For Trick or Treat this year we setup a table and filled it with small candy bags. Each small bag contained a few candy bars and m&ms. We placed signs on it, instructing everyone to take 1 bag each. Since we have a security camera in the front yard anyway, we pointed it at the table during the 3-hours of trick-or-treating, then I edited it down to just the visitors. I always put scary sound effects during trick-or-treat, but the sound was horrible on the video due to the windy weather today, so I muted the sound on the video and added just one scary portion of the soundtrack that I often play during trick-or-treating. Enjoy!

I was sad to hear of Sean Connery’s passing this morning. He was 90 years old. I actually watched The Untouchables two days ago. I was actually looking at a list of Kevin Costner movies at the time, just wanting to watch a good movie of his I hadn’t seen before, and I found The Untouchables. As it turned out, Sean Connery was in that movie, and actually won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance. He died a horrible death in that movie, but his real death was much more peaceful. He died in his sleep, in the Bahamas, with his family around him. I enjoyed many of his movies, and grew up loving his James Bond movies when I was very young. I think he made his first James Bond movie in 1962 – a year before I was born. He will be missed.

There is a whole science to speech and they way things are heard and interpreted. Like the whole weird “Bah Bah Bah Fah Fah Fah” audio illusion video I posted recently, things can often be misinterpreted when someone speaks.

I work on a help desk, often taking calls from users on bad cell phone connections or even users with good connections that just sound muffled and audibly “blurry”. I ask for usernames and workstation names when needed, and often misinterpret “t’s” as “p’s” and vice versa, making it difficult to find the correct account or the right workstation name.

If everyone knew the phonetic alphabet, it would help a lot. But if you try to say “My last name is spelled Tom Robert Ocean Tom Tom Ida Edward Robert”, most users would just be confused thinking you have eight last names or something. When I hear that I instantly translate it to “TROTTIER” as it is read. Each word can be clearly heard and understood, even over most noisy or muffled phone lines, easily enough to spell it correctly if you understand what you’re listening to. But if the phonetic alphabet is unfamiliar to you, you just feel bombarded with a whole pile of miscellaneous words when all you wanted was the spelling of a person’s last name.

I don’t think it takes much to pick up a phonetic alphabet. Once you know how it works, it makes sense and you can start using it easily. The hardest part is probably memorizing the correct word to use for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet. I don’t actually know how I memorized them myself. I learned it when I was a kid, just from listening to the police scanner over the years. Not even realizing it, over time I had each letter committed to memory. There are several phonetic alphabets though. The two most popular ones are used by the Military and Law Enforcement. The one I know if Law Enforcement: Adam Boy Charles David Edward Frank George Henry Ida John King Lincoln Mary Nora Ocean Paul Queen Robert Sam Ton Union Victor William Xray Young Zebra. “W” is the hardest to remember, for some reason. I keep thinking it’s “Whiskey”.

The military phonetic alphabet is totally different, but they all make sense and work really good for spelling things out. The delay caused by speaking an entire word also helps to slow the person’s spelling of the word, giving you more time to type it out or write it down, so it just flows in smoothly.

Then there’s “10” codes. I know many of the law enforcement 10-codes, again, just from listening to the police scanner since I was a kid, but this is a completely different animal. Like 10:32 is “Gun” or “Man With Gun”. This one is also often just called “A 32”, as in “Suspect is waving a 32 around at people.”

Where am I going with this and why did I post it? Well, just because I had a very muffled help desk call this morning, and a phonetic would have helped a lot. Unfortunately, as I said, most people don’t know it, so all I can do is have them spell it multiple times, or slow down and give me one letter at a time. Another reason is just to distract me (and maybe my two or three regular visitors) for a minute or two away from the bombardment of political and racial crap being flung everywhere these days so close to the presidential election.

Whoops, just pushed you back in right there. My apologies. Now back to your regularly scheduled mayhem.

I’ve been reading about the Electoral College this week just to try to get a better understanding of how it works and why we use it for presidential elections. It seems really overcomplicated and unnecessary, and I still don’t quite understand exactly why we use it, except that it’s because we always have.

Many people think their vote counts as exactly one vote toward their candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins the election. This isn’t how it works. But because the Electoral College has elected the winner of the “popular vote” (the candidate with the most votes) over 90% of the time, many feel this a fundamental component of “Americal Federalism”, whatever the hell that is.

The best explanation I could find of how this works is from Wikipedia. Using the Electoral College to elect a president, means that states having less population with 5% of the Electoral College votes have much more voting power than those in other states with higher population. This results in the US having several key “swing states” that have a much larger impact on the election than others, so the candidates often focus much more of their time and resources on those states.

