I was hoping to vote for Pete Buttigieg in the November election. A relatively young guy, Pete had accomplished a lot of what I’ve always wanted to be. Intelligent, multilingual, successful, confident, Pete was the total package. He has great ideas, he’s well spoken, and he was always a steadying force in the wild frenzy of the Democratic debates.
Since he has suspended his campaign, I honestly have no idea as to who I’m voting for, in the Illinois Primary or in November. Warren lost me when she took a DNA test. Klobuchar just rubs me as disingenuous. I can never tell if Biden knows where he is or not and Sanders just screams like the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz all the time. Politically, the majority of them are trying to out do each other in the crazy department. I have no motivation to vote for anyone in Congress, they haven’t gotten anything done in years. I think Biden missed his chance.
Pete embodied the hope and aspirations I believe we need for this country. I guess I’ll continue to follow him and his lead.
Godspeed Mayor Buttigieg, you’re a good man and you have great ideas. I hope to shake your hand someday.
It’s amazing, the things that come to mind at times. Whenever it’s time to recite The Lord’s Prayer during a church service, I sing it to myself. I never knew there was a video to accompany this Top 40 hit from the early 1970s.
Here’s Sister Janet Mead with “The Lord’s Prayer”.
I’m upgraded the monitor in my home office. After staring at two 24-inch Dell monitors that were provided by the office I went ahead and made the decision to move to a single monitor. Chris was selling one of two 31-inch monitors he had and this E series 31-inch curved monitor from Philips is a beauty.
I can fit all the windows I need to do my job on this monitor and still leave a little breathing room between the windows. This helps reduce my stress just a little bit. No more turning back and forth between two monitors with a low resolution and fuzzy fonts.
Interestingly, my Mac Mini runs a heck of a lot cooler with one monitor at 3840×2160 resolution than it did with two monitors running at 1920×1080.
It’s been a little over 30 years since I first saw “Shear Madness” in the Theatre District, back in the day when I lived in Boston. My first experience with the show was a solo adventure. I remember being enthralled with the idea of a stage show having a variable ending and being so up-to-the-minute with current event references in the dialog. I’ve seen the show a few times since, the most recent being the late 1990s in the same theatre in Boston.
“Shear Madness” is playing at the Mercury Theater around the corner from us here in Chicago. The four of us enjoyed the show very much and all of us were laughing throughout.
There are several important ingredients in this show, the most vital being an ensemble that works well together, and the performers in tonight’s production worked the stage wonderfully as a team.
The production, the set, the approach, all echoed the productions I saw back in Boston, mind you with all the Beantown references removed and replaced with Chicagoisms. Part scripted production, part improv, part stand-up, all of the performers were up to the task of a great performance. Not to give too much away, but there’s a part of the performance where the audience participates (“Big deal, I took a whole place setting.” “Not now, MA!”*). The four of us all contributed (not that there was a test or anything) and even outside of the audience participation portion, I still felt quite engaged with the show.
I’d like to give a special shoutout to Brittany D Parker as Barbara DeMarco and Mary Robin Roth as Mrs. Schubert. The whole cast was very good.
If you get the chance I highly recommend seeing “Shear Madness”. It’s a great escape and a fun time for all.
* Props to those who get that reference from another whodunit scenario.
Truman has been a bit wild today. During my lunch break he decided to completely rearrange the cushions on the couch and make himself a nice little fort. He then proceeded to pull pillows out of the cushions.
By the way, my grandmother had a different name for the couch or sofa. She called it “the Davenport”. It always sounded so regal to me.
I think Truman was sensing the changes in barometric pressure as the latest storm system moved in. I poked fun at meteorologists on Twitter this morning because they’ve been screeching and hooting and hollering about the incoming snow storm but one change of so many inches and the predicted foot of snow becomes an inch of snow.
Let’s face it, Mother Nature will do what she wants to do and that’s all there is to it.
Just to give you an idea of how random my brain can be, here is a picture of a set-top cable box identical to the one my city grandparents had in the mid-late 1970s.
Sing with me if you know it, “Eleven! Eleven ALIVE!”
That was the jingle for WPIX out of New York. One of several “superstations” they received through this analog box. Others included WGN-TV out of Chicago and WTBS-TV from Atlanta. My uncle would fall asleep on the floor in the wee hours of the night watching movies on “Home Box”. We now call that HBO.
