Tag Archives: TIC

Today I choose to take a day off from work (TIC00041d)

The PolyBlog
August 31 2020

We were planning to go away for the weekend to the inlaws’ cottage, but Andrea and Jacob were not feeling that great, and we postponed the trip. But we had planned originally to take the Monday off as well and make it a long weekend. With the decision to stay home, I left the holiday in the pipeline and took it off anyway, as did Andrea.

I’d love to say we had a fun-filled staycation day that rejuvenated us from top to bottom. Instead, we did do some small fun things like lunch out and a few games this afternoon, plus watching American Ninja Warrior’s All-Star show tonight.

But mostly, I just kept slogging on my home reorg. I’m in a strange phase at the moment in that I have a functional basement, more or less, and most of the things that I am sorting are in their assigned piles. Except that not everything that needs to be sorted is in the main part of the basement. To put it simply, I’ve sorted what is already here, I haven’t tackled the full back part of the basement yet.

So yesterday with Andrea’s help, and today through some stubborness, I plowed through the rest of the bins and boxes so I could truly see what I am facing. Fortunately, some of it went extremely quickly, and I was pleasantly surprised that three bins that I thought had a bunch of loose electrical stuff in it is actually not that at all, more old VHS tapes that are easily disposed of at some point, and I’m golden. I’m also really happy because some shelves that I needed to get to in order to really see what is there are now uncovered, some key dominoes haven fallen, and what’s left is also not that bad. Don’t get me wrong, I still have a ton of weeding to do. But the unknown is much closer to the known now.

Tonight, I took a small break from the family and took a short drive down to one of the park areas a few blocks south. I have been trying out some new astro planning software and one of the pieces of software is designed to help you plan different photography shots by telling you where exactly on the horizon the sun or moon (or planets, or constellations, etc.) is going to “rise”. I’m not talking about the Sun rising in the East, I’m talking about will it be directly behind THAT tree or about 2 degrees over and blocked by that house or 5 degrees the other way and coming up in open horizon.

If you know an area well, and have been out recently for sunrise, you probably know exactly where it will be on the horizon; if not, you’re more in the “general” direction phase. Which is not really that helpful if, for example, you want to see the sun rising behind a tree and find out that the angle is wrong and you should be 45 feet to your right to frame it properly. You can change on the fly, of course, but there are apps and websites that will tell you EXACTLY where it will cross the horizon.

Tonight, the moon is almost full (98%), and I wanted to test the app. So at 7:30 p.m., well 7:29 to be precise, I was perched with a south-easterly view to see the moon come up above some trees. I had planned to use a specific location earlier, but when I happened to drive by around 3:00, I realized that the angle was going to have way more trees than I expected (the park has more growth than I remember!). So I went to location B in my planning, which I didn’t go back and replan, just did a parallel thing. I used a free version of another app, and when the moon came up, it was about 5 degrees off. Still good, I was close, but if I was looking to frame a specific view, that 5 degrees could have meant moving 100 feet or so to the right really quickly with the tripod and reframing a shot.

The more expensive apps will do a better alignment job, offer you a virtual overlay for your camera view to show you where the moon would rise (it was off as I said), or even simulate what the light will look like at a certain time of day for you to plan ahead. I took some quick shots, no tripod, but I didn’t feel like I was getting anything “good”. Might have to do it with my DSLR. But, it was just a test. I have a specific target in mind, and I’ll aim for it next full moon. But I at least gave it a partial test tonight.

The downside to all this is that I don’t really feel like I had a “vacation” which I would have had at the cottage. I just kept slogging away. Progress or no, it’s still tiring. I am hoping to crash early tonight. Or at least early for me.

Today I choose to take a day off work.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to go down a musical rabbit hole (TIC00040d)

The PolyBlog
August 31 2020

I was tempted to include the full post I wrote about the rabbit hole that is “genres” for my music collection as a “Today I choose” post, but the reality is that it is more of a series of posts on their own.

So the TL;DR version of The rabbit hole that is organizing a digital music collection is that while I am making great progress on storing, backing up, and playing my music collection, I still have work to do to make it more shareable and a TON of work to do in simply organizing it by genres.

I’ll still need to do some more research to decide what categories “sing” to me, so to speak.

Today I choose to go down the musical rabbit hole of “genres”, and that rabbit hole is more of a full-on warren down there with tunnels and sub-tunnels. And maybe other animals that aren’t even rabbits burrowing their way through.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to listen to some nostalgia (TIC00039d)

The PolyBlog
August 30 2020

When I finished my post yesterday, I said I was going to take a break for a couple of days, but that was more about not being near a computer than it was about wanting or needing a break. I’m feeling pretty good about where I’m at for things, and blogging as well. I’ve got a small milestone coming up, and I’m looking forward to writing about it in my blog. But I was going to be at the cottage, or so I thought, so I had planned a short stoppage.

