Not bush league

Some of you may know there is a bit of scrub bush across the road from our place. I've walked through it a few times, but haven't done so in a while. It isn't anything special, other than still existing in a suburban neighbourhood.

The kids have made some paths through it, and I'd like to believe the trash was blown in by the wind. It's funny, a few days ago I was thinking of cameraing over there, and was all meh. Yesterday I was keen, and this is what I got. The light was pretty good, and don't ask me what any of it is.

Celina has become a tough subject lately. She is a very pretty kitty, but for some reason Curtis is much more photogenic. Celina likes to tease the camera.

Linda found these for dessert at Sidewalk Citizen. They're called PMS cake and very yummy. I could wish the layer of whipped cream was about half that thick, but you can't have everything.

Macro Monday 9, every day

Every morning I get up and use this thing. It's important. The process starts even before feeding the cats, and those of you with cats know how difficult that is.

I'm getting better at setting up the shots. The bike stand is really versatile, and it's easier to move the arms around to get the subject into the right place for the camera, then use the macro rails to fine tune.

Other times I've tried to get dialled into max magnification, but today I was more looking for interesting images. Most of these are between 3 and 4.5x. Some of you might remember the game farm shots while I was in Yukon. Most of those were shot through a fence. Some of the triathlon shots are through a fence as well. If you do it right, the fence disappears. Well, I can tell you that doesn't work on this. There were a few times on preview I could see through the mesh to what I wanted to shoot, but the actual photo was just blurry mesh.

Yes, I cleaned the subject afterward, really well, though I console myself with the thought there can't be anything actually growing on it. The subject gets immersed in freshly boiled water.

Are you still wondering?

I get asked, every now and then

I'm not sure what it is. Every now and then I get asked stuff. Some of it is practical (How do I do Ironman?) some of it is process (How do we migrate this data?) some of it is curious (Why aren't you on Twitter anymore?), and some of it is weird (bribe me with a glass of wine in private.)

So the Twitter thing is recent, but it ties in with other things related to retirement and life in general. I was a late convert to Twitter, thinking that if I had anything to say, it was going to take more than 140 characters. For a while it was ok, and I learned some editing skills to hone what I was saying. But the artificial nature of it chafed me. Mostly I used it tell people I'd blogged, and respond to other people I know.

About the same time I stopped listening to the news, and radio in general. The news was full of people trying to push my buttons or reporters doing their job reporting without context the stupid things and lies that various people in power and wannabes were saying. I started getting really selective about where I got my news.

It annoys me when video starts on a website without my permission. If I wanted to watch it, I would have clicked it. If I haven't clicked it, by definition I don't want to watch it and it's a distraction. Many videos annoy me, what with the long intro of meaningless graphics and brand building, and the host taking forever to get to the point. This is why I like text. I'm extremely good at processing it.

The music on the radio baffles me. Little of it is music to my ears, but then I think the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are new music. No, I don't know anything about the Tragically Hip or why people are upset about one of their members dying. Sad for the fans I guess, but it's inevitable. The newest band where I can reliably recognize their music? Pink Martini. Don't get me started on commercials in any medium.

Back to Twitter, I noticed more and more snark and gotcha and outright bullying happening, and nothing being done about it. Then the Idiot in Chief down south essentially threatened nuclear war in a tweet.

Yes. The man with his finger on the nuclear button, threatening North Korea with nuclear destruction, via Twitter. Say what you like about North Korea, I don't care. But they are the legitimate government of the country, even if it is reprehensible in many ways. There has been lots of diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing between them and everybody else, with varying amounts of it public. The North Korean end is mostly a semi-rational screech at best, and pre-Trump, everybody else's responses have ranged between paternalistic, to serious discussion, to veiled threats, all with varying degrees of rationality.

Now Trump 'negotiates' via Twitter, threatens nuclear annihilation, and in the great scheme of things that is not productive. On a smaller scale, how can that not violate Twitter's terms of service? They let him babble the stupidest most hateful things, and do nothing to throttle the bully pulpit. One could easily argue they are enabling the most dangerous man in the world to be even worse.

The other thing that pisses me off with Twitter isn't properly their fault. Have you noticed that a lot of so called news articles are just reprinting tweets? Or rather, re-re-printing tweets. The report says what the tweet says, then there's a screen shot of the tweet. Come on people, I don't need both.

