I am loving this weather for the first week of February. It’s hard to believe we are just approaching the halfway point of the official season of winter.
I am without complaint.
Winter?
J.P.
Grid.
From time to time I look up some of my history on my blog. This usually leads me to spending some time reading old blog entries, giving me a snapshot of my feelings, thoughts and such for a particular time frame in my life. I’ve treated this blog as an online diary and it’s served me well in that purpose. I like the idea of slowing life down enough to take the time to write more than a quick and witty blurb for posting on a social media site; I’ve never cared about the numbers of views or the number of comments I’ve received here. I do enjoy comments and trading thoughts back and forth with those that choose to read what I have written. There’s never anything wrong with a well-intended debate.
One of the things that strikes me when I read the older blog entries is the degradation of what I call my “quality of personal expression” after I joined Twitter. I still had a flip phone when I joined Twitter and I used to text my updates through a text message. Banging out 140 characters back then was a bit of a chore but I circumvented the problem by keeping that first tweet simple. On 9/24/2007 at 11:09 PM I simply tweeted, “Sleeping”. My evolution(?) from a flip phone to an iPhone improved my tweeting habits. Nowadays I share quick spurts of dialog with others by banging out an abbreviated retort or other piece of frivolity with others without giving it a second thought. This, in turn, has made me more outspoken. And that’s not always an entirely good thing.
“Opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one”, as the saying goes, and sometimes the expression of our opinion turns us into an asshole. I was recently visiting friends down south and as I look back at it, I think I might have been a little more mouthy than usual when it came to discussing politics, the economy and whether or not I, as a gay man, should be eating at Chick-Fil-A. Looking back on the weekend I decided that while I am very firm in my beliefs and I am willing to enjoy a lively debate on a given subject, there’s a certain amount of couth that one can lose when they are expressing themselves, especially when they’re used to belching out their beliefs in 140 characters or less. Sharing my life on social media such as Twitter, and living behind a Twitter handle without the burden of being face to face with whom you are debating, has resulted in me losing a bit of the sophistication that I never really grew up with but that which I long to have as part of my personality.
Perhaps living your life on social media is not as grand as the social media companies would want you to believe it to be. The key to being part of the grid is to find balance in it all. Putting the phone during dinner. Shaking a celebrity’s hand instead of trying to get a selfie. Enjoying a beautiful sunrise without posting a photo of it on Instagram. Enjoy the gift, skill and thrill of flight in an airplane without barraging your Facebook feed with posts about every nuance of the flight.
Lately I’ve been drawn to social media services that are a little more robust in their content. I’m starting to read more and getting away from the “scan for pictures” services. I’m liking Medium and I’m still using RSS feeds to aggregate content from various blogs and such. And as much as I try to step away from the service, I still enjoy Google+ much more than Facebook. With a properly curated contributor’s list on your Google+ feed, the service is wonderful. It’s a shame that it hasn’t caught on more.
The most important thing that I am realizing in 2016 is that while technology is an awesome tool, it’s not the be-all end-all for everything in the 21st century. Perhaps I’m getting a little wiser as I grow older but sometimes I just need to sit down, turn off the bits and bytes and enjoy the moment. And when I am online, I need to find robust, engaging content that feeds me instead of draining me.
I want to be a novel in this tabloid world.
Tech Quandary.
I had a little bit of a hissy fit on Twitter this morning. The tweets were a result of me venting my frustration with my iPad; I had run out of storage on my device and it wouldn’t let me delete anything to make room for content because I had run out of storage on my device. I just love that vicious circle of techy errors where you’re scolded for running out of hard drive space or whatever but to gain more space you have to clear more space but you can’t clear more space because you’re running out of space. The kicker of the situation is that this is an Apple product; a marvelous piece of technology where everything is magical and rainbows fly around and unicorns dance and clap their hooves together. Investing (substantially) more more into Apple technology is a bid to the promise of being free of crazy error messages, worries about hard drive space and the other mundane adventures that mere mortals on Windows and the like experience. After all, when you buy an Apple product, it just works.
And now I’m getting worked up again. It’s amazing to me where my mind goes when I type a blog entry without any forethought; those streams of consciousness where I just let me fingers do the walking.
