Tag: General

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One of those nights…

I’m tired but not able to sleep.

I was sorting some of his music and there’s something about seeing his handwritten notes in books that he played from every week that makes me feel blue.

I’ve been packing up things that I won’t be needing. DVD’s CD’s and their players since all the movies are streamable as is the music. I’ve been considering packing up the ethernet switch and relying on WiFi only. The switch handles all the CAT-6 cable connections throughout the house. Removing it would disable all the wall sockets.

The new computer, and iPad have the latest WiFi radios and provide more than acceptable speeds wirelessly.

The goal is to have all the tech that can or will be shipped boxed. There are a couple of items of tech that I’ll be transporting with me, so that I have them ready to use when I get wherever I’m going.

The same is true of kitchen appliances / utensils / glasses and dishes. I might not be actually taking these things with me, but I don’t have to have them occupying space, especially if I’ve got little need to use them.

I hope to have both the cubbies in the dining room empty by the weekend. It’s hard going through all the materials.

Some of the paperwork is more than 7 years old and once I’ve figured out the date, I’m pretty quick to put stuff on the shred pile. The trouble is that old and new are mixed in a jumble and that jumble isn’t sorted in any way. I’ve been sorting in a gross way. “Banking”, “Utilities”, “Paystubs”, and “Other” if the paperwork passes the initial date check. Doing a subsort of each major category is easier and provides a little crosscheck. For example, all the utilities end up sorted by provider and date.

I see some banker’s boxes in my future where all of this stuff can be filed and properly stored.

This all sounds like it’s a tedious time consuming mess. It is. However it must be done because there are still taxes to be filed and paid.

Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean the fucking government isn’t making your shit someone else’s troubles.

I really do hate the government. State and Federal, they’re parasites of the worst kind.

The dog has gone to bed. I’ve poured myself a second drink. I’ve become very much aware that my writing has suffered over the past year. I was reviewing some of the blog posts I’d written going back a couple of years.

It wasn’t advanced narcissism, I was looking for a piece I’d written a while ago. I haven’t found the piece, but I did notice a distinct difference in my writing. The time at the shithole company in San Diego, plus my concern about the other half, and all the other stresses in my life are visible in my style, choice of words, and even subject matter.

I need to write my way through the darkness. I need to get back to the quick turn of phrase and making my point.

For someone who has hated politics all my life, I’ve dedicated considerable keyboard time to it. I’m honestly not sure what that is about. I’d like to think I have something of interest to say, but I don’t think that’s entirely true.

The more likely truth is that I reached an age where I was able to compare the political system that I grew up understanding and being taught, with the system as it is today. In that comparison, either I’ve discovered significant differences or lost my naïveté.

I’m not sure which, if either is true. I only know that there are serious differences. Those differences have caused a dissonance that I’m having a hard time resolving.

I don’t think of my sudden interest in politics as fear, or white nationalism, or whatever else the SPLC might come up with. I’ve always believed there was a certain low level corruption in the political system and that corruption was held in check by there being more honest people in politics than dishonest ones. But now I’m faced with corruption that I can’t ignore and questions that are not being answered despite investigations and inquiries.

As a citizen, I believe that I deserve answers. Moreover, I deserve to see these bad actors perp walked out of the halls of power and into the halls of prison.

I’ve also come to believe that it’s a very good thing I’m not holding my breath.

I found a printout of a series of messages that the other half had with an artist friend of ours. Time flies! The other half was inviting our friend over to have a three way. I remember the night well and blogged about it too.

This is the first time I’ve seen the messages that led up to the three way. It appears that the other half had absolute faith that I could handle both of them. It was his overselling of my skills that led to me being somewhat annoyed at the other half because there is only so much sexual gymnastic magic I can perform in a night.

Nonetheless, reading the message thread and remembering that night put a smile on my face.

I could use a little human tough right about now, but I’m not into being with complete strangers. I really want to get to know someone before we’re having sex.

It was a really good night!

I suppose in the near term I’ll have to be content with the large selection of X-rated movies. It is extremely unlikely that I’ll find anyone close at hand who would like to develop a friendship prior to getting naked.

It’s time to go to bed.

I hope you’ve had a better night’s sleep than I have.

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Wow! That was more difficult than I thought it would be.

