J.P.

Coffee. Black.

My maternal grandparents are rejoicing as on Friday their youngest grandson drank coffee for the first time in 36 years. Yes, I was 14 years old when I had an after dinner coffee with Mom and Dad in their green wallpapered dining room. I didn’t care much for the experience and I really never got into drinking coffee.

Our semi-weekly housekeeper stocked up our Keurig supply with coffee pods this week and I noticed that amongst all the flavors of tea and hot chocolate that we enjoy, he had added some hazelnut coffee selections. I’ve been enjoying a vanilla hot tea in the morning from time to time and I decided I’d give a cup of hazelnut coffee a try. It was quite delicious! Oddly enough, it made me very productive for a Friday and I felt a tinge more of focus than usual. And it didn’t taste bad at all.

So today I went to Starbucks and had a cup of their Blonde Roast and it was wonderful. I sailed through some coding I wanted to achieve and again I felt focused. Again, I drank the coffee black, I figure if you’re going to drink coffee it should taste like coffee, not some sort of frappachappawhoowhoo whip cream concoction. No cream, no sugar, just coffee.

“Coffee, the finest organic suspension ever devised.”

I’m thinking a cup once in a while will help avoid that extra helping of diet pop I have too often. I figure coffee has to be better than the artificial crap in the chemically laced pop I drink will similar effects on my focus. Moderation is the key.

I totally get how it helped Captain Janeway beat the Borg.

7 April 2019 by Ponderings and Musings 0

Twitter Free.

I’ve been enjoying a Twitter Free weekend. An alert of this post will still appear on my Twitter timeline, but I haven’t looked at content on the platform all weekend and I must admit the only thing I miss are aviation related updates and updates from a smattering of folks that I actually like.

Twitter requires constant care and feeding to keep the noise down to a reasonable level. I know some folks like to jump in there and stoke the dumpster fire, but I’ve grown weary of that. It is no longer a reliable source of news; there will always be bad actors trying to pollute any late breaking news with opinion, spin, and disinformation.

I do miss chatting with those that share common interests. I just need to find a better outlet for it, or else determine if the necessary constant curation of my timeline is worth the effort.

But not this weekend.

6 April 2019 by Fun and Games Dept 0

Shazam!

The family got together to see Shazam! tonight. I haven’t traditionally been a huge fan of the DC movies, but this was very, very good. We had a lot of fun.

I didn’t spot any Easter Eggs from the 70s show; if you see any please let me know what I should have spotted.

One of my favorites from the DC Universe. I liked it better than Wonder Woman and Aquaman. I look forward to any sequels.

5 April 2019 by Geek 0

Movie Night.

So I’m excited to see “Shazam!” tonight. Here’s my first memories of the World’s Mightiest Mortal.

“Oh power Elders, strong and fleet and wise, appear before my seeking eyes.”

5 April 2019 by Fun and Games Dept 0

Real ness.

So Linus Torvalds, the “inventor” (I use this term loosely) of Linux, the operating system that runs 70% of the Internet, as well as a whole bunch of other things like Android phones (that’s a really bad description of Linux), really dislikes Social Media. In a recent article by NBC News, he talks about the anonymity behind Social Media, and how people really wouldn’t say what they say online if they had to say it face to face and using their real name.

He definitely has a point. I’ve read things from bots that would make your hair curl. I always blame the bots because I really try hard to believe that semi-intelligent human beings really aren’t as stupid as they portray themselves to be on the likes Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the like.

If you follow me on social media, you’d know that I indeed use my real name in most instances. There’s a few places where I use a pseudonym because I like to have an alter-ego once in a while, but I still try to act like a rational human being.

Why last night I suggested that someone build windmills near the White House to test Lord Marmalade’s latest lie that “the noise from windmills cause cancer”. To disprove Mr. Torvalds theory about saying things behind a curtain of anonymity, the real life with real names folks in the White House are defending this outrageous claim by Herr Orange Whippy Wig and saying there’s no evidence denying that noise from windmills cause cancer.

Science, it’s not just for the dorks.

I do agree that Social Media in the United States would be a better experience for all involved if the social media corporations forced validation of users and the use of real names in wild discourse. I limit this to the United States because there are folks that live in other countries who must use social media to communicate with others that are trying to flee said country. Anonymity is very important in some respects, but not when you’re shouting at someone.

Keep it real. Use your name. Take responsibility for your words.

4 April 2019 by Everyone's A Critic. Geek 0

Decision.

Chicago elected Lori Lightfoot as our next mayor. Mayor-Elect Lightfoot is the first African-American woman elected as mayor for The Second City. She just also happens to be the first openly gay person to serve as mayor for a major city in the United States.

This is what forward motion looks like. I’m hoping Chicago sets an example for the rest of the country.

2 April 2019 by Chicago 0

Streams.

So we’ve cut the cable cord (again) in our merry little home. Technically, we’ve cut the cord from a telecommunications company, but AT&T did everything they could to make sure U-verse works just like cable. The signal was horribly compressed, we had a DVR of questionable userability, and we were served with many channels that we would never watch just so we could get the channels we wanted to watch.

Before moving to Chicago we had cut the cord and had survived quite well with streaming services. Living here in the big city we have even more options over our OTA (Over-The-Air) antenna because we are actually close to broadcast locations. We have a very small “U” shaped antenna, about as thick as a dinner napkin, hanging near the television and we are able to receive nearly 50 channels. The networks are gorgeous; there’s no signal compression at all and it works amazingly well. We have no need for a DVR as anything we’d want to “record” we can actually just download through the streaming services we enjoy, including Hulu and Netflix. Plus, Amazon Prime Video comes with our existing Prime subscription, so we have just about everything covered.

I was hoping Apple would announce something that would take our breath away when it came to reimagining the television experience, but from what I could garner from the keynote, they’ve just expanded the TV app to include a little more data and they’ll be offering another subscription service in an already crowded market.

Not exactly the approach I was looking for.

One thing that we’ll definitely not miss are the cable news channels. We’ve both decided that we are completely and utterly burned out on the constant chaos coming out of Washington, D.C. and the news channels are doing everything they can to stoke the fire. They want to continue the ad revenue and pull a chunk from our cable subscription service to justify their existence.

We’ll be quite content going a la carte and on our own terms.

1 April 2019 by Geek 0

Sunday.

This is what an enjoyable Sunday afternoon on the ground in our home looks like. The Cubs didn’t win today, but we still enjoyed watching the game together.

31 March 2019 by Fun and Games Dept 0

Stupidity.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I have become really tired of this trend of celebrating stupidity. I’ve had a front row seat for the degradation of American society for the 50 years I’ve been on this planet, but over the past couple of years the pace has shifted into Overdrive.

We live in an age where:

  • “We’re all out of bread, but we can give you toast”, is a valid response from a waitress.
  • A woman spots a moose on her lawn so she throws a cat at it. To be clear, the story reported that it was a wild moose, apparently hence the cat. I guess you’d never throw a cat at a domesticated moose?
  • “Trump cuts aid to three Mexican countries” is a valid headline.
  • Cable news outlets have people debating the merits of whether our planet is flat or not

I doubt folks called The Dark Ages while it was happening, but I wouldn’t hesitate to think of this as The Age of Celebrated Idiocy.

Technology has the potential to do many things in the world. When we were in the infancy of global communication and being connected to practically every other human being on the planet, no matter where they were located, I never thought leaps in technology would make the masses willfully ignorant.

I fully support the idea of a reboot.

31 March 2019 by Ponderings and Musings 0

About J.P.

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.

Weird? Eccentric!

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