Long day of driving (by my standards, anyway). At about noon Sunday I headed over to the Issaquah highlands west of Tiger Mountain and south of Lake Samammish to do a Craigslist pickup of a Lillberg loveseat. I brought the dog with the intent of a stop at the north end of the lake, at the expansive offleash area in Marymoor Park.

He surprised me by clearly recognizing the area as we drove in. To my knowledge this was only his second visit there since he’s been with us. I suppose it’s possible he might have gone there with shelter dogs but that seems somewhat unlikely as his shelter was based in Snohomish County.

All went well, and we returned by driving north through Woodinville to Kenmore around the north end of Lake Washington. I had reset the trip odometer as I set out and happened to glance at it somewhere about halfway through; it showed about 45 miles. So I expect we drove around 90 miles in total, arriving back home at about four.

2oz vodka
1oz white tequila
dash sweet vermouth
dash Rose’s limejuice

shake on ice, serve up

Rise of Flight remains in rotation. For many years I’d struggled with positioning the monitors and TrackIR such that I could get 180 degrees plus of vertical head motion. The issue stems from TrackIR’s default design position at the top (or bottom) of the monitors. I position my monitors with the bottom bezel about a foot up from the desk, placing the top bezel two feet up. My head position places my eyes more or less in line with the bottom bezel.

If the TrackIR clip is on a baseball-cap brim, as intended, then, when I look down, the TIR camera loses the reflection strips as I tilt my head down. adding reflection dots to the cap works to an extent.

Moving the TIR to the bottom of the screen allows the camera to see the head motion, but the hat brim then occludes the monitors.

I finally resolved this by placing the TIR at the front of the desk, angled up toward my face, and by mounting the TIR reflecting clip directly to the bridge of my nose and to my forehead with cello tape. Experimenting, I have learned that I could also just hold it on my face with my eyeglasses.

However, my eyeglasses don’t provide optimum visual correction to the screen and I prefer to not wear them while working in that setup. I suppose the resolution here, at least in the interim, is to buy or find a cheap sunglass frame and pop the lenses.

The wizened MS SW FFB2 is still absolutely perfect, to my surprise. I have a CH pedal set but for whatever reason I have found them to be hard to calibrate. I’ll bring them online in a couple weeks, I think.

Viv just turned on the tube and it dropped right into a headline rebroadcast of the fucking “it was a rock” Pasco police shooting. She managed to change the channel before the fucking money shot but good god. When she asked me why I was yelling at her to change the channel I had to explain what had happened to her, a task I did not relish. She has heard nothing about it and has a well-formed, fully earned distaste to hearing me rant about social justice issues.

aaargh. we are under attack by the small black ants known around here as ‘sugar ants’. they showed up very early this year and have proved unusually persistent. i believe this is an unfavorable augry for their future fecundity.

Out my window, I can hear one of the resident hummingbirds performing his mating dives. The dives produce a birdcall which is actually produced by the bird’s feathers as he comes out of a high-speed dive.

This particular fellow is acoustically interesting because he seems to have the ability to change the pitch and timbre of the call, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. I suppose it could be that he’s attracting conversation from a member of a different species.

And a successful test sortie in Rise of Flight after a catastrophic machine failure about six months ago. Still need to twiddle with this and that controller driver setting but on the whole satisfactory.

And oh yeah, finally stumbling my way through Vollmann’s Imperial, years late. Gotta pick up the current Harper’s for the second Fukushima piece.

It’s not holding my attention much, I suppose in common with or as inversion of The Ice Shirt. For whatever reason, I don’t share Bill’s fascination with extreme landscapes, so his stuff like this that dwells on the intolerable environment is just a slog. I can see the shimmering figure of this book as a Seven Dreams emissary but don’t think it’s characterized as such.

Tease for Ross’ “Picture.” Oh my god. Hell yes.