Ponderings and Musings

51. Not prime, but awesome. Some numbers physically look more awesome to me than others, and 51 looks awesome.

A health provider recently said to me, “you’re on the back nine, the best part of the game.” Yep. A great place to be.

NY Route 51 goes from Mount Upton to Ilion. It’s a nice, scenic drive. There’s ups, there’s downs, curves, and straight runs. Enjoyable all the way.

Back in my school days, bus 51 was driven by a woman named Jean. Not my regular bus, but word had it she could bounce two HS football players against each other while keeping one hand on the wheel. She was in charge.

There is no Illinois 51. There is a U.S. Route 51 in Illinois and it runs the entire length of the state. I’ve been on approximately half of it, and Earl and I will finish the other half before the year’s end.

I’ve never had “51” in sequence in any of my home or personal phone numbers, but my internal office number when I worked at Digital was DTN 251-1282.

I’m right where I was meant to be at this point, on this planet, in this moment of time. No regrets. I look forward with excitement of what lies ahead.

It is an absolutely divine evening in The Windy City. It’s 77ºF after 10:00 p.m., perhaps the warmest it has been at this time of night in 2019. Impressive thunderstorms passed through earlier this afternoon; I was called from my office to the balcony when I heard hail banging against the windows. When I looked out I couldn’t see the clock you see in the snapshot I just took a moment ago.

The weather cam on our balcony caught a bit of the storm.

Mother Nature may throw us some more storms throughout the night. Looking at the forecast discussion in my aviation weather apps, there’s probably going to thunderstorms on and off through the weekend.

I might not get to fly much over the next few days but at least Mother Nature is strutting around impressively. For the moment, I shall sit on the balcony, enjoy the summer breeze, and relax. It’s a good way to wind down for the night.

I notice things that many people don’t pay much attention to. I’ve always been this way; at age 8 I remarked to my mother as we were driving through town, that someone had taken down all the corner street signs throughout the village. As it turns out, the village had taken down the signs to have the cast iron signs repainted. Why they did this with all the signs at once was beyond my comprehension, but nevertheless, she said she would have never noticed that sort of thing and she felt I should become a scientist or something.

When we first started coming to Chicago to visit Jamie, I noticed that every electrical socket in his apartment was sideways. I thought this may have been just a quirk of the builder of the 1950s apartment building he was living in, but then I started looking at wall plugs everywhere we went in the city and aside from when the plug was sharing a box with a wall switch or something, the plug was always turned sideways.

By the way, by sideways I mean the “face” of a typical U.S. electrical outlet is on its side, rather than looking like two eyes and a mouth agape underneath.

A little research on this revealed that most Chicago-based contractors do this because they always have, and that’s how you can tell you had a quality electrician doing the work in your home. City codes also require conduit in the walls, and it’s easier to install wall boxes sideways when you’re working with conduit.

It is of little consequence as to which direction the plugs are oriented on our wall, except if you have a nightlight or something, because then the nightlight is pointing sideways. So if you’re particularly religious or something and have a nightlight featuring the Virgin Mary, she’s going to be laying on her side.

I talk about this today because I spent a few minutes replacing one of the outlets over the kitchen counter with a new receptacle that contains USB charging ports as well. Since I come from a family of building contractors, it seems that I am required to do this sort of thing on my own in lieu of hiring a handyman to do it, and of course I over-tightened the wall plate and cracked it, resulting in a trip to the local hardware store. Since this wall outlet shares a box with the switch for the garbage disposal, it’s one of the three plugs in the entire condo that is vertically oriented.

Regardless of the direction it’s facing, I’m pleased with the result of my work this afternoon. Now I’m going to take a few moments and lay on my side.

So this afternoon I stopped at a chain restaurant called Veggie Grill. This particular location is located on the Loop in Chicago. I’ve never been to one of these restaurants before, but the selection was good, I was able to make a healthy choice for my lunch, and the service staff was pleasant.

As I walked into the restaurant the first thing I noticed was all of the signs proclaiming that this particular location did not accept cash. They accept credit and debit cards only. The tech head in me assumed this also meant they accepted Apple Pay and the other contactless payment methods, but there were no payment terminals to be found; I had to pay with my credit card, and their point of sale system relied on the mag stripe on the back of the card.

A restaurant going cashless relying on 1950s technology seemed rather odd to me; especially when mag stripes have pretty much gone away everywhere else in the world and over the past few years the United States has been glacially moving forward to adopt better, more secure technology.

This cashless payment requirement got me wondering, why is this particular location cashless? The signs all over the store seem to indicate other locations in the chain accept cash. What made this store unique?

The location doesn’t seem to be in a particularly dangerous area of Chicago, after all, it’s on the Loop, and ultimately anything can happen anywhere, I can’t imagine that a restaurant proclaiming themselves as “Veggie Grill” would choose to locate in an undesired socioeconomic climate. Yeah, there’s always a chance someone is going to try to grab cash from the cash register, but it doesn’t seem to be anymore likely here versus other places I’ve been in Chicago.

