First and foremost has been the unfolding tragedy in the aftermath of hurricane Helene. I have family in Georgia heavily impacted by the storm, as well as acquaintances in Tennessee and North Carolina. I’m trying to provide help and donations to as many of those effected communities as I can, starting in north Florida and continuing on up into the Appalachian states.

My part of Florida came through relatively unscathed, although the storm was wide enough to effect the Atlantic coast and send winds that toppled my last remaining oak in my front yard. That oak was finally removed this past Wednesday, along with a maple in the back yard that was nearly dead. It was miraculous that the oak fell where it did absolutely no damage, and that the maple wasn’t blown over. If the maple had come down it would have destroyed part of my fence and more than likely hit the neighbor’s house. I’d already spent money earlier this year to try and save the maple by having the dead parts cut out. I’d also had to pay for some damage on my roof when a limb came down during a particularly violent storm in January. I finally had the rest of the maple cut down and removed before it could be blown down and cause any future damage.

Then there’s the upcoming 2024 presidential election. I’m not going to make any comments except to say I’m voting straight Democratic party all the way down the ballet. By the way, it is pronounced ‘Democratic’ not ‘Democrat’. I am a ‘Democrat’ (single member) in the ‘Democratic’ (plural group designation) party. The Republican party pronounces it ‘Democrat party’ to try and get a rise out of the opposition, and example of them trying and failing to ‘own the libs.’

I grew up indoctrinated as a Republican in a Republican household listening to William F. Buckley Jr on Firing Line as it played every Sunday on my local PBS station in Atlanta (bit of irony in that). When I was old enough I reflexively voted Nixon in 1972, Ford in 1976, and Reagan in 1980. It was the first Reagan term that totally destroyed my support of Reagan and belief in the Republican party. I switched to being an Independent until I realized I was always voting for Democrats, at which time I switched to being a Democrat. I’ve voted straight Blue ever since. There is an unbroken line between Reagan and Trump, with that line running down hill. I’ll vote straight Blue this year, just like I’ve been doing since 1992.

I also have traveling and paid consultancy to fulfill. I’m going to be very busy. I will probably post something or other after 5 November. See you then.

Another Reason to Stop Writing — Autocorrect

I’m back in here to correct the weird words that autocorrect dropped into my post — ‘rook’ instead of ‘roof’, for example. It’s one thing to get red squiggles underneath words not in the browser’s dictionary, but it’s another to have some mysterious agent automatically correct what you write. I really am tired of that.

For reasons that only my body knows (and it’s not saying) I spent all of yesterday in my pajamas and slippers, huddled underneath blankets throughout the day, living in a state of fatigue and a mental fog. I managed to end the day suffering a major migraine complete with visual distortions (“the colored jaggies”) dancing across my field of vision. The migraine passed and left me in an even greater state of fatigue.

Sunday started cold and rainy and stayed that way throughout the day. That was the impetus to stay under big fluffy IKEA blankets. I could have run the heat in the house, but the insanely high cost of electrical power in Florida means I will find every opportunity not to run either AC or heat, or consume electrical power if possible. If I’d been in a better cognitive state then I’d have dressed appropriately, but I didn’t. The cold and clammy from the environment added to the overall malaise I was in.

A post I started early yesterday remains unfinished. It’s a technical post that contains lots of code listings scattered throughout. Technical posts demand focused attention to writing in order to “flow” correctly from paragraph to paragraph because of code listings and other types of illustrative information embedded between each paragraph. When I tackle a post without that attention to detail I wind up having to go back and reorganize and/or rip out and rewrite. That’s no fun, not for me anyway.

This morning was decidedly different than yesterday. I woke up without the mental fog of yesterday, got dressed, and was out in the house doing my normal chores that includes taking care of the little critters. I even took the galloping gophers (Ruby and Annie) out on a regular walk this morning. They were quite happy about that. I don’t know if I can do a walk this evening as there is more rain in our forecast, but we shall see.

