Autumn in the Ozarks
Nov. 21st, 2025 12:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
earthobservatory_iod_feed
Late-season reds and browns swept across the Ozark Highlands in the south-central U.S.
earthobservatory_iod_feed
Taking a swipe at dating apps
Nov. 20th, 2025 05:30 pmtim_harford_feedAlgorithmic dating, like online dating in general, has overpromised and underdelivered. Yes, that is the uninformed opinion of a centrist dad who has never tried online dating — but it is not merely the uninformed opinion of a centrist dad who has never tried online dating. The market has reached the same conclusion: despite a background of frothy valuations for all things tech, share prices of the dating companies Bumble and Match Group (the owner of Tinder) have fallen precipitously in the past few years. User numbers are flagging too.
This reckoning has been brewing for a very long time. Scientific matchmaking dates back at least to the 1920s, when Science and Invention magazine explained the use of pulsometers (“electrical sphygmographs”) and a body odour test (put the object of your affection in a glass capsule to which a hosepipe is attached, and sniff away). One test even had a researcher suddenly fire a pistol into the air to see how the loving couple reacted to stressful situations — if both of them showed signs of panic, this was alleged to be a bad omen for the chances of marital harmony. But a more direct precursor of today’s dating apps is Operation Match, a 1960s effort by enterprising Harvard students who were scrounging some time on a punch-card computer.
Operation Match claimed to rely on a 75-point questionnaire to make the perfect pairings, but the truth was simpler. “The first thing we did was to make sure they were in the same area,” co-founder Jeff Tarr later told a documentary-maker. “Mostly girls wanted to go out with boys who were the same age or older, their height or taller, the same religion. So after we had these cuts, then we just kind of randomly matched them.”
So much for scientific matchmaking, but there are worse ways to find love. While Grindr and Tinder are slicker and more immediate, they seem to work in much the same way, eschewing an algorithmic match in favour of what so many web ads describe as “hot singles in your area now”. (If I am the only one seeing these ads, please never tell me this.)
Perhaps that is sensible. There is obvious appeal in the idea that from a sphygmograph to a deep-learning system, “science” will find your perfect match, but it is not hard to see the shallowness in the promise of an algorithmic pairing. Mathematician Hannah Fry — author of The Mathematics of Love — put her finger on the problem: “You don’t really know what you want.”
We can write down the list of qualities we might want in a partner, but some of them are circular (“I would be attracted to someone attractive”), some of them seem important but may not be (such as a shared taste in books or music) and some defy description. A list of categories in a computer database might feel scientific, but we should hardly be surprised if our affections are governed by a very different subconscious checklist.
Also, people lie. Researchers have discovered that the typical user of online dating websites is richer, slimmer, blonder and sexier than the rest of the population — at least, according to their own profiles. Lake Wobegon is real, and accessible on a dating app near you.
A further complaint is simply that dating apps induce people to spend a lot of time anxiously scrolling and not nearly enough time going out and having fun. This is 21st-century life anyway, but the gap between what the app promises and what the app delivers is particularly stark when the app is offering to help you find love — or, at the very least, some kind of intimacy with another human.
Looming over all this is a broader social question: are dating apps bad for society? The worry here is not prudish but more of a parallel with social media. We worry about Twitter, YouTube and TikTok not only because they distract and distress us but because they may be contributing to a polarised society in which everyone lives in their own information bubble.
A recent working paper written by three economists, Yujung Hwang, Aureo de Paula and Fanzhu Yang, tries to shed light on the question of whether dating apps polarise us. As with social media there are forces pushing in both directions: some dating apps allow people to filter who they see by categories including race, religion and education. These filters might contribute to greater polarisation, where people date only people of the same race and education level. On the other hand, dating apps make it easier to skim through a large number of possible matches, just as a social media account presents a vast range of different hot takes. So perhaps dating apps encourage more mixing across ethnic or educational lines?
