I’m watching COVID stats closely, daily, to make a decision about going to Cabo next month. We’d really like to go, but launching ourselves into a hotspot with 40X the positivity rate of 2-3 months ago, *and* in a place where I don’t want to be at the mercy of an unknown health care system, isn’t appealing.

Today was the first day in a while that the positivity rate trend looked like it’s going the right direction. It’ll take several more days of downward trends before I feel OK about making the trip.

In general I’m feeling good about doing “normal” things in San Diego, being vaxxed and boosted. Get-togethers with friends, going to restaurants, etc. I don’t think mortality is likely if (when?) Omicron gets me and I trust the health care systems here, though I don’t want to add to their work burden. But going out of the country is a whole different level of risk. And southern Baja is a pretty rough place after you get out of the resorts – not somewhere I want to be sick and quarantined.

Just sitting around this morning when I thought something exploded outside. Big boom, then a sharper cracking sound, then a rumble. Then another boom.

Turns out it was a deep earthquake a few miles from us. Reported as a 4.0, but it felt a lot bigger. Kind of scary, but no damage. Definitely got our attention.

My all-time favorite UK fan comment after our dominating win over Kansas: “We stole the dog right off their porch!”. Classic.

I had a friend over to watch this one and it was great. Pure joy to see such a great game. I’m still up after midnight enjoying the feeling of the big UK win.

I have to actually go to work today. Can’t say I’m happy about that. Have to shower and shave, get dressed in something other than a T-shirt or sweatshirt, drive to a building 45 minutes away and meet in person with other people. It’s so…primitive, so 2019. Thank god I’m retired and this only happens once in a great while.

I got a nice surprise from my friend Jon yesterday. He received trophies for our golf tourney win last fall, trophies I didn’t even know we would get. Looking forward to getting mine to display at home, pictured below. (For those not acquainted with golf, a golf tournament is organized into flights, where each flight contains golfers of approximately the same skill level, as measured by your US Golf Association handicap.)

2021 wasn’t a total loss

I’m gradually getting back in the saddle on my writing project after a week+ of work distraction and illness. I have about half the word count I wanted by this date. But I like where the story is going. That said, Act 2 is hard to write. I’ve known how the things begins and ends forever, but filling in the middle with good plot, good pacing and good character arcs is just tough. Maybe it’ll get easier if I just finish this first one.

This is pretty interesting. I worked on projects like this back in the 80s, writing simulations of satellite warfare and actual algorithms for detection of satellites approaching one another with ill intent. Forty years later, it’s happening. I think the next 40 years will see Earth’s orbital space become the new center of military conflict. The high ground, and all that.

We have two places we want to go in February – our annual week on the beach in Cabo, and to Louisville to see the family.

I’m tracking COVID stats in both places, and it’s not looking good. Louisville is reporting about 2000 new cases each day, and Cabo about 1500 per day. That’s as compared to about 30 per day when we visited Cabo in early December. A 50X increase!

While we’re vaxxed and boosted, it doesn’t make much sense to fly into a hot spot with that kind of positivity rate. The numbers I cite are only the positive tests recorded in each place – who knows how many people are sick but haven’t gotten tested or treated. Especially in Cabo.

Have to make the Cabo final decision in about a week, so there’s not much time for the trends to reverse. The case incident curves for both places went straight up at approximately Christmas 2021, and haven’t started to trend back down yet.

We’ve hunkered down here in Socal since that early December Cabo trip, and it’s getting old. I for one am anxious to start traveling again after a two month hiatus. But not yet anxious enough to say “fuck it, let’s roll the dice”. Maybe in another 30 days…

I’m getting pretty tired of how pop-up and “personalized” ads are ruining the Internet browsing experience. If I shop for a chair on one website, I see ads for chairs on every other website for weeks afterward. And the fact that those ads are served more or less in real time means that websites take forever to load, particularly on a slower device like an iPad. Pages keep shifting around until the slowest ad server in the chain are finished, and it makes some sites impossible to read. Or at best irritating.