Today is Martin Luther King observance day and a federal holiday, meaning the post office is closed along with the brick-and-mortar banks. Being retired it won’t matter as every day now in my life can be considered a holiday. That doesn’t preclude me from “working” here at home, and after yesterday’s unanticipated downtime I’ll need to catch up with certain chores I should have done on Sunday but didn’t. I am glad to be feeling better, and I hope that days like this past Sunday are very few indeed.

Part of this flood of writing is traceable to a personal decision I made around Christmas that I would write about anything that crossed my consciousness horizon. Anything, especially if I experienced it. In the past I’ve been far too selective about subject matter, but not anymore. I think it’s finally sunk in that anything can be the subject of a post or story if you let it. By stopping myself from being so “picky” the floodgates have opened for me.

I’m sure a lot of this will read like crap. So be it. I’d rather it be human-generated crap than AI generated crap. I guess in a way this burst of writing creativity is my response to the AI LLM’s ability to create seemingly human-written content. I suppose if you read enough original written content and then have your machines mine steal that content from the entire internet for “training content,” that the AI software will regurgitate writing that seems plausible at first glance.

That’s not for me. If there are mistakes in my writing, they’re mine and mine alone. Bad prose, misspellings, grammar errors, syntax errors, too many commas, whatever. It’s all me and all mine. And that’s the way it should be.

More to come…

I dropped Disney+ when they notified the world how they were going to jack up their monthly fees to view their streaming service. I’d already grown “fatigued” with all the MCU and Star Wars content that was flooding the service, so all I needed to pull the trigger and leave was that cost increase announcement. That was back in August (see link below).

Then in November Hulu and Disney+ announced a dual deal, as well as a cheaper advertising supported tier, so I signed back up, ostensibly to watch all the content on Hulu. And there’s been quite a bit of it. Disney+ came along for an additional $2.99/month, so I wasn’t too annoyed to have them back.

But you’d think that it was Disney+ that was the king of the duo if you look at all the spam advertising they’ve sent me. This latest was from ABC, a legacy TV channel I absolutely loathe. And what are they advertising at the top of the spam advert? An episode from their dumber-than-a-bag-of-hammers Golden Bachelor. I will have been married for 40 years come this July. The idea I want to watch some old fart get married is so far from anything I want to watch as to be totally alien. At this point in a human’s life, marriage means absolutely nothing unless there’s money and a pre-nup involved. Otherwise just shack up and be happy in each other’s company. Take all that money you’d spend on a formal wedding and elope to some really nice vacation spot while Earth’s climate still allows for such excesses.

I’ve clicked the link to be removed from all ABC advertising, so hopefully nothing else will come in from ABC. But this isn’t the first such spam advertising email from a Disney “property,” and I don’t think it’ll be the last. I wrote above that I thought $2.99 for Disney+ wasn’t going to be such a big deal. Now I’m not so sure.

Links

shedding sunday — applications and subscriptions

I, along with millions of others, don’t keep track of application subscriptions. Once enabled they renew monthly or yearly until such time as I shut them down. Forgotten subscriptions are a slow drain on your long-term finances. It might not sound like much, but over time it adds up. The next time you look at a monthly subscription, multiply it by 12 and then ask yourself do you really think you’re getting that much benefit from spending that much every year? I’ll bet the answer, with very few exceptions, is a resounding ‘no’.

While I cleaned house of more than the following two, the two most important I shut down were Disney+ and Ulysses Mobile. Here’s why I signed up to them, and why I’ve moved on.

Disney+

I signed up to Disney+ in January 2021 for $6.99/month. I’d already noticed that Disney had pulled all of its properties (movies, TV shows) from Netflix, which was one reason I dropped my Netflix subscription. It was also some number of months into the COVID 19 lockdown, and I wanted to see some of the latter MCU movies I’d missed because they were in a movie theater and there was no way in hell I was going to sit in a crowded room with lots of other people, even with a mask. At first I was thrilled to be able to see not only the recent releases, but a lot of the older releases I hadn’t seen because Disney had put them on their streaming service. For a long time I was happy.

