• Category Archives day by day

  • This is the category closest to just being a plain diary. Places I go, things I do, people I see, what’s happening in my life.

  • Overlayers

    Posted on by Don

    I just got back from the Canal Museum’s Volunteer Appreciation Luncheon, and am now waiting for our snow/non-snow weather event to come down.

    Things have been pretty quiet around here otherwise, though we did host the CAT holiday party last weekend, and saw If Beal Street Could Talk, followed by a stop at Bonn Place, with John and Donna last night. (Tonight we’re seeing the new RBG movie with Shari and Rick –two movies in a row!)

    What have I been up to? I’ve been practicing and playing my cello, doing some reading and historical research — I’ve been on a “history of Bethlehem” kick lately, and have been obsessed with the old settlement at Christian’s Spring — and have also been working on an updated map of the trails at Walking Purchase Park.

    This map has been long overdue, but I’ve been waiting on the trail guys to finish their reconfiguration/re-blazing/renaming project. They’re pretty close to done now, trail blazes all over the place with the new names posted, so I went up and photo-documented the trails and then re-did the trail maps. I’m not too happy with some of the choices they made, but hey — it’s not my circus anymore.

    I also downloaded some old aerial photos of the Valley, taken about 1938. I took one that showed our neighborhood and part of Sals, georeferenced it, and put it on my map as a partly transparent overlay. For some reason the photo looked almost like hieroglyphics when I zoomed in, at other times like a blowup of some still from German Expressionist cinema, and in the end seemed just plain creepy. The overlay was almost like a ghost.


    day by day

  • Resolve To Stop Procrastinating

    Posted on by Don

    Hi! I’m back! Welcome to 2019!

    I’m sitting in the living room right now, listening to the radio on a rainy day — WXPN has a program going in right now, “50/50,” where every Saturday afternoon (for 50 weeks) they play the songs from a different year. Today’s year is 1979, a weird and transitional one musically, and we’ve heard everything from punk and New Wave, to disco, to what eventually became good old classic rock. An interesting mix.

    Some Lists:

    Places We’ve Been This Year

    • Montreal with John & Donna
    • Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg, VA
    • Durham, NC to visit Emmi & Kyle
    • The Adirondacks with the Felker clan
    • Montpelier VT, for Ben’s graduation
    • Michigan (Ann Arbor and the Upper Peninsula)
    • Sudbury, ON, and Niagara Falls
    • Nashville, TN for Brian & Heather’s wedding
    • Columbus, OH

    Rides

    • Wissahickon (VMB )
    • Merli-Sarnoski Park (VMB)
    • Philadelphia via the Schuylkill River Trail
    • Road Scholars Rides
    • Road and MTB in the Adirondacks
    • Wildcat Ridge, NJ
    • Tahquamenon Falls & Indian Lake Road Rides, MI
    • Marquette and Calumette, MI
    • Wissahickon (with Hope & Renee)

    day by day

  • Out and About

    Posted on by Don

    I’m over on Southside now, blogging from Sagra Beans, the new coffee house in the new building, basically where the late, lamented Wildflower Cafe used to be. Well, “lamented” might be too strong of a word: I pretty much never went there, hadn’t been inside for years before they closed (years ago), but still.

    I have to say though, that this place is pretty nice. They have the usual coffee shop problem — they don’t lack the manpower, but they do lack a system for quick customer throughput when things get busy: they had four people on line when I got there, and the place was shut down while one worker worked the espresso machine. Not a good situation for a caffeine-deprived queue!

    This problem is not unique though; in fact I know of few coffee shops, ones worth going to, where this does not happen. On the plus side, these guys have plenty of space and plenty of seats, including several spacious bar-type seating areas — I was originally going to go to Lit, but their space was all taken: one or two people at each four-person table and a bunch of empty couches, unsuitable for laptops. I have all the room I want now, and the people here are also very friendly. They’ve got my recommendation!

    What to do while I’m here? This place so new nobody put them on OpenStreetMap yet, so I went on and added them. (For “information source” when I uploaded the data, I was tempted to put “I’m there now.”) Then I did a little browsing, and a little blogging, and now my coffee is done and I’m ready to go.