One solution for this is a VPN, or virtual private network. I know a bit about VPNs – I was the CTO for an SAIC-backed business VPN startup in the 2001-2002 timeframe. Back then VPNs were rare and mysterious, but now they’re everywhere.

A VPN uses cryptography to establish an encrypted connection between your device (the client) and a matching server elsewhere in the world. All your Internet traffic is then encrypted and routed to the VPN service provider’s network/server instead of your ISP’s server. Most VPN services today have multiple server sites (their network), so one day your apparent location is Stockholm, the next day it might be Kansas City, and another day it might be London. Your IP address and location (which is defined as the location of the server’s IP address) change depending on which physical site the VPN service chooses to decrypt and route your traffic. Ad servers can’t see who and where you are, so their “personalization” algorithms are defeated.

So I’m looking for the best VPN solution for home use. Right now I’m leaning toward Express VPN.

There are a few unknowns in adopting a VPN these days. One is what effect it will have on streaming – will my Roku devices streaming things like Netflix and Amazon still work. Another is video conferencing, previously a small issue, but post-pandemic, a big issue. MS Teams and Zoom need to work. And I wouldn’t put it past MS to intentionally muck up any non-MS VPN approach.

Uncertainties aside, I really think it’s time for people (that would be me) to push back against the Facebook-Amazon-Google unholy trinity of data and identity sharing that drives the online ad business.

This looks like something I’d want to attend. Smart people talking about the future and technology. Great speaker list…Carver Mead, Esther Dyson and Craig Ventner in particular. I’d listen to those three opine about anything.

I don’t watch much NFL football these days – in fact, almost zero – but I did tune in to the last quarter and the OT of the Kansas City v. Buffalo game last night. Pretty exciting stuff. If regular season games were played with that pace and energy, I’d watch more often. That game is already being talked about as one of the all-time greats, and I agree.

Between feeling crummy and dozens of hours spent on Board issues, last week was a total loss for creative writing. I intend to do better this week, road to hell notwithstanding.

I’m definitely getting hooked on Wordle. I’m not a fan of puzzles and crosswords, but Wordle hits the sweet spot in terms of difficulty and time to complete. So far I’m a solid 4.5 in terms of the number of words I need to solve. Pretty average, I would think. <Sixty minutes later.> Shit, I no sooner wrote that than I ran into the toughest Wordle yet. It was extra tough because I had the rules wrong. I thought each letter could be used once and only once, but noooo. RTFM.

Finally, I finished all 600+ pages of Surface Detail this morning. What a fantastic story. My writers group would *hate* Banks, with his excessive world-building and unconventional dialogues among machines, but I love it (perhaps a mismatch there). I can only hope that our world is being observed by The Culture at this very moment, and that Special Circumstances has agents here on Earth to help us through our problematic societal childhood.

Not feeling great today, and this is my attitude about eating healthy.

Bring on the potato chips.

For yesterday’s game I wished that the team would be ready, play well and play hard. They did. I wished that the zebras would be neutral. They weren’t – Auburn shot three times (!) as many free throws as UK.

I forgot to wish that our team would stay healthy, stay uninjured. They didn’t, and those injuries plus the awful foul-calling was the difference.

I love college basketball, but when the refs let one team beat up the other, it’s not much fun. Auburn’s big guy would have fouled out twice in an objective forum. Tough to watch.

The only silver lining is it’s clear that when healthy, we can beat anyone. It was clear that we were the better team until Washington went down. Even after that, it was stalemate with UK playing five against eight.

But a loss is a loss. Auburn will now be number one in the SEC and the nation, and we’re trying to get everyone healthy. It’s a better season than last year, but not yet a return to glory.

Big game today. Auburn is favored over the Cats. Gotta get my emotional state ready for either outcome. All I ask is for our guys to play hard, play well. And for the zebras to be decent.

But I have to watch it DVR-delayed, because…big meeting today at the same time. Can’t go into any details, but we will set the course for a company after a brief period of instability.

Here’s my Zen photo for the day. I’ll just keep this scene in mind when things get rough. Taken in Malta, 2019.

