Month: April 2024

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Oh for God’s Sake! This shit has got to stop!

I swear, it seems like the asses in New York are splashing gasoline around then playing with matches.

Now the Judge in one of the what? 100 cases against Trump claims he may impose more fines and put Trump in the clink for 30 days for violating a Gag order that frankly I think is questionable in the first place.

These judges placing gag orders on a defendant in cases which seem sketchy at best suggests to me that whatever they’re doing in those courts, it’s not above board.

Moreover, it makes New York City, (already a shitty place in my book, been there a couple of times and wasn’t impressed,) look like what it is. A shit hole of a city that makes the dystopian movie Escape from New York, look like a good day. 

Well at least they’re finally being truthful about how shitty New York City really is.

Juan Merchan Trump trial 640x480.I no longer give a wet runny shit about Trump, the lawsuits, if Trump did anything wrong, if the City of New York is right, the Judges, the Colleges, or in fact any aspect of New York City.

Honestly, If the entire city was destroyed by terrorists, a meteor, a solar flare, flood, earthquake, or a plague of locusts. I wouldn’t give a fuck.

I officially hate New York City, and everything that New York State has to offer.

When you look at the absolute scum New York has sent to Congress it’s arguable that a good part of this country’s problems start with New York, and the cherry on top of our fucked up Congress are the scum bag politicians from California.

I feel like I’m being assaulted every fucking day with this bullshit!

Sorry… I got into the car this morning to run an errand and it was the top of the hour so I got to listen to all the news on the radio.

I’d be inclined right now to vote for Trump just to give the middle finger to every damned progressive politician. If Trump were to win, I’d be laughing my ass off sending letters to every member of congress that said, “You’re FUCKED Now!!! HAHAHAHAH”

Especially if Trump immediately declared martial law and started arresting members of Congress on suspicion of sedition and corruption. I know that will never happen. Even if Trump were to win, nothing and I mean absolutely nothing will change.  Hell, Let him be a fucking dictator! Still nothing would change. Because Trump would be hampered by his belief that the constitution, bill of rights, and the Law itself still mattered. None of that is true. The Communist scumbags have won. 

Hell, Let me be der führer! You want this shit cleaned up? I’m the man for the job. No Mercy! I’ll come up with Operation Bug Bomb and the follow on, Operation Roach Motel in a week.

I can promise two absolutes. 1) You’re not going to like my methods. 2) There will be an end to the bullshit. Even if I have to make a desert and call it peace.

There’s no way in hell I’d get elected to the office of Official Toilet Plunger, so everyone is safe.

We live in a dying Republic. It’s been dying for at least 20 years. Unfortunately, I think this is the end of our founding fathers grand experiment. They weren’t sure it would work, perhaps they’d be impressed that we had as good a run as we did. I forget which one said, “We’ve given you a Democratic Republic if you can hold onto it.” 

Well it’s slipped through our fingers. I’m sad, angry, outraged, and feel some responsibility too.

I’m probably an outlier.

This incessant shit is really starting to damage my calm!

Congress JUST DO IT! Just tell us we’re fucked. We’re property of the state. That we have no rights but those graciously given to us by our generous overlords. Then you can sell our asses to China, or the Tech Companies, Big Pharma, or whoever else is pulling your strings. Just stop the cognitive dissonance! It really hurts!

Here’s a plan. Arrest Trump and all his children. Put them all in Gitmo. Abolish the House, Senate, Elections, Constitution, Bill of Rights, and burn the Declaration of Independence. Declare Biden dictator for life or better yet King.

Then you don’t have to worry about those messy elections and Hunter Biden would become Prince Biden. Whichever politicians made it to The Court of King Biden would have access to all the wealth a captive slave labor force could produce. Between the flood of illegal immigrants and the existing citizens y’all could probably strip-mine the entire continent in 30 years. I’m sure when Hunter became King, he’d be more than willing to hand out money and lands based on how well members of the court sucked his cock!

God! I try so hard to avoid the news. I’ve got subscriptions to Apple News, and other News sources that I haven’t opened in months. That’s for my protection. When I hear or read the latest insults to my intelligence and / or my dying belief in our Constitutional Republic I am simultaneously thrown into a rage and black despair.

