Sunscreen.

“Always wear sunscreen”.

Back when I was in radio, there was a song called “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”. I tried to wear sunscreen my entire adult life, as I had too many sunburn incidents when I was a kid. The thing is, I don’t like the feeling of sunscreen on my skin. But we’ve found a lotion by Nutrigena that fits the bill.

Even with all this sunscreen slathered on my body, I’ve managed to get some sun today. I’ll have to really slather it on tomorrow.

Resort Life.

We work a lot for moments like this. One can not take money with them when they’ve come to the end of the road. Experience all you can, both work and pleasure. When your time comes, be exhausted, out of breath, and when asked what you did with this life, answer honestly, “I did everything I could with what I was given”.

View From A CRJ-200.

Yesterday we flew aboard a Skywest (United Express) CRJ-200 out of Denver. It was my first time flying in a westerly direction out of KDEN. The views are spectacular.

While I’ve had some “mountain” flight lessons in a Cessna 172, the mountains were actually the Appalachians between Greenville SC and Asheville NC. We learned all about flying in the mountains during my initial flight training, but I have yet to take a single engine flight over the Rockies.

I’m looking forward to crossing that off the bucket list someday.

Home.

Earl and I are on a 5-day getaway, currently aboard a United flight from O’Hare to Denver. This getaway is a focus on relaxation for the two of us, and I’ve been looking forward to this trip for a long while. Denver is not out final destination today.

There are many things I love about calling Chicago home, and one of them is the fact we live so close to a major airport. Not only can I watch flights on approach into O’Hare on a daily basis (something I love to do), but many of our flights out of the Windy City are a one hop experience (contrary to today’s flight). When we leave ORD I’m always excited to identify the landmarks I can easily identify as a private pilot. Here’s a photo fo KPWK, the home airport of one of the Flying Clubs I belong to and the airport where I’ve logged many departures and takeoffs in the Archer III.

I’m at one of the most happiest moments in my life, despite all the chaos going on in the world. Life is what you make it to be, always strive to make it the best it can be.

Life.

Here is where all my cares go away. I find pure personal fulfillment and enjoyment as a private pilot. It’s one of the greatest accomplishments I have made in my life, and I look forward to continuing to grow as a pilot and enjoying this view for many, many more years to come.

Trump.

Spotted on Facebook, this is a very accurate assessment of Trump.

Someone asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” 

Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England, wrote this magnificent response:

“A few things spring to mind.

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.

Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.

He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.

He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.

There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

* Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

* You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.

He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.

In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:

‘My God… what… have… I… created?

If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”

Thanks Occupy Democrats

Picard.

The second trailer for early 2020’s “Star Trek: Picard” dropped earlier this week and like the classic “80s/90s” Trekker I am, a tear or two formed in my eye when I watched it.

I think I’ve been convinced to get a CBS All Access pass when this comes out early next year. It has a classic-Star Trek vibe, and there were some surprises in the trailer that made me really excited about this upcoming series.

See for yourself. Link to YouTube above.

(I’m crossing my fingers for an appearance from my gal Admiral Janeway sometime during the show).

Addendum: Watching the trailer again, I’m more excited about “Star Trek: Picard” than I have ever been for Enterprise or Discovery. Maybe I don’t speak for all Trekkers, but this is what I’ve been waiting for.

HomeKit, Part 3.

So the conversion to all HomeKit for our Home Automation system continues. The outlier continues to be a Google Home Hub in the kitchen, as Earl uses it for recipe guidance and an occasional YouTube video, but he’s indicated this is simply a luxury right now and he wouldn’t mind if I sold it.

I replaced our two Smart Outlet Plugs with devices that were suppose to be compatible with HomeKit/Siri, Google, and Alexa. I was able to configure them for HomeKit without an issue, which was my plan all along. But getting them to join the Google network has been trickier. I’ve reached out to the manufacturer, VOCOLinc, for assistance, but this has not proven to be fruitful. Since the Google and Alexa integration is a secondary need I’m not pursuing it further, however, I can say these VOCOLinc plugs do work very well on HomeKit. They have both been rock solid.

The HomePod in our Dining Room had a bit of a fit last weekend and forgot about all the devices in the house. Siri would respond to requests for whole rooms to be turned on and off, but it wouldn’t control a specific device, even though we were able to without an issue with Siri on our phones and by using the Home app on iOS and/or our Macs. I restarted the HomePod but that didn’t help the situation; Siri just started behaving normally again after a couple of hours. I don’t know if there was an Internet issue or something else, but Apple constantly has our devices talking to each other in the background, perhaps they just had to have an extra chat.

Today I installed a Lutron Decora Smart Dimmer Switch to control the lights over our breakfast bar. Switches normally need two wires, the hot from the panel and the hot subsequently going to the lamp, as the switch is just turning this leg of the circuit on and off. But smart switches need to be powered as if they were plugged into a wall outlet, so the Smart Dimmer Switch also needed to access the Neutral wire. Luckily, modern homes have the neutral wire where it needs to be, but older homes didn’t follow such standards and there’s a good chance you won’t have a neutral wire in your switch box. I was able to tap the neutral wire without an issue, though, and the setup of the switch was flawless. I love the way it looks and acts.

I’m very interested in the smart control panels by Brilliant Control, which are designed to replace up to four light switches in a wall box. The interface looks good, the idea behind it is awesome, and it would give us the high-tech approach I’m striving for in our home. The issue is they don’t make a HomeKit version at the moment, but according to Brilliant Control it’s in the works. I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

I am making progress with this ongoing project and I’d say I’m around 90% pleased with the results thus far. Earl has remarked that he doesn’t miss Alexa at all and he’s happy with having one “system”, so that mission is accomplished.

Ponderance.

According to Apple’s spell check, “ponderance” isn’t a word. Betty White could never give enough clues to guess that Password.

That’s how I feel tonight: full of ponderance. There’s a lot to think about.

iPadOS Beta 3.

After hearing Apple had released Public Beta 3 of their latest version of iOS/iPadOS, and doing some reading on the stability of this beta, I’ve gone ahead and installed it on my iPad Pro.

I’m really liking what Apple is offering in iOS 13 and iPadOS.

Cosmetically, Dark Mode is gorgeous. This is dark mode done right, and it is a welcome relief to my eyes. One of the reasons I prefer to use a Mac at work is because of Dark Mode offered in Mac OS. It’s a lot easier on my eyes while staring at the screen for too many hours in the day. Windows 10 offers a Dark Mode but it is uneven at best and many of the apps just turn gray; Mac OS and now iOS/iPadOS turn much darker.

Performance of Beta 3 seems to be great, though I’ve been messing with it for only an hour or so. I briefly had Beta 2 on an older iPad and that was an unmitigated mess, this is much better and it feels like Apple Developers are making great progress on getting iOS 13 ready and stable for the assumed release in September.

I’m still trying to get into using my iPad Pro as my primary computer; I believe computing needs to be taken to the next level and tablets are going to be the way of the future. I’m eager to see where development from all players in the game take this next step. Maybe Apple will be the leader, maybe they won’t. Only time will tell.

Right now, I’d say they’re headed in the right direction.