Reading.

When I was a kid I enjoyed reading anything I could get my hands on. My mom came into the kitchen on more than one occasion finding me parked in front of a bowl of Super Sugar Smacks reading our phone book.

From an eBay listing.

The telephone directory pictured above is not from our small town but it looks identical to the CONTEL phone book we had of the same year. When my paternal side of the family decided to sell the business, we had a collection of every phone book for the area from 1969 to 2010.

I’m digressing.

I would often be reading the phone book because I didn’t have anything else at hand to read at the moment. I gleaned a lot of information from the phone book, because after all, the phone book holds a lot of information, and I started memorizing phone numbers without even realizing it. For example, today I can still recite the phone number for the main office of my alma mater and for my elementary school, though I have no reason whatsoever to call these people and I have probably never called these numbers in my life. They were just there in the phone book.

Like many geeks I have tried to move from reading books to using their electronic equivalents, namely, the Kindle app from Amazon or Apple Books. I usually try to read using these apps on one of the iPads I’ve had over the years. And with the turning of the clocks to the New Year I have come to one solid realization.

I hate electronic books.

I don’t feel connected to what I’m reading. I don’t like having my eyes lit up in a darkened room by the words on the “page” and I feel like I’m actually just using a bunch of web pages.

Give me a real, printed book anyway.

Now, I’ve never had an Amazon Kindle with E-ink, which doesn’t rely on backlighting, so I don’t know if I would enjoy that reading experience. A couple of weeks ago my husband and I browsed around our local Bookmans, which is a delightful used book store with lots and lots of interesting things to read. I purchased a book on storm chasing that I’m currently reading and before going to sleep for the night it’s quite nice to not have an iPad staring me in the face as I’m starting to feel sleepy.

I’ve often quipped that the reason we have school violence is because students are no longer high on the fluid to make ditto copies. Perhaps we’re all getting cranky because we have too much blue light staring us in the face all the time.

I’m finding myself much happier settling down with a book before calling it a night. It’s a shame we don’t have a phone book in the house, just in case I have a literary emergency.

Hiking.

While Earl made his daily trip to the gym, I went hiking in Saguaro National Park east. I got started just before sunrise. I’d been on the majority of the trails I traversed today but the solo hike is just what I needed and as I write this I feel fantastic.

Feeling fantastic is good. I’m already planning my next hike for Saturday.

Our time is finite. Get out there and enjoy as much as you can before you reach your expiration date.

Reality.

Like everyone, I suppose, I sometimes think what life would be like if we won the lottery. What would we do with all that money? I have visions of buying an airplane so I can fly the family all over the country and easily fly us back east to visit with the relatives, but after the novelty of that wore off, what would I do? I am easily bored. I like tinkering with things and I like being able to get things, but the things I want to get have been obtained through hard work, which helps sidestep the boredom.

At one time in my life I thought I wanted to be rich so we could hobnob with the country club set, have lavish dinners and expensive drinks, and garner the attention of everyone in the dining room when I loudly ordered a $500 bottle of champagne, “make it two”.

The truth of the matter is, I’m content with where we are on the socioeconomic scale, and we are quite fortunate with our position. Too many people don’t have a reliable roof over their head, way too many people are looking for food, and way too many people live paycheck to paycheck. Because of the smarts of my husband we’ve been able to build a good life for ourselves and provide a bit for those we care for.

That’s much more fulfilling than that expensive bottle of champagne.

On the back half of my life I’m still looking to be a better person, but I’m not searching to be a richer person, at least not in an economical way. Deep down I’m still the guy from rural Central New York that grew up in a small town that was on the wrong side of the interstate as far as his classmates were concerned and you know what?

That’s awesome.

I’ve known a few too many “trust fund babies” in my life. While it’s fun to be able to have what you want without doing much to earn it, where’s the value in that? More importantly, where’s the zest of life in that?

I need to stick to the awesome.

Busy Overhead.

I love living near a military base. We have aircraft flying over on a regular basis. It is music to my ears.

Caturday.

