Month: October 2020

Not So Easy

That’s tomorrow, and I might have earwormed you.

I make not apology for that.

This morning, in between catching up on podcast episodes sitting in my queue, I’m listening to 90s stuff that’s stuck in my head.

I have a week’s worth of Kennedy on my DVR, but who knows if I’ll get to that today.

But for the 90s plame, that goes to Jewel.

Tomorrow is 1 November. Tomorrow I’ll start my binge writing month.

I was trying to assemble the list of topics I’ve assembled, but I’m too lazy to dig through the draft entries into a single document.

I think I have most of the days covered, with little resampling, or free-writing. If I need to do the latter, it’s there, and I don’t need to plan it.

So I need to figure out what to do for some birthdays next week.

Saturday, again

I’ve been spending a lot of day so far continuing to piece together my writing bits for next month.

I also signed up for a ProtonMail account.

Seeing what’s happened over the past two weeks with tech editing make me feel very uncomfortable with what’s going on with “Big Tech” lately.

Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account for posting a story that was potentially-damaging to the Biden campaign.

Looking right now, just after 1300EDT on Saturday the 24th of October, and they’re still suspended.

So start your own Twitter. Start your own Facebook.

I don’t have the resources.

They also don’t have the resources to block everything forever.

The tagline of this site is Everything Gets Deleted Eventully.

Yes, it does. But everything can come back.

Search your own name in one of the search engines. and enter your name in quotation marks.

Bing shows me, as I’m signed-in to Office 365 with my corporate account; had to do my timecard. DDG doesn’t show me on the first page of results. The totes-didn’t-used-to-be-evil engine doesn’t show me on the front page, either.

Five years ago, that wouldn’t have been the case.

I’m listening to the clearly-Canadian Texas Senator, Ted Cruz who’s talking about this on his podcast.

But by putting things somewhere outside the control of the tech oligopoly, and the US government.

It used to be that if you searched for me, you’d find things like interviews about Slashdot’s tenth anniversary in the NYT.

But even with the mass deletions, I do refuse to be permanently-erased.

I’m probably not going to have a legacy through posterity, but somebody, somewhere, might find what I’ve created.

Whether it’s of any value to anyone is unimportant.

So I write. It’s what I do. It’s something I still can do.

Learning to Relax

I started writing this on Thursday, but got distracted. I’ve sortakinda been off work since Tuesday, and trying to figure out what to do with myself. See the title.

I’ve been trying to burn built-up leave. When you go, what, five years without any paid time off, you grow accustomed to just working all the time.

Because of a change in my company’s policies just before the lockdown, I had a ton of time built up that I needed to spend before the end of the calendar year.

A few weeks ago, I told my boss that I probably just wouldn’t be working on Fridays through the end of the year.

So, after I finished paying my protection racket to the “professional organization” that has a protection agreement with the government, and demands money from me every three years just so I can stay working.

My psychologist thinks that I should try doing my writing via a microphone. I don’t know what to do with speech-to-text stuff, and I’m not sure what to do with the resultant audio.

Do I try to record a podcast?

Nobody wants to listen to that shit.

Besides, who knows if I physically can even do it. This morning, after doing my normal things, I’m slowly calm down.

But when can I get some continuous sleep?

I don’t know. I’m not sleepy at this point, but definitely, as the kids would say, woke as fuck.

So work on the NoJoMo stuff for next month.

11/1: Intro, etc.

11/2: ???

11/3: Election Day

11/4: Election Day reactions (if we know the winner….) Other things in the week, relatives’ birthdays.

11/11: Veterans’ Day

11/26: Football, especially Thanksgiving Football. (As I write this, the games are evenly balanced among conferences; if you look at some previous years, I was complaining about the paucity of AFC teams….)

11/27: Thanksgiving

11/30: Final/wrap-up

Another thing I did this morning was clean up some Shmoocon entries I’d accidentally had under the NoJoMo tag. Oops.

I think what I did during the summer was somewhat-effective. Maybe I’ll try to incorporate that in. My first thought was to do that for every entry, but given everything that has been, and will be going on, I worry that I’ll be writing far too much.

Resistance is futile

Or is it government?

Today’s news is that President Trump has COVID-19. That is on the heels of Ralph Northam also has it.

One flaunted his sparing mask use. The other wore his as a badge of honor.

Both got the virus.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s no omniscient answer?

I come back to, “Government Doesn’t Work.”

Buy things that support the science that’ll knock this out. Pray if you believe in God. (And understand that belief in God doesn’t preclude science….so says the guy who’s entrusted his complex medical issues to a medical center at a Catholic university…)