A Canadian who hasn’t read Farley Mowat should be ashamed. So it’s with a red face that I admit to finally getting around to reading my first Mowat book — The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be.
I’m about halfway through, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. Mowat was a great Canadian storyteller. He had a wonderful command of the English language, and he knew how to spin a spellbinding yarn.
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be has me laughing out loud at regular intervals. I love the fact that it takes part in Saskatoon — a nice change from foreign locales I don’t identify with.
This is a book that sat on a shelf unread for more years than I care to admit. The good news is that there are two others — People of the North and A Whale for the Killing. They’re next on my reading list.
And it turns out that Mowat wrote dozens of books. I could be in Mowat mode for years!
Now that its first season has ended, Star Trek: Lower Decks finds itself in a strange new world — a new Star Trek TV show with good reviews.
Discovery and Picard have not fared well with the critics. The biggest problem is that these shows don’t feel like the Star Trek we’ve come to know and love over the years. In the end, what critics and fans want is Star Trek: The Next Next Generation.
Picard, despite the presence of the main character in TNG, plus the presence of three others, didn’t cut it. For one thing, this version of Picard (the character) is old and tired. For another, he’s no longer the captain of the best starship in the fleet — he’s merely the leader of a band of renegades.
Lower Decks, on the other hand, takes us back to the TNG days with no apologies. Their ship isn’t as great as the Enterprise, but it looks and functions the same. Although it’s played for comedy, the feel is like good old TNG.
At least three of the old TNG characters have shown up, and they are young and vital — like they were before.
The first reviews for Lower Decks, based on the first four episodes released to critics, were mostly not good.
Alan Sepinwall, for Rolling Stone: “Whatever the reason, Lower Decks is the latest disappointment in the Star Trek stewardship of CBS All Access and producer Alex Kurtzman.”
Mike Hale, for the New York Times: “There are several Prime Directives being violated there, one having to do with lazy joke writing.”
By the time we get to the finale, things are looking better, Swapna Krishna, writing for Vulture (part of New York magazine), says “Mike McMahan and his team deliver a funny, heartfelt, and satisfying conclusion that holds a lot of interesting implications for the second season of the show.”
And: “All in all, this was a strong and well-written first season.”
At Comic Years, Joshua M. Patton sums up the shift in feelings toward Lower Decks:
“Humor is subjective, of course. So, while more than a few scenarios in this series didn’t work for me, there were plenty that did. The holodeck episode and the episode about the Starfleet medical colony were two particularly standout episodes. They were able to leverage the idea of Starfleet as something less-than a force for good into some great comedy. However, the Star Trek: Lower Decks finale episode is the pinnacle of the season, perhaps intentionally so.”
Assuming that Lower Decks will continue to improve in Season 2, there is much to look forward to.
Unbelievably, yet another notes app has surfaced. How many variations on this theme can there possibly be? The answer, apparently, is lots.
The latest to come to my attention is Obsidian, which is billed as “a powerful knowledge base that works on top of
a local folder of plain text Markdown files.”
Since any searchable collection of notes could be considered a knowledge base, this claim might be more of an emphasis than a stand-out.
The second part, though, is important for many people because they don’t like the idea of their notes in a proprietary format. If the app ever disappears, the notes may not be retrievable. This potential problem is solved by storing the notes in a folder on your computer (instead of the app’s database) in plain text, which future computers will always be capable of reading.
This is an important point if you’re thinking about entrusting your work to an unknown quantity — and at this point, still in beta, the future of Obsidian is very much unknown.
Another feature is the ability to create links between notes because “the human brain is non-linear: we jump from idea to idea, all the time.” Other apps, such as Bear do this, but what really makes Obsidian different is the ability to display all these links in a graph.
This allows you to visualize all the connections — a big plus if that’s the way your mind works.
The thing that could put Obsidian ahead of the pac is its extensibility. That means anyone can create a plug-in that makes the app do more. At this point there are already dozens of plug-ins from both the developer and the Obsidian community.
