This is bad. I’ve never seen anything have such an effect on literally everything around the entire globe as this pandemic has. All Restaurants, Bars, parks, and even many stores have closed to try to help control the spread, but it continues. All public gatherings — meetings, concerts, or literally anything where 10 or more people might gather together for any reason — have been cancelled. Everyone is instructed to stay at least 4 feet from anyone else at all times. Millions of workers have been asked to either work from home or are getting laid off indefinitely.

No one knows how long this might last either. Weeks? Months? There’s no telling. Symptoms present much like the flu, but the disease is not. There is no cure. They say they’re “working on it” and hope to have a cure within a year. Meanwhile society starts to panic. There are mass shortages of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, of all things, probably having to do mainly with a few people who decide they’re going to try to make some money by hoarding and re-selling these things for a huge mark-up. It’s funny to see the stories in the news of people who end up stuck with thousands of cases of hand sanitizer and/or toilet paper, now unable to sell the items because online retailers recognize the scam and block them from selling it on their site.

That was last week. I held off on publishing the above, thinking I would finish it later that day or at least in the next day or two. Now it’s a week later. The hoarders have been pushed out of the news and there’s an abundance of toilet paper again. Sanitizer, well that’s another story entirely. But the pandemic continues to spread despite stricter and stricter rules being places on the public. I think it may have slowed, but we’re current approaching 700,000 infected worldwide and the US surpassed China (where it originated) in confirmed infected two days ago. Everyone, for the most part, is on lockdown. Authorities insisting we remain in our homes, in isolation–no visitors, no groups of more than two people now. Everyone’s looking for ways to entertain, occupy and educate their kids while in isolation.

Personally, since I work for a hospital in IT, we’re working from home too, but our on-call tech has to go on-site twice a week for issues that can only be handled in-person. Last week was my on-call week so I had the pleasure of going on-site twice last week. We scheduled on-site visits for 4 hours, but Friday’s visit was so busy with so many issues, I ended up working my entire 8-hour shift on-site. The scariest departments to visit for issues are the ICU and the Emergency Department, both most likely containing infected patients. I just stay clear of everyone, work on the necessary equipment and get my butt out of there as soon as possible. For issues that can be done in the IT Department, I move the hardware there, which is fairly isolated, repair it as needed, then deploy it back to the department it came from. I’m glad my on-call week is over tomorrow. The other two techs we have will rotate the on-call for two weeks now, then it’s back to me again. So we’ll see if things are better or worse on-site in two weeks.

At home we’re hanging in there. The puppies are doing well too, but we’ve noticed several of their toys no longer squeak because they like to attack and chew on them trying to squeak them, then play tug-of-war with them until the squeakers get punctured and no longer squeak. So I looked up toy squeakers on Amazon and bought a 50-pack for a few dollars. Sandy then performed surgery on a bunch of their toys using a seam-ripper tool and replaced them all with new squeakers. The dogs are once again happily attacking and fighting over their favorite toys again.

We’ve been video chatting with the grand-kids, Matt and Anna to keep in touch and make sure everyone’s doing ok, and we run out for the occasional meal (curbside pickup only, there’s no more dining out now) or grocery items as needed, but otherwise trying hard to just stay put, stay sane, and somehow keep active in both mind and body. Here’s a good dashboard of the pandemic. I keep one screen in my home office up with this page constantly, and I set it to auto-refresh every five minutes:

https://ncov2019.live/

So at this point it’s the little things. Just doing everything we can to keep it together and maintain our sanity through this and try not to get infected ourselves. It a few days the number of infected with surpass one million people. The idea is to slow down the infection rate as much as possible as doctors work to develop a treatment that will work. One or more trials are already in progress, but there’s no word yet on their effectiveness, if there is any at all.

Many have lost their jobs, either permanently or temporarily, and the economy is taking a severe hit, obviously. This pandemic will clearly change the world. What it looks like afterward and how we move on if anyone’s guess.

At least we have some decent technology to deal with the situation a little better. As I work from home, we have a meeting every few days using Zoom – a nice meeting app that allows hundreds of people to meet using video and audio. For us it’s only five people, so it’s pretty easy to manage. My phone at work is forwarded to my cell phone, so I still get all of my work calls as I normally would, and the Help Desk line that us three techs manage goes directly to voicemail and the three of us rotate who constantly checks and responds to the voicemails. In addition to that we have a ticket system we also rotate responsibilities for. With everything still ramping up and more and more of our users needing to be setup to work remotely, the past couple weeks have been pretty hectic. But it certainly passes the time quickly.

