I enjoyed watching the Venetian Night in Halifax. The boats go up and down the Northwest Arm, to mark the end of summer sailing season. Still plenty warm. I'm not at all a boat person, so excuse my descriptions in the captions.

My best effort to capture the eclipse from my balcony, holding my phone up to a binocular eyepiece.

Photo from earlier. Before the chomp. Not sure if clouds will cooperate.

TIL my little old crown of thorns plant, of which I have many cuttings around, makes lots of phorbol esters. Phorbol was (and maybe is) a hot topic in total synthesis. I've had crown of thorns for many many years, and not known this.

Another camping trip in the books for this increasingly less-nervous driver!

Immortalized by Google Street View. To the best of my knowledge, the only instance of me on it! www.google.com/maps/@42.331...

Google Maps

Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.

google.com

LOL, was at a wedding last night with a bunch of old students turned friends. So of course I had a dream where I was a student again, taking an exam in math, which I knew nothing about. "School Dreams" are pernicious. I suspect I will always have them.

Andrei Sator is going to be pissed.

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 3w ago

Belgian student strikes gold worth €9m while digging sewers

I use F.LUX to reduce the blue light in my screen at night. (I commonly get asked "why is your screen so orange"). Anyway, I just realized my location was still set to Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, after all these years. Not a huge difference, but funny I never noticed it!

Within spitting distance of perfect :( www.maptap.gg August 9 100🎯 100🎯 100🎯 100🎯 94🏅 Final score: 982

My 24 year old computer broke recently. It had become unusable about 12 years before, not because of hardware or software issues, but because it would no longer take updates. I have another computer that's 10 years old that would work perfectly well if the battery was not defective, and glued (1/n)

Throwback to the longest hike I ever did, the Liberty Lake Loop at Kejimkujik.

www.maptap.gg August 8 100🎯 98🎯 98🎯 93🏆 95🏅 Final score: 958

First time this has happened since I have lived in Halifax!

Ryan Snoddon@ryansnoddon.bsky.social · 4w ago

3rd straight day cracking 30°+ in Halifax!!! Hitting 30°C back to back to back is a rare feat here near the Atlantic coast. This is just the 6th time at the Shearwater site since 1944. Aug 30th to Sept 3rd (5 days) in 2010 was the warmest stretch & only run to go longer than 3 days. #nswx #halisky

No lab work today. It's too hot!

I may have missed the message that things were changing, but I noticed the interest rate in my emergency fund account dropped yet again from what it was when I started it. So I pulled up some info, and wow, my bank has an amazing incentive structure if you put even more money in that account:

This has come up before, but never changes:

"Pleasant" - at 99% humidity. LOL.

Picked some fantastic weather to cook in.

In the days before I had a smartphone, I printed out Google maps when I went to Dresden and Vienna, and got lost both times, as I had not printed a wide enough area. Didn't get a New York Times story though!

The New York Times@nytimes.com · last mo.

Three teenage boys printed directions for a hike on a trail in British Columbia, Canada that Google Maps estimated to be over five hours. In reality, their hike weeks ago lasted at least 12 hours and required the intervention of rescue crews, according to the Lions Bay Search and Rescue team.

I'm glad I remembered it is Natal Day weekend, because otherwise I would have been afraid something was exploding!

Anyone in Halifax picking up a geosmin smell in the water? Their site only appears current up to July 17th!

wow the revamped ACS website is terrible

I've only flown on 2 trips since 2019!

Some are much faster, but I have never solved a NYT Monday crossword in under 6 minutes before!

I realized I have a lot of expired stuff in my camping gear, so I was restocking on emergency water purification tablets (I use a UV sterilizer normally when camping), and this was listed as something people "also buy". I have many questions.

Amnio is a word, but amnion is not. And of course my perennial irritation, that amination (my subject expertise) is not a word.

One of the privileges of my job is evaluating various grants, to help decide what might be meritorious to give government-based funding to. One of the most irritating parts of my job is navigating the government website to do that task. They constantly make changes to the portal that (1/2)

Latest lunar mission? No, it's just me playing around with the time-lapse mode on my phone camera. This is 30x speed.

The perfect angle to watch the moon inch across the sky without even leaving my couch. If you're wondering about "Otto", he is a very ineffective pigeon deterrent, though if I pick him up and wave him at the pigeons, they will fly away for 5 minutes.