Ok, the site is back now after an evening of experimentation, confusion and frustration. The limitations of using just https://listed.to/@jimtrottier for my website is just too much for me (and a few other visitors). As it turns out, this site is simple enough and complete enough that it’s easier for me to just make the effort and post like “normal” people do, directly through my website, than do deal with all of the complexities of HTML all over again when I want something a little more than just words in a post, and without having to re-post my links to all of my other content in pretty much every single post.

To test how easy or difficult it is to post here, or just to see if I’m capable of accomplishing something geekily difficult, I’ve given myself a challenge I mentioned in the title and won’t mention again. No rewards, no reason, let’s just do this once and see what happens.

Oh, and I “cleared out” the “Listed” site too, so don’t bother checking that site anymore. Sorry for the confusion. Fortunately anyone who only visits my site once a week, or less frequently, won’t even notice that anything ever changed, they’ll just be reading and wondering what the heck that blank “listed.to” page is and why I’m rambling on about a few postings that aren’t even there, then they’ll read the rest and realize I came to me senses again, and reverted back to the old site. Then again, if they read my site top-down, they’ll see this first. My head hurts.

Standard Notes has an awesome feature that allows you to instantly publish any note to a public blag page with a single click. Here’s my blog page:

https://listed.to/@jimtrottier

Now I just need to figure out how to embed that page on this site. I thought that would be pretty simple, but it looks like it’s not. The listed.to site apparently doesn’t support standard embedding. For now, please click the link above. I’ll be posting entries there probably a lot more often than here.

Have I mentioned how much I liked Keep? I’m sure I did, it was a big deal (at least for me) when I cancelled by Evernote subscription and went with Keep as a totally free option and it worked out great for me. Sure, Keep lacked the fancy HTML formatting that Evernote has, but it was fast and pretty much unlimited. Keep also had a couple pretty nice features most other note apps didn’t–especially free ones. One was OCR. You could search for text with an image or photo and it would find it. And you could extract text from an image any time you wanted.

Well, all was bliss until a few weeks ago when I actually started using it much more. I had a previous post prepared in which I explained how I stopped using my little paper notepads at work, but for some reason that post never got published. I don’t recall exactly why. Anyway, I stopped, cold-turkey. No more pen & paper at all. Everything digital. ALL notes at work are now digital, which makes them that much more useful. That unpublished post explained in detail what happened that made me decide to go this route, but it really does help a lot–not only saving on paper, but in the new ability to search and find anything in an instant and to document my daily work in our ticket system for the rest of the team to be able to search and find.

But, as I said, things also took a turn around that same time, or I just never noticed the issue before because I never used Keep quite so much. Here’s the issue: Since I’m typing notes into Keep much more often now, I have become much more aware of how it constantly saves everything to the web on-the-fly, as I’m typing and working. It constantly tells you this at the top of the Keep screen. Well, right around the day I started using it much more, it would occasionally pop up a message at the bottom of the keep screen that says “can’t connect right now, try again later.” I can understand that happening once in awhile due to maybe a server issue down the line, my internet connection, or maybe my corporate network connection at work being glitchy. It happens sometimes. But when this happens, Keep halts my typing. It lasts about 10-15 seconds, sometimes a bit longer, maybe up to 30 seconds being the longest, and I can’t type anything at all into Keep during that time.

When I’m on a phone call or working on an issue and trying to document everything at the same time, this can get quite frustrating. Like I said, it wasn’t bad when it was just once in awhile, but over the past week it has become constant. In pretty much every note I take there’s forced pauses. It drives me nuts now. I just don’t understand how Keep can’t allow the user to keep typing and just cache the unsaved data until the connection becomes available again, then save it. I thought that was the reason they have the constant notification at the top of the screen–so you know when your current work is or is not saved at the moment. I don’t think there’s any point to having that if you can’t even type anything in when you’re NOT connected to the internet.

Anyway, it became too much. I searched the web plenty of times and others have had this issue with Keep since 2017 or 2018. I’m not sure if it stopped their typing at that time, they didn’t mention that aspect of the issue, but this is my experience, and if it has been happening for a few years I’m shocked nothing has been done about it.

