If you’re still following along, or even if you just stumbled onto this corner of the Internet by accident, Happy New Year! May you find what you’re searching for this year.
J.P.
Caturday.
Truman has been hanging out in the “public” spaces of our home a little more since our return from back east earlier this month. He’s getting along well with Lucky and Jinx these days. There has been nose-to-nose sniffing without hysterics, though once in a while the dogs will go tearing through the house when Truman decided to jump over the dog gate that separates our upstairs area from the rest of our home.
Here he’s posing in the kitchen, standing next to the shelf that has been deemed as “safe”. The dogs do not bother him when he’s on a cat on a shelf.
The Demu Trilogy.
I’ve decided to re-read one of my favorite sci-fi novels, “The Demu Trilogy”. I believe this could be my 37th or 38th time reading this collection of stories by F.M. Busby and I’m very much looking forward to the experience.
I’ve written about this book a couple of times before, and you can see the entry from 2020 here, which leads to an entry from 2007 here_.
I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Choosing Happiness.
I just signed off of my work computer for hopefully the last time in 2022. I’m not expected to work until Tuesday morning and it’s a wonderful feeling. On Friday afternoons, even on quiet weeks like this, I usually run out of mental bandwidth by lunch time on Friday and getting through the rest of the workday can be a chore. I decided to let everyone on the team go a little early today to get a jump start on the weekend.
With the New Year rolling around, I’ve been thinking about resolutions and things I want to do better in 2023. Go back over the 21+ years of this blog and any mention of resolutions are the same, whether it be 2002, 2012, or 2022. I am who I am and that’s all there is to it.
I am making a couple of adjustments in my ways to try to make it in a healthy to 2032. Actually, I’m more selfish than that; I want weight and balance in the airplanes I fly to be easier to calculate, so I’ll be a little more focused on my health in the coming year. Solidly beyond the half-century mark, it’s not as easy as it used to be, so my expectations have been adjusted accordingly. I’m never going to climb Mount Vesuvius, but I’ll continue to hike around the top of Mount Lemmon.
Over the past couple of years I’ve finally accepted that my thought processes are not what one would consider “normal”, whatever that is in this day and age, and I’m no longer enduring an internal struggle because of this. When it comes to the numbers, I’ve finally accepted my whole spectrum of thought. Gone are the sixth grader worries of “I can’t play that game with John, he’s too weird”. I’m sorry if your eyes glaze over if I start talking about the history of all the cash register systems at a given coffee shop chain over the years if we meet up in person over a cup of coffee. Don’t worry, even though I can tell you that the license plate number on my dad’s 1971 muscle car (819-OST) and my grandparents’ 1973 Buick Electra 225 (510-OSB), I won’t, but please don’t ask me what I had for supper last night. No clue. However, I will instantly notice if you’ve changed hairstyles or modified your facial hair in any way.
In 2023 I’m going to make more of an effort to eschew the negative rhetoric so prevalent on social media. I’m going to punt the conversations from the pundits and stop using technology that folks in the industry keep telling is better when it’s really not. Sorry, Apple, you’re not who you used to be. Oh, I’ll keep using your products because I have them, but I’ll be weighing my options carefully when it comes time to make a new purchase. And gone are the days where I put all my apples in one crate. One step toward this is the deleting of tech oriented podcasts. My podcast selection is more focused on brighter things, and I’ll be sharing my listening list shortly.
I’m not ready for the 2024 Presidential Election. I don’t care about it at all and I’m really not going to care if it’s just a slate of a bunch of Baby Boomers that are WAY past their prime. I’ve barely recovered from the Trump years and I’m still not over the 2022 midterm elections, especially as an Arizona resident, since we have such sore losers when it comes to certain Republicans in this state.
And I’m finally going to give up my task management system of 13 years, which was designed by someone else, because earlier this month I discovered I was spending way too much time keeping that task management system organized. A text file with a list of my to-dos is just fine, thanks. And text files with to-do lists don’t need a $50 subscription or a $79 periodic upgrade fee.
At this moment I seek out the happiness and try even harder to spread it far and wide. With this mindset I feel like 2023 is going to be a good year in many respects. Just don’t read about La Niña or El Niño predictions for the year. If you do, pack a lifeboat and a seat belt.
I hope anyone that stumbles upon this blog finds peace, joy, and most importantly, happiness in this New Year. We all deserve to be who we were meant to be.
Narcissism.
Tech journalist Mike Elgan sums up a bit of 2022 quite well in this article (unfortunately it may be behind a paywall, I received it as an email).
And that’s why “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” is exactly the movie we need right now. Yes, it’s a fun murder mystery. But the theme throughout is: Most of these young super-geniuses lionized by social media are actually just narcissist morons.
Some other gems from the article:
Elon Musk ran his mouth about Twitter so narcissistically that he was forced to buy it, wasting $44 billion and destroying the social network by personally making all the major decisions and, in doing so, driving away its most active users and best advertisers.
Kanye West ruined his own business empire by expressing his antipathy for Jewish people and his admiration for Adolph Hitler. But behind this garden variety antisemitism was a more familiar trait of total narcissism — West’s longstanding belief that he’s an unparalleled artistic and business visionary genius. And Jesus.
And, of course, Donald Trump continued to dominate the news with his own special mix of malignant narcissism and criminality, caught stealing top secret documents (most likely to show off as trophies at his golf club) and lying about winning an election he lost.
I won’t share the entirety of the article here, but if you’d like to see more, drop me an email.
Ringy Dingy.
Today I learned how long distance dialing worked in 1951. I love these old videos. I find them much more enjoyable than the Chinese spyware known as TikTok.
Janelle.
Janelle Monáe wrote “Cold War” in 2010. This song still moves me 12 years later. She is an amazingly talented woman. We need more people like her in the world.
She Seems Nice.
I hear Twitter is having an outage. Thank God. I hope that platform dies an agonizing, painful, bankruptcy inducing death and the likes of Julia Hartley-Brewer, whoever the heck she is, goes away to the nearest rock as her new residence. Not cool at all.
Twitter is not a Town Square. It was never a Town Square. Don’t buy into the Silicon Valley hype of creating a virtual town square. It’s not. It has become a haven of horrible people getting way too much amplification of their hateful, inhuman voices.
They all just need to go away.
Money, Money, Money.
I’ve kicked off the Resolution Revolution for 2023 and I’ve been focused on finances. Over the years I have accumulated some recurring subscriptions (redundant?) in Apple’s App Store. They are for apps that I use with some regularity and quite frankly it’s unfortunate that the tech industry has moved to this recurring charge model.
I wiped out a LOT of little subscriptions today. To the tune of savings around $1000 a year. $50 a year for web access to a task manager? Gone. Nearly $400 a year for aviation software that does practically everything but fly the jet? Reduced to General Aviation levels. Linux servers in the cloud? Relocated to home, where they run for free.
I get that developers need to make cash but our bank account can’t afford to be so gratuitous to these folks. If there’s an open source version that I can support and run on my own server I’m going to do it.
I feel like there’s some turbulent times in the financial world coming for all of us 2023. It’s time to get things in a row so we can weather the storm.
