Ponderings and Musings

When Grandma and Grandpa City retired in the 1970s, they still were awake around 7:00 a.m. eating breakfast and doing their morning routine. They both seemed to look forward to the newspaper each morning; and one of them would always be working on the crossword puzzle. Grandpa City would also read “the funnies”. As a youngster I had the impression this was something they looked forward to.

Today, as a man in his mid 50s, I get that.

There are two activities I must complete daily for my day to feel fulfilled. I’m hooked on Wordle and the daily goals of Solitaire on my iPad.

My husband and I tried Wordle results each day, usually first thing in the morning. He texts me a screenshot of his results (without the actual letters, just the number of tries required) and I then do the same.

My Solitaire app has four daily goals. Three of the goals are tied together for bonus points and there’s a fourth “arcade goal”, which compares with what others are doing on the platform. I also play the daily challenge and oddly I always find that easier than the other games of the day.

The Solitaire game does allow me to try another goal if I find the original proposed goal too daunting, but I usually stick it through until I solve the original goal. I will skip a goal and ask for a new one if they want me to solve a multiplayer game as a goal, because it’s Solitaire and if I wanted to play multiplayer card games I’d go to a casino or something.

So while I don’t read “the funnies” in the local newspaper anymore, I do look forward to my two rounds of games every day. I find the experience relaxing and rewarding.

And relaxing and rewarding is always a win in my book.

I write a lot of things down at work. I’m in a lot of meetings, I lead a team of 15 developers that are all working on different projects, and our team juggles the technicalities and mechanics of over three dozen different applications.

I’m completely reliant on my personal knowledgebase, or in the newer vernacular, my second brain.

I tend to remember written notes versus typed notes. I usually end up writing notes and then typing them into a searchable interface along the lines of Microsoft OneNote or even plain text documents, but it’s the handwriting activity that’s locking data into some sort of memory in my cluttered brain.

I’ve tried writing my notes using my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil directly into Microsoft OneNote, and the practice is a bit more efficient, but I don’t enjoy writing on my iPad Pro with my Apple Pencil nearly as much as using a good quality gel pen and a decent notebook. I prefer a dot grid over lined paper and I alternate between blue and black ink gel pens.

I was reading social media comments around the fact that many schools are no longer teaching cursive writing to students. It’s a shame to see the practice become a lost art, but students still need to learn how to write, and as you can see by my own penmanship shown above, it’s more about writing for legibility and efficiency, and if a student is writing in printed letters instead of using cursive, well, at least they’re writing.

One comment noted that most Gen Zers won’t know how to sign documents because without cursive they won’t have a signature, but there’s nothing that says a person’s signature has to be in cursive. A person’s signature has to be a consistent, understood mark of a person’s identity. There’s no rule in a book somewhere that says it has to be in cursive. I know a lot of folks that have beautiful signatures. My mother, both my grandmothers, and especially my sister have or had impressive signatures. My signature is functional and legible. I’ve seen plenty of young adults scrawl a bunch of lines as their signature and I know more than one person that’s just put an X or something close that on the dotted line. An impressive signature dazzles at times, but as long as the younger generation maintains the ability to hold a pencil or pen and make legible marks on a piece of paper (or slab of silicon), the world isn’t going to fall apart.

I still can’t get used to writing large amounts of information on an iPad Pro. Let’s hope pen and paper don’t go extinct.

I love the contrasting light at sunset here in Sonoran Desert. I’ll never tire of this.

Today I learned “Frasier” is coming back to television. I wasn’t a huge fan of the show back in the day, but I’ve seen plenty of great moments from clips and this latest resurrection of an old sitcom doesn’t look too contrived. Since we pay a boatload of money for Paramount+ (Star Trek, The Good Wife), might as well give it a go when it comes out. It looks much better than when they tried to reboot “Murphy Brown” a few years ago, so we’ll give it a shot.

Earl and I were talking about memories of days gone by and I mentioned a vague recollection of “Onion Nuggets” at McDonalds. My husband didn’t remember them but I did some digging around online and found a little bit of information.

McDonald’s Onion Nuggets came before the Chicken McNuggets. Introduced to select markets in the ‘70s, Onion Nuggets were around until the early 1980s.

I must have enjoyed them in one of the select markets back in the day. I can easily remember trying them and liking them, but I don’t remember where this occurred.

I figure I have about 30 years left in this life. Of course, that’s an arbitrary number subject to countless variables unaccounted for in this declaration, but it helps keep my sights on the future in perspective.