The other night Earl and I were watching television and Truman decided to jump up and sleep on my chest while I was sitting on the couch. This is a particularly rare event for Truman so I was honored by his presence.

Unfortunately I coughed and he rapidly ejected from the situation and settled in on the blanket sitting next to me. He then assumed several positions until he found just the right one.

He is so charming.

Finale.

A Still from For All Mankind Season 4 Finale, Episode 10.

We finished up the latest season of “For All Mankind”. This was the fourth season of the Apple TV+ series, which highlights an alternate history based on the Russians being the first to the moon back in the late 1960s. Season 4 took place in the early to mid 2000s.

In this alternate history, the space race never stopped, and by 2003, seven countries have come together as the “M7” and there’s a well established colony on Mars. Russia is still very much the USSR and Al Gore is president of the United States. The spirit of what we know as the space race in the 1960s is still very much present and technological advances are happening quicker in this alternate timeline because of each country’s drive to be first in everything related to space, despite the cooperation taking place between the countries. In season four, a lot of the space industry has gone to corporations, specifically, “Helios Aeronautics” is the main contractor for much of the technology.

Earl and I had a hard time with the first couple of episodes of this season; it just seemed to be going in weird directions. The series has never focused solely on Science Fiction, there’s a lot of human elements, and in a similar vein to the the original Star Trek, the series takes on current events in their own way. The employees of Helios, the political climate, and many of the other socioeconomic based story lines feel very familiar. After all, no matter the technology present, humans will always be humans that do unfortunate human things.

The season finale was undoubtedly my favorite episode of the season. Clocking in at around 80 minutes, things were tidied up fairly well, there were a couple of lefts and rights in the story line that I didn’t expect, and at times I had a hard time deciding who I was suppose to be cheering on. I thoroughly enjoyed the viewing experience.

Apple has not confirmed a season five as of yet, but the episode left room for growth without being too obvious about it. It’s my understanding the writers have written out a plot intended for seven seasons. I’m hoping they get to see that come to fruition. Though the tone of the show has changed a little bit and as the alternate universe diverges from our reality more and more as the decades go by, I still enjoy the show and while this finale was satisfying, I’d really like to see the rest of it come to its intended conclusion.

Titles.

As I build up the blog list in the right hand column of this bloggy thing here, I’m noticing that some folks opt to not show their entire post in their RSS feed. Instead, the feed features a first paragraph, or in some cases a sentence or two intended to entice folks to their website for the rest of their writings. These are all perfectly fine approaches, but as I start to rely on RSS more as a way to discover content on the Internet, I sometimes have an unread feed list of 50+ items from the past day. Again, this is all perfectly fine, however, because I have varying degrees of attention span, I may gloss over a really blog feed because something in the tickler prose didn’t grab my attention.

This got me thinking about titles on blog posts. I have used titles on my blog posts for well over two decades. Around 10 or 11 years ago I started using one or two word titles in some sort of edgy (at least in my mind) way, and honestly, I think I got the idea from Jennifer Saunders’ titles used in certain seasons of “Absolutely Fabulous”.

Using one or two word titles has resulted in WordPress incrementing file names on the direct links back to these posts; I wouldn’t be surprised that if I hit publish it’s actually going to show as “titles-3” or something similar in the address bar of your browser when you read it. Nothing wrong with this and in a way it’s kind of nifty to see how many times I’ve used the word “titles” to title a blog entry.

As an aside, in early 2023 my husband and I binged “The Good Wife” from beginning to end, watching one or two episodes every night. It didn’t take me very long to figure out what the writers were doing there with episode titles.

  • Season 1 = one word title
  • Season 2 = two word title
  • Season 3 = three word title
  • Season 4 = four word title
  • Season 5 = three word title
  • Season 6 = two word title
  • Season 7 = one word title

I think it was apparent from the very beginning of “The Good Wife” that they intended either a four or seven season run of the series. We never got into “The Good Fight” to see what they did with the titles there. If we want to see Christine Baranski below one-liners we have “The Gilded Age” where she can do a good Maggie Smith impersonation.

OK, I think I’ve gone off in a distracted direction.

