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| UFO Research Room by Krzysztof Maziarz and Joyce Silva |
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| Vic Cyber Game in Hanoi, Vietnam, designed by Vương Luân Computer |
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| Man From Uncle |
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| Rodeo Salinas |
California Bob tries out ChatGPT:
Recent ChatGPT conversation:
[I check Expedia, see everything is $400+ a night]
Me: [close window]PS: there's a rodeo or something in Watsonville this weekend, everything booked.
Watsonville is 20 miles down the road from the Rodeo in Salinas.
The Curmudgeon’s Urban Hike: Part 2
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| Voodoo Doughnut |
I picked out a couple of science fiction novels, Nemesis by Isaac Asimov and Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. I haven't read anything by Asimov in like a zillion years. I read pretty much all of his stuff when I was younger. Nemesis interests me because it involves a large self-contained spaceship with a population of people that has gone to a nearby star. There's all kinds of technical problems with making that kind of voyage but technicians can figure that kind of thing out. The part that's a complete mystery to me is how are you going to get a group of people to live in a confined space for an indefinitely long time without killing each other or going crazy. Is it possible? Anyway we'll see how Isaac sorts it out. Maybe I'll learn something.
I read another of Bacigalupi's books a while back, The Windup Girl, and it was pretty great. As I recall it involved a girl with some kind of cybernetic-biomechanical enhancements that gave her, I don't know, high-speed ability or something, but it was problematic because if she used it very much she would overheat and she was already living in the tropics so staying cool was already a problem. Seems to me there was also a big shop that employed elephants turning big turnstiles or something. I also remember there being the remains of giant animals like skeletons or exoskeletons that were part of the landscape.
Since I found these two books and the girls weren't done browsing I headed down to the coffee shop and got myself a $4 cup of coffee in a ceramic cup. The coffee shop used to be run by Powell's but they've turned it over to some other outfit and now the coffee shop area is for coffee shop customers only. It's okay, I can afford $4 for a cup of coffee. I walked over to the corner of the room to find a seat.
There's a bench against the wall and some small two-person tables in front of the bench and then chairs facing the opposite side of the tables. I picked out a place to sit and at first I was going to sit with my back to the window looking back at the room which is kind of my go-to orientation but then I thought, you know, I'd like to watch what's going on outside. I have a good view here and it's raining outside and inside it's nice and dry so I sat at the other side of the table and then I thought this is the kind of position somebody doing, you know, surveillance would choose. 'Oh look there's a man's in a coffee shop looking out the window. Is he looking at anything in particular? No, he's just in the coffee shop looking out the window.' But a person with a suspicious turn of mind would wonder what he's watching. Is he watching that building across the street waiting for the bad guys to show up? But if they saw me hesitate when I sat down they might think well no he's not looking for anything he's just looking out the window. On the other hand someone might think that would be deliberate ruse to make you think that he's not doing surveillance, he's just looking out the window. You could argue either way.
The girls wanted to do some shopping so we headed over to Northwest 23rd. I took a nap in the car. While I am dozing there, a little box appeared in my vision. It was just big enough for two or three letters. They looked like letters that were printed in the books I had been reading. The letters were sliding by, right to left, too fast for me to make out if they were actually words or not. I was a little short of sleep, which is why I was napping, but in any case it was very strange.
We had lunch at Fireside. I got a cheeseburger, it was delicious.
On my way there (two blocks from the car) I was accosted by two people asking for spare change and passed one guy, flailing his arms, gyrating and cursing loudly, next to another guy curled up in a ball by the wall. Just typical downtown Portland. I had to use the restroom several times while we were out and about. Three of those restrooms required a passcode to unlock the door. The only one that didn't was the one at IKEA, which is its own little empire.
Note - I originally dictated this to my phone and when I said 'deliberate ruse', the phone transcribed it as 'deliberate rouse'. Now when I am editing this for the blog I saw the word rouse is wrong but I couldn't think of what the right word was, so I asked Webster for synonyms for deceive and it did not list ruse. Took me a while, but I eventually remembered ruse.
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| World Wide Delivery in 30 Minutes or Less |
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| Kitchenette |
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| Breakfast |
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| Havana Club Rum |
As I was writing this, I realized that the only way that this story makes any sense is if he didn't leave the secure area of the airport in Miami. He would have had to clear customs there, but he might not have left the secure area. But it's also weird that Cuban security would let him on the airplane with two bottles of hooch, and he was concerned that American security wouldn't.
