I know I’m posting this a day late, but this photo just came from back home and it made me happy. Apparently Truman has parked himself on Mike while Earl and I are out of town.
October 2024
Good Morning.
I snapped this photo during my morning walk. I’ve been trying to get out and go for a morning walk each day of this portion of our trip and thus far I have been successful. It’s a good feeling and a great way to get the day started.
My husband and I have been walking an average of 25-27K steps while here in San Francisco. I’m hoping it’ll help balance the wonderful meals we’ve been enjoying when I jump on the scale when I get back home.
Coming Out.
On this Coming Out Day, this is my Coming Out story. At least the beginning of it. I shared this on Facebook earlier, and it took 10 years of courage to get to the point to share this story as detailed below.
I’ve shared bits and such of this story on the blog before. Here’s the whole thing.
There wasn’t a National Coming Out Day back when I was a teenager. After years of knowing I was different, I realized in the Spring 1985, specifically during a 4th period Ethics class in Room 113 during my junior year to be exact, that I was fooling no one, including myself.
The desks were arranged in a circle. Somehow the class discussion has circled around to homosexuality. A classmate said, “Well let’s face it, John will have a hard time being gainfully employed…His mannerisms and way of speaking are going to prevent serious employers from hiring him”. As others agreed, friends and other classmates joined the discussion. I sat there as stoic as possible. I realized it was time to admit to myself that the gay was very much fact. The class conversation continued around how hard my life would be, AIDS, and whatever other fear based dialog was being bandied about during the Reagan era. The air around me was suffocating.
After a timespan that lasted forever, the PA speaker in the ceiling chimed an A-flat after the square clock clicked to 11:04, signaling the end of fourth period. Everyone went to lunch. I didn’t move. “Do you want to go into my office for a few minutes?”, asked the teacher, a man I admired. I did and I wasn’t in his office before the tears flowed. My mind was moving at an outrageous RPM, I didn’t know what to do, and all of a sudden another teacher was in the office with me. My head was down; she looked me in the eyes, grabbed my hand and at that moment she talked me off the edge. All the conversation around disease and being destined to a life on the streets had completely derailed me. I don’t know if my thoughts in those moments ravaging my head would have come to fruition, but if they had, I would not be typing this today. That teacher, Karen O’Brien, saved my life that day. I will never forget her words. “You are an asset to this world”, “You are important”, “You need to be you” were among many things she said in those moments. She had compassion.
It would be a year before I told anyone else that I knew I was gay. But someone had just said the right things at the right time when I needed to hear it most and I started to feel the beginnings of accepting myself for me.
When it seems the world is upside down and inside out with so much hate directed at people for just being themselves, someone today is going to allow themselves to “know they’re gay” for the first time in their life. This is why we have National Coming Out day.
Be who you are, because you’re beautiful. And to quote a wise woman, “People – I find them fascinating. I haven’t found one yet that didn’t impress me.”
Wine.
We went on a wine tour in Napa and Sonoma today. The tour started at Fisherman’s Wharf here in San Francisco, stopped at the Golden Gate Bridge, and then took us up into wine country.
It was a lovely day and we met some lovely people during this excursion. We went with “Dylan’s Famous Wine Country Tour” from Dylan’s Tours. Our driver was Jeffrey. He was very knowledgeable about the Bay Area and of wine in general.
Here’s a bunch of photos from our excursion.
Random Thoughts.
My random thoughts of the day:
- No one asked for my random thoughts
- If you’re in the path of Hurricane Milton and chose to evacuate, I hope you were able to do so safely. If you chose to stay behind (which I also think is a valid choice), I hope you’re ready for the adventure of a lifetime.
- No one is going to make your life awesome except for you. Relying on other people, whether it’s financially, politically, socially, isn’t going to work. Only you can find your awesome self.
- The way to make the world a better place is to be authentic in who you are.
- Screaming into an echo chamber on social media accomplishes nothing. Blogging into the world where anyone can read what you’re writing barely makes a dent, and that’s if you’re lucky. Go out and live to your convictions.
Motivation.
This meme is from Mel Robbins. I have followed Mel for many years, having discovered her through a TED talk I watched more than a decade ago.
