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Now I know why TV sales are good this time of year

I watched the State of the Union address last night.

There were several points where I thought I was having a stroke, or that I’d passed into some alternate dimension.

There were some amusing tweets during the speech.

Joint Chiefs

The Joint Chiefs of staff didn’t look happy at all! Of course they must have been concerned about the 10 sailors being held at that very moment in Iran.

Yeah, Iran, you know the country that we’ve brokered a deal to reduce sanctions with? The country that regularly paints our ships and aircraft with targeting systems as we maneuver in the Gulf? The country that has nuclear aspirations and has repeatedly stated its desire to not only destroy Israel but the United States as well?

You know, the helpful friendly nation of Iran, our friend…

I’ll tell you what, if I were Obama I’d make sure I wasn’t alone with these guys. I felt the heat through my TV when Obama said he’d made the military stronger.

Trey Gowdy

Then there was Trey Gowdy. I guess that 7 years is just too long to be able to hide your true feelings and I can’t help but think Gowdy is right up there with the Joint Chiefs.

“Is that a mixture of hatred and disgust sir, or did you eat some bad baklava?”

I can’t imagine how many televisions were shot last night. When Obama leaves office, several things are likely to happen. Gun Sales will fall, Television sales will fall, and cord cutting will level off.

It might be a good thing this is President Obama’s last year.

Below is a small sampling of the tweets that caught my attention.

SOTU1

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Strange Tears

I’m a mean hard bastard.

I’ve been that way all my life. Which is why I find myself in this very strange place.

Th

I feel like my world is slipping away.

It was David Bowie’s passing that popped the bubble for me. Or maybe it was a combination of seeing Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek Into Darkness and Bowie’s passing that managed to pound through my defenses.

Th 1These entertainers are people I’ve never met, so it shouldn’t be personal.  But they are touchstones in my life. Their loss is a sign of unrelenting change.

I heard the strains of Space Oddity on the radio this morning and was suddenly singing along & crying. It was weird.

Unintentionally, I started tallying the losses in my personal life.

I’ve seen my share of death. In the ‘80s and ‘90s the tally increased weekly. After a while I stopped going to funerals. It wasn’t because I didn’t care about or want to remember those folks. It was that I couldn’t bear any more losses.

61260414Time is catching up with me.

I know in the not too distant future I’m going to have to bear more losses. The numbers are probably going to increase faster too.

Folks in my family are getting up there in years. I have friends who aren’t in the best of health and while I love them, time and distance have made us into very different people.

You see, time takes its toll on relationships too.

Why am I crying? Even hard assed warriors cry. I’m not ashamed of my tears.

The catalyst of music or movie is one thing, that’s the trigger.  What is the underlying cause of my tears right now?

Is it that I’m not as good as surfing the winds of change as I once was? Is it sadness that some days I feel like a dinosaur watching the last sunset? Is it fear of being left all alone?

I know these feelings aren’t unique.

There are books and plays, movies and TV shows that have explored these feelings.

Dracula, Dr. Who, and at least one book by Heinlein pop into my head instantly. These stories ask the question:

If you could be immortal would you?

Could you bear the mounting losses while continuing to walk endlessly into the future?

How long before the transient nature of life made you a monster, disconnected from all the things that make us human? Would you, after a few hundred years, stop being human because you can no longer keep count of those you’ve loved and lost.

How long until the voices, faces and lives become background noise, and your interaction with them is limited to nothing more than furthering your agenda? You agenda would likely become an agenda, the normal lived couldn’t see and one in which their life or death is but a drip from a leaky faucet.

Images

Perhaps it’s normal to think of these things at points in your life. We know we’re mortal, we know we’ll end.

Maybe the lesson is to just cry.

Maybe from time to time, we should let it all out, not hold anything back, and don’t dwell on it.

When our tears have finished, then we’re supposed to pick up the less brittle pieces of ourselves and move on with grace earned by our successes, failures, and even our tallied losses from years of living.

Like everyone else, I’m clueless. I can tell you this;

Time keeps moving on and so probably should we.

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Goodby Mr. Bowie

David Bowie

Thanks for the music and showing those of us who didn’t always fit in, that it was okay.

You showed us reinvention and being unapologetically ourselves were good things.

Godspeed,

Ground control out.

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SCRATCH!!!!

Brain falling apart

I was working on a post. Then my brain just stopped…

The entire point fell apart and I was left here with my hair blown back and no clue what I was doing.

I didn’t smell toast so I know it wasn’t a stroke but nonetheless it’s annoying.

I’m giving up. 

I’ll try again tomorrow.

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Just learned something interesting

I have two blogging programs that I use regularly.

The one I’m using right now is reliable and a workhorse but sometimes it’s a bit more than I really need and its interface is dated and perhaps a little “busy” when I’m interested in just typing.

The Other Blogging program is simple and features the newer “Open” design that many programs are moving to. The newer programs seem to be leaning toward minimalist icons in the menu, and a generally Spartan appearance. I like the look and feel of the newer interfaces, as a result I gravitate toward programs that are using the Spartan look.

February 10 089

Which leads me to some of the problems that new software can exhibit…

Software that’s a bit buggy, or in this case a lot buggy. The newer program has some issues with its spellcheck. “Issues” is me being polite.

Their implementation of spell check is almost completely wrong. A couple of weeks ago I went to great lengths to document how wrong they were.

Oh I was nice. I’d noticed the problems and when to their website to see if there was an estimated date when they’d have it fixed. On their site I saw many people leaving messages about things not working right but no-one was really specific.

The impression I got from the replies the company was writing, was that they didn’t understand what the users were complaining about.

I’m an OLD ASS SQA guy. 

So I figured I’d define the problem in a way that the programmers would understand.

I opened my copy of their program and started checking and unchecking options in the spellcheck system. Then I was doing screen capture and boiling down my procedure to recreate the problems into five or six steps. I put it all together and sent it off to the person at their company who takes care of these sorts of things.

I got a very nice email back saying, “Thank you, we get it now, and we’re working to fix the problem.”

“Cool,” I think.

Then I set all the settings back to my preferred conditions in their program and went on with my life.

Then, over the past couple of days I’ve been firing up the program to write quick little blogs. The program is highlighting some spelling errors but not others. I didn’t notice the inconsistency until this morning. The other thing the program is doing is this. It’s autocorrecting things as I type and doing that wrong!

I go back re-check the settings and confirm that indeed, the little check marks are having absolutely no effect. Which means another bug report to the company and that when they update the program they may have to have the customers do a complete uninstallation and then reinstall the program. That’s seriously ugly! Somewhere along the line, either using the program or changing the settings, the program has lost control of it’s preferences file.

Uh OH!  This means that Blogs I’ve written over the past few days are probably horribly screwed up!

Sure enough, I go out to the blog site and find that not only did the program not schedule things right, it also did some really bad things to spelling in the blogs posted over the last couple of days. 

So I’m falling back to the reliable old workhorse until the programmers get a handle on the defects in the new program.

Maybe I’ll hit the manufacturer of the new blogging program, up for a job. They could use my assistance!