Let’s see what the next week brings.

We had a nice dinner at Texas Roadhouse last night for Sandy’s 61st birthday. I’m paying for it today. I woke up in the middle of the night last night with really bad cramps and in the morning my blood sugar was way too high. That’ll teach me.

I understand the high blood sugar reading, our celebratory dessert we had later in the evening at home was pretty sweet… in more ways than one. I don’t know what it was that gave me the cramps though. I only ate half of my meal and brought the rest home to eat for tonight’s supper. I guess if I have the same cramps overnight tonight I’ll know for sure it’s either the loaded baked potato or the steak.

This morning I typed up a sentence in a document at work and re-read it as I always do. I make frequent small typos, so I always try to re-read everything to make sure it’s spelled correctly. This time I typed the word “using” as “sungi”. I transpose two letters a lot, but to scramble an entire word is a first for me, and I sure hope it’s not a sign of anything. Just worrying out loud.

I lost 4 pounds last month. I’m sure I’ll find it again with little effort. Seriously though, I feel a little better, got a little more energy these days. We’ve been slowly trying to ease into the keto thing, which seems to be working in a major way for a lot of people I know, so it sounds like something that might actually help for us as well. Sandy and I are both getting started with changing our habits and what we eat. So far so good.

We were very saddened this past week to hear of the passing of Jada, Jay & Shell’s daughter. She was only 18 years old. Our thoughts and prayers go out to them as they go through this difficult time. Here’s a couple links that explain everything very well, as well as a couple of awesome video slideshows of Jada.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/jada039s-memorial-and-celebration-of-life Please donate if you can.

https://www.messingermortuary.com/obituary/Jada-Thoennes

Ernest Cline includes a really awesome description of humanity in his book “Ready Player One”. It’s so awesome, I’m going to repeat it here:

I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said: “Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we’re descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you’ll learn more about it later. But trust me, that’s really how we all got here. There’s proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. “Oh, and by the way … there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid. Deal with it.“

There’s much more after that, but that’s the beginning of it. Some might find it a little offensive and might say it’s just not true, but that’s when we get down to the age-old debate we’ve had for thousands of years.

Sandy, Kevin and I watched this movie the other day. Wow. We were not quite expecting that. I saw that Nicholas Cage stars in it, so I figured it can’t be that bad, right? It wasn’t bad, I just wasn’t expecting him to be in this kind of movie, and I thought it was just a weird sci-fi movie. The movie is from an old HP Lovecraft story about an organism that falls from space and lands on this family’s farm. It turns everything into a really trippy psychedelic experience, and gets creepier and creepier the further into the movie you go, With today’s makeup and special effects, I thought they did a great job making it very disturbing. Sandy thought she might have nightmares after that one. Kevin was fascinated, and even watched it again the next evening with his friend. That just doesn’t happen, so I think that says a lot for it.

The background information I read about it on Wikipedia explained a lot. The director of the movie grew up on HP Lovecraft stories–his mother would read them to him when he was a child–and when his own mother was old and ailing he would read HP Lovecraft’s stories to her as well. They loved them. I know Stephen King also grew up as a HP Lovecraft fan, and was a big influence on his work.

The movie is worth a look, but not if you’re squeamish. It’s equal parts science fiction and horror. They avoid a lot of the potential exploitive gore with cutaways at just the right times, but it’s enough so you know for sure exactly what you missed and you can picture it vividly in your mind. This effect, I think, can sometimes be more disturbing than showing you everything on-screen.

I’ve been on a “MAME Quest” recently. This is a quest that might last for months. Maybe even years, if I’m lucky. Let me explain. MAME is an arcade game emulator. The first version of it was released in 1996 and it’s been evolving slowly over the years. MAME allows a user to run original arcade game software (ROMs) on whatever device you have the MAME program install on. There are MAME versions for PC, Linux, Android, iOS, and many other platforms, allowing users to play thousands of classic arcade games on just about every popular device and platform, including smartphones (Android and iOS) and consoles (Nvidia Shield, which runs on a fork of Android).

