Category: Tech

Another Year

First of all, my wife today referred to our basement as Lake Asshole without me prompting her. It is true, this stupid blog is corrupting people left and right. Insert maniacal laugh here.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled post:

One year ago today I posted a picture that I took with my iPhone. It marked the completion of the Flickr Photo a Day Challenge thing. 366 days (2020 was a leap year) with at least one photo. Success. I had tried that challenge a bunch of times and crashed and burned each time.

The next day (one year ago tomorrow) I still took another picture. The day after that I did it again. I wasn’t planning on doing another photo a day thing, it was just Covid-19 pandemic-land and I had to keep my locked down self entertained somehow, right? A few days into September there was a day where I did not take a still photo, but I did take a video of the cat doing something. Eventually I created an album on Flickr called “Not Doing a 365, but…”

Well… assuming that one video counts for a 365 project (notice I didn’t call it a photo a day this time, that’s a technicality, but it’s my project so I make the damn rules so blah), I just completed the 365 I wasn’t actually doing. That picture of the two wheel dolly I posted earlier? Yeah, that was the pic for day 365. So not only have I completed a photo a day thing after trying and failing over and over again so many times… I’ve now done it twice without a break in between. It’s not a 366 or a 365, it is a 731….

….and counting.

September 1, 2019 through August 31, 2021.

Good heavens, what a nerd!

Might be Time to Leave Facebook

I’m really tired of the fascism and science denial and inability to know truth from lies on facebook. I think it’s time to bail. I am thinking about blocking everyone except Jen and the kids and the guys in the band. I’m sick of learning how stupid people in my life can be. How completely lacking in feelings or humanity so many people are when you remove the sham of direct personal interactions.

Right now I look at facebook and I just want to tell everyone there to go fuck themselves. I’m just so sick of it all. Obviously it’s not everyone, but I feel like I no longer want to worry about collateral damage, if you know what I mean.

Twitter and Instagram are the other social network services I use and they are both awful too, but so much of facebook is just bile and I think after 13 years it is time to flush away the puke.

Calming Down

I don’t know if I was over reacting a little this morning, or if I’ve just been so busy at work since then that I lost perspective, but things have calmed down quite a bit today. They both took naps (I’m jealous) and the sense of impending doom I felt earlier is gone. That’s good, right?

I was expecting Bellana to drive back to Vermont today but instead she made a salon appointment and planned to spend the day in Boston (I’m jealous). That means she’s going to be at our house when I get home tonight. Actually, I might get home first, but whatever. She’s going to join us for Marvel and Burgers night. What If…? Season one episode three. It should be fun.

During the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic, someone bought my parents a digital picture frame that can be loaded remotely via an app. We all added tons of pictures to it and it’s been running around the clock* ever since. Today I had to go out to the porch for something and I saw a couple of old pictures on the window sill, hidden by 100 years of stuff. One had a picture of my mother’s mother. The other had a picture of my father’s mother, and a picture of my father’s brother. I thought I would scan them and add them to the picture frame. I had to dig through a pile of stuff, it felt like Harry Potter in the last movie robbing the LeStrange vault, but I was able to grab them. I was surprised to find two more pictures hidden behind my father’s mother. One had a picture of one of my father’s aunts and one of his uncles, and the other was a picture of another aunt.

I scanned them all with my iPhone and added them to the picture frame. I’m still waiting for one of them to pop up, and for my parents to notice. That might actually take a couple of days as there is a little league world series game on and one of the teams is from New Hampshire. Suffice to say, distracted.

*It doesn’t exactly run around the clock. When the ambient light level drops below a certain level the unit shuts itself off. Outside of that it’s been running around the clock.

WoW and TWD

I just spent about an hour playing World of Warcraft and I didn’t die once! I was killing bad guys left and right! It was a slaughter and those pricks never even touched me (mostly)! Of course this just means that the next time I play I’ll get attacked by a bunny rabbit and it’ll tear my lungs out. That rabbit’s dynamite!

