I’ve had this song going through my head this morning, so I thought I would share. From 1979, here’s Barbra Streisand with “The Main Event”.
This is a special VJ dance edit that gives the beginning a little more punch.
Anyone want to tell me why I waited 41 years to realize how hot Ryan O’Neal is?
I spent some time daydreaming about what we are going to do when we’re able to travel about this country again. I told my husband I want to drive far away from any city lights on a moonless, clear summer night and just gaze at the stars. I want my vision to be filled with the beauty of space. There’s a whole huge universe out there and I want to see its awesomeness, unimpeded by city lights. I want to watch comets dance and see satellites streak by. I want to lose myself in thoughts of who is sitting on another planet, many light years away, wondering what’s going on near that pale, little yellow dot in their night sky. I want to feel hope.
I want to lose myself in the stars.
If you visit this website on a regular basis you may notice I’ve made some changes to speed up the response time of the user experience. We’ve been with our web hosting company, Machighway, for over 10 years and they continue to be a joy to work with. Pages and photos should be loading faster. Please, if you see anything broken, please leave a comment so I can go fix it.
For the technically minded, I finally updated the version of PHP running the show here. I also fixed some WordPress plugins that had memory leaks and were slowing things down and discarded several that were no longer needed.
There are other blogging platforms out there, and many of them are quite fast, but with nearly 20 years of blog entries managed through WordPress, I’m not ready to jump to anything else yet. It’s all a matter of care and feeding. It’s not good to treat the underpinnings of this blog like the proverbial server that’s been forgotten and dry walled into a new wall.
One thing I do struggle with is finding a WordPress theme that fits the mood of the blog I’m maintaining. I’ve had this commercial theme here on this site for many years. I haven’t found anything that comes close to what I’m looking for, so it’s going to stay. It took me a little while last night to find the theme I thought best suited my new blog over at The Vintage Point of Sale Site but I finally found something I thought fits the mood.
Thank you for stopping by and continuing to follow my adventures here at Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity. I look forward to continuing sharing my adventures here and in my various annexes for the foreseeable future.
We really have some poor choices available to us in this here 21st century. You know, our telephone calls in the 20th century were of a better voice quality than what we have today? That’s right, when we “let our fingers do the walking“ and we talked to friends and family over 20th century telephone equipment, the reliability of a connection and the quality of our speaking voices was better than what we experience today, even if we are still using a land line and a corded phone.
Progress?
Society has also shifted to social media for things far beyond sharing little bits of life like “I just had the most awesome hamburger!”. Government officials use Twitter to declare war. Family members have moved their entire lives to Facebook. Geeks used to talk about their geeky interests on Google+. If there’s late breaking news you’re most likely going to read about it on social media first and then let the news media fill in the details (hopefully).
Yesterday I tried to stop reading Twitter. I didn’t delete my account because I was still working on downloading my data but I told myself if I could go one month without touching the platform I would probably delete my account.
Didn’t even make it a day.
We live close enough to the CTA tracks to be able to hear announcements to the platforms when we have our windows open. Even though I haven’t ridden a train in over a month, my spidey-sense knew something was amiss and then I heard an announcement. The trains were stopped for a sizable chunk of the line and mumble mumble mumble. I instinctively turned to Twitter to see what was going on, because as a Chicago I follow the CTA Twitter feed to see what’s going on with the trains.
Now, there’s other places I can see what’s going on with the CTA, however, the fastest response is usually on their Twitter feed. It’s not like I’m looking to ride the train but in these idle, lockdown times, I was curious as to what was going on.
So I fired up Twitter.
It was then I saw several tweets about airplanes from my pilot friends and I also saw why the trains were stopped and I caught a couple of nifty little musings from folks amongst the 600 or so accounts I follow on Twitter.
It was a beautiful day in Chicago, it would have been a great day to fly, but the airplanes are grounded for non-essential flights. It was good to see aviation stuff from aviators.
I believe Twitter has been a major contributor to the negative conditions we are experiencing in the world today. I think the basis of why the platform was created is sound, I just think it was ahead of its time. While I have major concerns with the uneven application of Twitter’s Rules of Conduct policies, I also believe American society was not equipped to handle Twitter, and much of the other technology we have available to us today. The evolution of technology has outpaced the evolution of our society. This leads to bad actors, weaponization, and general misuse of the tools we have at our disposal.
So I went back on Twitter via Tweetbot and am tweaking it again to make the best of it.
It is my intent to share my displeasure with Twitter’s uneven application of their Rules of Conduct whenever and wherever appropriate. Without users Twitter would have nothing. Without loud voices trends can never be changed.
In the meanwhile, I’ll know what’s going on with the trains and I’ll be able to chat with the friends I’ve made on the platform.
I’ve decided to create a new blog about my interest in Vintage Point of Sale Systems (electronic cash registers and the like) from the 1970s and 1980s.
If you’re so inclined, you can find it at The Vintage Point of Sale Site.
Might as well use this down time for geeky productivity.
I think Truman is getting bored with the subtle changes in our routine, even though we’re both home most of the time under normal circumstances. He knows something is different with the world but he can’t put his kitty paws on the details. Kibble and treats are happening on schedule but something tells his feline sixth sense that something is off.
To help cope with this situation he works on shredding the couch (I was tempted to call it a ‘davenport’) and climbing the screens on the windows to the balcony.
He needs a catcation, despite the innocent look displayed in the photo above.
