I was out for my groceries. Hit a Reject Shop for some kids stickers, a birthday coming up. Saw these … lol the only fungi I’ve seen other than photos for over a month.
Surprising, that there were different sorts … Not that there was much relationship to real fungi
Good to see evidence in the sky of winter back-burning, where town councils pay teams of volunteer fireys (slang for volunteer fire fighters) to go out and burn undergrowth in an attempt to limit the fuel load ahead of bush-fire season.
Cold weather is the time to do that, much less chance the fire gets away.
That burning off had to have been done where the wind wasn’t so fierce, locally we had gusts of over 35 kph.
This morning opened the curtains to see two kookaburras on the lightpole out front of my unit.
Bit of a crummy photo, it having to have been cropped severely. I was inside, behind glass, the birds were probably about seven metres (23ft) distant, and the camera just is not interested in middle distance detail.
The kookies don’t look like they’re watching for insects in the grass at the foot of the podium, but they are canny hunters.
The lawns at Carinya are being mown, and grasshoppers will jump up to get away from the blades.
There goes one of the birds.
He glides a long slow flight to the whirring insect, snaps it up with his beak and turning his aileron-feathers slightly, changes course for a perch on a fence down there.
Gulps down the prey.
Reading Weaponized by Neal asher (2023) was a marathon.
There are a couple of Asher’s novels I’ve enjoyed, The Skinner and The Voyage of the Sable Keech, for example, the first two instalments of the Spatterjay trilogy, published in the early 2000s.
I found those inventive and engrossing. I still think with fondness about the living ship. The Polity novels that intervene between those and Weaponized are set in a human universe ruled by AIs.
In Weaponized a bunch of human characters from the polity intend to colonize an outer planet. They’re all in their second or third century and are bored. They intend to go back to basics somewhere new.
Ursula Ossect Treloon is their leader. The plot is a relentless competition for superiority between the human would-be settlers, and the native wildlife.
Neither of them wins when both appear to be taken over by superior Jain technology, from yet another universe. The end is is circular, a mystery, when a fragment of Ursula is saved by the Polity mole.
Most of the story is the ‘science’ describing the adaptations that need to be made to continue the struggle to survive an ever evolving enemy.
And this is an evolution happening at a daily at most week’s pace. The actual plot was told with a series of one liners buried in the almost baroquely detailed descriptions of the technology. Non-stop action as the back cover promises.
By about a third of the way through, I was wishing for a bit of ordinary narrative, describing the settlers ordinary time. But if anything proceedings notched up, there was never any relief.
Part Two of Blog Usability
Having a good night’s sleep often helps me to ‘think’ things through, with that kind of thinking being done in the unconscious. So while sitting down for breakfast this morning and checking the weather and my mail, I also checked how my latest blog post appears to people reading it on the their mobiles/cell phones or tablets.
First there are the four lines below: Title, Author, Categories and Date & Reading Time
Then the BLOG CONTENT, arguably the meat of the meal. My stats page tells me 8/10ths of people read just the email and they have the opportunity to Comment and or Like. Eight tenths of the time I do the same. Most mornings I have time to read things, but not comment.
People who click through and read on the Reader interestingly get the Tags in a header at the top. Nobody else does. Clicking through and reading on the Blog gets you the following list of additional bits and pieces.
Share this and Likes, another important bit. Then, Related posts. Then Tags, I was surprised to see. Then, the Published by … and About Me paragraph, followed by Leave a Comment. Finally, one after the other, the three new widgets. First the Search Box, followed by the mashed up Categories list and, finally, Recent Posts.
A lot of superfluous stuff in that list that I doubt anyone will read. One thing I dislike about the internet in the last 3 or 5 years … the amount of bloat and padding a reader needs to negotiate their way through!
It’s as if since no one is accountable for the amount of web-space being used … like we have vast distances of free geography to fill up and never mind the amount of electricity needed for cooling towers … and 3000 words looks far more impressive then 1500 words … repetition and padding are the new normal.
I grew up when paper newspapers and magazines were the go, when every inch of print had to be paid for, and flab, repetition and padding were cut ruthlessly. It seems to me we need to renew that contract. To save on cooling towers and save readers.
So. This is what’s going to happen. Starting at the end of my list, Recent posts is gone, as they are more or less taken care of in the Related Posts item. The list of Categories is gone, as the categories pertaining to that post are covered in the third line of the title block, and they are more useful to me in their nested format in settings.
While the Search Box is useful, I don’t know how useful it’ll be where it is. Wait and see is the go with that item. Then there’s Leave a Comment. I’m leaving that where it is.
Then, Published by … and About Me is starting to look rather jaded. It’s up for a make-over. Tags are said to be important but I often suspect the post’s title and categories are doing the grunt work. I might be able streamline Tags … they are a work in progress. Related Posts, Share This and Likes are all to stay.
Blog appearance has changed and hopefully, as a result, usability has improved.
Not like these Lego stairs. This is Tim working on them, he needs to transform the treads from three-tiles-high to two-tiles-high to improve usability.
After studying all the themes available and making notes on just one possible, had another look at my present theme … Independent Publisher 2 by Raam Dev … and discovered that it allowed me to insert the three widgets I wanted. I thanked Raam Dev and my lucky stars.
Over the years and on the various different blogs I’ve been involved in, I have tried quite a few themes. This one is my favorite and so I was glad I could hang on to it.
I’ve tried to do things a little like Tim is doing to his staircase, in the example above, to make this blog more user-friendly. For instance, by adding a search box to help find installments of the novels, and for me being able to find quickly if I have already posted up such-and-such story. I looked for Amble and did not find him other than a mention in another story. But that’s all right, he’ll keep.
I’ve cleaned up Categories. And oh boy, the list was endless. It needed me seeing the list in total to realize how unwieldy it had become. But what I’ve just noticed is that the new list of categories has mixed and matched subcategories as though they all have the same value. I’ll rejig that sometime, maybe tomorrow. I’ll also need to clean up the list of tags. I have 34! pages of tags. Tomorrow is a better day for that job, too.
Last is the widget for the five last posts. I don’t know how useful that is. Let me what you think? maybe I’ll replace it with a tag cloud.
Rita de Heer 