Wisconsin and Florida are very big swing states, which is why we get many more visits and attention from the candidates than most other states. This was probably another reason both candidates came to Kenosha after all of the violence and destruction here too. And it wouldn’t surprise me if this was actually a factor in a lot of the violence as well. But maybe I’m giving the offenders more credit than they deserve. Can they really be deep thinkers? I don’t know, but trying to figure out all of this Electoral College crap is almost enough to drive me to violence. Why not just make everyone’s vote count equally and use the actual numbers? Aren’t we a country of equality? Oh yeah…not…quite…yet. I think everyone in the US needs to be Electoral College Dropouts!

I had a dream last night that I lost the puppies. Somehow I managed to lose them while walking in an unfamiliar neighborhood far from home. I’m not sure if or why they were unleashed or how they got away, just that I lost them and couldn’t find them. I felt so bad, wondering who had taken them, what kind of person he or she was, if they would be abusive or nice… Then I wondered if they were alone, wandering the streets looking for me, cold and hungry… I woke in a bit of a panic, confused as to whether any of it was real for a moment, then the puppies woke as well and assured me that they were safe and sound, ready to go outside for their wake-up break. I gotta stop eating so close to bedtime. I wonder what they dream about.

A co-worker mentioned this yard the other day, so I had to take a look.

This yard is located on Sheridan Road in Waukegan, very close to Vista Medical Center, a few houses North of Vista on the East side of the road. Unfortunately the front yard is huge and this display is set pretty close to the house, far from the sidewalk and street, so I couldn’t get a really good photo to really show perspective and I wasn’t willing to trespass, but those smaller skeletons are about the average person in size, I think. The huge skeleton, holding the other skeleton upside-down by its leg, must be about 10-12 feel tall!

This photo is 108 megapixels, so you can zoom in a few levels on Flickr to see more details if you click on it a few times. I like the skeleton walking the dog…if that, in fact, is a dog skeleton…

We watched “Unhinged” tonight – Kevin, Sandy and I. It’s a new release starring Russell Crowe. All three of us enjoyed it a lot. I thought it was pretty well done. It’s about an unstable guy (Crowe) who has some serious issues, including currently being wanted by the authorities after he kills his wife (or ex-wife) and torches her house and is on the run. He has a little incident in traffic while driving when he stops at a red light and fails to go when it turns green. A lady behind him lays on her horn a couple times to wake him up so he’ll move. After a few tense moments, she finally gets frustrated enough to just drive around him.

Well, this pisses the guy off, because (as he explains to her and her son when he catches up to their vehicle in traffic again) she should have simply given him a “courtesy tap” — a short honk-honk — instead of laying on her horn like she did. He asks for an apology from her, and says if she apologizes it will clear the slate and they can be done with it. Well, she hadn’t been having such a great morning herself, and doesn’t feel she has anything to apologize for, so she refuses. Oops.

From there, things continue to get worse, go horribly wrong, escalate more and more, and people start getting killed. I won’t spoil the rest of it, and won’t even mention how it ended, just that all three of us were riveted to the movie from beginning to end. We thought it was very well-done.

I’ve been trying to work out some nice automations for our home. Actually, this has been an evolving project for over a year now, and I’m not sure it will ever end. I enjoy it. I’m probably one of few though. I can see how many other people might struggle and get frustrated and angry a lot trying to perfect their particular automation situation. It’s complicated.

See the screenshot from my phone of a few of my current ones. I’ve recently been experimenting with using both the furnace and the AC with automations to try to stabilize our living situation. We are constantly adjusting the thermostat manually or switching from AC to heat or vice versa to try to keep up with the wildly changing weather conditions that Wisconsin has. It’s complicated, so I figured at least I can apply some solid logic to it instead of one of us adjusting things to their linking when they’re home alone, and another person adjusting things again according to what they like when they’re home alone, then having different compromises when both Sandy and I are home or when all three of us – Sandy, Kevin and I, are home. Sandy and I agreed on these Heat & AC ranges, so we’re seeing how it goes. So far, so good.

But we do have to adapt manually when we get fully into “Winter mode” and back to “Spring Mode”. In the Winter we cover the AC unit, which is outside behind the house, to protect it from the elements during the Winter months. So during that time we want to make absolutely sure that an automation doesn’t turn on the AC…that could be disastrous. It’s a simple toggle though, to just switch off any individual automation for as long as we want to.