Of those 30 arbitrary years remaining, I’ll probably end up working a third of them. For those not quick with the maths, that’s 10 years. I plan on retiring at 65, if my company will have me for that long. If not, I’ll find another gig to pad out the arithmetic. I don’t know what tech company would want an aged team leader but I could probably bluff my way into something fruitful.

These thoughts of remaining time on my odometer are not morbid. They’re realistic. And quite frankly, my plan is to make these the best 30 years (give or take 30) of my life.

Today was the day of Apple’s latest round of announcements, and following the lead established during the pandemic, Apple had a slick, pre-recorded presentation to spill the goods.

I cleared my calendar at work and switched my Teams status to “Do Not Disturb” so I could enjoy the festivities.

Today Apple announced the latest generation of iPhone, the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max. The fastest iPhones ever (why wouldn’t they be?), all models showed a decent spec bump and some amazing photographic capabilities. I am currently rocking an iPhone 13 Pro, which replaced my iPhone X back in the day. To secure this iPhone 13 Pro from the family budgeting department, I had to sign a document and place an entry on the family calendar stating I would not update for three years. So I see an iPhone 16 Pro Max on the horizon for next year.

Apple also announced WATCH 9 and their latest version of the WATCH Ultra, dubbed the Ultra 2.

I guess phrases like “Windows Vista” destroyed any marketing chances in the future of having something than iterative numbers attached to device names in the 21st century.

The Apple Watch upgrades boast impressive features and more iterative spec bumps. I’m not compelled to replace my WATCH Series 7 at this time; maybe I’ll go crazy a year from now and/or when we win the lottery.

As mentioned in my previous blog entry, the little skit around Apple’s initiatives for becoming Carbon Neutral by 2030 was my favorite part of today’s presentation and I’m really happy Apple is doing the right thing by focusing on a better environment. Sometimes it feels like the long way around to this goal; buying a new device the is friendlier for the environment than your current device, instead of just keeping your current device, seems like the long way around but with recycling practices and the like, it makes sense.

A few of our neighbors have American flags in their landscaping and/or front yard. All do the proper thing and have solar powered lighting to keep the flag illuminated during the night. The previous owner of our home had a flag hanging over the garage but I didn’t see anything indicated it was illuminated.

It was well into my adulthood that I realized hanging a flag like this was much more of American thing versus patriotic displays in the rest of the world. Of course too many folks take this to extremes and wear the American flag on their underwear, hanging off their car, etc. which I think is a bit too much, though I do have an American flag top I bought in 1990 from International Male.

I don’t wear it anymore since it’d look like a crop top today and it was never intended to be a crop top.

When I was in elementary school I was a pretty strong student, hitting the honor roll on a regular basis. Presented with the opportunity to take a test or a pop quiz or the “Iowa Tests”, which were a standardized battery of tests given near the end of the school year, I generally finished any of these tests first and would silently wait for everyone else to finish. I wasn’t one to check my work; I either knew it or I didn’t and over 90% of the time I knew the answer and hence ended up on the honor roll.

This all changed in sixth grade. My sixth grade teacher, a man in his early 30s that all the girls went gaga over (I liked his mustache but that was about it; I was still bitter about my much more “enrichment” teacher being let go at the end of the previous school year), he would have us put our tests or quizzes on his desk when we were done and then we’d sit down watching everyone else do the same thing. As usual I was always first and my grades would show it, usually 88 to 92. That’s what I did. A few weeks into the school year he pulled me aside to tell me a few things. First of all, I had to stop making my penmanship “too pretty”. I wasn’t putting hearts or stars over the “I”s and “j”s or anything, I just had a little bit of a loopy flair to the way I wrote and I didn’t see any harm in it. The second thing he mentioned was that I was racing through my tests way too fast and I should slow down and recheck all my work before handing it in.

This started my tendency to second guess myself.

My grades on exams went down a bit and being as literally minded as I can be, I didn’t blame it on going against my nature of just “I know it or I don’t” but rather, I was doing something else wrong and if I just kept checking my work I’d be fine. I took his words to heart and for the rest of my school career I slowed my natural thought processes down and became a merit roll student. I clearly remember watching students take their tests up before me and counting them so I wouldn’t be in the top three or top five, and I would change answers that I second guessed so he could see I was checking my work. I don’t blame the teacher with the mustache for the drop in grades, he thought he was urging me to slow down and check my work like every other student, but that just didn’t work for me. This is what I get for growing up in the tail end of the “one student is like every other student” era. It would have been easier to go metric.

And my penmanship can still be a little loopy but no hearts or stars for the dots.