2023 in review, 2024 on the Horizon

6FPS V6#1: January 8, 2024

chuqvr@gmail.com@chuqvr@fosstodon.orgchuq.me

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

We made it to 2024, and the first newsletter in Volume 6 of 6FPS.

It was a good but quiet Christmas. Laurie got me something I’d asked for, which is the latest addition to the garden — I’d seen it at the local bird feeder store and it tickled my fancy. I also got a bird sculpture of a puffin I quite like, which is the beginning of what’s going to turn into a re-organization of my home office. There’s also a nice first nations carving (you can kind of see it under the puffin) that I need to find wall space for.

I’ve been thinking about re-organizing my office for a while, and I’ve been unsure what to do. Now that I’m not working, I don’t need it to be set up to look nice on Zoom calls nearly as much, and I’ve been pondering pulling everything off the walls and swapping in different art pieces and photos. I’m still sorting this out in my head, but now I have some things I need to make room for, so I have motivation.

The office update also seems to have given me a workshop project. My office has two desks in it, one for the computers, which is a Jarvis sit/stand that I love, and the other is a slab of generic wood sitting on two Amazon flat-pack sets of drawers to serve as a project desk. And while it does that quite well, it’s not exactly pretty. And that got me thinking… I could head down to the nearby hardware dealer and get myself a walnut slab, clean it up and add some legs to it, and make myself a rather pretty desk. And how hard could this possibly be?

The legs will probably be something like this. The drawers I use are from Winsome and they’re actually pretty well done for $75 flat pack pieces, but they’re also close to a decade old and one of them is definitely showing its age. Not sure what I intend to do about them yet, if anything. Something to think about and do research on.

Vertigo Update

After spending a few weeks chasing what my dosage should be to control the vertigo, I think we’ve found the sweet spot between managing it. Too much and the drug causes its own side effects, too little and it doesn’t properly control it. I’ve been on this dosage for a couple of weeks now and it’s made life a lot more fun with very minimal issues, which is nice. I did get out for the tests my specialized asked for, and the results just came in and the overall news is good, showing no signs of nerve damage or unexpected lesions or growth. It seems to indicate a treatment path my specialist had suggested but I haven’t had a chance to talk to them yet to see what they think. But overall, things seem moved in the right direction over the last couple of weeks.

Picking the Wrong Fight

I’m no fan of Chick-Fil-A — the politics of the owners convinced me to not eat at these restaurants, similar to my choice to not support Hobby Lobby with my money — but New York lawmakers are picking the wrong fight here. There are many bigger and important issues they should be working on. This is specific to the outlets at rest stops, but to be blunt about it, the time to have required this was when the leases were being issued, not now. Since this was how the outlets operated when these locations were leased to them, New York just needs to shut up and live with it. Should they choose not to renew leases or offer new leases at these places, I’d fully support that, but this just seems wrong to me.

Cleaned up the Archives

One of the projects I finally tackled was cleaning up the 6FPS Archives, which were a hot mess. Since moving to Squarespace Campaigns, I was linking to the newsletter as sent. A big problem with that is that as things change (like, oh, dumping Twitter in favor of Mastodon) there was no way to update the links, so over time, the archives were a haven for broken links and outdated information.

I’ve known for a while the proper way to do this was to make each issue a web page as well, so I can update them or remove outdated info as needed, but I also knew that was going to be a slog so I kept putting it off. Slog it was, it took me four editing sessions and about 7 hours to fix, but each issue is now its own page here on the site, and I’ve gone through and cleaned each one up as I moved them over. Older issues got edited to remove things like the info footers, since that’s where a lot of the broken links were, but I created a proper template for the newsletters and so starting with last issue, newsletters in the archive will contain everything — except for the things that break over time.

If you are thinking to yourself “I didn’t even know there were archives of 6FPS” then I don’t blame you; the page hid them way down at the bottom and gave no indication there was anything down there, so if you didn’t scroll, you’d never see them. As with any project where you open the hood and start fixing things, I ended up doing a bunch of little things along the way, and I think the 6FPS page is a lot cleaner and you can actually find the archives without going exploring.

By the way, if you want a nice tool to do link checking and help you find and fix the linkrot that is inevitable on the internet, I recommend the Integrity app on the mac. Works well. I’ve been using it for a long time and it is quite powerful but not complicated to use. I use it once a month just as a way to make sure things are working okay, and as of today, a sweep of my web site shows zero broken links or errors for the first time in a couple of years. Yay me.

