Today marks the day I completed 52 rides around the star called Sol. I’m the most comfortable I’ve been at an age beginning with a “5”. I can say it out loud and I’m happy where I am at this point in my life. I have no regrets. I look forward to future.
Onward and upward.
Earl and I finished watching “Tales From The Loop” on Amazon Prime this weekend. It took us a while to finish the eight episode series. We started it at the beginning of lockdown. While the concept was very intriguing, and I especially enjoyed the intersection of science fiction with retro-futuristic technology, the pacing of some of the episodes was a little difficult for me to grasp.
I shan’t spoil anything here, but basically, “Tales From The Loop” is about a town that is built above a scientific research facility called “The Loop”. We are reminded of photos of the the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. References to activity with in “The Loop” are vague; basically, they make the impossible possible. The episodes show us what happens to individuals as a result of being near “The Loop”.
The music in each episode is gorgeous. It’s probably the best scenic type music I’ve heard in years. The cinematography and visuals are amazing. The stories are compelling, just paced oddly at times.
Overall we enjoyed the experience, but it’s best left enjoyed at your own pace.
As we try to navigate sidewalks and such where people aren’t wearing a mask, the only thing keeping me from not exploding is figuring eventually all these non-mask people in public places will die off. The trick is to avoid them and keep our distance to remain healthy. C’mon Darwin, do your thing.
Living in a condominium building in the third largest city in the United States has really been an education in the nature of my fellow Americans. Couple this experience with the response to the COVID-19 and it’s easy to see why my sister would always say she was Canadian when living and traveling abroad.
In 2020, the United States and its citizens do not garner a favorable opinion across the rest of the planet.
Sharing a building with other property owners is interesting. It’s disheartening to see how many people don’t care about the “common areas” of our building. Occasionally we find beer cans left in the stairwells, or someone will punch the elevator call buttons in the lobby hard enough to knock the entire assembly off the wall. Dog walkers love to put bags of poop in the mail recycling bin (under the large sign that begs people not to put bags of poop in the mail recycling bin). Folks throw cigarette butts off their balcony.
It’s not all bad. We have a good share of pleasant and responsible neighbors, but there are a few that seem to go out of their way to ruin it for everyone else. It’s kind of like the people that voted for Trump. They’re unhappy so they want everyone to be unhappy.
Walking the streets of Chicago I have seen some of the kindest, heartwarming acts of humanity and I’ve seen some of the most jaw-dropping acts of entitlement I’ve witnessed in my nearly 52 years on this planet. I’m encouraged by the number of people that hand a dollar to the homeless person asking for money on the expressway off-ramp. I’m discouraged by the number of people that just walk by the homeless person sitting on the sidewalk on “The Magnificent Mile”.
Public social media posts give us insight to just how awful Americans can be, all in the name of “freedom”. As a Chicagoan it’s concerning to see how many things we see in our daily business that could end up as one of those awful public social media posts. Naturally, these acts are not confined to The Windy City, but with the size and diversity of our population, we have more opportunities to see it.
I think part of my concern is because the pandemic has confined us for so many months and we’re fed such terrible things when we peruse social media. I remember the days when we had just three or four channels, with an evening newscast and a once, maybe twice, daily newspaper delivery. The constant electronic connection, coupled with the ever present 24 hour “news” channels have not fared well for our country. The sad part is I don’t know if there’s ever a way for us to go back to a less bombarded state. I try from time to time, and it’s a good feeling when I’m successful.
Ultimately we find what we seek and it’s taking a very focused, concerted effort these days for me to find the positivity in the population.
I hope I don’t run out of the necessary bandwidth before the election in November.
Last night I posted a picture of myself standing on our balcony, basking in the light of an impending thunderstorm and the ambient lighting of the area, shirtless. I am reminded of a conversation with my Big Brother Season 4 handler, Katie, before I told her I was dropping out of the Top 32 running for the casting of that season. I had to check in with Katie every 12 hours and talk about the most intimate of details of my thought processes. Katie didn’t know what to think, perhaps she reverted to a script when this happened.
Katie: “Can you please send me a photo of you shirtless? A webcam photo will do.”
J.P., within an hour, sends a photo to the designated email address. This involved connecting to an Internet Service Provider via dialup.
Katie: “Well, do you mind always wearing a shirt while you’re on camera?”
It was ultimately my choice to drop out of Big Brother 4’s casting call because my husband said he wasn’t going to be waiting for me if I got kicked out of the house early because he thought the whole thing was ridiculous. But he was very supportive of me for getting to the top 32 of the casting call, despite the 75 page contract that had been faxed over in the middle of the night. So, while wearing a shirt at home, I left a message on handler Katie’s voicemail that I was dropping out of the running.
It’s a good thing I dropped out because I could have ended up with the guy who went crazy during the first week. He started throwing chairs and got kicked out because he was screaming about having anal warts.