My bet was on increased polarisation. Faced with a broader choice of people to connect with, we often use that choice to seek out people just like us. Consider a study of college friendships conducted by three psychologists, Angela Bahns, Kate Pickett and Christian Crandall. They compared the friendships that students formed at small college campuses with those at the much-larger University of Kansas. The smaller campuses offered less diversity overall, yet students at small colleges were more likely to have a diverse group of friends — diversity here referring to all sorts of differences in opinion, background and behaviour. Given more choice, people sought out their ideological twins.
Despite this, Hwang and colleagues found that the impact of online dating was — to my surprise — to enable people to date and eventually to marry people of a different ethnic background. Why? The answer is simple: Tinder, the most popular app, does not offer filters beyond basics such as location and sexual orientation. Instead, users are thrown into an undifferentiated pool of dating prospects and have to figure it out.
There is a strange parallel to social media here: although social media are filtered and highly polarised, they are also chaotic and scattershot. Filter bubble notwithstanding, you are more likely to encounter opposing viewpoints on Twitter than reading your favourite tabloid newspaper.
Chaotic and scattershot doesn’t sound like a recipe for dating success any more than it sounds like a healthy news diet. But in both situations, there is a case to be made for casting the net widely and in strange waters — as long as we can occasionally move past the shallows into something deeper.
That deeper experience might be a good book, a serious hobby or a long-term romance. The only problem: there’s no revenue in any of that.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 23 Oct 2025.
I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.
Thankful Thursday
Nov. 20th, 2025 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearToday I am thankful for...
- Coffee. AKA bean soup, in this household.
- Compression socks. NO thanks for hypertension.
- Onions and garlic. Just because I have to cut back on salt...
- Not tripping when I carried Bronx upstairs. Remind me NEVER to carry ANYTHING up or down stairs that requires taking both hands off the railings.
- Memories. (This season a lot of them include our drives down to LA for Loscon, also giblet gravy and Mom's chopped liver recipe.)
This and That
Nov. 19th, 2025 09:16 pmbillroperToday was disjointed, partially because I was recovering from yesterday's trip and fall. I've got a bit of soreness in the right wrist, which is not unusual, because I'm acutely right-handed in a number of ways and use that hand to push myself up from my desk chair. I am pushing more carefully than usual today. :)
But nothing too bad seems to have resulted from hitting the deck, so we're going to count this as a win and a cautionary tale. As part of the win, I have put away the remaining parts from the baby gate install in case they are ever needed for something else, which means that the big piece of unneeded gate extender is no longer on the bedroom floor. (It was out of the way, but nevertheless...)
Progress was made at work today, which is also good. And I had the chance to go down into the studio and play around with things a bit more in the wake of yesterday's install. Everything continues to work well, so that's a good thing.
Calvin the Dog got some training in "the living room is part of the house" today. We'll see how that goes.
But nothing too bad seems to have resulted from hitting the deck, so we're going to count this as a win and a cautionary tale. As part of the win, I have put away the remaining parts from the baby gate install in case they are ever needed for something else, which means that the big piece of unneeded gate extender is no longer on the bedroom floor. (It was out of the way, but nevertheless...)
Progress was made at work today, which is also good. And I had the chance to go down into the studio and play around with things a bit more in the wake of yesterday's install. Everything continues to work well, so that's a good thing.
Calvin the Dog got some training in "the living room is part of the house" today. We'll see how that goes.
Krasheninnikova Remains Restless
Nov. 19th, 2025 05:13 pmearthobservatory_iod_feed
The volcano on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula continues to erupt after centuries of quiescence.
Three on the Floor
Nov. 18th, 2025 11:01 pmbillroperSo it went like this...
The new baby gate arrived this morning. I dropped the old baby gate off at UPS over lunch and it is on its way back to Amazon. After work, I decided that I would see if I could quickly install the new gate and it turned out that I *could*, having figured out all of the problematic parts with the previous gate. The gate is now installed on the stairs and should, I think, prevent Calvin from coming upstairs. It does not *seem* to prevent Gretchen from coming upstairs, although it doesn't make the whole process any more pleasant. And Julie needs to see how to operate the gate so that she does not tear it down accidentally. I have called Julie and suggested a demonstration, which she has declined. I worry about this.