I am the “money manager” of our flying club. I maintain the banking accounts, the accounts receivables and the accounts payables for the dozen or so owners of our two airplanes. I really enjoy this role in the club because I like to think that I’m pretty good at it. I lucked out in that arena of life; growing up in a family-run retail environment gained me access to accounting practices at a very early age. The early geek in me picked up a lot and this has been a benefit throughout my life. Doing this sort of thing comes naturally to me. The thing is, we are well into the 21st century and quite frankly I’m sick of filing papers and keeping paper trails of all the transactions. Earl asked why I’m still tracking everything on paper because the reality is that I can store everything electronically and still be perfectly within the boundaries of good accounting practices and the law.
So now my tech quandary is this: I want to use my Apple devices to digitize these records but I don’t want them to live within the Apple Eco-system. Honestly, I don’t want them to live within any eco-system. I don’t want to rely on a paid storage service, I don’t want to use a paid app to maintain this data, I want this to be as accessible as possible using any computer by anyone that is granted access.
And this is where the full-blown geek kicks in. I have a plan in my head on how I’m going to store this information but I need to write it down to get my plan into action.
I’m discovering that I love writing things down instead of doing thing entirely on the computer. But this creates paper and it seems silly to create paper to plan out a scheme to get rid of paper.
It’s that vicious circle again.
The previous sentence was my planned final sentence of this entry but then this popped into my head: Is it a vicious circle or vicious cycle? Does the vicious circle have teeth? Does it go “grrrr”?
Things to ponder.
Happy Endings.
For the past week or two I’ve taken to watching reruns of the ABC comedy series “Happy Endings” during my morning workouts. Back in 2012 I had purchased the entire second season of the show from iTunes so that we could watch it when we cut the cord, but then iTunes got all funky and I forgot that I had the show in my queue until I moved to my new iPhone 6S Plus at Christmas time and all of my bandwidth for the month was used downloading the series to my phone.
In case you’re not familiar with the series, which was on ABC for three seasons, it’s kind of like “Friends” for the 21st century. There’s six folks, two of them are sisters, two of them are married, one of them is gay and he used to date another one of the ladies in college and one of them is super good looking and drives a food truck. The show is packed with rapid fire witty repartee, there are few winks and nods towards the existence of an audience watching the show sprinkled here and there all the while not taking itself seriously.
ABC really did itself a disservice by bumping this show around on the schedule in the third season and ultimately cancelling the show.
I am enjoying watching this second season that I never caught up on back in 2012 and I will probably end up watching the third season as well (don’t tell Earl until the iTunes bill comes along). While I may have thought that the quality of the show as borderline-ish back when it was in first run, the truth of the matter is that it is better than anything that passes for a sitcom today (“Two Broke Girls”, anyone?).
If you’ve never seen the show, I suggest watching an episode or two and giving it a whirl. I think you’ll find it to be a good time.
The Real Reason I Dislike Winter.
I’m in a bit of a ranty mood this afternoon. I’ve been watching my Twitter feed fly by with bogus winter storm names, graphics depicting nearly Armageddon-like events and general idiocy regarding the Nor’easter winter storm slated to hit the East Coast metropolitan corridor starting today. I keep reading how this is “the storm of the century”. By my count, this is the 20th or so storm of the century to hit this century. It even has a name to make it easier to discuss online. Because everyone loves an online discussion about the latest catastrophe. It’s what drives the American public.
When I gripe about the hysteria that strangles Washington, D.C. and related cities during this type of event, many are quick to tell me that the affected areas are not used to this kind of storm and therefore they don’t know how to prepare for it. Apparently, preparations include raiding every grocery shelf of every morsel of bread and milk possible, lactose intolerance and gluten allergies be damned. The fact of the matter is, I must be smarter than the average of American because if I went through “the winter storm of the century” one or two times, I would certainly be well prepared by the time the 20th storm of the century blew through. It’s not that difficult to figure out, storms are allegedly growing more intense, therefore, I must be more vigilant in making sure that my family is prepared for the next big storm. That’s just a small portion of what we call Common Sense®. When I point this out to people, they say they’re prepared but the municipalities are not keeping up with the changing times. It’s someone else’s fault that they can’t get their precious rats named Mabel and Finster to their baton lessons. Well, if the municipalities can’t keep up with the changing weather, then logic would dictate that folks are electing the wrong people into the wrong positions for the wrong reasons.
My biggest question is, why are you so dependent on someone rescuing you from catastrophe? Why is their responsibility to make sure they can plow you out, provide you water, etc? Ma and Pa Ingalls did just fine in the middle of a Minnesota winter without electricity. Build a fire, light a gas stove, fire up the barbecue. Do you need water? Melt the snow.
