macdonaldster

Here are some health and fitness updates: Moh's surgery    After finding out I had basal cell carcinoma on my right ear, I had Moh's surgery. That was on Wednesday. Now it's Saturday and I have had a cold since Friday morning. No one else in my home has a cold. The ONLY place I have been for over a week is that clinic, a pharmacy where the staff were masked, and a small convenience store near by to purchase a snack. Anyway, I've got that going for me. I had a great nap today and it seemed to help. For anyone dealing with post surgery wound care, I really would would say to check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viiLbz-jSwo Reviewing it let me really take care of the dressing on my own. I have incisions running in two directions as well as a central area where the actual tumor was so there's a bit of ground to cover. My dressing today went really well and it looks pretty tidy, considering I did it myself using a hand mirror for reference. Dietary chang

What a strange time to be alive. I really think the world keeps getting "weirder" as I get older and I am not sure if that is just how every person sees things as they age, or if our stretch of time really is the strangest time to be alive so far.  It started in 2017 with the NYT article about UFOs (archive.today link) . I read the article, reviewed the videos, and checked out the UFOs chatter on Reddit. Why? Well, several years ago, I saw an extremely bright green meteor that had a lot of nickle in it streak low across the sky and off to the horizon when I was out in the yard with my dog. It was low enough that I heard it sizzle (https://earthsky.org/space/whoosh-can-you-hear-meteors-streak-past/). This really freaked me out. It lit the area up like the day. It was "otherworldly". I became obsessed with understanding what I had seen. Over the course of time, I eventually found out this was a fairly common meteorite burning up and the nickle caused the green flame.

 I have a lifestyle which can be stressful for me.  It might not be stressful to others, and might seem incredibly busy to still other people. Probably I'm just leading a normal life for a married person with a child and a full time job. But regardless, stress can build up for me.   One of the things I find aggravates my perception of this stress is an unrealistic expectation about when and how I should be able to relax. This weekend, for example, I spent a lot of time doing things I might not have chosen for myself. I enjoyed some of them, others were more like chores, but none of it was particularly terrible to do. I even got to take a nap today.  But I feel no more relaxed today than I did coming off the week on Friday afternoon. I feel like a weekend should recharge batteries but maybe it is my own personal issues leaving me almost dreading the week to come.  After doing some soul searching, I think it comes down to physical activity. I am simply not getting enough exercise. Fo

 See: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/Gaia_finds_candidates_for_interstellar_Oumuamua_s_home I am not an astrophysicist but reading between the lines it seems unlikely that: this piece of space debris would interact with some many systems as opposed to getting caught into orbit (gut feeling) originate in a system without some type of larger bodies since the hypothesis is this might be a natural object that has flaked or chipped off something else after a collision (or be a technological relic) Combining this with the competing theories of the nature and behaviour of the object, I think it remains in the realm of possibility that this was either a relic or active interstellar piece of tech. Do I think that is likely? No, not at all. But I do think it makes sense to at least continue to entertain that as one possible explanation.  If the result of the Gaia analysis was "it started out here, there's a bunch of rocky exoplanets, doesn't look like it

After years of trying different blogging systems which mainly focused around generating the blog and uploading it (or variations on that like the systems where you commit stuff to a git repo and it builds remotely or Obsidian Publish) I have returned to ye olde Blogger and found I have content here going back QUITE a ways.   I was going to flatten it all but I think I will leave it.  In doing this, I have been struggling to come up with a good reason to blog. I want to write things, and publish them on the web, as a way of clearing my head. It isn't evident that this has value to the rest of the world but writing publicly does seem to alter the way it feels to write.  My current issues: - health - found some skin cancer on my ear, cardio health is in the toilet from my last bout with COVID, and I need to deal with my posture and terrible eating habits.  - tech - is a reckoning coming for ChapGPT in court with all the copyrighted docs they used to train  - weather - Edmonton, the ci