A lot of our automations send text alerts to our phones–like if motion is detected anywhere in our yard around our house or in the garage, or even if the garage door has been left open too long (we sometimes forget). Some people don’t like getting constant text messages or notifications on their phone, but I prefer to know exactly what’s going on. At work, with my phone and an extra-low volume while I’m working (also automated based on the day and time of day) I get these notifications as well, and if necessary, I can check and see what’s going on–even if just to make sure Sandy, or whoever is home that day, is ok.

I’ve started to get used to the patterns lately too–like this: I’ll hear a sequence of alerts such “Motion at back door”, then “Motion in backyard”, and I know someone let the dogs outside. Or if there’s “Motion at back door”, then “Motion in backyard” followed by “Motion in driveway”, then I know someone came out the back door and walked into the driveway, maybe heading to their car to leave. If I get those three notifications along with “Garage door is open”, obviously someone came outside and went into the garage. Or if I hear “Motion in your front yard” followed by “Motion in your driveway” and/or “Motion at your back door” and/or “Motion in your backyard” that’s usually a delivery person.

Annoying? Not to me. I feel more at ease knowing. And with dual camera and security systems surrounding the house, I feel even more at ease, knowing if anything does happen, it will most likely be recorded, most likely on more than one camera and at one or more different angles.

Forget sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. And the puppies can try to sneak off the bed to go tinkle on a puppy pad, but there’s a good chance I’ll be on them first, ready to rush to the door and let them outside for a middle-of-the-night potty break.

All of this stuff is also a great comfort when we are away from home for a day or more. We still know exactly what’s happening at home and what, exactly, the puppies are up to at any given time.

It wasn’t easy getting his name spelled correctly. I didn’t even believe the correct spelling Google provided at first. Matthew McConaughey was interviewed by Howard Stern the other day, and I enjoyed it very much. As with all of Howard Stern’s interviews, he went in-depth and asked all of the questions others never would, giving some very interesting insight into Matthew’s life and upbringing.

One thing I never knew was that the movie “A Time to Kill” was McConaughey’s “breakout” movie – the one that made him a star overnight, and skyrocketed him into his acting career. I vaguely remembered the title of this movie, and after reading the synopsis and seeing the all-star cast, I was shocked I remembered nothing about the movie, but I knew I had to have seen it years ago. It was released in 1996, 24 years ago. I had to watch it again, so last night I did just that.

I tried to walk the dogs after supper and it started raining, so we came right back after getting to the driveway. The dogs were a little disappointed, but they’re also afraid of the rain. I took advantage of that extra time, knowing “A Time to Kill” was a long movie, and settled in to watch it. Sandy had other things to do, so I watched it with the puppies.

The movie was awesome, as expected, and was even very relevant to today’s society. It had a lot of racial tension, the KKK, and white supremacy throughout, including a racial riot during the main trial, not unlike today’s issues. It’s sad that this is still an issue after so many years. Things have only progressed a tiny bit, and it seems we’ve even devolved most recently, taking several steps backwards.

Anyway, that’s not the subject of this post, it’s Matthew McConaughey. But that’s an excellent movie, you should definitely watch it if you haven’t, or watch it again if you don’t remember much of it. It’s worth it.

I also bought “Greenlights”, a new book that just came out, by – go figure – Matthew McConaughey. The book release is probably the main reason he was on Howard Stern, but I don’t care. The interview was fascinating enough to me to warrant spending one of my precious audiobook credits to read his book. The audiobook is already read by Matthew McConaughey, which is another plus. There’s something different about a book when it’s read by its author–there are no mispronounced words or misinterpreted things at all–it’s very authentic to how it was intended to be read. There’s also something better about an audiobook read by a good actor–he can act out all of the parts very well, especially if he’s recalling actual experiences from his life.

I’m only about 30 minutes in though–I started the book on the way to work this morning–and it’s really good. Not quite a “memoir”, but more of just interesting events and turning points that occurred in Matthew McConaughey’s life that all led to his current place in the world–all of the “Greenlights”, as he calls them.

Next I think I’ll re-watch my favorite Matthew McConaughey movie–“Interstellar”.

Subject: Wife 1.0.

Dear Tech Support:

Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources. No mention of this phenomenon was included in the product brochure. In addition, Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during system initialization, where it monitors all other system activity.

Applications such as Poker Night 10.3, Drunken Boys Night 2.5 and Saturday Football 5.0 no longer run, crashing the system whenever selected.

I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run some of my other favorite applications. I am thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but the uninstall does not work on this program. Can you help me, please!!!

Thanks,

–Jim

Tech Support response:

Dear Jim:

This is a very common problem men complain about but is mostly due to a primary misconception. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 with the idea that Wife 1.0 is merely a UTILITIES & ENTERTAINMENT program.

Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and designed by its creator to run everything. It is unlikely you would be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0.

