A lovely early-summer morning, especially in the wake of the previous morning’s discovery.
Tipis at Brandon University
Blog
The Milky Way
I’m still learning how to process RAW images using Darktable on Linux. I think I’ve found a few good tutorials, but I need more practice. I’d like to learn how to remove noise without sacrificing the sharpness, for example. (Maybe I need to shoot at lower ISO and then stack and align the photos?)
Anyway, I shot this south of Brandon on the evening of May 31st (or maybe really early on the morning of June 1st). Enjoy!
Ride for the Breath of Life
This weekend I joined the Brandon Kinsmen club in putting on the 2019 Ride for the Breath of Life, supporting the research done by Cystic Fibrosis Canada.
It’s a poker-derby ride, about 200km in length, with stops in Brandon, just outside Minnedosa, Sandy Lake, Rapid City, and then back to Brandon.
I was the official photographer, and so I drove the whole route, stopping every so often for some photos.
Dozens of bikes at the rest stop outside Minnedosa 
Approaching Sandy Lake 
The route, more or less
Contracts
Penny Arcade has some advice on contracts.
It’s probably not even bad advice.
More star trails
You’re not getting tired of these, are you? I hope not, because I’m not planning to stop.
This one was shot in the wee hours of Friday, from about 12:10 – 1:10 AM, behind cabin 650 at Elkhorn Resort. You can see the International Space Station streaking by (I saw it go overhead, too, and I waved to the crew). Also, there’s a short meteor streak in the lower third, on the far right.
Nerdy details: 219 images @ 15s, f/2.8, 16mm, ISO 800. No dark frames. Stacked using a Startrails plugin for GIMP.
Catch-22
I’m watching the first episode of George Clooney’s adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and I’m realizing I need to reread the book.
Bike Ride
It’s a long weekend Monday here in Canada, so I went for a nice long bike ride today. 23km and change, in a bit under two hours. There was quite a wind out of the east, so I’m happy with that time.
I had my camera with me, and so I snapped a couple photos: a goose landing in the river, above, and a train under the 1st Street bridge, below.
I didn’t get a photo of the family in the not-yet-open splash park on 1st Street south of Richmond (Kinsmen Park, I think), making do with a water-gun fight.
The Twilight Zone
I really want to like the new The Twilight Zone. But I think the problem with an anthology series is that you’re always starting from square one. Every episode requires an all-new round of exposition, and exposition is hard to do well.
I really don’t like the “as you know, Sally” style of expository dialogue, where characters say things to each other that they both already know, for the benefit of the audience. It sticks out like the cliché sore thumb for me.
And there’s a lot of it in this first season of The Twilight Zone.
Maybe it’ll get better, but so far I’m on the sixth episode, and it’s not been living up to my hopes.
(On the plus side, the acting has been top-notch, across all the episodes. Even the child actors have mostly impressed me.)
Update
Well, episode 6 — “Six Degrees of Freedom” — was definitely a brighter spot, at least for me. It had some issues, sure — technical quibbles on the level of CBC’s SF attempt Ascension, q.v., but at least they tried harder. (For instance, they gave a reason, however ludicrous, that the Mars ship would have artificial gravity.) The story, though, manage to capture me and hold me till its end, even with a bit of clunky “as you know, Katherine” bits of infodump.
Seems I can forgive a bit of clunky writing if the overall story is good enough.
One Great City
Driving around Winnipeg this weekend, and this song came on the radio. What to do?
Crank it up, so it’s almost—almost—audible over the two Harleys beside me at the light.
Encyclopedia Brown
When I was a kid, I read a lot. I worked my way through the Hardy Boys mysteries, and even read a Nancy Drew book or two before I decided those were more in line with my sister’s sensibilities.
One day I discovered Encyclopedia Brown in the local public library, in a book of ten short mysteries whose endings were hidden at the back of the book, like a puzzle book. I was hooked. I read all the EB books the library had, and—if I recall correctly—I also discovered that interlibrary loan would bring me new tales.
As I aged, I discovered that names like “Franklin W. Dixon” and “Carolyn Keene”, authors of the Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew mysteries, respectively, were “house names”, false identities adopted by writers who would write one or two or ten novels in the series, then move on. I long assumed that Donald J. Sobol, the name on the spine of the Encyclopedia Brown collections, was also a house name.
I was wrong. Donald J. Sobol was a real person, a single, singular author, and this is his story.