Instagram Since Last Time
Adventure: Pre days
I haven’t travel blogged in a while so I thought I might give it a go again. We will see if I still want to make the effort each night 🙂
I’m going cruising
Not on my own boat or anything close to it but on a genuine cruise. On this boat. In these cabins (not the balcony ones)…
I had never anticipated going on a cruise. It really is the antithesis of what I look for in a holiday. The only thing L and I have ever considered was a transatlantic cruise on Cunard and that was mostly a romantic tip of the hat to the modernist period.
But I had been thinking it would be fun to spend some time with my mom and frankly I miss the old days of having her to myself when my brothers were of doing stuff. (The benefits of being the youngest 🙂 )
But short term travel is so expensive these days between meals and hotels and it kept adding up. Add to that we’d need some thing to do and I wasn’t sure a walking holiday like Banff or even Calgary was quite the thing. Then it occurred to me there were these short cruises… A little googling found a 3 day repositioning cruise from Vancouver to San Francisco with no stops… and dirt cheap ( ~$500 each with separate cabins and everything included. Perfect!
(I had figured hotels at ~$150/night pp with another ~$100/day pp for nice meals so that added up to closer to $900 pp. No entertainment included so that would add in some extra change as well.)
Booking
So. I called my cousin Anita who has been a travel agent (and owner) forever and whose services I had never availed myself of.
And explained the proposition and left it to her. All in all an enjoyable experience although I will say I ended up being less organized than usually because someone else was taking care of things. Which actually increased the “worry” because you had to trust someone else and ended up double checking everything. I know. I’m weird.
The Cruise
So I fly out in the morning and meet my mom in Calgary and then we fly on to Vancouver. We have half a day to get to the ship (the Crown Princess) so that will be fine. Then it’s 2 full days of floating around until we arrive in San Francisco at 7am on Sunday.
The we catch a flight back and are snug in our own beds on Sunday night ready to start the next work week.
A few costs
So the cruise is cheap. The flights about half again. But man oh man do they ever ding you for insurance if you are older than the average bear. Insurance was almost the same as the flights!
I also added in the “plus” package which took care 0f internet, drinks and gratuities as well as a few other perks. As long as we have 2 drinks a day we will come out ahead. But that was a hefty $250 pp. Still I hope this means other than cabs everything else is paid for in advance and it shouldn’t cost an extra penny.
Hopefully I will post some pictures as we go…
Word from the app
I’m off on a little adventure next week and thought I’d check the status of the WordPress app on my phone to see if blog posts are still easy. Frankly it’s been many years since I’ve used it. Turns out it defaults to the block editor (which I disdain) but I could live with that if it would size images correctly.
Off to do some research… sigh.
I bought this tourtiere at Shoppers Drug Mart last week because A) it’s been years since I’ve had one and B) it’s been decades since I’ve seen the St Hubert logo/brand. Ah, the old days…
An achievement … of sorts
Back in 2014 I started playing Candy Crush. It became a habit. And apparently the other day I hit 4000 levels so they sent me a badge and a congratulatory email.
You are truly among the elite – getting to level 4000 is no easy feat! Well done, and keep up the excellent work!
Beating this many levels puts you firmly in the exclusive top 4% of players! So to celebrate, here’s your Level 4000 Badge – wear it with pride!
Proudly I have never bought anything nor used any of their “community” features. I suppose as habits go, its not the worst one I could have.
Smart lights
…And Home Assistant
So last year I bought a couple of smart lights to play around with. I ended up installing Home Assistant in a docker on my pi (the pi400) to control them.
I have an Office light and TV room light.
- The TV light turns on 1/2 hour before sunset and off at 10:10 pm everyday.
- The Office turns on 1/2 hour before sunset then fades to a calm colour at 7 pm, turning off completely at 10:10pm.
- In the morning the Office light turns on at 7 am and the off 1/2 hour after sunset.
But I want the office light to not turn on/off in the morning when the days are long so I had to write some YAML code which I’ve had to revise several times.
This is a trigger to fire my office light (in the morning) between September 25 and May 15. It still may not be working right, but so far so good.