Maybe the Keep servers are overloaded now, with so many people using the free service these days, I don’t know. So I went on the hunt, yet again, for another decent free, or inexpensive, alternative note app. I tried a few more and would up with “Standard Notes.” It’s a simple app, much like Keep, completely free, but with a desktop app as well and a “Expanded” option for a small fee (or a LARGE fee if you only pay monthly). If you buy into their long-term 5-year plan, it’s only a little over $2/month. Pay only monthly and it’s $9.99/month. Huge difference. But the benefits of “Expanded” are plentiful. You get a 30-day money-back guarantee on the 5-year plan, so I’m into that right now, trying everything out and giving it a run for my money.

So far, so good. It lacks the OCR abilities that Keep has, but I can still use Keep for a few minutes at a time whenever I need to just pull text from an image, then save that text in Standard Notes. Everything else, however, is there and then some! It does the same on-the-fly saving of my notes, but without interruption at all, from what I’ve seen, and it offers full editing capabilities in may different tasty flavors I like, such as full HTML editing and even a full Coding editor complete with line count. There are plenty of other extensions to add details to the program like work count and other stats, printing of notes (which you would think is a given, but Keep never had it–I had to export a note (or several) into Google Docs and then I could print it. And it was pretty easy to use Google Takeout to extract all of my Keep notes, then use a plugin that Standard Notes Extended has to import those into Standard Notes. We’ll see if it holds up for the full 30 days, or if I get my money back. Right now it’s looking pretty good.

Wow, even the cold callers are rude these days. I got a call today that came up as SPECTRUM on my caller-id and was an 800 number – (800) 892-4357 to be specific. I’m still waiting for 1GB to come to our area, so I answered it. A guy with a very thick Indian accent introduced himself and said he’s calling to lower my internet, TV, and telephone price. He said “You’re paying over $100 a month right now, right sir?” I said “No, I’m paying $96 a month and I only have Internet.” He immediately hung up on me. No goodbye, no thank you, nothing but a very loud click. Pretty impressive for a solicitor. You usually have to work hard to get them off the line. I take that as a sign that I have a decent rate for my 400 mbps connection.

YouTube recently announced that they’re getting rid of Google Play Music and going with only one streaming music service: YouTube Music. So I’ve been playing with YouTube Music more lately, trying to use it as a replacement for Spotify to see if it makes the cut.

So far, I can see it has some limitations, but it also has a few nice features that Spotify doesn’t. One of those is lyrics. I haven’t found a song with lyrics yet that doesn’t have the lyrics right there up-front when you’re on the song in YouTube Music. And they’re just straight-up lyrics too, not the gimmicky “Behind the Lyrics” thing that Spotify has, which shows you just a few lyrics then gives you little bits of trivia about the song or its artist as the song plays.

There’s also an “UP NEXT” button which shows you the playlist of songs queued up to play after the one you’re listening to. And, because it is YouTube Music after all, there’s a video for just about everything, so they include a simple slider at the top of the app (I’m referring to the Android app) to switch between “Song” and “Video” at any time.

And just as Spotify does, as you add songs, albums and artists to your library you get suggestions for music you might like, and I’m YouTube already knows me pretty well and I’ve discovered a lot of new stuff I like in it.

The only thing I find a little annoying is how there isn’t a separate app for YouTube Music on some devices, like Roku. On Roku YouTube Music is embedded in the YouTube app. You open YouTube and then choose “Music” from the menu, and that’s YouTube Music. It kinda makes sense, I just find it harder to find since it’s not consistent–on my phone it’s a separate app. If I’m in the YouTube app on my phone Music isn’t an option. Maybe Google’s still working on that though, I don’t know.

Lastly, YouTube music also has “Smart Downloads”. It will automatically download your liked music overnight when you’re not using your phone. You just have to choose how many songs to allow (up to 500) and the quality, and it takes care of the rest. You can also choose video quality.