The stuff I remember. Whew.
Oh, and the television tuner was always tuned to Channel 4, because in Syracuse we already had channel 3 and that would conflict with the signal coming from the cable tuner.
The first escalator I remember riding was at the Woolworth’s in Watertown, New York. The escalator took shoppers down to a lower level where you would find a selection of small shops, sort of like a mini-mall. I remember riding the escalator down and then back up and then being told by my mom that one ride was enough. We then ate lunch in the Harvest House restaurant.
My husband and I did a little bit of shopping today. One of our stops was at a recently opened Menard’s (insert banjo music, “Save big money at Menard’s!). I was a little tickled to see it was a two story building, with bridges across a big opening and nifty escalators that could accommodate carts and wheelchairs and everything.
At the top of the escalator was a woman playing a grand piano. I kind of thought she should have been playing banjo music but the grand piano was a nice touch.
The guest room closet was getting clogged up with unused computer equipment. A 2009 iMac, a 2007 Apple Cinema Display. These things would have to be removed to get the luggage out for our trips. Truman delighted himself by hiding behind the equipment until we shut the door, then he’d climb up and knock something off the shelf to let us know he was trapped in the closet.
We’d then find him in there and he’d come running out with an innocent look on his face.
I decided to finally get rid of our excess computer equipment. Instead of putting it in the building’s recycling room I decided it needed to find a new home, so we donated the equipment to FreeGeek Chicago.
A while back I purchased a used laptop from this shop in the basement of storefront on Milwaukee and Diversy. I really like what they do; they take old computer equipment, make whatever they can functional by cleaning it up, making sure it works, and installing Linux Mint, and then sell the computers to breathe new life into old equipment. Instead of cluttering up landfills with older equipment that still has lots of life in it, FreeGeek finds new homes for this equipment. This helps save the environment, it reduces waste, and it spreads some Linux love around the area.
I really like this approach.
FreeGeek Chicago also refurbishes Apple computers and other devices and sells them for continued use. In addition, FreeGeek also offers educational services around the world of Linux and other open source software.
It’s a great organization and I hope to become a volunteer there one day. I hope the new owners of our iMac and Cinema Display enjoy them as much as I did.
I was flicking through my subscriptions list on my iPhone the other night when I said out loud to myself, “what in the blue blazes are you doing”? I realized I had way too many active subscriptions on my iCloud account and I was barely using most of them.
It was then that I realized that Apple was really smart when they got into the credit card game. By offering an Apple credit card, with promises of 3% cash back on purchases from Apple, it was just the little nudge that suckers like me needed to justify the purchase of yet another app or subscription from the Apple eco-system.
There’s a huge number of developers out there building beautiful apps that make our lives better. There’s no doubt about that. But there’s also a lot of crud available out there. And with this new paradigm of software where “you don’t own it, you just pay to use it”, pockets get emptied. Quickly.
Apple News+. US$9.99/month. Apple advertised a magazine browsing experience on your favorite iDevice that would transcend the likes of Harry Potter’s moving photos and paintings and Hogwarts. In reality, most of the magazines are PDFs of the printed copy and are chopped off at the bottom of the screen on my iPad.
Apple Music. “Hey Siri, turn on the buffet”, referring to the Philips Hue Light strip we have lighting up the dining room buffet. The response? “Sure, here’s Phoebe Buffay and the Hair Balls with ‘Smelly Cat'”. I ask Siri to play “some nice dinner music” from Apple Music and it plays Metallica. “Play some instrumental background music”. A woman immediately starts singing. Anything I want on Apple Music is more easily obtained from Spotify, which we already pay for.
iCloud. Apple now offers to storage plans that are on either side of what we need, either 200 GB (not enough) or 2 TB (approximately 2000 GB, way too much). It’s easier to just store my files on a hard drive in my office attached to a Raspberry Pi. And it’s probably more secure.
When we start heaping on the TV streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access, etc) to replace cable it ends up that it’d probably be cheaper to just get cable.
I’m all for developers and service providers getting the money they deserve, but at some point one has to choose what’s important and what’s extra frosting left on the spoon.
I’ve culled the subscriptions down substantially and I’m committed to sticking to a manifesto I wrote around software and hardware purchases, and determining which services deserve cash and which do not.
Let’s hope it’s a good first step to not wearing out my credit card.
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.
