM’s finest is allowed to go in this neck of the woods.
—orc Thu Jun 25 23:23:21 2009
One of the new single-ended SD70s sits near the back of the yard at Ruby Junction today.
—orc Thu Jun 25 22:12:57 2009
Jun 22, 2009
Jun 21, 2009
I'm not sure exactly why, but pretty much every time I've gone out on the bicycle this spring or summer I've ended up being rammed by a variety of winged buzzing insects, including lots of bumblebees (here I am, rolling along at 30 km/h, and then I see this small black and yellow blob shooting towards me, followed by a crack, thud, or smack.)
Today I had the most amusing variant of this; I heard the crack, then heard some indignant buzzing sounds from inside my helmet. I shook my head, but something still didn’t feel right, so I pulled over and stopped ~1km down the line, took off my helmet, and there was a stunned bumblebee trying to shakily clean herself off before either flying away or doing a suicide attack against my scalp. I helped her decide by blowing her out of my helmet into the weeds by the side of the road, and then rode off before she changed her mind and hopped back onto the xtracycle bus for the rest of the trip out to Rugg Road.
—orc Sun Jun 21 23:20:28 2009
Mavis peers down at her loyal subjects from the lofty vantage point of her Ikea throne.
—orc Sun Jun 21 23:11:16 2009
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