Hidden operating files within your system would cause Girlfriend 7.0 to emulate Wife 1.0 so nothing is gained.

It is impossible to uninstall, delete, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is not designed to do this. Some have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but end up with more problems than the original system. Look in
your manual under “Warnings Alimony/Child Support”.

I recommend you keep Wife 1.0 and just deal with the situation. I am thinking of having Wife 1.0 installed myself, I might also suggest you read the entire section regarding General Partnership Faults (GPFs). You must assume all responsibility for fault and problems that might occur, regardless of their cause. The best course of action will be to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE.

In any case avoid excessive use of the Esc key because ultimately you will have to give the APOLOGIZE command before the operating system will return to normal. The system will run smoothly as long as you take the blame for all the GPFs. Wife 1.0 is a great program, but very high maintenance.

Consider buying additional software to improve the performance of Wife 1.0. I recommend Flowers 2.1 and Chocolates 5.0. Do not, under any circumstances, install Secretary With Short Skirt 3.3. This is not a supported application for Wife 1.0 and is likely to cause irreversible damage to the operating system.

Best of luck,

–Tech Support

Sandy, Kevin and I all tested NEGATIVE. Woohoo!

Since all of our family’s Christmas and Thanksgiving festivities have been cancelled this year due to COVID-19, Sandy and I decided to go visit her brother Rick for a couple days before Winter sets in. Rick lives in Wisconsin Rapids. We just got back. We had a nice visit. The fall colors were a great backdrop for our entire trip. We took a few photos, take a look.

We found out recently that Kevin’s friend’s father tested positive for COVID-19. His friend was coming to visit Kevin about once a week. He’d spend these evenings with Kevin in the basement and they’d watch videos and play videogames. We have little to no contact with his friend, and usually only see him when we go down the basement for something or when his freind comes upstairs to use the restroom.

We didn’t know if his friend had even gotten tested himself, but found out recently that he hadn’t. I messaged him and asked him to get tested, since he was at our house recently. He replied with only a “Gotcha”. Apparently his employer told him that if he didn’t have any symptoms, don’t worry about it, so we don’t think he intends to get tested, or at least not immediately.

We, on the other hand, are concerned for ourselves, so we’re getting tested. Over the weekend I tried to get Sandy and I scheduled for a test, but this turned out to be much more difficult than we expected. First of all, there are apparently no testing places in Kenosha that work over the weekend–or at least none that I could find. Monday was the soonest, apparently. I chose the CVS drive-thru testing site, as Sandy knows exactly where this is since we get several of our medications there. I scheduled the date and time for her, then the site starts you on a live 15-minute count-down timer at the top of a long form. So you have exactly 15 minutes to complete the form or your scheduled time will be cancelled. It asks for all of your basic identity information as well as your insurance information. It’s very frustrating and nerve-wracking when you know you’re in a time crunch to complete the form, so this made it much more difficult. After entering all of the required information correctly (after several errors and corrections) I successfully submitted the form with about 2 minutes left on the clock. I really don’t see how a normal person would complete this form in the 15 minutes alotted. I used a lot of auto-fill information from LastPass and still came close to running out of time.

So that was scheduled for Monday, and Sandy went on got the test done. She said they give you the testing stuff, then you do the cotton swaps up the nostrils yourself, seal up the kit, and drop it in a bin on your way out of the drive-thru.

On Monday morning at work I called my doctor’s office and asked if they do COVID-19 testing. They said no, they only test for antibodies, but provided me with several Kenosha-area testing locations. I checked with my boss and he said there’s a close one right down the street. Since I work at a hospital, he didn’t recommend I get tested here, as it requires an ER visit, so a full ER charge would be incurred.

I googled “COVID testing near me”, and Google was very helpful, providing the address of the testing site my boss was referring to, along with these important notes:

• Appointment not required
• Referral not required
• Testing for all patients
• Drive-through
• 8am-4pm, 7 days a week. Daily until 750 tests are completed.

I went on my lunch hour and it was quick. They give you a paper form to complete as you’re waiting in line to drive through the tent, but no pen to fill it out. Luckily I was able to find one in my car. (they should note that in the Google page – bring a pen!)

The form seemed much shorted than the online for I filled out for Sandy’s test – Identity information and insurance numbers, that’s about it. A second page was informational, which you just keep. They come up to your window once you’ve completed the form, have you keep your mask on over your mouth but pull it down below your nose, then they put a cotton swab up one nostril and spin it around (made my eyes water), then they do the same in the other nostril.