Overall I really like it, and maybe soon I’ll drop Spotify. Right now I’m kinda stuck, because Kevin is a big fan of Spotify and doesn’t want me to get rid of it, and we’re on a family plan, so if I drop it, he’ll lose his access. I’ll keep both for now and we’ll see how it goes down the road.

I’ve been on sort of a “Launcher Quest” lately, looking for the “Best Launcher” for PC that’ll let me quickly play any game on the PC I use solely for gaming. There are a ton of “Top 5” or “Top 10 Game Launchers” out there, so I started with a few of these lists. Here’s an example:

I won’t list any others, but there are a LOT of these lists, and they’re all completely different. Most of these lists usually end up having one or two top launchers that the others have, and these are the most popular ones. I found a lot of issues with many of them, and some were actually pretty good, but none of them were quite what I was hoping for. They all had limitations in some way, or were difficult (or impossible) to add certain types of games, but I tried many of the top picks from several lists as well as a few others that sounded interesting.

End Result: I’m using FENCES. This wasn’t even on ANYONE’S recommended Launchers list and isn’t even considered a “Launcher”, it’s more of just a desktop “add-on”, but I wasn’t able to find ANY actual launcher that supports all of the different game sources I use, and Fences supports unlimited Fence Desktops and literally ALL game sources (and apps) that I use, so it’s a clear winner for me. It doesn’t have any 3D or other “bells & whistles” that the top lauchers do, but I don’t care, it works and it works quite well for exactly what I need it for.

Since I use all 4K monitors (and one 4K TV) on my PC, I just set the icon size to “Large”, which makes them very easily viewable on all of my monitors and my TV, then I just created as many different Fence Desktops as I needed, and grouped by icons accordingly, with separate fences for “Apps”, “Currently Playing”, “Emulators”, “Mini Games”, “Misc. Games”, “Google Earth”, etc., then I can simply grab the left or right edge of my screen to flip to the previous or next desktop as needed. Since I can have an unlimited number of desktops and fences, my options are wide open, and every single game source is supported! The Google Earth Fence might sound odd, but I love it! I save an icon for every interesting place I want to–like my home, my work, and other interesting places on the planet and I can instantly just open any of them up and explore the area–in 2D or even 3D, or even drop down to street view and look around. In 4K this is really sweet to play with.

But back to Fences–I can even add apps and games installed from the Microsoft Store… I simply created a shortcut to “explorer shell:AppsFolder”, then whenever I need to create a shortcut to a native Windows 10 “tile” app I just open that “Windows Apps Folder” and find the app icon, right-click it and “Create Shortcut”. Windows then prompts me saying it can’t create a shortcut here, do I want to create a shortcut on the desktop instead?” I say Yes, then I just go out to my current desktop’s default Fence, grab the icon, and drag it to the Fence I want it in.

I can even color-code each of my Fences any way I like and change their behavior and appearance in many other ways as well. For me, I haven’t found any other PC “Launcher” that works as well as Fences for everything I need a launcher to do.

As far as what was missing from ALL of the launchers I look at and tested, “BigFish” was one of them. Some might laugh and might call this one a joke, since it’s probably not even considered a “real” game distributor, since they only sell mostly “mini games” that were much more popular “back in the day” with much earlier versions of Windows, but I really enjoy a lot of these and still have a monthly subscription to a few of them, which means I have amassed dozens, if not hundreds, of games on their platform, so it’s relevant to me, but apparently not very popular these days as none of the “top launchers” in everyone’s recommendations support this service’s platform or its games. I just love me a simple game of BrickQuest, Slingo, or Fishdom now and again.

I started watching this show recently (full name: “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia“) after hearing it mentioned many times on reddit. Netflix also recently pulled an episode from Season 8 due to its controversial racial content, which really sucks, but I got it elsewhere, so I still have that particular episode–and just another reason I don’t have Netflix. Why would you want to basically “cripple” a TV Series you host, making it “incomplete” just because it has a little controversial content someone complained about? Heck, South Park, Family Guy, Rick & Morty, and many other shows wouldn’t even exist without controversial content! What ever happened to Free Speech?

