Do you think Die Hard is a Christmas movie?
The NHL has now “paused' their season, meaning no games until after Christmas. For now. Bets on the pause extending until after New Years?
It’s beginning to feel a lot like March, 2020, when the world seemed to start locking down. Back then it started with professional sports and now I see NHL, NBA, and NFL games being postponed. The NHL is postponing travel games to Canada for U.S. teams.
There is much in this New Yorker article, A Political Philosopher Is Hopeful About the Democrats, that makes sense to me as one who lives in fly-over country. I think the desire to be respected may be stronger than of democracy. Our predicament is due to an avalanche of decisions starting with Reagan and continuing through Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Unfortunately the mode of politics is to gain power and then get all you want while you can so there is no real focus on core needs.
We are being visited by a flock of birds, enough that I can hear them chirping as they forage. When the whole flock takes flight you hear the mass flutter of their wings.
I am seeing a definite increase in the number of athletes in COVID-19 protocols and sporting events being delayed. I can’t help but feel some form of a lockdown is coming. Bah humbug!
From two years ago:
My constantly saying that I am great does not make me so, that makes me arrogant.
As noted previously, I have a new Macbook Air and I am just getting used to using Mac OS. When at my desk I am connecting the Macbook to a 32 inch BenQ monitor via a USB-C dock and because I am using the Macbook’s keyboard, the monitors are arranged in System Preferences Displays settings as vertically stacked, with the external display above the internal display. I have the external display set as the primary but what has been frustrating is that the OS X dock doesn’t automatically move up to the primary display. I cannot believe that I have to move the mouse to the bottom left of the external monitor to get the dock to move when OS X seems to be smart enough to know which menu bar is active on which display; seems to me on which ever screen the menu bar is active that is the display that should have the dock. Testing shows that the issue only seems to be with vertical stacking of the displays (so I move the mouse up/down between displays) and not when the monitors are horizontally arranged (move the mouse right/left between displays).
Today’s Axios Future provides a very nice one pager about Quantum Computing. I really like how Axios publishes on the web.
It’s a weird weather day. Temperatures are in the 50s, which is way above normal, and a lot of wind. Weather apps are reporting sustained 20 mph wind with gusts up to 40 mph. Right now rain is moving in. Biggest risk is a power outage. I am trying to decide whether I can take my normal walks outside.
Did you see the news that Pfizer’s COVID booster is effective against the Omicron variant? How many of you then thought to yourself, of course it does, that’s how they are going to make more money? That’s the corrosive power of money influencing our thoughts and our decision making.
Nine years ago I wrote a definition of personal computing in the following formulaic manner:
personal computing = hardware + software + Internet + intelligence
For the most part I think that definition still holds up although we haven’t come as far with intelligence as I expected we would back then.
Today I learned about V for Wikipedia, which is a nice though oddly named iOS app for Wikipedia that on first look reminded of me of V for Vendetta. I think the nearby feature will be useful.
Right now more than 4,400 people in Michigan are in hospitals due ot COVID and we have the highest amount of hospitalizations in the United States.
How many static site generators can there be? Seems like thousands! Well, only hundreds.
Three years ago I built my wiki server and the wiki has grown to 409 pages. I still need to move it to a 64-bit server in order to run the latest version of wiki.
I think folks who are serious about “tools for thought” should check out the work of Linus Lee. Linus has a different point of view on the topic that includes developing one’s own tools for thought, which thus are highly optimized to one’s thinking, but also focuses more on what to do after one writes stuff down rather than on the writing.
We had above normal temperatures yesterday but work prevented me from getting outside enough. It was a glorious sun.
Looks like all those millions of workers quitting their jobs, aka “the great resignation,” are not lazy, they are going in to business for themselves.
Finished reading: No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear by Kate Bowler 📚 The writing in this book is all too relatable to me. A quote:
While I believe that there may be rich meaning at every crossroad in our lives—each meeting and departure, car accident or chance encounter—I do not believe that God will provide for every need or prevent every sorrow. From my hospital room, I see no master plan to bring me to a higher level, guarantee my growth, or use my cancer to teach me. Good or bad, I will not get what I deserve. Nothing will exempt me from the pain of being human.
Most of us know and are faced daily with what is to be human but spend little time thinking about Being.