This is one of the things people love about text editors such as VS Code. It creates a community that can snowball an app’s usability. Instead of bugging the develop to create a new feature, you can create it by yourself. Or, chances are, someone else has had the same idea and done it for you.
Obsidian is worth watching. If you’re settled into a satisfactory routine with your current apps, it will be tough to switch. But if the right plug-in shows up, that could be a game changer.
The current flag of Kamloops is what is known in vexillology circles as a bedsheet — the coat of arms on a white background. There are red bars to the left and right edges, similar to the Canadian flag but slimmer. Arched over the shield are the words “City of Kamloops”.
It was designed by former mayor Jim Walsh and adopted on Oct. 1, 1985. Sorry, Jim, but it’s atrocious on every level.
With the bar set low for improvement, I tried my hand at creating a new one.
The blue represents the confluence of the two rivers that trisect the city. The green represents the sagebrush on the mountains and hills that surround the city. The sun represents our optimism and connection to both nature and natural resources. It also alludes to the 316 days with sunshine that brighten our lives in an average year.
The yellow of the corona and the blue of the rivers are borrowed from the flag of British Columbia as an homage to the province.
For awhile I was hung up on having the flag more obviously represent the confluence of the rivers. After all, the word “Kamloops” is an anglicization of the Indigenous word denoting the meeting of two rivers.
Someone made a flag like this for Kamloops in a contest on the vexillology subReddit. It looks pretty good. And one of the better city flags, St. Louis, beautifully represents the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri.
Either way, I didn’t feel that I could compete.
I had in my mind one of my favourite world flags — Ukraine. It’s yellow on the bottom and blue on the top, representing blues skies over yellow wheat fields. It’s perfect.
For Kamloops I’m proposing green sage over blue river. I could stop there if this were a country flag, but a city flag can afford to be more homey. Thus the addition of the sun.
Things I’m not sure about:
1. The colour of the sage may be overly optimistic. It’s normally a duller colour, but I can’t see that looking good on a flag.
2. The sun might be cartoonish, but it’s the best I can do for now given my limited artistic abilities. I might do an update if I can come up with something better. It also might be too big.
Half way through my October news-cation, the changes I’ve noticed in myself are a mixed bag — but mostly good.
I feel more focussed on my immediate world, including my family, which is a good thing. But also on self-improvement habits such as writing, tai chi, reading and walking. I think I’m also more calm and relaxed — it’s hard to say for sure.
If there is a downside, it might be that I’m stressed more work. Without the distraction of pandemic stats and the Idiot in Chief, I may be thinking about office politics more than usual. On the other hand, there’s a lot going on, so it’s possible a news diversion wouldn’t have helped.
I had hoped that detoxing from bad news would help me sleep better, but I haven’t noticed a difference.
It’s been a worthy experiment, and I intend to see it through. Come Nov. 1, I’ll gradually ease my way back by only reading news about the city and the province. After a couple of weeks, I will expand to the nation. I may never go back to world — at least not until the Orange One is ousted, which could be in a few months or a few years.
Captain Gullivant, like Lemuel Gulliver of Gulliver’s Travels, journeys far and wide on voyages of discovery and adventure. But he lives far into the future — so far that it might be considered an alternative reality — and goes from planet to planet throughout the universe.
Technology has advanced to the point where you can build a spaceship capable of going anywhere within a few days. You don’t buy the spaceship, because resources are so abundant that they have become free for everyone. The knowledge required to build such a craft is also freely available.
Captain Gullivant is not actually a captain. There are no ranks in this far future. Everyone can be anything they want to be. “Captain” is his first name, which was bestowed upon him by his parents. Many people change their names in this far future, but “Captain” has a special meaning for him. He is inspired by the last two lines of Invictus by William Ernest Henley:
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
It’s not clear whether he takes true inspiration from the poem, as have famous people through history, or whether he has a more superficial relationship with the poem. His last name, after all, is a combination of gullible and gallivant.
But it definitely shines through in his actions. Wherever he travels, he is certain that he knows better than the inhabitants of the planet, that they should change to be more like him. And just as certainly, they prove him wrong, usually with irony or some twist of fate.