I find her quite fascinating.
Following her page on Facebook is one of the main reasons I still keep my account alive on that wretched platform.
I find Mel to be quite pragmatic. Her observations on life, and especially what we can do with our lives with just a bit of common sense, is inspiring.
I like to be inspired. Stop being fine. Start being awesome.
Advertising.
These iPhone 16 Pro ads were all over Denver and they’re all over San Francisco. As mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I have the new iPhone 16 Pro. The Camera Control has not impressed me at all; I find the UI (User Interface) very confusing. Light press, hard press, press once, slide, press twice, what do I do to take a photo. It’s easier to just use the Volume Up button like I’ve done since the iPhone 3G or so.
I’m surprised that Apple is advertising Apple Intelligence so much since it hasn’t been released. There’s now rumors that the first pieces of Apple Intelligence, but not the complete package, will be available to consumers by the end of October. I refuse to install the beta version of iOS 18.1 on my brand new iPhone because beta software is used for testing, not pre-releasing new features to the public. Traditionally, beta software has meant “it’s not ready for production yet, it’s buggy, and we need some folks to test it so we can continue to move it towards production”. Releasing beta software to millions of users just seems like typical gross (as in ‘yuck’) marketing.
I’m hoping that Apple Intelligence steers this whole “A.I.” trend in a different direction that what we have to do. A.I. is not smart. In fact, all A.I. does is predict the next word that you’ll want to see based on what it’s presented in response to your request. It’s a word salad maker. In fact, it’s like throwing words into a salad spinner and getting the words out in the expected order. That’s it. A.I. does not know fact from fiction, it just knows what the next word in the paragraph should be.
I’ve gotten into the unfortunate habit of disregarding work emails that were obviously written by the company’s in-house A.I. by the way. If you can’t take the time to write an email to me I can’t take the time to respond.
I’m getting off track.
I’m hoping “Apple Intelligence” steers A.I. into a direction akin to what was described as a new approach to operating systems about a decade ago with the “MercuryOS” project. The desktop paradigm that we use on our desktop and laptop computers has become woefully outdated, as it’s based on actual office desktops from the mid 20th century. You shouldn’t have to organize all your stuff into files and folders. You shouldn’t care about file names and the like. Anything touting “Artificial Intelligence” should handle that stuff for you, so you can find your words and images and the like in your personal word salad.
I don’t want “A.I.” to find facts, I want A.I. to find my stuff and perhaps guide me into a natural workflow for responding to emails and scheduling meetings and the like. Sure, it can summarize those meeting notes, just don’t actually write my notes. It’s not that smart.
Just for fun, I had ChatGPT summarize everything you’ve read in this blog entry thus far.
In this blog entry, JP discusses his experience with the iPhone 16 Pro, expressing disappointment with its Camera Control interface, finding it confusing and preferring the old method of using the Volume Up button to take photos. He is surprised that Apple is heavily advertising its upcoming “Apple Intelligence” feature despite it not being released yet, and he avoids beta software, viewing it as an unpolished product for testing.
JP is skeptical about the broader trend of AI, criticizing its limitations as a tool that merely predicts the next word without understanding fact from fiction. He shares his frustration with work emails generated by AI, seeing them as impersonal, and hopes that Apple Intelligence will take AI in a more practical direction, such as helping users manage files and workflows instead of generating content. Ultimately, he advocates for AI to assist in organizing and navigating tasks rather than replacing human thought processes.
See? ChatGPT and the like are great at spinning the word salad.
I’m hopeful that Apple Intelligence is going to spin the words in the right direction and focus on productivity and the like, instead of content creation. We shall see.
Someday.
Wide Open Spaces.
Yesterday we drove from Westminster, Colo. to Cheyenne, Wyo. to visit our friends Tim and Gordon. It’s been too long since we last saw them; our last visit was back in 2016. We’ve been friends since 2001 or so, keeping up correspondence over email and chatting from time to time. Tim is an avid clock collector and we met through having collected the same type of clock systems from The Standard Electric Time Company.
In my typical ways, I couldn’t simply drive up Interstate 25, so we took US 287 through Longmont to Fort Collins, and then over county routes to US 85 to make the rest of the trip north.
