Morning, deer...

Morning, deer, and a few other things...  When there was just barely enough light to see this morning, I looked out to our bird feeders to see if they were empty.  I spotted this deer scrounging the seed that birds had kicked off the feeders and not yet cleaned up (eventually they get everything edible).  I couldn't see well enough to tell if it was a buck or a doe – the bucks have lost their antlers by now, so the only way to tell is by getting a good view of their nether regions, or the back of their head (where you can see scars on a buck).  From its behavior (feeding alone), I'd guess this is a buck, but that's just a guess.  This one is being relatively polite and not knocking down my feeder.  Good deer!

The photo looks like broad daylight only because I've manipulated the exposure to make the deer more visible, and corrected the white balance to eliminate the blue twilight cast.  This is actually a good demonstration of the iPhone X's low-light capabilities, stabilizer, and telephoto – this was very low light, long exposure (1/15th), no flash, hand-held, on 2x optical telephoto.  Pretty amazing for something that weighs a few ounces and is the size of a thick postcard...

We got an email from an old friend last night, a woman I worked with through the '90s and up to '02.  She's 70, her husband a little older, and they're just now retiring.  They sold their small farm for cash, only to discover that the buyer was a gang-connected drug and gun dealer.  They went through a series of physical and legal adventures, including flying bullets, when finally this bad actor was arrested, arraigned, agreed to a plea deal for 15 years in federal prison.  Her (long) email reads like a précis of a script for a Hollywood production.  Holy cow!  And this sweet lady is someone who, if you were to meet her, you would think was primarily occupied with crafts and homemade shortbread.  I'm going to reply to her shortly, but right at the moment about the only thing I can think to say is “Holy shit, woman!”

Thursday we dropped off our little Munchkin (the male kitten who fell into our casement window a few months ago) and Ipo (the sweet female field spaniel whose owner didn't want her, and we adopted) at the veterinarian's to be neutered.  We picked them up in the afternoon.  Munchkin was back to his normal self within an hour or so of getting home.  One of the vet techs brought Ipo out to us, and while she was waiting for us to finish the paperwork she sat down in the lobby with Ipo – who was wiggling her butt to beat the band, and just loving all the attention from the vet tech.  I'm not sure she really wanted to go back home with us. :)

Yesterday afternoon we were relaxing at our kitchen table after a very filling meal at La Unica.  Debbie was reading about the animals up for adoption at the Cache Valley Humane Society (she does this almost daily).  She spotted a cat named “Tigger” that reminded us both of our beloved Maine coon Halala Pala, who died of cancer a few years ago.  Then we read the description and discovered that Tigger was 12 years old – and we knew that cats of that age are nearly impossible for organizations like the Humane Society to adopt out.  So we talked it over for a minute and then decided to go get her.  Which we did!  The staff at the Humane Society was delighted that someone came in specifically to get Tigger.  They tested her for FeLV (negative!) and in an amazingly short time we walked out with Tigger in a carrier.  She's now ensconced in her own little queendom carved out of our cattery, where she'll get as much time as she needs to get used to us and the other cats.  We found out that she was an indoor-only cat, the only pet of an elderly lady who has become unable to care for Tigger.  I'll post some photos when she's willing to come out of hiding...

A wintry drive...

A wintry drive...  Our neighbors Gary and Elayne S. own a gigantic 4WD pickup, and yesterday after lunch together we went on a drive around the north side of Porcupine reservoir with them.  It was just stunningly beautiful along the whole drive.  The scene at right is looking west over the reservoir, toward the dam.  We saw some deer, rabbit tracks, some chickadees, and an eagle.  Gary did a few Brodies along the way on the icy road, scaring the bejeezus out of Elayne – and I think he was a bit disappointed that he didn't manage to frighten Debbie. :)

Gary and I took note of the water level in the reservoir: it's only about 10' below full.  I don't think we'll have any problem with a water shortage for irrigation this year, which is great news.

They took us to a new (to us) eatery: Sabores.  It's tucked away off the main drag in Logan, behind the Beehive Grill.  We were both astonished to find another great place to eat in this little town.  Debbie and I have been missing good Thai food, and when we spotted Pad Thai on the menu we both ordered it.  It was excellent!  Debbie ordered dessert, and when they brought it out we were a bit shocked.  It was tres leches (three milks) cake (a common South American dessert), and it was a huge chunk.  Also delicious!  Between the four of us we managed to put it all away.  We'll be back to Sabores – that was a real treat, especially with friends for company...

Well, this I didn't expect!

Well, this I didn't expect!  When I went out to my barn office this morning, I was surprised to find that my iMac Pro was powered down.  After I powered it back up, I noticed that the Ubiqiti WiFi node in my office had also powered down over night, though it came back up on its own.  Then I discovered that my little Mac Server (a Mac Mini) also had powered down and come back up – as had all my networking gear.  It looked exactly as though I'd had a power outage – but I have a (really nice) UPS running all of it.  WTF?

My UPS isn't actually in my office – it's just outside my office, in the storage area part of the second floor of my barn.  That part of my barn is unheated.  Looking the the UPS logs, I discovered an event around 3:30 am this morning: temperature too low, at 9°F.  The thing shut down because it got too cold!  This is a new experience for me – all the temperature problems I remember seeing in electronics was because it was too hot, not too cold.

So now I have a new project: to move my UPS down into the heated part of my barn.  That's just 2 feet below where it is right now. :)  This will mostly involve drilling a couple of holes (for the input and output power) and building a shelf for the UPS, high on the wall of my workshop.  Not a project I was expecting!!

Another titanium artifact...

Another titanium artifact...  This is made by the same folks who made the titanium dice.  This is a key-chain clip, 6 cm (about 2 1/4") long.  It's made from a solid titanium blank, laser-cut.  The jagged-looking cuts form a spring, and it works beautifully.  The angled end prevents the sprung part from moving outward, and the force to move it inward is perfect, a few ounces.  Once again, I marvel that it's possible for an ordinary person to buy something like this...

Scenes from winter in Paradise...

Scenes from winter in Paradise...  By request, at right is my snow plowing rig: my Kubota B26 with a 400 lb. weight on the back and the hydraulic tilt blade in front.  I had it out again this morning, scraping off the two new inches that fell last night.  The forecast for last night? Zero inches.  It's still snowing intermittently this morning; it won't surprise me a bit if I need to go out again later today.

After I get back from my visit to the dentist. :(  Just a routine cleaning, but still ... not my favorite activity.

I took this yesterday to give you an idea just how much snow we got.  That trash can has the salt we use to keep our sidewalk and porch free of ice.  It sits under the stand of pine trees in our front yard – and it still accumulated that much snow!