    Actually, I think I’ll stick around for a bit — they’re about to roast some coffee in this huge machine right in front of where I’m sitting, and it looks pretty interesting. I do have to get out of here soon though: I’m ready for rain, with raincoat, umbrella, waterproof laptop bag and all, but I still want to try and beat the storm. I’ll be driving over to Easton for my music lesson later, but I’m on foot for now.


    day by day

  • Philadelphia Birthday

    Posted on by Don

    We went in to Philly yesterday to celebrate Ben’s birthday. We met Ben & Candace at Penn Books (where we did a big chunk of our Christmas shopping), visited the Institute of Contemporary Art (where we saw awesome exhibits by Ree Morton and Cauleen Smith), and finally had dinner at Mercato, a little Italian place on Spruce Street. I was exhausted when we got home, but what a fun day!

    UPDATE: This is what I wrote ten years ago.


    day by day

  • All My Dreams Come True

    Posted on by Don

    This morning, after years of procrastination, I got my chipped front tooth fixed. The dentist decided not to use any novocaine, or any anesthetic at all, and it was the most painless bit of dentistry I ever experienced. And now I have my smile back…

    When I got home, the town leaf collector truck was just in the process of cleaning up our leaf pile, which had been sitting there, mocking me, since late October. My day was complete.

    Actually, it was just noon, but the rest of the day was gravy: I rode down to the Museum for a few hours and got home just before dark, then I hung out, played my cello and did a little reading.

    I went to my old boss’s retirement luncheon yesterday, and saw many old friends and co-workers there, which was strangely bittersweet (many were looking much older and less hale, and there was much talk of a vanishing past), and for the rest of the day I was kind of — not somber exactly, but maybe a little bit, maybe a bit nostalgic, a bit reflective, a bit “Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?”

    Today I was back on my game.


    day by day

  • WTF, Facebook?

    Posted on by Don

    I’ve been getting more and more disenchanted with Facebook lately, as it seems to be getting less useful and more intrusive as time passes. The kicker was when I was talking, in the real world, about a product with someone, then later got ads for that product when I clicked on a FB page — coincidence? (Granted, this may have been Google’s work…)  Since I also found myself acting like a Facebook addict with it on my phone, or maybe more like some Pavlov dog, obsessively checking every notification (which in the meantime were becoming less relevant — so-and-so was live, or added to her story!), I decided to quit cold turkey. I logged out of the Facebook app on my phone, did the same for  Facebook Messenger, and removed both from my home screen so I wouldn’t be tempted. Life started getting better…

    I also found myself around the same time, ticked off by a peripheral friend who got into a political comment war (on a news page) with someone and, seeing that I was a mutual friend of that person, attempted to drag me into it. (The worst part of it is that my peripheral friend was basically right and the other person really is an ass, but this was straight up cyberbullying as far as I was concerned.) Unfriend. Unfriend them both! And that’s exactly what I did — then I went through my friend list and unfriended another 50 people, and did another 40 the next day. (There were people in there who had passed away — that was tough to do, but necessary — and  people who I know but don’t particularly like or communicate with, and many I didn’t even recognize.) I also removed myself from a bunch of groups. Suddenly FB seemed a lot more manageable, and life started looking even better. Until…

    We were out the other night, and I happened to mention FB and how I had logged out, when all of a sudden I started getting Facebook push notifications again! This time I’m sure it was a coincidence: the app, which I had not actually removed from my phone, got updated, and probably logged back in on its own afterward. But: Zombies! Facebook push notification zombies! I un-installed the app, and also Messenger.

    So now I went on FB on my laptop, and saw what these notification actually were — they had nothing to do with me or my interests; they were basically clickbaity come-on’s. It’s almost like every time I tried to push them away, Facebook ramped up their desperate, annoying attempts to stay in my face.