Nvidia Shield Pro is the platfom I run mine on, and the one I’ve had the best luck with, successfully running the most ROMs that I have found. It’s also key for me to be able to use a standard controller to play games instead of trying to use a PC keyboard or a cell phone touchscreen. I have to have that tactile control or I just can’t play a game. Nvidia Shield has some nice controllers that feel good in my hands and I feel very comfortable playing games with them, so this is a great fit for me personally.

Another key to the whole thing is the ability to FIND the ROMs you want to play. Fortunately, there are a lot of free ROMs and ROM sources out there though, so if you’re not too picky, it’s pretty easy to find a lot. But if you’re looking for something specific, it will most likely be much more difficult. Trust me though, there are tons of great games out there. I’m not saying it’s all legal and on the up-and-up though, because a lot of it isn’t. It’s a lot like configuring Kodi for the motherlode of “free” content consumption. You have to be very careful or you risk receiving warning letters to stop from your Internet provider, and possibly eventually losing your ISP and/or a serious legal issue with copyright owners and their lawyers. But that’s a whole other can of worms I’m not going to get into. MAME itself is free and legal and there are plenty of free ROMs out there, like I said. I have searched for most of the old arcade games I recall from my days in “Funway Freeway”, the arcade I grew up in when I was in my teens–the arcade that my old friend Hans worked at and eventually managed. That’s where we first met. But that’s a whole other story–one that might even already be published on this site somewhere. But as I was about to say, I’ve searched for most of the great arcade games that I grew up with just by searching Google using this format: “name of game MAME ROM” and I’ve had great results finding 99% of them as a simple link allowing me to download the ROMs. Some of these sites try hard to get you to click the wrong link or delay the actual download so you’ll get sucked into clicking elsewhere or view an ad, etc., but that’s par for the course these days, and I can always wade through the crap and get the actual download accomplished. Be sure you have some decent malware and antivirus protection while doing this, naturally.

I’m finding it very fun going through the list of thousands of games, looking for the true gems, and separating them out so I’ll have a pretty solid collection to enjoy in the end, hopefully playing my ass off living in the past until I’m much further into the future.

We watched Uncut Gems the other night. Wow, it was a loud, fast-paced mess. I think that was the point though. I think it was Adam Sandler’s first serious role too. I wasn’t sure quite what to think about it in the end. It was a pretty tragic story by the time it was over. It built up to this huge pay-off you think is coming, and then BAM, it’s all over in the midst of it all going down. I thought the music throughout was a bit odd and misplaced most of the time, which drew my attention to it too much. When the music and audio is just right for a movie I usually don’t even notice or mention it, it simply makes the movie that much better. But with this one, you definitely notice it. And it continues long after you think it should have faded or ended at many points. Just a little odd I thought. Overall though, it was a decent movie with excellent acting and a good story.

We feel more secure now. I hear all the stories about the issues with Ring devices–how hackers easily break in, how they partner with the Police Department to make neighborhoods more secure, but how that’s supposedly a bad thing, etc. etc.. But I’ve found most of the negative things be unfounded, and a few other apparent “issues” have two or more sides to them. You can look at them as being good or bad, or positive in some ways and negative in others. And either way, all of the conversation about them has only served to educate more and more people and helps improve the products and the company as they evolve and adapt their services and products.

As far as our situation goes, we went a bit beyond what most people do, just for extra protection and redundancy. I’m not going into it further than that though, you know what “loose lips” do.

Anyway, In such little time I’ve learned a lot. Things like when, exactly, the paper-person delivers our paper in the morning…and exactly what he’s wearing. I think he’s cycled through his entire wardrobe already at least once. When the mailman (-person?) delivers our mail. When our fire hydrant is flushed. When each neighbor walks his or her dog(s) – boy, Shadow and Tiger REALLY make sure we know when THAT is. But even when they miss one, we see it. What time of day the tree shadows are just right to trigger motion at our back door. When the weeds in the front yard need to be cut because they’re triggering more of those motion alerts. And if there’s even an accident at our intersection, I’ll have it fully recorded and on the channel 6 news well before the next day’s paper comes out.

The puppies had their first (and hopefully ONLY) major fight the other day, and we were able to go back and determine pretty much exactly what happened and how they brawled. Take a look, it’s interesting.

Then there’s the critters that apparently come out at night and frequent our driveway and garage. Racoons, spiders and dragonflies, oh my! There’s at least a couple of cats that cut through our driveway at least once or twice most nights, as well as a few stray dogs and even a fox now and then, not to mention the racoons and bunnies.