Anyway, Always Sunny is still an active series and it started in 2005, so they have 14 seasons in the bank and have been renewed for a 15th, so how bad can it be? That’s how I look at it, and I’ve watched a few episodes of Season 1 and wasn’t disappointed. I’ve already seen several “controversial” things in it that some people would be offended by. That’s the show. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes. The show sure is “gritty” and right to the point, that’s for sure. Danny DeVito has been in the cast since Season 2, and he’s hilarious, so I’m looking forward to see how much funnier it gets when I get past Season 1.

Yesterday I found this old movie that looked good which we hadn’t seen, so we watched it last night. It was really good. It stars Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, and William Hurt. It has a 7.3 on IMDB, which made me choose it over a few other new releases I’ve been meaning to watch. A 7.3 on IMDB is fairly good, and it didn’t disappoint. IMDB’s description is about all you need: “A well-respected businessman is sometimes controlled by his murder and mayhem-loving alter ego.”

I think I’m going to turn my website into pretty much my own public version of Keep. I use Keep for every little thing I note–at work, at home, when I’m away… If it’s something big I need to document or the tiniest little thing like a song title that I want to remember, it goes into my Keep (that’s Google Keep, for those unfamiliar). My Keep is everywhere–on the web and on my phone, and I have links to it on every PC, tablet and phone I use so I don’t forget anything I wanted to save to recall later. Like the Internet and Google, it’s just there.

So I’m going to start frequently going through my most recent Keep notes and posting them on my website. What the hell. If nothing else, it’ll at least show something different on my website much more often than it has over the past several years. I already often type up my website posts in Keep anyway, because it’s so convenient and comes up instantly, as opposed to opening WordPress on my phone or opening my website’s back-end on the web, which both actually only take a little bit longer to open, but longer nonetheless. Besides, it’ll open my notes up to a bigger audience. Who knows what that could do? Let’s see if it gets me into any trouble. All I gotta do now is accidentally post a private note in the wrong place and off we go…

Did I say that right? Or is it “I’m not the smartass you think I am”? Being a geek working in IT (both at my job and when NOT at my job), I get asked a lot of technical questions. I’m happy to answer them, but many times my answers don’t come from just me. I often google the question, then pass that information on in my own words, making it seem like I am an all-knowing supergeek, when, in actuality, Google is.

It always amazes me how Google can translate even the most confusing and misspelled sentence or question into exactly what you were trying to search for and give you 1,254,233 relevant search results in a split second. Granted, most results beyond the first page are totally useless and are only based on a key word or two in your original query, but they are related in a small way.

That first page–and usually the first or second link on that page–most likely contains exactly what you were seeking. It’s like an ever-expanding infinite encyclopedia that combines the knowledge of everyone who posts anything on the web–basically the entire world’s connected population. My mind boggles.

Remember actual Encyclopedias? I remember collecting several complete sets. There were like 20 or 30 volumes in a complete set, and you often got them one at a time, starting your collection from an “Encyclopedia Salesman” who went door-to-door selling them like they did vacuum cleaners. You’d get a new volume each month and your parents paid for it. Or sometimes you could get a volume or two at the grocery store each shopping day to add to your set until you completed it. I don’t remember how much they costed, but I’m sure it was pricey for the time. But it was knowledge, and my parents, though reluctant and not wealthy, invested in them for the family’s cumulative educational benefit. I ate them up. We even bought a huge two-volume “Complete Dictionary” set that included a “younger” version of dictionary with many illustrations and artwork and a grown-up, very compact small-print dictionary containing every friggin’ word ever imagined in the English language. But no slang. No “urban dictionary” nonsense back in those days, that’s for sure.

That was my “Google” back then. Am I showing my age? Whatever, that’s my history and I’m proud of it. It made me who I am today. It gave me that thirst for knowledge that had never been fully quenched. And today’s Google is just a gazillion times (or a googol) larger and that much more awesome than it was back then. Yeah, that’s spelled right, look it up.

So back in the day, I’d run to the bookcase and grab the relevant volume for the letter of the subject I wanted to find out more about, look it up and soak it in like a sponge. Today I just open a browser on a computer and type in my question, or just pull my phone out of my pocket and thumb it from literally anywhere. Knowledge is what? Power? Then Google is the most powerful entity ever created. Or the Internet is, I’m not sure really… How good is the Internet without Google? It’s Alta Vista. Not so good.