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| KATSEYE for FLAUNT Magazine 2025 - Lara |
Thought maybe I invented a new word, but no, asocial is in the dictionary. Don't think I've ever heard it used, what I do hear is introvert. I take introvert to mean inwardly focused, and most non-asocial people take that to mean the opposite of extrovert, which is what they are. But I expect that social people, by and large, cannot imagine that a person would be interested in anything besides other people, and since most people, well, at least all the people they know, are sociable, it follows that asocial people are in the minority and might be actual freaks. Weirdos, malcontents, and probably troublemakers to boot.
There is a cult of Do-It-Yourselfers, people who pride themselves on being able to cope with most any kind of mechanical problem that dares to make its presence known. But capitalism has so perfected the creation of mechanical do-dads, you can now live your life without knowing anything about how things work. Of course it's always been possible to do that, you just needed a lot more money. Now you can do it for a relative pittance, well, if you live in an apartment in the big city. 'Course that compartment is going to cost a pretty penny, but with all the money you save on things like repairs and entertainment, it's still very possible for many people. And by saving money on entertainment, I mean digital entertainment is dirt cheap. Any kind of real life entertainment like driving a car, going to concerts, flying to Europe, or even just hiking in the woods, is going to take real money, so you can judge yourself on the social pecking order by how much you can afford to blow on entertainment. Not how much you spend, but how much you can afford, because it is very easy to spend more than you can afford. Don't do that. That is the road to ruination.
Being able to fix broken mechanical do-dads is all very well, but you are never going to get very far doing everything yourself. All our great mechanical contraptions (trains, cars, airplanes) were produced by large groups of people working together. Near as I can tell, the mechanically inept greatly outnumber the mechanically adept, so when you have a large number of people gathered together, most of those people are going to be incompetent, so the task of the leader is to design a multitude of simple jobs that these friendly nitwits can do. Maybe nitwits isn't a very nice label to apply to these people, but most everyone is a nitwit about something. Those who are mechanically adept are sometimes socially inept, and when they commit a faux pas than any right brained (left brained? I can never remember. I mean what possible use is that kind of information?) individual could see was the wrong thing to do, they are also likely to be called nitwits.
There are two ways to make money. You can sell a product or service and if you are successful you could make a large amount of money. The other way is to squeeze the peasants. That doesn't actually work so well, you can't get blood from a turnip, so what you do is you squeeze everyone, so you can say it is 'fair', but you're actually getting most of the money from the big capitalists. Now you've got this big stream of money coming, and make no mistake, it's big, it's like a firehose of money, what are you going to do with it? Well, a big chunk is going to old folks (like me) for Social Security and Medicare and that's pretty much fixed, The rest of it is up for grabs, and that's what Congress is all about. With so much money going through the government, it isn't very difficult to divert a garden hose size stream to any kind of pet project.
So Mamdani won the election for Mayor of New York City. All the press I''ve seen is predicting gloom and doom for New York. I don't think it's going to make any difference. Of course, I'm three thousand miles away, I probably wouldn't notice if New York fell into the sea. In any case, New York is too established. If the bureaucracy is not totally integrated (communication and business wise), the underground good-ol-boy / girl network surely is.
So what we have here is a guy who is a social butterfly has talked his way into the top position of the New York City Government Mafia. I don't know what he is going to do, but whatever it is, it going entail more of the tax stream going into his, and his cronies pockets. I mean, that's the whole point. Now if you can dress is up and sell it to the peasants, and you can see he knows how to do that, you're golden.
The big shots who are making bundles in the financial markets don't care. So what if your taxes go up by a zillion when you've just make ten zillion? Yes, the streets are littered with little people, but you never go out, all your financial work is done on line.
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| Chipped Glass Microwave Plate |
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| The apparently undamaged plate |
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| Plate when it came out of the dishwasher |
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| Chip off the microwave plate |
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| Locked up Laundry Detergent |
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| StorQuest Self Storage |
Save it! It's valuable! has been my sarcastic response any time there is a question about whether we should save some bit of paper that the has potential to be valuable, like receipts, instruction manuals or warranty cards. Problem with that approach is you end up with a heap of papers, most of which are absolutely worthless. Taking the time to evaluate whether a piece of paper really has any value requires thinking, and thinking about stuff that doesn't interest you is work. So the piece of paper gets added to the heap.