When I went out this morning to fill our bird feeders, several species went right on feeding despite my presence: chickadees, juncos, house finches, and goldfinches.  I take that as a sign of hunger.  Our nearby honey locust had a swarm of birds perching in it: magpies, pigeons, grackles, and about a dozen red-winged blackbirds.  As soon as I left the area of the feeders, those red-winged blackbirds flew down in a group and started browsing on the cracked corn I'd scattered, as well as picking through the sunflower seeds smaller birds had pulled out of the feeders.  I sure hope they're ok through this snow and cold – they look very much out of place.

Yesterday afternoon we took a drive up Blacksmith Fork Canyon to Hardware Ranch.  For me, the scenes of snow-on-rock were quite beautiful (below).  But darned near everything on that drive was beautiful: the stream, the contrast of red osier dogwood against the snow, the snow in the trees, and the broad vistas of snowy mountains.  Up near Hardware Ranch we saw several groups of deer, including one with about 40 members.  We also saw a few isolated deer, most likely bucks who have lost their antlers.  At Hardware Ranch itself there were hundreds of elk, picking through the night's snowfall to get to the hay beneath...

Red-winged blackbirds are here...

Red-winged blackbirds are here...  This is a couple of months early for them.  It must have been our warm spell that brought them, and they arrived to 18" of snow.  Not exactly blackbird happiness!  They're swarming our feeders; I suspect they'd be starving if not for what we're putting out...

A very German case...

A very German case...  The little aluminum “suitcase” at right holds a pair of binoculars that we just bought.  The case cracked me up – I'd be able to identify it as German even without seeing the logo. :)

We've been looking for stabilized binoculars with high magnification and big objectives, to give our ancient eyeballs the best wildlife viewing we possibly could.  We already own a pair of stabilized Canon 18x50s – great magnification, fairly bright, so-so optics, so-so stabilization.  We also have a pair of stabilized Fujinon 14x40s – so-so magnification, so-so brightness, very good optics, fantastic stabilization.

I finally located something that promised to be a combination of the features we prized the most: these stabilized Zeiss 20x60s.  We've only had them out on one outing so far, but our impression so far is that we have a winner.  The magnification beats the Canon by a little.  The objectives collect 44% more light than the Canon; they are super-bright.  The optics are simply magnificent; the best I've ever looked through.  The stabilization is great, but very, very different than our other stabilized binoculars.  For starters, the Zeiss stabilizer is totally mechanical – no electronics, no battery, and (we quickly noticed) totally silent.  Unlike the electronic stabilizers, the Zeiss stabilizer doesn't seem to interact with panning or tilting the binoculars at all.  In that sense, they act just like unstabilized binoculars.  On the other hand, for the small tremors and vibrations that plague us when using unstabilized binoculars, the Zeiss stabilizer works perfectly.  On the other other than, for large perturbations, the Fujinon's stabilizer works better – which makes perfectly good sense for their target market: mariners.  On the whole I find the Zeiss stabilizer perfectly adequate for our needs – and I really like the absence of batteries and noise.  Zeiss' target market (for these binoculars) seems to be hunters and military, and those with deep pockets – these are damned expensive binoculars.  We had to think long and hard before plunking down our cash, and what tilted us toward it was that wildlife and bird watching is such a big part of our enjoyment of Utah.

Lazy Susan shelves...

Lazy Susan shelves...  In our kitchen cabinetry there are two corner cabinets in the same corner: one below the counter-top, the other above.  When we bought the house, there were plastic Lazy Susan rotating shelves in both of them.  These worked, but not all that well.  For starters they weren't quite level.  The white plastic the shelves were made of looked cheesy and were quite flimsy.  Another thing we didn't like is that all the shelves rotated at once (the supporting rod had rotating joints at the top and bottom, and the shelves were all fixed to the rod).  The worst problem, though, was that the lowest shelf scraped against the cabinet bottom as you rotated it.  So one day last week when I looked at them for the umpteenth time, it occurred to me that something better might be available, if the sizes happened to be standardized.  Maybe even something made from wood.

So I did what I always do in such circumstances: I went to Amazon and searched.   In no time at all I found two made from wood, one 30" in diameter and one 18" in diameter.  Could our shelves be that size?  They were!  I ordered them, and a couple days later they were in my hands.  It took just a couple hours to install both of them, including removing the old ones.  The biggest challenge I had was cleaning – because the back corners of those cabinets hadn't been cleaned in probably 15 years.  Maybe even more. :) Much scrubbing was required!

You can see the result in the photo above right.  They're great!  The shelves rotate independently, they're perfectly level, they don't scrape the cabinet, and they're wood.  That was a quick win of a project!

Something probably only an old fart like me would marvel at...

Something probably only an old fart like me would marvel at...  I have no interest in dice or anything generally done with them.  But these dice, which I purchased recently, are absolutely fascinating to me – because of what they're made from and how they were made.  The material is titanium, pure titanium.  They are machined from a rough block – with the machining done on a CNC milling machine with accuracy in the 0.0005" range.

When I was a kid, such an artifact would not have been possible to make at any price, much less the $39 I paid for this pair.  Pure titanium was available, but in a very limited number of shapes, in small quantities, and very expensive.  Machining titanium was just barely possible, with the most expensive of tools, a very high running cost (because of the need to replace bits), and of course it would be done manually.  Titanium parts were used only for the most exotic needs where no other material could possibly do the job.  The intricate engraving on these dice would have challenged the very best machinists – and it would have taken many, many hours.

But today, for the price of a nice meal out, I can hold these in my hand.

These are silly, useless objects – but – I marvel, I do...

Weather forecasters have the best job...

Weather forecasters have the best job...  They never have to be right!  Two days ago, our forecast called for 1 to 3 inches of snow yesterday and last night.  As of this writing, we're at 18 inches – and it's still snowing.

Now mind you, this is actually a good thing – we need the precipitation, especially for snow pack up in the mountains around us.  We're fervently hoping they got a similarly unexpectedly great amount.

Yesterday morning when it started snowing, the temperature was in the high '40s, and the ground hadn't been frozen for a week.  Consequently the first 3 or 4 inches that fell turned into a thick layer of slush, especially on our driveway where it was about 2 inches thick.  The forecast called for a hard freeze last night, around 20°F (which it did) – so I decided to plow the driveway even though it was still snowing hard, in the hopes of getting that layer of slush off before it froze into solid ice.  Checking this morning, it appears that I succeed in that: we've got about 4 inches of powdery snow sitting on the driveway.  That should plow off very nicely.  I'll be out plowing in an hour or so, and tonight the forecast calls for another 1 to 3 inches – so I expect to be out plowing tomorrow as well.  If I'm to believe the forecast, we won't see above-freezing temperatures until next Sunday – a huge change from the warm spell of the past two weeks or so...