After that you’re done and 4-8 days later I’ll get a phone call with the results. They won’t leave the results in a voicemail, you have to talk to them. The details on the information sheet were kind of confusing about that–if you can’t answer the phone, will they at least leave a message telling you that your results are ready and asking you to call them to get your results? I’m not sure. They only stressed that the call will come from an “888” number and I need to answer it. I’ll be waiting.

That leaves Kevin. Yesterday I took Kevin to the testing station over his lunch break, and things were a bit different this time. When I went on Monday, there were 3 cars ahead of me lined up to pull into the tent – two lines, two sides of the tent. When I brought Kevin there, the huge parking lot was packed and cars were lining up on Sheridan road to get into the parking lot! They have traffic cones throughout the lot so the cars snake around the outside of the lot and eventually into the two sides of the testing tent. I estimated about 70-80 cars in each of the double lines in the lot in front of us, as well as 10 cars in a single line on the street in front of us. Quite a difference from yesterday! Unfortunately it took is about 80-90 minutes in line before we got into the tent and tested. That part was quick, and we were out.

I think the biggest thing slowing that whole process down was the paper form – there’s one guy in the parking lot and he hands the form to the next couple of cars in each of the two lines, but that’s it. A lot of people don’t have the form completed when they drive into the tent, and they won’t test you without the signed form, so they wait for you to complete the form at that point. If people could get the form when they ENTER the lot, they’d have like an entire hour or more to get it completely filled out and signed so they’re ready by the time they get up to the tent. It’s simple logic. I even saw a couple people complaining and two people from way back in the line even walked up to the guy and asked for the forms and talked to him–probably suggesting the same thing–but nothing changed, he kept doing it the same way–probably because he’d only grab a few forms at a time, hand them out, then go get a few more from the tent. Ever hear of a cart, or maybe a backpack.? Oh well.

We’re pretty confident sure all of our test results will be negative, but didn’t want to take a chance, especially with Kevin and I also working five days a week in a hospital containing COVID patients. We’ll see what happens.

Two people can listen to an entire speech – the exact SAME speech – and hear two completely different things, and get completely different messages from it. The author took a speech from one candidate and asked his friend to read it, saying it was a speech from the other candidate, and his interpretation and feedback was totally opposite of what it was for people who read it and knew who the speech was really from. And those interpretations were totally different depending on which candidate a particular reader supported when they read it. Without even realizing it, when we follow a particular party and know it’s general beliefs, then read something from the opposite party, we automatically read and interpret it differently, instead of with an open mind. There is proof all throughout the book.

Thinking about this, I keep recalling a commercial that the Trump campaign constantly runs – The one where Biden says “If you elect me, your taxes are going to be raised, not lowered.” It’s pretty easy to recall, because it’s been running on commercial television probably 3 or 4 times per 30 minutes these days – I can’t seem to miss it! I, and hopefully millions of Americans, see that this obviously can’t be true, but it’s right there, coming from Biden’s voice. I’m sure most Biden supporters have already done the research and most Trump supporters probably have not. Those Trump supporters probably figure it’s not worth their time. I’m sure the situation would be the same if it were reversed. And it often is.

We hear what we want to hear and believe what we want to believe. In trying to keep an open mind, I decided to do the research. I easily (within a few seconds google searching) found the original speech that the clip was from, and listened and watched closely. Take a look for yourself:

You only need to watch the video starting from about 10 minutes 50 seconds forward. Biden asked the crowd how many people benefitted from the 1.9 Trillion Dollar tax cut. When one person raised their hand, he told that person that his or her taxes are going to be raised, not lowered, if they elect him. He was saying, based on that person’s high income, which would presumably be over $400,000 per year, his taxes would go up, just as he’s been saying all along, and is still saying.

Sure, every politician who promises all the big tax cuts is lying, we know that. It’s all exaggeration, to some extent, to get elected and they all do it. Then, when they do get elected, they may even try to keep their promises and all of the red tape and hurdles come up, compromises are made, things get very very complicated, and in the end there’s people who understand, people who don’t, and those that just go with what their party says about the sitting president.

I just hope everyone (or enough people) can just keep an open mind and try to look at everything, and not just blindly follow someone. Look at all sides. Deeply. Try to understand where they’re coming from and where they got their information. Do the research. Please. There isn’t just two “sides” either. There are also “independents” and other parties. They just don’t get enough sheep behind them to make it very far. Do the research. Do it for us. Do it for ‘Merica, dammit! Our future is at stake.

I purchased a nice new Kindle Paperwhite from Amazon on March 15th, 2019 – about 18 months ago. It wasn’t cheap, it was their top-of-the-line 10th-generation model with free 4G LTE wireless and WiFi and 32GB of storage for books. Today it is an expensive paperweight.

