A green heron does a bit of hunting along the UC Davis arboretum.

Learning craft began NSL early.

A fun evening

A future maestro or Andy Warhol Boulder Concerts - adam-bridge

Sunset, Kasey formations, China

Pixar ponders a leap down onto Pixel.

If I had known how dirty cork oaks are I’d never have chosen then for our yard. They drop leaves all year round in massive amounts. They’re pretty trees, no doubt about it, but they’re sure messy and labor-intensive.

Web site designers: we need to talk.

For those of us “of a certain age” the trend toward low-contrast design makes life so very squinty and so very unpleasant. Using light text on a light background makes for an unpleasant experience. Maybe it’s all trendy but it’s user-hostile.

STOP IT, please.

Thank you.

I have read all but one of the Nebula Award novel nominees. Wow, am I underwhelmed. Three of them I had to just skim through because they were simply not interesting.

Two I genuinely enjoyed: “Jade City” by Fonda Lee which I can recommend and “The Stone Sky” by N.K. Jemisin - but the latter is the 3rd in a trilogy and not accessible for someone who wants to enter.

But “Autonomous” by Annalee Newitz, “Ammberlough” by Lara Elena Donnelly and “Six Wakes” by Mur Lafferty just don’t make the grade.

I haven’t tried “Spoonbenders” by Daryl Grfegory having been so disheartened by the novels I just mentioned.

Either I’m totally out of step or I’m just becoming a grumpy old man.

And now I have to stop and find out what kind of trouble the cat is making in the studio. It sounds serious…

The first weekend of Facebook Freedom.

The results: Delightful!

Also Margaret brought Fred up who is being very 3 but still fun. He loves riding in the trailer behind the bikes: a natural born tourist. Can you say “ROAD TRIP”?? because Fred will be a natural, I think.

2018-04-07

Landing in LA on first leg to China.

2018-04-08

Looking out from the balcony of our 25th floor AirBnB in Guangzhou

2018-04-09

Along the Pearl River looking at the Guangzhou Tower.

I need to understand how to share images here and how to mark posts as being related to books or photographs or whatever.

Sometimes I think this medium is designed for people who already understand how the medium works.

An unusual ice cream

We went out to lunch at one of the oldest restaurants in Guangzhou . The food was Cantonese (of course) so it was bland. But they had ice cream and smoothies. One of our party ordered (get ready) Durian Ice Cream. I was invited to have a taste. After a few swallows in trepidation I took a chance on a spoonful…

It wasn’t awful. It wasn’t even bad. What it was…was strange. And I can’t begin to describe the flavor. I do know it was complex. I know it had an immediate flavor and then another that oozed in afterwards. I found I wanted to have another taste - but only to try to understand what I was experiencing.

Now, weeks later, the experience 7,000 miles away, I no longer remember anything specific about what I tasted. I remember the strangeness. Would I try it again? I think so. But not to enjoy, but to experience, like a particularly violent amusement park ride.

If you have a chance to try durian ice-cream…give it a shot…but be prepared.

Evergreen News: Evergreen 1.0d32: Send to Micro.blog

Well, this is good!

Midnight Diner: A Tokyo Story

While we were on our trip to China our hosts, David and Xurry, highly recommended a Japanese series they had been watching. We found it on Netflix. Last night we watched the first three episodes and found them wonderfully compelling.

There is a diner open only from midnight until seven in the morning. Run by “The Master”, a man of indeterminate age with a nasty scar that begins above one eye which descends down his cheek, his menu offers only a single dish. However, if you ask for something, and if he has the ingredients, he’ll make whatever is asked.

That’s the setup.

But the story isn’t about him, it’s about the people who come to his diner, who interact with each other and with The Master. The stories, at least the first three, are small and sweet.

If you are looking for the video version of a short story collection that doesn’t involve super-hero, massed alien invasions, or high level action, then this might be the place for you.

Give it a try.

So, this has become my sharing place since today I abandoned Facebook in favor of something more open and less invasive.

I’m hopeful this format will work for me. And it should. I suspect I’ll be using Ulysses as my composition source and moving work over here.

This is day 12 of the flu and its aftermath. And it sucks. With family coming home this weekend, and me being still contagious according to the doc, I have to stay at some distance from everyone I want to hug. But at least they’ll be home.

The complexity of software is making for insecure systems and slowing down the improvement of that same software.

Consider iOS and all the frameworks present in macOS. The two are cousins - as if macOS was the United States and iOS Great Britain. Move from one country to the other and you feel you know the rules but you step out into traffic and are nearly killed because the vehicles were coming from the “wrong” way.

Logically there would be a way to smoothly shift from the older, more complex, macOS implementation to the more modern iOS. But in doing so fundamental features would be lost that make the Mac what it is. The restrictive nature of the original hardware on which iOS was designed to run for the most part no longer hold. (watchOS is an exception.)

Both of these systems came from designs by NeXT in the last century.

It’s time to ponder a redesign of the OS with an eye to efficiency of implementation and growth and security.

I argue that Apple can do this and must do this for its products to continue to evolve.

Watching two series right now that seem to have mixed themselves in my subconscious: The Tunnel and Witnesses.

The Tunnel has gotten absurd and it’s not even through the first season. But Witnesses even though it’s in French is much more interesting.

I still have problems separating the two plot lines and characters.

test post to see if this works

I use a gel case on my iPhone X because I’m often on my recumbent and I’ve had serious mis-adventures with previous iPhones (that would be you iPhone 7+) I don’t see any screen scratching on my current iPhone and it goes everywhere with me.

The iPhone X has completely ruined me for Touch ID devices. I’m one of those people with no useable thumb-print so often I have to us an awkward gesture to open my iPad. No such problem on the iPhone X.

The same holds true for gestures. I love the new gesture system.

Ah ha! There’s a Micro.blog app for the Mac. And here I am typing on it. In it? Into it?

As with a new lens I never quite know what to write on a first post.

So I’ll be original: Hello, World!

Now to investigate tools…