And the road work that proceeds at a snail’s pace in the street in front of our house. Whenever something changes I go back and see when and what they did. But at least we can see pretty much everything surrounding our house and yard, so both Sandy and I are very happy at this point. This also means neither one of us an get away with anything ourselves either. We’ve both already caught and questioned each other when we do something the other isn’t aware of. I won’t get into any more detail than that, but there is that “downside”, if you want to call it that. We think it’s fine though–it’ll keep us more honest.

It’s such a comfort to be able to let the dogs outside to play, then sit down and watch a movie or TV show and monitor the dogs in the backyard at the same time, just to know they’re ok. We know exactly when they’re back at the door and ready to come in too. We set up our “control panel tablets” (one upstairs and one downstairs) with Alexa and Ring, then set the motion alert ringtones on them for back door motion to be a bunch of barking puppies. We never miss when they’re ready to come in anymore.

Call me a geek one more time. Go ahead. Do it.

We watched The Night Clerk last night. It stars Ty Sheridan, who played the main character in Ready Player One. The movie is a little odd, but we went in expecting that. It’s about a guy who has Asbergers Syndrome–a high-functioning type of Autism. He works as a Night Clerk for a Motel chain and has some odd habits, but apparently also some very good tech skills. He likes to hide miniature cameras in the hotel rooms and then watch customers going through their day to day routines, memorizing and recording their habits and conversations.

He seems to do this only as a way to learn everyday conversation and habits, then he emulates them in his day to day life. Ultimately (and as we expected) this ends up getting him into a lot of trouble down the road though. A customer staying in one of the rooms he has cameras in is murdered and he captures it all on video.

It’s a good story, the only complaint we have is that it’s UNFINISHED! The movie just seemed to end in the middle of the story, leaving us with a lot of unanswered questions. Way too many to give us any kind of satisfaction at all. In the end we felt like we wasted a couple hours of our time.

Whoa, what just happened? Sorry, I’ve been ill. I had an upper respiratory infection that hit me kinda hard, so I’ve been out of it for the past week, groggy and resting as much as possible to get past it. Anyway, the Oscars came and went, obviously, and here’s my two cents:

BEST PICTURE – Parasite
I don’t understand how a foreign language film could even win best picture… Isn’t that what the “International Feature Film” award is for?? I’m so confused. Yes, it won for THAT award too. A guess Parasite is “catching.” In light of the Coronavirus outbreak though, it figures. I still haven’t managed to watch it. I will, very soon though.

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE – Joaquin Phoenix – Joker
Really enjoyed this movie, it was way more serious than I thought it would be and definitely not what I was expecting. Joaquin’s performance was worthy.

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE – Renée Zellweger – Judy
Didn’t see this movie but heard it was very good. I’ll have to watch it some time.

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE – Brad Pitt – Once upon a Time… in Hollywood
I think I mentioned this last time… I didn’t care for this movie, but now, given its popularity, I think I need to give it another shot. I’ll watch it all the way through next time to give it an honest chance.

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE – Laura Dern – Marriage Story
This movie was very good and Laura Dern’s performance was also very good. I’m not so sure I would vote her best supporting actress though.

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM – Toy Story 4
I really enjoyed every Toy Story movie, including #4. It’s so rare that ANY film franchise on it’s fourth movie can still hold up just as well with such a solid story and cast, not to mention how teachable and timeless it will be for generations.

CINEMATOGRAPHY – 1917
Excellent all around. Well worthy of this award. Watch this movie.

COSTUME DESIGN – Little Women
Excellent movie, excellent costumes. I haven’t watched the previous versions of “Little Women”, but I did find them and will watch them eventually, just to compare.

There were a bunch more awards, but I’ve taken way too long to get this post up, so that’s it for me.

First of all, before I forget (again), click here for a printable list of all nominees on one page. I love these “ballot-style” pages they make each year. They’re great for contests too, if you want to see who can pick the most winners each year. The Oscars are on Sunday, February 9th, 2020 at 8e, 7c, 5p, Now back to the movies. Here’s some more we watched:

1917 – Incredible movie. Just amazing as they created it as a one-shot floating-camera experience. It actually made me a little dizzy at times, and I felt exhausted by the end of the movie. It follows two soldiers during World War I, sent on a cross-country mission to get a message to a specific general who is about to send hundreds of men unknowingly into a German trap. If they can make it to him in time, hundreds of lives will be saved. The movie literally FOLLOWS those two soldiers every step of the way, seemingly non-stop, along their entire journey. It’s a winner. Seriously. I can see it winning in several different Oscar categories. Mark my words.