The two photos below are from yesterday afternoon, about halfway through the snowfall.  We have quite a few branches so heavily loaded now that they're at risk of breaking...

Blogiversary today...

Blogiversary today...  On this day thirteen years ago I made the first post on this blog.  I haven't posted every single day, but I'm close to that.  This post will be the 13,914th post since I started this thing.  When I started, way back in 2005, blogs were “the next big thing.” That hasn't worked out quite as many people thought it would, but it's worked fine for me.

If you're a regular reader (as about five of you are! :) then you already know this blog is mainly aimed at friends and family.  But, you might say, that's what Facebook is for!  And I say: a pox on Facebook!  I can't stand the damned thing.  I have an account there, but it is almost completely unused.  These days all I use it for is to see posts that people ask me to look at (generally by sending me an email link).

Nevertheless, it's hard for me to accept that I've been doing this for thirteen years, and that I've written almost 14 thousand posts.  Crazy!

Not all news is bad...

Not all news is bad...  This is the name of a daily email newsletter that I signed up for a year ago.  I look forward to getting it every day – it never fails to cheer me up after reading the news each morning.  It's free, and I've never been spammed from the site.  You can sign up here...

Sisyphus tracks...

Sisyphus tracks ... a couple new ones:

Mystery solved...

Mystery solved...  For a couple of years now, we've had a problem with three different digital clocks.  All of them mysteriously ran too fast, but intermittently.  Over the course of a month, they might gain a half hour or so.  The thing that's really weird about this is that three completely different digital clocks – different brands, different circuitry, different chips at the core – all did the same thing.  Also, the problem happened whether the clock was in our house or in my barn office – and those two places have different electrical supplies (even different transformers!).  I still suspected something amiss with our AC power supply, but then when I ran one from my UPS (a model that is continuously supplying inverted power) it still had the same behavior.  I gave up, and started to think of explanations that included Harry Potter and divine intervention.

But then a few weeks ago, the problem suddenly stopped.  WTF?  Three separate clocks having a problem, and all of a sudden they all work?  How could this be??

A few days ago I had the first thought of a possible explanation.  The clocks all started working about the same time that the power company fixed the top part of our power pole (blogged here) – could that be what fixed my clocks?  I didn't know exactly what they did beyond replacing the top crossbar.  So I called the power company, hoping I might get some answers.  And I did!  Turns out they keep good records of what was found and what was done – and one of the notes they'd made on that day said “heavily corroded HV connection”.  The “HV” means “high voltage”, the input into the transformers for my house and my barn – and those two transformers shared that same HV connection.  Ah ha!  Now there was a possibility!  A heavily corroded connection might exhibit intermittent connections when, for example, the wind shook the power pole a bit. 

So I rigged up a bit of an experiment with one of the clocks.  I wired up an outlet whose power came through a wire that I cut, stripped, and then bound together with a rubber band.  Then I tried wiggling that joint.  Lo and behold, I was able to replicate the peculiar behavior.  The clock didn't lose power, but it did pick up the intermittent connection as though it was additional cycles to be counted – and the result was the clock gained time, just as we used to observe.

I'm left with the mystery of why the problem still happened with a clock connected to my UPS.  I think the most likely explanation is that the intermittent connection issue was transmitted through the UPS as coupled noise – which is certainly disappointing.  The UPS works fine if I switch off its primary power, so I know the inverter it contains is working properly.  I see no glitches on its output (using a 'scope) if I flip its primary power on and off.  Nonetheless, the clocks malfunctioned when running on it prior to January 11. 

I have to conclude that for our entire time in this house, up until the repairs on January 11, we've had flaky power and didn't even know it!  The clocks have been rock-solid now for over a month.  I'm very glad to have the problem fixed, but I'm still amazed that we didn't even know we had a problem!

Pies...

Pies...  A few days ago Debbie made these two (delicious) coconut custard pies.  With just a little help from her, I'm halfway through one of these. :)  The other went to our neighbors and friends Tim and Jeannie...

So yummy they are!

Trailer trials and tribulations...

Trailer trials and tribulations...  Yesterday I visited a local trailer dealer to look at aluminum utility trailers, similar to the one at right.  I was surprised at how reasonable the price was, and how nicely the trailer was made – so we quickly came to agreement and I decided to buy it.  I want a trailer for towing behind our Model X – something big enough to carry 12' long lumber and 8x4 sheets of plywood, and this one is just about perfect for that sort of use.  It weighs just 420 pounds, a spec with more impact than just being good for towing behind an electric car: at that weight, this trailer doesn't require registration or licensing in Utah.  Hooray!

The towing capability was one of the things that attracted me to the Model X in the first place, but we have never tried to tow before.  The hitch receiver in the Model X is removable, and I've been carrying it in the car's “frunk” ever since I bought it, over a year ago.  Yesterday the trailer folks helped me install it – except that we couldn't!  We thought at first that we were doing something wrong, but then we found a YouTube video demonstrating how to do it – and it became clear that there was something wrong with my hitch receiver.  Dang it!  So I ended up just putting a deposit on the trailer to secure it, then I contacted Tesla with a request for assistance.  A few minutes later, I had a service appointment for the next day (this morning) – both for the hitch issue and for my annual maintenance.

So this morning Debbie and I headed down to SLC and the service center.  We got there in plenty of time.  We were given a loaner car, but sadly it wasn't a Tesla – it was a Cadillac SUV and since I can't say anything good about it, I won't say anything at all.  We were given an estimate of half a day for the service, so we went to lunch at the Red Iguana (spectacular, as usual), and then spent three hours at the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium, 15 miles south of SLC in Draper.  This turned out to be a lovely surprise – it's an incredibly great aquarium, though I think that name is a misnomer.  It's more like a zoo with an aquarium attached.  In addition to all the things you'd expect an aquarium to have, they also had two otter exhibits (with different species), a clouded leopard exhibit (with a breeding pair), great bird exhibits, and even some plants (palms, mostly).  There's lots more there, too.  We thoroughly enjoyed our time there, and we'll be back for sure.

