Humanity is doomed

6FPS V2#6

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

it's July. One inevitable occurance in July is my birthday, and so I'm now 62, officially aged and can no longer claim advanced middle age. On the positive side, I'm 62, and I'm around to complain about getting old, which is much better than the alternative.

Feedback on the last issue's re-design was overall quite positive. There were a few glitches, and I'm continuing to refine it a bit this issue as I see how I can put it together a bit better. I'm happy with the new look, so we'll stick with it for a while. 

Unlike what seems like a lot of the country, I continue to be mostly sheltering in place, although I'm trying to get out for walks when I can (while avoiding people as much as possible). Unless things change (which they well might), hairdressers and barbers in Santa Clara County will be allowed to take customers about the time you read this, which is awesome, because what's left of my hair has moved past unruly into the stage best described as "early hermit". And, as it turns out, my hairdresser of 30+ years has retired to move to Oregon, so I now have to find a new barber. It's actually kind of fun to realize I'm having to worry about a mundane issue like this.

Not exactly talking about the pandemic

The last couple of issues of 6FPS have been kind of pandemic heavy, in part because it's been a massive impact on my life and those around me. I'm trying this issue to go in other directions, but.... this is kinda pandemic related. Sorry.

I've found it a struggle at times the last few months to focus. Sit down to read a book, I find it hard to concentrate. Go to the computer to write and -- nothing happens. Or it's a slow, slogging grind to get things done. I've been able to keep things flowing at work okay (but at times: not great), but it's impacted other things I'm trying to do. 

A chunk of that is that the pandemic causes stress. So much chaos going on around us, so much unknown, too many idiots not taking it seriously that can impact me no matter what I do. That stress adds some chronic energy sapping into my life, and I think that's been part of where this loss of focus has come from. Since I happen to tick a number of boxes in the "high risk if you catch covid" checklist, I've tried to be really careful in my possible exposures, and trying to think through all that without simply becoming a paranoid hermit also impacts all this. 

The last few weeks have been better -- in fact, for the first time in forever, this issue of 6FPS was finished early, and you can see the progress I'm making on the new blog. Part of getting past this (at least for now), it turned out, was a realization that the strict stay at home rules (and later being really cautious about going out at all anyway) has kind of turned life into one long non-ending grind with out any real variety or breaks. Weekends have been mostly impossible to differentiate from weekdays -- and again, I know lots of other people feeling this and finding it impossible to remember what day of the week it is. 

Since so many people around here are going out on weekends and crowding the parks and trails, I ended up talking to my boss about this, and I've started re-arranging some of my work schedule to allow a few hours once or twice a week to go get outside and use birding as a way to unplug and get into different situations and environments again. It's really helped. It breaks up the monotony, but it also starts layering in fresh experiences and unplug from the day to day and recharge the batteries. 

So I wanted to suggest this to you as well: even with Covid hanging around, we all need to take breaks and get away from it all. Birding is a great excuse to go for a walk, away from others and in safe situation. If you're not a birder, though, still do it: get outside, go for a walk, or find a bench where you can just sit and turn off the devices and be for a while. 

Another aspect of this are vacations: Laurie and I aren't going anywhere and haven't gone anywhere since this started, and we've both missed at least one of our traditional yearly trips. We've talked about this, and we have tentative plans to rent an AirBnB house down in Morro Bay for a bit once we feel things are safe enough to do the traveling. Maybe this fall -- definitely not now, as things seem building again. But be both see the need to get a break from the far too familiar as a way to recharge, and we're thinking of ways to do that which are possible and safe. Something you might want to think about, too.

Maybe not that Grand Adventure, but... even 3-4 days unplugged, I've found, can do wonders for my state of mind. And that's something I think we can all use and take advantage of to improve our attitudes as this damned virus continues on. 

Reinventing the my blog....

I have started a new and fairly significant project, which is to tear down what I've been doing online from scratch. This is not the kind of "I'm bored with how this looks, let's change the design" project, but more of a scorched earth, rebuild it from scratch a piece at a time thing. I did a blog post on this, which you are welcome to read for more details. 