Real world events are complicated, much to the dismay of conservatives everywhere. There is no one true (TRUE!) answer, no solution that will fix everything. All they want is to do is use that promise to springboard into power where they can do what they like for themselves and their buddies, regardless of the reality around them. As near as I can tell, they want to roll the clock back about 50 years, or to what their parents/church/community told them in their first childhood.

Real world events are certainly more complicated than a series of tweets, and I want to see them treated this way. I want to see world (country/province/civic) leaders speaking in coherent paragraphs about the issues of the day. I want to see the people that oppose them also speaking in coherent paragraphs about those issues. I want reporters to connect up those paragraphs and contrast them with what experts in that field say. I want to be able to tell if leaders have changed their thinking over time as the science has advanced, or if their own opinions evolve. I want to hear the reasons leaders hold the opinions they do, and be able to determine if they are starting from a reality based position and tweaking a position based on what they think they can sell to the electorate, or if it's magical thinking based on a work of fiction, or them living in fantasyland.

Twitter is conducive to none of those things, so I've decided to ease Twitter out of my life. So far I haven't missed it. I don't think there's anyone I actually know on Twitter that isn't on Facebook or Instagram. Maybe I'm missing out a few jokes, but oh well. I'm getting better at skipping past news stories at the first appearance of a tweet.

It's been a wonderful summer living on my own schedule. Sometimes I've chosen to get up early to do a photo thing, or get to the pool when it's quiet. Sometimes I've been so busy the day passes in a blur, and other days I've done nothing more energetic that cuddling a cat. It's been good to think about the things I want in my life. I like being able to step back from events a bit, comment where I think appropriate, and let other things sail on by.

This photo has nothing to do with today's blog. It's from a photo ramble a couple weeks ago, dressed up in Photomatix a bit. Pity about those straight lines in the clouds, I'm not sure what that was.

Frosty rose leaf mojo

If you don't like frosty rose leaves, carry on. Click here if you do.

We've been having a lovely fall here. Linda is getting the garden put to bed for the season but there's still lots to do. Last night was kind of crappy, a bit of rain, then snow. We had no idea what we'd wake up to.

Lots of frost, and a beautiful clear sunrise. The dark of the sky slowly lightening to an orangey rose in the east, sunlight glinting off a hard frost. I was out a couple times trying to capture the light, but managed to find it in the rose leaves. I love that rich orange reds mixed with the green of some of the leaves.

The last few days I've been feeling sort of blah in general, but today I saw the light and hustled to pick up the camera. It seemed like there was lots of shoot just in our front yard.

I'm really liking experimenting with a colourful blurry background, so you're going to get a bunch of that.

Win some, lose some

The win part has been the running. I'm getting out regularly and it's feeling pretty good. Only 2 days of spin so far, one easy and one moderate. This gets chalked up in the so far so good column. The swim still sucks.

The new glasses were a win. Five years is long enough for one pair. The new ones are much clearer, but the prescription has changed a bit and I'm hunting for the sweet spot a bit. This complicates life for photography, especially when you're playing with depth of field. I've been looking at a bunch of photos and wondering if the photo or parts of it is out of focus, which might be a good or bad thing, or it's just my eyes and glasses playing tricks on me.

I was out in South Glenmore park yesterday afternoon, and found some interesting stuff. However what I saw, and what the camera captured are not the same at all. I'm quite disappointed in some of the shots that I thought would turn out well. One expects that of some shots, of course, but this was most of them. Almost all of them.

This is the only one that I like even a little bit, and I'm still not entirely pleased with it. There were a number of other shots taken with the same idea that I thought would turn out better, but no. Such is life.

The sky has been interesting lately, but I haven't been in the right place for a good shot, and unwilling to dash to what might be the right place. Sometimes when the coffee is really good...

I'm in this odd sort of hiatus just now. There are some winter projects lined up, but it's still nice out so I don't want to start burrowing into the basement and doing indoor stuff. It looks like we've got another week of nice weather, so I really ought to be out doing stuff, but I'm temporarily feeling uninspired about it, which is sort of odd for me. Any photo buddies have any projects they'd like company on?

Maybe the steak about to go on the BBQ, the spud and veg, plus (of course) the red wine will get me feeling better.