Bad, bad case of writer’s block right now. I should be working on the novel and I’m doing anything else. I’ve read political and technology news, edited my Storyworth book, read and edited Kathryn’s Storyworth volume, curated some more travel pictures, read about 200 pages of Ian M Banks’ amazing book Surface Detail and took a nap. And now I’m blogging.

I have a high intensity, soul-sucking Board meeting tomorrow morning (messy, murky people problems to discuss) that will likely insure that I get no writing done then either. Word deficits mount, relentless as the tide.

I’ve only two more hours until the sun goes down and I can distract myself with dinner, some TV and an early retreat to bed. Have to be rested for the damnable meeting.

I’m putting some time in on organizing and sorting my 34,000-ish digital photos, including moving some new ones (not actually new, just rediscovered and enhanced) to my Favorites folder.

Here’s one I took in 2020 in western Colorado. I like it quite a bit.

And here are a couple from the San Diego Zoo last year.

It’s sure fun to sort back through these…lots of good memories.

Tonight’s UK vs. TX A&M game just about did me in. Way too close for comfort, and Kathryn thinks I’m insane for the angst/cheering/shouting on my part. Being a real fan is tough.

We didn’t lead until late in the second half. In 5-10 years, I probably won’t be able to watch a game like this without emergency intervention.

One of the best things happening in my little life these days is the resurgence of a strong, winning and fun to watch UK basketball team. I love this analysis, found on A Sea of Blue, describing one of the big reasons for our recent success. Mr. Vinsel makes a strong case.

I’ll be watching the game tonight against TX A&M with my UK shirt and hat on.

Meanwhile, I’m still recovering from the last episode of The Expanse on Amazon. And by last, I mean “no more episodes”, hard withdrawal, full stop it’s over. Tragic. I started watching The Expanse in late 2019 with my buddy Jon Sessions, killing time in the evenings during our annual golf tournament. I was quickly hooked. Then it kept me occupied during that awful December and January in 2020 when we moved Dad and Phyllis into assisted living, after getting Dad out of the hospital and removing tons of clutter from their home. Since then I’ve read all the books (they’re spectacular), and watched the TV episodes as slowly as I could. The TV series is outstanding by itself – but if you’ve read the books, it’s 10X better. Back story, detail and context make a big difference. But it’s over for now, though I hold out hope that there will be a big-budget Expanse movie or two, picking up in Book 7 or so where the TV series left off. Call it nerd optimism.

OK, this is probably addictive. Wordle. Got my first word in four tries. But they only release one Wordle per day?!

NPR covered this a few days ago.

I finished T. Jefferson Parker’s latest book today, A Thousand Steps, and wow, what a great read! A mystery, a history book, a time travelog, a coming-of-age story, and some unforgettable characters. He *is* the master. And to think he lives just down the road.

I’ve met him, listened to him lecture and even taken a few writing tips from him. And I’ve been to a few of the Laguna Beach places he writes about in this novel.

Been thinking a lot about the nation’s problems lately, and like every other amateur goofball in America, I have the answers. Here’s what I would do to remake American democracy.

1. Term limits for every elected or appointed official and judge. No exceptions.
2. Get rid of the Electoral College. Move to one person, one vote, a simple democracy.
3. Establish a simple rule of one US Senator for every two million people in a state. States where a lot of people live get more representation. States where almost no one lives get a few.
4. Legalize cannabis just like alcohol. Release every prisoner imprisoned for pot use, sale or possession.
5. Move to a 10% flat tax for all citizens down to the poverty line of approximately $40K/year. You make $100,000 per year, you pay $10K for your public services. You make a billion a year, you pay $100 million. You can afford it.
6. Secure our borders by repurposing the military’s $700-800B annual budget. Take half of that budget and establish a set of border bases across the southern border. Patrol and control the border using humane methods. Establish training programs for people wishing to immigrate and enroll them.
7. Establish an absolute minimum wage that’s above the poverty line. That would be about $20/hour.
8. Require that Congress hold a vote on any US soldiers deployed to a foreign country. No hidden wars.
9. Replace every coal plant with a combination PV farm and modern mini-nuke. PV carries most of the load during the day, the mini-nuke carries the grid’s load at night.
10. Establish very strict training and registration programs for gun ownership. Anyone over 18 (except a felon or a psychiatric risk) can own a gun, but they must be trained, registered and retrained / evaluated every other year. Pure Second Amendment – *that* is a trained militia.
11. Make it clear that a US citizen has complete control of what is done to their body. No exceptions.
12. Double and triple down on education. Pay teachers a lot more and incent them based on student performance in the future.
13. Incent companies to manufacture in the US and/or to use US-sourced parts.
14. Provide basic, free (paid for by taxes) health care services as a right for every US citizen.

