Well, I pre-ordered my new phone today. It’s a killer. Should be pretty sweet. Now I just have to wait two weeks for it. Verizon always seems to have issues with taking orders. You would think by now they’d have the entire process down and working really great, but it’s quite the opposite. Nothing but problems using their website, blank pages when it should be displaying critical information I need, and just a lot of frustration with most functions not working right in ANY browser.

That’s not all though. I always end up using the chat function on their website to have a real person prepare my order as I type everything out that I want, word by word. The chat function works great–it’s about the only thing on their site that does work properly. But in the end I STILL have problems with the process AFTER I place my order. My order always somehow gets flagged, put on hold and sent to fraud prevention. Then I have to call a special number with 24 hours to avoid having my order completely cancelled. And doing THAT is a challenge all its own. I think I had to call Fraud Prevention 7 times today because I would answer all of the challenges (Name, PIN #, Phone #, and all the proper buttons to get me to the “Order placed on hold, need to release it” people, I’d get hold music for a bit, then it would ring once or twice, then disconnect completely. So I’d have to try all over from the beginning again. And again.

Finally I was able to actually get to a human, explain my issue, and she asked me more questions, then sent me a text and a a phone call to make sure I have the actual phone with that phone number, then she finally released my order for processing. Wow. I just wonder if everyone else has to go through all of this. And it’s every single time I upgrade with Verizon. I really like their service and plans, they just need to work out their website and fraud prevention processes. Sheesh.

Here’s the specs. Mine’s the one on the right (the 512GB version):

Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra specs

GALAXY NOTE 20 VS. NOTE 20 ULTRA

Whew! It’s only day 19 and I almost missed posting something! We had a great cookout tonight with Matt, Anna, Connor, Kevin, Sandy and myself. Stuffed burgers, brats, hot dogs, corn on the cob and Matt & Anna brought a nice side salad. Then a nice ice cream cake Sandy made for dessert! Everything was awesome and everyone was stuffed when we were done.

Today was the big announcement of the new Samsung Note 20 phones. Tomorrow they’re available for pre-order, so I’ll be getting my order in for a new Note 20 Ultra and I should have it around August 21st. Not quite sure if I want that snazzy new bronze color or not. The color won’t matter much though–mine will be put in protective black case as soon as I get it anyway.

Wayne finished his Lego kit yesterday. Check it out!

My cousin Wayne picked up the new Lego Nintendo Mario set. It includes a reproduction of an old console TV, NES game controller, NES Console, and even a removable cartridge of the Super Mario game, all built with Legos! You can even turn a crank on the side of the TV and it “plays” through a Super Mario level by scrolling a Lego-built level inside the television. This thing is awesome. Check it out.

As he assembles it, he’s been sending me photos . I’ll post them all in a photo album as soon as he’s done.

I’ve been noticing lately that I make & miss more typos. I’m a little bit concerned that this might mean something. I do try to type pretty fast, and these days I’m trying to type 100% of everything, including the things I used to write down on paper. I think it’s improving my speed, but I am making more mistakes and I think I’m actually missing them when I proofread my documents.

The way I see it, making a typo is normal, but missing it completely on a re-read is not. I should be able to catch and correct it immediately, I think, and end up with something well-written. I think I’ve been pretty good with this up until recently, when I’ll re-read a document I’ve published and even proofread once or twice, and I still find errors. Typos drive me nuts. Did I mention that? And most of mine lately are entire words, so they’re not usually picked up by my spellchecker with the red underlines. I wish WordPress and Standard Notes included a grammar checking as well, like Microsoft Word does. I think that would help me a lot. But why now, all of a sudden, do I need more grammar and spell-checking? Is something changing as I get older?

I joke all the time about having “CRS” (Can’t Remember Shit Stuff), but I think it’s beginning to evolve into something more real, like Alzheimer’s, which then leads to dementia. It could be a totally irrational fear right now, and nothing I should be worrying about, but I do. I know I have several risk factors against me, including morbid obesity and diabetes, and I’m trying to work through improving those conditions.

