Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
The beach is closed now, along with the bike path and the sidewalk I was standing on. ALL of Los Angeles County’s beaches are closed.
Neighboring Ventura County just re-opened some of theirs with distancing rules in place, and while Orange County has resisted closing their beaches, they had so many people show up at the coast this weekend that some cities are thinking about closing them after all. (Well, maybe only on weekends when non-locals might show up. 🙄 )
Thinking back to the last “normal” weekend in southern California before it became clear that covid-19 was spreading locally & closures started.
After a busy Saturday & Sunday morning, I went out for a calming photo walk at the beach.
Not many people were there. I’m not sure if it was just not warm enough yet, or people were starting to keep their distance already, or if they were just all at the other end where there was a kite festival.
#photo #beach #SocialDistancing #california
Seeing a lot of these signs in front of restaurants when I go walking in the neighborhood.
Most people have been really good at maintaining social distancing while out. The group in the distance seemed to all be one family.
Except for runners. Runners passing me from behind (where I can’t see them to move out of the way myself) have a 50/50 track record of dodging around vs. just zooming past at a distance of a foot.
Went out for a walk this morning. Found a note from one of the neighbor kids for the 9YO, written in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the house: “Hi ___! From ___”
Saw several more as I walked around the block. Apparently he wanted to say hi to all the kids he knows.
Finally recovered enough from the flu to get out for a walk in the neighborhood (while that’s still an option).
I think this first bird (possibly a goldfinch?) was trying to practice social distancing, though the crow in the third photo seems to be doing a better job. The house finch was such a bright red that I thought it had to be another kind of bird until I looked at the photos.
#photo #birds #nature #finch #HouseFinch #goldfinch #crow
So, California has issued a statewide stay-at-home-unless-absofuckinglutely-necessary order.
https://covid19.ca.gov/stay-home-except-for-essential-needs/
The 9YO is already climbing the walls.
And I’m still recovering from the damn flu, so I’ve basically missed the window for any trips outside except for groceries (and maybe a chest xray if this very non-covid-like cough doesn’t clear up)
LA County order earlier today specifically said neighborhood walks were OK as long as you kept your distance. The statewide one doesn’t.
I find myself thinking about Sam’s speech a lot. About how in the stories that really matter, people faced overwhelming darkness, and had a lot of chances to stop, but they kept going.
A Reminder About Story Middles
Clouds flow over the snow-covered #SanGabrielMountains above #LosAngeles this morning. We've had a decent amount of rain this December, and snow in the mountains, leading to hopes for a wet winter and enough water to store for next summer.
Oh, and skiing for those who are into that sort of thing 😁
At the Japanese Garden section of the park. There is a sign warning about not taking the animals, including the koi (which are deliberately stocked, I’m sure) and the turtles, though it’s possible the turtles may have been simply released here as former pets rather than deliberately stocked.
This squirrel was running on three legs, holding it’s left front leg up. It looks like it’s injured.
Usually #iNaturalist’s AI is pretty good at narrowing down to a genus, but sometimes it can get confused. Like this #pigeon sitting on a silk floss tree branch. It was “pretty sure” it was a *hawk*.
Um, nope!
I can sort of see that with the first image, but the second one makes it blindingly obvious!
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30408488
@KelsonV I just realized it’s literally confusing hawks and doves.
Thinking about what it means to self-host a service, and that there are degrees even within that.
I have a self-hosted WordPress blog in the sense that I manage an installation of WordPress, but I run it on a VPS at a web host. It’s not as self-hosted as someone running a server on a Lollipop or FreedomBox, but it’s more self-hosted than someone using WordPress.com. It’s also more self-hosted than someone using the managed WordPress hosting at the same web host.
The key advantages of self-hosting are privacy and control. Unless a service uses end-to-end encryption, the admins at each level can probably read your stuff – you have to trust that they won’t do it unless they have to.
And of course when you run your own service, you don’t have to fear losing control when Google Plus shuts down, or Flickr changes their pricing structure, or Tumblr changes their TOS, or MySpace botches a server migration.
The obvious disadvantage of self-hosting, of course, is that you’re on the hook for all the maintenance. Spam filtering, moderation, security updates, server migrations – those are all on you.
And unless you’re using your own software, even on your own box there’s still the risk that a project is going to shut down & leave you without security fixes, or pivot to a new direction that no longer fits what you want. (So glad WP’s block editor is still optional!)
@iona Yeah, that’s sort of the balance I’ve settled on, too. I manage the top-level web apps, but my webhost handles the hardware, the virtualization and the LAMP stack.
(And email. Ugh, I’d forgotten how much of a pain a mailserver can be to handle until I tried to set one up on a Raspberry Pi a couple of months ago.)
I guess I’m kind of splitting the difference.
Just a few Flashes (and a Rainbow Raider) who I saw at WonderCon this year. There were a bunch more, including a TV Barry/Iris couple, a Jedi Flash, and more.
These are just the ones who slowed down long enough for me to take a photo! 🙂 Check out my full cosplay gallery on Flickr:
#Cosplay #WonderCon #WonderCon2019 #TheFlash #KidFlash #RainbowRaider #BlackFlash
Took the new camera to #WonderCon for #cosplay #photography.
1. I finally have a camera that can really handle inside lighting at a convention center!
2. I’ve gotten too used to just capturing costumes, instead of composing interesting shots.
2a. My 8YO took 1 photo all weekend (#InsideOut) & it ended up being the best that day. I took the lesson & improved my shots the next day, including the other 3 here.
#HarryPotter #BeautyAndTheBeast #LittleShopOfHorrors
I took this with my phone to use as a reference for a photo I took with another camera. I wasn’t intending to do anything with it, but I find it *fascinating* that the phone’s digital zoom function makes it look like it’s made up of brushstrokes instead of pixels.
(Though personally, I’ve never understood why digital zoom is implemented as a resize instead of just cropping to a lower resolution.)
Tonight’s waxing crescent moon. It’s passing in front of the Hyades star cluster right now, which I’d love to get a photo of, but the moon’s just waaay too bright to capture the background stars!
#photography #moon #night #stargazing
Downloaded MCEdit so the 8YO can edit Minecraft world’s. He used it to fill 10 entire chunks with TNT. Then lit one of the edges. The chain reaction has been going for at least 10 minutes, punctuated by periods of major lag.