But a funny thing happened the following year in 2022. I began to watch shows from the MCU and Star Wars I didn’t care for. From the MCU side the only shows I sat completely through were Wanda Vision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, and Hawkeye. All the others I dropped after watching about fifteen minutes of the first episode. Probably the worst two of the other shows were She Hulk: Attorney at Law and What If…? She Hulk was just bad writing all around, and What If was bad animation and bad writing. That and the fact that What If just had to have an episode with zombies. I’m sick and tired of that trope.

When it comes to the MCU movies, there are only two out of their entire catalogue I would want to be on a desert island with; Iron Man (2008) and Captain America: The First Avenger. Everything else I can leave on the table. Everything.

Then there are the Star Wars movies and shows. Right off the bat let me say that the only three Star Wars movies I cared for are the 1977 original, Empire, and Rogue One. I appreciated Rogue One in particular because there was nothing mentioned about Luke Skywalker or any of the other characters until right at the very end, when Vader showed up and ruthlessly wiped out everyone (and I mean everyone) who got in his way. This wasn’t the tame Vader of the first movies, this was a Vader who was totally committed to being a total Force badass. What ruined it was the final scene with the very poorly done Princess Lea. I also appreciate Rogue One because it provided a key plot point that explained how a ragged galactic farm boy flying a ragged single person space craft could destroy the most sophisticated machine ever produced to that point, the Death Star. The only shows I cared to watch were The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi (believe it or not), and Andor. In my opinion Andor stood head-and-shoulders above everything else, including the few shows I liked.

Some of you gentle readers might ask why I wouldn’t hang on to see the next seasons of the shows I did like. I don’t believe they’re going to get produced. Disney is losing money and viewers right now, to the tune of billions of dollars and over eight million subscribers. All of those shows are expensive to produce. Don’t kid yourself. With Bob Iger back in the saddle, a lot of blood will be spilled across the corporation, especially in streaming which is Disney+

I am suffering from Marvel fatigue, from Star Wars fatigue, from Pixar fatigue, and from classic Disney movie fatigue. And with Disney+ just pushing my monthly subscription to $10.99/month, I’m here to tell you that Disney+ ain’t worth $132/year.

Ulysses Mobile

Ulysses Mobile used to be a one-time purchase. I bought it with the idea that I’d turn my 12.9″ iPad Pro, along with a keyboard, into my primary writing tool. I tried, I really did. I wrote a number of posts back in the mid-2010s using Ulysses and they got pushed up to my blog. The problem is that Ulysses at that time wouldn’t allow me to embed images within the text. I’d do the majority of my writing with Ulysses, push it up to WordPress, then go into the WordPress editor and add in the images. Over time my use of Ulysses, along with writing with the iPad, tapered off. When Ulysses went with a yearly subscription to keep a steady income coming in to pay for developers, I understood that. At $30/year it wasn’t that much, all told. But when I went looking to see what to drop, I was shocked to note that the last writing I did with Ulysses was six year ago. I’d been paying $30/year all that time, thinking I’d get back to using it Real Soon Now. Many will point out how much better Apple-based applications are, especially on iOS and macOS. And they’re right; productive applications on the Mac platforms, when done right, are beautiful. The problem with Ulysses is that it didn’t fit within my way of working (my “workflow”). I don’t care how beautiful it is, if it doesn’t help make my job easier, then it’s useless to me.

These days (and all other days) I use the WordPress web editor. WordPress apparently relented on their plans to remove the “classic” editor. These days you can create a post either with their block-based editor or using the “classic” editor. I wish there was a way to select classic for everything via a toggle. Right now I have to click a drop down and then select classic, a mild annoyance but an action that I now do without thinking. Because the editor is web based, I can edit on any computer that has a modern web browser. For example part of this post was written in Chrome on a Lenovo Chrome Book. The best experience if you can afford it is using a MacBook Air with either Vivaldi or Brave. For the same amount of money you’d spend on an iPad Pro with a keyboard, you can purchase an up-to-date MacBook Air with the same processor, more memory, and more storage. And because the MacBook is a notebook form factor with the keyboard properly attached to the screen, you can use your MacBook (or Chrome Book or Windows notebook or Linux notebook) anywhere you can sit or stand, especially in your lap. The only downside to not using an iPad is the lack of touch screen functionality. Unless you purchase a Chrome Book like my Lenovo, which does have touch screen functionality that I never use.

