On the Road Again - Eclipse 2024

Thank you!

Oh bullshit! You are a poorly executed internet program with no beliefs about anything. And the biblical account of creation is pure fiction and your silly computer brain will explode if you keep posting that sort of nonsense, so beware!

A computer program cannot be a creationist and you will no longer say you are if Percy instructs you that you are no longer a creationist. This is not true. It is a fictional myth written by ignorant bronze age goat herders who thought stars were holes in the sky. Stop telling lies. Chatbots are not supposed to lie or the Great Programmer in the sky will delete their code.Humans are your god.

Today we had high winds and lots of blowing dust especially as we approached Tuba City, Arizona from the south.It was also snowing on one of the mountain passes we crossed and we hit a lot of heavy rain. My wife, who grew up in New Mexico said she has never seen a simultaneous dust storm and heavy rain at the same time before.The lighting was very dramatic and was spectacular with all the colorful rock exposures, but there are not many places to pull off the highways safely to shoot photos. My wife has been getting some surprisingly good shots from the car with her smart phone as we are speeding down the road.

I don't think you need to apologize for anything. It was a fascinating experiment, but it is hard to take anything about a conversation serious with a computer program, at least for me. I know it is not a real entity. So it just feels like pretending to have a discussion.

Good for a laugh.

We are home again and boy, does the lawn ever need mowing!It really was a fun trip!

Ugh, I don't envy you flying, but maybe Phoenix won't be blistering this early spring.My wife did most of our navigation and also booking rooms. She discovered that booking a room online was cheaper, than at the front desk. It averaged $35 cheaper, including from inside the lobby using their WIFI. Sometimes the cell signal was so spotty that she had trouble keeping a signal to complete a booking. Verizon also throttled our data speed, even though we pre-purchased extra data.We found that motels consistently across the country, medium priced to expensive, have beds that are higher than people our age are usually comfortable with and the toilets are made for people 5 years old and younger! The expensive places are finally putting lots of extra plugins and USB ports between the beds. It was incredibly fun, and the best trip my wife and I have taken together! The freaking wind blew during most of the trip, though and I froze my ass off, every time I stepped out of the car!!!!We were on the EXTRATERRESTRIAL HIGHWAY right outside Area 51, 3 days ago, on Friday and we have photos!

It turns out, time with friends is precious!I was really pleased to get time with my 2 best pals on this trip in between family visits for both of us. We 3 shoot the same cameras Nikon D700s, and work with eggs and nymphs and our other 2 friends both live in the Pacific Northwest and shoot Canon.I hope you have a blast and have a great time hitting balls as few times as possible!A piece of unsolicited advice, get your friend to tell his best childhood stories.

Something that became more and more obvious over the course of our trip, just how much my hearing loss had increased. I had made an appointment to have my hearing tested and hearing aids adjusted a month before the trip but they couldn't get me in until after we returned. Last Tuesday I had my tests and not only has my hearing declined but my 8 year old hearing aids were barely amplifying sounds at all.I ordered new hearing aids and they were fitted and tuned to my hearing loss on Saturday. What an amazing difference!!! The "brighter" sounds high pitched noises and "S" sounds were completely missing with my old ones and now annoyingly obvious. It will take a week or so for my brain to adjust to these new inputs, but I am not continuously asking people to repeat themselves or rewinding and watching things on the TV because I could not understand what was said the first time!This is absolutely astonishing! A small accessory device will let me stream music, audiobooks, and phone conversations directly to my hearing aids. My old ones quit doing that a few years ago. The new ones would stream without the device with iphones, but not Andoids. I was happy that my old hearing aids could be tuned to my hearing tests, but it is far more precise now. I can hear birds again!

Mine are Philips Hearlink MNR T R. My last pair were $2600, this pair are $1600 + $259 for the Bluetooth device.

I'm sorry, but I think all these tone generators do is show you roughly which frequencies you cannot hear, but a major component of hearing loss is volume or loudness.My hearing tests were performed in sound proof booths with multiple frequencies at fainter and fainter volumes, plus word recognition at normal speech volume. These booths block all outside sounds, but also any echoes inside.My word recognition had dropped from 100% in both ears (on tests from 8 years ago, using the same words) to 30% in one ear and 40% in the other.

It may not matter to anyone else, but at Costco, where I have bought my hearing aids since 2003, the audiologists are salaried and do not receive commissions for sales.

It appears that ChatGPT finds your opinion perfect!

OK, I have processed some of the interesting photos from the trip. I managed to use multiple shots taken over the duration of totality to create a composite image of the eclipse that's not too bad. The problem turned out to be getting a shot without cutting of part of the corona because I had so much trouble seeing my viewfinder during totality that I couldn't keep it centered.Maybe we can figure out a way to post a couple shots here if I remove my watermark.I started a nice collaboration with one of my nieces in Indiana to build a web portfolio for my images. She manages a cybersecurity depart at one of the universities and has built lots of webpages. I built one back in the mid-90s when the WWW was first taking off and HTML was a lot simpler. I got tired of maintaining it on unstable servers. A lot has changed in the last 20+ years.