Richard Jewell – This is a pretty good movie. It’s the true story of what happened to Richard Jewell, the security guard who was railroaded into being blamed for the Olympic park bombing. It was directed by Clint Eastwood. It details Richard Jewell’s previous employment history up to the bombing and what he went through afterward. Kathy Bates is nominated for Best Supporting Actress in this one.

Bombshell – A well-done, well-cast version of the former Fox News leader Roger Ailes. It stars Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie. Like I said – well-cast! It’s about as good as it gets for a 2-hour synopsis of the story. There’s a much longer mini-series called The Loudest Voice on Showtime that goes much more in-depth, if you’re interested in the story. This one is also very good, and Roger Ailes is played by Russell Crowe, who I think had a much better performance than John Lithgow did in Bombshell. But Bombshell did focus on the women the most, while The Loudest Voice focused on Roger Ailes. Bombshell is nominated in three categories.

Three Christs – This one isn’t nominated, but it sounded interesting, so Sandy and I watched it. We thought it was really good. It’s the story of three different people in a psychiatric ward who all think they are Jesus Christ. They all have very different personalities, and one doctor takes on the mission of exploring what would happen if all three of them were put in a room together to try to help them with their issues. One of the stars (who thinks he’s Jesus Christ) is Game of Thrones alumni Peter Dinklage. Very good movie.

Motherless Brooklyn – A private detective in the 50’s who struggles with Tourette Syndrome, except that back then they didn’t have a name for the disorder. It’s fascinating to watch, and is a must-see for anyone who likes gangster or mob movies. Very well done and authentic to the period. This one wasn’t nominated, but was a great movie.

And So It Goes – This one is an older movie, so it’s obviously not nominated, but Sandy and I watched it and enjoyed it. It’s a Michael Douglas movie, and I stumbled onto it after Sandy and I started binge-watching The Kominski Method on Netflix. That is an awesome series that just finished up a second season of episodes. Sandy and I just finished Season 1 and started Season 2. I highly recommend The Kominski Method, especially if you are a fan of the old movie “Grumpy Old Men”.

More coming soon.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately, prepping for the upcoming Oscars. They’re on Sunday, February 9th, 2020. I always make several copies of the printable list of nominations that they post on their website, then try to find and watch everything I can so the show makes more sense when I watch it. I enjoy it probably as much as most football fans enjoy the SuperBowl each year. It’s even always on a Sunday, just like the SuperBowl. If some of my favorite movies of the past year are nominated, I think it’s much like if someone’s favorite team makes it to the SuperBowl. It makes it that much more enjoyable.

I bet it’s very difficult for the average person to enjoy the Oscars as much as I do, because unless you go see nearly every single movie that releases, you don’t see even half of the movies that are nominated, and the “shorts” and foreign films nominated are even harder to find than the mainstream movies. I have some personal techniques and methods I use each year that help me a great deal in this regard, so fortunately I am able to have much more available for me to watch than I can consume before the actual Oscars air. So I watch everything I can that looks like it might be interesting in the weeks before Oscar day, and I think I do pretty good. Not with my picks, mind you, but with the percentage of nominated content I watch. My picks are often horrible compared to who actually wins, and many times I’ll go back and watch some winners again just to figure out what I missed.

This reminds me of back in the day when I working at AMC/Chrysler and Gene Decker and I used to make our Oscar picks and discuss the movies, giving everything a “star” rating from one to five, a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, Siskel and Ebert-style. Roger Ebert’s picks were also heavily discussed (and very often disagreed with), and everything eventually always came back to “What’s The Best Movie Ever Made”? If you didn’t say “Citizen Kane” you were an idiot, you didn’t know what you were talking about and certainly weren’t a movie buff. We always laughed at that. Citizen Kane put me to sleep. I think it had a similar effect on Gene too. For it’s time I’m sure it was Epic. Maybe you had to have seen it when it was first released to really appreciate what it meant, the story and how it was told, but it certainly wasn’t what I thought it would be going in. Maybe it was just the fact that it was in black & white, but I can usually dismiss this if it’s a good story. And it was, don’t get me wrong, but I just didn’t think, after watching it, that it was the best movie of all time. I could go on and on about that one, but I’ll stop there.

