Some photos from a visit to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve: Harbor Seals, Sea Stars, a Chiton, a Hermit Crab and a Sea Anemone.

(Previously)

(Recent Photos)

The Washington Post has a fun quiz that asks you 19 questions and then tells you which Democratic candidates you agree with the most. I took it last year and it said Warren, which I agreed with, but they have just updated it:

"Since we first published this guide in November, new candidates have joined the race and several others have dropped out. We have included everyone polling at least 1 percent in The Post’s national polling average. This new version adds questions on such topics as gun control and the criminal justice system."

Taking the quiz it now thinks I'm in the Yang Gang, even though I gave a thumbs down to universal basic income (my objection is that as much as I'd like $1,000 a month from the government I don't need it, there are much better things to spend it on). My full breakdown was Yang, Warren, Buttigeg, Sanders, Klobuchar, Steyer, Bloomberg, Biden and finally as a last resort Gabbard.

I think the problem with this sort of quiz is that it doesn't let you indicate how much you care about each issue. I'm totally fine with legalizing marijuana at the federal level but it's not the first thing I'd want any democratic president to work on. So I downloaded my results and fixed this by force-ranking the scale. My #1 was eliminating the electoral college and #19 was letting all prisoners vote (I agree with Sanders here, but he should work on it after he fixes the pot law which is #18 on my list). Once weighted on this scale my #1 issue is worth 1.00 points and #19 is just 0.05.

With this list Warren is restored to the top spot. In order I now have Warren, Yang, Buttigeg, Kloubuchar, Steyer, Sanders, Bloomberg, Biden and again if some form of green room food poisoning kills the top eight, Gabbard.

I'm a little surprised that Buttigeg is so high up this list and very surprised that Sanders (who I voted for in the last primary) is so low. Without any policy assistance from WaPo I'd go Warren, Sanders, Kloubuchar, Biden, Yang, Buttigeg, Steyer, Bloomberg and (sorry again) Gabbard. Although, full disclosure, if it would get rid of Trump I'd vote for a McConnell/Graham ticket.

If you want to try this and save a few minutes here's my spreadsheet. Add your quiz result in columns B through J and then rank the issues in column L from 1 to 19 where 1 is the most important to you.

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Back in 2016 I shared an idea for a tool that would automatically arrange meetings to maximize stretches of production time. As a marketing genius I called it Meeting Defragmenter.

I just read about Clockwise, a startup that is doing exactly this. Right now it supports GSuite and it looks like Office365 is coming soon. Can't wait to try it!

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Catfood Earth for Android 4.00 is available for download and is updating through the Google Play Store.

As with the 4.00 update for Windows all images have been remastered to 4K resolution. Earth for Android has also been updated to better support Android 10 (updates are faster and the settings layout looks much better). You'll need to grant location permission in settings to have Earth automatically center on your current location. It's also possible to set a center longitude manually (I find -90 works well for centering most of the Americas).

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Catfood WebCamSaver 3.20 is available for download.

WebCamSaver is a Windows screensaver that shows you a feed from open web cameras around the world. It also includes WebCamBrowser which allows you to explore the directory and launch a URL where you can control each cam.

Version 3.20 includes an updated list of working webcams - if you are an existing user this will replace any current list the first time you run the updated version.

(Previously)

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Catfood Earth 4.00 is available for download.

The main change is that all of the images shipped with Catfood Earth have been remastered to 4K resolution. This includes NASA Blue Marble 2 monthly images (which Catfood Earth interpolates daily) and the 2016 version of Black Marble (city lights at night). The Catfood Earth clouds service has been updated to full 4K resolution as well.

Earth 4.00 also includes an update to the 2019c version of the Time Zone Database.

As well as providing desktop wallpaper and a screensaver, Catfood Earth can render frames for any time and date. To celebrate the release of 4.00 I created the 4K video below which shows all of 2019, 45 minutes per frame, 9,855 frames. You'll see the shape of the terminator change over the course of the year (I always post the seasonal changes here: Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice). If you watch closely you'll also see changes in snow and ice cover and even vegetation over the course of the year.

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A timelapse portrait of San Francisco on New Year's Eve 2019:

The video features the view from Inspiration Point, The Palace of Fine Arts, Union Square, Crissy Field, The Ferry Building, Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park, Market Street and the sun setting over downtown shot from Twin Pearks.

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The Immigration Station at Angel Island is a fascinating piece of history. It's amazing how unwelcoming we were to Chinese immigrants while the station was in operation, and how ineffective all of the unpleasantness was. It's a racist mirror universe of Ellis Island. Get a guided tour if you can. I've visited the Immigration Station a couple of times and also hiked around the perimeter (which is spectacular), but this trip was the first time going up to the top. The Angel Island Company site suggests that this is a 6.5 mile hike but my GPS thinks it was 5 miles and so did the fact that we made it back in time for our planned ferry back to San Francisco.

Get off the boat, head right and up the hill to pick up the sign for Sunset Trail. This takes you up to a spur about half a mile from the top that is well signed for Mt. Livermore. There are a few picnic tables and an annoying mast that makes it hard to take the panorama that this peak is so obviously calling for. On the way back down head right at the first opportunity to follow North Ridge trail back to Ayala Cove.

Hike starts at: 37.868337, -122.434656. View in Google Earth.

(Hike Map)

I converted an ASP.NET MVC web application to 64-bit in order to use dlib and it immediately died with a System.BadImageFormatException (Could not load file or assembly 'xxx' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.)

Assuming I must have a stray wrong-bittedness something lying around I spent way to long with the assembly binding log viewer (Fuslogvw.exe) trying to figure out what I had messed up. But eventually I realized that Visual Studio was launching a 32-bit version of IIS Express to debug a 64-bit web application.

To fix this select Options from the Tools menu, expand Projects and Solutions, choose Web Projects and then check Use the 64-bit version of IIS Express for  web sites and projects. Problem solved.

(Probably shouldn't have this component in the web application - the plan longer term is to move it to an asynchronous process somewhere instead.)

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(Previously)

It's the start of Winter (or Summer if you're south of the Equator). Rendered in Catfood Earth, showing December 22 at 04:19 UTC.

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