Remain calm, be kind, and carry on regardless!
You've reached the online journal of Richard Rathe.
I started posting to the web in 2004! In this iteration I'm trying a few new ideas: minimal markup, working with mostly plain text, and moving beyond the timeline. Some refer to this as a "Digital Garden". I call it BLIS (BLog It Simple).
@nickrauchen (Mastodon) @wisdom (Quote Bot) @richardrathe (Youtube)
A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
The entrance to The Wave is a long curved corridor of twisted stone stripes with no real floor. The stripes vary in both color and indentation. It’s a remarkable visual/tactile surface! The actual Wave is tulip-shaped, looking a bit like a skateboard park designed by Dr. Seuss. There was an ephemeral pool at the lowest point.
In the late 1970s two friends and I invested in a three room cabin on thirty acres embedded in Superior National Forest in Northern Minnesota. That cabin and other buildings are no more after the Camp House Road forest fire swept through.
This nominal Three Person Tent from Sierra Designs is an asymmetrical, rectangular, wedge design. The asymmetry shifts the maximum interior height towards the head end where it is most useful. The sides (and doors) are nearly vertical thanks to a short spreader
pole across the top.
My neighbor Dave transplanted these roadside Iris plants to our local drainage ditch. The seeds must be spreading down stream with new plants and flowers popping up at each culvert. 🙂
Out with friends to canoe down the Santa Fe River in north Florida. We saw many large turtles sunning themselves along the way plus a juvenile bald eagle! Stopped for lunch in the outflow from Blue Spring.
My Presentation to the Sante Fe Audubon Society on Jan 14 2025, including photos and personal stories from 28 wilderness trips over 25 years! I've canoed, kayaked, and sailed most of the navigable areas. In the talk I briefly cover the geology, hydrology, flora, fauna, and history of this unique national treasure.
There are various configurations of camping hammocks that I'll outline below. Most are gathered
with single tie-on points at each end. Some have integrated bug nets. Complete packages come with both nets & rainflies. After a brief survey of the different types, I go on to propose my criteria for the Ideal Hammock
.
Spring is the time to hunt for carnivorous plants along the Gulf Coast of Florida and Alabama. The image below from 2020 shows three different, unrelated species that have all evolved the ability to trap and consume insects (Pitcher Plants, Butterworts, and Sundews).
It started out so well… then the wind and waves shut us down—again. I haven't had a normal
Everglades trip since 2017! I decided to try December to see if conditions would be better than the usual time in January. It did not make any difference in the end. On the plus side there were no bugs!
Last week I traveled with my Sister Diana to Southern Illinois hoping to experience the Total Solar Eclipse. We were not disappointed! We had mostly blue skies that day with some high stratus clouds. Nothing can really prepare you for the moment of totality. We could suddenly see “stars” (actually the planets Venus and Jupiter) in the odd twilight. It got perceptively cooler and the wind changed direction.
HTML files generated by KIST are compatible with the BLIS Static Web Journaling & Blogging System system.
There is one caveat when creating the final zip archive. The mimetype
file must be uncompressed and positioned first in the archive. This is so reader and other software can confirm the format (application/epub+zip).
This One Person Tent from River Country Products is a clever hybrid of single and double layer designs. The head of the tent has generous mesh panels for ventilation. The foot is completely enclosed in waterproofed nylon, allowing the rainfly to be much smaller (saving weight and volume). This is a unique design I have not seen elsewhere.
Distant relatives of mine built this Fort
in southern Pennsylvania before the Revolutionary War. (Yes, a stone farmhouse was considered a fort back then!) The fort/house had two things going for it: fireproof walls and a fresh water spring in the basement.
This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. I didn't think I was going to have time to prepare anything and also, in a room full of such luminaries, I thought, What could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say?
So I thought I would settle for a debate. But after having been here for a couple of days, I realized you're just a bunch of guys! It's been rife with ideas, and I've had so many myself through talking with and listening to people, that I'd thought what I'd do was stand up and have an argument and debate with myself. I'll talk for a while and hope sufficiently to provoke and inflame opinion that there'll be an outburst of chair-throwing at the end.
Most are familiar with the concept of FUD—short for Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt. It summarizes a strategy often used in marketing and political propaganda. Its effects are pernicious, divisive and lead to exploitation. Examples abound. Fear is a strong motivator! To resist FUD one must understand how it is practiced using the principles of Deception, Obfuscation and Misdirection.
AJ focuses on Action Items defined as discrete activities that can be performed, decided, or otherwise resolved (aka a todo list). This is the lowest level of organization—a shopping list for example. The higher level Task is to go shopping. The shopping list is an aid to complete this task. If you are planning a party with food and quests you must complete several tasks to ensure a successful event. Let's call this top level outcome a Project. As an outline it might appear something like this:
Fantastic rock formations in Utah
KIST combines the best elements of various markup formats I've worked with over the past forty years. The original purpose of these tools was to quickly generate valid HTML. The plain text source files are nearly universal and reusable!
Kist.pl renders documents as plain vanilla
HTML by default. Generated pages will degrade gracefully
to the degree possible. These pages contain a minimal set of CSS styles in the <head> element. Authors are free to replace these styles with their own custom styles (using the -s flag).
![Green River, UT [source:google]](commentary/tesla_review/green-river.jpg "Green River, UT [source:google]")
I recently did a trip with a friend in his new Tesla Model Y. (St. George, UT was the furthest west). I was amazed at how many Tesla-branded charging stations there were, and how integrated they are with the vehicle. You tell the dash navigation system where you want to go and it will route you based on your current charge, the distance, need for re-charge(s), and charging station locations.