Let’s get back to this year’s nominees:

“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood“. There are a lot of nominations for this one. I only made it halfway through this one and I got bored and moved on to something else. It just didn’t grab me. Now that I see all of these nominations for it, I’ll have to go back and watch the entire movie before the Oscars.

“1917” – I haven’t watched it yet, but I plan to.

“Marriage Story” – I watched this one with Sandy. It was good, we enjoyed it. It’s a divorce story though–not a happy outcome. I wonder if it’s much better for those who haven’t gone through a similar situation, or worse. Sandy’s been there. I was with her through the second half of hers. It basically just ends open-ended, probably in the best light it could have, as everyone is just sort of trying to move on after the divorce issues are all settled.

“Joker” – This is a really good, intense movie. Don’t mistake it as being a super-villian comic book movie. It’s an “origins” story about The Joker from the Batman comics. Very dark and depressing, but well-acted and filmed. It gets deep into how the Joker came to be and how he evolved into The Joker.

“Pain & Glory” – one of those foreign language movies. Lots of subtitles to read. Might be worth it though, I might try to watch it.

“Parasite” – Another foreign language film, but a horror movie. The reviews say it’s really good though, definitely going to watch this one.

“Ford v Ferrari” – Watched this one. Excellent movie. I just wish the ending was a little clearer. I had to look up more details on the web about what happened in real life at the end, and it was pretty horrifying. I think they played it down way too much in the movie with very vague details. Other than that though, it was a great movie.

“The Irishman” – Excellent movie on Netflix. Joe Pesci, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino… You can tell just by the main cast members what kind of movie it’s going to be, and it didn’t disappoint. It was really long and epic, as it should be. It’s the story of Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino) and the crime families involved. Good stuff.

“Jojo Rabbit” – I watched about 30 minutes of this one and was pretty confused, so I stopped and did a little research. I’ll go back and watch the whole thing before the Oscars, now that I see it’s nominated in several categories. It’s about a German kid, around the time of World War II, who has Hitler as an imaginary friend. Yes, you read that right. Silly sure, kind of an awkward comedy of sorts. Now I’m very curious though.

No, not bad movies. Movies that, after you finished watching them you said “oh shit!” and went back and watched it again to pick up everything you missed. That was a post I recently found on Quora. When I catch one of these good questions I immediately start sifting through the hundreds of responses and write down a list of what I find. (All within Google Keep of course – no trees were harmed) This one made for a great list of movies I need to either watch or re-watch. Here’s what I came up with:

The Usual Suspects
Fallen (1998) *
The Truman Show
The Matrix
Memento *
Donnie Darko
Shutter Island
Arrival
The Sixth Sense
12 Monkeys *
Inception
Parasite *
Interstellar
Moon
The Prestige *
Ex Machina
A Scanner Darkly *
Pan’s Labyrinth *

* = Haven’t watched it yet. The rest I’ve watched, but plan to watch again, thanks to this list.

We watched “A Dog’s Purpose” tonight thinking it was “A Dog’s Journey”. We watched “A Dog’s Journey” several weeks ago, and then watched it again with Haylie and Connor when they were here, so you’d think I would have known. We were all a bit confused. Haylie and Kevin insisted wasn’t the right movie, but I pressed on, insisting otherwise. It had Josh Gad as the dogs’ voice and the dog went through many different reincarnations, but halfway through the movie I realized Dennis Quaid hadn’t shown up yet, and I thought he had been in it really early on. But then I thought about and knew the little boy would grow up to be the Dennis Quaid character, but MAN, it was taking a lot longer than I remembered. Then Dennis Quaid appears and the movie just starts looking like I remembered it…and the credits roll.

Holy crap, “A Dog’s Journey” is a SEQUEL! Couldn’t someone have mentioned that when I previously posted on my site and on Facebook that I watched that movie?! A Dog’s Journey picks up immediately after A Dog’s Purpose. I never knew.