Then we headed back to the Tesla Service Center, where we got some good news and some bad news.   The good news: they found the problem with the hitch receiver - some welding flashing that was preventing the receiver from fully inserting into its socket.  A bit of careful grinding and that was fixed.  The bad news: the estimate we'd been given for the routine service was badly off.  Instead of a half day, it would take a day and a half.  That meant we had to drive the Cadillac back home tonight, and we'll have to drive it back down to SLC tomorrow.  Driving that conventional car 70 miles back home was ... a really downer experience.  I am so completely spoiled by my wonderful Model X!  The Cadillac's two-chipmunk engine got the car to 80MPH, but it took a couple miles to get there, instead of the 200' or so that the Model X takes.  The ride was so mushy that I was afraid there was something badly wrong with the suspension – but apparently that's intentional.  Going uphill in Sardine Canyon required keeping the accelerator to the floor to stay at 65 MPH – and all the while the engine is making alarming noises.  Then the Cadillac's “auto-stop” feature was constantly making me think the car had died.  That feature is intended to save gas – a laudable goal – but it does it by shutting off the engine whenever the car stops moving.  Even at a red light!  The engine automatically restarts when you take your foot off the break, but of course there's a brief hesitation before it can actually apply power to the wheels.  It's such an awful driving experience after being used to the Model X!

Los Primos...

Los Primos ... is the name of a local restaurant that we enjoy.  They also call themselves the El Salvador, which is sometimes confusing.  We always thought that the name meant (in Spanish) “The Best”, or something along those lines, because “primos” sounds to us like “prime” or something closely akin.  As they serve the best Mexican food in town, this seemed completely appropriate.

But recently we discovered that “los primos” actually means “the cousins”.  It seems that three cousins started both the restaurant and the related grocery.  Nothing wrong with “the cousins” as a name, but it doesn't have quite the same cachet for us as “the best”!  :) 

Sisyphus table...

Sisyphus table ... some of my recent creations:

Bird feeding...

Bird feeding...  This post is in response to a reader's inquiry.

We have eleven winter feeders all together: five sunflower seed feeders, two Nyjer thistle seed feeders, one platform feeder, one suet feeder, and two feeders dedicated to “no mess” seed.  Except for three of the sunflower seed feeders, my feeders are all Droll Yankee products – I've found them to be more durable than any others I've tried; most last for at least five years and some we've had for over ten years.

In the summer we add several hummingbird feeders to our array of feeders.  None of our hummer species winter over, so they come down for the winter.

We go through quite a bit of seed in the winter time, and drastically less in other seasons, though it never goes to zero.  Right at the moment monthly seed consumption is about 120 pounds of black oil sunflower seed, 80 pounds of cracked corn (on the platform feeder and scattered on the driveway), 60 pounds of Nyjer thistle seed, 25 pounds of “no mess” seed, and 2 pounds of suet mix.

Except for the no-mess seed, my local source is Tractor Supply Company – they have the best prices locally, and the seed is all good quality.  The “no mess” seed I have no local source for, so once or twice a year we head down to Wild Birds Unlimited in Salt Lake City and stock up.  We don't get the “no mess” seed because it doesn't make a mess, though that's true.  We get it because I'd read that in extreme cold temperatures the wild birds can more easily get the calories they need.  I can't independently verify that, but I can tell you that the consumption of it is almost zero except when the temperature drops below about 20°F – and then the colder it gets, the more gets eaten.  A working hypothesis is that the birds actually prefer the seeds au naturel, but when it gets too bitterly cold and they need more calories, they'll go for the avian fast food.  We see all sorts of small songbirds on those “no mess” feeders; so far as I can tell there's no species that prefer it over the sunflower seeds.

The Nyjer thistle seed feeders are dominated by goldfinches (both Lesser's and American), though they are occasionally visited by chickadees and house finches.  Woodpeckers, magpies, and flickers are the most common visitors to the suet feeder; the occasional chickadee can be found there as well.  The scattered cracked corn brings hordes of juncos, a few pigeons and doves, and deer.  Magpies and doves seem to prefer cracked corn on the platform feeder, along with a lot of chickadees.  The sunflower seed brings many different species, but more house finches than anything else.

My mom would have loved to have seen our birds feeders, but she never got the chance...

Northern shrike sighting!

Northern shrike sighting!  We drove up Blacksmith Fork Canyon this morning, looking for wildlife.  We spotted about a bazillion deer, mainly up the snow-free slopes high above us.  Behind the Hardware Ranch visitor center we also spotted six elk about 200' from us – the only elk we saw on the entire trip.  The herd at Hardware Ranch, we read, has left to follow the snow line up higher.  Presumably if it does get cold again, they'll be back (for the free hay dispensed at Hardware Ranch).  We also read that the moose prefer to stay above the snow line, which may explain why we've only had one sighting so far this winter.

The highlight of the trip, for me at least, was spotting a northern shrike strutting on a fence post roughly a mile east of Hardware Ranch, right along the road.  That's not my photo at right, but the bird we sighted looked very much like this one.  It's a migratory species, and this one was here for our warm winter! :)  It probably came down from either Alaska or the Hudson Bay area.  They're not a common bird at all, so I cherish the sighting of it.  He popped up on a fence post as we were looking at some deer high on a hill a half mile or so behind him – it was just plain luck that we saw him at all...

Best scallops evah!

Best scallops evah!  Who'd have thought that we'd find our best source ever for fresh (never frozen) sea scallops right here in Cache County?  That's a strange-but-true for certain!  Combine almost two pounds of those fine scallops with Debbie's utterly perfected broiled scallops recipe – replete with butter, garlic, lemon, and dill – and you've got an unbeatable entrée.  Then add perfectly done white sushi rice and roasted asparagus and you've got an unbeatable meal (photo of my plate at right)!  We gorged ourselves yesterday afternoon on this repast fit for king...

Sunset in Paradise...

Sunset in Paradise...  From a few days ago, taken from our driveway.  While the east coast is having unusually cold weather – and even more unusual snow – we're having unusually warm weather here.  The snow is nearly all melted from the floor of Cache Valley, and mud is upon us.  The mountains are still snowy, but mostly above the 6,000' level.  Our 10 day forecast has only a couple of nights where our temperatures will be below freezing.  Last year at this time I was freezing my butt off in an arctic suit – this year I'm often outside in shirtsleeves.  So weird!

Kitchen modification, roughly number 357...

Kitchen modification, roughly number 357...  Since we purchased our home almost four years ago, we've been incrementally changing things in the kitchen to suit us.  The latest of these changes was to remove the modular cabinet-top Jenn-Air gadget that was installed in our island.  It was much like the one in the photo at right.  Both sides of that thing are removable (just by lifting them up), and a total of seven modules came with the house.  In the 3+ years that we've been living here, we've turned it on exactly twice – both times just to see if it actually worked.  With another four-burner range, two ovens, and a microwave, we just never even came close to needing it.  And it took up almost a third of our island counter-top!

