@alameth@sfba.social
@alameth@sfba.social avatar

alameth

@alameth@sfba.social

Dad, husband, computer geek, photographer, genealogist. #BackyardBirds, #BloomScrolling, #Walking, #Trains, #SilentSunday, #StairsSunday, and #Gardening. Pictures are my own. He/Him. Proud member of the Woke Mob.

Avatar: white male in brimmed hat. Banner: man in a hoody taking a picture of a city bridge.

Please understand, my toots are public and hashtagged but I only accept followers I know in real life.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

alameth, to Bloomscrolling
@alameth@sfba.social avatar

Everything is coming up #daisies!

(First effort with a #pollinator and the macro lens.)

#BloomScrolling #Flowers #FlowerFriday #FlowerPhotography

alameth, to Birds
@alameth@sfba.social avatar

Geese over San Francisco Bay at sunset.

Rasta, to random
@Rasta@mstdn.ca avatar

Tried to keep one as a pet, when I was a kid..
@ForfarFairLady 😎​
They are cute, the babies, even cuter
(that's why I say, leather gloves for petting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_porcupine

alameth,
@alameth@sfba.social avatar

@Rasta @ForfarFairLady 😮

There was a wildlife center that had hedgehogs that guests were allowed to pet, but they were really serious about only petting them one direction. I was surprised and amused that the hedgehogs really liked it; they almost seemed to be purring.

I'm guessing with a porcupine petting without leather gloves is not an option, even when petting the “right” direction?

alameth, to Birds
@alameth@sfba.social avatar

I very much doubt I could make friends with any of the critters in my yard. There is too much competition here in the shruburbs, and too many dangers. When I put out a plate of Lyric Fruit & Nut mix in a far corner, the crows approached it with great caution, and always kept a lookout posted atop the utility pole. Never did I see a crow approach the food without a lookout.

It was then I realized I have never seen a crow alone in the yard: they are always in twos or threes.

An American Crow, standing on a sloped roof, cautiously approaches a small plate of feed resting atop a redwood fence.
An American Crow cautiously uses its beak to grab feed from a small plate atop the corner of a redwood fence. A wood utility pole stands next to the fence.

Catlynn, to Birds
@Catlynn@nerdculture.de avatar

1 2 3 smile! A+ for effort since you don’t even have lips 😅
#backyardbirds #birdwatching #birds #nature #wildlife #raptor #birdphotography

alameth,
@alameth@sfba.social avatar

@Catlynn @JosephMeyer Before Mastodon, I scratched my social media itch by posting bird photos to Slack channels. Engineer that I am, I'd meticulously I.D. each bird, and frankly some of those names get a little long winded, e.g., Juvenile Western Dark Eyed Junco.

A team lead responded by sharing pictures of birds he'd taken on his iPhone, with a caption that read, in it's entirety, “Bird.” 😄

(I still don't have anywhere near @Catlynn 's skills for actually naming all the birds in my yard.)

webuiltthiscity, to Orchids
@webuiltthiscity@sutrofan.com avatar

deleted_by_author

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    alameth,
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    @Jonathanglick @webuiltthiscity My first thought. 😄

    drahardja, to random
    @drahardja@sfba.social avatar

    Here’s your regular reminder not to put all your online service eggs in one basket. Spread em around, so that when one fails (it will) or suddenly stops its service (yes, it will), you don’t lose all of your cloud dependencies.

    I try to use different services for my backup, email, passwords (that one is LAN, not cloud), photo storage, video, music, podcasts, books, gaming, news, etc. I encourage you to do the same. Bonus: a provider that specializes in only one type of service, rather than everything to everyone, tends to offer a higher quality of that one service.

    Diversification: it’s not just for stocks.

    alameth,
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    @drahardja

    alameth, to Flowers
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    Fall in California are all about small, delicate, and very determined. 🙂

    Tiny bulbous magenta flowers on top of a dark green stalk.
    Small intense red flowers shaped like palmate leaves emerge from stalks on top of a small branching plant with green, red, and yellow leaves.
    Dozens of small marigold-like flowers with bright yellow centers and orange petals, growing on a wood stalk.

    Catlynn, to nature
    @Catlynn@nerdculture.de avatar

    Thelma and Louise share breakfast during the eclipse this morning 🌞🌚

    alameth,
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    @amyfou @Catlynn 😄 ❤️

    Private
    alameth,
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    @jblue @plants 😮 TIL

    alameth, to Bloomscrolling
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    Amazon Water Lily at the Conservatory Of Flowers San Francisco. Yes indeed, those enormous circular leaves all support the one flower in the center.

    (As long as I was already here, I thought I should share some photos of the lily itself.)