I didn’t enjoy A Dog’s Purpose as much as I enjoyed A Dog’s Journey though, I must say. I think this is one of the rare times that a sequel is better than the first movie. I did enjoy it though, and knowing I’m not completely losing my mind now, it’s pretty satisfying knowing the “whole” story, even though I experienced it backwards. I bet it probably would have been more satisfying having watched them in the proper order, but totally not knowing A Dog’s Journey was a sequel and not even thinking “something is missing” at any point says even more about how good it was. It stands on it’s own pretty well.

Now don’t even get me started on “A Dog’s Way Home”. THAT movie wasn’t even in the same league as either of these two.

I just finished reading The Institute, Stephen King’s latest novel. Awesome book! The book starts in a simple little town where a ex-cop passing through takes a job as a night knocker. There’s a kid, a really smart kid, whose 12 years old and already getting ready to attend MIT because he’s gifted. That’s the setting. From there it gets chilling. Even without King’s usual ghosts, monsters or boogeymen. The “monsters” in this one are people.

The kid, Luke, is kidnapped in the middle of the night. His parent are murdered in the process. He wakes up at The Institute in Maine in a room that’s just like his, except no windows. There’s other kids there and he learns from a young girl in the hallway, seemingly smoking a cigarette. Turns out it’s a candy cigarette. Remember those from when we were kids? She tells him that they “do stuff” to the kids, injections-flickering lights-dunking, but at least they’re in the Front Half. You don’t want to go to the Back Half. No, that’s like the roach motel. Kids go in and don’t ever come out.

This story is about the all people throughout history who have told themselves that the horrible, hideous and atrocious things they do are for a “greater good”. This book is intense. Mainly because everything seems so believable and real. You start to wonder if there’s something similar really going on throughout the world and it’s being kept a secret. Could that even be possible with how everything seems to end up on the Internet these days? It was a very good story, good writing, and very relevant with everything that’s going on in the world today.

Well, after a series of disappointments with Tidal, I have ended up cancelling our accounts there and sticking with Spotify. I actually found a decent widget in the app store that provides even more functionality than the embedded Spotify widget did. That widget was my biggest beef with Spotify, and what triggered my desire to seek something better.

As it turned out, at least from my experience with it, Tidal’s claims at having millions more songs is a bit deceiving. Sure, they do have more songs, but from what I’ve seen, it’s mostly because they offer most of the same albums and artists’ but add multiple versions of their albums in several different languages as well as the “US/English” versions. This will easily pad their “song count” numbers and I don’t think that’s right.

Tidal’s app and web interface are also a little harder to work with than Spotify, and I don’t have any friends over there either, so the social aspect was lost for me. Like Facebook, there’s advantages to having “everyone” on the same platform, even though this is probably only a minor factor, it does matter.

Kevin was also not a fan of Tidal. He grudgingly accepted the trial, but struggled with how he would get all of his music and playlists onto Tidal.

The “Hi Fi” option, which were included in my trial, was very nice, so I actually noticed little difference between the highest quality setting of Spotify songs on my devices compared to the Hi Fi versions of them on Tidal on the same devices. I’m sure true “audiophiles” can tell, or have much better audio hardware to play it on that reveals the differences, but I just didn’t notice much difference myself.

There are more factors, but I’ll stop there. We kept Spotify–the family plan–and we’re sticking with it. I still just don’t understand why they would drop the widget from their app… just to make the download smaller? To ease the amount of code the programmers had to work with? How much updating is needed for a simple widget that plays your music and playlists? I wouldn’t think it would add much more work, but then again I have no idea what features Spotify has planned for the future… Maybe there’s some new and amazing technology they’re working on that would make the old widget such a PITA to work with or update that they had to make this early cut to focus on what really matters most. I can’t imagine what that might be though. I’ll guess we’ll just wait and see.

I am currently reading Stephen King’s new book “The Institute”. It’s great, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s about a bunch of kids that were kidnapped and taken to “The Institute”, a building complex located out in some remote woods. I’m not sure exactly what state it’s in at this point in the book, but I’m guessing, since Stephen King wrote it, it’ll be in Maine. The details are so rich you actually care about the kids. I’m about 35% done with it, mostly listening to it to and from work, but I’m going to start listening to it on the treadmill, as it’s getting to the point where I keep wanting to drive “just a little further” to listen a bit more.

We’ve had some nasty thunderstorms the past couple weeks, so there’s been a lot of flooding in the area. Nothing at home though, our sump is working well and keeping us dry. The puppies aren’t phased one bit by the storm either. We’ve conditioned them early, giving them treats for tolerating loud noises. Now they look at us like they’re begging for food during thunderstorms.