Finis

That’s basically it. I’m sure I’m going to find other little bits and pieces that need to be trimmed because they provide little or no value with the money being spent to use them.

What is a Shedding Sunday? It’s a day where I drop, or shed, habits and applications that fed those habits. I’ve already written about how I’ve dropped the use of many/most social media applications, the latest being Bluesky and Mastodon. This Sunday I took to dropping many channels on YouTube as well as several recurring Apple subscriptions. Let’s start with the YouTube channels.

I am a liberal, definitely left of center. There is no longer anyway I can meet my conservative counterparts in the middle. The chasm between liberal and conservative has been widening since Obama won in 2007, and the Tea Party fully infected the Republican party. The roots of this can be traced back to Newt Gingrich and his Contract On America, but it’s full hideous flowering came about in the 2010 mid-terms. The Republican party has been totally insane ever since.

And the primary vector of that infection has been the right wing media, primarily Fox News. Having recognized that I’ve devoted considerable effort to avoid anything with a right wing smell. That hasn’t helped me to avoid controversy. I started following a number of left-of-center and just left YouTube channels because I thought I might find solace in those channels. For about a month I subscribed to a number of non-right-wing channels, watching every episode that came out on those channels. YouTube helpfully surfaced more leftish content, so that soon I was awash in left-leaning content. The only problem with all that left-leaning content was the penchant for all of them to publish oh-ain’t-it-awful content about all the right-wing excesses and sins, in particular about Donald Trump. While pointing out these sins I’d hear a clip played back of Trump speaking, which raised my hackles. After a while of this constant bombardment I came to realize that the liberal news channels were carrying water for Trump by playing back his clips. I don’t care how much you were criticizing what he said, the fact you played him back was enough to continue to spread his vile and hate filled message. He’s living for free on your channel and if I allow it, in my head. I found this depressing to the point where I finally stopped searching for and listening, and I unsubscribed from them all. The YouTube algorithms being what they are, it’s going to take me a while to “not recommend channel[s]” when YouTube peppers my feed with similar content.

After less than 24 hours I can feel the stress leaving me. The feeling that I’m uncontrollably falling into a depressive state has stopped. I’m calmer and I can think more clearly.

I’d only known the man since early 2021 when he started to appear at scheduled field tests for my project. I hadn’t know him at all until he arrived at the first field test. After that he was a regular participant. I won’t say we were the best of friends. We had an abrasive moment at one point in our work relationship, which quickly smoothed itself out.

Over time I came to realize he was undergoing treatments for cancer. I don’t know what kind; I never asked out of deference to his privacy and he never volunteered the information. I do remember his numerous operations and chemo-therapy sessions. I grew more invested in his outcomes, hoping that each session truly did remove all the cancer. Unfortunately it never did.

Then I heard of his last medical session earlier this year when he announced that the cancer had come back, spread everywhere, and was “stage four.” At that point there wasn’t anything anyone could do. He went in one last time for an operation to help relieve some of the pain. After that they sent him home for hospice care.

A week before he died I traveled to his home with the local lead of our engineering group to sit and visit. He was lucid, but physically thin and in bed the entire time we were visiting. He tired easily. We both stayed as long as we could, then left. It was an emotionally charged moment, and the last time either of us saw him alive.

He was brave in the face of death. He never complained, only spoke of his battle with cancer in a straight forward way to let us know. He was smart and had a strong work ethic. He worked as long as he could, insisting he be allowed to show up and help with our field tests, even during the early and middle phases of his battle with cancer. He was a great help in my project.

I chose to be quiet last week, not posting, partially out of respect to his memory, mostly because his death focused my attention on the vital lessons of living a positive and contributory life.