The wayback machine contains oodles and oodles of tidbits I posted long ago. It still tickles me when I find little gems that I somehow never re-posted here. Here’s one from almost exactly 20 years ago – 08/07/2000. Just a few short bulletpoints, but it brings back a lot of memories. Surprisingly, some of the links actually come up if you wait long enough for the wayback machine to dig them up:

• Current Events -Sandy has Bronchitis, and is not feeling well. Today (8/7/2020) she has a temperature of 101.8. She went to the doctor and got a scrip, so she should be better in a few daze.
• New DVD’s: Independence Day – Lots of extras, two versions of the movie, and two discs, all for about the same price as a regular DVD! Drowning Mona – Very funny dark comedy with an obsession for Yugos.
• Matthew and I are playing the heck out of Speed Punks and N-Gen Racing, two great new Playstation games!
• Still watching Survivor, waiting for the last 3 episodes.  Watching Gervase get voted off was a real shocker.  When the news broke about the website revealing the winner I immediately went there and tried it myself; Sure enough, they were right, everyone’s picture was there with an X on it except Gervase’s! So naturally I bought the story. Turned out the creator of the show was the one that “leaked” the “secret” as a way to throw off the geeks. It worked very well, I must admit.
• More photos are up, which use a Webshots Community page to allow us much more space for our photos, and you can even send a digital “postcard” with any photo in our albums or any other photo on the Webshots site!

Here’s a few things I’ve watched recently:

The Room (2019) – I liked this movie. It’s about a couple who move into a huge house and find a hidden room that is sort of magical… In it you can ask for anything and it’s yours. Yeah, kinda like a magic genie, but there’s a catch. Watch it and see.

The Rental (2020) – I enjoyed this movie. It wasn’t the usual horror movie hack & slash fare. The characters were very developed and the acting was really good. It stars “Lip” from Shameless. Some things were predictable, but it turned out different enough to be very interesting. And just when I thought it ended and left me hanging, the quick scenes during the closing credits explained a few of the questions I had. Good movie.

Archive (2020) – Another movie I enjoyed. It takes place in 2038, where a guy gets a job developing robots with near-human AI. In 2038 they also have “Archive” technology used for when someone dies–they are able to store your “consciousness” or “mind” in an archive that you can access for up to, I think two years, so that your loved ones can say goodbye and get your final affairs in order. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it was a fun ride and had a surprise ending!

Greyhound (2020) – Great war movie, based on a true story. Takes place on a naval ship and Tom Hanks plays the ship’s Captain. Exciting and very loud… I shook the house with this one, not wanting to miss any dialog hidden in the noise. I was especially amused at all of the good meals delivered to the Captain throughout the movie–none of which he ever got a chance to eat.

I also watched a few older movies, just because I enjoyed them: Hollow Man (2000 – Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Shue), Body Heat (1981 – William Hurt, Kathleen Turner), Lucy (2014 – Sharlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman), Men of Honor (2000 – Cuba Gooding Jr., Robert DeNiro), Jerry MaGuire (1996 – Tom Cruise, Renee Zellweger, Cuba Gooding, Jr.)

I was recently digging around looking for a playable version of the classic game Lode Runner. This game came out in the 80’s and was a great 2D platform game I really enjoyed. It came out for all of the old systems like the Apple II (never had one), Atari 8-bit PCs (had several), Commodore 64 (had one), IBM PC (had several), Atari ST (had one), and so on and so on… I didn’t have to search very long and I hit this page: http://loderunnerwebgame.com/game/.

It’s the real deal, running just like it always did and providing the exact same gameplay…in any PC browser (using HTML5). Just in a browser. But it’s not just the original Lode Runner. It’s all the variations, too! Check it out. Five different versions of the game. It’s also completely open-source and might be an awesome lesson on how to code HTML–I have dug into it that far yet, I’m just enjoying playing it. It even works with controllers, and even includes the editor, so you can even make your own levels! Today’s kids might find it boring or too simple, but I enjoy the crap out of this stuff.

Lastly, it’s completely free, no ads, no catches. How does THAT happen these days?! Wow.

We still have our August 11, 2020 election ballots and I have no clue what to do with them. I can’t vote. I’m stuck. Can someone explain this to me? I’ll google what I can after this post, but maybe someone here can just give me a clear answer real quick. Politically, I’m not with a specific party. I vote for PEOPLE, not PARTIES. I don’t understand how anyone can just pick a party and blindly stand behind everything that party supports and endorses. I try to find out what each politician stands for, and if I feel the same then I vote for that person.

So on the ballot (see the scanned ballot image I’ve included here) in the box “Special Instructions for Voting in a Partisan Primary” it says: “You may choose only ONE party’s primary. If you choose a party, votes cast in that party will be counted. Votes cast in any other party will NOT be counted. If you do NOT choose a party, and you vote in more than one party, NO votes will be counted. You must vote for individual candidates.”

I would LIKE to vote for individual candidates, but since at least one of the people I want to vote for is not in the same party as my other preferences, I can’t, as none of my votes will be counted. Is that correct? If so, this is all just a waste of time.