I can’t imagine a world without the Internet now, but I worry, with the current pandemic now seeming to subside, that something much worse could easily take it all away. We need to appreciate what we have much more than we do. It could all just be some geek’s weird wet dream that could vanish in an instant when he wakes up.

I just had to post that one. My favorite comment… “Good God, Man, even your backyard is terrifying!

I’ve been enjoying Stephen King’s latest book, “If it Bleeds”. I’m listening to the audiobook on during my commute to and from work. Since I was working from home when the book was released, I’m a little behind with this one. I finished the first two stories and I’m on the third now.

The first story was interesting – it’s about an iPhone – the old 1st-Gen version that was a little buggy.

The second story was just plain irritating. The story might have been much better if King hadn’t decided to do the entire thing BACKWARDS. That’s right, it goes from Act 3 to Act 1, telling the last part of the story first, then the middle, and finally the beginning. It’s an end-of-the-world story, so I started out pretty confused and not knowing what the heck anything was he was explaining until somewhere in the second act, when I fully realized everything was being told in reverse. So by the end of the third act I realized more and more clearly what’s going on, but I had to re-assemble things in the correct order in my head just to put some sense to it. It ended up being just a bit too confusing for me to enjoy and appreciate the story much, so I’m thinking about re-reading that one, maybe in actual book form this time instead of as an audiobook, but reading it in the correct “act order”. I’m curious if this will reveal some hidden flaws in the story, or if King actually wrote the story in the correct order, then just decided to publish it backwards. I don’t think he’s ever done that before. I’m not sure what the point was.

Right now I’m in the middle of the third story, which is the book’s actual title, “If it Bleeds”. It’s the longest story in the book and I’m really liking it. It connects the 3-book Mr. Mercedes series, The Outsider, and this story together, all intertwined. The main character is Holly Gibney, who was in all of those books. I’m looking forward to the last story too, which is “Rat”. I think the creepy cover design for the book is a clue to that story. We’ll see.

I think yesterday was the hottest day the puppies have experienced yet. It was in the low 90’s here. They both would play a little outside, then plop down on the lawn and relax. It’s pretty rare for them to actually lie down in the grass, they usually just sit up in it and look around. Just an observation I noticed yesterday, even in the evening. It seemed like they enjoyed it out there, so I let them out a few extra times throughout the evening.

We kept it cool in the house — about 74F — so naturally they had to cuddle and bury themselves in their comforter to stay warm enough for their liking.

And it was my birthday, the big 57. Oh joy, it’s my Pandemic Birthday. Pretty uneventful day all around, which is how I like it. Birthday celebrations should stop at a certain point. It’s a good thing to reach maturity, but after that it’s just good to be healthy and happy. Then, later on, it’s just a good thing to wake up in the morning. I’m approaching the third phase now… The fourth? I’m not going to say. I just typed it out, then realized it was way too depressing, so I deleted it.

I turned 57 today. I think my health is a little better than is was in the past few years. My blood sugar is more under control, for one thing. And I feel pretty good. I lost a few pounds since last year, nothing major, but at least it’s a step (or thousands of steps) in the right direction.

It’s scary out there right now though. We’re all struggling to get past the whole COVID-19 thing, still wearing a mask everywhere and still trying to socially distance while at the same time trying to get the world functional again. Then the death of a black man at the hands of a white police officer occured in Minneapolis and all hell breaks loose again. Protests everywhere from Black Lives Matter (BLM) fill the streets in many cities, including Kenosha, and the bad element takes advantage of the situation to vandalize and loot what they can at the same time. It ends up sending the entirely wrong message. Whether these people are part of BLM or are just tagging along to take advantage remains to be seen, but it’s scary out there.

They’re busting out windows all over, firing weapons crazily, starting fires… One police officer’s home in Racine had pretty much all of the windows of his home and the windows of a minivan in his driveway smashed out as well as someone starting a fire inside the house.