Even though we are 13 days into 2024, I think I’m going to try being a little more verbose in titling my blog entries. Aside from the use of “Caturday”, because there’s really only one way to celebrate Caturday and that’s with a properly titled blog entry and some purr-fect photos highlighting the wonders of the local feline.

I hope my title titillated you enough to get to the bottom of this blog entry. I just had to use the word titillated.

Redundancy?

With the new year I’m giving using my iPad Pro as a primary computing device another go. I’m not using my iPad Pro exclusively, but I am using it as a “sidecar” during my workday. While work has me trying to do things on a Windows 10 all day long, I can swivel to my iPad Pro to take care of personal tasks that pop up during the day, play music, etc.

So far the experience has been acceptable.

One of the frustrating things about my iPad Pro is that it’s still running a glorified version of iOS, which was originally designed for the iPhone, and it seems stuck in that paradigm. I’m really hopeful that Apple will change direction on this soon, as the iPad Pro line feels very overpowered for what’s generally asked of it to do.

Another thing that slightly bothers me about my iPad Pro is not Apple’s fault at all. The YouTube app on iPadOS doesn’t allow me to use plugins to hide comments and their idiotic “shorts”, something I always do in all web browsers on all platforms when I’m in YouTube land. I detest shorts and with the rapid degradation of society, comments in general are really not worth my time. It takes a little more brain power to ignore these things when using the YouTube app. My solution is to just not watch videos from YouTube on my iPad Pro.

That’s probably better for my mental health all the way around.

Out Loud.

I think out loud a lot. I often ask “why”. I think it drives my husband crazy at times, but sometimes I need to know the “why” so I can process it and understand it. I’d suck at just being told to do something without knowing the logic behind it. A weakness? I think not.

One of the things that definitely drives my husband crazy is I’ll process all the “why”s and the outcomes of a discussion out loud when he’s just asking for me to answer a question. For example, he’ll simply ask something like, “do you want to go to DiCastro’s for dinner”? Before I respond I may say something like, “well, I really like the pasta at DiCastro’s and they have a great selection of beer. They’re also really good at Chicken Marsala, but the Trackside has those great bread knots and it’s not too far away. We haven’t seen Lisa in a while”.

“Who is Lisa?”, he asks, with a slight hint of annoyance in his voice.

I look at him in disbelief, “The owner of DiCastro’s, of course”.

You’d think that after almost 28 years he’d be able to keep up with my multi-threaded approach to thinking a problem, but as we get older my multi-threadedness is a bit more scattered and he isn’t the fountain of patience he used to be.

We still make it work.

I try to rail in my ever charging trains of thought but as I get older I simply do not have the bandwidth to keep the herd of cats in my head in the same litter box. I just go with it now, knowing very well that I will come to a sane outcome that probably only I can understand and hope to relay coherently to the rest of the family.

And this is why I’m looking into Focus and Productivity webinar type things on the Internet in this here New Year.

Wish us all luck.

Vision.

Today Apple announced they’ll start accepting pre-orders for the highly anticipated Vision Pro, Apple’s “spatial computer”. It’s a VR/AR (visual reality/augmented reality) device using goggles. Deliveries start on the 2nd of February and the unit starts at $3,499 US.

That’s a lot of money.

I’m having a hard time understanding the use case for this device, especially at this price point. The Vision Pro will undoubtedly be an amazing experience for the user, and when it comes to wearing VR goggles on your face, I’m sure Apple’s experience will exceed anything we’ve seen before.

But the old guy in me wonders, why do we need this? Is it to have an unlimited number of “monitors” in front of your eyes? Is it to further immerse the user in an online world, shielding them from the realities of real life? Other than a super nifty computing experience, how does this new spatial computing paradigm make this world better?

Vision Pro Glasses? Sign me up. Take my money. But fairly heavy goggles tethered to a battery pack in my pocket? For $3,499 US? Pass.

My husband is relieved. The credit card company is not.

Apple is expected to sell 350,000 units in 2024. That’s $1.25 billion dollars. There’s a lot that could change in the world via $1.25 billion dollars.