I ventured into a local Jewel-Osco (supermarket) today. I had also stopped at Target beforehand. The Target was handling social distancing quite well. There was a “sanitized cart” corral at the front door with a young man wearing a mask wiping down carts as they came in to make available for customers. Arrows and other reminders dotted the floor everywhere you looked. All employees were wearing masks. The checkouts were mostly being handled by the self-serve lanes, where markings on the floor showed customers where to wait and when to proceed. An attendant sanitized each register after a customer was done with their purchase. People were friendly. The staff was helpful.
Back to the Jewel-Osco. Things weren’t quite as organized. About a third of the customers were wearing masks. About half the workers were wearing masks, not including the folks behind the deli. Signs on the floor reminded customers of social distancing using carts as a measurement and relegating aisles to one way traffic. About half the customers were minding the direction of travel. The busiest part of the store was the alcohol section. One entrance/exit was blocked off. Again, more signs on the floor of how to maintain your distance. Plastic overlays on the card transaction machines at the self-serve registers; Jewel-Osco still wants you to decide whether to donate to their latest charitable cause or not which defeats contactless payment with Apple Pay or Google Pay. Does anyone still use Samsung Pay?
This was my first time venturing into the general public in these circumstances and I must say I don’t have a lot of faith that we’ll be approaching anything akin to “normal” even by Labor Day. I know beaches are opening in Florida and there are protestors wanting to apparently lick each other in public. For the most part the length of the effects of this pandemic will be determined by the lowest common denominators of the country. Rushing through social distancing practices will just make the social distancing practices last longer.
Maybe this is what the masses want. I don’t have an answer and I don’t know what passes as societal thinking these days. Things have been going crazy for pretty much the entire 21st century.
You’d like nearly 20 years in I wouldn’t be surprised by any of this.
One of the more depressing sights along my daily walk is the Day Care Center down the street. Even though it’s mid-April they still have their St. Patrick’s Day decorations up because no one is going to the Day Care Center. We’re all locked in and locked up trying to beat this virus while Trump encourages people to protest in the streets.
The nearby elementary school marquee talks about a “Patriot’s Day Dance” on March 30th but I’m positive that never happened. All the blinds have been closed, all the shades have been drawn, all the lights have been turned off in that elementary school. Today Governor Pritzker announced Illinois schools would be closed through the end of the school year.
I wonder if the Day Care Center will be taking down their St. Patrick’s Day decorations to put up pumpkins later this year.
I’m nothing special and there’s nothing unique about our situation; I’m sure like millions of other Americans we’re just as tired of sitting at home as they are. People liken these times to World War II when Americans went to war, built things for the troops, and rallied together. The comparison is like apples to oranges; we don’t have any sort of presidential leadership, there’s nothing to send troops to, and families left back at home during wartime could at least hug their neighbor.
We have to avoid our neighbors on the street.
I watched a man stand on his porch to don a scuba mask and snorkel. He was taking his garbage to the cans in the alley adjacent to his home. He would be passing by no other human being; the elaborate getup was absolutely unnecessary.
People are scared.
I get wearing masks when you’re out in public and mingling with other people, that makes sense for the most part, I have noticed that some folks wearing masks relax social distancing protocol because they think the makes them invincible. A little bit of brain power and research will prove this is not true, but there’s not a lot of that in American society. I saw a meme this morning:
“What borders on stupidity?”
“Canada and Mexico”.
It’s a very sad commentary on a very real problem this country faces.
I hope the kids are able to put up Independence Day decorations this summer. This gives me hope.
This is a 1983 press photo taken in a Kmart. I don’t know the location of the Kmart, though I can tell you this is one location I had never been in. It would appear the photographer is standing on the checkstand for register #1. I’m surprised to see both registers two and six are designated as express checkouts.
The cashiers are using NCR 255 cash registers, which I’ve never seen in a Kmart. As a vintage technology buff I can tell you the NCR 255 was capable of scanning as early as the mid 1970s, but Kmart really struggled with bringing their store systems into the electronic era. Notice there’s no scanners in the checkstands and the cashier doesn’t have a wired wand anywhere. Undoubtedly the cashier was entering a price and selecting “Key 1”, “Key 2”, etc., as that was the way Kmart designated their departments at the time. Announcements over the PA system would refer to personnel as “Clock” and a number, you had to listen for your “clock” number to know when to respond.
The NCR 255 cash registers were quite sophisticated compared to what I remember from that era at Kmart; the Kmart in Mattydale kept their mechanical cash registers well into the 80s and the Kmart at “Western Lights” in Syracuse had loud NCR 225s that made a lot of banging sounds. Another Kmart near where I went to college had something completely different that wasn’t made by NCR at all.
I have a lot of useless information in my brain.
One thing I found surprising is the stacks of cartons of cigarettes along the express checkout. I had completely forgotten that was a thing back in the day, though now that I think about it I remember the grocery stores in my hometown having a similar arrangement at the registers.
I took a look at the visitor stats for this site for the first time in a very long while; most people come here to visit a page I wrote years ago about the department store chain “W.T. Grants”. Many former employees stop by to reminisce. Other visitors stop by to read about my memories of early computers and cash registers.
I really do enjoy vintage technology. I was doing research on NCR’s minicomputers of the 1970s when I came across this photo via a Google search. Kmart had a huge mish-mash of registers across their stores in the early 1980s until they finally settled down onto one somewhat cohesive system around the same time they ditched the big red “K” with the turquoise “mart”.
That Kmart sign is much bigger than any “Big K” sign I’ve ever seen since that unfortunate switch a couple of decades ago.
Now there’s hardly an Kmarts left in the country. Times are certainly different.
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!