I’ve been thinking about buying a pair of nice bluetooth over the ear headphones.

I’ve got a set of AirPod Pros 2nd Gen and while I like them very much, I don’t like that my ears get annoyed with me if I wear them for more than a couple of hours at a time.

Were it not for that, I’d have them in all the time.

It would be so much easier than listening to the crazy lady screaming about whatever she screams about, or hearing her fella, yelling at the yappy dogs, while grinding away on some piece of metal, driving or “Fixing” a vehicle that’s on it’s last legs.

What he needs to do, is stay out from under the hoods of the various vehicles he’s destroyed (5? I think at last count,) and leave it to a professional. His version of a properly running engine is very different from mine! 3 of 8 cylinders firing, punctuated by 5 consecutive backfires is not proper operation! There’s also the thrilling sound of him running a chain saw at 10 PM. I’m not kidding, I’ll turn the lights off and he’ll start the chainsaw. That motor is also on it’s last legs! One can only hope that when It dies we’ll be spared the restful sounds of him cutting whatever he’s cutting.

Don’t ask…

All I can say is this used to be a quiet neighborhood. This is what happens when you let riff raff move into nice places!

I’ve been in hollers in Tennessee, and Kentucky where folks were dirt poor, and not school educated but they weren’t this kind of white gutter trash.

It’s funny in a way, California can’t even do white trash or rednecks right.

You can see why I might be looking for noise cancelling headphones, that are comfortable in the long term.

There are literally times when I can’t watch TV in my living room due to the noise coming from that white trash. I like having the windows open this time of year, I like the fresh mountain air (even when it is full of pollen).

So I’m faced with, turning up the volume to unbearable levels, closing the windows, not bothering to try to live my life and watch a movie or TV show in my house, or a set of headphones.

I know there are those of you saying, “Why don’t you call the police?”

Hahahahahaha! Where the hell have you people been living? Police? Helpful? Responding to a noise complaint? The police can’t even arrest and hold her for more than 8 hours after she assaults someone. Which she’s done 3 more times since she assaulted me last year.

BTW, if I lived in one of those “Fly Over” redneck places… Let’s just say this whole thing wouldn’t be a problem. Folks go missing in hollers all the time…

I digress, I was considering the Apple AirPods Max. They’re expensive! But I can also buy them from Costco and save $70. I saved $50 on my AirPod Pros at Costco. My concern there is that the Max is generation one and come fall Apple may be releasing a replacement version.

This led me down a rabbit hole of reviews and firmware versions for both the AirPod Max and my AirPod Pros. That’s when I discovered something interesting and strange. I did a search for “Latest AirPod Pro Gen 2 Firmware” then I got articles from last year through this year. I told the browser to limit the results to only this year. You’d think that would narrow your search but oddly it didn’t by much.

I was still seeing articles listing last years firmware as current and it was clear from context, the article had been written last year but the date was today’s date. I looked at several similar articles thinking perhaps there was a current update but there wasn’t.

There was however a shit ton (Technical Term) of ads.

Then it dawned on me, these outdated articles are monkeying with the dates to appear current so they can serve these shitty ads.

This reduces the usefulness of the internet and honestly makes me discount the validity or accuracy of publications MacWorld and 9 to 5 Mac I’m looking right at you!

It occurs to me that because of folks doing stuff like this to keep serving the same 5 ads over and over again, overall the internet is becoming less useful all the time. If the filtering doesn’t work, then the user is faced with a wave of outdated and current information with no ability to determine what is real, and what is useless.

Imagine writing an article about Trump when he was President, packing that article with shitty ads, then updating the date.

A query like “Who is President of the United States” could return Trump, Biden, Obama and Bush. How would someone know? If they had to turn on the TV to figure out who the president is, then the internet would be kind of useless.

All this ad crap and targeted marketing was a bad idea to begin with, and it’s only gotten worse.

I come again to a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the past few years.

“Is the internet’s usefulness eclipsed by having to filter through all the crap to get valid information?”

I’m really wondering. I guess I’ll know when I see an article saying, “Australian farmers pig has piglets with wings, Farmer Stunned!” I’d bet that at least 25% of folks on the internet would read the article, and a lot of them would believe it.

