Bomb cyclone and ESS

So, I was in the bathtub when the fan went off.

The lights, too.

Very quiet and peaceful.  Since I have the second best view in Port Alberni, I could see that everything north of Dry Creek was without power.

The computer was out, of course.  And my old phones rely on wifi, so they weren't going to get anything.  But the new cell has some data on the contract, so I was able to confirm that, yes, Emergency Support Services had been activated.  Not for the power outage as much as the fact that Highway 4 was closed.  A tree had fallen on a logging truck.  ("Revenge!  Revenge!")

So I found some clothes, grabbed a number of flashlight type tools, and one of my ESS colleagues kindly picked me up and we headed for Echo Centre (as usual).  The usual bedlam ensued, but we were ready for the crowds in short order.  The Powers-That-Be determined that we had more than enough volunteers on hand, so I was among those tapped to go home and get ready for a midnight shift.  As we were leaving, there was a woman in a car who sounded rather desperate and wanted to know when it would be open.  We told her that the doors would be opening up in a few minutes.

Mind you, we also noted that there was a tremendously strong smell of marijuana smoke from the car ...

It was also evident that a lot of people (and companies) had *no* preparation for *any* kind of emergency.  (Come and join us as volunteers!  You get training!  On how to get you and your family ready!)

Midnight shift never came.  Nobody showed up (including our pothead), and the site was deactivated around 11 pm.

MGG - 5.46 - HWYD - 24 Sussex Drive

As mentioned, I didn't get to do much in terms of tourist stuff, since the tourist type attractions were only open during the hours that I was actually in front of a seminar.  So about the only thing that I could do in terms of seeing the sites around the different places where I was conducting seminars, was at night.  As it happened, I could not sleep properly when I was out doing the seminars.  I know, because it happened even when I was teaching in California, or Calgary, that it wasn't jet lag that made me unable to sleep.  I have always theorized that I wasn't able to sleep when I wasn't in the same bed with Gloria.  I would generally get about two hours sleep per night, while I was doing the seminars.  I do remember one particular seminar where I know that I got a total of two hours sleep for the entire *week*.  Most of the time, conducting the seminars, I was running on adrenaline.  But this did mean that I had plenty of time in the middle of the night if there was anything nearby that I could walk to.  So I would walk around things.  I could not go into museums or famous buildings, but I could look *at* the famous buildings, and sometimes parks or other natural features of beauty.  When I was teaching in Sydney, Australia, I pretty much mapped out all of the trails and roads on North Head.

I did scare the pants off the Prime Minister's security detail at 24 Sussex Drive.  I had taken a picture of the stone gate posts, illustrating the fact that they no longer had the 24 Sussex Drive address displayed on them, when I became aware of a rustling in the bushes.  I bid the officer a good morning, and he bid me a good morning back.

I had other experiences wandering around looking at famous buildings.  It was interesting, in Washington, DC, to see the number of homeless people who had semi-permanent encampments.  One of them, and seemingly one of the largest, most organized, and most prepared for the cold weather at the time when I was wondering around, was right across the street from the Treasury Building, which I found highly ironic.  I wandered around the Parliamentary precincts, in Ottawa, although I knew that the security detail for Parliament Hill had a very sophisticated video surveillance system.  This was one of the places where I set up my camera, which had a self timer on it, to catch the buildings, with myself peeking in one corner.  As noted elsewhere, this was the origin of Gloria noting that I looked very gnome-like in these pictures.  I think that was mostly because of the garden gnome that traveled around with pictures of him in various tourist locations, slightly prior to, but around the time that I was teaching doing the seminars.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/11/mgg-546-hwyd-trivially-easy.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: TBA

Nahum 1:3

The Lord is very patient but great in power; He makes sure that the guilty are always punished.

Hiding in plain sight

If you look closely, it's not photoshopped, and it's not a lesson in camouflage.  It's easy to miss things in plain sight.  This has sleeping room for at least a dozen, plus a common or cooking area, and possibly a wind barrier (or possibly laundry).  It's quite extensive.

Seals, penguins, problems, and humility

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a photographer from National Geographic was sent to Antarctica to photograph leopard seals.

You may think of seals as cute, and possibly even cuddly.  Leopard seals are much larger than Harbour seals, Harp seals, or even Pacific sea lions.  Leopard seals are one of the alpha predators of the Antarctic seas, possibly only topped by orcas.  Therefore, the photographer was somewhat nervous about getting into the water with these massive predators.  He describes the leopard seal's head as being twice as wide as that of a grizzly bear.  And I would imagine he would know.

So, he gets into the water.  And a leopard seal immediately comes up, and, in a threat display, opens its jaws wide.  And completely surrounds his camera.  He got an excellent picture of the inside of its mouth and throat.

Rather than attacking, the seal then swam away and came back with a penguin in its jaws.  It then released the penguin, very near the photographer. The penguin swam away.  And, of course, the photographer, not being interested in penguin activity, didn't pursue it.  The seal swam away, came back with another penguin, and, again, released it.  This went on for some time.  And then the seal started catching penguins, and shaking and tiring them until, when the seal released them near the photographer, the penguin swam away much more slowly.  The photographer still wasn't interested in the penguins.  The seal kept us up for a while, and then eventually started actually drowning the penguins before it came back and presented them to the photographer.  The seal actually placed dead penguins on the photographer's camera or head.  (Some of the seal's actions seemed to indicate that it might have seen the camera *as* the photographer's head.  It's intriguing the the seal was taking this much trouble for an entity it couldn't even identify, let alone be familiar with.  It doesn't Understand What this thing in the water is.  It's difficult to understand, and dangerous to anthropomorphize, what the seal might have been thinking.  But it's fairly obvious that it wanted to ensure that the photographer was fed, and even trained in terms of how to hunt penguins, and that penguins were an important food source.)