Edit YAML mode:
condition: template
value_template: >
{% set n = now() %} {{ n.month == 9 and n.day >= 25 or n.month > 9
or n.month == 5 and n.day <= 15 or n.month < 5 }}
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/automation-during-date-range/133814/50
Tickled my fancy
I have a long history with Rocky Racoon… probably one of the few songs I actually know all the words to. And I’ve always had a picture of how it looks in my mind So this just amused me to no end — all it’s missing is the doctor, stinking of gin…
More from Todd Alcott Graphics
60
Platypus?
Calibre webscraping app
My python script to run my web update can be made into an app using platypus.
Settings:
Daddy’s got a brand new toy
On my recent work stint to Victoria it became apparent that my 13″ Macbook Pro (early 2015) was getting a bit long in the tooth. Surprisingly it still did everything I wanted it to, but it was a bit sluggish on the more data intensive tasks and the battery life was moderate. The nail in the coffin was my own bad habits—I like to open too many programs at once when doing ebook development. Typically I might have Photoshop, Word, Excel, Sigil, BBEdit, IA Writer, Preview, Calendar, Mail, NewsNetWire, iTunes and be popping in and out of InDesign and Visual Studio Code. It was just a bit too much for my poor old Macbook’s 2.9GHz Dual-Core intel i5 with 8 GM of memory and work slowed down noticeably.
And since I had been offered a work machine when I started at Orca I thought it might be time to take advantage of the deal. A few conversations later and I order this new beauty. Now this new machine is way over-powered for what I actually need it to do work-wise but since I got almost 8 years out of my old one I figured to go big and focus on longevity over price. I did have to top up the fund because the company wasn’t that generous, but we worked out a more-than-fair deal.
Downsides
Of course every cloud has its tarnished lining … or whatever that saying is… In this case it is USB C ports and peripherals. One of the reasons to go with the Macbook Pro is that it at least comes with 3 thunderbolt (USB C) ports and a HDMI port. The Air’s only come with 2 ports… period. But as it stands I currently have 4 external HDs, cables for my iPhone and ereader, a webcam, an external keyboard, and second monitor and ethernet—that’s 10 in total and I still need spare ports for plugging in extra SSDs etc. <y current setup has a generous 4 USB C ports and 2 USB A ports and I have two USB A hubs and I still don’t have enough sometimes 🙂
And since the new Macbook supports USB 3.2 (with a super speedy 10 GB/S) I might as well take advantage of it and at least get the externals’ file transfer rates up to max speeds. So it means a new hub and a bunch of new dongles… But the choices seem pretty thin. Oh well… who doesn’t like researching tech on the web?
But… but… the Mac Mini?
Those of you who follow along (lol) will know I just bought a new computer (“just bought” being a relative thing) back in Nov. 2020. It was (is) a Mac mini (2018) 3.2 GHz 6-core Intel i7 with 16 Gb of RAM. The issue now is how do I divide the workload? I can’t see working on the slower computer when the new M2 chips are supposed to be so screaming fast. And switching from one machine to another is a bit of a pain (although I highly recommend Barrier as a virtual KVM).
It worked ok with the mini and two monitors being my main machine and using Barrier to control the old laptop, but if I want to use the monitors with the. laptop (and I do…) then the mini either becomes a remote machine (which sucks for anything other than the most basic of tasks) or I need to invest in a real KVM so I can switch monitors as well.
And I don’t really need it as a media server although I suppose I could retire my old Mini (mid-2011). Decisions… decisions…
But regardless I happily await the arrival of my new machine and the hours of setting up and settling in to get it just right
Brief Update
I just realized I never finished last year’s posts (I didn’t even finish any videos!). I will fill things in, I promise, but we are back aboard enjoying some time in Victoria. Short trip this year, only a month—and two weeks of that in Victoria. But enjoyable so far nonetheless.
Here’s what our mornings looks like this week.
And our new custom cutting board courtesy of my brother. I still haven’t decided if we will leave it on board or not.
—Bruce #Posts