Day 15, COVID-19 Lockdown

Tuesday.  Day 15 of the Johnson County stay at home order.  Good coffee in the coffee pot.  Overcast skies this morning, clearing and warming up to 80.  Today should be a good day. Either running some errands for mom today or bringing her along to get her out of the house.  Not getting out of the car - drive-through pharmacy, drive-through banking.   SamTheDog says 'Good Morning' on our badly in need of staining deck:

The oldest son has to work a 10-hour shift today at the sandwich shop. Minimal contact with people though.  Hoping he stays healthy.

Homelife has been about the same as always.  Given all of us continue to expose ourselves to the public for work or essential runs, we keep ourselves essentially quarantined.  Kids stay in their rooms on their computers, wife and I keep 6 or 8 feet separated, everything we touch is sanitized at least once a day.  So, it's a small, peaceful, quiet existence.  No complaints really. Wouldn't mind having a bigger flat panel TV now, but such is the way of the world.  I need to get out to the garage and freshen up the bicycle for some mandatory outside time in the morning and evening.  Physical exercise generates positive brain chemicals as well as helping to reduce stress, weight gain (ugh), and alleviate boredom.

(Whups - published too soon.  Afternoon and evening thoughts to follow.)

Random Facebook post I saw encouraged me to find the old Ravioli at Lightspeed text file from an MIT mailing list.  Bit rot had occurred, but I was able to retrieve the original from a 2009 back up at the web.archive.org Wayback machine.  Therefore, I present to you, 'Ravioli At Lightspeed'!  A good funny read about what happens when you accelerate a can of ravioli to near relativistic velocities.

Other news - stabilized and fixed a video from Saturday of a noisy bird and got it published.  Enjoy 24 seconds of Overland Park environmental sounds:

I did that to remember how to stabilize video, as I walked down to the end of the block to take some photos of the full moon, and stuck the Canon 90D on the tripod and vlogged the walk up and back.  That is some shaky footage; we'll see what Davinci Resolve can do with it shortly.  I did get a great shot of the moon, and more.  

Well, that took some new skills.  Photos came out fine; the video blog needed to be stabilized and then I worked with LUT's and the color wheels and curves in Resolve to punch out something visible in the clip - video in essentially pitch black does not look very good.  

 

Video is currently rendering then needs to be uploaded to YouTube; so while we wait I'll post the three best photos I got this evening:

 

I swear I'm going to get something faster; but even the latest $4000 precision workstation laptops still only have 6 cores, like my gaming laptop.  Guess I'll just get a true color monitor and hook up the gaming laptop for video editing.  I need to build a short desk for that.  Tomorrow...  Anyway, that was quite fun to do while the wife is participating in some sort of echo chamber of COVID-19 discussions that can't be posted on Youtube.  We'll just leave that there, as I'd rather not clutter up the internet with my opinions of other people.  Me?  I'm having a great time.  Busy day tomorrow with meetings and such, the temperature in the upper 80s but windy.  May still have to get the bike out for a Costco run first thing in the morning.  Canned food would be good, and I've got ROK straps in case I can score a case of paper goods.

Ah - the video is complete.  Take a look, first time doing a walk and talk video blog!

Quarter past 10 here, hours past my bedtime, but I've been having too much fun editing and blogging.  Till tomorrow,

Your humble scribe,
Will England