The truth of the matter is that I don’t really dislike winter. I actually like winter better than the mud season we call spring, with water and melting slop all over the place. I can do without the bitter cold we get up here in Central New York (bitter cold being below zero Fahrenheit for days on end, not the balmy 30 degrees that folks in New York City are always bitching about), but snow doesn’t really bother me. Snow doesn’t cripple me. It slows me down to a sensible speed, but life does not grind to halt when we get a foot of snow, or even two feet of snow. I might get bummed out about not being able to fly, but I can always go out in the Jeep and play in the snow. It’s called Independent Thought® and that’s something that I wish would become contagious throughout the entire country. I feel that I could easily ride a winter storm out on my own until the sun peeked through the clouds again.
It’s the mindset of the general populace that I really dislike about winter. This is fueled by a media building an empire built on hysterics. Ever since 9/11, people love drama, they love catastrophe and they love chaos. It’s the new normal. The media successfully gets everyone so whipped up about things that wouldn’t be a big deal even 30 years ago that it needlessly cripples vast portions of the population. Gone are the true meanings of “epic” and “massive”. Open your front door to a wall of snow or climb out your second story bedroom window onto the snow in the lawn sometime, then let’s talk about the full wrath of Mother Nature.
In the meanwhile, please, by the universe of all that is sane, please calm down.
Adele.
I’m not a fan of Adele’s music. I’ve been rather vocal about this (shocker), but honestly, I think part of it stems from the fact that I used to work across the cubicle hallway from a woman that played “Rolling In The Deep” incessantly for two years. She would weep. I didn’t know why and honestly I never asked because I found the whole thing unnerving.
That being said, whenever I see Adele in an interview or doing some other talk show type thing, she seems to be very down-to-Earth and a genuinely nice person. Over the weekend, I saw her “Carpool Karaoke” segment with talk show host James Cordon (didn’t know he existed until this weekend) and Adele again seemed incredibly down-to-Earth and just so damn friendly. For some reason I enjoy the way she waves her hands and such when she’s singing. She believes what she’s doing and she’s incredibly good at doing it.
And that’s what’s important.
DL 1987.
I am aboard Delta flight 1987 from Syracuse to Atlanta on my way to North Carolina. I am visiting friends in the Raleigh-Durham area this weekend; it’s our annual holiday gathering.
I’m in seat 3D aboard this MD-88. The mood in the cabin is jovial. As the airplane was loading at Syracuse I noted that no one was wearing sweat pants this evening. The flight is not quite full. I was originally scheduled to fly from Syracuse to JFK and then to Raleigh-Durham, but that flight was delayed and I wouldn’t have made my layover, so I rescheduled with some assistance from the Delta app and then speaking with Todd at Delta Customer Service.
Delta Customer Service always impresses me. It’s a nice change of pace in today’s world.
I can see the very last remnants of the sunset off on the horizon from 35,000 feet. That’s just one of the many awesome things about flying. I always feel bad for folks that don’t feel the thrill for flight the way I do. I can understand being a nervous passenger and the like, some people are just not wired to soar above the earth, but I learned the joys of flight at a very young age and I am a better man for it. Ten years ago or so I would get nervous on airline flights for the simple reason that I didn’t know the pilot. As a kid I always knew the pilot, it was either my father, my grandfather or a friend of the family. Flying on an airline back then felt weird because I couldn’t observe was the pilot was doing, and that made me hesitant about flying the airlines. I have never, ever been nervous in a single engine airplane, even that summer afternoon in 1985 when the engine in my Dad’s 1940 Piper J-5A suddenly stopped while we were on downwind to land and my dad had to do a dead-stick landing. We pushed the airplane from where we stopped on the runway to the hangar. My dad’s reaction to the event was simple. He said “huh”. We were back in the air the following weekend.
I’ve practiced many dead stick landings in the Cherokee. I did several as a student and I’ve practiced them from time to time as a licensed pilot. It’s good to keep one’s skills sharp. I figure that airline pilots have to do the same thing, though they probably don’t dead stick a real, live MD88 very often. That’s what simulators are for.
I look out into the dark sky as we skirt the tops of the haze. It is so awesome. If I was 10 years younger I would definitely be changing my career to become a professional pilot. My plan is to become an instructor so that I have something to do when I retire. I love the idea of sharing my joy of aviation.
There are some bumps here and there on this flight, just enough to keep things interesting. I know some folks think airliners bounce all over the sky in turbulence but it’s rare for the airplane to move more than a few feet in the sky at the very, very most. Airplanes are built to withstand much more than they’re ever subjected to.
