A lovely desert morning flight with Earl today. We flew to E77 San Manuel and back, though we didn’t land due to density altitude concerns (it was already in the 90s here) around getting out. This was Earl’s first time through Redington Pass in an airplane. He took some great photos. We passed through at 7500′ MSL, with 9500’+ peaks off our left wing and 7000’+ peaks off our right wing.
Shoutout to the Southwest flight that, when told to watch for us as traffic in his vicinity, “watching for the chicken hawk”. That actually made me LOL. For reference, our call sign today was Skyhawk 912LB. KTUS was fairly busy, nearby DM AFB was doing skydiving operations, and the AZ NG had six jets in the air doing impressive things. As you can see below, we did a few extra turns over the city to get sequenced in. I enjoy playing in the sky with the bigger airplanes. This is something my Dad and Grandfather avoided back in their day, heck they didn’t even have radios.
Truman is insistent on going out on the roof around 9:00 PM every night. I have to accompany him out there, or else when it’s time to get back in he’ll start scratching at the door and weatherstripping and since we haven’t paid for those things yet, we probably shouldn’t let kitty destroy them.
I have noticed Truman is more insistent on going outside when there’s moonlight. I don’t know if it gives his night vision an extra kick or what, but he likes to just go outside and bask in the moonlight. I go out with him and we look at the stars together.
My very first blog entry was written 22 years ago today. I didn’t know the word “blog” at the time; instead I was just writing an online journal. I originally wrote the entry using Microsoft Frontpage; it was be a year or two before I adopted the word “blog” and moved to a blogging platform. My first officially blogging platform was Blogger. In 2005 I moved to Movable Type and then a year or two later I moved to WordPress, where the blog continues to live today.
My first blog entry talks about flying with my Dad in his newly built AcroSport II bi-plane for the first time and mentions that “someday I’ll be a private pilot”. It’s good to know I achieved at least one goal in those 22 years.
In the earlier years of this blog and before social media really took hold I tended to share opinions and thoughts on a somewhat regular basis. That content moved to social media once the chaos relocated to those parts, especially after the 2016 election season was underway, though I did do a fair share of griping about George W Bush’s presidency at the time. To this day I still wish we had a better choices on all sides of the aisle. I want to vote for someone, not against someone else. I’ll leave it at that.
Every once in a while I’ll go back and read a smattering of entries to get a feel for my attitude and feelings at a certain stage of my life, and that’s a good thing to do from time to time. In many ways I have changed and in many other ways I am who I have always been.
That’s a good balance.
As a little bit of a hoot, here’s my first image posted to the site. It was taken with a webcam that was state of the art at the time. I was growing a beard and wanted to share a progress photo.
Ever since I was a young lad and first discovered reruns of “Star Trek” (The Original Series) on CKWS, to be enjoyed after school, I have loved the series. As a Trekker, I have a Starfleet uniform, an outfit I call my “Starfleet Shore Leave” wear, and I have followed along with most of the various series.
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” is one of my favorite series, and probably my absolute favorites of the “NuTrek” universe. “Star Trek: Lower Decks” is also a series I look forward to and I’m looking forward to season four coming out later this year.
There was recently a crossover between SNW and LD and I was really looking forward to seeing what that was all about. We sat down to watch the episode last night and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I won’t go into details of the episode and my only review is that it is an awesome experience, but there is one element from the show that I had to integrate into my daily life. You see, the structure of Starfleet, and the mind set of most of the characters on the show, is something I work toward. As a kid I hoped I’d see a more “Star Trek” type of society come to fruition with the arrival of the 21st century. I knew we wouldn’t have transporters and the like, but I was hoping we’d start figuring out the homeless and food shortage issues and all try harder to get along. Unfortunately the 21st century has swung us in the wrong direction and sometimes I get mired in the chaos and I find it brings me down.
A fellow fan of the show recreated a Starfleet recruitment poster spotted on the recent Strange New Worlds / Lower Deck episode (entitled “Those Old Scientists”) and I was delighted to find it was in high enough quality to print in a decent size.
The picture frame is ordered and scheduled to arrive tomorrow. I look forward to hanging this in my office, as a daily source of inspiration, before the end of the week.
