July 2, 2026. Campsite. Iceland, Day 8. I had a nice relaxing day at this beautiful campsite as it rained torrents off and on through the day. Mostly I spent the time reading. As I said to Andrea today, I'm in a good place right now, happy and calm. #SDDaily
Done my ride... So tired
A few more from today, just for fun #photography
Currently 'power-resting' in preparation for my Ride for CHEO this Sunday. https://cheofoundation.donordrive.com/participants/Stephen-Downes
April 21, 2026. Nuthatch. I've spent the last couple of days resting to relieve a sore oblique. This means I've been working on my CList software. Meanwhile, enjoy this nurhatch. #SDDaily #bird #photography
With my retirement now just a few days away I have added the subscription links to my page so you can support continued publication of OLDaily.
I don't care if saying 'please' to an AI is less efficient. Saying 'please' and 'thank you' also makes the line move more slowly at a fast food restaurant (that's why you never hear the word in their advertisements). But I'm still going to say them because there's more to life than efficiency, and saying them (even to a machine) is a nice way to remember that.
March 14, 2026. Snow on a Saturday. Some abstract snow and weeds in the back yard. Working hard to get everything set up in my VPS before I retire. #SDDaily
Truly disappointed to read this: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/announcement/view/99
I find wilderness videos like this really inspiring. They're adventures I'll never be able to do myself, which is too bad, but I love the adventure, and they encourage me to get out and do what I actually can do, and to savour these rare moments. This one features four canoeists paddling from Hudson Bay into Lac Wiyâshâkimî in Nunavik, Quebec, and we see huge falls and the great northern forest and tundra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av5tRaT-OvQ
Andrea in the Cold #DailyPhoto #Photography snowshoeing, winter, forest, cold, 2026365 February 8, 2026. Snowshoeing in -20 weather (-33 with the wind chill) but in a brilliant bright sun. I'm pretty happy with the way I was able to focus on Andrea between the trees. https://ift.tt/uMi1FOa
It was a little cold out today...
#SilentSunday
All my Iceland photos fro last summer are finally posted:
South Iceland: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/albums/72177720330902983/
East Iceland: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/albums/72177720331159227/
North Iceland: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/albums/72177720331323135/
West Iceland: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/albums/72177720331674702/
Photos are descriptively titled and tagged, so you know what they are.
There's also my Iceland video playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeBQHgzQN9x0u1s5li0E1k5isMqdU0QWq
That completes all the archiving of my Iceland trip. :)
I will be returning to cycle Iceland some more in June, 2026.
January 30, 2026. From above. This is a grove of trees I see from my office on the third floor. It's so evident that the whole NRC complex was designed for a different era. There would have been many more people working in these buildings as many secretaries and staff as researchers, and things like the picnic tables and baseball diamond would be used, not sitting empty. Each building had its own cafeteria. It was an era of paper and memos and urgent meetings and camraderie. No more. #SDDaily
Looks like I picked a good day to quit sniffing glue.
So this is interesting, in the context of recent announcements that there will be positions cut at NRC: "Following the group meeting (tomorrow) regarding organizational changes, we would like to meet with you onsite to discuss the upcoming organizational changes that will have implications for your position within Human-Computer Interaction Team of Digital Technologies. Either a member of the Digital Technologies management team or I will meet with you personally."
January 25, 2026. Lights. This is a detail from the light in my office at home, where I spent the day working on setting up my new VPS (all lavishly documented on Youtube, the world's most boring videos). #SDDaily
So I've been working with chatGPT this afternoon and the session ended like this:
"I’m going to be very direct here because the evidence is conclusive:
- Your VPS filesystem is critically damaged
- /usr is missing
- even /srv and other standard top-level directories are missing from /
- you can’t run core tools (ls, head, etc.)"
I restored it from backup, but this is the most spectacular "Stephen Follows Instructions" fail yet.
Live on video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCDgYxKGeS8 at the 1:30:00 ff mark