North of Fort Collins the landscape is very comfortable to me. It’s wide open, with ranches dotting the landscape here and there, and just a whole lot of nothing. I love it in these parts; it’s one of the reasons I enjoy storm chasing so much. I feel like I can just wrap my arms around the big, wide open spaces.
I remarked to my husband my affinity for the area and asked him if he’d ever live in these parts and his answer was a quick, solid “no”. I grew up a little closer to farms than he did, and he likes to be relatively close to urban development, so the answer was not unexpected. Me? I could easily live in the middle of nowhere and not complain about it.
In fact, I’d be immensely happy.
Lifestyles.
I am a big fan of this new trend of “Lifestyle Centers” popping up in suburban America. If you’re not familiar with the concept, a Lifestyle Center creatively blends retail and entertainment establishments with apartments or condominiums. These centers are popping up around major cities as an alternative to suburban sprawl.
One of the things I enjoy about these developments is the walkability. By having the retail and entertainment venues close by, residents of these Lifestyle Centers can walk to the services they need. This is healthier for the resident, saves on auto pollution, and encourages a neighborly vibe reminiscent of the villages and small cities of the mid 20th century.
Our first encounter with such a development was back in 2012 when we stopped at The Woodlands near Houston, Texas to see what that was about. I found that area appealing. I know something similar recently went up outside of Phoenix, Arizona. The Lifestyle Center, with the prominent JCPenney sign seen in the photo above, is outside of Westminster, Colorado.
As we made our way to the Rocky Mountains during our recent vacation in the Denver area, I noticed a number of these lifestyle centers popping up along the routes taking us from Westminster to the Rockies. While they ring a little upscale in appearance and demeanor, they seem like a better solution than suburban sprawl.
Driving.
I’m fortunate. I have been in all 50 states, and aside from Seattle and Denver, I’ve driven in all the major and many of the smaller cities in the United States. Not to focus on the negative, but the worst drivers in my encounters have been found in Omaha, Nebraska. Driving that city is maddening, because it’s like the folks there have been given a bunch of freeways and don’t know what to do with them.
Denver, Colorado comes in a close second.
Denver has a myriad of freeways throughout the metro area. One of the big trends in the area is toll based Express Lanes. Instead of HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes found in most major cities, the Denver area charges a toll to use these “express lane”, which is just a striped off lane from the rest of the freeway. The tolls change based on popularity.
This is not what makes driving Denver freeways maddening.
The growing trend of “camping in the passing lane” is gaining steam in the area. Drivers will hang out in the second to left lane (because they don’t want to pay the toll) and then shoot across the remaining lanes to get to their exit at the last minute. Or motorists will bang on their brakes for no reason. There’s no one in front of them. There are no exits coming up, but for some bizarre reason, Denver area drivers like to randomly bang on their brakes.
The Colorado Department of Transportation, like many other states in the United States, believes that only Interstate numbered freeways should have numbered interchanges. If you’re on a freeway that’s carrying a U.S. Route Number, there’s a good chance you’re not going to know how far it is until your exit if you’re not using GPS because the interchanges are not numbered to the mileposts. It’s only when you’re a mile or less from the interchange that you realize you need to start moving to the right. That’s when you discover that folks will continue to bang on their brakes in random fashion.
Another thing I noticed is that folks either strictly adhere to the speed limit (which changes quite a bit) or they are wildly ignored. The ones adhering to the speed limit tend to stick to the passing lane as an act of defiance to the rest of the world, deluded into thinking they’re doing some sort of public service by crunching up traffic behind them, all the while bang on their brakes at random intervals.
And don’t get me started on whatever they’re trying to do with this Peña Blvd. taking you to Denver International Airport. But as a quick aside, I will never understand why airport authorities like to design the road signs on their property to look as completely different from standard road signs as possible. I want to get to Terminal West, not enjoy the creative design of some bored designer throwing road sign symbols around in Microsoft Paint.
Yes, Denver, you are not the worst drivers I have encountered. That title solidly belongs to Omaha, Nebraska. But wow, do you come in a close second.
Take your foot off the brake and drive on.
