Today is the first day I’ve been able to take a walk in 2025 due to having COVID since New Year’s Eve. We got a few inches of snow over night.
Manton has created a low cost version the environment I used for my primary blog called micro.one. I honestly think the $5 per month I pay for micro.blog is a good deal, but if you want to dip your toes in to blogging and the fediverse then micro.one is a very good way to start.
I haven’t posted here since the day after Christmas and in many ways the picture below explains why.
Days after Christmas I traveled to Grand Rapids for the annual Great Lakes Invitational college hockey tournament. Michigan Tech lost their first game to Western Michigan and won their second game in overtime against Northern Michigan.
Despite Tech’s loss, I had a great time, however I started feeling congested on New Year’s Eve and confirmed via home test on New Year’s day that I have COVID. I’ve been isolating since then, but have to be back at work today.
It’s my first experience with COVID and this has been one serious cold. The symptoms have improved and the fever broke a few days ago. I’ve had all the symptoms but no loss of taste or smell. I wouldn’t be surprised if I am feeling the affects for a while.
NFL On Christmas Day
Yesterday (Christmas day) is the first time that Netflix streamed live NFL games and I was happy to have a sports alternative to the NBA, which historically has been the only professional league playing on Christmas. Netflix’s production did not go without a hitch for me using an Apple TV. I went in to the app and selected “Watch Live” which I expected would take me to whatever was the current place of the stream, but instead it started at the beginning of the stream an hour earlier. Worse, for some reason it got to a point where it just kept showing non-stop commercials, like it was stuck in a loop. I was screaming in frustration/anger because I knew the game had started and I was not able to watch it. It then dawned on me to look at the progress indicator at the bottom of the display and I noticed it mostly at the beginning on the left rather than the right, so I tried fast forwarding and that enabled me to catch up. I don’t know what happened, I searched to see whether anyone else had the same experience and I did not find any reports.
Christmas day 2024 in southeast Michigan. Merry Christmas 🎄
Finished reading: The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller 📚 I believe the way to understand world around us is to understand ourselves. Awareness of how our ego demands to be in control and forces us to see the world and either/or. The studies discussed in this book support a deeper knowing that the world is not nor intended to be perceived as either/or but rather both/and. If you are familiar with Richard Rohr’s writing you will find much of what he says supported by the findings described in this book.
Right now there is no way to add a photo to a collection using the Android version of the micro.blog app. At least I don’t think there is as I am use dark mode on my phone and when I tap a picture in the Uploads section of the app all of the text appears to be black on dark so i can’t read anything.
Hopefully some time in the future there will be a way to add a photo to a collection at the time of upload.
Squirrels on a cold roof.
Finished reading: Invisible Jesus by Scot McKnight 📚 I think this book is targeted at professional christians, but it does make good points.
A good start to the holiday week.
Major League Hypocrisy
Generations of people in the United States have grown up under the thumb of institutions that they believe are corrupt. The only solution now, these people believe, is to blow up the institutions. The focus is on the destruction of the institutions with little thought about what comes next. Who decides what comes next and why? This is the opportunity the billionaire class sees for themselves, which is why people like Elon Musk are willing to “donate” their time go the new U.S. Presidential administration.
New Photo Collections
A new feature has been added to micro.blog that automatically generates pages of photos that one groups together in to a collection. I found the instructions for creating my first collection did not work, as I had to create a new page and embed the shortcode. Looks like after creating that first page I can then create new collections as per the instructions, but you still have to create a page with the collections shortcode in order to make them available.
I have created a Photo Collections page that will be the index to my collections. I wish that the Photos page automatically listed the collections rather than making me create and maintain a page.
We have plenty of sunshine here today, but the temperature with wind-chill has been below zero up to the single digits.