I fell for one the other night, some bullshit about a mystery in some dudes backyard. It was written like some reality show script. A paragraph that said essentially nothing, then a commercial, and another paragraph then commercial. It went on and on, but it was putting ads in front of everyone that was curious late at night.

Spoiler Alert: The guy bought a house built in the late 50s, the “Mystery” was that someone who owned the house had put in a fallout shelter. Over time, other owners had added soil and landscaping that buried the hatch. Then the shelter had gotten forgotten about except as a dim rumor. The guy found the original blueprints at the county records office and decided to investigate. The shelter was in pretty good shape so the guy renovated the space. It was pretty cool. The article could have covered everything in maybe 4 well written paragraphs with photos. Instead they took almost 100 paragraphs all of which were poorly written.

I finally went to Apple for the answer. I’d not gone to them in the first place because often asking a simple question in Apple’s support section, does not provide a single Byte of data. You’re still going to have to sort through a ton data that’s not relevant.

By the way, as of 6/28/2023 the current AirPod Pro Gen 2 firmware is 5E135.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to drop the hammer on headphones…

This is how I lose entire days…

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Something I never thought I’d say…

I suppose there are a lot of those things.

In this particular case, it’s I’m happy with how long my computer battery lasts. I’m also somewhat impressed with the iPad battery too.

The computer is insane. I’ll use the thing for days. I’ll be surprised when I get a low battery warning and then think, “Oh Yeah, it’s been a while!” This is very different from the older machines I’ve had. I lived by their power monitors and always carried spare batteries or adapters.

I’m still working on settings on the iPad to minimize its power consumption. My Computer and iPad both use the M2 chip but the iPad is more in line with a day or day and a half of use. I think that’s because there are background applications that wake up or are running on the iPad that aren’t as “busy” on the computer.

I believe I can probably trim more of the iPad background applications out of the background and realize more power savings.

The point is, when I started using laptop computers years ago, a 2 hour battery life was considered good. Now I’m talking about 2 day battery life between charges. I’m using the machine as I normally would, I’m typing blogs, surfing the net, working on stories, (although not fast enough there,) attending video conferences or watching lectures. Through it all, the computer doesn’t seem to care or get winded. I don’t think I’ve heard the fans come on, ever.

For the first time I’ll leave the house with my machines in my brief case and leave the chargers behind.

I suppose this is on my mind because today the computer asked for a bit of power. I plugged it in, and it said okay I’m charging to 80% quickly. (That would have actually gotten me through my typical day with ease.) The computer then switched over to a holding pattern at 80% and will finish charging by about 1:30PM.

This means that the machine has figured out my general habits and is using the charging feature Apple designed to extend battery life. It’s cool. I can override it if I want, or need to, but why? I’d rather have a battery that’s healthy in two or three years (like my iPhone 12 Pro) than force the issue. Besides, I’m using the big monitor in the office. I like this monitor a lot but I like working with the computer on the back deck more.

For the past 24 hours the wind has been kicking up to crazy gusty levels. I don’t feel like sitting out on the deck in all the blowing dust and pollen. Even though the sun is shining and the temps are nice.

It’s been all I could do to keep my sinuses open and the poor dog literally snorted a patch of pollen he thought was a food wrapper (I think). He’s been sneezing 5 or 6 times at a go for the past two days. I laugh at him… Then he saunters down the hall trying to look dignified, until another sneezing fit hits and he sneezes himself into a wall or something. My continuing to laugh gets me a dirty look and he retires to his “Room” where he can be alerted about food but doesn’t have to look at me.

All of which is to say that the amount of pollen in the air is so high that getting it into a keyboard would not be such a good thing. So I don’t need to be sitting outside for my sake, the keyboard’s sake, or the dog’s sake. All of us are quite comfortable inside.

I’ve got the leeward side of the house open for the fresh air but every once in a while the wind will shift just for a minute or two and blow a new batch of yellow joy into the house.

I was originally going to use a photo of my hand but when I looked at the photo I realized that you could easily see all of my fingerprints. Probably not a great idea to broadcast that kind of biometric information across the internet! With a little work I could convert the image into usable prints, so you get the swiffer. If the FBI ever needed non carbon fingerprint dust, I can recommend pine pollen.

I hope you all have a nice Monday. I’m hitting the sinus spray again!