Why am I doing something this insane? Some of it is technical: I decided it was time to move away from the Wordpress theme I've used for a long time, and because a good chunk of the content in the current system depends on custom features of the theme, so moving it will entail a lot of handwork -- and once I realized that, I decided to completely change the platform and so I'm migrating from Wordpress to Squarespace. Once I made that decision, it was easy to also decide that I could use this as a chance to make major structural changes and rebuild a new setup that was really what I wanted now and could work with for the next ten years. The existing setup, in a way, is literally 20 years of layering on tweaks on top of tweaks without ever blowing it up and starting over, and it's well past time I did so. 

Whee. 

In any event a couple of the smaller pieces are done:

  • Silicon Valley Birding is my guide to birding in Silicon Valley and access point to the South Bay Birds mailing list I run. Moving it to Squarespace allowed me to do a simple, easy to back out of proof of concept to make sure Squarespace was something I really wanted to work with (it is).

  • My History Hockey Archives is new, and I've moved my hockey writing from my blog to this as a permanent record of that part of my life. It contains the writing I did about hockey that started in the blog from 2001 until I decided I was done in 2018. By moving it to a new Wordpress blog like this, I save me the hassle of shifting it to Squarespace, and I have it set up as a nice, read-only archive of that content that won't need much, if any, of my time in doing admin or maintenance in the future, but which makes it available as a long term archive.

The star of the show is the new blog. I'm going to be shifting from the current chuqui.com domain to a new one, chuq.me, and in fact, the blog as a work in progress is already live and you can explore and send me feedback on things you'd like me to fix or add to it. So far, I've done some basic design and I've moved the oldest parts of the blog there because that was really simple and gives me some content to design against, so everything that had been posted to the old blog from 2014 and before is gone, because it's been relocated to its new home. After 2014, the migrations are going to get more complicated and I'm planning that out now.

Some of this is about reinventing all of this because I'm a much different person than I was last time I did any major redesign -- that goes back almost 20 years to when the first version of chuqui.com launched. It will also allow me to simplify my online setup, as I plan on moving my photo portfolios onto the new site and retire the smugmug site.

I'm also planning on some things that have been on the maybe-someday list for a while, such as taking all of my mailing list archives, which are tens of thousands of individual text files, and turning them into an HTML archive to make them more accessible and more readable (Perl, don't fail me now -- this is going to be script work, primarily). I'm also finally going to take my OtherRealms archives and make them HTML-ized with anchors into the various parts.

I think the results will be worth it, but there's a lot of grinding to do to get there. Now that I've finally started, it's moving along, but I'm still at the point where the todo list is growing a lot faster than I'm closing items being added.

But I'm enjoying it, and I think the result will be nice, and that's what matters, right? But it probably does mean less new content on the old blog (or new blog, when I decide to shift) for the duration, as more time goes into this for a while.


Bill Shannon, R.I.P

Bill Shannon, RIP: Word came out in the last few daysthat we've lost Bill Shannon to cancer. You may not know the name, but he was a key person in the early days of Silicon Valley. I was lucky to work with him at Sun back in the 1980s, and -- complete trivia here -- in fact still go to his dentist that he and his wife recommended to me at the time. Bill was one of the key kernel people working on Sun's operating systems, and in fact stayed with Sun his entire career. 

You will find very little online about Bill; by choice, he was a private person and was very careful about having any information go online. He was well known and respected among those he worked with; he could have been a major nerd celebrity if he'd chosen, but didn't want that. 

I learned a lot watching and listening to Bill as a relatively young, new nerd in training. I was doing technical support for Sun (one of my specialties was sendmail, but I did a lot of general system administration support as well). And Bill was responsible for my favorite support ticket ever, when one day I took a ticket titled "Getting 'Panic: Bill and Tom say this can't happen'". 

So I called Bill and asked him how something he said couldn't happen had just happened. It turns out there had been a big internal discussion about whether that specific panic error was needed, because it could never happen -- unless there was a very specific hardware failure on the motherboard. Which, of course, had just..... happened. We swapped the motherboard and everything was fine.

I haven't talked to Bill in a few decades -- staying in contact in Silicon Valley tends to be one of those things you always plan to do, and rarely succeed at -- but he was an incredibly sharp mind with a strong technical bent, and a really nice, quiet person who, when he spoke, you simply shut up and listened to. I'm sorry he's gone, but whatever suffering he had from the cancer is also gone. The word is a smaller place with him no longer in it. 

And with that, on with the show!

What's New?