It’s time to wrap it up for the night though. We are 10 minutes away from the season 11 premier of The Walking Dead. It’s zombie time, babie! I sure hope the FiOS app on my iPad can still find AMC. Season 11 is the last season, though it’s going to be three eight episode segments instead of the usual two. That’s good. I can handle some bonus time before it ends.

I should also note that the character I was playing in WoW uses a crossbow, so I was basically Darryl. Unless you prefer the comics to the TV show, in which case I was Dwight… though in TV land Dwight is now on Fear the Walking Dead and that’s pretty much a fate worse than zombified un-death.

Just remember, kids, when the zombies are chasing you, make sure you walk faster! Ooh! See what I did there? In the immortal words of Alf, I kill me!

Oops

I wear my AppleWatch over night to track my sleep data. I charge it to 100% before I go to bed, then put it on when I turn in.

At 11:45 I decided it was time for sleep. That’s when I realized I never charged my watch.

Think I’ll stay up a little longer.

Oops, dumbass.

Nothing Constructive

I didn’t play guitar tonight. I did play about an hour and 10 minutes of World of Warcraft and with the exception of the last five minutes or so when I died repeatedly I had a nice stretch of slaughtering bad guys and monsters so I guess it was okay. I know we said we weren’t going to play World of Warcraft anymore, but it’s still my wife’s all time favorite, and it is also the only game I have on my PC and my subscription hasn’t run out yet so… yeah.

Star Wars: Old Republic is downloading, so there’s that.

There’s a Pixies song in the soundtrack to The Suicide Squad. Hey, off of Doolittle. Yeah… that set off the old Boston rock fan zaniness in a big way. I had already started listening to a lot of Throwing Muses prior to watching the movie but now we’re just up to our eyeballs in the music of the city of Boston from the late 80’s through the late 90’s. Pixies have been the soundtrack to tonight’s video game violence. I’ve blown through Come on Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa and I’m about 3/4 of the way through Doolittle. For my money, Pixies Doolittle, Throwing Muses House Tornado (or the first record), and Mission of Burma’s Vs are enough to justify the entire god awful decade of the 1980’s. Throw in a handful of Rush records and just dump the rest of the decade down the crapper and you’re good to go.

Did I mention that Betwixt is getting back together for a few shows soon? There’s your 1990’s justification right there.

You know, I wish I had something constructive* to add to the electronic conversation tonight but I just don’t. Go give Doolittle a spin and you’ll feel better. Try Betwixt’s Moustache album too. Also, if you can find Smackmelon’s Space Shot play that too. Trust me.

*Twice through the course of this post, once in the title and once in the body, I have misspelled constructive as constructed. I blame society for my spelling short comings. The Pixies playlist just moved on from Doolittle to Bossanova. We should be Digging for Fire shortly.

Addendum: When I logged out of World of Warcraft, the Steam app said I had 10 seconds to wait before I could play Star Wars: Old Republic. Groovy, thought me. Then when I hovered my mouse over the Start button it changed to 8 seconds, and then to 4 hours and 50 minutes. It’s currently reading two hours and 56 minutes. Okay. I guess we won’t play tonight. It’s all right. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to be a Jedi or a Sith to start with anyway.

Addendum #2: We watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory tonight while we ate dinner. In it, Sheldon played a Theremin. Did anyone else completely forget that there is a Theremin in the Pixies song Velouria? The world is a small place, and music makes time travel possible.

Season 11

I had a moment just now where I thought I missed the premier of The Walking Dead’s 11th season, but that doesn’t actually happen until next week. Whew, eh?

I closed all three rings in my activity app tonight. That means I closed all three rings every day for a week. The app calls that a perfect week. I’d be much more excited about it if my legs weren’t in so much pain.

This has been a really good weekend for the three of us. The only thing missing was my step daughter. She’s coming down next weekend and we are going to get to spend some quality time with her. This weekend though was all about Harry and it was wonderful. I’m so excited for the next chapter in his life to start in two weeks but I’m also crushed that he has to leave us. I want to make the most of the time we have left.

For now though, let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a work day.

Sweet dreams, internet.