Yet, morning came, and J wasn’t feeling well. I had been “off” for M/T, Andrea was feeling “off” W/Th, and the cub was “off” F and now Saturday. While lots of people would have just pushed him to “suck it up” so we could go to the cottage, I try extra hard not to do that type of pushing. If it was me, I would have been trying to decide how to stay home without disappointing everyone since I’m the driver, and pushing me just makes me feel worse. So I told him flat out that we wouldn’t push him, it was his decision, and since he really wasn’t feeling up to it, we ended up postponing the trip.

Which gave me some time for more progress on the basement, but it also left me with a bit of time to play with some of my music collection some more. And out of nowhere, an old album came to mind.

The album was called Street Hits and it was put out by CBS Records, but the distributor in Canada that created the partnership? Bata. Yep. The shoe company. There are 10 songs, 7 of them by Canadian artists I guess.

We have Apple Music, and we really don’t get our money’s worth out of it much these days. We used to play music trivia while driving to work, but that is out. I do turn it on sometimes in the basement while I’m working, although I also have to keep turning it off for conference calls and frequently forget to reach over to hit play again. But with the entire library at my disposal, could I find all the songs from Street Hits?

A walk on the dark side

My older brother (by 13 years) had Deep Purple, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Meatloaf, etc. But he was older, married, lived a few blocks away. For my brother closest to me in age (by 6 years), we were living with our parents who were mainly Top 40 listeners. One of the two local radio stations, CKPT Peterborough, was permanently on the dial in the kitchen and we weren’t allowed to change the station. Nor in the car. Not that there was much else for AM or even FM to reach the Peterborough Valley area. There was one other station, CHEX, but it wasn’t a whole lot different. CKPT had a bit of the older stuff too, CHEX seemed to be newer music. But it was relatively plain pop music.

Parts of Street Hits seemed subversive in comparison.

First up was “Hold On”, by Triumph. Nothing particularly startling there, a pretty basic ballad. “Music holds the secret, to know it can make you whole…”. It’s pretty up-tempo after a slow open, but it’s not revolutionary.

Second on the list was Loverboy, “Working for the Weekend”, with everyone trying to get it right with a new romance. Again, a nice basic up-tempo song, with a bit of backbeat.

Then you hit the third song. “Wango Tango”. Ted Nugent. And suddenly you are in the NSFW category. And you don’t get three guesses to figure out what Wango is referring to…later on, when he is describing the new dance, well, both her ankles are turned out, her belly is down, and her butt is up. You do the math. But then it goes further. There’s a bit more metaphor…she is supposed to pretend her face is a Maserati, turbo charged and he’s offering fuel injection, and the music and lyrics are done in a rhythmic fashion. See where I’m going with this? No? Are you a monk? What about when he looks for a garage to store the car?

For a 13-year-old kid, it was like finding out someone had made a porno and released it on cable. My description of the song sounds terrible, I know, but the music is decently compelling, it has a strong backbeat, and more importantly, a gravelly voice that’s almost a throw-forward to eventual rap-like lyrics with less spitting or rhyme.

That this qualified as “art”, was workable as a song, was mind-blowing. But we made sure we only listened to it when our parents were away.

Goddo followed up the porn song with “Pretty Bad Boys” singing about being, well, a pretty bad boy looking for a pretty bad girl.

And then Straight Lines took us back to a love ballad called “Letting Go”. WTF? “And the hardest part of love is letting go…”.

On to Side B

Right, an album. So after five songs, you had to flip it over. 🙂

Ozzy Osbourne kicked it off with “I Don’t Know (Live)”. He was playing for the first minute to his fan base, and honestly, I couldn’t care less. It sounds like satanic worship music, or what it was pretending to be anyway. But after that, the next four minutes is a decent song with a pretty aggressive guitar-led set of riffs. It lags a bit in the middle, but the rest? Not bad.

Judas Priest’s “Heading Out To The Highway” was next, and it wasn’t much of an addition to the album for us. If I’m honest, Ozzy wasn’t much either. It’s okay, just not very compelling.

Then you hit Rough Trade, which has a pretty aggressive band name that a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily even understand, but the song is called “All Touch”. And you could listen to its metaphors and similes for a long time and still have no idea what exactly the song is about. “Splintering fragments of conversation, Never got down to cold hard facts, All touch but no contact”. Casual sex? Missed connections? The start of a break-up? When you read the lyrics, you see it seems more like drama between lovers or a cat-fight, where the fight is all verbal (all touch but no contact). It was like something I had never heard before and it was the only reason to listen to the B side.

“Follow You There” by the Queen City Kids (who had opened for Ozzy apparently) was okay, but nothing special.

And then we close it out with Harlequin’s “Thinking of You”. Another lily-white love ballad. It sounds like something that should be sung by Billy Joel.

It was one of the weirdest albums we owned, and I don’t even know what made us want it. We made a special trip to the Bata shoe store in some mall to buy it, it was $3.99 and we asked our mother to get it for us. We had to have seen it advertised on TV, but it wasn’t like we knew the songs really. But we wanted it. And every weekend, that album was in our rotation.