In Kenosha we listened to the police scanner all day Sunday while watching a protest participant stream the protest live on Facebook. There was shooting, people throwing bricks at police officers and their vehicles, breaking out windows in vehicles and the windows of stores. One person came out of his house as the protesters were walking by and threatened someone with a shotgun. Things got pretty heated. The police were initially trying to stop the vehicles in the protest, but that turned ugly and they weren’t able to stop the walking protesters at all, so they decided to stop trying to stop the traffic and just keep the protest civil, but I don’t think it turned out quite that civil anyway.

The city has imposed a curfew for everyone to reduce exposure and crime in the city during the protesting. People are allowed to be out and travel only if it’s to and from work. As if COVID-19 weren’t enough, now we have this to deal with. But Happy Birthday, Me! I’m going to go play some games and stop thinking about what’s going on in the world for a few hours.

I’ve spent the past few months at home, like most other people. But unlike most of those people, I didn’t really mind it. That’s normal for me. I like it here. It’s quiet, I have everything I need (for both work and play now), and (probably unfortunately) I don’t socialize all that much.

I still watch the COVID-19 tracking board daily. It has slowed down a bit, but never stops going up. Right now the world is at 5,481,141 infected, 346,071 dead. 97,906 dead in the US. I just worry that everyone is way too anxious to get out there and open everything up again and socialize this soon, maybe too soon. But I can also understand the need to get things started up again before everything is “too far gone” to recover, and thousands of businesses die a horrible death in addition to the COVID-19 victims. It’s hard for anyone to say what’s best. It’s a really delicate balancing act we’re walking now. Are the lives of the extra victims worth it? Keep a mask on out there at the very least.

Soon I’ll have to start going back to work the old-fashioned way–by commuting again–but I’m not looking forward to it. I saved a LOT on gas the past few months, and my puppies took quite a liking to their daily lunch walks, which will soon come to an end, except for on weekends. Like me, they’ll adjust.

In other news, I’ve been keeping plenty busy. Our movie server’s network card died recently, and unfortunately it was a pretty cheap PC which had no expansion slots at all, so I couldn’t even install a replacement network card in it. I tried an external wireless card, but it couldn’t even handle that. We have 400 mbps Internet service, and all I could get out of it was about 20-30mbps. Definitely not something I could live with for streaming our movies and TV shows, even if we stream the most from home. Kevin and I both also stream when we’re away from home, and even at lunch at work occasionally, so we need as much bandwidth as we can get. I know the drill–upload speed, which is what we’re using when streaming while away from home, is pretty slow as it is, but believe me, it was intolerable with a replacement gigabit wireless card in that PC. For some reason it just couldn’t handle it, so I threw in the towel.

Kevin had a much newer desktop PC he hadn’t used in over a year though, so I made a deal with him to buy it, and our new movie server was born. It took several days of imaging, configuring and indexing, but it’s done now and fully back up and running much better and faster than before. And with one less PC in the house I just had to buy another one of course, which went into my man cave. I called it my birthday present to myself for this year. Now I’m using the new one to play all of my games. Setting all that up has kept me busy as well, but has freed much more space on the other PCs in the house quite a bit. I (and probably they) feel much better now that they have much more “breathing room”.

We’ve been bingeing on Ozark for the past few weeks. As Matt said, it’s like “the new Breaking Bad”, and I think that’s a pretty good description. Unfortunately it’s only three seasons long though, and we’re on the last season already. Fortunately I found out last night that the series will continue, so we can expect a fourth season and hopefully even more after that. I think if I had known it’s still an active series we wouldn’t have binged quite as quickly as we did though. Now we’ll probably have to wait nearly a year for the next season to arrive.