Good times.
I was reading old blog entries the other day and I had to laugh. In 2008 I was writing about how I was never going to buy another iPhone, at least one on AT&T, because iPhone OS 2 was killing my wifi, my battery life, and was generally acting poorly. Of course, this was the first update to my original iPhone. We were still working with whatever came before 3G with cell signal. I forget what it was called.
My how things change yet how they stay the same.
I’m typing this blog entry on my iPad Pro. My iPad Pro works brilliantly, albeit the way Apple wants it to work, because I refuse to jailbreak anything. I have never jail broken my phone before. I don’t really see the need to do this. I even skipping the whole “run the beta!” game on both my iPhone and my iPad Pro because I don’t want to get all depressed when things are acting wonky and I know it’ll be months before the proper release of the software currently being tested comes out.
I’ve been tinkering with Linux a lot. I ran Ubuntu Linux on my MacBook Pro for the month of June and it worked well for what it is, but it has nowhere near the polish that Apple is known for. After living in the Apple ecosystem for many years it’s hard to break out; especially since things feel like they’re lacking a cohesion when you’re off of Apple products. I like the cohesion. I actually rely on the cohesion. I am at my my focused when things are cohesive. Work’s edict of having to use a Windows 10 laptop really threw me for a loop and I haven’t quite recovered. I often break the rules and run my work stuff on my own Mac Mini, but then I get a message from the regional desktop systems manager asking why I haven’t used my laptop in a while and then I get back in line.
But having a Windows 10 laptop in my Apple world really disrupts my cohesive approach to productivity.
Even though we have to use a Windows 10 laptop at work I spend all of my day working on Linux servers. We build and run our applications on Linux because it saves the company money. It’s a good thing Linux is so versatile.
I’m not as versatile as Linux.
It’s odd that I enjoy so much cohesion in my technology experience because I’ve always been fascinated by dissimilar technology doing the same task. When I was very young we would go to a local department store called North Country. The decently sized department store of its time, much like McCrory’s or Woolworths, had four checkouts up front. Two of the checkouts had Victor mechanical cash registers and the other two had Sweda mechanical cash registers. I was fascinated by this. Two different makes of cash register, with different receipt formats and different buttons and different sounds, doing the same thing. I stopped in an old Zellers Department Store in Canada years ago and some of the checkouts had NCR computerized cash registers while others had IBM registers, but they all did the same thing and were apparently running the same software. That was kind of cool to me.
So this makes me wonder why I have to run Microsoft Outlook on a Windows 10 laptop when it runs perfectly fine on my Mac Mini.
As I get older I’m finding I have less and less bandwidth, or perhaps it’s interest, in trying to fit into expectations. Maybe this is what they mean when they say older people get set in their ways.
I just know I want my way to be a certain way.
So back in 1983, two mini-series and a television series that last for just one season graced the airwaves of NBC. “V” and “V: The Final Battle” showed us what life could be like if aliens from Sirius descended upon us and promised to be our friends. The Visitors looked like us, seemed to act like us, and wanted to live in harmony with us. They had our best interests in mind. They claimed they brought with them a cure for cancer. They would show us their technology. They just needed a little bit of water and a few minerals in exchange.
They manipulated, and eventually took over the media. They formed youth-corps to foster cooperation between humans and The Visitors. They had big press conferences and said grand things. All the while, they were capturing entire neighborhoods of people to be processed as food, grabbing every ounce of water they could pump up to their mammoth motherships, and plotting the destruction of human civilization.
Wide swaths of the population continued to support The Visitors. They claimed to be our friends. It was the dissenters, the Resistance, that was messing things up. The Visitors came down on humans, eventually strolling the streets with laser guns, commandeering the media, and taking control of the government, all while quieting the scientists or making them disappear entirely.
Back in 1983 I couldn’t fathom how the humans who followed The Visitors as these benevolent beings could do so willingly.
It is now 2020. What we saw in “V” and the follow-up shows isn’t so far-fetched after all. Many humans, especially many Americans, will do anything for power. And they will go to great lengths of bending or discarding morals, turning a blind eye to the obvious truth, or discard any shred of scientific evidence, in any attempt to keep themselves to be perceived as powerful.
One has to wonder if anyone in The White House eats a mouse from time to time.
The United States government wasn’t really designed for a two party system. The founders didn’t even write about parties in the Constitution. They didn’t want two factions going at it for political purposes.
But here we are.
During family night watched the Jon Stewart movie “Irresistible”.
The movie is well done, packed wall to wall with familiar faces, and is a satirical look at what the two-party system has come to in the Trump era. The plot was not as predictable as I predicted it to be. At the end of the movie we all declared that we enjoyed the movie very much.
Recommended.
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.
Weird? Eccentric!