Kaimusailing

Oops, last post mislabeled the photo. It is not of the sunset near the American Legion, it is of the sunset over Somers Cove Marina. Well, it’s a better photo.
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My sunset photos were being ruined by Samsung’s image enhancement algorithms. Some say it’s AI, but nothing is AI yet. It is a fancy set of algorithms that modify the image data and on the way they lose some of the red color in the sunsets. I thought it was red eye reduction being applied to a landscape scene, but the algorithms are much more sophisticated, they will not use red eye reduction unless they actually identify eyes or faces.
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The phone’s camera has gotten a lot of praise from those who view my pictures. Oh, you’ve got a great phone camera. Ahem, there is the Andy factor. It is hard to overcome a bad camera, but a bad cameraman can overcome a good camera.
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It is hard to circumvent Samsung’s image manipulation. I tried sending the image to the laptop and using GIMP to try to correct it. Very awkward. If I set the camera to save the image as RAW, then I would have a chance working with the RAW data, but that would still involve transferring the image to the laptop. I would like to do it on the phone. Maybe an app would help.
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Setting the phone camera to PRO mode helps. I tried a photo edit app that didn’t help. I opened another app called Snapseed and it enabled me to correct an existing photo. I used HDR mode to restore dynamic range and boost saturation, basically undoing what Samsung was doing. So the photo on the last post was a modified image. I like how the app works and I played around with other images.
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I could enhance other photos that other people had made, including one of my grandson, Ike, in Oxford, UK. I took a stab at it and thought it made a difference, but I wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of commentary afterwards. Ike’s dad said I made it look like he was a GI crawling through the trenches. It did not enhance the photo, I have to experiment with photos of people, and now maybe they will run away if I want to take a snapshot of them.
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I took a day off, just a small ride on the bike. 97 in the boat cabin. Not as bad as St Marys, Georgia. The bike riders of the Tour de France got a rest day too. My ride was a short one to the wine shop. Another older gentleman showed up on his bike. Cheater. Electric bike. No pain and no gain. I bet I could outrace him, but it looked like a high end model.
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The election, the conventions, it’s all coming up. In the TV world it is a season to make a lot of money. Rallies, interviews, photo ops, debates. It looks like both major parties have latched onto candidates that have major flaws. It is a result of our political apparatus. The right and left wingers control their parties and vote in the primaries for the nominees. As a result we have what we have.
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The local elections of city council members resulted in the mayor retaining one of her councilmen but lost a councilwoman. She will gain a local businessman as a new council member. He is competent and will be OK. It seems there is a divisive issue, a zoning variance that will allow low income housing units to be built in the city near Somerset Ave. There are already plenty of low income housing units in town. Politically it might be an issue of getting grant money and putting it to work. Crisfield only has about 2400 voters, and they pay taxes to the city while others just over the line do not pay to the city.
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I did meet the mayor while out on Cove Street and she gave me her handout, a list of accomplishments. I said Crisfield doesn’t need anything, it is the one place that has nothing, and people will come here for that, to get away from everything else. After the election I finally looked at her list and it was padded with some accomplishments listed 2 or 3 times. Most people in the city know she has accomplished a lot in a short time. She is a local girl. She wants to have a convention center to bring more people to Crisfield. Not a bad idea. Conventioneers will have to fly into Salisbury though. Ocean City snaps those people up.
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I cannot sleep. Not sure why. I looked at recipes and boat plans. What is the hurricane situation? Then I got the idea about something that has been bugging me. I watched a video about the Yugoslavian double agent who was the prototype for James Bond. In the video were scenes of the Brownshirts, the Nazis, and their attack on the public. They had flags. It’s the flags that bother me. Here in Crisfield we have a lot of Trump 2024 flags everywhere. Can it be the same? Is this Trumpism a form of fascism? I have said no previously, but then I had a chilling thought. Gun violence, bump stocks not illegal, bump stocks are a tactical weapon, it’s like pieces of a jig saw puzzle that are confusing unless you already know the layout. No matter who wins the presidency this fall, our nation is headed to a time of internal conflict escalation.
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The bike had another puncture of the rear tire. It seems to be happening about every 2 weeks or so. I cannot find any pattern, the punctures are random, the tire itself is perfect, they are less than a year old. I have gone through 4 inner tube replacements. I hope the latest tube lasts long enough that new spares arrive in time. The old Serotta is still available as back up.