I don’t how they expect regular people to even understand enough of the complexities of these ballots, let alone how each politician stands on each of the key issues! Why does it have to be so divided like this? To me, it makes no sense. I can only hope the November election ballot isn’t the same way. Is this just the way a “Partison Primary” works? If so, what’s the point? Does this ballot even result in people winning an position?

This just in from the Kenosha News… published yesterday, Monday, July 27th, 2020, as the country starts to require face masks everywhere… My cousin Wayne. Now I’m off to watch Jim Carrey’s “The Mask”. Just kidding… actually we’re going to watch “The Rental” tonight.

I recently watched an old movie titled “TAPS” (1981). It stars Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn and Tom Cruise – all of them were very young back then, so this was a nice look back at a little of their early work. Somewhere in the middle of the movie I had to step away for a few minutes to do something, so I paused it. This is the frame I paused on.

It’s a normal frame from the movie, but for me it struck a chord. See the black CB Radio console on the desk? I know that radio! We had several different models of the “President” line of CB Radios! That there is the Dwight D. Eisenhower model. I knew it very well. We actually had several different President models, each had a different president’s name as it’s model name. That model, the Dwight D. Eisenhower, was the top of the line – the best one they made. That speaker on the right was actually a completely separate component and was just an empty metal box with a speaker mounted to the front. My dad managed to find another speaker, or took it from another Eisenhower he might have picked up at a rummange sale or flea market, and I was able to splice the wires to connect them both so we could have a speaker on both sides of the base station. It made it look more “balanced” and it sounded nice that way, even though CB Radio was mono anyway. I remember him being pretty surprised I wire that up and make it work.

My dad’s CH handle was “Redbeard” and mine was Redbeard Junior.  Blue Goose was Ted Meimar, a good friend of ours who sold us a lot of electronics, video games, and computers back in the day, and Utility Man was a very loud neighbor who lived across the street from us.  I remember Utility Man would install huge powerful “kickers” on his CBs that would overpower several CB channels at once for miles and miles when he talked–often for very long periods of time–on any CB channel.  Some users became so annoyed with his disruption that he sometimes got his coax cut–they’d sneak up to his house and actually cut his coax (the wire connected from his CB to his roof antenna or tower antenna) so he wouldn’t be able to broadcast.  Kickers were illegal actually, so I can understand their frustration.

CBs were a big thing back then.  We didn’t have cell phones, and most wireless portable telephones (wireless home phones) were unencrypted, so people could also use a scanner radio that had the same band of frequencies as those phones and scan the band, find conversations in the neighborhood and eavesdrop on neighbors’ phone calls.  Both sides of the conversation too, nothing left to the imagination.  Again, totally illegal, and I wouldn’t necessarily admit that my dad or I listened to any, I’ll just say that I verified the “Proof of concept” when I learned about it.  Ah, the good ole days.

Can you imagine if President radios were built these days?  We’d have a “Donald J. Trump” model… there’s a really funny joke right there, but I’m not gonna touch it.

I must be in my second childhood. Either that or I’m still in my first one. I love Lego games. Lego Video Games, to be specific.  I have dozens of them on several different platforms, with PC recently becoming my platform of choice for playing them–primarily because I can play most of them in three-screen “surround” mode.  This gives me the closest I’ll probably ever be able to get, personally, to a VR Lego experience.  With my one bad eye, I just don’t get the whole VR experience with real VR when I’ve used it.  I just get a headache after and hour inside that world and things get really blurry.  But with three regular screens providing one very very wide game screen, I think I get close enough to that experience and I can enjoy it for many hours at a time with no blurriness or headaches.

My favorite Lego game is still Lego Worlds.  I’ve been playing it for years.  Other players complain that it’s very limited and just the same old stuff over and over and just a grind to reach the 100 gold bricks required to unlock all of the tools to play the game, and I guess they think that’s the goal – 100 gold bricks and you’re done.  I disagree.  That’s what I would consider the FIRST goal.  Unlocking all of the tools is essential, yes, but that just enables the ability to do everything in the game.  There are still hundreds and hundreds of other items to acquire in the game–minifigs, brick builds, brick types, etc., and all of those enable even more things you can do in the game, including building entire worlds of your own if you want to.  It’s truly unlimited, with an almost infinite amount of procedurally-generated worlds containing any amount of mix between many different biome-types (old west, Christmasland, Candyland, the moon and many more–or even just start with a completely flat, empty landscape and go nuts!).  It allows you to bring any of the minifigs you discover to life, dropping them into any world or your own worlds and interacting with them all you want.  Give them an army of vehicles and weapons and see what they do… Spawn a hundred zombies and watch them swarm… I love it.  I’ve played Minecraft and I know how awesomely huge that game has gotten, and that’s great.  I’ve playing in there for hours on end as well, but I lack a lot of the creativity that it demands.  You only have simple square blocks to build your worlds with in Minecraft.  Sure, there are tons of different types of those blocks to work with, and even many more you can craft by mixing them together, but in the end you still have to build things one block at a time and to me it’s just too tedious and I can’t seem to create anything worthwhile without spending way more time than I have trying and re-trying until I get a result I like.  Sure, Lego Worlds allows you to build brick-by-brick, just like you can in Minecraft, but that’s just the beginning.  You can instantly place complete “brick builds” anywhere you want, which are previously-built structures of Legos, making it simple to create a world to your liking in a very short time–or take you time to get everything perfect.  You can even build a nice structure or area (for example a park) and save it as a brick build to use in another world or in the same world as many times as you like.