So not long ago we had the brilliant idea of replacing it with a nice big cutting board.  With a piece of tempered glass to go over the cutting board when it wasn't in use, we'd be able to use the entire island as a counter-top – plus we'd free up quite a bit of space under the Jenn-Air that was consumed by the power source and a 6" diameter duct for the down-draft ventilation built into it.  The challenge was where on earth would we find such an odd-shaped cutting board?  I could make one, but I don't have a planer big enough to handle the 23" x 30.5" size we'd need.  So I did some research on the web, and discovered this site – and good reviews of it in several locations.  I queried them, and they had no problem at all making a nice maple cutting board to our specs.  The actual maker was John Boos, a company I'd read about when researching some other kitchen things, but had never done business with.  When I got the quote for the custom cutting board I was quite surprised at how reasonable it was: a solid maple board for less than it would cost me to buy the wood!

We received it a few days ago, and over the past couple days I removed the Jenn-Air and installed the cutting board (photo at right).  The tempered glass cover should be ready on Tuesday.  Removing the Jenn-Air was actually easier than I expected it to be, except for one little detail: making an odd-shaped “plug” for the hole in the bottom of the island's cabinet where the 6" duct entered from below.  Whoever made that hole apparently never heard of a compass. :)  It took me about eight tries to get a reasonably good fit, close enough that I could caulk the remaining crack.  That was a bit of a pain!  The board arrived packed in some of the best packaging I've ever seen – there wasn't a ding of any kind on it.  There was, however, a defect from our point of view: the edges had very sharp corners.  Probably the factory would have rounded them for me had I been smart enough to ask, but I wasn't.  So I used my router table with a 3/16" radius quarter-round bit, and put a nice radius on all those sharp edges, and sanded it all down nice and smooth.  That, however, caused a problem with the finish.  I bought the same finish the factory had used (they kindly documented it!), and by the time I was done you'd never know it wasn't done in the factory.  I mounted it in the Jenn-Air's hole by screwing eight rubber bumpers into the bottom of the board, two along each of the hole's edges.  I spaced these so that the board is snugged in tightly – yet it can be popped right out if need be.  We're very happy with the result!

Amazing battery lifetime...

Amazing battery lifetime...  I got my new iMac Pro in the last week of December, roughly six weeks ago.  It came with a wireless keyboard and mouse that incorporate built-in rechargeable batteries, much like a smartphone has.  My old mouse used ordinary AA batteries, which I typically had to change every 3 weeks or so.  My old keyboard plugged into USB and had no batteries at all.
So one of my first questions about these new-fangled peripherals was: just how long would these batteries last on a charge?

Well, I now have the answer for one of them, the mouse.  I recharged it last night for the first time since I received the system, when it reported being at 5% of charge.  My keyboard is still at 70% of charge, after six weeks of frequent use. 

For approximately the 37 billionth time, I am just in awe of the degree of advancement in a technology, within my own lifetime.  Rechargeable batteries were basically non-existent when I was a kid.  The standard was old-fashioned zinc-acid batteries, which are actually quite difficult to buy today – alkaline batteries have basically taken over the disposable battery scene, with capacities several times that of a zinc-acid battery.

The most significant advances aren't in the batteries, though – they're in the incredibly low power consumption of even fairly sophisticated circuits like a Bluetooth optical mouse.  That's truly mind-boggling.  The simple, inexpensive optical mouse on my desk has functionality that was either impossible (Bluetooth) or really difficult (the optical movement sensing).  The latter alone would have taken a roomful of circuitry in the '50s, dominated by power-hungry vacuum tubes.  A wild guess at the power consumption would be 5 to 10 thousand watts.  My modern mouse can't consume more than a few thousandths of a watt at most.  More likely it's an order of magnitude less than that. 

And now we have an electric car headed to the asteroid belt!  :)

The weather was nice enough...

The weather was nice enough ... that Debbie and I got to take a little walk this morning, with Race and Miki.  When we were getting ready to depart, the dogs had no idea we were about to go for a walk.  But when I picked up the leashes, Race immediately knew – even though it's been several months since he last got to go on a walk with us.  Happy dogs!  The temperature was quite warm for a February morning: 46°F.  The scenery was beautiful, too.  The foreground is a bit drab without our usual greenery, but the snow-capped mountains made up for that. 

Incidentally, both of these photos were taken with a hand-held iPhone X.  The second photo is using the 2x optical telephoto.  Both would look much worse without the image stabilization...

You should be envious...

You should be envious ... as this is what I had for dessert today, at Jack's.  It's an orange-rosemary panna cotta, and it was brains-fall-out delicious.  I had the pina colada version of this last week and thought it was great – but this version is even better!

While we had lunch today (with our friend Michelle), we watched the webcast of the spectacular launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy.  The image of the two side cores landing side-by-side looked like something straight out of a science fiction story.  It occurred to me that the science fiction trope of a flying car has at last become reality, with Elon Musk's Tesla roadster now in Earth orbit (and soon to be solar orbit).  That's not quite how I imagined flying cars would turn out, but ... it will do.  It will do...

Bunch of Valentines...

Bunch of Valentines...  Generated by JSisyphus on my Sisyphus table...

Blacksmith Fork Canyon...

Blacksmith Fork Canyon ... is just a few minutes from our house, and yet it's one of our favorite wildlife watching venues.  We make the roughly 35 mile drive (it's a long canyon!) up and back two or three times every week.  Yesterday we did so again, late in the afternoon, and were treated to three great viewings of bald eagles (twice the same adult, perched about 100 yards from the road), and a long viewing of a small herd of deer (8 does and yearlings) browsing about 30 yards from the car.  One of the things we love about the Model X is that it's so quiet that animals aren't leery of it.  We parked there, car on, for ten minutes or so.  The deer looked up at us at first, then decided we weren't a threat and went on munching...

Now here's something I can root for!

Now here's something I can root for!  If you know me, then you know I have a profound lack of interest in sports (and therefore an equally profound ignorance of them).  But the excitement that sports fans unembarrassedly display is something I can identify with – it's just that my excitement springs from something other than sports.  In this case, it's today's scheduled launch of SpaceX's “Falcon Heavy”, with Elon Musk's Tesla roadster as the payload.

If you don't know about the Falcon Heavy, here's some background.  Don't miss the animation on that page!  Today's launch will be the Falcon Heavy's maiden flight, and Musk has been careful to set expectations low, saying there was a 50% chance the thing is going to blow up.  Whatever happens today, I'm sure SpaceX will eventually get Falcon Heavy working reliably.  When they do, it will be the world's largest (by payload to orbit) operational rocket.  The qualification is because the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program was larger, but of course it is no longer operational. 

