💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › files › week › 2022 › index.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:37:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Area temperatures rose considerably on the heels of last week's bitter cold. I needed to drive my wife to an appointment at an office not far from my parents' house, so I decided to enjoy the unseasonably-mild afternoon at a park I frequented in my high school days. The trip brought back many old memories, but the sight of the park's creek, covered in steadily-melting ice, was particularly striking to me.
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I live in the American Midwest, and our city was caught square in the middle of the recent arctic blast. We were able to keep ourselves warm, but snow blew everywhere around us and ice formed in every conceivable pocket. I discovered an intricate and rather delicate swirl of frost on my study window just as the worst of the cold snap began to fade.
Week 50: Boeing 747 N706CK at Memphis
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I wanted to visit Memphis, TN primarily to see FedEx's air fleet, but of course other carriers use the airport as well. My primary spotting target, the McDonnell Douglas DC-10, made very few appearances, but other gems were prevalent. One of the highlights was this Kalitta Air 747, freshly arriving as flight 4563 from Los Angeles.
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Our town's public transit system is quite lacking, so when we visited Chicago, IL this weekend, I took advantage of the extensive trains and buses in use around the city. The CTA Red Line's Grand station caught my eye, as it was one of the few underground stops to contain a section of interlocking track.
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Hedgehogs are more active at night, so we rarely see Kino moving around his cage during the day. This evening we refilled his empty water bottle, only to discover that he must have been quite thirsty: he immediately walked over to the bottle and drank for a few minutes straight. This extracted video frame shows him licking the steel ball inside the nozzle to loose water from the bottle.
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My wife and I hosted Thanksgiving for our family this year. She loves to cook, and she is quite skilled at it. Though there were only six of us total, the spread was immense and quite delicious.
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In preparation for a party, I was invited to a friend's house to help test and troubleshoot an arcade machine he had built. We experienced some stuttering issues in the game, so he tested out a new power supply, graphics card and hard drive in the machine's onboard computer. Unfortunately, the PC inside is low-profile, requiring us to pile components on top of each other helter-skelter. We were never able to fix the stuttering.
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My wife and I were invited to a board game café this week. While the games themselves were quite fun, I was pleased to see that the shop also sold crafts from independent artists and books by local authors. As we waited for our friends to arrive, we noticed the nearby table had a river of dice embedded in it.
Week 44: Bales Hall Pipe Organ
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I had the chance to see the famed Notre Dame organist Olivier Latry perform at the Bales Organ Recital Hall in Lawrence, KS. The organ in the hall is spectacular: a three-manual console with 45 stops in total, when the design of the building created around the organ from the ground up. I've attended a number of organ concerts over the years, but the sound of this instrument was indescribable.
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After a particularly stressful week, my wife and I went out to a restaurant the day before Halloween. My burger was served with a large steak knife stuck through it. In the spirit of the holiday, I couldn't help but spread some ketchup around each side of the puncture.
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The weather was unusually warm this weekend, so I decided to visit a park and walk along some of the trails. The park has a small lake, and after completing one section of trail, I found myself farther along the lake than I thought I'd be. I ultimately took more trails and walked a complete circuit around the lake--a total distance of over seven miles. Some spots along the way offered fantastic views of the lake.
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My usual bicycling path runs through many wooded areas. When I bike in the morning, deer are a common sight, but on this evening I spotted several along the trail. One group grazed out in the open, right next to a busy sidewalk.
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We found ourselves at a country store in rural Kansas this weekend. I grew up in a small farming town and some of my relatives still own agricultural land, so farms and other rural places are familiar and comforting to me. The fields near the store were too pretty to pass by unnoticed.
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While traveling home from my business trip, I passed through Washington Dulles International Airport. I had never been to the airport before, and I fell in love with the number of international aircraft I saw in the terminal. One of the most prominent was an All Nippon Airways Boeing 787-9, as seen in this extracted video frame.
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EPCOT is my favorite park at Walt Disney World. The COVID-19 pandemic has prevented us from visiting the park since 2019, but since that time, Disney has added quite a lot of new shows and attractions. One of the more subtle, but surprisingly dazzling, additions is twinkling points of light on the outside of Spaceship Earth.
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There are several arcade chains in the region, but we tend to visit some a lot more than others. It had been so long since I'd visited this one that my original card no longer functioned. Fortunately, I was able to transfer all my points and tickets without fuss.
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I live in the American/Central time zone, but my job's hours are American/Eastern. As a result, I get out of work an hour earlier than most people in the area. When my wife and I went to a local sushi restaurant after work last week, we were one of the first customers through the door, and the train was still full.
Week 35: Thunderbird Afterburner
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This weekend the US Air Force Thunderbirds came to town for an air show. During some of their passes they ignite the afterburner of their F-16 Fighting Falcons, which produce a deafening roar. Eagle-eyed viewers might be able to spot shock diamonds in the exhaust of this aircraft as it makes a high-speed pass.