I know that a few of these ideas are a bit naive and don’t take system complexity and unintended consequences into account. But I like them anyway and I think America would be a better place if they were implemented.

Feel free to comment with any ideas of your own, even if they conflict with mine.

My writing schedule has gone to hell. First I lost at least a day to a COVID booster hangover. Now I’ve lost a couple of days to some craziness in one of the companies I’m associated with – craziness that is taking up a lot of my time and cognition. I may be able to make up the deficit, but…2000 words per day adds up. I need to clear my head and have some very productive days in a row.

So Dr. Anthony Fauci now concedes that pretty much everyone is going to get the Omicron version of COVID. I remember telling my Dad sometime in 2020 that “looks to me like everyone will get this before it’s through”. Sorry I was right.

So if that’s the case, is it finally time to get rid of the masks and the conflict / irritation they’ve produced? Unfortunately, no.

• We have to do everything possible to slow the spread of Omicron and give hospitals and health care workers a chance to catch up. That’s our immediate problem – too much pressure on the whole health care system.
• We still have two susceptible populations to worry about. Kids under 5, who haven’t been authorized for a vaccine dose. (Let’s make this a priority, please). And folks in assisted living homes – I can’t see us just giving up and saying “tough shit, you’re going to get the virus”, when we know their death rate from any illness is much, much higher than other segments of the population.

If we can get some kind of vaccine approved for the little ones, then maybe we could keep mask protocols in place for anyone in contact with nursing homes and assisted living facilities. And remove mask requirements for the general population. That would go a long way toward restoring normality.

And, if we can give the health care system some time to recover and retrench, we can get rid of the vaccine mandates. By now everyone in the US who is willing has had multiple chances to get vaccinated. Given universal spread, the only person they’re hurting by not being vaccinated is themselves.

So I think this is how 2022 could (should) shape up. One, we get the health care system back on its feet. Two, we find a way to protect children under 5 with a vaccine or therapy. Then we get rid of mask and vaccination mandates, with an exception for elder care facilities.

I don’t know why, but this whole situation made me think of the classic Country Joe and the Fish song “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag”. An edited verse from that Vietnam-era song:

“and it’s 1, 2, 3, what’re we fighting for?
don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
next stop is vietnam Omicron
and it’s 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates
well there ain’t no time to wonder why
whoopee! we’re all gonna die”

Dark humor, which at times is the best.

This is very cool. A great way to store energy without batteries, without firing up coal plants. We already have a large pumped hydro generation plant in Socal (the Lake Hodges complex), and this operates on the same principle. Charge the system at night when electrical rates are low, then discharge power into the grid when rates are high, typically starting at 2pm. It’s simple energy arbitrage on a huge scale. In Socal our peak rates are above $0.45 per Kwh, and lowest rates are around $0.18 per Kwh. That’s a big spread.

And with Goldman Sachs investing in this, you can bet it has some real positive ROI. Sweet.

We’re back in a dry cycle here in Socal. After getting some badly needed rain around Christmas, we’re back to dry, cool days. It’s great for outdoor activities, but not great for the trees here that need some more rain. We’re at 6.5 inches for the season (since July 1, 2021), and if that’s all we get it’ll be bad. We don’t want any more pictures like this from our back deck, taken in December 2017.

This morning I enjoyed reading about Masten Space Systems and their space infrastructure business. There are some obvious overlaps with SpaceX, but Masten seems to be carving out a niche in the extraterrestrial landing systems area. In fact, Masten’s first space landing mission, set for late 2023, will ride a SpaceX launch vehicle on its way to the Moon. Exciting stuff.