“Exercise”

The clock was fast approaching 10:00pm and thanks to our glorious flake day I still hadn’t closed two of my Activity app rings. Move was about 3/4 done, but exercise… I had five minutes from going up and down the cellar stairs for laundry and flood clean up, but that was it. Five minutes down and 25 to go.

When Jen went to bed I went down stairs to check on the flood situation. While I was down there I “exercised” for 15 minutes. That’s the longest I’ve gone at once since I started this whole ring closing push two weeks ago.

After that I went upstairs to the bed room and gave my back a good 20-30 minutes of rest before getting up and finishing with 10 more minutes. Kick ass! I had all three rings closed at 11:00, with a full hour to spare.

I’m going to be busy tomorrow so it’s not a guarantee, but I’ve got a shot at my first perfect week in a long time.

Kick ass, dude.

I Love My Family

I love my family. They are the best. You will never meet finer people.

Knowing that I am going to be at my parents’ for two whole days and that I won’t see them at all during that time, they asked me if I wanted to play a game of Ticket to Ride Online with them. We all have it on our iPads and figured it would be a nice thing to do together even when we aren’t together. Look me in the eye and tell me that isn’t the nicest thing anyone has ever done. I mean, seriously. How wonderful are Jen and Harry? I know Bellana’s not a big fan of that game, but maybe we can find something we can all play, assuming we can sneak it in around her work schedule as she is working up a storm in the final weeks before school starts.

I’m not sure who setup the network at my parents house, but I am pretty sure they have a firewall of some kind that is blocking online games. I’ve mentioned my troubles with World of Warcraft in the past, and tonight I had to switch from the wifi to my iPhone’s hotspot in order to connect to the game. I know my sister’s kids were doing some of their remote school here last year. I wonder if they put something in to keep them honest.

Speaking of online games, Jen and I have been playing World of Warcraft for the last month or so. WoW is owned and operated by a company called Blizzard. Blizzard has been getting demolished with charges of various kinds of sexual misconduct in the work place. I believe their CEO resigned over it recently. Karmically speaking (I do not believe in Karma, but the principal still applies) we are both starting to feel uncomfortable supporting the company so we’re looking for something else to play. Jen was looking into Star Wars: The Old Republic today. She won’t have to twist my arm to play that one. A game where I can be a Jedi? Sure! A game where I can get in touch with my dark side and be a Sith? Sure! I’ll have to download that one when I finally get home from this nana/papa sitting shift, sometimes in 2043 or so.

Last time I was here I mentioned that the only place I feel comfortable doing my “exercise” is in the cellar, and I don’t like going down there and leaving my parents alone without having a legitimate reason to go down stairs. There is laundry to do tonight, so I have my reason. I didn’t have a chance to start it until a little after 9:00, and only had five out of 30 minutes done, but I think I can close the ring. I have been down stairs once and I got my time up to 15 minutes. I think I will have two legitimate reasons to go into the cellar before midnight and I think I can get in the 15 remaining minutes. We’ll see. It’s really hot here and the humidity is unreal. We’ll see.

I left work for the day at 3:30 today so that I could spend some time with Harry before I came to my parents house. We watched the first episode of What If…? It was really good. I can’t wait for more! While we were busy with the Marvel fun, an email was sent to the whole company saying that our return to the office policy was changing again. Our requirement to come in approximate once a week has been temporarily put on hold due to the increasing Covid-19 numbers (which reminds me, I haven’t updated my spreadsheets yet). My boss called me a little while ago to make sure we were all on the same page. It’s looking like going into the office is off the table until (probably) mid-October. Obviously that could change at any time, but I feel much safer. It was pretty uncomfortable being there the last couple of times. I didn’t feel unsafe per se, I just didn’t feel comfortable. Tonight’s announcement was like a sigh of relief.

Okay, I need to update my MA and US Covid-19 numbers spreadsheets, and then I need to mix a song. All of that sandwiched around laundry and “exercising” and actually going to sleep and stuff. Here’s hoping the quiet night stays quiet. Fingers crossed.