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For my uncle's birthday, we visited a dinner theater in the region. The meal largely consists of a buffet, but I like to try to save room for dessert. This sundae is my personal favorite.
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I don't intend to get particularly good at pinball, but some of my friends go to a nearby pinball bar quite regularly, so I go with them to hang out. One of the tables has a street racing theme, and I started playing it because it was the cheapest table at the bar. Ths week I got an unusually high score on the table--higher even than the average score at the local pinball league match this summer.
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Though I've played Sound Voltex at arcades many times, I often only have time to play during the nightly eAmusement mainenance period, which happens in the middle of the day in the US. I made sure to visit the arcade this week on a day when maintenance did not occur. As a result, I finally got my first two 19 cleras on my eAmusement pass, including a 19 I'd never passed before.
Week 31: Sunny Day at the Lake
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The grandmother of one of my high school friends lives a few hours out of town. She owns a house next to one of the area lakes and regularly goes boating during the spring and summer months. When my friends goes to visit her, sometimes he will invite me along. This was the first time I'd visited the lake with him since 2018.
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I brought my wife's digital SLR camera with me to AirVenture. She has two fairly basic lenses for the camera, but since I'm not a professional photographer, I find they're more than adequate for my purposes. The longer of the two lenses captured this shot of a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II passing over the airfield at Oshkosh.
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I flew into Chicago, IL on Sunday, from where I drove north to Wisconsin to attend EAA AirVenture. A southwesterly wind blew over Chicago Midway Airport, the same direction from which our aircraft approached the field. This necessitated us to fly past the airport and turn around to approach from the other direction. The turn gave me a fantastic view of downtown.
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I visited Hilton Head Island with some friends last week. The beaches along the south and east of the island are packed with tourists, but a few parks and shorelines are buried among residential neighborhoods. I stopped at a quiet park in Mitchelville to try to catch a glimpse of Parris Island, but I didn't realize that the beach was also under the glidepath for the commercial Hilton Head Island airport.
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Our hedgehog, Kino, was initially quite scared of us. He has grown more friendly and curious in recent months, but he still does not like to be touched. We take hin outside using a fabric bag called a "snuggle sack", and a few nights ago he emerged from the sack into the darkness of the backyard.
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The original version of the arcade game Sound Voltex used monitors that ran at 60 frames per second. Newer cabinets have upgraded to 120 FPS monitors, and the home version of the game, SDVX コナステ, now supports 120 frames per second as well. A friend of mine allowed me to play on his account, where the higher frame rate allowed me to clear a chart that has eluded me for weeks.
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We own a Pump It Up arcade cabinet, and with the help of a friend, we installed an off-the-shelf PC and some generic I/O boards inside the cabinet. The PC runs a standard copy of Windows 7, and input from the dance pads is mapped as keyboard input, allowing us to run any program we want on the machine. Of course we primarily use it to run a home version of PIU. For the last half-decade we've run StepF2, but this week I decided it was time to upgrade to StepPrime.
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My current smartphone is a Samsung Galaxy Note8, which has dual 12 MP main camera sensors. I have 2x optical zoom with the device, but the rest of the zoom--up to 10x--is digital. The pixelation at that level makes photos almost indecipherable, but by altering the exposure compensation, I can at least get some details to come out.
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I was invited to a tiny pinball bar on Thursday. I hadn't played pinball in years, and I'm no good at the game, but I always enjoy playing it. One table was themed with classic monsters such as Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and Frankenstein's monster. I'm a sucker for that kind of horror, and the table was one of my favorites at the bar.
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Two examples of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the only aircraft to deliver nuclear weapons in combat, are flightworthy today. One of them, 44-69972 "Doc", visited an airfield not far from us on Saturday. I was incredibly fortunate to be able to take a 30-minute ride in the bomber. As an aviation enthusiast, it was one of the most amazing flights I've ever taken, and one I'll like never be able to do again.
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Spring in the area has been unusually rainy. The clouds partially broke on a day when we needed to move some arcade equipment, allowing us to keep the electronics dry, but rain continued to fall to the east, producing one of the strongest rainbows I've seen for some time.
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My wife received a stuffed seal plush in the mail as a gift. It was supposed to puff up to a round shape upon being removed from its vacuum packing, but we've found that it has remained curiously flat. It makes a silly perch for one of her cat plushes.
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I've seen this aircraft performing touch-and-gos at KMCI many times, usually on Mondays around noon. I'm not sure why they're performed at a civil airport and not at one of the nearby air bases; this could be a privately-owned plane, or on load to a civilian operator. I'd never had the chance to see it on the ground until this day.
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I own four arcade sticks and two flight sticks, including a full HOTAS. After purchasing a PowerA Fusion arcade stick for Switch this week, I gathered up several of my controllers to try to figure out where to store them all. The small controller in the lower right is the "Pocket Voltex", meant to be used with Sound Voltex-like games such as K-Shoot MANIA or Unnamed SDVX Clone.