I went to turn it on yesterday and was greeted with a giant battery icon in the middle of the screen with an exclamation mark in it. I’ve seen this a couple times before, and it means the battery is dead. On the previous two occasions I was able to plug it in and after a while it booted up normally and I was up and running again. This time, however, the amber “charging” light never came on at all. I couldn’t tell if it was charging or not. There are no other controls on the device except a single power/standby button.

Everything I found online didn’t help–hold the power button down for 40 seconds to force a hard reset, charge it some more, then try again. Over and over and over. Done, done, and done. It has to be either as serious device issue or a dead battery. It had a 1-year warranty, so that expired months ago (figures). I could pay about $60 for a battery kit that includes both the battery and a special tool to open the device so I can change the battery, but it might not even be the battery. If it turns out the device itself has the issue, I’m out another $60. I can’t buy the battery kit from Amazon, or some stupid reason, so I’m not sure it would be returnable. Batteries are in that gray area when it comes to returns and shipping.

I suppose I’ll eventually just order the battery and get the process going. Right now I’m just too pissed off to bother. I didn’t even use the device much – maybe two dozen times at most, often playing an audiobook on my phone and following along with the kindle book. I can’t see the battery going bad after such limited use and only after 18 months. It just makes me angry that I opted for all of the extras and paid all that extra money and didn’t even use or need those extras.

I don’t think I’ll ever bother with a separate Kindle device again in the future. For me, it’s just not worth it. I can do it all on my phone anyway. I just thought it would be nice to be able to sit outside in the sunlight and still be able to comfortably be able to read my books. I can do that on my phone though, I just have to crank up the brightness to the top and turn off the auto-brightness option to make it bright enough to read in most sunlight conditions. And my phone’s screen is a little smaller, that’s all.

So here it sits, just another scrap device that’s going to be the new base of my recently-flushed “broken hardware pile.” Oh joy.

This is hilarious! If you’re a Seinfeld fan like I am, you’ll love it.

America's favorite mailman has seen tRUMP's "systematic, premeditated assault on the U.S. mail" & he is STEAMED. I love this PSA both for its message & because it's like a deleted scene from Seinfeld. Thanks so much for this @iWayneKnight & @DavidHMandel! 😂#Hello_NEWMAN!!! https://t.co/zX9D4HBQI8

— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) October 10, 2020

Yesterday I started reading the book “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter”, a book written by Scott Adams – yes, the author of the Dilbert comic. It’s actually pretty enlightening and Scott Adams even predicted Donald Trump would win the 2016 election!

I’m not very far into the book, less than one hour in, and already I’ve learned a lot about some of the thing’s Trump does, and has done for quite some time, to persuade his voters and “win bigly.”

Did you know he never really said the word “bigly”? It was “big league”, but some (his opponents) like to think he said “bigly”. I guess you’d call it “fake news”.

Another thing I learned about so far is The McGurk effect. Check it out, this is fascinating to me:

Basically, what we see takes priority over what we hear.

This video has some more examples of this effect:

I look forward to what the rest of this book holds. It sounds like it’ll be pretty interesting. Or maybe that’ll just be my perception of it.

We watched The Wolf of Snow Hollow on Kevin’s recommendation last night. He had shown Sandy the trailer for it yesterday and she said it looked like a good movie, so we gave it a shot.

Movies don’t always live up to their trailers. I hadn’t watched the trailer myself, but if she said the trailer looked good, this is one of those cases. Of course, she didn’t think the movie was as bad as I did, so I guess I should have watched the trailer. Ok, I will. brb.

Yeah, it’s one of those cases alright. After thinking about it some more and reading a few YouTube comments under the trailer, it does seem to look like an episode of Fargo…with a werewolf thrown in. It’s kind of a quirky, comedy/horror film. Most of the time you don’t know whether to laugh, gasp, or gag. And the directing was just bizarre. I couldn’t follow it at times. It seemed to jump back and forth in time, quickly, in certain scenes, making it very confusing.

The acting seemed really bad also. Except for a couple characters – Robert Forster and Riki Lindhome, who played the Sheriff and a Deputy, respectively. The rest of the characters just weren’t even fleshed out enough to seem credible.

But I now see what’s going on here. The writer, director, and star of the movie are all the same person: Jim Cummings. Come on, how much can one person do? Was the budget just that low for this movie? Maybe, if the budget really was that low, this was a very good movie for the price, overall. When I think about it more, I wonder if this movie will turn out to be one of those cult classics that just has to be a must-watch for a movie or horror buff in the future. Either that, or a good “Jack of all trades, master of none” lesson.