  • My new project: reinventing this thing you're reading

  • Bye Bye Northwestern Crow (2020 AOS Supplement is out)

Photos: Pied-Billed Grebe Tending her Nest

With work and the travel and "just stay at home and don't go places" restrictions going on, I haven't had much time to go out and create new images. That's slowly starting to change as things open up a bit and I feel safer getting outside. It's going to be a while before I set down in a restaurant, though...

I did finally have a day where I could go out and bird and take the camera and spend some time out in the field not punctuated with the thought “… as long as I’m back in time for that meeting in an hour”. Because weekends is when the various open space areas get busy, I’m mostly confining myself to week day outings when I can arrange them, and most of those are squeezed in around other things. But at least it’s outside.

July 1 was the 10th birthday of my company, which celebrated by closing the company and telling everyone to unplug and go have some fun. I chose to head out to Emily Renzel wetlands, where we have some Pied-Billed Grebes nesting. 

It was great just sitting in a camp chair and spending an hour thinking about bird photography, and getting comfortable having the camera out and going again. This was my favorite of the day, because I think it shows a nice behavior as the grebe is rolling the eggs before sitting down and continuing to brood them. Birds roll the eggs every so often to make sure they’re evenly warmed. (by the way: five eggs). 

This is a mid day shot, because that’s mostly when I can get out. The big challenge was heat shimmer — this is my big lens, at full reach, and fairly moderately cropped, so we’re talking about maybe 1200-1500mm 35mm equivalent for the reach. I shot on burst to try to work around the shimmer, which was a good move because about 80% of the shots were ruined and soft because of it — but all you need is one, right? 

Happy to be out. Happy to have a camera in hand, and want a camera in hand. Happy to actually get a result I’m happy with. This isn’t an image I’d ever print, but it’s a great look at a nice bird behavior with a fun to watch species.

It's not a great shot, but it's a usable shot. I still need to work on the processing some, but it's something I'd use online or for an article at this point. And it's something new that I'm happy with, and right now, I'll take that.

For Your Consideration

The Pandemic

Photography

  • Landscape Photography | Why I shoot intimate landscapes: Alister Benn, a Scottish Landscape Photographer, talks about why he never chases golden hour light and has shifted his work to intimate compositions. A fascinating discussion that helped me resolve some confused thinking on my part. Benn is, in general, the photographer educator most influencing my thinking right now.

Birds and Birding

Health and Fitness

Technology Nerdery

  • Tech and the inevitable unintended consequences: Om on the problem of how companies don't stop to think about the implications of what they are building.

  • I did a twitter thread talking about problems I have with the way Apple treats its developers (written during the Hey! controversy).

  • The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design: This is a fun discussion. throws an interesting detail view on the opinions underneath Apple's redesign in Big Sur.

  • How We Shot The Talk Show Remote From WWDC 2020: I thought the technical quality of this year's Daring Fireball "not live" during WWDC was quite high. This piece explains how they did it, and I had made some guesses on how they produced it that involved a lot more complexity than "multiple iPhones on locked down tripods and everything edited together in post". it's rather amazing how much you can do now with rather basic gear, and that's amazing -- and I think we already tend to take it for granted.

Humanity is Doomed

I wrote a book!

Download Now!



I'm thrilled to announce the results of a secret project I've been working on the last few weeks. I've written a book. The title is "... And the Geese Exploded" which if you read my blog was the title of a piece I wrote about this year's trip to Merced National Wildlife Refuge, and it was the thing that made me realize I needed to write this book.

This book is available for free -- no strings attached, not even an email address. The download is in PDF, which is easily readable on most computers and tablets (and it looks awesome on my iPad in the Books app, if I do say so myself), and also exists as a hardcover printed copy, but only one copy of it exists, I have it, and no, you can't buy it. But the ebook version is all yours to enjoy.

The book is a combination of a series of short essays about my birding life, how I feel so deeply for birdwatching, and some of the aspects of being a birdwatcher that mean so much to me. It also includes over 100 of my favorite photos that I've taken over the last decade here in the greater Bay Area, out in the central valley wildlife refuges, and here in the western coastal states in the U.S.

Interested? Head over to the download page where you can find out more about the book and how it came to be, and to grab a copy for your enjoyment. If you know of someone you think might enjoy this book, please share this with them, and pass this along through your social channels to help reach others that might want to have a copy.

See you Soon!

And with that, I'll see you in Jult with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along.Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

About 6FPS and Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqui@mac.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Copyright © 2020 Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.