I’ll be fine, I’ll calm down and get back to some semblance of being numb to all this insanity. At least until the next invasive news article or one of the morons in power manages to strike a match that sets fire to a full blown revolution, insurrection, civil war… whatever. I don’t know what the trigger event is going to be, but I think eventually some asshole politician will do something that cannot be ignored, and the survivors will long for the riots from the “Summer of Love”

It’s time for me to go for a walk, clear my head and do something constructive.

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After a year, I still really like my M2 MacBook Pro

There are a lot of things to complain about with technology companies these days. Chief among my complaints is that technology companies seem to think they can and should be arbiters of social and moral standards. For the record, they can’t. 

I wish that technology companies would just do technology. I’d love it if they all just made their products, improved them, and stayed out of politics and / or social justice.

That’s not the world we live in. It’s futile to wish for these technological behemoths to change. 

Even X / Twitter for all it’s fanfare about freedom, has started sending message to people that say things like, “Most authors wouldn’t say this to other people, would you like to edit your post?” The implication being that if you don’t make your post acceptable to their Algorithm your post will be limited in its reach. A.K.A. Censorship. 

Apparently calling Shelia Jackson Lee an idiot for saying the moon was made out of gas and the sun might be too hot to live on is a no, no. Even if idiot is exactly the right term.

Meaning for me at least that Twitter is once again losing me. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

Apple is not much better. It’s easy to overlook Apple’s social justice messaging because they’ve always been a closed ecosystem and spent a lot of time breathing the rarified atmosphere of their own farts.

That being said, Apple has generally made products that I liked from a hardware perspective and because of that, I’ve owned multiple generations of Apple products. It doesn’t mean I agree with Apple’s political, ecological, or social justice stance. It means their products work in predicable ways that I understand. For me owning Apple products is not a fashion statement, it’s a practical one.

My current MacBook Pro is about a year old. I find that shocking because usually by the time a machine reaches a year old, there are little things that tell its age. I’m not talking about scratches or stuff like that.

The machine starts to “feel” slow, or the battery doesn’t last long enough, and a ton of little things that individually are nothing but collectively they tell the user the machine is “old”. It’s subtle, but over time, dissatisfaction and boredom set in and you find yourself checking out websites looking for the next new thing.

I’m pleased to say that my MacBook still makes me smile. I run it most of the time in low power mode if I’m on battery. I don’t notice that I’m technically running the processor “slower”. I’m always blow away by how long the battery lasts, even with a combination of teleconferencing, web surfing, and me writing, I have yet to have the battery die before I was done looking at screens for the day.

Running Windows, in VMWare Fusion, either in low power mode or in “normal” mode I’ve noticed a few things. This computer provides buttery smooth operation of Windows, and the fans are either never on, or they’re on at such a low level I don’t hear them. That’s a big difference from my Intel I7 MacBook Pro. On that machine, within a minute of bringing Windows up, the fans were screaming at full power. The battery life isn’t significantly affected, VMWare makes the machine very busy but I think I could still get most of a day out of the battery even running Windows all day long. 

Then there’s the speed at which this machine handles rendering Video and Audio versus my older MacBook Pro. The performance is so high, the first few times I rendered something I thought the render had failed because the computer said it was done so fast.

For the sake of this post I did go look at the new M3 lineup. I hadn’t looked at any of the new machines until today.  Let’s just say I could probably spend $7,000 on a laptop. However, I’m not sure that I would be any happier with that new hotness than I am with the machine currently in front of me. 

That suggests that right now, for my needs, the machine I have will last me quite a while.  Fingers crossed, I might get 5 -7 years out of this machine. Who knows? This machine might last me until I kick the bucket.

I’ve been looking for a job for a while and not having any luck. A friend of mine has just started a job search and is having no better luck than I’ve had over the past 4 years.

I suppose this is part of what led me to appreciating my MacBook. 

We were talking about podcasting, blogging, and various alternative income methods. It was during that conversation, I thought, “My current laptop has more than enough horsepower to do those kinds of things effortlessly.”

I might need a better quality microphone. I could probably use one of the mics Jerry owned, but I can’t find the interface that would allow me to power and connect a standard XLR cabled mic to my computer. I know we have such a device, but I don’t know where Jerry put it, or if he might have been using it at the Church or Temple.

That’s a pity because we have two very nice microphones.

I’ve got more research to do before I start trying to podcast or whatever, so I’m going to keep looking for that interface. Ideally I might not have to purchase anything.