Installed the Android 15 QPR 1 update on my Pixel 7a yesterday. The most important new feature for me is the 80% limit on recharging the phone. Information I’ve seen about phone battery life suggests that continually charging the phones up to 100% has a big impact on battery life. I think that problem is made worse by wireless charging that makes it simple to just recharge the phone whenever it is not in my pocket. For example, I have the Pixel Stand that really seems intended to be the resting space for my phone when I am at my desk, but before yesterday I had to be sure to not leave it on the stand once the battery reached 80% or so of charge. Now I (hopefully) no longer have to worry about that.
I don’t understand how any professional sports owner can tolerate the same performance year over year, but that is the case for the Chicago Cubs as long as Jed Hoyer is in charge. I wonder whether Craig Counsell has started to think he made the wrong decision last year?
The weather was fantastic today, with sunshine and above average temperatures. Here is a picture of what’s left of the sunshine reflecting off trees along my walk.
A couple of weeks ago I took advantage of Best Buy’s Black Friday sale to buy the Space Black M4 Macbook Pro, and I have been very happy with the purchase. The sale plus trade-in of a M1 Macbook Air brought the price down to below the cost of the 15-inch Macbook Air. I am finding the 14-inch screen of the Pro to be much better than the 13-inch one of the Air, and of course the M4 processor and 16 GB of RAM provide much better performance.
Today I received the sleeve case I bought for it from Mission Leather Company, shown below. I have been using these style cases from Mission Leather with my Macbook and iPad for several years now and recommend them. I picked the darker leather, “Whiskey”, version of the sleeve to match the near black color of the Macbook.
Debate That Leads Toward Progress
This blog post by Alan Jacobs on the conservative disposition is similar to a book by George Will titled The Conservative Sensibility. I think both do a good job of describing the conservative world view. What I don’t understand from reading these pieces is how conservatives imagine progress is made.
Will has a pretty strong disdain for progressives. Most conservatives I encounter seem to wear their knee-jerk reaction against progress as a badge of honor.
Now, I imagine an answer that Will might provide is it should be incumbent upon one to convince him that whatever one might claim is progress is that in fact. For that to work, it must also be incumbent on conservatives to listen and be open to being convinced. What I see in practice more often than not is an unwillingness to listen to an opponent, often tainted with contempt, coupled with an inability to make a persuasive argument. In short, a lack in what I would say are the skills of debate.
What might even be worse than the lack of true debate in politics today is a seeming disagreement that progress is in fact a goal. We can’t even seem to agree that shootings in schools in the United States is a problem worthy enough to actually strive to prevent. If we can agree that a child’s life might actually be more important than a constitutional amendment, then how can any progress be made?
A Lack Of Meaning And Dualism
Just read a great blog post by Dave Rogers on the importance of meaning, which includes a referral to a TED talk on the topic. He writes:
But as children, we were exposed, constantly and relentlessly to messages about achievement, about desire and acquisition, about competition and rank. We were saturated in these messages, and children today still are. We relentlessly observe each other, in part I suppose, in the traditional sense of getting to know other people. To make friends, or to learn who our enemies are. But mostly, I think, to compare ourselves with others.
I particularly agree with this description of how dualism is implanted in children by emphasizing achievement and merit that can only be determined through comparison.
In my opinion, one way to read Genesis 3 is as description for how all of us grow up. Our parents teach us right from wrong and in that we all eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Dualism becomes our default, evolutionary, mode of operation, which requires us to see everything and everyone apart from ourselves. Dualism prevents us from seeing ourselves as a part of something else, connected to everything and everyone around us.
What I find even worse, is that almost everyone’s experience with what is known as Christianity, reinforces this dualism. Whether it’s described as bible believing or not bible believing, protestant or catholic, saved or not, sinner or not a sinner, and we believe these things because we believe this is how God intends us to view things. All of this defines a hierarchical world with supremacy as the natural order, and that leads to all the “isms” that ills us.
It’s as if we convinced ourselves that the story of Genesis 3 is exactly how God intended, but is that true? Go back and read it. What if the whole purpose of what Jesus taught was to for us to change our minds about how we think of God?