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My wife needed to catch a plane this weekend. She hadn't felt quite right while packing, so the night before she left, we picked up two COVID-19 test kits. I had never taken one before, which is an interesting thought to me, since the pandemic has now lasted two and a half years. Fortunately, we both tested negative.
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In our Final Fantasy XIV-themed tabletop campaign, I play as a red mage, but until now I've played with green dice. I've been getting consistently bad rolls in almost all of our combat scenarios with them, which has left me a little demotivated at times. This new set of red dice has been somewhat kinder to me--even when our GM hasn't!
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The weather has remained stubbornly cold in recent days, preventing many trees and flowers from budding. Over the past weekend, an azalea tree near my office suddenly bloomed, despite the frost on the ground mere days before. My first indication that the tree had bloomed was not the sight of the flowers themselves, but the wonderful scent they emitted across the parking lot.
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With the weather slowly warming up at the start of the month, I finally had a chance to walk around a local park with an old friend. He informed me that earlier in the year, he had found dozens of turtles lounging near the ponds along the park's trails and footpaths. I spotted one myself as we passed one of the quieter spots.
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I'm fairly certain I will never clear Pump It Up charts in the 20+ difficulty range, nor am I actively pursuing such a goal. I simply want to stay in shape, keep my weight down, and have fun playing a game I enjoy. That isn't to say that I don't pursue other challenges in the game, though, such as replacing all the arrows with identical soccer balls. This week I cleared my first S16 using the noteskin.
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My sister owned a copy of Pokémon: Yellow Version when we were young. We used a cheat device to teach the hidden move "Surf" to her Pikachu--usually only doable through official Nintendo promotional events--which unlocked a surfing-themed minigame on the cartridge. Recently I felt the urge to play the minigame again, and when I did, I achieved a new personal high score.
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I had an extremely bad week in mid-March, the details of which I won't expound upon here. Upon leaving work near the end of the week, the weather turned quite cold and dreary. It almost felt like nature was wallowing in my sorrows with me.
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Local temperatures oscillated wildly over the course of the week, reaching close to 80 F one afternoon and dipping close to 0 just a few nights later. Snow melted off our roof during the warm days, and water overflowed from a clogged gutter onto a Japanese maple tree in our front yard. The water then froze as temperatures fell, leaving thick ice on the branches.
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I paid a visit to Kansas City this week and got to explore much of the city center. I arrived at KC's Union Station fairly late: most of the attractions were closed for the evening, and only a few people remained in the front hall. This meant, however, that the historical terminal was unoccupied, allowing me to snap some striking photos.
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Temperatures have been rising in the area over the last few days, but some snow remains in shaded areas. While walking next to a swimming pool a few days ago, I came across one such place: the thin line of shadow created by the top bar of a chain link fence. A single line of snow found refuge in the shadow, unmolested by the heat of the sun.
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An arcade in the region has a fairly new DanceDance Revolution machine. I don't go to that arcade very often, because my preferred dance game is Pump It Up and this location does not have a PIU machine. When I visited last week, I discovered that a broken menu button had been replaced with a button that didn't match the others at all.
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A rare westerly wind at KMCI caused traffic to arrive and depart from runway 27. This extracted video frame shows the shadow of a Southwest Boeing 737 as it crosses over the perimeter fence on final approach. I love seeing the shadows of aircraft--watching them speed along the ground gives a very real sense of how fast these planes fly, a sense which is often dulled by seeing them move across a featureless sky.
Week 05: A Work-in-Progress Workstation
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My wife and I recently re-arranged the house to have separate studies. This gives us privacy, as well as extra space to set up equipment and furniture other than just our personal desktops. I've used the extra space to set up a dedicated digitization machine and a retro gaming station. VHS cassettes and RCA cables have already started piling up.
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I purchased a Kobo Clara HD last week, factory-new directly from Kobo. Unfortunately, when I opened the box, I discovered that the screen already had damage: a visible crack line ran across the upper-right corner of the screen, and the top several lines of pixels didn't function. I immediately opened a ticket with Kobo, and they agreed to replace the device under warranty.
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I've returned to working full-time in my office, but almost all of my coworkers have switched to working from home permanently, and most have only come on site once or twice to pick up their belongings from their cubicles. Every now and then I see some remnants of the COVID-19 mass exodus, such as a calendar that was never advanced past March of 2020. It's a little spooky to see--I'm reminded of the abandoned towns of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
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We enjoy crepes and often frequent a local creperie on the weekends. Recently we've begun baking and cooking more often at home, so my wife decided to try her hand at a ham and asparagus quiche. The result, soggy bottom crust aside, was absolutely delicious--and surprisingly photogenic.
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The most direct route to my office includes an interchange between two highways. Most of the interchange ramps are left exits, and they all involve very tight turns. Tractor trailers often take these ramps too fast and tip over--and whenever they do, I have to find an alternate route to work.
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