Give me a break. Give me a break. Break me off a piece of that kit-kat bar.
You deserve a break today at McDonalds.
I hate myself for typing the two previous lines.
Do I need a break? Yes. Of course I need a break. Who, living in the American capitalistic rat race (see the first two lines of this post), doesn’t? I need a break from work, from stress, from guilt, from pain, from thought (sort of), from… well… life. Take me and my wife and my step kids and put us on a plane heading west. Drop us off in San Diego, CA right on the shore of the Pacific ocean and let us flake together for a few weeks.
That’s the kind of break I need. Just leave us alone and let us… be. Just for a little while.
Hey Google Bard, generate an image of a Jedi Knight relaxing by the shore of the Pacific ocean…
I asked for a Jedi and it gives me red light sabers? I don’t recall asking for a Sith Lord, thank you very much. Oh well. Close enough for a Wednesday morning.
I don’t know every invention that happened in my lifetime. I’m sure the military has some crazy stuff that would blow all of our minds if we knew about it. My lifetime started in May of 1971 and there have been a lot of things that have been invented over that time. There is one that stands out to me though.
The personal computer. Whatever it may have been. Google tells me the first PC was invented in 1971 so we may have to squint a little to put it into my lifetime, but you get the deal. IBM and Apple had the first consumer level computers that I knew of. The Apple II was everywhere when I was in school. Microsoft’s deal with IBM to license their Disc Operating System (DOS) rather than sell it allowed for IBM clones and soon enough they were everywhere too.
DOS led to Windows, the Apple II led to the Macintosh which eventually led to the iPhone which more or less brought us to where we are today. Everyone in the civilized (or should I write that as “civilized” because, ya know… nazis and shit) world has some sort of computer or smart phone. The internet is essential to operating our society now. Computers are basically our lifeline.
On a more personal note, the invention of the Personal Computer led to me having a career as a programmer. It led to my wife having a career as a software engineer and a software architect. It led to our family earning a living. I would call that a pretty important development, wouldn’t you? Damn right.
Hey Google Bard, generate an image of a jedi knight using a macintosh computer.
I can’t really answer this one because I really don’t know the answer. I’ll take a crack at it off the top of my head.
Wake up next to my love. Get my exercise in for the day, have some breakfast, shit-shower-shave, and start the day.
This is a fantasy, right? That means it is sure as hell not a work day so maybe I play the guitar for a little while, or go outside and photograph some stuff.
This is a fantasy, right? That means both of my step kids are home for a visit. The four of us, me and my wife and the two kids, spend the morning together doing… something… anything. Then we go to lunch together.
After lunch the four of us do something together… anything. I don’t even care if it’s actually a whole lot of nothing, as long as we do it together. Then we go to dinner together.
After dinner the four of us do something together. Watch a movie, play some games. Anything so long as it’s together.
End the day by falling asleep next to my love.
I am a simple man and I enjoy the simple things. I think my hypothetical ideal day demonstrates that. I’m also gettin’ old so there’s no sky diving or hang gliding type shit for me. Just family and happy. That’s ideal for me.
At this point I need to change the subject a little. I am going to start a new thing on these daily writing prompt posts. Google has given it’s stupid AI thingie the ability to generate images. I am going to use it to generate an image related to each day’s post. I’ll try this for a few days and see how goofy I can get.
Oh yeah, the image will be something with a Jedi Knight. For today, I asked Google Bard this question:
generate an image of a jedi knight on his ideal day
Me
I think we’re all going to have a nice giggle at this little thing. Until we get tired of it, of course.
Every time I hear the word “perspective” I hear Peter Gabriel’s voice*.
I don’t know how to answer today’s question. I am a human being living in the physical universe. Things happen in the world around me and I react to them. Physically and emotionally. I think the show Futurama explained this aspect of humanity best…
(Fry and Bender are watching All my Circuits) Fry: So, who’s that weird-looking guy? Bender: That’s a human. Fry: What’s he do? Bender: Eh, the usual human stuff. He laughs, he learns, he loves. Fry: Boring.
From the Futurama episode “I, Roommate”
So how do events and time effect my perspective on life? When good things happen I learn from them and want more stuff like that to happen. When bad stuff happens I learn from them and want less stuff like that to happen.
I’m not sure there is any other way to look at this one. Maybe everyone else will come up with a better response, but not me. Not today, at least. Sorry to disappoint.
*Perspective by Peter Gabriel:
You get a TV quote and a song in this post. Am I over compensating for something?
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….
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?
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.
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!
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.
I complain about a lot of things. I will give you a list and you will see that the things I complain about the most all boil down to pretty much one thing.
Fascists and fascism
Nazis and nazi-ism
Maga
Trump and trump supporters and trump sympathizers and trump collaberators
Americans whose words and actions are anti-american and anti-democracy
Insurectionists
Treasonists
Anyone who helped or supported or sympathized with the attempt to overthrow the democratically elected president on January 6, 2021
Anti-science
Anti-vax
Anti-evolution
Climate change deniers
Misogynists and/or incels
Bigots
Qanon
People who abuse children
People who abuse their spouses
You see the trend there? That’s the serious list. That’s the real response to the question. Now I’ll give another, shorter (I hope) list that’s more sarcastic and more in the spirit of kidding around and lowering whatever tension I just built up with my real list.
People who drive too slow in the fast lane on the highway
Winter weather
Traffic jams
Morning commutes
Evening commutes
Country music
Television commercials, especially the ones that pimp drugs with awful side effects
Did I mention snow?
Websites that autoplay video, especially when the audio is not muted
The New York Yankees or the Montreal Canadians
There… that’s a good lighten-the-mood kinda list… though I should probably delete it and let the serious list stand on it’s own. I feel a bit like a coward leaving the second list, but what can you do, right?
There was a time when my social life more or less consisted of watching sports. I’d say 50-60% of what I did with my free time involved watching sports. There was a period in my life where I had a partial season ticket package (10 games) for the Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League, a full season ticket package (40 games) for the Lowell Lock Monsters of the American Hockey League, and then during the summer we split a full season ticket package for the Lowell Spinners of the New York Penn baseball league (I think it was about 50 games and we went to half of them). At the same time I used to follow the Lock Monsters on road games because there were six AHL teams in New England. I would go to road games in three of the other five locations. Along with all of that, there were playoff games for the Bruins and the Monsters. One AHL season saw me go to maybe 50-55 games. Crazy.
Now? I still follow hockey and baseball closely, but I rarely go to games in person, and I have a tough time fitting actually sitting and watching games on television, or listening on the radio, into my busy schedule. I still hang on every goal and every run, but I miss tons and tons of every season.
So the answer to the question, what are my favorite sports to watch? Hockey and Baseball. The Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League, and the Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball. Those are my favorite teams. I also follow some NCAA hockey but my old school, UMass Lowell, is seriously crappy this year so they are tough to follow. There is a minor league baseball team in Manchester New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Fisher Cats who are in the Toronto Blue Jays system, but I haven’t been to a game there since 2007. This year I am hoping to get to a game and maybe follow them on the radio a little bit. We will see.
Inside the Red Head's Head 