Meanwhile, the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter card for the Apollo 8 unit that I bought arrived from Sweetwater. It had come via USPS and the notice said that it was in the mailbox. This seemed unlikely and it was, as all of the mail had been left on the porch, because that box had no hope of fitting in the mailbox. I brought everything in and it was now time for dinner.
We have been keeping Calvin on an extra-long leash to keep him in the family room when he is not in his kennel, but after dinner, I decided we should let him roam free on the first floor and determine whether the new baby gate would keep him off the second floor. This cost us one wooden cooking spoon that had been used for dinner and which Calvin found while counter surfing. Ruby took it from Calvin and it died while I tried to take it away from Ruby without breaking it.
And then a little while later, Calvin went and laid an enormous load in the middle of the living room where he has been previously guilty of doing so. Great.
By now, I am *really* unhappy. I head back into the living room to turn on the lights and clean up the mess.
And I trip on Julie's suitcase, which is still sitting in the passage between the hallway and the living room where it has been for over a week since Windycon. I had been thinking that this stupid thing really needed to go upstairs. I had thought correctly.
Trips to the floor: one.
Swearing and shouting ensued, because I was unhappy with pretty much everyone in the house at this point, including myself. Happily, I don't seem have done any major damage to anything, so I was able to pull myself up on the stairs, get up, and clean up the pile of poop. In multiple trips to the toilet, but no more trips to the floor.
I had thought to drag Calvin to the living room and rub his nose in it, but he was having none of this, so I exiled him to his kennel. Then when I was done cleaning things up, I dragged the kennel full of Calvin to the living room, where he will remain until morning in exile there.
And then Gretchen and I finished watching our TV show. After that, I went to the basement to install the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter into the Apollo 8 unit. This is easier when the unit has not already been installed into the rack so that it can only be accessed from the floor.
Trips to the floor: two, but with more planning this time.
Taking the card out requires a lot of playing with a teeny, tiny Allen wrench (which I only dropped once). Then I discovered I couldn't lever it out with my fingernails, but I got Julie to come in and hand me the bit of metal that had once covered a expansion card slot in the back of a computer. That tool did the job nicely. The new card was installed, the screws put back in, the Thunderbolt cable that needed to go to the computer which I had carefully identified and rerouted was plugged into the Apollo 8, and -- as long as I was on the floor already -- I moved the rest of the cables on the assumption that this was all going to work.
I levered myself off the floor, walked through the procedure for registering the used Apollo 8 unit to my account, and all of that worked. Now, the only thing that needed to be done was to use the new, short Thunderbolt cable to connect the Apollo 8 unit to the Apollo Silver unit.
I called Julie to do this, because it has to be done underneath the console. She plugged the cable in and went back to her computer.
The Apollo Silver unit and the Satellite refused to pop up on the list of devices.
Ok, there is no reason this shouldn't be working, unless Julie has somehow plugged the cable in incorrectly. This means that I will need to inspect the cable install.
Trips to the floor: three. Once more with feeling.
Thunderbolt cables are finicky beasts and it turns out that Julie had twisted the Thunderbolt cable so that the lighting bolt was face up on the Apollo 8 and face down on the Apollo Silver. In her defense, I hadn't removed the cable wrap from the new cable and that was the way that it *wanted* to be plugged in. It was just wrong.
I unwrapped the cable, plugged it in correctly, and stuck my head out from under the console. Three devices were now present in the display. Yay!
I crawled back up into my chair, fiddled with things a bit more, discovered that all of my plugins were now recognized, and declared victory. I fired up Cubase, pulled up a recent project, and hit the playback button.
Everything sounded good. Very good. Probably better than before, which is what one should expect from the newer unit with the better converters.
So this project was a success.
I am going to go take some Aleve now.
