I should be able to get into the Christmas spirit. No, not the bottle I keep in the basement, the Merry Christmas state of mind. After all, the Fedex, Purolator and UPS trucks arrivals have petered off to no more than 2 or 3 per day, I’ve found some nice instrumental Christmas music to play in the background, there’s snow on the trees and the whole Fam Damily was here yesterday having a great time making cookies and decorating the Christmas tree.
But I’m having a hard time dealing with the reality that instead of sending greetings to three sisters this year there is now only one. My sister Sylvia died in Geneva on November 27th and my sister Norma in France on May 27th. Probably not the greatest time to be visiting the lawyer to revise our wills, which we did last week. It all makes for some sombre reflections.
Mary-Jo has written a very nice Xmas letter which appears on this site, so I’m not going to repeat everything, but link you to existing posts and photographs. And add some snooze-worthy geeky details.
My do-it-yourself projects this year were helping Adam convert part of his living room into a bedroom, and repairing the third side of our garden shed. Adam’s project involved framing a new wall with a door in it, hanging the door and lots of drywall finishing and trim.
It was “interesting” solving problems with only the tools that I had thought to bring. For instance, the ceiling over the door I had to install was sloped, and less than eight feet, so the header had to be tapered with a battery circular saw and then a handsaw to get the bit that the small blade didn’t reach in the centre.
Getting everything in the Mini was also “interesting”.
Mary-Jo came along on several trips to help with sanding or holding up one end of something, and of course provide suitable motivation. She was very helpful when my air-nailer failed, as she was able to get a replacement while I got on with something else.
The saga of the rotting wooden foundation frame continued with the long side of the shed, and my hoarding instincts came in handy as I’d kept a spare length of the siding for 15 years, and was able to replace the rotted out part as well as the underlying structure.
Then I back-filled with gravel and landscape fabric to keep wet soil and mulch away from the wood this time. (I originally thought the composite siding was designed to be in contact with soil, and to be honest the original landscapers just mulched right up to the shed.)
I was much better at posting photo collections this year, and here are some that may be of interest:
Gathering of the clans for June birthdays
Photo trip with Anna to the Royal Botanical Gardens
Capturing photos of dragonflies
Best of 2019 scenic photos collection
Mitch and Brooke got married
Geek alert – most of the rest of this gets a bit technical, so feel free to set your browser on auto-scroll and nap through to the end!
Photographically, I changed my full frame camera twice. Yes twice. I was originally set on a D850 and then began to have second thoughts – mostly about the cost. I sold my D800 as the first step in an upgrade path, and then Nikon came out with the Z6 and Z7 cameras. I researched the Z6 and thought it would be a great entrée into the new world of mirrorless cameras. I took my third party lenses into the local camera shop to see if they behaved themselves, and for the most part they did (one would need a firmware upgrade). I never thought to check the Nikon lenses – heck, why would I doubt that they would work?
So I came home one day with a gleaming new camera body and soon found that not one of my full-frame Nikon lenses would autofocus on the Z6, and the auto-focus on the third-party lenses was not that swift, either. I returned the Z6 and a month or so later got an older full-frame body, a D750, which does auto-focus on all my lenses, although it’s not a fast focussing body like my D500 (or like the D850 would be).
I also sold my beloved D70 and the two lenses I originally got with it, as it was not getting very much use. I did, however, take it out on one last field trip and got a beautiful picture of a cedar waxwing. While it doesn’t have today’s bells and whistles, the D70 was very light, the battery would last forever, and it still took great photos!
It wasn’t until I went through the 2019 photos that I realized that I started cataloging my colour slide collection in February – and they are still stacked in my office waiting for the task to complete.
However, I did prioritize the people photos, so I think most of the treasures have been unearthed. But I do have a nagging feeling that somewhere I have a “best-of-the best” box waiting to be opened, as I’m sure there are some photos that I remember which aren’t in the boxes where they would be expected to be. I did evolve a process for digitally capturing what I have without tedious individual copying. Now if only I could finish that job!
Observant readers will have noticed that many of the links to other posts went to another site, unabashedgeek.ca, and may have wondered why. Well, for several years, I have had plans for a commercial (money-making) site where I would post geeky articles about anything I thought I could write a post about. This year I have put more work into this concept, and I have been somewhat successful in recent months with adding new content most weeks. So: teampowell.ca is family oriented, unabashedgeek.ca is general interest and runs ads which apparently everyone ignores. Not quite everyone: I did hit the jackpot when someone clicked on one which brought in a whopping $1.21! Now I’m 12% of the way to my first $100, which is the minimum level at which Google will issue a cheque. Heady stuff!
I’ve been doing my research and found that 70% of the visitors to unabashedgeek use their phones (I guess the other three use desktops, and one of those is me) so I’m busy redesigning the wordpress theme that I created to be more mobile friendly, and this is the activity that Mary-Jo was referring to when she speaks of my finding it both frustrating and satisfying.
Fifty years ago I learned to code in assembler, where there is a one-to-one correspondence between a statement in assembler and an instruction in machine code.
These days, one uses a development tool that creates a theme that is used by WordPress to generate PHP which is interpreted in real time into html which is used by a browser to put content on your screen. But wait, the way that content appears is modified by CSS, which these days is generated by SASS which is another by-product of the development tool. And I’ve left out the bits about JQuery producing javascript and the fact that the actual post content does not really exist, it’s pulled from a database. It’s like eating with chopsticks via a remote control and when something doesn’t look right, it’s not always easy to tell what went wrong – especially when I have to re-climb the learning curve every two to three years when I make major changes.
But I’m hoping to have a new site theme before Christmas – if I can cobble together enough time and brain cells to figure out how to do what I want to do. Meanwhile, I’m going to yoga sessions twice a week, so I can keep calm and carry on developing.
Hoping you and yours have a fantastic 2020!