More than simply being the biggest, it will (like it's smaller brother, the Falcon 9) be reusable.  I'm old enough to remember when NASA told Congress that orbital booster reusability was impossible, and that the closest anyone could ever get to that was the Space Shuttle approach.  For a tiny fraction of the Space Shuttle's development cost, private enterprise has done what NASA said was impossible – and as of today, with almost the same payload capacity that NASA was ever able to achieve.  The launch costs for SpaceX are absolutely dwarfed by NASA's costs – a single Space Shuttle launch (including amortized development costs) cost more than SpaceX has spent for their entire development program and all launches combined.  Yay, capitalism!

I will be watching in a couple hours...

Things that make me feel old, part 8,382,650...

Things that make me feel old, part 8,382,650... I read this morning that Paul Simon is retiring from touring – and that he's 76 years old.  Holy senior citizen's discount!

Latest Sisyphus table creation...

Latest Sisyphus table creation...

Quilts and little old ladies...

Quilts and little old ladies...  A couple years ago, at a craft fair in Logan, we ran into a little old lady named Marlene who made quilts.  She's a petite gal, and if I were to guess her age I'd say 70 or 75.  Her quilts are real works of art – beautiful fabrics, classic patterns, and hand stitching so precise you'd likely guess it was made on a machine.  Her prices are quite reasonable, especially when compared with, say, an Amish quilt from Pennsylvania.  And the quality of her work is even better than the Amish quilts we've seen.

About three months ago, we bought another quilt from Marlene, and this time we ran down to her place (in Roy, Utah, about an hour away) to pick it up.  She runs her quilt business out of her own house.  In conversation we discovered that she has 10 children – and 37 grandchildren!  Her 7 daughters all occasionally help her with the quilts, but these days they're so busy with their own families that mostly she does the quilting on her own.  She also told us that she was trying to use up her inventory of fabric, as she really didn't expect to be doing the quilting much longer – age is starting to limit her abilities.

Well, on our drive home that day, Debbie and I made up our minds to buy two more of her quilts for our bed.  We love them, and she's willing to make them oversized for us (to cover our pillows completely, along with our thick mattress and box spring).  We have no idea where we can get the equivalent, at any price – let alone at her prices.

So we ordered two more, for a total of four – we've got the seasons covered. :)  Today we drove down to pick up those two; she'd called Debbie this morning to let her know they were done.  This time we had a bit more conversation with her, and learned that she grew up on a wheat and potato farm near Burley, Idaho.  That makes her the third person I've met who hailed from that little farm town – all LDS (Mormon), all good people, all hard workers.  There's something in the water there, I think.  Something good.

One of these days when I have my wits all together, I'll post some photos of these gorgeous quilts...

Big-eye tuna poke...

Big-eye tuna poke...  We went to our local grocery store (Macey's) yesterday, and to our delight they had just gotten in some more big-eye tuna.  Their seafood manager told us it was “spectacular” – and he was right.  We bought a pound-and-a-half of it, and Debbie made her (also spectacular!) poke with it.  She served it over brown rice, as usual.  This is quickly becoming one of our favorite meals!  We were seriously stuffed when we got done. :)

Afterwards, as I mentioned in an earlier post, we watched Groundhog Day.  This was our first time watching it from Blu-Ray, a substantial improvement from the DVD – a much crisper picture and crystal-clear audio.  We enjoyed it just as much this time as on our previous viewings (probably six or seven over the years)...

My latest Sisyphus table track...

My latest Sisyphus table track ... this one mainly in order to demonstrate Bézier curves.  I called it “Swoopy Radiance”  :)

Happy groundhog day!

Happy groundhog day!  Only out here, they'd call it “rock chuck” day, for that's the common name of this marmot if you live here.  They have no idea what a groundhog is. :)  We're going to watch the movie (which we both love) again tonight – a newish tradition for us.

We had such a lovely day yesterday.  For me it started with a good night's sleep, something that is an increasingly unusual (and therefore more cherished) experience these days.  Astonishingly that was repeated last night.  Two in a row ... I can't even remember when that last happened.  Of course these days remembering even my name is starting to be a challenge...

I spent yesterday morning finishing up a major enhancement to my JSisyphus software: I added the ability to draw Bézier curves.  I'd used Bézier curves many times before, in drawing programs such as Photoshop or GIMP.  They'd always seemed kind of magical to me, and I had no idea how they were implemented.  So I read up a bit on it earlier this week, and quickly ran into yet another concept I'd never seen before: parametric equations.  This is a standard pattern in my programming experience ... in order to do something new to me, I have to learn something new to me.  That's what I call fun!  And this time, the outcome was surprising to me, as it turns out that parametric equations are actually a rather simple idea, and that Bézier curves are actually really simple to implement.  My code for the Bézier curves is about half Java's verbose boilerplate and about half “meat” – and yet the total is only a screenful of code.  The hardest bit turned out to be ensuring that I generated enough points over the line, as the rate of change varies over the whole line.  In any case, it was easy, and the code worked on the second try (the first try failed because I made a mistake in transcribing the basic equation).

Shortly after I posted the Bézier curve changes, I got an email from someone who had downloaded JSisyphus and was trying to make it work.  This fellow was a C++ programmer using Visual Studio, so his issues were really all about getting a Java IDE installed and learning a bit of Java.  In under an hour, he had it going – my first JSisyphus user, I think!  Later in the day I discovered that someone else had cloned it, too.  Cool beans!

Around noon yesterday Debbie and I took off for Salt Lake City with plans for a purely fun afternoon with two stops: the Red Iguana, then Caputo's market for some cheese and chocolate shopping.  The Red Iguana had two specials: a baby back pork rib in mango mole sauce, and seafood fajitas.  Both sounded wonderful; Debbie ordered the ribs (first photo below – Debbie started eating before I could snap the pic!) and I got the fajitas (second photo).  Both were just ridiculously good in every detail, as is our common experience there.  Debbie took one bite of her ribs and decided that she didn't want to share (as had been our plan).  After a bite of my fajitas, I didn't care!  :)  As always, I'm amazed at the attention to the little details there.  The chips and salsa were fantastic, and the iced tea perfect (as always).  My fajita vegetables were cooked to the perfect point, sort of al dente, and they must have put the seafood in toward the end of the cooking, as it wasn't overcooked as seafood in fajitas so often is.  The salsa fresca and guacamole were heavenly..  Debbie couldn't manage to eat all of hers, so I got to taste the ribs, and I polished off her black beans.  Awesome, both of them, even after I was stuffed full of my meal.  And of course we had dessert to finish up.  I'm not sure how we did it, but we both managed to eat an entire flan (regular for me, chocolate for Debbie) smothered with caramel sauce, whipped cream, and a half-cup or so of sliced fresh ripe strawberries.  Oh, my!

Then it was on to Caputo's, which is but a short drive away from Red Iguana.  There we got ourselves several nice cheeses (they let us taste them all before we bought), some sandwich ham for me, some pasta, and two varieties of chocolates: chocolate-covered candied orange slices for me, and chocolate-covered figs for Debbie.  Both are outstanding!