My advice to 'new' Calgary city council

Last night was the big night. One of the most exciting civic elections in my time here. Out of the 14 councillors, 10 ran, and 10 were re-elected, so there are 4 new faces on council. Nenshi was re-elected to the Mayor's chair by a convincing but not overwhelming margin. So essentially it's the same council that was widely derided as disfunctional, though how anyone that remembers the 'Bronco' council can think that is beyond me.

Where to begin?

By the standards of most people, you're all arrogant. Arrogant with a capital A, so don't be thinking some of you are better than the others. Put your ego on a leash, and get on with your job. Remember the lessons from kindergarten, play nice and share? Even though you are elected by people in one ward, you have to make decisions about what's good for the whole city. No, it isn't good for one part of the city to get all the gravy all the time, and another area the sharp end of the stick. Grow up, suck it up, recognize the value, and values you all bring to office.

Yes, it's a tough job, but you volunteered, and went through quite an ordeal to prove how badly you wanted the job. There is a long list of services the city currently provides and it has to be paid for, or make the decision to cut it. There is a huge list of additional things the city could spend money on, and you have to decide. Huge and expensive. Expand a water treatment plant and there's hundreds of millions of dollars. Each kilometre of new roads is more dollars, and then we get into bridges and complicated intersections and the money goes up and up. Equipment for cops and firefighters doesn't come cheap. I don't even know what all the city spends money on, but you'd better know.

Do not be fooled by outsourcing. Sure, they say, it's cheaper for a private company to collect garbage. Except we have a fleet of vehicles to deal with the several streams of waste, and people trained to operate them. Are you going to sell the vehicles and lay off the people? Then what do you do when the outsourcing company raises prices? As they will when they know they've got you by the short and curlies.

The overall operating budget is $3.5 Billion, and the capital budget is $5.8 Billion. Added and written out that's $9,300,000,000. That's a lot of zeros, and there's a lot of stuff that needs to fit into it. Maybe it sounds like a lot of room, but there's not. Focus on the big picture, not the stuff that is a rounding error, no matter how visible it is.

It's a constant struggle to find the best value. Sometimes it looks sensible to spend a little more now and save on the next phase of construction. Sometimes that turns out to be not the best idea in hindsight. Do we buy the bargain basement bid, and pay early maintenance costs, or the cadillac bid and write a big cheque up front?

So-called common sense is a poor tool. You need high quality data, and lots of it, and you'd better read it thoroughly. How much, exactly, do all the various options for a particular choice cost? We're talking many millions of dollars, potentially over decades for some choices. What are the benefits and drawbacks of each choice? Compare that to another choice, such as the various Green Line routing alternatives for the downtown core. Then another set of choices on another issue, again and again. Common sense is quickly overwhelmed. You need a system, not intuition, and certainly not an ideology. There's lots of times a solution is counter-intuitive, so check the numbers, but believe the data.

We've all seen a road paved, and a short time later it's torn up again for some other work. What a waste, we think. How hard can it be to coordinate that sort of work? Well, actually, it's enormously difficult. Calgary has 16,000 lane kilometres of paved roadways, and work could happen for any number of utilities on, under, or near the street. Such a coordinator would have to know all the street related work the city plans to do, plus all the city utility work such as water, and wastewater lines, plus work done by outside companies for natural gas and petroleum product pipelines, as well as electrical and data lines, and probably more that don't come to mind at the moment. Imagine knowing all that, or keeping track of all that in a database that would change every day, and then trying to make sense of it to schedule the work for all the different contractors for the various players, and trying to get it all done before the ground freezes again. They do try, but for short sighted politicians, work like that seems like it's easy to cut and not miss. There are any number of people working for the city that do work that produce value that might not be obvious. It's easy to cut staff and regret it later.

Calgary is in a crappy economic situation just now, everybody knows that. Everybody has advice for you. Some quick points:

