J.P.

Living in a condominium building in the third largest city in the United States has really been an education in the nature of my fellow Americans. Couple this experience with the response to the COVID-19 and it’s easy to see why my sister would always say she was Canadian when living and traveling abroad.

In 2020, the United States and its citizens do not garner a favorable opinion across the rest of the planet.

Sharing a building with other property owners is interesting. It’s disheartening to see how many people don’t care about the “common areas” of our building. Occasionally we find beer cans left in the stairwells, or someone will punch the elevator call buttons in the lobby hard enough to knock the entire assembly off the wall. Dog walkers love to put bags of poop in the mail recycling bin (under the large sign that begs people not to put bags of poop in the mail recycling bin). Folks throw cigarette butts off their balcony.

It’s not all bad. We have a good share of pleasant and responsible neighbors, but there are a few that seem to go out of their way to ruin it for everyone else. It’s kind of like the people that voted for Trump. They’re unhappy so they want everyone to be unhappy.

Walking the streets of Chicago I have seen some of the kindest, heartwarming acts of humanity and I’ve seen some of the most jaw-dropping acts of entitlement I’ve witnessed in my nearly 52 years on this planet. I’m encouraged by the number of people that hand a dollar to the homeless person asking for money on the expressway off-ramp. I’m discouraged by the number of people that just walk by the homeless person sitting on the sidewalk on “The Magnificent Mile”.

Public social media posts give us insight to just how awful Americans can be, all in the name of “freedom”. As a Chicagoan it’s concerning to see how many things we see in our daily business that could end up as one of those awful public social media posts. Naturally, these acts are not confined to The Windy City, but with the size and diversity of our population, we have more opportunities to see it.

I think part of my concern is because the pandemic has confined us for so many months and we’re fed such terrible things when we peruse social media. I remember the days when we had just three or four channels, with an evening newscast and a once, maybe twice, daily newspaper delivery. The constant electronic connection, coupled with the ever present 24 hour “news” channels have not fared well for our country. The sad part is I don’t know if there’s ever a way for us to go back to a less bombarded state. I try from time to time, and it’s a good feeling when I’m successful.

Ultimately we find what we seek and it’s taking a very focused, concerted effort these days for me to find the positivity in the population.

I hope I don’t run out of the necessary bandwidth before the election in November.

I was reading old blog entries the other day and I had to laugh. In 2008 I was writing about how I was never going to buy another iPhone, at least one on AT&T, because iPhone OS 2 was killing my wifi, my battery life, and was generally acting poorly. Of course, this was the first update to my original iPhone. We were still working with whatever came before 3G with cell signal. I forget what it was called.

My how things change yet how they stay the same.

I’m typing this blog entry on my iPad Pro. My iPad Pro works brilliantly, albeit the way Apple wants it to work, because I refuse to jailbreak anything. I have never jail broken my phone before. I don’t really see the need to do this. I even skipping the whole “run the beta!” game on both my iPhone and my iPad Pro because I don’t want to get all depressed when things are acting wonky and I know it’ll be months before the proper release of the software currently being tested comes out.

I’ve been tinkering with Linux a lot. I ran Ubuntu Linux on my MacBook Pro for the month of June and it worked well for what it is, but it has nowhere near the polish that Apple is known for. After living in the Apple ecosystem for many years it’s hard to break out; especially since things feel like they’re lacking a cohesion when you’re off of Apple products. I like the cohesion. I actually rely on the cohesion. I am at my my focused when things are cohesive. Work’s edict of having to use a Windows 10 laptop really threw me for a loop and I haven’t quite recovered. I often break the rules and run my work stuff on my own Mac Mini, but then I get a message from the regional desktop systems manager asking why I haven’t used my laptop in a while and then I get back in line.

But having a Windows 10 laptop in my Apple world really disrupts my cohesive approach to productivity.

Even though we have to use a Windows 10 laptop at work I spend all of my day working on Linux servers. We build and run our applications on Linux because it saves the company money. It’s a good thing Linux is so versatile.

I’m not as versatile as Linux.

It’s odd that I enjoy so much cohesion in my technology experience because I’ve always been fascinated by dissimilar technology doing the same task. When I was very young we would go to a local department store called North Country. The decently sized department store of its time, much like McCrory’s or Woolworths, had four checkouts up front. Two of the checkouts had Victor mechanical cash registers and the other two had Sweda mechanical cash registers. I was fascinated by this. Two different makes of cash register, with different receipt formats and different buttons and different sounds, doing the same thing. I stopped in an old Zellers Department Store in Canada years ago and some of the checkouts had NCR computerized cash registers while others had IBM registers, but they all did the same thing and were apparently running the same software. That was kind of cool to me.

So this makes me wonder why I have to run Microsoft Outlook on a Windows 10 laptop when it runs perfectly fine on my Mac Mini.

As I get older I’m finding I have less and less bandwidth, or perhaps it’s interest, in trying to fit into expectations. Maybe this is what they mean when they say older people get set in their ways.

I just know I want my way to be a certain way.