Dr. Reed Timmer, storm chasing guy of Team Dominator, has predicted a total of 1,207 tornadoes in 2024. This is based on data aggregated from years with similar weather patterns (El Niño, oceanic water temperatures, etc) over the past 50 years. It looks like New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida are going to see an above average count of tornadoes this year.
I have been on the fence about going on another storm chasing week during the peak season this spring. While I did see one tornado last year and experienced some impressive lightning storms, Mother Nature was in a mood for the week I was out on the Plains and I found 2023’s trip disappointing. My chase in 2022 was fun, though, and on both occasions I got to meet some other storm chasers and see some great landscape. It’s just that last year I had to do a LOT of driving day to day because of Mother Nature’s hissy fit last year.
It looks like this year could be more promising if I time it right and incorporate the lessons I’ve learned over the last few years into my approach for this coming year.
I know I have the support of my husband if I decide to go. I’ll be watching the weather patterns closely over the next few months and plan out a more spontaneous approach (ha!) to the trip in 2024.
So here it is, the 1st of January. I slept in a bit this morning. I’ve gone for a walk around the neighborhood (which was very quiet) and now I’m thinking about the New Year and what lies ahead.
It took me a little while to get my gears turning this morning. I looked back at yesterday’s blog entry and a couple of my social media posts and I probably wasn’t as optimistic as I really want to be. What the world needs is more optimism. Sometimes it’s hard to find that optimism but I shouldn’t stop trying to find it.
Getting through the holiday season is always an exercise of “getting over the hump” for me. I worry too much on the upslope, I love it when it peaks, and then I’m a little sad when we’re on the downslope and getting ready to idle into the winter months.
We don’t have a lot planned for the New Year’s Day; I may go browse a locally owned used book store. There’s a couple of titles around meteorology and storm chasing that I’ve been looking at online; it’d be great to support the locally owned bookstore by buying a gently copy of the title.
As 2023 comes to a close, I’m reminded of some of the dialog in this “Maude” episode that aired on December 30, 1974. The retching about 1974 giving way to 1975 starts around the six minute mark. It’s shocking how much hasn’t changed in nearly 50 years.
2023 wasn’t my favorite year. 2023 wasn’t my best year. A lot of good things happened in 2023 but it seems like there’s a bit of a wet blanket over the country. I wish I could say I’m looking forward to 2024 but I feel like it’s going to be a continuation of 2023… more war, idiotic American politics, and that looming presidential election. Oh how am I dreading the presidential election. It’s going to be another exercise in “vote for the least worst candidate”. And freaks are going to be running around with their weird cult behavior, folks are going to be saying asinine things online (I really wish you needed a license to get on the Internet), and people that are rich through idiocy are going to continue their idiocy. I know, I sound like a Debbie Downer on this New Year’s Eve.
I’m hoping 2024 proves me wrong.
I have made a list of personal goals and aspirations for 2024 and I’ve already begun work on them with the Winter Solstice. That’s a bright spot. I’ve also purchased a couple of bottles of decent champagne for tonight’s celebration, so that’s always fun. Living in the Mountain Time Zone, the time zone that America forgot, we get to celebrate New Year’s Eve at 10:00 PM from New York, again at 11:00 PM from New York when the rerun the whole affair for the Central Time Zone, and then we’re left with someone dropping a giant taco on Downtown Tucson at 12:00 midnight Mountain Time. I’m not really jazzed about the New Year’s Eve celebrations on the television anyway. We’ll probably just hang out with family and friends and call it a night. It’s like that one New Year’s Eve when I was kid when my mom and dad went square dancing and we were left with a babysitter named that didn’t move off the couch the entire night and forced us to watch “Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?”
Maybe I should go take a nap so I’m ready for the frivolity.
I found this marketing display on the cash register at Wendy’s to be interesting. If you read the fine print you’ll notice it’s meant for the drive thru.
When I shared this with the family on our private chat, Jamie posted this which made me laugh out loud while I was still waiting in line.
I never figured out what Truman had spied up on the wall when I took this photo. I didn’t see anything moving, I didn’t hear any critters making critter sounds, but something definitely grabbed his attention as we were sitting on the couch together.