Anyway, that’s the gist of Lego Worlds.  I have many (most) of the other Lego video games as well, but none are as free-playing and open as Lego Worlds is.  Most of them offer their own unique worlds that you can eventually free-play in, once you reach their main game goals, and the stories and voice acting is great and much different, but I always come back to Lego Worlds.  I seem to be in the minority though, and I just can’t figure out why.  Here’s my Lego Worlds stats on each platform I play it on:

I’m currently working hard on the PC version, always trying to inch closer and closer to obtaining 100% of everything. I’ve never been there, but maybe some day I’ll have 100% of something at least. On all of the console versions my game save has gotten corrupted at one point or another, forcing me to start over completely from the beginning.  The console versions also have limited number of worlds you can have saved at once, then you have to start cleaning up and deleting old worlds before you can save any more.  The PC version has never corrupted my save though, it has always worked and I haven’t ever had an issue with running out of save space for new worlds.  I think I have hundreds of worlds created in it now, and I’m always creating more.  They form a sort of spiral galaxy, endlessly building out and around in an oval shape as you create more and more worlds, so it’s pretty neat. The PC version was also the very first to be released, if my memory serves me. There was a beta version for quite awhile and it was pretty undone back then, as I recall, but I started playing it anyway–without a controller. That was even before I started playing “real” PC games.

This week I learned something new about Android’s Windowshade – the pulldown notification screen in Android 10. I like to listen to Spotify at work a lot, so I had a widget on one of my home pages for it so I could Like or Unlike songs as I listen to them to refine my library a little bit more each day. So as I was listening one day this week, I had the windowshade pulled down showing my current Spotify song and other recent notifications along with the current weather conditions, and I accidentally pulled down on the Spotify notification a second time. This opened up the details even further, now also showing the Like/Unlike option, the full album art in the background, and even the progress bar of the song playing!

Well, there goes my widget. I uninstalled it completely. It’s no longer needed, so I freed up that RAM and let it go. Very nice feature I never knew was there! I just wonder how long it’s been in there and I never knew about it. Now I’m realizing I can expand notifications for other apps as well–like e-mail… I can pull down the latest e-mail notification and see other recent e-mails I didn’t see come in. Sweet!

I took a half-day yesterday to take care of some personal business, so I walked the dogs in the afternoon. The temperature was decent, but apparently really hot in the direct sunlight, so Shadow only made it halfway through our one-mile goal before stopping under every shade tree he could find to lay down and take a break. Tiger, on the other hand, was always perky and ready to keep walking at all times, as usual. I felt bad for Shadow, but he loves his walks. Maybe he just needs a hat!

He spent the rest of the walk rushing through the sunlight, then sloooowly walking through the shaded areas and stopping for a breath whenever he could in the shade. In the sunlight I also noticed he liked to walk very close to me, like a well-trained dog. He’s done this in the past too. But during yesterday’s walk I realized exactly what he’s doing–he’s not following any training he’s never had…he’s trying to stay in my shadow, in the shade! I varied my speed a little, fast and slow, fast and slow while watching him and confirmed that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Here’s a couple more photos:

Wow, my website has been here for 20 years. Almost. About 19.5 years to be precise. Looking back at my first post, it was on January 7th, 2001. The world and I have been through a lot over those years. Some little things have been omitted though, I’m just finding, and others just weren’t posted, I have no idea why. I probably just never got around to them, planning on making more of a production out of them, but didn’t find the time, then forgot about them. It sucks when that happens, and I’ll try to find that stuff and post what I can as time permits, even if it’s way late.

