Music Monday: Paul Simon (and Art Garfunkel) – Kodachrome
Posted By RichC on April 5, 2021
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Happy Easter 2021 – He is risen. He is risen indeed.
Posted By RichC on April 4, 2021
For Christians, there’s no more celebrated day than Easter … for without a risen Savior, no other day in Christianity would matter. He is risen indeed!
BUT … why does the day always change? I mean, we’ve assigned December 25th to celebrate Christmas and most other holidays on our calendar at least fall in the same month? So why does Easter have to move around so much? Like a birthday, etc … there must have been “one” day on the calendar that Christ rose … although it was a Sunday. Hmm?
Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon.
A look at some Jewish and Christian history helps to shine a “little” more light on the subject, but reading a BBC magazine article makes one realize just how politically charged and difficult it was for churches, let alone governments and countries, to come to an agreement on when to celebrate Easter … even if they were all using our relatively modern (1582) Gregorian calendar. It’s no wonder they couldn’t come up with one fixed date.
I’m sure that I’m not the only one who still struggles with the March through April wide span of days … the earliest being March 22nd and the latest being April 25th. That is quite the spread … but why?
It has to do with the moon …
The moon’s cycles played an important role in ancient times, which is how the date of the Jewish holiday of Passover was determined. Eventually, Christians decided to observe Easter during the same time as Passover, with early celebrations occurring on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring.
The Paschal Full Moon and Easter
The date of Easter—a moveable holiday—coincides with the Paschal Full Moon. However, the Paschal Full Moon may not be the exact same date as the actual astronomical full moon. The date can vary as much as two days from that of the actual full moon, although the two intersect more often than not.
Archive: Granddaughter catch-up photos from this past week
Posted By RichC on April 3, 2021
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Tech Friday: A now rare Internet connectivity issue & speedtest
Posted By RichC on April 2, 2021
We have not had many Internet connectivity issues since switching to Cincinnati Bell Fioptic fiber and then added a mesh network instead of traditional router (although the Netgear Nighthawk was pretty good – we move it to the condo). 
Perhaps a lot has to do with companies building out the infrastructure with fewer buggy devices – but knock-on-wood – our current set-up has been pretty reliable.
This past week was an exception in that something happened on 3/29 that made the morning connection sluggish. I suspected something on my end (it wasn’t) but by the time I started the diagnosing, all was back to normal … and since it has been a while between speed tests, I was curious. It’s amazing what a couple decades can do in technology … although 50/20Mbps today connected through my home network is not 162/124Mbps as it was in 2019 or 267/116Mbps in 2018 (I blame smarthome and IOT devices)?
An Akron/Canton CAK photo from my Palm Treo in 2006 #TBT
Posted By RichC on April 1, 2021
While cleaning up one of my old Flickr accounts where my Palm Treo 700p photos were backed up, 
I stumbled across one of the first photos with it I took and posted to this blog – June 2006.
Even though the camera was lacking by today’s cellphone standards, I still think the Palm PDA turned Treo cellphone did a pretty decent job with this Akron-Canton Airport (CAK) evening photo and a few others as I traveled around Ohio … and so decided to include it now, 15 years later for Throwback Thursday #TBT.
By the way … have a prank-free April Fools Day… curiosity of the EV company, Voltswagen! (the clip below is from last week … and I’m still unsure if it was intended as a joke???)
An etymology share: “What Time Is ‘Noon?”
Posted By RichC on March 31, 2021
When was ‘noon’ a time that was later in the day … 
like 3PM? Let’s check with merriam-webster.com:
There’s something aesthetically pleasing about the word noon. Its palindromic spelling feels appropriate for the middle of the day, when the sun is directly overhead and the hands on the clock are pointed upward in a straight line. It’s even spelled with letters found more or less in the middle of the alphabet.
But there was once a time when noon referred to a different time of day—and that fact is reflected in the word’s etymology.
Noon takes a path through Middle and Old English, where nōn denoted the ninth hour from sunrise. That word derives from the Latin nonus, meaning “ninth,” related to novem, the word for the number nine. If you mark sunrise at approximately 6:00 in the morning, that puts noon at around what we would now call 3:00 P.M. Romans called what we now call noon meridiem, literally the “middle of the day”; hence our designations A.M. (for ante meridiem) and P.M. (post meridiem) for the hours before and after the noon hour.
After 6 days, the Ever Given is moving and the Suez Canal is open
Posted By RichC on March 30, 2021
The news that has captured much of the of the world’s interest this week was the very large Ever Given container ship lodged sideways in the Suez Canal by 
40+ mph winds (and perhaps some mechanical issues?). The “Empire State Building” size ship snarled traffic for 6 days surprising most people as to just how difficult it was to refloat and move back into the channel. Thankfully on Monday it was finally freed.
It wasn’t until I saw the navigable channel illustration (right), did I understand how the ship was wedged in so tight. It was still shocking that even the largest tugs struggled to pull it loose and only after days of dredging and waiting on tides. It was also eye-opening to see just how much of the world economy in our JIT (Just In Time) manufacturing, inventories and supply culture we all depend on, especially now that businesses are starting to open after nearly o year of COVID19 shutdowns.
Music Monday: The Band and Kodachrome photography
Posted By RichC on March 29, 2021
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Worked on some spring yard clean-up over the weekend
Posted By RichC on March 28, 2021
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Business change, server updates, an idiom & a friend’s new toy
Posted By RichC on March 27, 2021
This past week was an on and off work week. I’ve been struggling to update software and the latest Linux flavor on an old 
server while telling myself “I’m getting too old for this.” Right or wrong attitude, I think keeping up with fast-paced technology change is a young person’s game.
On the plus side, a client that I thought left, came back and wanted me to recover their account, emails and old website … but in the same week, another long time customer has decided they were ready for a redesign of their website and asked me to transfer their data. Over the years I knew that I should have been recommending a CMS platform, but when customers are happy, why rock the boat?
Interesting fact
The origin of the idiom ‘rock the boat’ is attributed to American statesman, lawyer and politician William Jennings Bryan, who was famously quoted “The man who rocks the boat ought to be stoned when he gets back on shore.” In this 1914 quote, it is evident that Bryan was referring to those who stir up trouble.
Desultory - des-uhl-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee
- lacking in consistency, constancy, or visible order, disconnected; fitful: desultory conversation.
- digressing from or unconnected with the main subject; random: a desultory remark.