Today is National Coming Out Day. Today is the day the LGBTQ+ community encourages support for those coming to terms with their sexuality. As I said on Facebook earlier today:
Today is National Coming Out Day. A LOT has changed since I came out in the mid 1980s, and the vast majority of it has been great progress for the community. Let’s keep that momentum moving forward and let’s respect the individual experience each member of the community has with their coming out process. We don’t all do it the same way or at the same pace.
Even though I came out in the mid 1980s when the AIDS epidemic was nearing full swing and there wasn’t a bunch of letters together (I think it might have been around the start of “GLB”), I didn’t have it too bad. Last night I was watching an episode of “V: The Series” (from 1984) and remember thinking on its original run that Duncan Regher was hot.
Looking at him today I don’t know why I thought that, he’s not really my type. It probably had to do with the hormones of a 16 year old.
Many years ago I wrote a blog entry about coming out, and you can see it here.
I consider myself lucky to be a Gen-Xer. When it comes to technology my generation is a little bit country and a little bit rock ‘n roll. We were witness to the birth of computers in the mainstream, advances in telecommunications, and the development of the Internet. We saw retail establishments move from handwritten receipts and mechanical computation to scanning and instant lookup to near obsolescence with the rapid development of online shopping.
Growing up we had two phones and three jacks in our four-bedroom house. Our community was not part of the “Bell system”, but rather in a territory maintained by GTE. It wasn’t until I was well into high school that we garnered a private line; prior to that we had a party line that we shared with one or two other people on the street. Once in a while mom would contact that phone company to move us to a different party line because the current members were quite chatty and we could never use the telephone. Secretly, my sister and I had a little game where if she wanted to use the phone and one of the other parties were on the line, we’d flick the hang up switch or I’d take the receiver and run it across the carpet to make scratchy noises. This probably upset the folks trying to have a conversation but what did I know, I rarely talked on the telephone. To this day I don’t really enjoy the exercise.
When we’re out and about in the 21st century I notice lots of people having dire conversations on their telephones. They’re walking, they’re driving, they’re watching a movie in a theatre, they’re at a funeral, they’re at a wedding, they’re in a museum, it doesn’t matter. Folks must talk to other folks immediately and at considerable length and they must do it now.
Imagine Millennials and Gen-Zers being restricted to the confines of a room with a long curly cord connected to a wall mounted telephone.
It was in the mid 1980s when we got our first cordless phone and while I tested the signal by walking to the road and back while talking to my mom at work, I didn’t find much practicality in it. Just because I could talk to my mother while walking to the road and back, I didn’t really see the need to do it. Plus, the degraded voice signal resulted in a lot of “whats” and “huhs”. It was the latter half of the 1990s when I got my first cell phone and while it was nifty, I didn’t feel it was proper to talk to anyone while browsing produce or riding my bike. It’s probably because my Mom worked as a telephone operator when she was young, but we were instilled with a certain amount of manners when it came to using the telephone (scratching the receiver on the rug to bump parties off the party line notwithstanding). This is probably why I find public telephone conversations to be a pet peeve of mine. I find the telephone (and today’s modern equivalents) to be a personal device for a personal experience. Screaming at your kid’s social worker in the middle of a Better Dairy department seems quite rude.
I know I’m starting to sound like a cranky old man when I talk about these things, but we are losing many of the societal pleasantries we once enjoyed. I don’t see us returning to a time when telephone conversations were a personal matter and that’s a bit of a shame.
On the other hand, I no longer have to listen to folks having conversations on a party line, I can easily eavesdrop while walking the neighborhood. Creepy, but available.
Like much of the United States, at one time telephone lines went along the railroad tracks that ran through the property of the house I grew up in. There were power lines as well, but they were active and tended by the local power company, Niagara Mohawk. The telephone lines had come down years before the house was built; I was in my early teens when I discovered the old poles lying in the woods adjacent to the tracks.
Many of the fallen poles still had their glass insulators on the crossbeams. Curiously, they were easy to screw off the pole; I collected several and brought them back to the house. When my dad saw them in the garage after one of my scavenger runs, he went out in the woods with me and helped me bring back more. I cleaned them up after school. Some were blue, some were green, some were clear glass.
Now here’s more proof that I was a very odd child, well on my way to my eccentric middle aged persona I carry today. I decided to use those glass insulators to string my own wires through the woods between the house and the railroad tracks. I was always fascinated with electricity, but probably more fascinated with anything that was connected to something else. So I grabbed numerous lengths of baling twine from the family farm across the street and ran baling twine on century old glass insulators installed on trees and my own crossbars made of scrap woods left over from the construction of the house. The baling twine ran for nearly three and a half acres. It would be several years before it would come down; there’s probably still glass insulators spread out in the woods behind the house. It wasn’t like I was building a workable tin can telephone system or stringing lights, I was just putting rope up in the trees. Tarzan would have a field day back there.