Check this one out. I found this in the Wayback Machine. Somehow it never got posted here. Funny how I was posting in the 3rd person:

“2/4/01 – Tomorrow Kevin turns 3 years old! We’re having his party at Bozzo’s house this afternoon.  His party has a dinosaur theme, and he’s getting dinosaur-related gifts.  Sandy and Jim got him the movie Dinosaur on DVD (Special Edition, 2 DVDs), some dinosaur wood puzzles, and a big plastic container filled with all sorts of dinosaurs.  

Jim’s using 5 messengers now — MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Odigo, AIM, and ICQ.  Sheesh! It’s not so bad though with 2 PCs on the internet at once–all the messengers stay on one PC and we surf the net and do other things with the other one.  It’s just experimental though, to see how all the programs work and what their differences are.  There’s an alliance forming among several of the major messenger services right now, so hopefully they’ll come up with a good unified solution… In the meantime though, Jim just likes to play with them and juggle between them until they break.

The blue car is in the shop this weekend–another head gasket blown.  That’s the 2nd hard gasket change for that car now, so it’ll be on it’s 3rd gasket. The black car is on it’s 2nd one as well, so I guess it’s just a thing you have to live with on Neons.  We’ve heard it’s a pretty common problem on Neons.

Our CD recorder died last week too. It just stopped refusing to record CDs one day, and then stopped reading CDs altogether. I opened it up, but could see nothing physically wrong with it.  So I’ll have to get another one of those along with a new DVD drive, which has been giving me trouble for some time too. That one occasionally refuses to read DVDs, and never wants to read CDs any more either…Maybe it’s me, but neither one of them wants to work any more no matter what I do.  I’ve even tried them in different computers with the same results. Oh well. Time to upgrade.”

Muwahahahaaaa. One nice thing about this goal is that I can cache as many days ahead as I want. Sure, even with WordPress I could pre-post and I actually did that a lot. Some days I have a burst of ideas and thoughts I wanted to write down and the time to write them out, so I would, then I’d post them on my website and give each posting a separate date to spread them out throughout the week. I can do that with Standard Notes now too, and it’s even a lot easier. As if I publish so much that having a few in one day would overwhelm someone. LOL. Thinking about it now I realize that was probably a little silly. But there, another day in the bank.

I re-watched Men of Honor (2000) over the weekend. Awesome movie. I knew I had seen it years ago, probably when it came out on video. Robert DeNiro and Cube Gooding Jr. I think I came back to this one as a result of a recent search I did for Michael Rapaport. Micheal is on the Howard Stern Show occasionally and is pretty foul-mouthed and insulting on there usually, verbally attacking other people on the show, so I wanted to see what other movies he had done. The only movie I could remember ever seeing him in was The 6th Day, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, which I enjoyed. So when I googled “Micheal Rapaport Movies” out of curiosity, Men of Honor came up and looked like probably the highest-rated movie of his out of all of those it listed. I’m not sure about the rest of them, but Rapaport only had a small part in Men of Honor, but I thought it was good. He played a stuttering character–someone he himself would probably make fun of in real life, judging by the way he acts on the Howard Stern Show. Anyway, good movie, just thought I’d mention it.

Today, July 20th, 2020, marks my 24th Anniversary with Sandy, my wife, my better half, aka The Warden. She says she hates it when I call her that, then she says she misses my dad calling her that. He’s the one that started it, and it was with affection. He always knew she did everything she did just to help him. And she’s the same with me. I don’t think I’d even be here if it wasn’t for her. She has kept me on-track (or at least tried as hard as possible) with everything from eating healthy to making sure I take my meds accurately and on-time each and every day, and has always taught me over our 25+ years together that you always help others as much as you can, be kind and fair to everyone, respect your elders, be a good person, don’t hold a grudge, there are more good people in the world than bad, and never go to bed angry.

We’ve had a great time, and it has all gone way too fast! It seems like the older we get, the faster time flies. And these days we can hardly celebrate. We would normally go out for dinner at least, and even though some restaurants are fully open, we aren’t willing to risk it. Next year will be our 25th though, which is supposedly much more of a milestone, so we’ll be sure to celebrate that one at least a little better than this one.

So I just found out this is coming out soon… the book and the audiobook.  I’ve already pre-ordered it.  They’re not saying much of anything about the story, just that it’s the highly anticipated sequel to “Ready Player One” and it’s 384 pages.  That’s precisely 2 pages shorter than Ready Player one.  I’ll be looking out for actual reviews once someone actually gets to read the story.  And I can only hope they got Wil Wheaton to do the audiobook!  I can’t imagine anyone else doing it better.