US National Parks
This map shows the location of all the national parks, recreation areas, and historical areas maintained by the National Park Service.
Maybe the best time of the year to get LASIK is around Christmastime 🎄
Between the Xanax, pulling an all nighter, driving like a bat out of hell around those roundabouts when the bus did not show up, and those flashing white, red and green lights in your eyes for 20 seconds each, it was a very psychedelic experience. Kind of like smoking a lot of pot and enjoying the rich colors of the forest, but more of synthetic experience with Christmas colors shown by lasers and LEDs. Really the whole experience was much like montage scene in The Parallax View, certainly no longer the 6 minutes in the outpatient operating room, though minus the trippy music and the photos replaced with lasers. Probably the anti-vaxxer types will claim LASIK is about mind control but I like the fact that I will never have to wear glasses again except maybe for reading and to look stylish when I’m playing a data scientist at work.
I caught the first bus of the day to Price Chopper. 🚍 The bus was supposed to go right past the lot where I was parked overnight 🅿️ but the driver didn’t do that loop probably because nobody asked him and it was early in the morning despite the schedule. It was fine, I walked over there and got my truck, went to Price Chopper 🍏 for a few things I needed at the store. Then I was home by 6:45 AM. Got balled out by the bus driver for wearing a dark shirt and not flagging down the bus with a cell phone or flashlight. 🔦 Admitly it was a pretty dark morning. But I was glad my truck was where I had left it, no ticket on the dashboard 🎫 and I can see pretty good. My eyes are a little bit irrated but no worse then it’s been lately, especially after smoking a lot of weed up at camp. 🏕️ Did I just spend $4,100 so that I could smoke pot without issues of my contacts getting irrated at camp? That well is debatable. Actually, dry eyes and contact irriation had been a growing issue even when I wasn’t stoned up at camp 🏕️ – and I was going to have to go to the eye doctor and get more contacts soon at any rate, not a pleasant experience.
So the next day I’ll have to do hourly eye drops 👀 but I slept through most of the initial healing and are feeling good. I pulled an all-nighter the previous night, or at least intentionally stayed up until 11 PM and got up 4 AM to be as sleep deprived as possible prior surgery, so I could sleep it off once I got home. That plus the Xanax they gave me and a sleeping pill or two 💤 I slept a good 12 or 13 hours solid, though maybe I woke up once or twice to take a piss and then put on a podcast before sleeping a few more hours. No shower today, 🚿 and no swimming for a week or skydiving for a month, though I wasn’t exactly planning on jumping out of an airplane ✈️ this month. They recommend taking some kind of pain reliever 💊 but I didn’t take anything as I wasn’t bothered any more then my contacts were irrating my eyes too many days this summer from the dry eyes
Truth is it was so werid to get out of bed and see your face in the mirror and everything in nice sharp focus. ☺️ While I’ve had this big ass mirror next my bed 🛏️ for the 18 years I’ve rented this dumpy apartment, you know most morning were about reaching for the glasses, 👓 and if you saw anything through the dirt and muck splattered on them, it was good. And then trying to get those contact lens in for good vision. My vision is petty darn sharp now, though at times my eyes get dried out and there was some haze around the streetlights when I was waiting for that early morning bus to get Big Red. Some of it actually was fog, not just my recovering vision.
Heading up to Thacher Park this morning on the Nature Bus, 🚌 I’ll bring my bike but I am not going to do any kind of crazy riding because I am still recovering – probably just spend some time hiking, photographing and hammock time reading. 📸 I am not sure if I am going to stay all day but maybe the first part of the day to enjoy the beautiful morning. 🌅 Tomorrow I will go apple 🍏 picking with dad 👨👨👦 and then maybe next weekend I’ll head up to the Adirondacks for a week up at Horseshoe Lake, Lows Lake and ultimately the St. Regis Canoe Area. 🛶 Should be a nice week, though it seems like I was just out in the Finger Lakes not that long ago for that trip. Winter is coming quickly, and it would be nice if there was some color left 🍁 before I take a week to go off there. I thought up about going up to the Finger Lakes but I think I’m not that interested in doing that.
The Incredible Montage
People ask what LASIK is like. It is much like the montage in the Parallax View - they take you into a darkened room, sit you down into a chair, welcome you to the surgery room, strap you down with stress balls in each hand, shine a spinning white light in one eye, with some flickers of red and green for five seconds as they count down. They say stay still and you are doing good. Then they flash a green dot you stare into with a spinning psychedelic pattern of red flashes appear around it and they countdown from 15 seconds. With a brush they paint over the eye. Then you are done on that eye. They repeat the process on the other eye. You feel or hear nothing besides the surgeon's countdown. Thank you. Please proceed to our offices, the Optometrist will be with you shortly to confirm the success of the procedure. Takes no longer then the Parallax View scene either, maybe six minutes from entering to exiting the darkened surgery room. Not long for burning through $4,100. Instantly you can see better then before the procedure without glasses, though they recommend you keep your eyes closed as much as possible to keep them moist as the eye lens re-attaches.
After The Fire
After the controlled burn at the Pine Bush, often the pitch pine turn a bright red. But they are not dead. They will quickly sprout new leaves and become healthy once again.
Saturday September 21, 2019 — Notes
Sperm Whale Oil 🐋
I had no idea that sperm whale oil was a key ingredient for both automatic transmission fluid and certain high temperature hydraulic fluids prior to its ban in 1972, and for a number of years in the 1970s the synthetic replacements were inferior especially in high temperature applications.
The banning of sperm whale harvest lead to a new industry popping up in cities during the 1970s – the transmission repair shop. Peak whaling years was the late 1950s into the 1960s, far exceeding the whale oil for lighting boom of the 1870s. Over 250,000 sperm whales per year were harvested in the early sixties – which put then at risk of extinction despite their widely distributed population due to their low reproduction rate and long lifespan.
Read more about Sperm Whale Oil and Transmissions. https://www.jalopnik.com/1949479/whale-oil-in-car-transmissions/
How they figured out alternatives to Sperm Whale Oil for high temperature lubricants. https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/the-innovation-file-solving-a-whale-of-a-problem/#gsc.tab=0
Early OOM Killer
Since switching to Fedora, the oomkiller hasn’t been doing it’s job as well as it did on Ubuntu, as they have aggressiveness turned way down. So I installed earlyoomkiller, so hopefully the next time I run out of memory, my computer will sacrifice a process rather then run out of memory and freeze up as I try to breath enough life into to kill something.
oomkiller looks when the memory is critically low and kills a process to keep the system from crashing. earlyoomkiller is much more aggressive killer, it will sacrifice a process when memory + swap falls below 10% free and not wait until the last minute to start sacrificing processes.
Yes, my 2016 laptop with 12 GB of memory is getting a bit long in the tooth though with the SSD drive it’s plenty fast but data sets and applications have grown more memory intensive in recent years. I’ve thought about getting a cheap used Windows 10 laptop to replace it, and then obviously removing Windows 10 as I don’t see much use in it.