Eric Phelps

@ericphelps
464 Followers
237 Following
1.2K Posts

Worked in USA, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela, Nicaragua, UAE, Morocco, Iraq, Nigeria, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, India -- and all of them full of good people. Still working, now back in the USA.

Weekends are usually biking, kayaking, or hiking. It's "urban hiking" in the hidden areas everyone else drives past.

I follow #hiking and #kayaking, so even if it looks like I'm not following you... I'm following you ;)

I usually post a couple times a week.

Webhttp://ericphelps.com/
Relive videoshttps://www.relive.cc/profile/ericphelps
Baby birds! My wife has a decorative lantern on the front porch, and some little wren decided it was a good place for a nest. We have lots of "gorilla hair" mulch in the front yard, so nesting material was abundant.
When the chicks first hatched, they were so tiny they were buried in the mulch. Now they're big enough they're easy to spot.
So cute!

"Actually, let me just try running it and see what happens."

-- What the AI said during a thinking session while writing scripts to translate documents to French. Yes, this particular AI gets bored with repetitive work or endless analysis.

Using AI at work to translate 24 pptx training files, and:
* I let the work CoPilot attack the whole folder and it kept trying to automate things.
* When I forced it to do each file separately, it effectively refused.
* When I launched a fresh instance for each slide, it worked at first, but…
* When I let the agents run overnight to finish, they deleted all my source files and corrupted the output. And charged us $50.
* I used my personal DeepSeek account to do the whole job for $1.
This little rodent is staying with us for a while while his "mom" is in the hospital. It's been a year since we had him over.
What's amazing to me is that he remembers all our "rules". When I came home last night, he ran over, sniffed me, gave me a "play bow" and started barking at me. He remembered we always chase each other around the house, barking at each other like idiots when I come home.
This morning both of us were limping. Tonight I walked around the house barking. It'll have to do.
Some days I get off work and realize the most work I did all day was making breakfast. Some day someone's going to realize what's happening. Likely when I'm training my replacement.
-- "That's all you do?"
-- "Shush. We've got a good thing going on here. Don't pooch it. People call you with problems, you look up a few things, fix the problem, heck, most days you don't even have to get out of your chair. And they pay you. It's crazy."

I took my friend Gary Geddes on a hike to one of my favorite areas a couple weeks ago. He just sent me these two pictures. He managed to convert mundane into magical.

https://garygeddes.pixels.com/
https://www.instagram.com/garylandscapes/

#WildlifeWednesday
#WellnessWednesday

Deer make the woods feel a little more magical 😊🌲🦌

#FlyFishing #Fishing #Hiking #Walking #Nature #Creek #Wildlife #Deer #Photography

Picked out a nice 6 mile hike (which was 7 miles, I suck at estimating).

Very happy my knee held up. I think I know the secret now: If you walk on a paved trail, you swing your foot and come down on your heel. That sends a shock up your leg. But when you're on an uneven dirt trail (and wearing microspikes!) you pick your feet up and place them down flat. Way less stress on the knee.

Which is why my plan for today was a 100% dirt trail. And it worked.

https://www.relive.com/view/vXvLEZNwM7O
#hiking

I know our local bald eagles relocated after their tree fell over, but I didn't know where they were. Yesterday I got a glimpse of the eagles, so today I was on a mission. Turned out to be really easy. With just a basic idea of the location, I was able to identify their tree right away. It's the tall tree on the other side of the pond.

I had lots of bushwhacking and hill climbing and sketchy slopes, but I identified two different safe viewing locations if I want to take a friend.

#hiking

Bored at a garden club party. How fast is that airplane flying? If it's 6 miles high at 45 degrees it's about 8.5 miles away.

Three fingers together at arm's length is a 10:1 ratio. So the fingers cover about 0.85 miles. Ah, but the plane is flying at 45 degrees to me, so it has to travel 0.85 * √2 = 1.2 miles to cross my fingers.

It takes 9 seconds to fly across my fingers. Okay, there are 400 of those 9-second periods in an hour, so 400 * 1.2 = 480 miles per hour. Seems slow.

Still bored.