Category: Generic

To-Do Lists

Daily writing prompt
Something on your “to-do list” that never gets done.
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I make a lot of to-do lists. I post a lot of them here. I don’t really have an issue with failing to complete everything. My issue is finishing everything in a timely manner. 

How about an example? Okay. Let us say I made a list of things for today, Saturday. Hypothetically it would be a short, manageable list of achievable things. If I put my nose to the grindstone I would clear the list over the course of a day. Instead I get distracted and I procrastinate and some of the things get punted off until Sunday. The same thing happens on Sunday. I make progress, but the last item or two gets punted off to Monday morning. Then it happens again, on a smaller scale, and the last thing gets punted to Monday after work. 

Everything gets completed eventually, just not on schedule. None of what I’ve written so far answers the actual question though so let me think for a second. What is something on my life’s to-do list that never gets done? I never hit a huge mega lottery. That’s been on my to-do list since I first learned what a lottery was. I haven’t completed it yet, but one of these days….

For the Birds

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite thing to cook?
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I cook a lot, but I don’t cook a lot of stuff. Does that make sense? It will.

I am a meat and potatoes kinda guy. Unfortunately for my family and their diet, when I cook I cook like a meat and potatoes kinda guy. There are only a few dishes that I am competent enough to prepare without supervision. If I had to pick a favorite it would be boneless chicken breasts. In the oven, in the air fryer (that’s been my go-to since the early days of the pandemic lock down), once in a while on the gas grill outside (though that often ends in fiery destruction), and on even rarer occasions in a frying pan on the stove.  I could seriously have chicken for dinner every night and not complain once. 

Side dishes are a little more varied, but I get into ruts in that area too. Lately it has been instant mashed potatoes or instant stuffing (Stove Top) or maybe a canned veggie. Sometimes I get a little more elaborate and air fry some mini potatoes or a fresh veggie. For a long time (before my gastric bypass surgery) it was almost always a quinoa and stir fried vegetables thing that my wife taught me to make. My new stomach and I have a tough time with quinoa now though so if I make it I can’t eat it. Jen likes it though so I have no problem making it, and I should make it for her more often.

In the interest of mixing things up, for the last few weeks we have been using one of those internet delivery meal prep services a few nights a week. Jen signed us up for Dinnerly. So far we’ve been very happy with it. They send us a few meals on Fridays and we usually cook them together. Jen does most of the heavy work, but I help her where ever she needs. Even with the service, most of what we make is chicken. Chicken is my favorite thing to eat as well as cook. Just call me a bird brain, right?

Apple iie

Daily writing prompt
Write about your first computer.
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My father bought our first computer from what was probably the only computer store in Tewksbury, MA. It was on Main street sort of near the intersection with Chandler street. I’m not sure what is there now. It had a monitor, a keyboard, and two floppy drives. I believe it was 1983. 

It looked like this:

Apple IIe and Bank Street Writer
I found this image on Flickr. Click to view the original post.*

I don’t recall the specs beyond that. Maybe before I click publish I’ll ask the stupid AI Assistant if it knows. I do remember we had a joystick but it didn’t work very well. We also had a modem wired into our telephone. We could plug a phone line into the computer, connect it to the phone, and dial out direct. We used it to call some old bulletin board services. It was completely epic, like the movie War Games but without the treason or the nukes. Unfortunately the modem was so slow it made the whole experience useless. We did have a text chat with some random person once. That was ground breaking, indeed.

I used it for school to write papers and essays. We had a word processor program that worked pretty well. I also played a lot of games, but that experience wasn’t quite as good as what we had over at Mike the (future) Bass Player’s house as he had a Commodore 64 which was a better gaming platform. We had a great baseball game and an olympic decathlon game that was really fun but difficult. We had a text based game that I think was a Zork knock off that I seem to remember was called Mobius.