The new baby gate arrived this morning. I dropped the old baby gate off at UPS over lunch and it is on its way back to Amazon. After work, I decided that I would see if I could quickly install the new gate and it turned out that I *could*, having figured out all of the problematic parts with the previous gate. The gate is now installed on the stairs and should, I think, prevent Calvin from coming upstairs. It does not *seem* to prevent Gretchen from coming upstairs, although it doesn't make the whole process any more pleasant. And Julie needs to see how to operate the gate so that she does not tear it down accidentally. I have called Julie and suggested a demonstration, which she has declined. I worry about this.
Meanwhile, the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter card for the Apollo 8 unit that I bought arrived from Sweetwater. It had come via USPS and the notice said that it was in the mailbox. This seemed unlikely and it was, as all of the mail had been left on the porch, because that box had no hope of fitting in the mailbox. I brought everything in and it was now time for dinner.
We have been keeping Calvin on an extra-long leash to keep him in the family room when he is not in his kennel, but after dinner, I decided we should let him roam free on the first floor and determine whether the new baby gate would keep him off the second floor. This cost us one wooden cooking spoon that had been used for dinner and which Calvin found while counter surfing. Ruby took it from Calvin and it died while I tried to take it away from Ruby without breaking it.
And then a little while later, Calvin went and laid an enormous load in the middle of the living room where he has been previously guilty of doing so. Great.
By now, I am *really* unhappy. I head back into the living room to turn on the lights and clean up the mess.
And I trip on Julie's suitcase, which is still sitting in the passage between the hallway and the living room where it has been for over a week since Windycon. I had been thinking that this stupid thing really needed to go upstairs. I had thought correctly.
Trips to the floor: one.
Swearing and shouting ensued, because I was unhappy with pretty much everyone in the house at this point, including myself. Happily, I don't seem have done any major damage to anything, so I was able to pull myself up on the stairs, get up, and clean up the pile of poop. In multiple trips to the toilet, but no more trips to the floor.
I had thought to drag Calvin to the living room and rub his nose in it, but he was having none of this, so I exiled him to his kennel. Then when I was done cleaning things up, I dragged the kennel full of Calvin to the living room, where he will remain until morning in exile there.
And then Gretchen and I finished watching our TV show. After that, I went to the basement to install the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter into the Apollo 8 unit. This is easier when the unit has not already been installed into the rack so that it can only be accessed from the floor.
Trips to the floor: two, but with more planning this time.
Taking the card out requires a lot of playing with a teeny, tiny Allen wrench (which I only dropped once). Then I discovered I couldn't lever it out with my fingernails, but I got Julie to come in and hand me the bit of metal that had once covered a expansion card slot in the back of a computer. That tool did the job nicely. The new card was installed, the screws put back in, the Thunderbolt cable that needed to go to the computer which I had carefully identified and rerouted was plugged into the Apollo 8, and -- as long as I was on the floor already -- I moved the rest of the cables on the assumption that this was all going to work.
I levered myself off the floor, walked through the procedure for registering the used Apollo 8 unit to my account, and all of that worked. Now, the only thing that needed to be done was to use the new, short Thunderbolt cable to connect the Apollo 8 unit to the Apollo Silver unit.
I called Julie to do this, because it has to be done underneath the console. She plugged the cable in and went back to her computer.
The Apollo Silver unit and the Satellite refused to pop up on the list of devices.
Ok, there is no reason this shouldn't be working, unless Julie has somehow plugged the cable in incorrectly. This means that I will need to inspect the cable install.
Trips to the floor: three. Once more with feeling.
Thunderbolt cables are finicky beasts and it turns out that Julie had twisted the Thunderbolt cable so that the lighting bolt was face up on the Apollo 8 and face down on the Apollo Silver. In her defense, I hadn't removed the cable wrap from the new cable and that was the way that it *wanted* to be plugged in. It was just wrong.
I unwrapped the cable, plugged it in correctly, and stuck my head out from under the console. Three devices were now present in the display. Yay!
I crawled back up into my chair, fiddled with things a bit more, discovered that all of my plugins were now recognized, and declared victory. I fired up Cubase, pulled up a recent project, and hit the playback button.