Also, saw this olive oil tribute on CNN today. Makes me happy to see the word getting out on EVOO (extra virgin olive oil) and its health benefits. Our modest grove of 250-ish trees produces some spectacular oil (with a LOT of work). I took a break from tree management and harvesting in 2021, but in 2022 I hope to get bumper crop. Here’s the tasty result at the end of the long process from a previous year.

My MD cousin Donnie alerted me to the fact that the COVID-related admissions in Louisville have never been higher, even at the beginning of all this two years ago. I took a look at the CDC’s county-by-county data, and whoa! Jefferson County has a 32% positivity rate and growing. Linear-scale maps show cases and positivity curves going straight up.

I hope all my family and friends in Louisville stay home for a while. That’s a bad situation. I worry so much about the grandsons, who aren’t able to get vaccinated.

I took some photos yesterday with an old friend. Not a person, but a lens.

My first real camera was a Nikon EM SLR that my Dad bought me when I graduated from college in 1979. He tricked me by telling me he was interested in a good camera, and what would I buy on a modest budget. I gave him the specs for the EM, and added that if he wanted a really great lens that he should spring for the Nikkor 50mm f1.4 prime lens. It was then (and still is) a fabulous lens. When he gave it to me I was flabbergasted (guess I was pretty naive back then).

I used that lens for years until I switched camera bodies and technology moved us along. I switched to Canon cameras, then Olympus and who knows what during the point-and-shoot digital camera years. But now I’m back to real cameras, and they make adapters for modern cameras to any lens you can imagine.

I probably hadn’t used my little Nikkor lens in 25 years. I’ve carried it around in my collection of stuff for 42 years (interesting number, that) and now it’s resurrected as a bolt-on for the Fuji X-S10. I had forgotten how heavy it is for a little guy – Nikon made them like tanks. It’s way heavier than the camera body.

Setting the camera up for the non-native lens wasn’t too tough once I waded through the documentation. I had to tweak two internal settings, including one nonsense setting. It tells the camera to fire the shutter even when it can’t detect a lens (and it can’t when an adapter is used), and once that software switch is set, you never need to reset it. When I attached a lens directly to the mount, it detects the lens and works as designed. When I attach an adapter, then the shutter also works, just without extending camera features through the lens. So what in the world was the point in that switch?

I don’t know what my Dad paid for the thing, but after 42 years it’s still worth $300-400 as a used lens. So it was nice to get a $300 prime lens for the $25 adapter cost.

Now I have to learn to shoot with the hybrid old lens / new camera. Focus and depth of field gave me some real problems in yesterday’s shots – the hybrid combo is strictly manual focus with a slightly odd focal point due to the adapter. And drinking wine while shooting photos probably didnt help.

But here’s a shot of the crowd that came out well in terms of light and focus. Can’t say much for the composition.

I also liked the tone of this little still life, though that’s the camera sensor more than anything else. I think I got the focus solid.

There are a couple of others from yesterday that are publishable, but I need to work on them.

All told, it was great to have an old friend back at my side.

Texas chili night in Socal tonight, inspired by a recent Yellowstone episode. Pretty tasty. I love chili but when I cook it I always forget the little extras for the top – cheese, cilantro, onions, cracker crumbles. Details that matter.

It helped that KY found their game again, besting Georgia handily. Seriously fun to watch – they shot about 70% from the field in the second half.

Been dealing with a (hopefully) brief version of writer’s block today. I’m getting further behind my schedule.

Today was the day we expected to board the ship in Buenos Aires, en route to Antarctica and beyond. That’s a weird feeling – in another reality we didn’t cancel. And in that reality we probably all got COVID and crashed into an iceberg.

I should be adding to the novel, but…a blog post is about all I can manage at the moment. I took advantage of a perfect day here in Fallbrook. 74 degrees F, sunny, just enough breeze to feel good. I moved my afternoon office down to the patio of the new winery just a mile away from the house, and after a glass of wine and some photography, getting my head around the next scene on the Moon isn’t working. Pictures of my lakefront winery office to be posted later.