    This may hurt me in the end, since I’m sure there’s FB stock buried somewhere or other among our mutual funds, but I can’t help feeling a bit of schadenfreude over their recent, and no doubt well-deserved, stock slump.


    day by day tech talk

  • Pastorale

    Posted on by Don

    Kind of a mellow day: I got up and continued learning GNUCash while sampling some experimental croissants Anne made, got some easy chores done, dishes and laundry and so on, then rode over to volunteer at the Museum for a few hours — I got home just at dark. Finished some more chores, played my cello for a bit, and now I am back at the computer, listening to Polish Prog Rock over the internet. A nice day, a mellow day. It’s the simple things…


    day by day

  • Updates

    Posted on by Don

    So, remember back in May, when I had that hissy fit over embedded Garmin rides? Well, I happened to be visiting my other blog, where I noticed that a Garmin frame was actually displayed correctly. WTF? I checked some posts here, where I had ride posted, and sure enough, there they were — everything was as it should  be. I’m not sure what happened to make them work, though there have been several updates to Firefox since May, and I also changed my browser’s cookie policy recently. Either of those might have fixed the frame problem, or both working together, or maybe it was even an update by Garmin that did it. However it might have happened, the righteous justification for my most recent GIS project just evaporated. Now I’ll have to continue just because it’s fun…

    Speaking of Python projects, I went back and added a dialog box to my FreeCAD Re-Entrant Throat script, and got it running today. There’s no error checking (yet), but it works. So that’s another project that’s suddenly, perilously, close to ending.

    UPDATE 2018-12-05: I added the input error checking (non-negative values, some constraints on design parameters based on other parameters) bringing up an error alert and looping back to the input dialog until all errors are fixed, before running the calculation code. Works great, and I had a lot of fun playing with it until I realized that RET’s are kinda boring…


    day by day tech talk

  • The Year in Free Fall

    Posted on by Don

    Well look at that, it’s December already!

    Listening: David Bowie’s “Fame” is on Radio Paradise.

    Not much is going on, but I thought I’d check in anyway… It’s been rainy and cold the past few days. We kegged our latest beer today, and we were going to brew today, but since we do our brewing outside these days (where it was, you know, raining), we skipped that part. (By the way, that new Roggenbier has quite a kick: the samples we took while kegging actually left us puzzled.)

    The GPX project is somewhat on hold right now, as I’ve gone into several other obsessions: I ran across some python scripts to build an interface, and I got them working. Excelsior! They were part of that Re-Entrant Throat Calculator port to FreeCAD I was playing with a while back. I may play with that a little more, it was fun to mess with it again.

    I’m also having more fun than seems appropriate, massaging our budgeting and financial data with Postgresql and JasperSoft Studio. I downloaded this past year’s banking transactions (think ATM and debit card purchase records), put them into a table and, deciphering each transaction description, sorted them into various categories. I then put them into a spreadsheet to help with planning next year’s budget, and I also broke them down into various Jasper Reports graphs and charts — I’m not sure JasperSoft Studio is all that great but I do like seeing what I can make of my data.

    By the way, this is what I wrote ten years ago.


    day by day

  • A Story

    Posted on by Don

    We went out yesterday to the Allentown Farmer’s Market, and on the way we stopped at Syb’s Deli for lunch. We sat near the window, and Anne noticed a cute little birdhouse, built to look like the deli, just outside on a telephone pole. (I didn’t see it until she pointed it out.) We asked the waitress about it, and she said they had no idea who put it up — one day it was just there. There were three other little birdhouses that also appeared in the neighborhood at the same time, she said, but these didn’t look like the Syb’s one or any local buildings: they were undecorated, except each of them had “eat the rich” written on it. Here’s a photo of the one outside Syb’s:

    syb's deli birdhouse
    Syb’s Deli Birdhouse

    We got a bunch of other stuff done yesterday, and then met Judy and Erika, at Stoke in Easton, to plan our Thanksgiving dinner. Today I raked the leaves; it’s cold and windy, and it even snowed a bit this morning, so I figured it was the perfect day for it. Later this afternoon Anne’s quartet will be doing a “house concert” at Jeff and Kristen’s, then we might go out for drinks after dinner, to a new place — new to us, anyway — down by Sand Island, called Artisan.


    day by day