Then I got to wondering if this was a way to keep homeless people out of the restaurant. A homeless person, if they’re able to purchase a meal to begin with, is most likely going to purchase a meal with cash. Those looking for handouts are going to look for handouts regardless of what the signs on the door say. Yet, I can’t help but think the cashless approach is a deterrent to receiving visits from homeless folks.

Maybe I should start handing out gift cards instead of packs of peanut butter crackers wrapped in dollar bills.

I’m the first person to want technology to take us forward in any way that it can, as long as for it’s for the good of the people, all the people. Technological advancements that are designed to segregate the haves from the have nots are rarely advancements in good faith.

I look forward to the day when we have replicators producing whatever we need for whomever needs it. In the meantime, let’s keep advancing technology to make it safe, secure, and convenient.

For everyone!

We often hear about Baby Boomers versus Millennials. But what about us Gen Xers? I’m solidly a Gen X and quite proud of it. Here’s a fascinating video talking about Gen Xers.

I know having a personal blog like is horribly outdated in today’s world of screaming on social media, but I can’t let go of this method of expression. I don’t write entries as often as I like and I have more feelings of writer’s block than I care to these days, but overall I still find enjoyment in this endeavor. I have a couple of friends I met through blogs back in the day that still maintain a personal blog, but for the most part, the personal blog has gone the way of the dodo.

I’m trying to decide if it’s the monetization of everything on the Internet or the infestation of Social Media, or a combination of both for that matter, that moved the needle on personal blogs. Back in the day there were plenty of ways to maintain a personal blog and there are still lots and lots of options available to us today. But in 2019 people don’t have time to sit down and write actual letters of the alphabet (versus emojis and the like), let alone words strung together in a cohesive manner, and so the expectation of the return of personal blog as a popular part of society is probably not going to happen.

“Read. Think. Be. Evolve.”

Kate Mulgrew said these four words as advice to a young person that was asking questions about her career, her writings, and her portrayals of the popular characters she has said over the years. “Hold a book. Put down the gadget”.

I was browsing through old blog posts earlier today and in 2007 I wretched about people using “their cell phones” all the time. It’s not a surprise that I was complaining, after all I do that way too often, but comparing what I was complaining about in ’07 versus how people use smartphones today, well, there’s no comparison. We have a whole generation of people that would absolutely lose their minds if there was a drastic shift in technology that pushed us back 10 or 15 years. I truly wonder if we would be able to survive.

I need to read more. My grandmother used to sit in her rocking chair, in front of the large windows at the end of her mid-century living room, and just spend time reading. She was one of the most even-keeled people I’ve ever known and I truly feel that reading was a contributor to that. My dad was the same way. He could spend hours reading and he was pretty even-keeled as well.

Read. Think. Be. Evolve.

Thanks, Kate. It’s great advice for a great life.

A number of years ago there was an Internet forum called “Topix” that was quite popular in the city we lived in at the time. The locals had found their way to this site to trash talk just about every aspect of living in the small Upstate New York city. The conversation slammed restaurants, hospitals, city officials, politicians, neighbors, friends, prostitutes, and priests. The shocking thing is a lot of this discussion named names; people’s dirty laundry was aired in an unbelievable manner. Back in the early 2010s I swore off the site as I felt that it was like walking through a sewer while wearing nothing but a fig leaf, and everyone was watching you do it.

Move ahead to 2019 and just a little bit ago I came to the realization that Twitter, at least as the way it’s represented through its algorithm to give you riveting content first, is pretty much an exercise in the same slog through the muck. Twitter became quite dank in the run up to the 2016 election, and as I think about it, probably even before then when it gave Trump a voice to carry on his Birther Conspiracy against President Obama. But revenue is revenue in the heads of many a social media CEO, and why worry about quality when you can fleece enough money from the masses and then try to cultivate a “edgy” image of a caring individual.

I’ve complained about Twitter for years but I still hold onto my original account, mainly because of the number of friends I’ve made through the haze over the years and somewhat because I wouldn’t be able to contact them any other way. In an obvious effort to rationalize my Sybil-like feels about Twitter, there is good news buried amongst the inaccurate tweets, banal memes, and reductive “analysis” that Twitter features way too often.

It’s funny that I’ve never made the comparison between that hell hole of “Topix” with Twitter, but that’s all Twitter has really become. A place where you can scream into a void and find someone that agrees with you, no matter how idiotic your screaming is (and yes, that includes my contributions to the site from time to time).

Seeing Twitter in this new light is making my gears turn again. My only concern is: where would I find access to late breaking news and how would I keep in contact with the people I have met over the years through Twitter?

I think it’s time for another Twitter-free weekend to find out.