Everything sounded good. Very good. Probably better than before, which is what one should expect from the newer unit with the better converters.
So this project was a success.
I am going to go take some Aleve now.
Iraq Reservoirs Plunge to Low Levels
Nov. 19th, 2025 12:00 amearthobservatory_iod_feed
A multi-year drought has put extra strain on farmers and water managers in the Middle Eastern country.
What’s it like to play with a professional Dungeon Master?
Nov. 18th, 2025 11:16 amtim_harford_feedI’ve played tabletop role-playing games for forty years or so, but I’ve never played in a “professional” game. That changed last week when – as a guest of RPG Taverns in south London – I was given a run through one of the new adventures in “Welcome to Hellfire Club“, which is the new D&D boxed set based on the game Eddie and friends play in Stranger Things. (A play with a play, indeed.)
Impressions? Well, the folks at RPG Taverns have created a safe space for adventure – bar on the ground floor offering food and drink delivered to your gaming table, and downstairs a warren of gaming rooms, all decorated in different vibes. (The 1980s vibe in our room was particularly strong – VHS, the A-team, they even had the tape-to-tape cassette deck I owned as a teenager.) It’s not super-slick (the soundproofing is nonexistent, for example) but it’s fun, and the gaming tables have everything you might want, including large tabletop screens to project maps and other images. (Also: I didn’t pay for my VIP journalist ticket, but £15 for a 2-3 hour session seems pretty good value. My local escape room charges twice that for one hour.) They are clearly aiming to create a real sense of community, including an ongoing campaign world and a Discord server with lots of active chat in between sessions. They’re also very beginner-friendly.
Our DM Phil did a good job – friendly, good pacing, fluent with the rules, spooky voices and strong descriptions.
As for the module? It seemed to have some lovely components – maps, dice, DM screen – and trod a nice line between the retro 1980s style dungeon-crawl, and a few new and genuinely unsettling twists. It’s pretty trad, to the point of trading on nostalgia. But if you like D&D, or like Stranger Things and are D&D curious… I would recommend it. And if you’re based in London and don’t have enough sessions with a regular gaming group and want to meet new gamers in a friendly setting with a safe hands running the game, RPG Taverns is well worth a look.
(For those wanting a different kind of gaming experience, Blades in the Dark is quite a trip.)
Reservoirs Dwindle in South Texas
Nov. 17th, 2025 04:39 pmearthobservatory_iod_feed
Drought in the Nueces River basin is reducing reservoir levels, leaving residents and industry in the Corpus Christi area facing water shortages.
Gear Talking
Nov. 17th, 2025 02:21 pmbillroperI was recording some scratch tracks yesterday up in my office and I have come to sing the praises of inexpensive gear, because the things you can do with inexpensive gear nowadays are pretty impressive.
Now, you need to have a computer and a DAW to run on it. You can get free DAWs, like Audacity. You can get cheap DAWs like Reaper ($60 for the personal license). Personally, I use Cubase and if I'm recommending a version of Cubase, I recommend Cubase Artist, because the must-have feature is lanes (or comping), which makes it easy to assemble a clean take from multiple takes that all contain flaws, but where you managed to do the right thing at least *once* for every note that you recorded. Other sufficiently good DAWs will have a similar feature (and I note that Reaper seems to have added this in version 7, so good for them!), but this is such a time saver that I wouldn't use a DAW without it. (I also note that the commercial Reaper license is $225, while Cubase Artist is $329 when not discounted, so...)
You need a microphone to record with. I recorded my scratch tracks using an old AKG C1000s, which is my favorite Swiss Army Knife of a mic, because it does a lot of things well enough and it isn't very expensive. Well, the brand-new version is apparently $324. When I bought mine, it was $100. And you can still buy a used one for less than $100 if you shop around.
