|
|
|
failed equalization
Wednesday, August 8 2018
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
This morning as Gretchen and I were drinking our coffee and not taking for granted the presence of our dogs, I saw some sort of bird land on a water-logged trunk that formed part of the opposite shore of the pond (some 200 feet away). It stayed there long enough for me to go and get the binoculars so I could observe it. For awhile it did nothing, but then it strolled about and kept bopping its tail, a behavior the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds (Eastern Region) (not a great field guide!) said was characteristic of the spotted sandpiper.
It had been too cloudy, rainy, and cool to go swimming yesterday, and today it was definitely too cool and cloudy for me, but not for Gretchen. This afternoon, winds blew in a huge patch of spindly lake weed, which I then systematically raked out of the water with the tined hoe in hopes of eliminating leech habitat.
At some point I took a recreational dose of ritalin and buckled down watching that pirated Lynda.com object-oriented PHP course. The ritalin had me paying close attention, and for the first time I really came to understand concepts such as interfaces, abstract classes, and the way they interact with magic methods. This will definitely help me during my next backend PHP (or other object-oriented) job interview.
Late in the afternoon, I kayaked over to the rocky part of the northwest shore of the northwest lobe of the pond, where beavers maintain a steep skid path for harvested timber. I climbed the skid path some distance and sat there with the binoculars, hoping a curious beaver would appear in the water below me. From my high vantage point, the body of any such creature would not be obscured by the glare of the pond's surface. Unfortunately, no beavers showed up. Instead, a light rain had begun to fall, and I thought I should paddle home to rescue Gretchen's books still out on the dock (she was in the cabin at the time). But before I could paddle back, I saw Gretchen doing her own book rescue.
This evening, Gretchen and I made a homemade pizza (using pre-made Trader Joe's whole wheat pizza dough) and a side of cooked kale with lemon juice. Because it was raining, we were forced to eat on the front porch (in the Adirondack chairs near its south end). There was a tiny hole in the wall through which we kept seeing mice coming and going. Evidently this was one of their main ports of entry and departure, contributing to a serious mouse problem in the kitchen (one that wasn't as much in evidence in previous years).
After dinner, Gretchen and I went on a sunset canoe paddle around the lake without the dogs. At the time, the setting sun was lighting up the west a crazy glowing burgundy. I pointed out the new beaver lodge on the west shore of the pond's northeast lobe. We then discussed the internal structure of beaver lodges, which always have underwater entrances. "If you're in a beaver lodge hanging out and your friend comes to visit, he just suddenly appears in the pool in the middle of the floor," I said. I then mentioned the weird fact that beavers continue growing throughout life and that old ones can be as large as 150 pounds. That might've been a slight exaggeration.
Still later, Gretchen and I watched a couple more episodes of Better Call Saul. Earlier today, I'd gone to the various cellphone spots to download graphic equalizer programs to install on my laptop in hopes of improving the sound from its terrible little speakers. (Some download sites refused to provide me any form of download, saying the software itself was incompatible with Android. Surely I'm not the only one who occasionally uses my phone as part of a sneakernet for other equipment.) When the one piece of equalizer software I managed to download didn't work (EqualizerAPO made the laptop completely silent), I used Windows' built-in settings, which are a little hard to find. The thing that seemed to help the most was audio compression (which, on the Windows controls, is referred to as "loudness equalization," as many people are apparently unfamiliar with the term "audio compression").
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180808 feedback
previous | next |
