Wednesday 8/9/2020
Went for a run at 7:15, under a gray sky and sub-70º temp, probably due to smoke. On the morning news they talked about smoke from fires in Oregon as well as Northern California combining. And indeed at 10am the sky was like Mordor. I had to stop my busyness and grab a camera.
I first tried to take this with the iPhone, but its pinhead computer is just smart enough to say, “That’s a landscape with a horizon, so that part is a sky. I know what skies look like and clearly the white balance is wrong, so I’ll just adjust it.” And it shows on the screen a gray overcast sky. Fortunately the Nikon is not so independent and is willing to record the light that is hitting its sensor and leave it the heck alone.
I realized about that time that I had been continually busy and wanted to note, on what. After my run I cleared email and found one from Grace, on the 4th floor, complaining about no newspaper, and for the second time in two weeks. I called the newspaper volunteer for this morning, who had nothing to suggest, she delivered everything she had. So I wrote an apology to Grace, and then an email to the five paper volunteers thanking them for their work and oh BTW could you take special pains to make sure that #431 gets her paper.
In the Python subreddit yesterday I had posted a suggestion; this morning someone had replied, and to verify that I was right about something I had to do 45 minutes of Python coding to show that doing something one way was 150 times faster than the other way.
Those things plus taking a picture of the orange sky, and writing the above, brought me to 10:40.
I flew X-plane for an hour, doing some of their training exercises. I flew five landings, and virtually walked away from three of them. I did one “pattern”, taking off and going around and landing, and managed not to crash. It’s quite challenging. The virtual Cessna seems to like to wander left and right rather than flying straight ahead and I’m not very good at getting it back onto line with the runway, for example. I don’t know if the real plane is like that, or maybe I am unconsciously putting small control movements into the joystick? Maybe I can get it to set the joystick to be less sensitive, or to have bigger “dead zones” at the center of motion.
After lunch I joined the RA Executive committee meeting. No real news. Following that was a presentation by a resident, Larry Basso, a long-time endocrinologist, still teaches at Stanford, presenting on (of course) Coronavirus.
Codgerville 