This predictive text stuff is annoying me. No, I wasn’t trying to title this entry as “Twenty Years.”

The show last night was fun. Food at the bar was good.

But today is a day of being finished, and relaxing.

I’m happy I finished.

I still need to listen to and write the latest ep of Notes of a Goon over on Back At Again.

But, at the same time, I’m ready to rest, too.

I have no idea what’s going on with the new days. I’m looking forward to the fall. Maybe there’ll be a place where I can take a breath.

Then write again in November.

Looking forward to the fall. Sounds like there’s a few hot days ahead, but I’m ready to relax. Some.

(And, perhaps out of habit, I was looking for news, but, no, I’m stopping. We’re finished. Happy birthday to me in a few hours.)

Kind of just kicking around before heading to the show for Robbie and Chris in Arlington.

Had to work today to try to get some things finished.

I’ve been getting quite a bit of enjoyment out of Eli Lake’s podcast. It’s refreshing to get some feedback on social media from a source. While I do have my disagreements with him, at least he’s got half a damn clue about the bad things in the world. I can’t say the same for a lot of the people who’ve taken over the Libertarian Party.

The brains behind the Mises Caucus last night on Kennedy was implying that people who get government pensions should be prohibited from making comments on current events.

What’s a nice way to tell him to go fuck himself? I’m sure there is one.

I sent my wife a list of backhanded Southern Women use.

Entertaining stuff. While she was downloaded in Florida, and has spent most of her life in Virginia, her parentage is from the North.

News. This hit from Epoch Times earlier this morning.

Same story, different source, and no paywall. But the big judicial victory the environmentalists had about offshore drilling got wiped away with the big spending bill they passed.

Oops.

A bit of schadenfreude?

My ride’s here.

Winding towards the end of the streak. Happy birthdays flowing to several of the folks I know; so many fellow Thanksgiving babies.

Leftover pizza for dinner. I do have to work tomorrow due to various outages this afternoon and earlier this week.

I have stuff I need to finish, but haven’t been able to get it finished due to technical difficulties.

Still have a few slots left in my fantasy league if anyone is interested.

News…. This one evokes memories of Tommy From Quinzee. (Apologies for the link that sets off the Sekurity alarms….)

FOX5DC has a sidebar with TMZ that’s on in the background. I can’t bring myself to care.

Two more days.

I should look for something interesting to write on. But who knows whether I’ll actually have a lot of time to write, now, that I’m working, then headed to see Robbie The Fire and BK Chris tomorrow.

Very long day with work interrupted by an appointment with the brain docs. Moving closer, but I think I might have to work, and forego some of the days I’d planned on taking off.

But I’m chugging through.

With the doc visit, I think we hit on some of my resigned attitude on so many things, including my family situation right now.

Though getting really bent out of shape about things has never really been my thing, the reality of my health situation really adds to it. Are you upset? No. Not really. It’s just something else I have to deal with. There’s nothing I can do about any of it, so why get angry?

Physically I’m able to persist better than I used to, so even less annoyance/anger.

Did have a podcast this afternoon that reinforced what I think about what’s going on when it comes to public affairs. This.

I’ve been calling the zOMGANTIWAR contingent the “NeoHippies” lately, and this really reinforces that. They’re stuck on latching on to any bit from the 1970s and 1980s that was viewed as being opposed to the evil US regime.

No. Go fuck yourself.

I think I mentioned that I went to high school with fellow military brats who were born in Tehran. I remember reading this about the team put together by Ross Perot who was deeply-involved in US politics at the time.

But I also remember hearing stories about things that happened at the airport/Air Force Base as things were really going nuts during the revolution.

Rumor is that you can make napalm out of foam rubber couch cushions….

But the AntiWar folks make it seem as if they’re perfectly peaceful, and we should be negotiated with. No. They’re still thugs. Just as they were in 1978.

I’m ready to be finished writing, but I’m going to get through what I’d planned. Three more days.

News.

The NeoHippies worry most about nuclear weapons. For them, nothing’s ever progressed past the LBJ Daisy ad from 1964.

Meanwhile there’s still a ton of conventional weapons that are sitting around….and they’ll still blow up. Saw this from Crimea.

I think I’ve written about this before when it comes to the Norks. Nuclear weapons are scary. But so are 170mm artillery shells.

And the latter are going to work a lot more often.

After Intertubes outage, I’ve kind of lost where I was.

So let’s call this finished.

Three more days.

I think I should have done more when it comes to prompting out this period. I didn’t, and am almost finished, so continue on with what I’ve been doing so far.

