Resting in Kelowna

My first computer job was in 1963. I developed a fairly simple program to do statistical analysis of the results of some test. I don’t remember what the test was. A co-worker was designing a search engine for the state of California to automate license plate lookup, to replace their then-current system of manually searching through 3×5 cards. This was a long time ago.

In the office we talked about how computers would make so much data available, managers might be overwhelmed by the details and lose the big picture. We didn’t think of the data being available to everyone.

I think of this when we look to see where to go next on this trip. Twenty years ago, or perhaps even ten, we would just blithely continue on our way and deal with conditions as we encountered them. Now I can look at an app on my phone to see where the wildfire smoke is bad, and we worry about driving through it or staying overnight there. Should we continue on our planned route or go somewhere else? The smoke is bad in some place, but it’ll take us three days to get there. Will it still be awful then? Perhaps it is data overload that helps make this era stressful.

(Of course, we didn’t have the widespread and frequent wildfires ten or twenty years ago. Climate chaos hadn’t begun to take hold then.)

Meanwhile, Andrea and I are still in the Okanagan Valley. Here, the weather is beautiful and the air is clear. Yesterday we went to the kangaroo farm. They have other critters, too, but we liked the kangaroos and wallabies best.

We even watched as a baby crawled out of its mother’s pouch and then crawled back in. (I was interested to see that it could crawl in head first and turn around inside.)

Afterward, we drove along the lake to Penticton, at its southern end.

There, we had lunch at Salty’s Beach House. It was probably the best fish and chips I’ve ever had. (The chips were American fries – not English chips – but the fish was excellent.)

Today we went into town to see the Okanagan Classic Thunderbird Club’s show’n shine. There were some pretty cars, all in beautiful condition.

And near the show’n shine, the local lawn bowling club was out in full force. It looks to be a bit like Bocce Ball, but with larger balls and a longer field.

Then it was out to Oyama, in the next valley. We still have clear skies around the Okanagan Valley, but the sky in the Lake Country is starting to get smokey. So we might as well leave anyway. Tomorrow we head south, down to the smoke in eastern Washington.