Then you need to get that microphone's signal into your computer, which means you want an audio interface. My current favorite inexpensive interface is the Universal Audio Volt 2, which is selling for $179. This gets you *two* microphone or line inputs, which is a lot more flexible than one, even if I only used one for my scratch tracks. And the second microphone input only costs you $40, because the Volt 1 is $139. And it comes with a stack of very nice plugins from Universal Audio plus a copy of their Luna recording software. Unfortunately, the comping feature in Luna is not nearly as nice as the one in Cubase.
There are a lot of other nice audio interfaces available with similar capabilities at similar prices, but this is *my* lecture and I like my Volt, so I'll just continue.
I have become very, very fond of the Universal Audio plugin library. Happily, you can *rent* access to it, which is much cheaper than buying it -- although you can also buy huge bundles of plugins for cheap now for much less than I paid for them. And so I recorded one track with both guitar and voice through that AKG C1000s and the Volt 2 into Cubase, then massaged it with nothing except the Universal Audio plugins, plus the Maximizer that comes with Cubase, and got my scratch tracks done and sounding pretty good in short order.
One of my hobby horses is the "Democratization of Technology", where things that were ungodly expensive and hard to do get easier and cheaper to do as advanced tech gets pushed down to prices that lower-end users can afford. And this is a fine example of that, because recording technology is remarkably cheap nowadays.
Figuring out how to use it? That's the hard part. :)
And if you want to see what one of these scratch tracks sounds like, here's one that I posted last year that used the same setup. Wind and Water
Now, you need to have a computer and a DAW to run on it. You can get free DAWs, like Audacity. You can get cheap DAWs like Reaper ($60 for the personal license). Personally, I use Cubase and if I'm recommending a version of Cubase, I recommend Cubase Artist, because the must-have feature is lanes (or comping), which makes it easy to assemble a clean take from multiple takes that all contain flaws, but where you managed to do the right thing at least *once* for every note that you recorded. Other sufficiently good DAWs will have a similar feature (and I note that Reaper seems to have added this in version 7, so good for them!), but this is such a time saver that I wouldn't use a DAW without it. (I also note that the commercial Reaper license is $225, while Cubase Artist is $329 when not discounted, so...)
You need a microphone to record with. I recorded my scratch tracks using an old AKG C1000s, which is my favorite Swiss Army Knife of a mic, because it does a lot of things well enough and it isn't very expensive. Well, the brand-new version is apparently $324. When I bought mine, it was $100. And you can still buy a used one for less than $100 if you shop around.
Then you need to get that microphone's signal into your computer, which means you want an audio interface. My current favorite inexpensive interface is the Universal Audio Volt 2, which is selling for $179. This gets you *two* microphone or line inputs, which is a lot more flexible than one, even if I only used one for my scratch tracks. And the second microphone input only costs you $40, because the Volt 1 is $139. And it comes with a stack of very nice plugins from Universal Audio plus a copy of their Luna recording software. Unfortunately, the comping feature in Luna is not nearly as nice as the one in Cubase.
There are a lot of other nice audio interfaces available with similar capabilities at similar prices, but this is *my* lecture and I like my Volt, so I'll just continue.
I have become very, very fond of the Universal Audio plugin library. Happily, you can *rent* access to it, which is much cheaper than buying it -- although you can also buy huge bundles of plugins for cheap now for much less than I paid for them. And so I recorded one track with both guitar and voice through that AKG C1000s and the Volt 2 into Cubase, then massaged it with nothing except the Universal Audio plugins, plus the Maximizer that comes with Cubase, and got my scratch tracks done and sounding pretty good in short order.
One of my hobby horses is the "Democratization of Technology", where things that were ungodly expensive and hard to do get easier and cheaper to do as advanced tech gets pushed down to prices that lower-end users can afford. And this is a fine example of that, because recording technology is remarkably cheap nowadays.
Figuring out how to use it? That's the hard part. :)
And if you want to see what one of these scratch tracks sounds like, here's one that I posted last year that used the same setup. Wind and Water
Antarctic Sea Ice Saw Its Third-Lowest Maximum
Nov. 17th, 2025 12:00 amearthobservatory_iod_feed
Sea ice around the southernmost continent hit one of its lowest seasonal highs since the start of the satellite record.