So last night was a full moon so it wasn’t the best night for stargazing. I still wanted to take the telescope out and see what it could do, and since Mother Nature wasn’t bringing us any storms, I set the telescope up in the driveway and took it for a test spin.
The iPhone app that is used in tandem with the Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ telescope is awesome. It helps you pinpoint what you’re looking for, with a bullseye that turns green when you’ve located the celestial object you want to gaze at.
Even though the sky was saturated with moonlight, I was able to get a good view at Altair through the eyepiece and it was right where it was suppose to be.
I also took a peek at the Moon and it looked awesome, with its lines and craters and little bright spots. I now need to read up on capturing photos with this telescope.
I’m looking forward to taking it out during the New Moon in two weeks.
We all know the evils of Social Media. It’s reactive, it’s explosive, and folks usually post stuff on Social Media just to get attention. Back in the early days of Social Media I was excited about the idea; it was like a message board one would find on AOL back in the ’90s or an expansion of the “blog” concept that had been around, at the time, for a decade or so.
I guess I didn’t see Social Media replacing blogs. And obviously, I haven’t gotten that memo.
Today I am doing everything I can to get away from Social Media; I’ve removed the apps from my iPhone, I make it hard for me to log into the various platforms, etc. The issue is, so many of my friends and family members are dependent on the platforms as their prime channel of communication. Aunt Lulu could drop dead and I wouldn’t get a phone call, just a post on Facebook. It’s gamble as to the timeliness of the news due to algorithms and the like.
I don’t have an Aunt Lulu, by the way, but I did picture Lulu from “Hee-Haw” when I typed that sentence.
Another thing I’ve noticed about Social Media, and specifically Facebook, is that it throws the natural progression of friendships and acquaintances askew. For example, let’s say that back in 2005 I started a new job and worked with a guy named Dirk. Dirk and I became work friends and then had a few beers outside the office and when Facebook started up, we both joined the platform and became friends. 2010 comes along and I have moved onto a new job, Dirk did the same and we haven’t really seen each other in person since our time together at our common employer. Dirk is a nice guy and has moved on to getting married and raising a family and the like, and his new job took him across the country. Dirk and I were never really that close, we just got along well at work, shared some common interests, and connected via Social Media because it was there. I doubt that since it’s been well over a decade since I’ve last seen Dirk, I won’t see Dirk again, unless Earl and I travel to that part of the country or something, but then I feel like I’d be imposing.
By the way, there isn’t really a Dirk.
So, Dirk and I had a good friendship at work and when we both moved onto other places, in the days before Social Media our friendship/acquaintance would have come to its natural conclusion. But connecting on Facebook skewed all that; we’re still connected well past the natural shelf date, neither of us want to “unfriend” the other because of niceties, and honestly, Dirk is using bandwidth I don’t have for information consumption when I scroll through Facebook and see that he’s painting his kitchen or something.
A similar phenomenon happens when one connects with an acquaintance you met at a party years ago, and you met just that one time, and now you’re connected for life through Social Media. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m just not wired to have a million and five friends scattered all over the planet and I’m trying hard to be too nice to not break connections because I don’t want to be the rude one.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some great people online, but most of the folks I consider friends I met in the pre-Social Media days, whether through AOL message boards around Macs, or through this blog thingee, or something like that. There are several people I know on social media that I met before social media and I enjoy what they share, but they’re usually like me and trying to get away from Social Media (hello London, hello Arkansas, hello Houston).
I should just do what I want to do and start breaking connections to those folks that would have come to a natural, friendly, mutual ending years ago. Maybe our Social Media connections shouldn’t be called friendships, but subscriptions instead.
Or maybe I should just go with the original plan to move away from Social Media altogether.
My mother often sends me screenshots of emails and text messages without explanation. I know it’s her way of asking if whatever she’s sent me is spam or real. 99% of the time it’s a spam message.
At work the Cyber Security department often sends out trick emails to test the userbase on their knowledge of rejecting spam. If one clicks a link in the fake spam email, we’re taken to a website with the link “youregonnalovetraining.com” or something like that, and our supervisor is notified. This hasn’t tripped me up in a couple of years.