Who knows? Maybe for once in my life, I’ve actually got exactly what I need, when I need it. 

That would be a novel thing to have happen!

Hope your Monday is a good one.

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Yesterday was pretty good.

I’ve been bordering on being blue for the past few days. 

I don’t really know what’s causing the problem but I’ve been thinking a lot about Jerry, our life together, acknowledging that I was happy and feeling sad about missing him and the goofy life we made.

I was tossing a bunch of little things that were junk when Jerry put them into the junk drawer and they were still junk when I pulled them out of the junk drawer. That man couldn’t throw anything away!

Spring_flowers_2015_longwood_cr_Longwood Gardens L Albee.(I smiled as I typed that.)

Then a wave of sadness washed over me. The dog had been walked, but I felt like I needed to step outside. The sun was warm, the breeze pleasant, and as I looked over the back yard I noticed weeds had sprung up with a vengeance.

I went down stairs with the intent to just do poo patrol. Once I’d completed that chore, I thought, “Might as well do the weed whacking too.”

That felt good. I took all the weeds down to nubs, Then I did the patch of grass & weeds between my fence and the next door neighbor. During one of the winter storms, some limbs had broken off of one of his trees and were laying in the way. I moved them, then cut the weeds which had been growing under the limbs. The battery on the weed whacker died just as I finished the last pass against the fence.

“Great Timing,” I thought as I put the weed whacker away. Slipping the battery into the charger I noticed it was the bigger battery that came with my chainsaw.

This led to checking the oil in the chainsaw, and since I was holding the saw, I grabbed a charged battery pack, shrugged and headed out of the garage. Happily I went out to the side of the house where the limbs lay and started cutting them into small manageable pieces. 

From the winter damage I’ve seen on the tree that lost these limbs, I’m not sure it will survive. That’s sad because it’s a beautiful tree. Similarly, the butterfly bush in front of my house is looking pretty shabby too. I’m hoping it will recover but I’m not holding my breath.

The singing of my chainsaw blade made me happy. I’d noticed some of my neighbor’s Mountain Lilacs were overgrowing the power pole we share. So before he gets an abatement ticket or worse, Edison “Helps’ by butchering the plants, I started pruning.

Well, I had the chainsaw in my hand…  

I cleaned up all the trimmings, came inside covered in sawdust and debris from weed whacking, and asked Jerry if there was anything else I should do before I cleaned up.

Yeah…

My heart stopped for a second. In that breathless moment I figured out part of the blues I’d been feeling.

You see, I always did the outside work.

I can run the snow thrower and always could. In winters, Jerry wanted to help and contribute. But Jerry had shitty balance, doubly so on ice, so we agreed that he ran the snow thrower. I was pleased with this arrangement because while he was holding onto the machine, the odds of a fall were greatly reduced.

When It came to yard work, trimming, digging, planting, painting, and that kind of stuff. I did the work, Jerry supervised. He made sure that I was staying hydrated, and wasn’t out in the sun for too long.

Jerry told me enjoyed watching me working in the yard. He said I looked hot, and he liked my confident strut and my confidence while using the tools.

At the time, I’d never thought that I could be hot looking doing chores. For me, it was just chores. Other guys, looked hot doing construction, or farming, or whatever. I never thought about myself that way, but I was happy knowing I was good enough for him.

I suppose what I’d been secretly dreading was this “first” spring.

Last year, I was just going through the motions still “numb” from his passing.

This year, I’m getting back to something like “normal” and those normal things remind me what’s missing.

One “missing” ritual is this. In the first days of Spring, We’d have discussions about planting spring flowers, or changes in the yard, and trimming of various shrubs and trees. Sometimes there wasn’t much discussion, Jerry would come home with flats of flowers and ask me to plant them. I’d do it because I enjoyed the work and because the flowers made him smile.

It’s that time of year and probably why there was a bit of a sting yesterday. This is a part of the healing process. It’s just going to take time.

The good news is that being outside and doing the usual, normal work felt really good. There’s more to do, but I wanted to see what my arms and shoulders felt like before using the pole saw on some Cottonwood trees that are spindly and overhanging my fence line.

The other good news is that I’m not blue today, it seems a little yard work was all it took to make the blues disappear.

Maybe I’ll go look at some flowers up at the hardware store.