I glanced to see what I’d written in the past, and there’s something from an unidentified journaling site whe3re I was writing my thoughts about the then-new MacOS X 10.2.

I wasn’t writing about the fun with 10.1 where Finder would crash, and you could SSH in to reboot the system, but not much else.

Random aside — this predictive text stuff in the browser is annoying gas hell, and I’m too lazy to STFW and figure out how to turn it off.

I did take a company DIEEI survey. *mumbles something about HR being the root of many the problems in the western world*

My wife asked if I wanted to move to the couch. I do, but I’m kind of staying where I am to finish up the things I’m working on right now.

Oh well.

Still kind of in the relaxed mood from some recent writing.

When it comes to the news, I’m kind of sparking on my past from systems engineering.

The climate bill is totes going to work.

Establish your measures of effectiveness comprised of quantifiable measures of performance.

That sort of thing is a terrible idea for anyone up for election.

More on the writing, however, I also need to build in more time for free-writing. Yes, a lot of what I’ve done so far this summer has been that, but I wonder if it’d be better if I really had specific spaces set aside for that.

Speaking of blog organization, though, Rooskie comment spammers have been something that’s been popping up last couple of days.

For the foreign attackers, “drop” target. For the ones from domestic providers, “reject.”

I have almost nothing from when I was fifteen.

That year wasn’t great. I had what was probably my first really major MS exacerbation.

Incredibly introverted. Lots of acne.

I watched something this weekend, somewhat with my wife (she bailed towards the end). The episode of this on Y2K.

It was a lot as I was doing some IT and radio engineering in those days. There were satellites that got retired early because of the problem. Generally, however, everything worked.

Still, there was a lot of worry about what would happen.

When the year changed over, pretty much all the lights in the studio were off, generators running. I had CBS Radio on a phone coupler in case the satellite didn’t work.

VICE, however, has really gone off the deep end when it comes to tracking minor conspiracies.

Speaking of VICE, interesting live event on Substack with the The Fifth Column folks last night.

It’s refreshing to have something I consume that’s not constant doom-and-gloom.

Same could be said for Brad and Hannah over at BASED Politics.

But what I’ve really come to the conclusion on lately is that the experts don’t know.

The RONPAUL/AUSTRIAN ECON crowd can’t explain why precious metals haven’t gone through the roof price-wise when it comes to increased currency liquidity. And, no, it’s not just the Federal Reserve. If it was, USD <–> EUR wouldn’t be basically 1:1 really for the first time ever.

I don’t know what’s going on. Neither do you because you read a thirty year-old Rothbard book.

I mentioned BASED because Brad had a guest talking about some of the provisions as the horribly-rebranded Inflation Reduction Act.

While I’m still skeptical that many of the provisions in the bills will do much of anything, but it’s not the disaster that was the Build Back Better package, with the PRO Act.

Things aren’t as bleak as I worried.

Today’s fun was taking half a day of vacation to go to the dentist. Party.

But whittle down the unused time a bit.

More tomorrow.

Just a few more for this period of writing.

Had an incredibly odd dream yesterday afternoon. I think it involved one of the maintenance men where I live now who’d been living surreptitiously in our old apartment 200 miles away….with some appropriately-aged woman who I think was on staff here, too.

Probably a combination of the issues dealing with my mom’s house, and all the craziness happening with her right now.

*shrug*

Looking backwards at old entries, I guess there was a quiz I’d taken in 2006.

What kind of sex are you?

You are Foreplay

Um. Okay?

Can I miss being young, and healthy? That was taken right about when my wife and I were getting really serious. If the quiz wasn’t lost to the Intertubes history, I mihgt re-take it to see what I get today.

But I’m comfortable that there’s not been anyone else for, really now, more than two decades.

News.

My representative, following Mrs. Pelosi’s lead, went to the Republic of China. Amazingly, enough, I don’t think it was broken clock syndrome.

Several likes on a Twitter aside.

This was a bit of a left-handed compliment. The folks running the messaging are amazed by the bullshit that folks like Zinn peddled.

This is as I’m struggling through one of the Soho Forum Debates about Ukraine. Yes, it’s a violation of the restriction I set on myself of turning the fucking channel when Horton is on, but, given that it’s more than a month later, I have a sick curiosity to see how wrong the arguments are.

It’s not disappointing me in that regard.

To quote some pandemic binge-watch I didn’t consume, Winter is coming.

Might be something to revisit during NoJoMo in November.

Settling out stuff with the journal, and pulling off the last bits from the old VM.

Yay Saturday.

Also have some things to help a friend with about some old audio hardware.

The fun of trying to compile drivers for somewhat-uncommon hardware.