This is the silver lining in not going to South America this month. January in Socal can be the best weather of the year. Days like today just don’t happen elsewhere in the US. It’s 25 degrees and snowing in KY – nice in its own way, but not outdoor wine drinking weather.

I spent a great lunch with my semi-pro photographer friend (he’s actually a pro and a good one, but he makes his living via other means), and we talked through high-end audio, photography, politics, etc. It was great. He confirmed some of the things I thought I was doing wrong with the new camera, and I’m anxious to try what I learned. Getting back to some basics – shoot manual, shoot RAW or RAW+JPEG, stay in the sweet spot of shutter speeds, ISO and aperture – and learn to do that without thinking. I know I used to do that with my ancient Nikon EM, my first real camera back in 1979. But over the years I’ve forgotten those basics. All the crazy software capabilities of modern cameras are cool, but they get in the way of a focus on composition. That’s what Robert confirmed for me. When I’m worried about 77 arcane software settings and what needs to be tweaked, I’m not thinking about the shot and its subject. So throw all that shit away and get back to basics.

In a different world, without COVID/Omicron, we would be on a flight from LAX to Buenos Aires today, being pampered in business class. But we live in this world, rapidly shutting down as we wearily weather another pandemic variant. So no South America for now.

As for plan B, which was to travel to see the grandkids after cancelling the international trip, also no bueno. My contacts in KY advise me that it’s not smart to drop in there anytime soon, as they have a massive Omicron surge. Very high local positivity rate, in the 20% range. Hospitals full, but infected patients not generally dying like they did in previous waves. So I think we’re hunkered down in Socal for the month. Not the way I hoped to start 2022.

On the positive side, writing is going well. Once I set aside the frustration at throwing away most of the 75,000 words I had written in first-second-third 2020-2021 drafts, I’m happy recreating the book in a new structure. I’m actually writing faster and with more purpose this time. On this pace and process I could see myself finishing two books per year, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Finish this one.

Also, I meet with a local semi-pro photographer today to learn a few things. I’m not happy with the pictures I’m getting from the new gear. For example, here’s one where the hummingbird colors should pop, but they’re subdued. Is it the lighting, or the camera sensor settings? Or does the colorful feeder somehow bias the sensor’s color pickup and make the bird’s colors less vivid?

I’m thinking the lighting, as the sun was bright and coming in from the top left. The front of the hummer was essentially in shadow.

I’m also having some focus issues. Lots to talk to the guru about.

This comment from A Sea of Blue just about sums up my take on last night’s heartbreaker of a UK game.

This game was butt

Ball handling was butt.

The injuries were butt.

Free throw shooting was butt.

The ending was butt.

The foul calls were butt.

Keion was butt.

Butt all the way down.

Writing is going fine, in fits and starts. It really helps to have a structure guide. In the first several drafts last year, I made the mistake of wandering around with backstory and let whatever interested me determine what I wrote. I ended up with an interesting mess. With a structural outline, I can stay on track, develop the characters and plot, and end up with something publishable. Fingers crossed.

I did take some time this morning to read the news. Probably a mistake. This video from CNN, where the reporter interviews people at a recent Trump rally about the events of a year ago at the capital, is soooo depressing. I’ve never in my life seen such delusional denial. One woman’s response: “…I didn’t see any Trump supporters there. I saw people pretending to be Trump supporters.” Holy crap. What in the world makes these people hold on to their bizarre beliefs?

And then there’s this article from The Guardian, a British publication, that lays our situation out in stark detail:

“The United States today is, once again, headed for civil war, and, once again, it cannot bear to face it. The political problems are both structural and immediate, the crisis both longstanding and accelerating. The American political system has become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are increasingly impossible.

The legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%, cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable, messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable television, in the malls.”

I don’t know about you, but the prospect of an actual civil war isn’t appealing. I’m too old for this shit.

Postings on this blog may be a little sparse this month. I’m knocking out 2,000 words per day on my novel’s rewrite, and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for pithy observations about the world or travel. So far it’s going well.

I may publish a chapter or two here to see if any readers have comments. Cart before horse most likely, but it’s a thought.