Installation Woes
Nov. 16th, 2025 03:10 pmbillroperWe decided to install a baby gate at the top of the stairs to keep Calvin, The Very Hungry Dog (a.k.a., The Appetite on Four Legs; a.k.a. Dr. Chew-It-All) on the first floor which is both much more dog-proof than the upstairs and also not a zone where Sunshine the Cat (a.k.a. What Do You Mean, *Dog*?!) tends to wander. Also, it keeps Calvin from eating all of Sunshine's food. This is all a great theory.
I bought an extra tall gate so that I could get it to hit the flat part of both banisters at the top of the stairs. Unfortunately, this particular gate design has a plastic ramp that sits on the ground and if it is installed so that you hit the banister posts, then the edge of the ramp goes over the lip of the step, which is a Bad Idea (TM).
Ok. Let me install the gate on the landing instead. Except if I put a 36 inch tall gate on the landing so that the foot is in the right position, then it doesn't contact the banister post there. A 30 inch tall gate will work.
The 36 inch tall gate is now tagged to return to Amazon tomorrow and a 30 inch tall gate of the same design is now on order.
I have now failed at two consecutive weekend projects, which is starting to annoy me.
I am going to go get the recording laptop and record some scratch tracks. I *could* do this in the studio, except I would have to do more rewiring under the console and that seems counterproductive...
I bought an extra tall gate so that I could get it to hit the flat part of both banisters at the top of the stairs. Unfortunately, this particular gate design has a plastic ramp that sits on the ground and if it is installed so that you hit the banister posts, then the edge of the ramp goes over the lip of the step, which is a Bad Idea (TM).
Ok. Let me install the gate on the landing instead. Except if I put a 36 inch tall gate on the landing so that the foot is in the right position, then it doesn't contact the banister post there. A 30 inch tall gate will work.
The 36 inch tall gate is now tagged to return to Amazon tomorrow and a 30 inch tall gate of the same design is now on order.
I have now failed at two consecutive weekend projects, which is starting to annoy me.
I am going to go get the recording laptop and record some scratch tracks. I *could* do this in the studio, except I would have to do more rewiring under the console and that seems counterproductive...
Done Since 2025-11-09
Nov. 16th, 2025 05:10 pmmdlbearSo I did, in fact, need a live appointment about the pain in my right ankle. Edema, which I could have checked for a couple of weeks ago if I'd thought of it. (I did think of it late last week, and immediately made the appointment.) I am now on two more blood pressure meds, and I'm supposed to keep my feet up and avoid salt. So much for brine pickles and pizza with anchovies.
The only places where I can put my feet above the level of my heart are in bed (with my feet on the wall, so I can only do it for a little while in the morning), and the living room couch. And about the only thing I can do in that postition is breathing exercises. Growf. I have a follow-up appointment this coming Wednesday.
I re-stacked the plastic bins under my desk, so I can at least keep my legs level if not up. Don't know whether that will help much, but it can't hurt. (Much; it's a little hard on my unsupported knees, and starts hurting after a little while..) Still no idea why I always feel cold in the late afternoon and evening, but I've gotten Colleen's fake-fleece-lined scooter cape out of the closet and it helps. The cold feeling might be partly -- or even mostly -- anxiety, but, well, Colleen's cape.
N is back from London, after getting m and Cricket settled there. Not clear what that will do to our recording schedule -- not much given that it was already a shambles. Lizzy, the folding mobility scooter, is also back. She appears to need some work, and definitely needs a new battery.
I don't think I've mentioned N's book, The World As It Ought to Be, since it came out in hardcopy and Kindle. Go get yourself a copy. I finally got her author's website more-or-less done; she's having it professionally desighed, but the one I hacked together will do until that's done. I got the Website Portfolio, which I mentioned last week, more-or-less done as well.
Some links: The rebellion will be federated – 2025 edition - Elena Rossini. She saved a baby goat. Now they travel the country, share a bed.