I suspect that saving stuff is a common affliction. Just look at the proliferation of storage lockers. These things are turning into giant compounds. I have enough stuff that renting a storage locker and moving some of that stuff into it would give me a little more room in my house. But you know what would happen: I would just accumulate more stuff and pretty soon I would be back to thinking I could use a little more storage space. However, I have a severe dislike for paying rent. It's bad enough paying property taxes, but at least I get something for them.
The problem I have is that I am an American and stuff accumulates. In order to avoid becoming a hoarder, you have to diligently and repeatedly purge your house of excess stuff. What a pain. The alternative is dying a tabloid worthy death when a pile of papers (valuable! Save it!) topples over on top of you and you suffocate.
My wife and I both work pretty diligently at getting rid of stuff we don't use. I have half a dozen items that I think might we worth enough to make posting them on Ebay worthwhile, but they've been sitting there for at least a month and I haven't made a single move in that direction. I might make enough to pay for lunch for a week, so I should do it. Of course, the longer I wait, the higher the price will go (because of inflation), but any dollars I do get will also be worth less (because of inflation), so that's basically a wash. More likely the stuff will be worth less because it is getting older by the day.
Then I got a notice from Google that my Google Drive was 3/4 full, and would I like to rent some more space? No thank you, but Google gives you 15 gigabytes. What all have I stored in there that's taking up ten gigabytes of space? So I started taking a look. I've been dumping files in there for 15 years, and there are a bunch. There are hundreds of rinky dink little spreadsheets, but these are only a few kilobytes each. There are some documents, maybe hundreds, but still, only a few kilobytes each. I suspect I started storing photos there. I probably ought to hook up my big hard drive and work on getting all my photos loaded onto it.
If I turn my head I can see my bookcase. It's mostly been taken over with medicine and stuff. There is only a handful of books and maybe one shelf's worth of 3 ring notebooks. My first desk when we moved to Oregon was a big old Steelcase unit I bought used. It had three file drawers, and I filled them with valuable papers. But I eventually found (like after 20 years) that I was only using a small subsection of one drawer. The rest were just sitting there, turning to dust. Something happened that caused a major reorganization and the Steelcase desk was replaced by a spare, wood veneer table from somewhere, Dania maybe? So a bunch of paper went to the recycler and a bunch went in the shredder. That was a pain. I remember that - sitting there patiently feeding a thousand sheets of paper into the shredder two or three at a time. The shredder earned it's pay that day.
Anyway, I probably ought to look in those notebooks. Most haven't been opened for years.
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| Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 |
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| Samsung 30 second ECG |
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| Baby Blues - Passwords |
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 establishes federal standards protecting sensitive health information from disclosure without patient's consent. - CDC
There must be some people out there who want to keep their medical records confidential, but I ain't one of them, and I don't understand this overarching desire for privacy. I suppose if you are operating in a contentious environment with people who will use any means, fair or foul, to trip you up or bring you down, you could want your medical records secure. Or you might just be paranoid. In the past I have just removed myself from those situations, but that may not always be feasible.
I watched All the President's Men again this weekend. I was thinking to myself that we need reporters like Woodward and Bernstein now but then I realised that we already know all about the misdeeds and the lies but it doesn't seem to matter these days. - Liz
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| Fentanyl pills on the streets on Portland, where such doses of the great annihilator cost as little as $1 apiece. (Credit: Tara Faul) |
The main reason for the move is our neighborhood is the drug / murder epicenter. 3 middle aged good Samaritans murdered in last few months.
This article captures the bad stuff that I see.
The linked story is pretty horrofic.
Previous posts about IAman's current residence:
Yesterday morning I went to see Dr. Schmidt, the urologist. Mom went with me. He listens to my tale of woe and prescribes Oxybutinin. I'm already taking Tamsulosin to cope with an enlarged prostate gland. When the prostate gets enlarged it becomes more difficult for it to relax enough to let urine flow, so the bladder, a muscular organ, has to work harder to push the urine out. The Tamsulosin lets the prostate relax so the bladder doesn't have to work so hard. Near as I can tell, after a long period of having to deal with the recalcitrant prostate, the bladder gets to be in a state of constant tension. So now I've got Oxybutinin which is supposed to relax the bladder. I took this once before, about a year ago, for a month, and it helped, but now the same problems have returned, so it looks like I will be adding one more drug to the handful of pills I take every day.