So I ended 2023 seeing 135 species, +12 from 2022. Three lifers: Common Crane, Chipping Sparrow and Hammond’s Flycatcher, giving me 308 species total. The last species I added to the year list was of all things Tundra Swan at Ridgefield when Laurie and I went on the 28th, and I got a total of four year birds that day, including, embarassingly, Green-Winged Teal and Red-Shouldered Hawk, and how they slipped past me all year I don’t know.

I ended up -3 pounds for the year, moving in the right direction but a big focus for me is accelerating the weight loss in 2024. I gave up about a pound and a half to Christmas, and I regret nothing. Overall, 2023 was a down year for exercise, with my average steps per day down about 10%. The vertigo had a fair bit to do with that, but so did the last few months at work as I was both doing my normal work and quietly prepping things to be something I could hand off to my replacement once I walked out the door for the last time.

2023 was overall a good year for me with some serious transitions and a few rough edges. I do feel like I’m starting to see how I want 2024 to shape up and where I want to focus my time and energy, but it’s clearly something I’ll be adapting across the calendar.

Most popular web pages 2023

Page views were -21% over 2022, but I did no marketing of my content and published no e-books. Not surprised. I need to write more, and push that writing out more. My most popular pages have been around for a while, back when I was more active on social than I am today.

I can’t tell you what my most popular e-books or images are because I don’t track any data on that, but I’m overall happy with how often the landing pages are visited. 6FPS subscriptions stayed about the same, not growing or strinking. Again, I’m okay with that.

Top pages:

What’s coming up in 2024? This will definitely change over time, but right now, I’m thinking that I want to focus more on my bird photography and continue working on the workshop and I want to get back into a habit of writing for the web site regularly. On a personal level, I need to push harder at the weight loss and fitness levels. I’ve also got a couple of e-book ideas to explore. I’ll likely be getting a 3d printer and that means getting more serious about learning Fusion 360. There are a few trips I want to take, but nothing is firmly planned yet. I’m working on my annual favorite photos list, but I don’t think it’ll be ready before this issue goes out.

Reality has its own agenda, of course, and we’ll see how that impacts my thoughts over the upcoming year.

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area. Additionally, every Wednesday is Photo Wednesday on the blog, where I post one of my non-bird images, and the bird images are posted on the blog each week as part of Feathery Friday.

My only camera trip this month was another visit to Ridgefield NWR with Laurie. Light was poor, birds were mostly distant, but I did get a really nice shot of this Tundra Swan, along with some rather average but useable images. I’m hoping to head back down there for a couple of intensive camera days towards the end of January where I can put in enough time to do the location justice.

It’s also time for my annual best/favorite photos of the year, and you can see them here:

Birds and Birding

Photography

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

I have eight e-books available. All are free for you to download and read with no obligation. You can download them from my e-book page on the web site.

These are the books that are available:

  • Birding 101: Hints and Tips for the New Birder

  • Merced National Wildlife Refuge

  • And the Geese Exploded: A Life With Birds

  • Birds of Santa Clara County

  • 2021.1: A Year of Transitions

  • 2020.1: Images from the year when Covid changed everything

  • 2019 (1)

  • 2019 (2)

Free Wallpapers just for Subscribers

New Wallpapers (August, 2023). A new set of 12 wallpapers are now available.

You can download this new set from the 6FPS Secret Wallpaper. The previous set of wallpapers are now with the full public set at Public Wallpaper page.

These are available only to you, my favorite people who happen to be subscribers to 6FPS. The previous set of images I released here are now available to the general public.

This is a small gift to you to thank you for being a subscriber. You are welcome to use any or all of them if you wish, but please: don't share the private hangout link with others, encourage them to subscribe via https://www.chuq.me/6fps instead. Thanks.

Free Prints to Subscribers

Anyone who’s interested in a free 8x10 print of one of my images si welcome to it. All you need to do is check out the images in one of the four portfolio galleries on my photography page, and then send me an email with the request, including the title of the image (or URL to the image), your name and a mailing address. My only requirement is that the email the request comes from must be a subscriber to 6FPS when I get the request. I will mail these out at no charge worldwide for any request I get during November, as quickly as I can make the prints and get them packaged up.

And with that, see you next issue!

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com). 6FPS is Copyright © 2024 by Chuq Von Rospach. All Rights Reserved.

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.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

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And with that, I'll see you in 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