Once in a while I wonder if the new owners of the property come across any evidence of my idiosyncrasies. Detailed doorbell wiring instructions written on the floor joists in the basement. Make shift clocks made out of paper plates tacked to a closet wall. Baling twine tied to glass insulators and strung from tree to tree, limb to limb.
In 1983 NBC featured a movie of the week called “High School, U.S.A.”. Apparently it was a pilot for a TV series that never came to fruition. The movie featured every “teen star” of the era, with every former “teen star” from the 50s or 60s as a teacher or other adult role. Here’s a cut and paste from IMDB:
I have absolutely no idea why this movie crossed my mind the other day but with the wonders of the Internet, I was able to watch this thing via YouTube. It’s as uneven in the 21st century as I remember it being back when I was a sophomore in high school.
Honestly, one of the things I remember from the movie is one of the high school seniors looked way too old for his role and he shaved with a straight razor. In 1983. That was very cool to me, though I had no idea why at the time. I could barely master my Dad’s Gillette Atra. It would be a couple of decades before I mastered the straight razor.
If you want to watch the full movie on YouTube, the best I can do is a Spanish dub.
My husband and I requested and received our absentee ballots for the upcoming election. On Sunday we placed our completed ballots in a mailbox at the post office and by Wednesday we had both received word that the voting commission had received our ballots and our votes would be counted.
It can’t get much easier than that.
I know it’s trendy among Republicans to make voting as difficult as possible for Americans, especially for those that aren’t white and/or don’t tend to vote Republican. Governors taking away ballot boxes, heads of the postal service removing vital equipment, layers of red tape on voter registration procedures; the list goes on and on with the tricks up the sleeves of too many government officials. Then of course we have Cheetolini telling everyone that the election will be rigged and inaccurate and that it will be impossible to determine a “true” outcome. This is all part of a propaganda campaign to sow fear and doubt into the voting population. It’s his way of undermining democracy.
Do not let the Republicans or their Orange Leader scare you from voting and do not let them deter you from voting. Though it doesn’t seem like it lately, our government depends on the votes of its citizens. When we don’t vote, we end up with messes like we have right now.
We need to clean up the mess. We need to get rid of the cancer. We need to put the cockroaches back under their rocks.
I miss the hustle and the bustle of living in a big city. I miss mingling human energy with other humans. The train platforms are quiet. The sidewalks are quiet. The scurry is limited to avoiding others on the street lest you be exposed to COVID-19.
The information is relentless. The news is non-stop. Too much of it is not good. What I’d give to see another state or another country right now.
“If you see something, say something” has been replaced with dire warnings of getting too close to our fellow citizens. We should all be in this together, doing our best to lift each other. But we’re too divided, led by division, ripping each other down.
This isn’t the way it’s suppose to be. None of this is proper. None of this is correct. We can do better.
A video of a snowball fight in 1896 was recently colorized and speed-corrected. The result was shared on YouTube. I really enjoy it, as many photographs from that era don’t feature big wide smiles and tend to lend a more “somber” vibe to the time. Ooh, and the mustaches on the men are awesome.
It’s fun watching folks from the late 19th century having fun in the snow.
There’s a video on Youtube of a married couple demonstrating email to the BBC viewing public. The video was shot in 1984 and the couple was using one of the many 8-bit computers available on the market at the time. They connected to a local online service to retrieve their email, and as plain as day, when prompted for their password, they typed “1234”. At the 80s wore on, folks realized there was a certain amount of importance to their online account passwords, so they upgraded from “1234” to “password”. In the mid 1990s they may have been using “Password”, and geeks were probably using things like “P@ssw0rd”.
Our online presence, and more importantly, our dependence on online services has come a long way in the ensuing 25 years and our entire lives are now online. Our passwords need to evolve accordingly.
A trick I’ve used for years is having a complicated “password base” and then appending different characters to that base depending on the application. For example, for Yahoo I may have the password “P@ssw0rd!Yaho” while for Google I’d use “P@ssw0rd!Goog”. It’s not the most secure approach, because if someone figures out your methods they can probably start getting into your other accounts. However, it’s a solid step in the right direction, the goal being have a different password for every online account.
I now know only one password. It’s a complicated password composed of random alphanumeric characters and symbols, and it’s quite long at 24 characters. What does this password do? It unlocks my Password Manager account.