Sisyphus table software...

Sisyphus table software...  I've beaten this stuff into good enough shape that I've released it for public consumption.  I'm calling it “JSisyphus”, following the common Java practice of stuffing a “J” in front of the descriptive name to imply that it's written in Java.  It's in a public repository on GitHub, and licensed with the very permissive MIT license.  If you're a Java-head, and you have a Sisyphus table, go take a look!

The photo at right is a track that I made.  I call it “NestedBubbles”.  It's an example of the sort of recursive pattern that I built JSisyphus to be able to do.  Such patterns are typically very difficult with graphical tools, but easy in software – once you have some sort of framework in place that allows it.  That what JSisyphus does, and that track is the proof of the pudding...

As I've been developing this, I've been in communication with some of the folks at Sisyphus Industries (the makers of the Sisyphus table).  They've offered some help, but much more encouragement, as they're hoping to build a community of Sisyphus table users.  To that end, they've started a subreddit and asked me to contribute on it (which I have).  In the meantime before they get their online community software going, I'm also hosting a repository for Sisyphus table “tracks”, again on GitHub.

This morning I had something quite satisfying happen: an email out of the blue from a programmer who heard about JSisyphus.  He downloaded it and was having trouble making it work.  I answered a few of his questions, and a little while later I got an email from him letting me know that he had succeeded!  So just a couple of days after I let the world know about JSisyphus, it's already being used by someone.  Very cool!

A very nice lunch with our friends...

A very nice lunch with our friends ... Michelle, Lizzy, and Lily (Lizzy's three month old baby).  We had the pleasure of introducing them to one of our favorite spots: Jack's Wood-Fired Oven.  They had been there once previously, but only for dessert.  Yesterday we all had pizza and soup, and then dessert as well.  The soup was one of my favorites there: cream of fire-roasted tomato.  The personal-sized pizzas we chose were all excellent.  When it came to dessert, they were out of our favorite (their lemon cake with raspberries) – so we tried three other desserts and shared them.  One of them, a chocolate layer cake, was made by the same bakery that makes the lemon cake, and it was really good – smooth, moist, and drenched with intense chocolate flavor.  The other two – an Italian pineapple cream confection, and vanilla creme brulee – were made in-house.  Our delightful waitress strongly recommended the pineapple cream dish, so I ordered that (photo above).  The creme brulee I didn't try, as Lizzy was shoveling it into her mouth as fast as she could; I thought sampling it might be dangerous. :)  The pineapple dish was spectacular.  Our waitress has excellent taste!  Lizzy pronounced the creme brulee the equal of any she's had, and it looked nearly identical to our gold standard: the Gastognome's creme brulee.

Great company and great food is a very difficult combination to beat...

Product recommendation...

Product recommendation...  I put six of these little battery-powered lights up in my barn last year.  It's usually before sunrise when I come out to my barn office in the mornings, and these little lights come on automatically to light my path through the storage area of my barn's second floor, between the stair landing and my office door.  Despite being used almost every morning, they're still on their first set of batteries (three AAA cells each).  This week I bought another set of six ($20 for the set), and I put one up on the outside of my barn door.  That's what you see in the photo, lighting up my lock so I can see to put the key in.  These lights make no claim about being suitable for outdoor use, so this is a bit of an experiment.  At just over $3 a light, I'm not risking much. :)

It's remarkable to me just how well these cheap little things work.  They only come on at night, when they're needed – and even then, they only come on when they sense motion.  Generally they pick up my presence when I'm about 12 feet away, which is just about perfect for my needs.  Once they come on, they stay on for 30 seconds or so after they last sense motion.  That means if I hesitate in my walking or fumble for a key, the lights stay on.

Highly recommended!

No blue moon for us...

No blue moon for us...  We've got thick cloud cover, solid, horizon-to-horizon.  Not even a hole to peek through.  It's very light, though, considering that cover – the moon above the clouds must be very bright indeed...

A squished bug...

A squished bug...  Of the software variety, that is.  My Sisyphus table software had a bug in it that was driving me crazy.  At apparently random times while the software was running, it would generate insane tracks for the table.  I call them “insane” because they didn't resemble in any way what my software commands told it to do.

I spent hours tracking it down to the point where in one function I could add or subtract a line of code and the problem would disappear or reappear.  The thing is, that line of code did essentially nothing – and even worse, adding it caused results before the added line of code to change.  This makes no sense unless one of two things were true: (a) the compiler had a bug, or (b) I didn't really understand what I was looking at.

One of my golden rules of debugging is never assume you have a compiler bug, unless you have proved to yourself at least 15 different ways that it couldn't possibly be something else.  I hadn't done that, so I kept plugging away.

The function I was having the oddball results in computes a transformed position – it applies an offset in Cartesian coordinates, and a rotation in polar coordinates.  After some very careful observation, I noted that when it worked properly, the input angle was about 2E-15 ... very close to zero, but not quite.  When it was working incorrectly, it was exactly zero.  This function called another function that computes an angle from a delta x, delta y pair; that function looked like this:

Spot the problem?  I didn't, at least not right away.  It's in the last line of that function, with the call to Math.signum().  My intent there was to multiply pi by either 1 or -1 ... but Math.signum() can also return zero, if the input is exactly zero.  Bingo!  The fix was simple: I wrote my own “sign()” function that returns only +1 or -1 and changed the function as below:

Presto!  Problem gone.

And it was not a compiler bug.  :)

Bananas, wireless charging, and plastic paper...

Bananas, wireless charging, and plastic paper...  Feeding banana slices to our five dogs is one of my daily joys.  We've been doing this long enough now that the dogs have integrated it into their notion of what a day is “supposed” to be.  They even know the particulars: the “proper” time to receive their daily banana slices is while my tea is steeping.  They watch for this, and when the see the right cues they start getting excited.  One or two of them will usually go sit by the island where we stash the bananas, and stare fixedly at them, occasionally glancing at me to see if I'm paying attention.  If I should do something wrong, like, say, sitting down to drink my tea without having dispensed the bananas, they'll be all over me with the sad looks, the touches for attention, etc.  Very effective, they are! :)  When I finally (from their perspective) walk over and pick up two bananas, then they really get excited!  They'll surround me while I'm at the sink peeling the bananas, always in the same relative positions.  Cabo will be behind me, grabbing at my belt; Mako and Miki to my left, Race and Ipo to my right.  Then I take the peeled bananas over to the biggest section of clear floor in our kitchen, which (so far as the dogs are concerned) is The Place of Banana Dispersal.  There I stand with my back to a cabinet, and the dogs array themselves before me in a semicircle – again, always with each dog in a particular place.  Then I cut slices, a quarter inch or so thick, and toss them out in sequence to the arrayed canines.  The way they react, you'd think I was tossing out chunks of steak!