Kevin and I went to see “IT: Chapter Two” last weekend. We loved it. Quite different than the miniseries, but that was expected. It was much closer to the book than the miniseries, and with the actors they cast in the adult versions of the kids for the second part, they made it much more amusing than the first part, but I think that lightened it up just enough. Stephen King even made a cameo appearance in the second half, completely confirming that this version has his blessing. Much more work of Stephen King and Joe Hill (his son) is coming too, and I’m looking forward to all of it.

On the geeky side, Google recently removed “Google Photos” from “Google Drive”, which is disappointing. Their Google Photos service allows you to backup every single photo and video you take automatically to the cloud, and I have used it for years. And since all Google Photos showed up in Google Drive, it worked out perfectly for me, because this way I was able to use my full backup of my Google Drive, which I have on my PC at home, to access any photo or video I’ve ever taken in one place on a single drive. This is great, especially if you’ve only accessed photo online for awhile. It’s just super-quick for everything this way, with all photos and videos “local”, right there on a hard drive. So, when they separated Google Photos from Google Drive, my local copy of Google Photos on my Google Drive hard drive no longer updated. No more simplicity. Thanks Google. They claim too many users got confused about the two services. I don’t believe that. I’m thinking there was something much more technical (or legal) involved, so they had to completely separate the two services. Anyway, it sucks, so I’m trying to work around it now.

My main use for a local copy of my photos is to copy them all to my SD card on my phone. I have 1TB of space on my phone (512GB internal, 512GB SD card), so I have plenty of storage and plenty of room to copy all of my photos to my SD card–I’m talking close to 60,000 photos I’ve taken over the years and even those I’ve scanned from photo albums. Even every screenshot. Anything and everything saved as an image, actually. I just found something that works pretty good too. It’s called Bulkr. It works exclusively with Flickr to allow you to very easily backup your photostream, or any group of photos individually. Since way back when I started using Google Photos, I’ve also used Flickr. I bought a “Pro” subscription of Flickr, which offers unlimited photo & video storage, giving me a alternate/additional backup for all of my photos and videos, which are also backed up automatically from my phone just like Google Photos does. Maybe it’s overkill, but if you come from an IT background from “way back” like I do, you know the pain of permanently losing something as a result of data loss, and having multiple backups provides a lot of peace of mind in the area.

Bulkr will simply “Backup My Photostream” with just a click of that button. It looks at your Flickr account in its entirety, then looks at the folder you want to copy your photos stream to, and it instantly knows what’s already there backed up and copies only new photos and videos it finds. This makes it really smart and simple, which I haven’t found with any other tool or app I’ve tried to use. So what I did was create a “Flickr Photos” in my local Google Drive folder, then I run Bulkr’s Photostream backup and it backs up to my Google Drive. This makes it work pretty close to the way it was with Google Photos worked, except that I have to periodically open and run Bulkr to update my Flickr backup. If I could further automate that part to run weekly, or even once a day, that’d be awesome. I’m looking.

Spotify recently removed the widget from it’s Android app, and this really ticks me off. No warning, no notification whatsoever, they just took it out. So when my phone updated the app the other day, my widget on my home screen stopped working and the controls disappeared. After a bit of frustration troubleshooting the issue, I searched the web and found this article:

https://www.slashgear.com/spotify-retires-its-android-widget-for-some-reason-13587148

So it wasn’t a mistake, they took it out with no notice or explanation whatsoever and have no plans to put it back in. After reading this I am very frustrated, and now I’m talking a much closer look at Tidal. Tidal’s app still has a widget, but it also has 20 million more songs than Spotify. Spotify sits at 40 million tracks, Tidal at 60 million. Sheesh, I remember when 20 million was ALL that Spotify had. Anyway, Tidal also offers a “Hi-Fi” option, which provides much better quality tracks than Spotify, for those really picky audiophiles. It costs more, but at least it’s an option Spotify doesn’t have.

I was on a Family Plan with Spotify, so I’ll do a trial of Tidal’s Family Plan and I’ll have Kevin try it out too. Tidal really looks like a serious contender, and I think Spotify just made a huge mistake pulling the widget from their Android app. This could result in a lot of users switching to something else!