In the Office Today

I am in the office today. I expect to be in the office tomorrow, at home on Thursday, and then in the office again on Friday. You are clearly beside yourself with fascination, I can see. Clearly.

I took a picture for today’s photo a day entry. Again, you are fascinated.

We called the contractor’s office who worked on our dishwasher over the last two weeks and demanded a refund. They sent out a tech to see what was wrong instead. He ripped our kitchen apart and found nothing wrong. Insert a frustrated sigh here. I ran the dishwasher twice last night and the error message did not return. The working theory is that something was partially blocking the outflow, possibly in the garbage disposal, and it just backed up into the dishwasher. Yeah, I guess. We’ll run the disposal before running the dishwasher and see how that works. Frankly I am still wanting to take the thing outside and run it over with the car. We’ll see how it goes for a while, but I don’t see myself trusting the little bastard any time soon.

Okay, I gotta run. Someone needs me to move some code out to a customer. I’ll get on that and talk to you folks later.

Random Cats

While I stress over the death rattle of my dishwasher (friggin’ thing) and the coup that put a nazi dictator into the white house, I try to compensate and make myself feel better about everything by taking bad photos of cats.

There, don’t you feel better now?

Amazon Boycott

There has been an organized amazon boycott underway for the last week. It started on the 7th of March and ends today on the 14th. I have been as successful as I can be in joining the boycott. I haven’t shopped at amazon or knowingly shopped at a site that amazon owns. I haven’t watched anything on amazon prime video. I haven’t knowingly used the news services they own, or even used imdb. The most difficult part was not using audible while driving in and out of Boston and to and from work this week. I am a bit of an audiobook junkie when I am driving and not touching my audible account was a little tough.

The question I have is, did I unknowingly use amazon web services? I think a huge chunk of the internet is hosted by amazon. There’s a good chance that I went somewhere that is paying money to amazon for their web hosting needs. I don’t think I could have avoided that at all. Hell, for all I know this very page is hosted by amazon. I hope not, but who knows?

For the things that I could actually control though, I have managed to play along. I just have to continue not giving amazon any business until midnight tonight. I can do it.

In the meantime, here’s a photo a day picture of a cat. Hopefully Flickr, the site I use to host the images you see on this goofy little page, is not hosted by the amazons. That would be disappointing.

Stoplight Theater: Boston Edition

Today’s stoplight theater comes from a random intersection on the short drive from the hotel we’ve been staying at over the last couple of days to the Mass Pike (that’s route 90 for non-local folks). Fascinating, I know.

Photo a Day

I forgot to take a picture of something… anything… before I left for work this morning. As a result, here is my iPhone’s charger’s eye view of my office… because I had to do something to stay on pace for this silly project…

Thursday Morning

It's only 10am and I'm already thinking today is going to be one of those days where I just start screaming and then can't stop no matter how hard I try.Happy effin' Thursday.
— Rob (@robj1971.bsky.social) 2025-03-06T15:04:47.989Z

Yup… that’s where my brain lives right now. Here’s a cat pic to try and calm us all down………

Hip Hip Hooray, folks. Yippee Skippee.

Poser

Look at my cat, Robin. What a poser.

That pic is my photo a day number 185/365. But wait, there are two more pictures of this little poser, mugging it up for the camera.

Photo a Day

Yeah, my last post said it feels like a normal Monday. That feeling went right down the crapper about 20 minutes after I published the post. Fun.

I did get a nice cat pic for today’s photo a day thing. Number 184/365. We’re over half way through the project… again. I mean, this is the sixth year in a row I’ve done this thing. I shouldn’t call it a photo a day for a year thing anymore, I should call it a photo a day for a decade thing. Anyway, here’s Robin Sparkles the photogenic feline.

Photo a Day

This morning I snuck in a few pics to cover today’s photo a day challenge picture. I had just finished adding the final tracks to a song and I picked up the camera while listening to the playback. Here is today’s entry, 180/365:

I almost went with this one instead…

These would have been okay too…

Forming Bad Habits

Two days in a row now I have skipped my daily exercise. Uh oh, bad habits forming over here!

Why? So I could record guitar tracks for RPM Challenge songs. That seems like a good reason. It will probably happen again tomorrow but instead of guitar it will be recording vocals in the car… assuming I can write the vocal parts for the last two songs before I fall asleep tonight. That’s a pretty big if.

Should I manage to get up early enough tomorrow I might be able to sneak some guitar playing in before work too. What about saxophone? I’m not sure if any of the remaining songs have plans for sax or not. I think one or two might. I also think I might just make a game time decision and change those planned sax parts to guitar parts. We’ll see. I put sax on four songs so far. That’s 20% of the entire project. That seems like an acceptable amount… though 25 or 30% seems more acceptable. We’ll have to see.

Once all of the songs are mixed (and hopefully that means all 20 songs and not some smaller number because I just declared mixing done while there were still songs outstanding) I have to pick an album running order. I might actually do three playlists. One with the 10 electric songs, another with the 10 acoustic songs, and then one with just the best 10 overall. That would be the one that I declare the Official 2025 RPM Challenge Album Submission, whatever that means. I thought about using AI to generate an image for the album cover but AI is fucking evil so I will just “borrow” something off of wikipedia. The working title of the final album is still Groundhogs Wear Top Hats but I might change that to Groundhogs and Top Hats to make the image search a little less ridiculous. We’ll see.

For now though, here are this morning’s stupid pics. I switched from the 85mm f1.8 lens to the 40mm f2.0 lens to give myself a little bit of a new option for the same old pics. The first one is today’s photo a day picture (179/365).