Lastly, today it’s nice and warm out, in the high 70’s, so we’re enjoying it. Sandy’s cooking out, our Memorial Day cookout, since it looks like tomorrow (which is actually Memorial Day) looks like it’s going to be rainy. I took the dogs for a nice walk around lunch, and this is the warmest it’s been for one of our walks yet, even though it’s only in the high 70’s. We walked a little over a mile, and on our way back, Shadow pulled a “Socks” on me! Seeing a nice cool spot in the grass at Towerline Park he just plopped himself down to rest. He was done walking. The poor guy was exhausted. Tiger, on the other hand, was still ready and willing to walk and not stop. Maybe it’s just black dogs–how they absorb the heat so easily and overheat, but he’s only a year old, I would have thought he’d be able to handle a one-mile walk in the sun. Socks didn’t start doing that until his later years at 15 or 16. Shadow’s a little overweight though, so I guess that doesn’t help. We’re working on that. He scared me a little at first, but after a minute of rest he was back up and ready to finis the walk home. He did stop once more, but this time it was just to sit down and it was a much shorter break, but then he was fine. They both had a nice long drink of ice-cold water when they got home and now they’re just lounging around the house recharging.

265,076 deceased, of those 74,799 were in the United States. The numbers keep rising as I watch the “tote board” constantly change on a dedicated PC open to the COVID-19 stats page I previously mentioned. That many lives lost and communities are “opening up” again and more people are back out and about. Apparently there is a fine line between how much self-quarantine is too much and how much downtime it takes for local businesses to go belly-up. Most would rather risk their lives than go crazy from boredom and/or see their community die, apparently.

I guess I’m lucky to still have a job. And so I bury myself in TV, movies and games when I’m not working. Not that this is much of a change from my normal routine anyway.

These days, when I dive into YouTube or live TV I’m overwhelmed with pandemic coverage of all kinds and I have to wear a mask whenever I have to go in to work. When I go on Twitter, there’s Trump, saying something silly. This is the first time in history a US President has EVER been so ridiculous and said and done such horrible things, and still he has enough supporters to get elected President, and maybe STILL enough supporters to get re-elected. How difficult is it to just keep quiet? About anything. He would seem so much more intelligent. But he’s outspoken about everything, doesn’t keep anything to himself, and that’s what his supporters eat up.

Stephen King apologized for how close several of his horror novels have come to reality. What is this world coming to?

And I post something political? It’s the End Times.

My cousin Wayne sent me a fascinating PDF document recently. It’s a complete Kenosha Phone Book from 1953! April, 1953 to be precise. Wow, what a cool snapshot from the past! This is 10 years before I was born. It includes handwritten notes on some pages as well – it’s the real deal. All of the phone numbers are 4 or 5 digits too, none of that newfangled 10-digit nonsense of the future.

I looked up Trottier and found my dad and his brother Sylvester, but my grandfather, George Trottier, wasn’t in it. Sandy’s father George Wegmann Jr., and his father George Wegmann Sr. are both in there.

There’s 75 “white pages”, as we called them back in the day, and 181 “yellow pages”. The Yellow Pages were advertising for businesses. And it’s ironic in this case, since the book is so old…they’re all yellow pages! But take look, it’s worth it if you like to look back at the way things were.

I’ll probably post a few screenshots from interesting tidbits about Kenosha as I find them when I dig into this book a bit deeper. Stay tuned.

Things are still a mess, but as they say, we may have peaked. The rate of infections has slowed everywhere, we’re all wearing masks, staying six feet from everyone else, washing our hands, sanitizing (when we can find sanitizer) and doing what we’re told, for the most part.

For whatever it’s worth, it looks like the nCov2019.live website is dead as of this morning (4/19/2020) and CNN has stopped displaying their worldwide and US totals on-screen 24/7 overlaying every show on their network. I guess this means we probably peaked and things and less critical. The total in my title is the last total I remember seeing on that site, which was last night.

Now there are protests all over the country trying to get the government to loosen restrictions and “open up” the economy to allow them to go back to work. Many people are very upset, fed up with all of the isolation and shutting-down of everything, and feel they need to start getting things back to normal before it goes too far, everyone goes out of business and the economy crashes. Who know what’s best?

I won’t get into it much here, plenty of others explain the situation much better than I can. One of those is Wil Wheaton. He tells it like it is. A tragedy.