It did have a nice twist at the end though, but even that seemed flat and didn’t pack as much punch as I expected. After watching it all the way through, I wanted there to be a huge, shocking twist of an ended that would make me say “AH, now it all makes sense and that was worthwhile to watch” but it just wasn’t there.

Overall, disappointing for me, but Sandy and Kevin liked it.

I just finished Bod Woodward’s book “Rage” on my way home from work this afternoon. Wow. That’s all I can say. It seems pretty honest, and most of it was even written from actual recordings with Bob Woodward and Donald Trump either sitting down talking and answering Woodward’s questions, or from recordings of phone conversations (recorded with permission of course).

Woodward also talked to many other people for the book, including Dr. Fauci. Fauci says Trump’s attention span is a negative number. I got a good chuckle out of that one. The book ends 105 days before the upcoming election.

One more key excerpt: In the Epilogue to the book, Bob Woodward lists Trump’s issues:

1. Oversized personality
2. Failure to organize
3. Lack of discipline
4. The lack of trust in others he had picked – in experts
5. The undermining or attempted undermining of so many American institutions
6. The failure to be a calming, healing voice
7. The unwillingness to acknowledge error
8. The failure to do his homework
9. The failure to extend the olive branch
10. The failure to listen carefully to others
11. The failure to craft a plan
12. Mattis, Tillerson, and Coates are all conservatives or apolitical people who wanted to help him and the country – imperfect men who answered the call to public service. They were not the Deep State. Yet each departed with cruel words from their leader. They concluded that Trump was an unstable threat to their country. Think about that for a moment. The top national security leaders thought the President of the United States was a danger to the country.
13. He said the intelligence people needed to go back to school
14. He said the generals were stupid
15. He said the media was fake news

He sums it up by saying that in the Trump Presidency, almost anything can happen. Anything. It could get a lot better, or worse, or much worse. It is unlikely a lot could get much better.

The upcoming election, and the inevitable pandemonium that will undoubtedly ensue afterward, no matter who wins, is going to change the world. The only question is: In which direction? For better or for worse? For richer or for poorer? Wait, what? Either way, I’m not looking forward to this. What’s that line from Star Wars…? “I’ve got a baaad feeling about this.”

I love it when I get a message or error at work that tells me “Contact your system administrator” or “Contact your local IT department”. That’s me. It’s telling me to contact myself. I’m that guy. That’s when I say “Ok, Jim, help me out here.” and I’ll talk to my self about it. Usually, surprisingly, that even works. I’ll think about the issue more in-depth, consider any options I hadn’t thought about initially, try whatever I can, and I’ll often be able to work through it.

The last time I remember being on the other side of that fence was when I was in college at Gateway Tech. Back then we wrote computer programs by typing each line of code on a punch card. Holy crap, am I ancient or what?! Anyway, the punch machines (each the size of a small desk) would sometimes jam or things wouldn’t work right, and I remember having to get IT help with that. Then there’s also the fun and embarrassment that ensues when you drop your huge stack of punch cards and your program becomes this mixed up mess of cards all over the floor…and they had to be in perfect sequential order in order to be read into the mainframe computer correctly. Oh joy. Oh, and I remember the one time I got a huge program punched, fed into the mainframe, then waited as it got stuck in a loop and halted everyone else’s programs as well as holding up everyone else in line behind me that needed to feed and run their programs until I was able to find an IT guy who could halt my program so I could go back and figure out what was wrong with it and re-punch the lines of code I needed to fix. Ah, the good ole days. Those programs were written in COBOL, by the way… the “COmmon Business-Oriented Language”. It was almost as easy to learn as BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and I enjoyed learning it. This was in 1983. After graduating with an Associate Degree I had difficulty finding my first IT job, so I ended up taking a Security Guard job that lasted for 5 years at AMC/Chrysler. Things started looking up after that when I landed a Lab Technician job at ITO Industries, a circuit board manufacturer located in Bristol, WI, then eventually went to work for another circuit board shop in Gurnee, IL, and finally transitioning to an IT position after being a Lab Technician there for a few years. Ah, geek problems.

Oh man. 77 days, that’s it. I lost my challenge. I totally forgot to post something yesterday. Let’s see, what happened?

In the morning after my shower I went out to the garage and cleaned up my “leftovers” from the week–tools left out, packaging strewn around from the new weed wacker I bought this week, etc., then I swept off the workbench and swept the garage floor. I had to pull Sandy’s car out of the garage before I could do any of this, because she tends to park too close to the workbench. (see exhibit a)

As I was sweeping up, I remembered us joking about the hanging tennis balls we’ve seen at various times on TV and in movies, that people have in their garages. These are used as parking aids–when you pull in you just watch the hanging tennis ball, and when it hits your windshield, STOP. That’s the perfect position, which fits your car in the garage and still leaves you the desired distance in front and behind your vehicle. Of course, to determine this exact position requires a little positioning and testing and re-positioning, and I was up for it!