It was a great computer. Eventually, at some point in the 90’s, my father had a friend who built IBM clones and we moved on to Windows 3.1. I messed with Macs for the first time when I was at Northeast Broadcasting School in ’93 (I think?), and then when I went to Middlesex Community College I took a class called Intro to Computers that covered an office suite called Claris Works that also used a Mac. Later, while at UMass Lowell (for my second time around) I got a job at a computer lab where I was tasked with putting a tech focused talk show onto the radio station. My desk had a Mac Quadra that I used for editing audio. I also used a program called Nifty Telnet that let me connect to the university’s Unix system so I could do my programming homework. That machine was epic. I didn’t become a Mac owner until years later, after I moved in with Jen. I got a MacBook Pro and have literally never looked back. I am 100% invested in the Apple echo system now. MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad, AppleWatch, HomePods all over the house. How long until they pull me into the new Vision Pro? Someday.

There you have it, my first computer was an Apple iie and it made me the computer nerd I am today. Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.

Hey, AI Assistant, what were the specs for an apple iie?

The Apple IIe, released in 1983, featured a 1.023 MHz 65C02 processor, 64 KB RAM, and used 5.25-inch floppy disks for storage. It also supported a lowercase character set, which was an improvement over its predecessors. The computer sported a sleek design and was compatible with a wide range of peripherals, making it a popular choice for educational and personal use.

* I was going to send the owner of the Flickr account a request to use the image on my page but it hasn’t been active for 12 years. Fortunately, it did have a license listed on the page which allows for use of the image for non-commercial purposes so long as I credit the owner. The link in the caption should suffice as a credit. Click it, please. That means I can never monetize this post. That’s fine as I have no plans to monetize this site ever. Thanks, mysterious Flickr account!

(Non) Daily Haiku for You #140

Today’s haiku is like everything else in my tiny little brain on the last day of January… it’s about the first day of February and the RPM Challenge… again. Sorry. I get a smidge obsessed this time of year.

Need some new ideas.
Have to write a bunch of songs.
Want to start right now.

Fear

Bloganuary writing prompt
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
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I have to admit that I am struggling to find an answer to this one. I have a couple of thoughts, but nothing I would ever share publicly. The difficulty is the second question. There are a lot of things I am scared to do, but none of them are things that I would ever consider actually doing, you know what I mean?

There is one thing that comes to mind that fits the spirit of this daily prompt. One thing that I am scared to do that I will do if the circumstances require it… or at least I would consider doing it in the right situation. What is it? Move out of the United States.

In 2016 the prospect of a nazi winning the US presidency led to a lot of discussion about possibly emigrating to a new country. Jen and I discussed it a little and agreed we could not leave our family behind even if we did find ourselves in a fascist dictatorship. We talked in general terms about where we could go. Some place where English is the first language and (hopefully) had a warm climate. In the end we didn’t leave even though the nazi did win the white house. 

Unfortunately for American Democracy and for civilization, that same nazi is running for president again. His rhetoric was bad in 2016 but it is already so much worse now. He is openly talking about dictatorship and half of the registered voters in the United States are still supporting him. He may be in jail by the time the election rolls around (he should be in jail now, but he will never see the inside of a cell because that’s how corruption works, right?) but he’s still going to win the republican nomination and he still could win the general election in November. 

If he wins again, do we consider leaving the United States again? Maybe. I think we will at the very least need to revisit the discussion. The topic is a little terrifying in terms of figuring out where to go, figuring out how to get there, figuring out the legal issues, and not to mention the implications for the US itself. It’s pretty scary, all right. Would I do it? No, I don’t think so, but I would have to think about it. We’ll see what happens. 

Would we move to Canada? That would be easiest but it’s cold there. England? Scotland? Ireland? Australia? I think Scotland would be the favorite for us, though it’s cold there too, isn’t it? If it were just me it would probably be Ireland, but for my family as a whole it would be Scotland. I doubt it will ever come to that, and the prospect is very scary to me, but if it does… I guess we’ll see.