• Anybody tells you they can cut taxes and keep the same services without debt is lying to you or is a fool.
• The low hanging fruit has already been picked.
• Finding efficiencies is data driven. While an outsider might have the initial idea, it takes people with a deep knowledge of the current system to do a pilot test, and determine if it scales up. It isn't a quick process, and it will probably cost money. More balancing.
• Finding efficiencies is often code for firing people. What happens to the work currently done by those people? The people around them already have too much to do, and no, the database system everybody thinks is the magic solution doesn't quite work that way yet.
• Everybody has ideas to cut services, and oddly enough, it's always services they don't use. But somebody does use them, or it would have been cut long since. One doesn't cut services to become or stay a great place to live.
• You have to do a better job of communicating why taxes are going up (because they are) and what we are getting for that money. We kept flat taxes during the Duerr era in the 90's, and got so far behind on infrastructure we're still catching up.
• The arena deal. Stand firm! I say, not one thin dime of taxpayer money for this boondoggle. These NHL owners are shrewd and wealthy, and they didn't get that way putting their own money at needless risk. If they can con the taxpayers into putting up money, why not? All their other owner buddies have done it, so why not here? The question we have to ask ourselves is, how good of a deal can it be if they can't or won't put their own money or their banker's money into it? Let them sell bonds to those willing to buy.
• The Olympics. Don't. Just don't. Once was nice, but we've been there and done that. The whole IOC is corrupt, and anybody dealing with them is tainted. It's a lot of money we don't have for nothing in return. Or do you mean facilities like the ski jumping towers that are now used as cell towers? Let's build facilities because we need them.
• Secondary suites is the current toxic issue, just like fluoridation and cat licensing once were. Just deal with it and stop wasting our money and your time! Remember, you're responsible for a multi-billion dollar budget, why are you thinking about a measly reno job in a private home? Decide on a regulatory framework and delegate it to administration staff. Maybe the councillors that vote against a regulatory framework should have to deal with it, and the rest of council can do something more productive with their time.
• Figure out what went wrong with the voting procedures this time, and fix it. A bit of a line up is expected, but that got out of hand.

It's easy for council to see only what's making noise. A few people yelling about some public art sculpture they don't like. Mercedes man screaming about public transit. People that don't like a decision calmly but doggedly wanting you to go back and revisit it, and cut taxes and services while you're about it. People that don't have all the facts, or that don't see how their choices would actually hurt people. There are all sorts of one-issue crackpots that bedevil your life and somehow you have to deal with them politely. Build a system and delegate, but keep an eye out in case one of those issues blows up.

We live in a great city, and I want that to continue. Taxes are how we pay for the services here, and there's no getting around that. While most people don't like paying taxes, they realize this, and want to know they're paying their fair share. Taxpayers want to see that we're getting good value for our tax dollar. You MUST communicate that better, and push back on the 'taxation is theft' lunatics. At the same time we shouldn't be spending a dollar to save a nickel.

Good luck with it all, and see you again in 4 years.

iPhone adventures

I've been a Mac guy for many years now. Many. When the Mac ecosystem expanded to iPhones and iPads I came along. Not as an early adopter, but mid pack or so. Generally I've been pretty happy, though there have been some frustrating times.

Like the last week or so. Imagine my frustration levels to seriously contemplate what safety equipment was required for me and my real camera to video smashing the iPhone 6 with a big hammer many times. I have the hammer, and any number of surfaces to put the iPhone on. I have safety goggles, and can probably rig a face shield. What I didn't have was an obvious solution to protect the camera.

The problem starts with an unresponsive home button. I did all the stuff, restarting, and getting more drastic. Then the screens started going crazy. I'm typing out a text and the screen goes away. Try to get into mail and after touching the button, the screen pulses and goes back to the home screen. I did a bunch of research and found several probable causes, all of which need expensive repairs. More practically it indicates it's time to buy a new phone.

Most phones are stricken with gigantism, getting bigger and bigger. The iPhone 6 is too big and the shape makes it hard to hang onto. I've never really liked it. The iPhone 4 was the perfect size. Pity it's obsolete. There are days the rapid advance of software from not ready for prime time, to pretty damn good, to minor tweaks to continue the improvement, to bloat, makes me despair. (iMessenger echo and Evernote, I'm looking at you!)

But wait! Apple was smart enough to realize some of us want a smaller phone, with all the power and most of the bells and whistles. I ended up with one of the last 128 MB iPhone SE in the city. A few signatures, waiting a while as it talked to the home computer, and a bit of checking and domestication I've got a new phone. Yay me! A buddy has a small selection of cases I can look over, and if none of those work for me I might put out the word to see if anyone has an iPhone 5 case they don't need anymore. So I'm happy again.

Last night had some interesting clouds sculpted by the wind. I was out freezing my tail off in the wind, but the photos turned out quite well. The sunrise this morning was also nice, but it didn't translate into photos as well.