Dogs running around
Chasing balls and ducks and sticks
They look so happy
Blown down willow trees
Trunks cut into large sections
Sawdust on the ground
The boy and I talk
as we walk around the lake
Perpetual bond
An owl stole my touque
One night while I was running
Then he dropped it
Yoga under trees
Sunny days and rainy ones too
Our mats in the grass
Lying on my back
Mostly still, arms by my sides
Shivasna begins
My eyes are closed
I am breathing through my mouth
My spine is tall-ish
Feet and hands planted
My butt very high in the air
Downward dog; woof woof.
Sun salutations
sometimes make me feel dizzy
Too much namaste
blood on my knuckles
cut and scraped, dull and aching
what was I punching?
stones tumbling in waves
retreating back toward the sea
fear of being dry
standing on a cliff
staring into the blackness.
forgot my question.
(written while listening to folklore)
Rain drops on bike rides
Somewhere between damp and wet
And then my chain breaks
November yard work
Consists of cutting back stuff
that’s done for the year
Proud eagle standing
On its razor sharp talons
Holding a seagull
Ginko leaves fall
And flutter in a wind storm
Look like little finches
Going to restart
My effort to write haiku
again. wish me luck.
I will publish them
As I write them. Generate
momentum I hope.
The above don’t count.
No references to nature
Same problem here. Tree.
Beautiful red birds
Their plumage looks like horse blood
Even in the shade
The leaves are falling
mostly in wet goopy piles
In the gutter. Ugh.
October was wet.
Many dark and rainy days
Occasional sun.
While working on my zentangles app, I added a spinner that appears when the app is fetching or saving data to CloudKit. This appeared to be working wonderfully. But then I tried using the app when I didn’t have access to the network. The spinner appeared and never disappeared.
Not Good!
I immediately thought of a couple of things that might fix the problem. Things like setting the time out for the network operation, using the Reachability frame work to detect when there was no network. But when I attempted to set the CKOperation’s time out, Xcode told me I was using a deprecated function, and I should really be using CKOperationConfiguration. Groan! I thought. This new things is likely just helping some obscure use case that doesn’t apply to me.
Sure enough CKOperationConfiguration has a timeout interval property, to let me do what I thought I needed to do. But then I noticed another property called qualityOfService that can have one of the following values: background, utility, default, userInitiated, userInteractive. Hmm, the header describes the behaviour for these different values…
As an aside, I find myself a bit confused on the subject of timeout intervals. It appears the operation’s configuration has a default timeout of 60 seconds. When I run in a simulator and disable networking on my computer, it appears to time out after 10 seconds When I run on an iPad, not on any networks, it appears to never time out. <Shrug Emoji>
Regardless of timeout confusion QualityOfService is a much smarter way to describe a network operation. When I set QualityOfService to UserInteractive and then attempted a fetch on a device with no network, the operation immediately failed. (likely thanks to internally using Reachability?) Awesome!
I do still have a couple of questions about Quality of Service.
Haven’t been super.
Writing one every day is
hard for me. Learning.
Haiku is easy.
Making time is harder.
Open to suggestions.
Rosemary Rocksalt makes
delicious bagels. Poppy,
sesame are yummy.
Seem to be slipping
I missed three days. Must get
back into my groove
Dogs were here for a
Few days. Piper and Cooper
They were a handful!
Got my Moderna
On Sunday. My arm is sore.
Otherwise ok
Heat wave is coming
Temperature is climbing
Stay cool and stay safe
I recently came across a quote that is playfully witty and wise. The character that is speaking is nine years old and has been home schooling, but now is facing the prospect of switching to learning in an actual school. Unfortunately she is reluctant. She is also a very clever lovable free spirit.
Sasha, the main character in the book, has just suggested that going to school will allow Nina to broaden her horizons. After she first asked Sasha to clarify what is meant by broadening one’s horizons, she says this:
Rather than sitting in orderly rows in a schoolhouse, wouldn’t one be better served by working her way toward an actual horizon, so that she could see what lay beyond it?
Nina Kulikova in A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
I find myself agreeing with her assertion. (as somebody who has occasionally enjoyed working his way toward actual horizons) But I also find myself confoundedly disagreeing (as a parent who has sometimes had to tell kids they need to do something they don’t want to do.)
For better or worse, Nina does go to school and is eventually swept up in life trials and tribulations. I don’t know if she would have been better served by heading toward actual horizons instead of the school house.
I suspect the people close to me have noticed that I spend a lot of time looking at license plates. As kids, we would spend our time in the car searching for license plates and then trying to find words that used the letters on the license plate. (of course in the order they appeared on the plate.) So for example, for VCM 620 the first word I think of is ‘vacuum.’
As we got older, we’d get bonus points for things like having the first letter on the plate not be the first letter of the word. We would usually start by trying to get away with something like ‘revacuum’ or even ‘revacuumed’ to also pad the end of the word. But with time it became seen as lame to mindlessly stick a prefix and/or suffix on a word. Eventually we would aspire to have the first and last letters truly embedded. ‘Servicemen’ is a word, right?
I definitely don’t remember every license plate of every car we’ve ever owned, but I do remember quite a few. GEK is an early one I remember. We had an NBA for quite a long time. The first car I bought myself was an SKV. Our current car is an XAD. More than once, I think I’ve weirded out friends by knowing their license plates.
Sadly as the number of cars on the road continues to grow, the arrangements of letters and numbers on plates get more varied and creative. Ontario, for example, use 4 letters and three digits. BC has recently moved to AB1 23C as the format of choice. The headache for the Ontario scheme is making sure no curse words make it on any plates. (Three letter plates obviously have a much shorter list of words to contend with)
My current license plate game is to turn the numbers into a letter that they look like and seeing if the resulting ‘word’ can be pronounced or even better have some sort of meaning. The numbers map to letters as follows:
Following these rules, one of my favourite finds is CR8 04K which would be “Crate Oak”