“Henceforth humanity has the right to know that it is good to be human, good to live on this earth, good to have a body, because God in Jesus chose and said “yes” to our humanity. Or as we Franciscans love to say, “Incarnation is already Redemption.” The problem is solved. Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days.”
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr
T’was the day before the blizzard and all throughout the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
All the the weather apps and TV stations are reporting winter storm watches, ahead of the “big” winter storm coming our way, and that this is happning on the Winter Solstice seems apt.
Will The 2023 Chicago Cubs Be Trade Deadline Buyers?
BleedCubbieBlue.com puts the Dansby Swanson contract in context:
“This is the largest deal that Jed Hoyer’s front office has inked during his time in charge, and it’s just really not that big of a contract relative to the rest of the league or the Cubs monetary might. It doesn’t crack the top ten in MLB in years or AAV. It is the second largest deal in the history of the Cubs franchise, and it is nowhere near the top 20 contracts as of 2021, let alone ever.”
What I see in Hoyer is a baseball executive afraid to make a mistake. Under the rubric of sustaining success one may never have the chance to win championships. What we appear to have here is a plan of waiting to see how the season goes, and if half way through they have a real chance, then make trades to sign players you need, which is what happened in 2016.
The question then is whether the Cubs have enough talent going in to the season to have a good first half and be buyers at the trade deadline. With the players they have signed and the young talent they have, the 2023 Chicago Cubs on paper are better than the 2022 Chicago Cubs, the problem though is that the Cardinals have also gotten better, and they added Wilson Contreras to a team with the reigning MVP.
“The longer I have tried to follow Jesus, the more I can really say that I no longer believe in Jesus. I know Jesus. I know him because I have often taken his advice, taken his risks, and it always proves itself to be true!”
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr
Reading this article about making digital (online) information accessible to your survivors and wondering, doesn’t passkeys make this problem worse? Passkeys work with the biometric scan on my Macbook or my phone and relies on my fingerprint that will not be accessible to my wife when I die. So, if I switch to passkeys, how do enable my survivor to access accounts protected by them?
I don’t want to be skeptical, I want to be curious.
Chicago Cubs Already Five Games Behind in NL Central
No matter how frustrated and angry I am with the Chicago Cubs front office for not signing any free agents of consequence, it doesn’t matter. The only real thing that matters is how Ricketts (the owner) feels about the result. If I am the owner of a team and I give the people running the team the greenlight to spend money to improve the team and they don’t do it, I am not happy with their results and I will come to the conclusion that changes are needed.
Hoyer has been a big part of the decision making since after the Cubs won the World Series. Since 2017 the Cubs have regressed in their effort to return to the World Series. Looking for changes from the same people making decisions is insane, you need to change the decision makers to get a different result.
The bottom line is that the Chicago Cub’s division competitors have become much better this off season than the Cubs, and so they are losing the offseason. It might be that the Cubs surprise with their own talent, but I think that Ricketts has to start losing patience with Hoyer. If the Cubs are at the bottom of the division and out of the running by June, I think Hoyer must go. If Hoyer continues to stay then I can only conclude that he is performing to the level Ricketts expects and therefore all the talent decisions are on him.
I was thinking we would never see blossoms in this succulent ever again.
I must be the only person who doesn’t care about ChatGPT. Ok, there may be a few others, but too few.
Why The Age of American Progress Has Ended:
When you add the anti-science bias of the Republican Party to the anti-build skepticism of liberal urbanites and the environmentalist left, the U.S. seems to have accidentally assembled a kind of bipartisan coalition against some of the most important drivers of human progress. To correct this, we need more than improvements in our laws and rules; we need a new culture of progress.
Both sides, locked against progress, leading to our demise.
Using IFTTT To Send Blog Posts To Day One
I am testing sending what I write in my blogs to Day One via an IFTTT applet that is monitoring their RSS feeds. There are two problems. First, the IFTTT applet doesn’t do a good job of handling titleless posts, second, hyperlinks in the posts are stripped, seemingly even if I create the links using markdown.
The applet simply creates new entries to Day One in an order and it appears that if the title is blank then the next entry in the item content is used for the title, which by default that is the item link. I moved the item link to below the item content, but my temporary work around is to configure the applet to create a “default” title for every post, with the actual title, it it exists, on the following line. but this is not optimal.
It looks like I could add some Javascript logic to the applet so I am wondering if I could simply write some code to inspect the feed title and skip it, but that may take some time to figure it out. I wonder whether anyone else has already done this?
I’ve been cross posting what I write here to Twitter, but due to the changes at Twitter I’ve decided that I no longer want to contribute my content to that service.
Recently changed the watch face on my Pixel Watch. I had been wearing Index but I am now wearing Concentric. I feel like Google doesn’t do enough with promoting watch faces.
For some reason Google Assistant is not working on my Pixel Watch. It recognizes “ok Google” but then does not recognize anything that I say. Restarting the watch and phone now as both have been updated recently. Ok, restarting the watch appears to fix the problem.
Upgraded my iPad Mini 6 to iPadOS 16 yesterday and was reminded of the new Apple Weather app, otherwise known as what happened to Dark Sky. One thing I wish the weather apps did and most do not is put the normal temperature next to the current temperature. I can’t be the only one who wonders whether the current temperature is above or below normal. I use many weather apps and the only one that provides historical information and normal temperatures is Accuweather, but they bury it.
Today I did some experimentation with passkeys, which is supposed to be the new, better, more secure alternative to computer passwords. Maybe it will be, but right now, it is not as easy to setup and use across platforms as passwords.
Over one hundred years and only one radio play by play person has called a World Series win for the Chicago Cubs.
Looking at the COVID numbers for my county and it shows good news and bad news. Good news is that the weekly reported cases is flat compared to this time last year. Bad news is that the infection rate, which is a leading indicator to the community numbers, is trending upward having been relatively level (up and down around 1) since August. It doesn’t look like we will reach the levels of new cases through the end of December and January like we did last year, but we clearly are getting the somewhat expected increases with the holidays and colder weather upon us.
Wilson Contreras signing with the Cardinals is the absolute worst case scenario for the Chicago Cubs front office. They better hope that Contreras does not become a Cubs killer or the fan base will never let them hear the end of it. The Cub’s unwillingness to do what it takes to keep players who fans grew to love is extremely frustrating.