What began as a great summer ended up being precisely that. I am hoping that the Summer months of extreme heat and smoke are a thing of the past for the Intermountain west, although I highly doubt it. At the very least this Summer proved to be a reprieve from what had become my expectation over the last several in a row. September, which has been becoming more and more the most pleasant month at 7,000 feet, was also marvelous and allowed for multiple days, in flip-flops, on the Park City trail system. August involved a trip to upstate New York, part of a now recurrent family excursion, and things were pretty sweet there as well. Normally hot and humid at that time of year, it was downright pleasant, if a bit rainy.
After becoming a little frustrated with what has been my favored library for online charts and graphs and that sort of thing, D3, I’ve taken the dive into really learning Python and am enjoying the experience. I’ve tinkered around its edges for a long time but have made the personal commitment to get to know it well. Three months in, it is going well. The inevitable comparison between JavaScript and Python is always in my mind now. They are extremely similar, in that they are trying to accomplish the same things in similar ways, but Python is less dependent on the browser. So Python is a pleasure. And that is something that I didn’t expect.
On a down note, the place we have been frequenting in December in Florida was hammered pretty hard by hurricane Ian, affecting family members who have spent Winters there over many decades. Fortunately no family members were there at the time the hurricane hit home and plans for reconstruction are evidently in the works.
And finally, I’ve decided to take a few steps back from social media where, somewhat as expected with their near-stunning collapse in value, monetization has clearly become the overriding raison d’être of the large companies that reign over it.
Many new photos of the trails above Park City and some of the old-town Park City neighborhoods are included in my photo gallery pages. Park City Galleries 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. Too many in fact and I need to go through them and get rid of a bunch. Curating has never been my strong suit. In the olden-days of film photography, especially in the case of 4×4 large-format photography, the curating took place long before you even took the photo, and there was serious merit to that approach. I didn’t quite catch even the beginning of the peak of Fall colors but I did find a few here and there. I should be back up there in December and will try and get out the skis, cross-country and otherwise, and develop a similar set of wintry Park City shots. Most folks only think of Winter when they think of Park City.
As Park City and the environs around it grow, in terms of people and dwelling units, trail access, even access to walk through the neighborhoods, is a worsening problem. Access outside of the city limits by public transportation, via the county’s Uber-esque free shuttles, is great. Inside the City, access is tough unless you live by a trailhead or are staying at a hotel by a trailhead. When you throw in trailhead car break-ins and the modern problem of catalytic converter thefts, the once-carefree situation of going for a day hike is a bit of a worry, even in Park City. The downside of progress I guess. A few of many long-term consequences of being a desirable destination for those looking for a place to live.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, what goes around comes around. So very long ago, we left upstate New York after finishing college and on our way to graduate school in Rhode Island. It was, and is, a great place for anyone to go to school because the colleges there are so numerous and of such economic importance that they are treated, and student antics are tolerated, well. Also the culture and cost of living are ideal for young people figuring out what to do with the rest of their lives.
Although I think things were much lower pressure for students before college costs escalated as much as they have. That was perhaps the greatest luxury. The ability to experiment. I started as an English major, dallied with film-making and journalism, was a fine-arts painting major for several months, studied Russian of all things, and ended up as a geology major. There were fantastic wonderful dogs, many many friends, keg-parties, an unparalleled and ongoing great romance, epic barn-wood gathering excursions and construction projects, rickety old houses that had alternated between condemnation and as student rentals, close and generous relationships with professors and graduate students, fantastic seasonal farm-to-table food, mind-widening ethnic diversity, and occasional outings involving skinny-dipping beneath enormous waterfalls. All wonderfully inexpensive, many actually free, and all quite comfortably set to the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Allman Brothers, and Neil Young.
I’ve considered all of that to be a thing of the past, the late 1970’s actually. But am realizing as I spend more time there, just a week or so every year does the trick, that it hasn’t really changed all that much. I’m the one that has been doing all the changing. Responsibilities had set in as they do. So what a nice find, to discover that the upstate New York that I had thought was long gone is actually still there. It is different, but not that different. The upside of the absence of progress I guess. A few of many long-term positives of being a undesirable destination for those looking for a place to live. The weather still would be rough for those of us acclimatized to the American west.
This trip involved lots of places around Ithaca and Cornell University, a visit to the Corning Museum of Glass, Cayuga, Seneca, and Keuka lakes and wineries, Hammondsport, Owego, a favorite cidery and restaurant outside of Trumansburg and a farm dedicated to rescued farm animals near Watkins Glen. Images are in my photography galleries in upstate new york 3, 4, 5 and 6.
And, of course, as always a few additions have been made from my walks around small town Southern Nevada. These are located in my Southern Nevada galleries.
On an entirely unrelated matter, lately, working with D3, I’ve run into several roadblocks with what had been my favored JavaScript library for building charts and graphs. These are related to how the library has been tied up with another for a while now and the availability of quick solutions to conundrums via googling is becoming harder. So I decided to take the deep dive into Python, the ultimate rabbit-hole for me. After seriously working with it for a little while, I’ve decided to love it. Something I didn’t expect and in many ways it is unfortunate. So many Python libraries to learn. So many libraries available. So much cool stuff. So much stuff pertinent to natural science and geology. I’m in slow pursuit of a hosting solution that specializes in Python or handles it well and should be making a lot of my quantitative and aspects of my technical illustration work Python-based going forward.
Along those same lines, watching the impact of heightened interest rates on the technology industry and social media in particular, I’ve gone from skeptical to downright avoidant. Meta stock was down 73 percent from its high of not long ago when I checked earlier this morning. Even after it has bought back 48-billion dollars worth of its own stock. I’ve never used Instagram and have recently decided to take a break from Facebook, perhaps a permanent one. I rarely see anything posted by anyone I know. And they appear to be beginning to let those who pay their bills dictate their content. Twitter is in the throws of the Elon Musk takeover. I used to use it as a resource to follow tech industry trends but haven’t really used it as a social platform. I still don’t really get TikTok. I never really got Snapchat. Pinterest does make some sense, but just isn’t my thing. It is a good place to look for food photography images and techniques. I did use LinkedIn extensively early on but maintain only a rarely-checked minimal presence there now. That leaves YouTube, which I use as a resource and publication platform but not really for social purposes.
I am curious to see what Musk does with Twitter and so am giving it another go. When the new Meta rolls around, I’m sure it will be pretty cool. But it is expected in 2030. In particular my concern about social media, in these days when the perpetual funding of companies via interest-free borrowing is over, is that when required to be as profitable as Wall Street would like them to be, the companies will crater entirely to the wants and interests of those who pay the bills. The current social media landscape was something of an end-around capitalism. Companies could exist indefinitely just living on borrowed funds. Whether capitalism catches up with it remains to be seen. I’m remembering a period not long ago when building for MySpace was considered a viable alternative to writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript and Flash and actionscript.
So specifically my goals are to switch to monthly updates, rather than every three months, of my personal stuff, and putting more of what I would have put on social media on my own site, while keeping an eye on the news for what’s what as that industry evolves or otherwise. Meanwhile, giving much thought to Mexico: Mexico City, Chiapas and Oaxaca. Oh, and what’s this about a Mayan train?