    A pink and white flower with many petals — an Amazon Water Lily — floats on a pond surrounded by its own gigantic leaves.
    A pond covered with the giant circular leaves of an Amazon Water Lily.
    A close-up of a single leaf of an Amazon Water Little. The leaf is over 2 feet across, a perfect circle with a 3" lip at the edge. The lip is covered with nasty looking spikes to ward of predators.

    alameth, to Bloomscrolling
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    Amazon Water Lily pond at the Conservatory Of Flowers San Francisco.

    alameth,
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    @cynblogger Thank you. I have “better” photos of the lilies, but the excited smiles from the two little girls made this special. 🙂

    lowqualityfacts, to random
    @lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social avatar

    Uh oh, which one of you works for Fox News? I think you may need someone to explain my account to you. Preferably slowly and in very simple terms.

    A tweet about how a Fox News anchor was recently arguing that the Holocaust wasn't bad for all jews.

    alameth,
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    @lowqualityfacts 🤦‍♂️

    alameth, to Bloomscrolling
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    I think this guy is just being next-level lazy: doesn't have to move a bit to be always facing the sun.

    alameth, to random
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    alameth, to Bloomscrolling
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    My largest tallest sunflower still hasn't bloomed, but I did find a delightful surprise in its still tightly closed head this morning.

    alameth, to PetBirds
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    I've been referring to the neighbor's hens as “the girls”; maybe that would be more appropriate for the small flock of young house finches that have descended in my back yard?

    (Yeah, this is my lawn. California. Brown is the New Green and all that.)

    A female juvenile house finch forages in a patch of weeds.
    A female juvenile house finch forages in a patch of weeds.

    alameth,
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    My brother noted that finches ground feed like cockatiels. 😄 For sure, I've never seen finches feed this way before, let alone a whole flock that was gorging themselves and ignoring a bird feeder that was just 10' away. By comparison the juncos, who are natural ground feeders, were doing their usual casual browsing and looked a lot less clumsy.

    A male dark eyed junco — a small songbird with a tan breast, brown back and wings, and a dark blue hooded head — forages in a weed patch.

    alameth, to Trains
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    BART, like Caltrain, kinda still looks like a refugee from the 1960's... because it is. But some of the BART stations are strikingly beautiful, especially at night. This is Colma Station, taken from its own parking garage.

    alameth, to hiking
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    Prickly Pear Cactus, upriver from Parker, Arizona.

    A lot of desert mountain was blasted to build “the bypass,” a highway to route impatient drivers around the congested area paralleling the Colorado River. There are many wide places you can safely park a car, scale the man-made cliff face, and take a short walk to find vast desert vistas that most of the people below don't know exist.

    seldo, to random
    @seldo@alpaca.gold avatar

    I wish everyone who is not comfortable using a computer knew how often I, a programmer of 26 years with a degree in computer science, turn my machine off and then on again to fix problems.

    alameth,
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    @seldo My actual computers (five), phones (three), cameras (three), sound system, telephone answering machine.... even the freakin' dishwasher.

    About the only “computer” in the house that I don't manually power cycle is the microwave oven, and that's because it trips the GFI when it and the toaster are on at the same time.

    alameth,
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    @seldo I keep wondering if the UX designers for my dishwasher looked at the problem and said, “it's OK to make the customers to power off and power on to reset it; they're used to having to do that for their computers.”

    QasimRashid, to random
    @QasimRashid@mastodon.social avatar

    Tonight I spoke at an AAPI event and mentioned America's history of anti-Asian discrimination—including the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Asiatic Exclusion League, & Koramatsu & Japanese Camps.

    Afterwards an older gentlemen approached me and said, "Thank you for reminding everyone the US Govt locked Japanese Americans in camps. I know—because I was born in those camps. I carry that with me til this day."

    I was left in awe. A reminder—this isn't ancient history folks. It's contemporary reality.

    alameth,
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    @QasimRashid We're rapidly losing this generation now. My uncle was 6 when taken to Tule Lake; all our other relatives from that generation have passed. We built memorials in Hayward and Tanforan, featuring members of the Mochida family who were forever etched into history by Dorothea Lange's iconic photos; two of the Mochida family have died since we started those projects.

    It's more than “living history”; it's a huge responsibility to act now while we can. 🥰

    rodhilton, to random
    @rodhilton@mastodon.social avatar

    The constant-threats-to-defederate thing is going to kill this place, seriously.

    Defederating an instance is an extreme measure and it should only be taken in extreme circumstances.

    Finding out I might stop getting posts from people I explicitly follow because they happen to be on an instance being defederated by mine all because a bunch of admins I don't know got in a spat over a user I don't follow is just about the most annoying value proposition imaginable.

    https://federate.social/@mattblaze/110317006852580015

    alameth,
    @alameth@sfba.social avatar

    @rodhilton How weird. The broken DMs are a big reason my trans friends won't join here.

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