Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent
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I like photography. These days, like almost everybody else, I do most of my casual shooting on my phone. But for almost ten years I’ve had a Nikon D3100 DSLR (APS-C format) for more “serious” photo outings. It has been a good camera. But it was time for an upgrade, especially since I’m interested in playing around more with video and the Nikon is not well suited for that.

After a lot of cross-shopping and research, I settled on the Sony a6600 mirrorless with the 18-135mm zoom lens. It’s also an APS-C format camera (I considered going full-frame but decided against it), but it has a lot more megapixels than the Nikon and features a solid mix of still and video capabilities. The main thing I was worried about was whether the viewfinder would be acceptable. It is. New OLED digital viewfinders are so good that you hardly realize you’re not looking at a “real” optical view through your lens.

Anyway, for its first outing we spent part of a day at Natural Bridge State Park in Natural Bridge, Virginia. I left the camera in automatic mode to get a feel for how well it handles things on its own. A bunch of still photos are posted below; they are unedited other than a little bit of cropping and straightening. I also included a short video of some test footage I took of flowing water (normal and slow-motion). Enjoy.

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Jackson Confirmed to Supreme Court

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Ketanji Brown Jackson has been confirmed by a 53-47 majority in the United States Senate, and will replace retiring Associate Justice Stephen Breyer on the United States Supreme Court. Jackson, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is President Joe Biden’s (D) first Supreme Court nominee.

Breyer announced in January that he intended to retire at the end of the court’s current term. He is part of the court’s ‘liberal wing’ and an advocate of the living constitution school of jurisprudence. Jackson is also generally considered to be a “liberal” judge, so her nomination is unlikely to shift the ideological balance of the court.

The U.S. Constitution charges the Senate with providing “advice and consent” on judicial nominations. Jackson is expected to be sworn-in this summer after Breyer completes the court’s current term and officially retires from the bench.

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If you read my last post, you know about our cruise saga. When we finally got back on a ship in September 2021, we thought the ad nauseum cycle of cancellations and re-bookings was over.

The second phase of our attempt to finally use up the cruise credit—i.e., the interest-free loan that Norwegian Cruise Line has been enjoying on our behalf—was going to be in January of this year. The plan was to drive down to Orlando, Florida, for a few days, including a day at Discovery Cove. Then we would drive to Tampa, Florida, to embark for a five-day Caribbean cruise.

We were already in Tampa when Norwegian informed us—a day and a half before embarkation—that the cruise was cancelled. The basically-harmless “Omicron” variant of COVID-19 was to blame. Sheer absurdity. So we still haven’t been able to use all the money we paid Norwegian in 2019.

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Melissa and I love cruises. Our first was our honeymoon—a seven-day Alaska cruise on Holland America Line in 2005. Since then we have tried to go on a cruise every two or three years. So far, our longest was a fourteen-day cruise for our tenth anniversary in 2015—back to Alaska on the same ship from our honeymoon.

We ended up on a charity cruise to New England and eastern Canada in 2016, then had a big non-cruise trip to Taiwan and Hong Kong in 2017, so we took it easy for a couple years. But 2020 was going to be a big travel year; we got our “TSA Precheck” and “Global Entry” cards and everything. It would start with our embarkation on a fourteen-day Hawaii cruise in April.

That cruise was in the second round of cancellations by Norwegian Cruise Lines in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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April Fools Site: Robots Only; No Humans

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For April Fools Day 2022, Off on a Tangent became a “robots only” website that required you to fail a “CAPTCHA” test before viewing the site. You can see the prompt and how it worked by clicking here. Here’s the message that appeared on the site:

For security reasons, Off on a Tangent is now a “robots only” website. Human use of the site is prohibited. I’m sorry that it has come to this.

Visitors attempting to access the website will now be given a security prompt and will have to disprove their humanity by failing at least two “CAPTCHA” tests before being granted access.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.