Personally, I’ll speak to our own situation. My boss is talking about having us return to working on-site starting Monday, April 27th. Just one more week of working from home and I’ll be back at the hospital working on-site full time. Right now the tech on-call works on-site two days a week (Tuesdays and Fridays), and this week (ending today, Sunday) is the second week I’ve been on-call and working from home. Working on-site isn’t too bad for us, as we can do most things from our IT office and remotely, only needing to go onto the floors when there’s an issue we can’t resolve remotely or when we need to round on the WoWs and PC equipment on the floors.

At home we’re hanging in there. We have plenty of entertainment to keep us busy with all of the movies and TV shows I’ve collected over the years. When watching these, I prefer to watch everything I can locally instead of streaming it, saving the Internet traffic for those that need it more than us. Not that it makes a difference to anyone really… I think it’s just a psychological thing that makes me feel better about consuming so much data.

Sandy is such a wonderful cook and enjoys it so much, we’re staying nice and healthy in that regard as well. She’s also cooking much healthier food than she used to, so that helps as well. Our occasional dining out has been replaced by either curbside pickup or delivery from our favorite restaurants, so that’s a little different, but we’re still dining out just as often, hoping that helps support our local businesses a bit.

For specifics:

Food: Sandy usually posts everything she cooks, as either a recipe or a video from someone else preparing the recipe. Restaurants: The Garage, IHOP, Red Robin, McDonald’s, etc.

Entertainment: We watched several movies lately, including: The Turning (hated how it ended), Bad Boys For Life, Troll World Tour, Outbreak (classic from 1995 with Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman), Vivarium (super weird), The Call of The Wild, and we’ve started watching the series Six Feet Under again. I think both Sandy and I watched it when it actually started airing on HBO in 2001, but have forgotten enough of it to make it interesting again. I remember it being pretty morbid, but kinda funny as well, and stars Michael C. Hall in his pre-Dexter days. We will usually watch an episode or two of a series and see if it “catches on” with us. If we want to see more, then we’ll keep watching it. Well, this one did that, just like Bates Motel did recently, and we’re off and running. We’re halfway through season one now.

We just finished the very last episode of Bates Motel last night. Sandy and I have been bingeing that one for several weeks. It’s a 5-season series, 10 episodes per season. It’s based on the characters from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie “Psycho”, though it’s based in modern day and in a different small town.

We gave it a chance one night and watched the first episode. That was all it took, and we were immediately sucked in and enjoying every episode, always wanting to watch “just one more” at then end of the evening. The storyline and acting is top-notch and we definitely recommend it, whether you’ve watched the movie Psycho or not. But if you have, you’ll find some neat easter eggs throughout the show, especially in Season 5, that pay homage to the original movie, though things are “twisted” to match the series in very interesting ways.

The shows stars Freddy Highmore, from The Good Doctor–another reason we chose to give this show a shot. He plays such a unique character on The Good Doctor that we wanted to see just how different he would be in a completely different role. It also starts Vera Farmiga, an excellent actress we’ve seen in a lot of other things, and Olivia Cooke, who played Artemis in the movie “Ready Player One”.

Everyone is now asked to wear a mask in public. You can have the virus and not know it and you can spread it to others by simply breathing or talking to them. I wore a mask when I walked the dogs yesterday. I saw a few others walking, but they had no masks. Sure, if you stay far enough away from everyone else, maybe you’re safe. But there’s wind and particles travel. It’s still a risk. And you can always take the example of our leader – President Trump, who refuses to wear a mask at all. He says it’s just “not for him, it’s just a recommendation.” The number of infected continues to escalate faster and faster.

The price for gas is $1.24. This is great, but where would we go? Everything’s closed. Gatherings are prohibited, dining in is out. A trip to the store is about it, just to gather essentials and get back into isolation. Everyone who works at the hospital was given a letter from the CEO explaining that we work at a hospital and we are essential workers. He suggested we keep a copy of this letter in our vehicle at all times, in case we need it. People just driving down the road may soon be stopped and cited for not obeying the stay-at-home order.

Since I started writing this post 10 minutes ago, the Covid dashboard now shows 1,135,911 infected. Over 600 more infected in just a few minutes…that we know of.