He’s been very snuggly the past couple of weeks. This morning we awoke with him actually sleeping on the bed with us and he wasn’t demanding kibble. He was just hanging out with his Papa and Daddy.
A trend that I’ve noticed over the past few years is retail workers working with one or more AirPods (or equivalent) in their ears. At first I was naive around my thinking and figured this was a way they were tapped into notices from management or something, you know, like in lieu of announcements over a loudspeaker or a ding-ding-ding-ding at Sears and Roebuck.
Silly me.
Of course the retail workers in question are listening to music in at least one ear, which is something I couldn’t manage in that environment. Today I saw a worker at a local Wendy’s with a Drive Thru headpiece on one side and an AirPod on the other. That would make me insane.
I stopped at this local Wendy’s for lunch. With careful planning this morning I spontaneously took the afternoon off from work and decided I was in the mood for chili and a baked potato from Wendy’s, so there I was in line. The Katherine of questionable skill behind the counter kept asking customers to repeat themselves as they were placing their order. While I was waiting to place my order two previous customers came up to the counter to ask for their order to be created, because in one instance she had misheard “Eight” instead of “Bacon”, resulting in the wrong meal for the customer.
I was asked to repeat my request for my chili. That’s when I noticed Katherine of Questionable Skill was working with an AirPod in her ear. Apparently her music was more important than her job.
I’ve moved on from the observation (though I’m writing about it) and am now sitting in our local Starbucks. There are more workers than customers at the moment and all of them have headsets but no AirPods (or equivalents) are in sight. I’m good with this. However, it’s probably because they have the music cranked fairly loud here. ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” is playing at rockin’ volumes, enough that I could hear the dub in the second chorus where they artificially extended some of the notes under “Queen…” before going into the bridge. (You didn’t know that was there, did you?) The volume is also loud enough to mask my tinnitus.
I’m thankful for that.
Now that I think about it, perhaps the folks working with AirPods are suffering from tinnitus and they’re masking it with music.
At the aforementioned Wendy’s, I also noted a customer using his speakerphone at a loud volume on the other side of the restaurant. I have always found speakerphone use to be rude, long before Steve Jobs blessed us with today’s modern smartphone. I once worked for man that used a speakerphone for EVERY call because he was multi-tasker at all times but master of nothing.
Some of the screeching on these speakerphones sound like glorified tinnitus to me. If the AirPod set isn’t masking tinnitus today they’ll probably have tinnitus to mask tomorrow.
Jack Baty at baty.net recently referenced an old post around Productivity. In his original post, Jack talked about his cycle of trying different ways of maintaining his productivity workflow, or his to do list.
I have been an on-and-off again OmniFocus user since late 2009. I like the application very much, and if I was still completely in on Apple’s ecosystem I’d probably use it full time. But I don’t have an interest in being any corporation’s ecosystem completely and full-time, and work has deemed that I must use a Windows 10 laptop, so that all falls apart in my mind. Now, the fine folks at The Omni Group do offer a web portal for their software, but it costs an extra $50/year and while I have paid for it in the past, I’m reducing subscriptions and I’m no longer interested in paying $50/year to do something at work. Work should be paying me (and they do, let’s keep it that way).
Plain text has always been my jam. If for some reason I want to use a VIC-20 to get to a plain text file, I can. So these days I am using todo.txt, a plain text productivity system originally written as a bash script by Gina Trapani. With this specific plain text format, I am able to get to my todo list from any computer, remotely, locally, and with confidence. And further more, I am able to write my own automations to generate tasks on a schedule or as needed.
Now, with OmniFocus and Apple’s Shortcuts platform, there are automation opportunities there as well. In that regard, OmniFocus is a strong player in making sure you have access to your data. I have always found Apple’s Shortcuts to be maddening and illogical to a certain degree. Perhaps it’s because I’m old school, but dragging and dropping blocks in a GUI is not automation, it’s doing app things.