At one point, the seal started to make threat displays, and the photographer was a bit worried that the seal was getting exasperated with him.  But when he looked around, he found that *another* leopard seal was behind him, and obviously the first seal was threatening the second seal, and warning the second seal not to attack the photographer.

Because the seal kept coming back with penguins, it actually did help the photoshoot to a certain extent, and the principle photography was completed in only two days.  However, an awful lot of the pictures would have been of the same seal bringing and releasing penguins to the photographer.  This probably had very little value in terms of the original magazine assignment.  The seal was behaving somewhat abnormally (at least, in terms of the assignment), and therefore an awful lot of the pictures that were taken could not be used in the commissioned article.

As I say, this happened some years back.  Recently, because of reposting on social media, the story has gone viral.  (I found a version of it on Instagram, and tracked down an article closer to the original at National Geographic.)  Many people have seen it, and many people have commented on the various postings and repostings based upon this story and the visuals from it.  A lot of people think that the story is cute.

And it is cute.  Here is a photographer who is afraid of being attacked by this alpha predator. And instead, the alpha predator attempts to teach the photographer to hunt and eat penguins. 

Not only was the story cute, but it's also rather sweet.  Here is a "vicious" alpha predator, taking time and energy away from its constant need to feed itself (partly to maintain the level of energy necessary for pursuing this constant hunting behaviour, but also to maintain the level of calories necessary to survive such a cold environment).

So, yes.  The story is both sweet and cute.  And it's nice to see that people appreciate that. But there is another lesson here, which nobody seems to have noticed.

How often do we, in our pursuit of solving or fixing a problem, fail to understand what the problem or the situation actually is?  How often do we, in our attempts to solve a problem, sometimes on someone else's behalf, have the humility to recognise that we may not have the right solution, and may not even have identified the right problem.

(For example, we may be so fixated on getting a photoshoot of vicious leopard seals that we fail to notice the importance of documenting altruistic behaviour on the part of a loepard seal.  But I digress.)

We are very proud of our political systems; business, commercial, and financial systems; our science, our technology, our analytical superiority.  Our ability to fix problems.  To identify problems and come up with solutions.  And how often is it that we don't understand the situation, or the problem, at all?  In this story of the seal and the photographer, the real issue was that the photographer did not need lunch, but close range examples of leopard seals actual behaviour in the wild.  The seal had absolutely no understanding of the situation and the requirements.  And was solving a problem that was not a problem at all.

How often are we doing the same thing?  How often do we think that we are solving a problem, only to solve the *wrong* problem, or a problem which isn't a problem at all?  How often do we not have the humility to realize that our answer to the problem is completely wrong, based on our ridiculously limited understanding of the problem and situation?

Mark 3:5

Jesus was angry as he looked around at them, but at the same time he felt sorry for them, because they were so stubborn and wrong. Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and it became well again.

How often does God regard us in this same way?  That what we are doing, and thinking that we are helping God, that we are supporting What God wants us to do, when we don't understand the situation at all?  We are solving the wrong problem.  We are helping God when God doesn't need our help in that way.

We think that we are supporting God.  And God is looking at us in the same way that all of those Internet viewers are seeing these repostings.  God must be thinking that we are kind of cute.  But He must be somewhat bemused, and maybe a little frustrated, that we insist on helping in our own way.  That we have decided what help God needs.  That political thought, or business thought, or financial thought, or scientific thought, or discoveries, or technologies, or systems are what God needs.

Sometimes we even think that we are protecting God from attack.  When God needs no protection at all.

Do we have the humility to accept that, maybe, what we are doing is just not that important.  That what we really need to do is to sit and, for once, just listen to God.  To just be with God.  To be in relationship with God.  Just to be with God *before* we decide what it is that God needs.

Otherwise, what we are doing to help God?  Maybe nothing that God actually needs.  And maybe what we are doing for God is actually hindering.  And even possibly annoying.  When He is the one who actually understands what the real issues and problems are.

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

MGG - 5.46 - HWYD - Trivially easy

He's a colleague in the virus research community, and we've known each other for years.  He is annoying because he thinks he knows everything.  What's even *more* annoying is that he's generally correct: he does know pretty much everything there is to know about malware.  And when he challenges you on a point, he's usually right.  And you're usually wrong.  I have only ever won one argument with him.

As Windows was becoming more dominant, and the Windows Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) file format was becoming more important, I made the statement that it was trivially easy to embed a virus in any Windows OLE format file.  (I don't know that it's as much an actual file format as the way that Windows itself deals with files.  And there's a difference between linking and embedding.  But that's tech stuff.)  In any case, I said it was trivially easy.  He said it wasn't.

Other people joined the argument.  He stuck to his guns.  And then he disappeared from the argument.  When he disappears from an argument, that's the time to worry.  Because he is going away, researching the topic, and when he comes back he is going to nail your hide to the wall.  Eventually, he came back.  And said, "It is trivially easy to embed a virus in any OLE file."  And provided an example to prove the point.  So I won that one.  (Even though he never admitted that I won  :-)  But it was a great relief to finally not be wrong in an argument with him.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/11/mgg-545-hwyd-street-vendors.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/11/mgg-546-hwyd-24-sussex-drive.html

Ezekiel 18:29

And you [...] say, "What the Lord does isn't right."  You think my way isn't right, do you?  It is your way that isn't right.