06 September 2015

Cowabunga

Listening to: Charli XCX, “Need Ur Luv” and Carly Rae Jepsen “Run Away With Me.” Summer pop struts, one featuring a saxophone. Also, the new Carly Rae album is ridiculous good.

Today’s Surf Report: Scary waves, low standing up to tumble ratio, Jon couldn’t make it past the breakers. Knocked silly multiple times, the end. Generally speaking, when I speak about “surfing,” it is of the web variety. But every once in awhile, usually in August, I take to the outdoors for my surfing.

You grow up in California and don’t surf and people are like shocked. I’m sorry, none of my friends growing up surfed okay? Like literally nobody. Even though we lived so close to the beach. It wasn’t until a summer in our mid-twenties that we got together and started learning. I never got really good, truth to tell, any good at all, but it’s fun to sit out there on a board, the ocean all clear around you, even if nothing is happening.

We always go to 11th street in Del Mar, which involves walking down across train tracks and then down this semi-steep dirt cliff. The first time we went it was scary but now it’s more mundane. It feels cool actually, to walk to a “secret” spot. The good thing about 11th street is that even though the beach is sandwiched between the touristy areas of Torrey Pines and 15th Street, the intimidating access point keeps it unpopulated.

Every day I’ve been checking the surf report and really, I have no idea what “overlapping pair of primary SW-SSW and secondary SSE Southern Hemi swells hold. Meanwhile, small shorter period WSW and SSE tropical swells mix in, along with minimal NW windswell.” Hah, ooookay. All I’m looking for is what the air and water temperatures are. The past couple weeks it’s been high seventies and low seventies, respectively. Having such warm water is pretty glorious. I’ve even been able to consistently catch a few waves this summer, so maybe I'm finally getting the hang out of it! Surfing: Five out of five stars.

What does suck is post nasal drip. Like if you get tossed around a lot, which I did the past two days, your head fills up with seawater and then an hour or two after you exit the beach a waterfall comes out of your nose. No warning, nothing, it just comes right out. It’s not snot or anything gross, just seawater that’s been lodged in your brain. But it’s still quite the experience. Nature’s Neti Pot I guess? Also I got flipped around so much today I gave up after half an hour, went ashore, and then found seaweed in my shorts while eating lunch two hours later. Whoopee.

I don't know how I just saw this right now, orcas chasing a speedboat. I'm so behind it's frightening.

The other thing I’ve been doing besides finally going outdoors — I’m still pasty, just less so — is getting my photo situation fixed up. I remember years ago when some tech people were saying that photo management was going to be the next big thing. And boy were they right! Ever since all the Internet goliaths announced their photo management solutions, I’ve been researching and debating which one(s) to use.

Before I just imported everything into iPhoto, sorted stuff into event and yearly folders, and left it at that. I had some Flickr accounts too, mainly as legacies. My photo collection felt like a nice mix of historical documents and useless fodder, but now with camera phones it's tipped way over into “too many shots of everything” territory.

Yeah, I still pick out the stuff I want to share for my personal moblog but otherwise all those photos just sit on the computer taking up space. And space, and space, and more space! I moved everything off to an external drive last year -- 130 gigs of photos stretching all the way back to high school -- but I knew that was only temporary. Enter iCloud Photo Library. I’d been waiting for a new computer (the old one barely opened that huge of a Photos file) and faster wifi to implement my photo plan. Da-dun, the big day arrived this weekend!

Well, turns out that shoving 57,250 photos to iCloud takes awhile. So the dream continues. In the meantime, here’s my photo solution:
  • Paid $3.99/month for 200 GB to use for iCloud Photo Library
  • Use Google Photos, unlimited setting, for cloud backup
  • Have everything on two externals too, one that goes with me, one that stays at home
I’ve discovered that one backup is not enough. Those in the know suggest two backups of everything, like two offline and two online. So a total of four. That means I’m actually behind. And I thought I was already paranoid. I pretty much believe in having backups for everything, up to and including friends. I mean, the most paranoid billionaire in literature, S. R. Hadden from Contact, essentially made a backup of The Machine so that when it blew up, he had another waiting for Jodie Foster to ride through some wormholes. Pretty genius. So yeah, back that shit up!

Oh, and I started clean with my new laptop. Instead of porting over all my old settings and programs from my Macbook, I started super fresh. New laptop, new life right? It took most of a whole day to get everything right but as I discovered, the most time consuming part was my Mac Mail folders. It’s embarrassing but I generally still rely on offline Mac Mail to do my email organizing. Even though I imported most of the important folders, I know it’s time to take my email habits straight to the Gmail interface. Hello IMAP, good bye POP.

The latter half of this post brought to you from my future android body. Let the cybernetic takeover begin.