None of the matters to him. He learns nothing, always knows himself to be right, and moves on to the next planet in his travels.
This blog now has a colophon in the footer, listing the apps used in its creation.
iA Writer: the best app for focused writing.
ImageOptim: the best app for crunching images.
Photoshop: maybe not the best, but a work perk that has embedded itself into muscle memory over the years.
Quick Draft: the best scratchpad app with free features.
Transmit: the best-looking FTP client, and possibly the best period.
VS Code: the best free code editor with a GUI. It may very well be surpassed in some ways by BBEdit, Nova, Sublime and others, but not enough to switch.
Textpattern gets a special “built with” mention. This underrated CMS is perfect for those who love to design. You can make your site look like whatever you want, then sprinkle in Textpattern tags to make it functional.
The great thing about older technology is that you already know how to use it. Even though it may take more steps, and be less convenient, it still seems faster.
That might be why AirDrop has yet to become a household word — well, that and the fact that it is Apple only, but more on that later.
Once you learn AirDrop, email reveals itself for the old clunker it really is.
Say, for example, you’ve taken a picture with your iPhone, and you want to do something with it on your Mac. Just tap on the share icon, as you would for email, and choose AirDrop. Then pick where you want it to go.
Within seconds, you see a notification on your Mac that you can click to open the picture in the default app for its format. If the picture is a jpeg, and your default app for jpegs is Photoshop, then that’s the app that will open it.
In an ideal world, AirDrop, or something like it, would be standard for transferring files between all types of devices — Mac, iOS, Android or Windows. There are apps you can download that will do this, but the setup and transfer processes make them about as complicated as email, so why go there?
If you have Apple devices, learn to use AirDrop. If not, hope for a future where AirDrop is a standard.
Now that I’m writing something every day (fingers crossed), I need a stream of ideas to keep me going. The ideas arrive, but they sometimes exit too soon for me to remember them. The answer: notes.
Often the advice is to carry a notebook where you can jot down your ideas. I already have two of my pockets stuffed with a wallet and a phone. If anything, I would like to find a way of cutting down. That might happen if I ever build up confidence in the iPhone’s wallet app.
So the solution for now is a simple scratchpad app. There are plenty of notes apps filled with a flood of features. In fact I’ve got one that gives me warm fuzzies — Bear. But this is not the same as a scratchpad.
I downloaded Quick Draft a couple of days ago, and so far it’s working well. It has one page, and one page only. Whatever you type on that page is what you see every time you launch it.
It supports markdown, so you can do a bit of styling for headings, bold and italic. You can share, select all, copy all, create checkboxes for a to-do list, and switch fonts.
If you get the Mac version, it automatically syncs your notes via iCloud. I didn’t have to do a thing to make this work.
There is a pro version that allows for more customization, but what you get for free is more than enough for my needs.
By writing this post, I’ve checked the second item in my Quick Draft list. I checked the first one yesterday with my post on favourite crossword clues. There are a couple left, which doesn’t seem like enough — yikes!
Crossword puzzles are one of my favourite things. I like them challenging, but not too challenging. I found a magazine at the grocery store that’s just about perfect — Dell Sunday Crosswords.
The clues I like least are the ridiculously obscure — so arcane that not even a search on the Internet yields answers.
The clues I like most are a play on words. Often these are signalled with a question mark at the end. Below are some that tickled my fancy. See if you can solve them.
Card-playing amphibian?POKERMITTHEFROGLawn takeover?COUPDEGRASSBroker wannabe?EXCHANGESTUDENTHermetic miser?AIRTIGHTWADHead of France?TETEWhopper jr?FIBWay across town?STREETRevolting word?ICKThumb nail?TACKTerm ender?ITECountry music?ANTHEMIntroductory course?SOUPMouth organ?TASTEBUDSDollars for quarters?RENTInflatable items?EGOSShort cut?BOBCoin collector?TOOLBOOTHWORKERBird watcher?CAT