Been a while. At the same time, I’m looking forward to it.

Trying to put together the plans for this fall/winter.

1. Travel to Biloxi again
2. Figure out what’s going on with my job
3. Get an MRI in December
4. Go to Mexico?
5. Criticize the stupid that’s coming from the political world

With the last one, I glanced around Twitter this morning to see if the NeoHippie crowd had had anything to say about Rushdie.

Fucking silence.

BUT IT’S ALL ABOUT MESSAGING!

Last night’s Peddling Fiction happy hour reassured me some, however.

Other people are reaching the same conclusion I was really arriving at last summer. Maybe I’m too tuned-in, but my life at this point is listening and thinking.

Flashback to this date in 2015. Things were seriously bad back then. I’m happy I made it through.

Is there an aspect of your personality you wish you could chnage?

That’s a tough question. The only thing I can think of is that maybe I’m too trusting of ordinary people sometimes.

I don’t think my boss is out to get me.
I don’t think the government is out to get me.
I don’t think evil corporations are out to get me.

I’ve never attributed to malice what could more easily be explained by ignorance or stupidity.

“They’re not bad; they’re just stpid.”

Maybe that makes me a fool.

But, whatever. I could spend lots of spoons thinking about how I’ve been fucked over. But I don’t have enough to waste.

---

I really haven’t backed down from those things. But the major disruptions I’ve been through in the past almost decade have really settled me.

Off to do some chores. :-/

Well, out of necessity, I think the move is progressing. control-h.org should be up on its new platform. Hopefully I don’t fuck it up, and it’ll run for about five years. (Will I live five more years? Good question.)

Sampling through old entries on OD with twelve in them. From Christmas Eve, 2001.

I’m twelve

Yah, so my parents bought me a bicycle for christmas. Hmm. Yet another hobby for me that involves the risk of serious bodily injury…..Let’s look at them, shall we?

– Chainsmoking

– Binge Drinking

– Skiing

– Mountain Biking

– Radio

Yep, I’m a goner. But I’ve decided I’m going to live long enough to see Halley’s Comet again.

---

I don’t know why I was so negative about this. Maybe it just seemed like there wasn’t a lot of effort put into it.

I’m guessing that was largely because of my age at the time, and the circumstances of the new post-9/11 world.

I was going into my last semester of college, and working quite a bit. My recreational time consisted of driving around aimlessly with interruptions for stops at all-night diners.

I think, by this point, I did have Saturday nights off, at least, after working the early morning shift.

Would I enjoy being able to ride that bike these days? Yes. Maybe not as much as skiing. Certainly not as much as being able to see, speak, etc..

Skiing would be nice, too.

So. News.

Anne Heche died. What a strange story. Trying to forget Phil Hendrie doing a bit on her when she decided she was tired of being with Ellen. Yes, there was an intonation about her needing baby batter.

The next was the story on Salman Rushdie’s stabbing in NYC.

The NeoHippies on Twitter seem to be pretty silent about it. Can’t say that I’m surprised. For them, the world started in 2003.

Nope. I remember.

I remember the PanAm flight over Scotland we were worried my uncle was aboard.

This stuff isn’t as new as you all are convinced it is. And you’re doing yourselves a disservice by listening to 1970s peaceniks who seemingly missed all of the 1980s; what happened to Ceausescu?

Yeah, I won’t be waiting around.

Time to go watch Beavis and Butthead, and have dinner with my wife.

Another long day. There’s not a lot of details I can give, but I’m satisfied I’m doing the right things, and am getting some credit for those things.

I did get reassurance on some of the things that I think are falling into neglect that my group is actually doing a very good job. We’ve just got so many things to stay on top of that it looks bad only if you don’t consider the total volume.

It’s more difficult to see the good things when everything’s flooding in at once.

When I was riding to my new office the other day, I was talking about some of my past fun when it comes to IT operations. Where I am has bits of it, but it’s really not the same thing. I think the move “to the cloud” is going to continue to make the esoteric tech skills less useful.

Part of my weekend plans involves trying to help a longtime friend do something esoteric with a wheezing client machine he’s working on. The hardware in question was iffy with Windows 98. With 32-bit Windows, it was dodgier, still. But it’s something I’m interested to walk through, see if I can get it working. And maybe finish up moving control-h.org to its new perch. Other stuff has moved, just need to finish up email, etc., with the main site.

So news. I did see discussion of an article on the death of social media on HN. This was just after looking through my old entries and seeing lots of discussion of Orkut. I remember running the network, and trying to figure out this newfangled thing…MySpace.

Things move along.

I have some things to do next couple of days. I should go to get to that.