With todo.txt, I am able to write my own little snippets and scripts to work my automation magic. For example, as a private pilot, I’m all about checklists in all parts of my life. I like being able to check things off as I complete them. Not only does it give me a sense of satisfaction around the actual completion, I’m also able to put something on a list and forget about it until it has to be done, build reminders, and make sure I do all the things I need to do by looking for a mark of completion or not. The paradigm keeps me safe in the cockpit and keeps me organized throughout my entire life.
When I’ve scheduled a flight, I create a bunch of tasks in my todo.txt file, the one bucket that manages all parts of my life, and have them waiting for me at prescribed times to prepare for that flight. I can log into my personal server from any computer in the world, get to a command prompt and type “flight”, answer a couple of prompts, and off we go. And even though I’m not a fan, I’ve built a little shortcut in Apple Shortcuts so I can say “Hey Siri, next flight…” and give the relative details. From the command line, it ends up looking like this:
A few lines of code, a few data points, and some logic, and voila, I have a project called Flight03TUS in my todo list for a flight I have scheduled for the 3rd to Tucson. I don’t even need to know the exact date, I can tell the script I have a flight on Wednesday and it figures it out for me. Magic? No, just simple code.
If you’re interested in the format of each of those entries in the screen shot, the todo.txt website has all the details.
Ah, but what about the iPhone and iPad? Simple! A very smart developer named Michael Descy created the Swiftodo app, which works great on iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. A lot of what I do with plaintext productivity was inspired by his website Plaintext Productivity.
And in case you’re wondering, yes I do use Dropbox to keep my plaintext productivity work all in sync between all my devices. Because Dropbox works with just about everything and the files are very small.
So, while there are plenty of pretty, robust, wonderful proprietary, for pay applications out there, as an old-school developer that is trying to keep it simple in 2024, I feel like I’ve settled on this approach to keep track of everything I have going on in my life.
The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is always weird to me. On one hand, work is quiet so I’m able to get things organized in my professional life for the New Year. On the other hand I know in the back of my head that New Year’s Day is just an arbitrary moment in time and there’s nothing really that magical about it. Hence why I tend to think of the Winter Solstice as the beginning of a new cycle instead of the 1st of January.
But this week of in between is also when I tend to have time to tinker around with projects and think about positive things I want do when things ramp up to full speed after the holidays. One of the things I’m doing is “tightening up” my social media presence. I’ve talked about this before, quite a lot actually, and this year I’m being a little bit more realistic about things.
Instead of declaring that I’m dumping social media, which I won’t, I’m reducing my social media presence a bit. Ironically, what’s old becomes new again and I’m starting to discover more personal blogs to follow through folks I follow on Mastodon.
If you visit my blog via the web interface, you’ll notice the blogroll is expanding. I cleaned up the old “Blogroll”, eliminating blogs that haven’t been around a long while. Those that remain are now in the “Legacy Blogroll”. I’ve followed these blogs for a long, long time; they’re primarily from the days before social media infested our existence.
You’ll also notice a new category called “Blog Resurgence”. These are newer blogs I follow via RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. I’m going to write a separate blog entry on how RSS can work for you, so strap yourself in for that. The RSS protocol has been around for a very long time and powers a lot of things, including blogs like this very one you’re reading right now.
The “Blog Resurgence” category is a work in process and will continue to be built out and otherwise tweaked over the next several days. I encourage you to follow along if you’re so inclined.
So what about Social Media? Well, Facebook and Instagram are both run by an evil company and while I haven’t abandoned the platform, I have again removed IG from my phone and only access it via web browser. I gave up on Threads. I also gave up on the new, but unrelated BlueSky. The “limited number of characters” updates from me appear only on Mastodon. I like the folks I have found on there.
Unlike my earlier forays where I interacted with primarily folks from the gay community, these days I’m interacting with folks from all persuasions all over the world and I am a better person for it. Since Mastodon tends to put the power of content in the hands of the user, instead of a sick algorithm determining things on behalf of a large for-profit corporation, I’m content with sticking with Mastodon.
I’m also giving PixelFed another run in lieu of posting to Instagram all the time. I’ve had a bit of time making PixelFed “sticky” (don’t read into that) for me, but I’m giving it another go.
But honestly, I’m most excited about long form blogs like this one and discovering them again like I did like 20 years ago.
It’s giving me the inspiration to actually write again!
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.
