Starting the second-last Sunday of July the construction industry in Quebec goes on vacation for two weeks.

Creating a Lens out of Fluids. Artists and physicists should talk more.

V.S. Naipaul about his cat (and also about grief) in The New Yorker:

The kitten was absolutely terrified. It had had an up-and-down life for many days and had no idea what was coming next. It tried now to run away, though there was no place for it to run to. It dug its little claws into the screen door and raced up to the ceiling of the utility room. That was as far as it could go, and I reached up and brought him down. Something extraordinary then happened. It was as though, feeling my hand, he felt my benignity. He became calm, then he became content; he was happy to be in my hand (not much bigger than him), so that in a few seconds, guided by a cat’s instinct alone, he moved from terror to trust. He ran up my arm to my shoulder; when I introduced him to some of my lunchtime guests, he sought to do the same with them. I knew nothing about cats. But he was easy to like.

I have had my time among the cats, and his words strike a chord. If I hadn’t suddenly become very allergic to cats in my mid-20s there might very well be a cat resident here now.

 No More Saviors, by Society If Dads:

A savior is supposed to do something no one else can, otherwise their semi-divine services wouldn’t be needed. They supposedly have more of something—faith, vision, power, expertise, authority, connections, plans—than others and therefore can do more alone than the collective they promise to rescue and redeem. They are not exactly part of the group they would deliver from peril—they stand apart in their greater capacity and knowledge and foresight: they are not quite among, they lead, speaking for, not with. The problem is that there are no such people on earth.

I came through this doorway via other means, but I agree: salvation lies in the group.

Homemade pesto (Heartbeet basil, Brighton Clover Farm pine nuts, Riverview Country Market Parmesan and garlic) with Island strawberry and basil soda. Perfect summer supper.

My mind often turns back to May 26, 2020, when Hon. Peter Bevan-Baker opened the then-“emergency session” of the Legislative Assembly with a question to the Premier:

Leader of the Opposition: My first question is to the Premier and it’s about how you’re doing. It’s been tough to work under these circumstances for all of us, but particularly tough for those who have added burdens related to their jobs.

So, Premier, how are you feeling?

Speaker: The hon. Premier.

Premier King: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.

I’m feeling fine. I don’t feel any differently than any Prince Edward Islander does. I think we’ve all been through a difficult time, we’ve all had difficult jobs and mine is probably more public than most, but I’ve been doing fine.

Like all of you in here, I worry more about my family than I do about how I’m feeling, but very kind of you to ask. I’m doing well and I hope you are, too.

“So, Premier, how are you feeling?” was such a generous way to open the session; while things got considerably more debatey later that same day and, indeed, over the following 26, that exchange established a bedrock of caring and compassion on which everything else was built.

Last month I generated a self-signed certificate like this:

openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out example.com.crt -key example.com.key

Yesterday, a month later, things depending on this certificate started to break, and I realized it was because the certificate had expired: apparently the default expiration date is a month.

So I regenerated it, adding -days 3650 to set the expiration date 10 years into the future.

openssl req -new -x509 -days 3650 -nodes -out example.com.crt -key example.com.key

I double-checked the expiration date with:

openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in example.com.crt

And was surprised to see this returned:

notAfter=Jul 19 18:42:13 2030 GMT

Surely something must be broken, I thought: 2030 isn’t in 10 years.

Oh, right, 2030 is in 10 years.

I’m continuing to assemble the pieces of my “stream the sounds of Prince Edward Island to the web” project, and I’ve reached the stage where I need to buy a microphone.

The Pisound box I’ll be using has a single unbalanced ¼” TRS line-level input, without phantom power, with input impedance of 100kΩ.

I’m looking for a microphone to plug into this box, a mic that will work well for picking up sounds over a wide range of frequencies, with a wide polar pattern.

Because there’s no phantom power, I’d need an external source of phantom power to use a condenser microphone (which is fine); if the microphone has an XLR connector I’d need a way to convert to TRS (which is also fine).

I’m certain I have some audio gearheads in my readership: any recommendations?

Two small victories for Oliver today: first, he’s now become the “quick, jump out of the car and pick up some new potatoes from that roadside stand” point person in the family; second, by telling me that buying both a bag of potatoes and a bag of firewood (down below the potatoes in the same stand, both were $5) would have cost $10, he outed himself as knowing more math than he usually lets on.

On the Amazon product description for the Powerextra 120 Inch Projector Screen:

Tips: pure white wall may work better than the screen, it’s recommended to use when don’t have pure white wall or in outdoors, please turn off the light when use it.

Kudos for telling the truth.