Just sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.
Kick.
In my never-ending quest to be a super smart superhero, or at the very least be as healthy as I can be, I am trying a supplement called CILTEP. A Nootropic, CILTEP is an all natural “smart drug” that should improve focus, long term memory and motivation. It’s goal is to help one reach Optimal Mental Performance.
I tried it for the first time yesterday. tl;dr It really helped me find my “zone” while working yesterday.
I didn’t feel any sort of caffeine rush, the colors around me didn’t get more vivid (like in the television show “Limitless”), but my mind was clearer than it had been in a long while. The noise that my brain usually goes on with was kept at bay. I was able to concentrate and honestly, I wrote some amazing code yesterday. I didn’t feel like I was on a drug or stimulant, I just felt centered and motivated. Interestingly, my tendency to stammer a bit was significantly reduced. I didn’t expect feeling that articulate.
I had a check-up with my primary physician today so I opted to not take another round of CILTEP this morning. The visit with my doctor was to address my high blood pressure which is controlled by medication. I monitor my blood pressure here at home on a routine basis and I did not see any increase in blood pressure yesterday as a result of taking CILTEP, so that was good, but I didn’t want to mess around with being a science experience during this routine checkup. I did tell him about CILTEP and he didn’t seem too worried about it, but my blood pressure still wasn’t where he wanted it to be. While much lower than it was a month ago, he deemed it to be too high and he increased the dosage of my blood pressure medication. I went with the increased dosage this morning and I’m not noticing any weird side effects, just a very slight headache, which could be expected. I’ll probably hold off on trying CILTEP for a day or two so I can identify if I’m suffering from any side effects from the BP med.
All in all, from what I can discern from one experience with this Nootropic, I think CILTEP gave me the kick for motivation and focus that I was looking for. I hold hope of becoming that super smart superhero.
Choices.
My mom called to chat this evening. She was “Granny Nanny” this evening; she was baby-sitting my seven-year old nephew this evening as my sister went out for a night on the town. My nephew had a friend over; they were watching a wrestling movie. My nephew then apparently decided to relocate the cat’s bed while she was eating in the kitchen. My mom had to pause our conversation to ask why the cat’s bed was being relocated. There was no real response except my mother let out a little bit of a noise that resembled what I would have heard at my nephew’s age when I relocated the cat’s bed. It was good to hear that even though it was 40 years later, the old girl still has that feisty kick.
I mentioned in a blog entry earlier this week that my family didn’t really talk about politics when I was growing up. My mom apparently still reads my blog (hi Mom!) because she thanked me for recognizing that she made thought out choices when she votes. This spurred a conversation about the upcoming Presidential elections. We actually talked politics. She’s the more liberal minded of the family. My social awareness, such as it was when I was growing up, was definitely influenced by her. I remember her telling me that Anita Bryant was a very mean lady that didn’t like some people when I saw her on the news with a pie in her face. She didn’t get wicked upset when a distant cousin came out as gay in the late 1970s (others in the family kind of had a freak out). We talked about taxes and our impressions of the New York State Welfare System and both agreed that it is way too easy to abuse. It was a great conversation. When talking about the Presidential elections, we both agreed that neither of us were thrilled with the choices that were shaping up for November but we further agreed that we didn’t think it would be a good thing if Trump became President (I really can’t see that man with access to the nuclear codes). We would vote for whomever we thought was the least damaging to the country as a whole. I told her I would have a gun in the house if the wrong choices were made and chaos insued. That sparked a conversation about my dad teaching me how to shoot all sorts of guns when I was a late teenager and that I was still pretty good at it. There were other points of the discussion that were quite nice and refreshing. I’m happy that I can talk to her about these things as an adult. It was a great conversation.
I can’t imagine living in Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina right now with the barrage of political ads that they must be enduring. With the GOP beating the war drums of fear in an unprecedented fury, Bernie Sanders yelling about his far-left social ideals and Hillary doing her thing again, I don’t know if I would be able to watch any media in those influential states without quivering in fear that another attack ad was going to grace my television screen.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that my ideal candidate just ain’t gonna happen in November. The best we can hope for is to weigh all the points and plans and elect the person that is going to do the least amount of damage by respecting majority opinion, the Constitution and the recognition that “all men are created equal”. I want a Patriot, not a Grandstander.
I want us to move forward again. And I look forward to talking to my Mom about it.
