Blog

Workin’ from home

Posted on by Patrick
My work-from-home setup

For a while now I’ve won­dered just how nec­es­sary it is for me to be on cam­pus. I live about five min­utes’ walk­ing dis­tance away; when I bike to work, it takes about as long to lock up my bike and walk to my office as it does for me to get to the University.

Now that the offi­cial word is “work from home if you can”, I’ve got my lap­top at home. Today I grabbed one of my two exter­nal mon­i­tors, too, so that I can code on one screen and view the results on another.

(Lap­top wall­pa­per: The Foun­tain of Indo­lence by J. M. W. Turn­er; exter­nal mon­i­tor wall­pa­per: my pho­to of the Milky Way from sum­mer 2019.)

Also, it turns out that a book on mythol­o­gy is inte­gral to my set­up; with­out it, the exter­nal mon­i­tor isn’t up high enough.

Monitor, back view

(My ISP’s upload speed is pret­ty abom­inable, but that’s a prob­lem for anoth­er day, I think.)

Two years

Posted on by Patrick
Eye (photo by Vanessa Bumbeers)

…and I real­ly don’t miss wear­ing glass­es all day every day.

(On St. Patrick­’s Day, 2018, I got my eyes lasered into prop­er shape by these fine peo­ple, and went from a 20/400 pre­scrip­tion in my good eye to a 20/16 in both.)

Some­times, when I’m feel­ing a lit­tle dopey in the morn­ing, I’ll still reach for them. (And find the read­ers on the night­stand, and put them on, and won­der why every­thing’s a lit­tle blurred…)

That reminds me, though, it’s prob­a­bly time to sched­ule an eye appointment…

(That’s still not my eye­ball. Pho­to by Vanes­sa Bum­beers on Unsplash)

Wind + Aurora

Posted on by Patrick
Star trails, with faint aurora

It was clear and rea­son­ably warm last night, and there was a rea­son­able chance of get­ting some auro­ra Bore­alis, so I head­ed to my usu­al spot about fif­teen min­utes out of town. I got my tri­pod set up, and retired to the warmth of the car—the tem­per­a­ture was only ‑10°C or so, but the wind­chill was sig­nif­i­cant, a south wind howl­ing along at what felt like about 40–50 km/h—and lis­tened to music for a while.

After about ten or fif­teen min­utes, I noticed that I could­n’t see the lit­tle red light on my cam­era any­more. I briefly won­dered if maybe the bat­tery had died, but then I real­ized that I also could­n’t see the thin dark lines of the tripod.

Sure enough, the wind had tipped it over into the snow. See the pho­to below, which is the ten-sec­ond win­dow when it actu­al­ly fell.

light streaks as the camera falls over
The moment my cam­era pitched over into the snow.

I cleaned the lens off as best I could, then packed it all up and head­ed home, where I gave the lens a more thor­ough clean­ing and then set it aside to dry. This morn­ing it looks OK, so I think I got away lucky.

Logline for the next story

Posted on by Patrick
Writer's Tears Irish Whiskey

I’m work­ing away on my library-full-of-self-eras­ing books, and I have a nov­el to fin­ish writ­ing, but I’ve had an idea and I want to pur­sue it soon. (Actu­al­ly, it’s not a new idea; it’s a re-use of a con­cept from one of my nanow­rimo projects.)

“The Slow-Motion Apoc­a­lypse” is a “day in the life” por­trait of an aging wiz­ard who hap­pens to be all that’s stand­ing in the way of a nuclear blast oblit­er­at­ing part of Manhattan.

Inter­est­ed?

Steven Page in Concert

Posted on by Patrick
[photo of the concert ticket]

A cou­ple nights ago we went to see Steven Page in con­cert at the West­man Cen­ten­ni­al Audi­to­ri­um. It’s been a while; he has­n’t been to Bran­don in twen­ty-five years. He was on tour with Craig Northey of The Odds and Kevin Fox, a cellist.

The show was amaz­ing. I con­fess, I did­n’t know much of Page’s new­er stuff, but what I heard I liked. We end­ed up buy­ing a cou­ple CDs dur­ing the inter­mis­sion, so I look for­ward to hear­ing more of his recent work.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Steven Page in Con­cert” →

A friendly face

Posted on by Patrick

At the cof­fee shop this grey Mon­day morn­ing, the young woman behind me asked if I used to work at the research sta­tion. I said no, I’ve worked at the uni­ver­si­ty for 25 years¹.

“You look famil­iar, though,” she said. “Maybe it’s just that you’ve got a friend­ly face.”

It’s good to know that my Mon­day face was­n’t a scowl.

¹ !