I went back into the house and rummaged through Shadow and Tigers’ toy bin and found a few tennis balls. I had to find a few, just to make sure I wasn’t stealing their only tennis ball, then I took that back to the garage and started constructing my “Parking Ball” apparatus. I drilled a tiny hole in the ball first, then I needed string and didn’t have any, but I knew I had an old, huge roll of loose plastic weed wacker line that George had stored from when we cleaned out the garage recently, so I used that. I stuffed the end of the line into the tennis ball and it stayed pretty good. Luckily I made the hole just small enough to allow me to force the string in and it wouldn’t slide out easily. That’ll even make it easily adjustable if I need to change it a bit as I’m positioning.

The first spot I chose in the garage rafters was a huge fail. I positioned it way too far into the garage and had the ball hanging way too low. I pulled Sandy’s car back in the first time, eyeballing about where it needed to be, then checked all around the car – it just cleared the overhead door by a few inches – perfect – and there is plenty of room in front of it, with a nice path of space to still walk in front of the workbench. And if you make sure the tennis ball is centered in the windshield, there’s also plenty of space on either side of the vehicle to get anything else you need in and out of the garage.

So now I had the exact spot, and I could visualize exactly where the ball needed to be full 3D space – x, y, and z – if you will. So I pulled the car back out of the garage, got the ladder back out, and tied the ball right where it needed to be, perfectly. I tested it afterward with Sandy’s car and it worked perfectly. She can’t mess this up. Then I pulled her car out again and cleaned up my mess.

Sandy had to go to get a haircut yesterday morning (see figure b, and the amusing figure c – more of this later) so I left her car outside and she left for the barber (‘stylist’ when it’s for women? whatever). When she was gone I decided to pull my car in try it on my car to compare. It worked perfectly on my car as well! I love it! The tennis ball was just a little higher up on the windshield, but otherwise it had the same distance from the overhead door and the same nice space still left in front of the workbench. Done deal. Today I’ll have Kevin pull his car in and test that one too. If anything, his car will probably leave more room in from and in back of his car, which will still be perfect – His car – a Kia Soul – seems to be shorter than ours. We’ll see.

After testing my car and having it in the garage, I realized we have the shop vac right there, so I looked to see how bad the floor mats were, and they were pretty sad. Very dirty, with a lot of dirt and dust throughout the entire car. I hadn’t cleaned the interior in some time. Armando’s Body Shop always fully details your vehicle inside and out, and I think the last time I was in for a repair was the last time it was cleaned! So I went to work. I vacuumed the floormats, removed them, vacuumed the floor itself, then vacuumed everything else in the car I noticed, then went to work with the interior and window cleaner. The rear window was the worst – it’s a very thin area, very hard to reach, and I had to kneel in the back seat. With my one bad knee and my new knee, it was a toss-up of which one felt better when cleaning the rear window. I ended up switching back and forth and taking a few breaks in-between just to lessen the pain. When I was done everything looked very nice, and I had that “new car” smell in there.

Oh yeah, exhibit c. Sandy texted me a photo of her hair right after she got it cut, so I “enhanced” it real quick and texted the new one back to her saying “It looks really nice, but I think it looks a little different on my end.” She got a little mad at me, but I don’t think she was serious. Now that it’s here for the world to see though, she might get a little more serious about being mad at me.

All that took up a good chunk of the day, then Matt & Anna dropped off the grandkids for the weekend, which easily consumed the rest of the day and evening, resulting in me totally forgetting about my challenge to post something..anything…daily. Oh well. I lasted 77 days. I think that’s longer than I lasted for any Ingress challenge. I remember them having badges for consistent daily hacks, and I think the top badge was 365 days of hacking at least once per day. I don’t even remember how far I made it, but I know I blew that challenge as well.

I don’t mind too much though. I’m still going to try to post daily. I like it. I just don’t have to worry about adding the “365 days…” to my title anymore. That was very often an inconvenience anyway, since I can never remember what day I was on, so I’d have to go back and look at my last post to make sure I got the number right pretty much every day.

And if anyone signed up for the daily “Newsletter” e-mail in the right sidebar, just an update: It’s working great now. I had some issues for the first couple weeks tweeking the settings, but I finally found an option that works properly, so you’ll get an e-mail once per day, if I posted that day, and it comes overnight, looks like between 3am and 4am.