We're still learning all the new features on our iPhone Xs.  One of those is the wireless charging.  I got two wireless chargers, and Debbie and I each have one on our nightstand.  They work.  I'm not sure how quickly they charge, but they do what we care about: put a phone with an empty battery on the charging stand at night, and in the morning when you wake up it's fully charged.  I'm a little surprised just how convenient I find it.  I used to fuss about every night searching for the end of the charging cable, often having to untangle it from other wires nearby.  Probably one night out of five I'd forget it, and have a half-dead phone the next day.  The little connector was fiddly; you had to align it just so before pushing it in, and it was easy to mistakenly slide the connector between the phone and the case.  With the wireless charging, I just put the phone down on my nightstand and it gets charged.  There's no careful alignment needed; setting it down pretty much anywhere on the charger works fine.  It's a little thing, but quite nice...

I was a Kickstarter supporter of the Remarkable tablet.  I got mine a couple of months ago, and I've been using it daily ever since.  These folks got enough things right about this that for the very first time I have stopped using paper-and-pencil for anything.  The “feel” of it is the most important part they got right.  Unlike any other electronic device I've ever tried sketching on, this one really does feel much like paper, right down to the scratching of the “pencil” tip over the “paper”.  It isn't perfect, but it's darned close, and close enough.  A second thing they got right is simplicity.  Using the table is not like using a drawing program, which is what every other device I've ever tried did.  Instead, these folks made it work as much like paper as they could.  You choose your drawing instrument (pencil, felt-tip, pen, etc.) and a few details (like the line width, angle of the pencil, etc.) and then you just use their stylus as though it was that instrument.  That's it!  You've got essentially an infinite number of pages to work with in the device's memory.  The best part, for me at least, is I can send any sketch I want to keep to a file on my Mac.  So, for instance, if I sketch out an electronic design I can zap it to my Mac and print it out.  Very nice!

I'm a big sketcher, though I can't draw anything that anyone would ever recognize. :)  In my recent work on the Sisyphus table software, I've made probably 100 or more sketches.  Generally these have been geometry problems that I'm trying to figure out how to solve with trigonometry.  It's much easier for me to understand the problem when I can visualize it, hence the sketches.  I don't save any of these – I make the sketch, I write and debug the software, then I just delete the sketch.  In the past when I worked on software like this, my desk would be surrounded by discarded, crumpled paper – something my workmates used to tease me about.  Those days are now gone...

Newbie mistake...

Newbie mistake...  Yesterday afternoon, after transferring our old phone information to our new iPhone Xs, we did a few tests.  One of them was to call each other, to make sure the phones were working.  As we did this, we were both holding our phones, standing right next to each other.  I called Debbie, and the ringer volume was really low – even though we had it cranked all the way up.  She called me, and we got the same result.  I spent a good fifteen minutes cruising through the settings, thinking there must be some new setting that for some reason defaulted to a low ringer volume.  Couldn't find a darned thing.

So to Google I went, and I found plenty of people complaining of the same thing.  However, the first ten or so posts I read covered only the same settings that I'd already checked.  Dang it!  Finally I read a post that mentioned an “attention-aware” setting associated with the new face ID on the iPhone X.  It suggested turning that feature off would raise the volume.  But that made me wonder what the heck that feature was ... and after a bit more searching and reading I finally understood it.  The iPhone X is knows if you're paying attention to it – and in that circumstance, it lowers the volume of the ringer and alerts.  Debbie and I were both staring at our phones when we ran the test, so the phones knew it and lowered the volume.  I put my phone in my pocket and had Debbie call me, and sure enough, the ringer volume was nice and loud.

That's a ... really nice feature, actually.  There's no reason for a loud ringer if I'm already staring at the phone.  We left the setting alone.

BTW, the face ID is so far working quickly and flawlessly for me.  Debbie can't use it to get into my phone, and vice versa.  When I pick up my phone, the face ID is so fast that I really don't even notice it – my phone “just works”.  I'm used to typing in a 6-digit PIN every time I pick up my phone; that's going to take a while to get out of that habit. :) 

Buying a “real” camera is starting to look silly...

Buying a “real” camera is starting to look silly...  Debbie and I just got our new iPhone Xs.  I spent a few minutes this morning playing with the camera on mine.  The iPhone Xs are replacing our old iPhone 6+s, and there has been considerable improvement in the camera over that time.  We thought the cameras were great on the iPhone 6+, but the iPhone X just blows that away.

The two photos below were taken from the same point, roughly 18" above my Sisyphus table.  The left-hand photo was taken with the zoom set at 1x, the right-hand at 10x.  Those lines that are so close together on the right-hand photo are roughly 0.4mm apart, about a 50th of an inch.  These photos were both taken hand-held, so especially with the zoomed-in photo you can tell the optical stabilization was working great. 

The three photos below were taken from the same point with 1x, 4x, and 10x zoom settings (left to right).  With these, the graininess introduced by the digital zoom (the optical zoom is limited to 2x) is much more evident – but only if you embiggen the photo.  They're still perfectly usable, and very nicely stabilized.  I should note that these three photos were taken with quite low light; with more light they'd be sharper, of course.

Getting a “real” camera these days involves tradeoffs, and more than just cost.  Compared with the convenience of my iPhone, and the fact that it is always at hand, the “real” camera means:

• I have an extra thing to carry (and remember)
• It's more difficult to use, meaning many quick, spontaneous photos simply wouldn't be taken
• The workflow for a camera is completely different (and more complex) than that of the iPhone

I currently own a really nice Fuji X-1 camera, along with a decade-old Canon system.  I haven't taken either camera from its bag for over a year.  And that's with the iPhone 6+ as the alternative!

I've been a photographer since the late '60s, when I bought (first) a used TLR from the '40s, and then my beloved Minolta SRT-101.  From then up to about five years ago, I owned a succession of improving cameras – both film and digital.  I've spent many, many hours reading camera reviews, understanding the technology, and lusting for whatever the current leading edge in cameras was.  But starting a few years ago – ironically, just as I was able to afford those leading edge cameras – I started to wonder whether I actually wanted one.  Are they worth the extra cost, hassle, and complexity for those very few occasions when I wanted to take a photo that my camera simply couldn't do? 

Now I look at the capability of the iPhone X, and consider that this continuous improvement doesn't seem likely to stop, and I conclude ... no, I don't want to buy a “real” camera.  I think I'll stick with my always-with-me, ridiculously-easy-to-use iPhone camera – and smile every time they make an improvement...