This morning I received notification that my payment for our Amazon Prime membership had been rejected. Since my husband and I had just had a conversation about our membership, I had to take a few extra beats to determine if the message was real or not. It wasn’t, however, my use of Apple devices makes that rather hard to determine for the average user.
On my iPhone, at first sight it looks like this message did come from Amazon. “Undisclosed-recipients” should be a clue that something is amiss, because logically something about my credit card would come directly to me, not to a bunch of people. However, because Apple likes to hide things, you have to tap the arrow to the right of the “From” field, then expand it and try to open a contact card to see the actual address.
In MacOS the behavior is much like that in iOS. However, Apple is kind enough to show the “From” email address on the first click instead of just burying it in a contact card.
We have a webmail interface on our hosting server for our personal domain, and it gives the opportunity to get to the information by clicking “Headers”, but will standard users know what the means?
And finally, going in full blown geek mode, I often use the application Alpine on my personal Linux server to triage my email throughout the day. Hearkening back to the old school terminal (green screen) days, Alpine gives me a pure text view of my email.
Unsurprisingly, Alpine gives me the information right up front, just like email did 20, 30, hell, 40 years ago. There’s no GUI (Graphical User Interface) magic trying to hide pertinent information to make it look pretty.
I don’t have my accounts set up in the ways of Microsoft Outlook to see how this would have been handled in that arena. However, looking through similar emails on my work provided Windows 10 laptop with Microsoft Outlook, the “From” would have appeared much like it does in Alpine. That’s a good thing, and something Microsoft gets right.
If you ever receive an email and you’re not sure of its validity, tap or click around until you can see the actual address of the sender. That will generally give you a clue as to the authenticity. “Headers” can give you all sorts of information. Unfortunately, this is where Apple products fail the most, with their insistence of hiding as many technical details as possible.
Sometimes the technical details is where the dirt is at.
Earl gave me a telescope for my birthday earlier this month. Unfortunately, it was damaged in shipment and we had to send it back to the company; the replacement arrived yesterday and we assembled it today.
I’m excited about this Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ telescope, as it works with an app on my iPhone, which will be situated in the mount on the right side of the telescope, and the app will guide me to the various things I’m searching for in the night sky.
I have always enjoyed gazing at the stars and this gift was a complete surprise. When I was a youngster, Grandpa Country had a telescope he would set up in the driveway once or twice a year to gaze at the moon. He had a lot of books on astronomy scattered on the various tables in the living room; and I have one of his smaller telescopes from his estate (a table top model).
I’m looking forward to the first clear night I can take this new telescope out for fun; it looks like it may be a few nights before I have the opportunity as Monsoon ‘23 has finally kicked in and I’ve been enjoying thunderstorms.
The natural beauty of the Universe, in tandem with everything Mother Nature does here on our little rock around Sol, is so fascinating to me.
Youtube channel owner “Vampire Robot” put up another video from what I assume to be a news video archive of B-roll footage. This video is from 1999 and was taken in Kmart, you know, back when Kmart still had thousands of stores throughout the United States.
As I look through these old shopping videos often posted on the Youtube channel, I can’t help but notice a few things. People seem to be calmer in general, but that could be because they’re in front of a large video camera lens, so admittedly they’re probably on their best behavior. But I also notice folks are dressed a little bit nicer than what we see today in the likes of Walmart or any smattering of grocery stores. You don’t see folks in sweat pants and other things that resemble bedwear. The stores also seem a little brighter and cleaner to me; I think that’s probably because today’s corporate approach to retail seems to be “make anything affordable look like a warehouse”. Where we used to have tile floors we now have shiny concrete. It’s cheaper. Cheaper investment leads to larger profits.
I think there’s three Kmart stores left in the United States. It’s a shame they’re gone, leaving us the choice of Walmart or Target in most cities and maybe a Walmart and one of the Dollar Store derivatives in smaller towns. Of course, there’s the higher end chains like Kohl’s and Nordstroms and Belk and the like, but middle-class, small town America deserves something more than what we have today.
Truman has decided the coffee table is a grand spot to take a nap when we’re watching television. He looks so peaceful and calm taking a nap in one of his favorite places.
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.