But it isn’t like you make a mixtape for your Walkman and throw Wango Tango on there. Trust me, I know, because I did just that, and if you’re not sitting in a kitchen listening to music blast with your friends, but instead are walking around in the sunshine delivering papers and listening to someone’s face being a Maserati, it’s just plain out of place.

Tonight, after Jacob went to bed, I pulled up the menu and searched. All the songs are available on Apple Music, even the Queen City Kids one. Heck, I even found a picture of the album cover online (a FB page for a bunch of radio audiophiles talking about old albums had mentioned it).

It was fun reaching back almost 40 years to 1981.

Today I choose to listen to some nostalgia.

What choices are you making?

The Playlist in Apple Music:

Today I choose to clean up my reorg space (TIC20038d)

The PolyBlog
August 28 2020

I mentioned the other day that my “reorg” state for my office, basement, etc. was getting to me, and while taking a break to cleanse the palate, or making progress was good, they’re minor mitigations for a larger malaise.

I don’t want to oversell how bad things are, I’m doing okay, making progress. A major phase will be done by next Friday I think, another by the following Friday, and fingers crossed, all of it by the end of September. A true reason for celebrating Thanksgiving, so to speak. 🙂

But I was feeling like the basement had become a construction site, not an office where I work at my normal job.

Tonight, I decided to sort a bunch of stuff around, move some major pieces from A to B, and be ready for the end of Phase I and the start of Phase II (although the numbering is getting confusing to me, I don’ t know what my phases are anymore). In the end, it’s workable. I’ll take some photos to add to the long piece when I do my before / after post some time in early October.

It looks and feels functional. Andrea and I even sat on the couch tonight for a bit in the middle of another project just to relax and enjoy the quiet and slightly cooler basement. Without the A/C on, it’s mostly livable down here! I hope I feel that way when winter comes.

And it should help my brain manage the “renovation” / “reorganization” stress.

Today I choose to clean up my reorg space to make it more usable and less like a construction site. I’m also going to take Saturday and Sunday off from posting, a clean weekend break.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to encourage my son’s creativity (TIC00037d)

The PolyBlog
August 27 2020

Jacob is good at certain things like chess and not as good at other things like team sports. That’s not a normative statement, nor a complaint, just a note that he won’t be joining a lot of obvious group activities that a lot of kids do and that are easily part of elementary and high school. He enjoys them, but not so much for competition. Finding activities that he likes to do more frequently, beyond board games with the parents, will always be a work in progress for him, as it has been for his parents.

Andrea has already guest-posted some time ago about hobbies (Guest blog: Horton hatches a hobby – Part 1 and Guest blog: Horton hatches a hobby – Part 2) and I post regularly about mine. Many of them are individual pursuits.

For Jacob, I have tried to encourage his writing, but since he doesn’t seem have a natural outlet or desire for his stories, it goes in spurts. I suggested that perhaps he could do book reviews, however brief, since he loves reading so much, and to be candid, I wish I had a record of everything I have read in my life. Obviously we won’t capture J’s early years very accurately, but he started a list this year and I think he is over 100 so far. Not a bad start. I’m thinking of doing it up as some sort of certificate or something he can put on his wall, but it too is a work in progress.

He likes designing board games, and has done two camps for it, and I need to get back to helping him actually create a solid quality prototype (we did one a few years ago called Jacob’s neighbourhood that we all enjoy playing now and again, mostly for some of the humour we put in it but it was rudimentary compared to a couple of his other games). I’m hoping to nail some stuff in the next few weeks and give him a version for Christmas somehow “secretly”.

So those are two areas that I would like to build on. He’s assembled some stuff, he’s done a few crafts with Andrea, a few courses here and there.

But a few months ago, he got a new iPhone for his birthday, and I’ve encouraged him to take some photos with it. He is willing to do some on his telescope at some point, which will be an interesting outlet for him, I hope, yet I was pleasantly surprised when he was at the cottage recently that he took some good shots of sunsets. No prompting from me, he just took some decent shots and sent them to us by text.

So, we’ve been chatting here and there about what to do with his photos, in part to encourage him, and in part just to display them, and tonight we doubled down together, sorted some 100+ photos by date, and then upon review, chose 4 that he quite liked. We uploaded them to CostCo, chose one for high-end canvas printing to see how it turns out, and three more as prints, and sent them off. The canvas one will take just over a week, maybe ten days; the prints are ready tomorrow afternoon. And he wants the prints as soon as they are ready (actually, I suspect he wants to take the prints with us to the cottage to show to people). Are they the BEST SHOTS EVER? Hardly. But they’re decent and HE took them himself.

I need to tweak some of the settings on his phone for higher-end images if he’s going to be enlarging some of them, but they were decent first starts. I’m hoping the tangible prints will encourage his ongoing interest. I would LOVE to see Jacob take a strong interest in photography over the next few years, even if only a hobby for the future. If he chooses not to, no problem, but in the meantime, I’ll reward his budding interest with some printing costs to help encourage him along the way.

Today I choose to encourage my son’s creativity for photography.

What choices are you making today?