With many users now using primarily mobile devices for their computing needs, both iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) users have a mostly secure of maintaining their passwords and that’s the built in password manager. There are also plenty of third party options available: 1Password, Bitwarden, LastPass, etc. All of these passwords work on the same prinicple: you unlock the “password vault” with the one password you need to know, and then the password manager creates passwords for each of your accounts and automatically fills in the incredibly complex password it has stored when it needs to be called upon.
My experience with this is mainly around the functionality built into iOS. With Apple’s integrated ecosystem, my passwords are in sync across my iPhone, iPads, and my Mac. Depending on the device, I unlock the vault with my Apple ID password, FaceID or TouchID. Then, when I’m prompted for a password, the device says “Hey! I have the credentials for this account!” and offers to populate the data for you. You don’t need to know the password, Apple is handling that for you.
1Password, Bitwarden, and the other third party offerings basically do the same thing, and even include the biometric protection of FaceID and TouchID. You just need to take the extra step of selecting your third party password manager as the default handler on your iPhone and/or iPad. The advantage to the third party management software is that you can get plugins for anything: Firefox, Google Chrome, Windows, Linux, it doesn’t matter. Now your passwords are synchronized across multiple devices and multiple operating systems. For those not all in on one platform (like Apple devices only or something), this approach makes sense.
Google and Apple also go one step further in that they let you know when you’ve used the same password across multiple accounts and they also monitor when that password may have been compromised. In these instances, they give you rather easy to understand options to change the affected accounts so that your information stay safe.
If you’re still using passwords like “baseball0517” to protect your online data, you really need to get to current times and start using a password manager, even if it’s the one that’s built into your operating system. One password for all accounts is pretty much the same as going on vacation with the front door unlocked and a sign on the front lawn that says “Come in and browse!”.
Over the next couple of weeks I’m probably going to write up some tutorials on managing passwords safely and share these on Medium. I’m a big advocate of online safety, so if you have any questions about this sort of thing, feel free to reach out in the comments on this blog post.
In the meanwhile, here’s some starter information from Apple and Google. Some of the third party password managers I’ve used in the past are 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with Bitwarden being my favorite right now.
Happy security!
For the dorks in the crowd, here’s the “E-mail” video from 1984:
Since the beginning of the pandemic we’ve been relying on Amazon and other online shopping services for our household needs. One of the neat things about living in a major city is that we often will receive our order the next day, especially when ordering from Amazon. This sort of immediacy is nifty.
However, as it becomes apparent as to how much money Jeff Bezos is making off of these pandemic circumstances, and coupling this with the fact that he’s not really allowing that wealth to trickle down to those on the Amazonian front lines, the ones that really get our deliveries to us the very next day, I’ve started focusing on shopping local.
I’m what I would call an “avid shaver”. After years of having a beard and/or mustache, I settled into a clean shaven routine when I became a private pilot. In many ways this is in remembrance of a discussion I had with my father back at the big airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1984. As we were walking about the airfield, he mentioned that many pilots opt to be well groomed, clean shaved, and with a structured, disciplined demeanor. While I’m sure much of this is due to many pilots of that generation having been in the military at one point or another, I admitted he had a point. Being a good pilot involves a certain amount of calm, cool, discipline, and structure, and outward appearance sometimes reinforces these qualities.
As a clean shaven private pilot, I’ve been purchasing “artisan” shaving products for the past decade or so. I have a Merkur Progress double-edged or “safety” razor. Men in the 1940s through the early 1970s typically shaved with these guys. 10 blades cost less than $2.00. Compare that to your Gillette plastic multi-bladed razor. Back in the early 2000s I purchased shaving brush at a mall kiosk and it has lasted me all these years. I like trying various soaps and creams.
Enter Shavenation.com. I could easily order my shaving supplies through Amazon, but with my focus on local or at least non-big-corporately owned entities, I opted to give “Geofatboy” and his Shavenation electronic storefront a try. He’s located in the suburbs of Chicago, actually just down the street from Chicago Executive Airport, one of the airports I fly out of, and Geofatboy has a bunch of instructional videos online. I placed a small order to give his business a try and it arrived in two days, was well packaged, and met all of my expectations. One of the items in the package was a sampler pack of shave creams from Geo F Trumper; yesterday I used “Spanish Leather” for my shave and this morning I used “Sandalwood”. I’ll probably try something a little more adventurous tomorrow.
Taking a few extra moments every morning to whip up a nice lather with cream and a brush and then slowly shave with a double-edge razor is my meditative and quiet time. The practice centers me and gets me on a productive start to the day. I’m happy to have found Shavenation.com and I’ll probably spend too much money in the future on shaving supplies.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
