What happened in 2023?

  • I got less regular about writing here semi-regularly. 😑

  • A bunch of work on climate change – 82 paper letters, 12 emails, 2 protests, phone calls, in-person meetings with local politicians, and submissions against LNG expansion in BC. I didn’t meet my target of 110 letters; however, I’m starting to have second thoughts about those kinds of targets for personal goals.

  • Two new hardware hacking projects: tree tomography and the one-pixel camera. Finished up the weather vane; no nesting from the chickadees this year. Seismometer set up. Lots of small random things.

  • A year of working at Wyvern! I think the infrastructure codebase is in good shape.

  • Health was a mix: nothing terribly serious, but COVID plus two sinus infections. Bleah.

  • Walking: 6.8 km/day average for the year. Down from 7.0 last year. Obviously this is the end times.

  • Gave up on hosting my own email and delegated it to EasyDNS.ca. Recommended.

  • Started learning Italian. È molto divertentimento!

  • Nature: 475 checklists for eBird (vs target of 450); 1671 observations for iNaturalist (vs target of 1300) and 3730 identifications (vs target of 900).

  • Added a few Wikipedia pages and updated more, mainly for species I’d observed for iNaturalist.

  • I read 53 books. Of these, “The Good War” by Studs Terkel was the most mind-blowing; it’s an utterly compelling oral history, mainly from the American point of view, of people’s involvement in World War II. I had never thought that moral ambiguity about a war, or deep suspicion about the US government’s action in a war, was anything but a recent development. Highly recommended.