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Donald Trump is shot while giving a rally just before the national convention to anoint him as the next president. He is given a glancing head wound, just inches from fatality, while one of his staunch admirers is killed with a bullet to the head. The shooter, who was killed right away, was a registered Republican. Very strange. Not so strange in the current crisis with mass shootings. Guns kill. People kill with guns.
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We are all at risk. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is get a seaworthy boat ready and self sufficient, not that hard to do. When you go out and sail on it you can come back to port or continue on somewhere else. Where would I go? In the first place, I either have to go from here North to sail out of Delaware Bay or South to sail out of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. There are military installations all around the bay, so if we are attacked, there might be no way out.
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If I retreat to Georgia/Florida, where the world’s biggest nuclear submarine base is located, I’d better get out to sea, that base would be #1 on a lot of lists of nuclear targets. Get out to sea, and where do you want to go?
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Maybe humanity has been driven by paranoia, but it must be built in, the early one celled creatures avoid anything that irritates them, it’s built into the fabric of living, and as they pass on their DNA, etc., their progeny will also avoid irritation. Toleration is how we adapt to irritation. Eventually we all want to get away from our neighbors, we can’t tolerate them. And they aren’t so sad to see us go. Humanity spreads out and contracts in places as it continues to find new open areas where humanity has not yet set foot. So, if you go to sea, where can you set foot?
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The heat wave has me in a strange cycle of not getting to sleep until very late and then not getting up, sleeping soundly in the morning when the temperatures are benign. So, breakfast is at lunch, and the cycle continues. If I wanted to get anything done it would be best to do it in the morning, but I can’t because I’m asleep.
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My week was one of a peculiar vertigo that I remember Eloisa dealing with, with something called Epley maneuvers. Well, that didn’t work for me. The symptom is dizziness when moving your head. Sit up, dizzy, two minutes later, OK. Lay down, dizzy, two minutes later OK. No nausea, maybe danger of falling and hitting something.
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This goes back to last week when I fell off my chair at dinner at Cuddily’s. I thought I had been partying too much, but I continued later that night after I had been taking a 30 minute break on the floor. What was it? There is BPPV, a form of vertigo that is a function of loose calcium fragments in the inner ear. Maybe a virus. Maybe I hit my head. But I didn’t hit my head until I already had the symptom, a feeling that I was going to pass out, and then, thud, I’m on the deck, or in this case, the dining floor, tile, not carpet.
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The concern from the women was about me hitting my head, landing on my shoulder, and not knowing what happened. They didn’t call 911 or do anything like that. If this happens to someone near you, call 911. The EMT’s know how to check for appropriate body functions. I guess the women didn’t want outsiders coming in and checking body functions.
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Cornelia Marie had bought a new car with the help of her mother, Cuddily. I wanted to see it and we went out with Nori the Wonder Dog, who had trouble with the new rear windows, they kept her from wagging her head out the window. Where would we go, the Legion?, there is room there to walk or run the dog and we did so. We sat at a picnic table and I contacted the other members of the Bad Crowd, and they came and showed up. What a wonderful afternoon.
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Cornelia Marie’s old car is a real soldier of cars. It will probably go on for a long time more, but right now it has a brake problem and crustacean on the starboard side, the result of enthusiastic driving at night. There is also an oil leak and almost 250,000 miles. We can’t let that car go, maybe to the, gasp, crusher. It has a tow bar and can haul boats in and out, let’s retain her.
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My old insurance co. won’t give me a quote because I’ve let my policy lapse for more than 61 days. Could be 61 months. I got my quotes from around the internet, and some phone time, and it’s just under a 100 dollars a month for an elderly new insuree with an old vehicle that only has liability.
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Over the weekend President Joe Biden quit his race for another term and endorsed Kamala Harris, his Vice President, as the new nominee. Someone said if this was a script for the “West Wing” it would be rejected as too over the top. Crazy politics.
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I’m intrigued by this scenario. A woman who has Jamaican and South Asian ancestry and has come up through the ranks as an attorney and prosecutor is facing a white male who has been impeached twice and convicted of felonies, you couldn’t make this up, but it was there in the cards, wasn’t it?
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Obama, blame him, audacious, run the gauntlet, waste your presidency on health care, but he did a good job on that. Is Kamala Harris another gauntlet runner, maybe with a different agenda, shift the emphasis away from giving everything to the rich folks, get ordinary folks some help, it doesn’t snowball from the top, we have seen, maybe it can snowball from the bottom.
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The image is another landscape photo modified by the HDR Scape filter. It is part of the Snapseed app.