General

Post #34

The last time I had 34 or more posts in a month was way back in October 2009 when I wrote 38 posts. I’m still not sure how I managed that. Temporary insanity, perhaps. Maybe this current spate of activity is a sign that I’ll be firing on all cylinders for National Novel Writing Month, coming some 31 days from now. Looking over my posts since the start of the month, my novel will be less a story and more a series of image macros about someone who runs regularly. I’ll call it The Jogger. No, too plain. That Jogging Guy. Hmm. That probably wouldn’t work, either. To really cash in it should be something like The Girl Who Jogged or The Girl Who Wore Running Shoes or The Girl [something something to go with the other billion novels that have appeared recently that have titles starting with “The Girl.” Thanks, Stieg Larsson who isn’t even alive].

Anyway, one of the things I’ve noticed is I can no longer stay up late on the weekend like in olden times because my body is so used to getting up early that all of my fun/party genes turn out the lights by 11 p.m. This is to say that while I am typing this I am also starting to nod off, so I’ll probably go to bed soon. But at least on the weekend I can sleep in. Except I feel guilty now when I do that, then regret it after I wake up because I have less time to do other things, both productive and otherwise, and also I won’t get the 12 hours of standing activity on my Apple Watch and somehow that has become important to me. On the plus side, it has reduced the chances of varicose veins or gout or something. Whatever it is that happens when you don’t stand enough, like our hunter/gatherer ancestors used to (I mean that they stood a lot, not the opposite. I’m pretty sure they spent almost every day hunting bears or maybe just one especially wily bear who always eluded their spears and traps. They’d call him Ol’ Scoot because he’d always scoot off before they could catch him. You couldn’t just sit around when Ol’ Scoot taunted you like that. Plus maybe you haven’t developed enough brain power yet to stop gathering poison berries to nosh on, so you really need some of that good bear meat or the stories around the cave fire are going to be all, “Remember when we had more than three of us to tell stories about that stupid Ol’ Scoot to? No, I’m good on the berries, thanks.”)

 

The September list (2016)

Some miscellaneous thoughts on the past month:

  • I didn’t trip when running. Yay. I posted some of my best times of the year when running (and not tripping). Also yay.
  • I had to change my run route once due to bears. Boo.
  • It didn’t snow. Yay.
  • After a few drizzly days around Labor Day the weather was pretty nice overall. The month ended with the chill of fall in the air. Because, you know, it was fall. Morning temperatures have dipped into the single digits. I already want summer back.
  • Low cal hot chocolate mostly tastes like thin chocolate water. I’ve had this a few times recently as it’s gotten colder in ye olde computer nook.
  • Work has been insanely busy. I don’t foresee it being not busy until the heat death of the universe. Possibly longer.
  • Halloween candy showed up store shelves almost as soon as Labor Day was over. Boo. The Christmas decorations are probably being brought out even as I type this.
  • The stat holiday is at the beginning of the month so it’s kind of all downhill after that.
  • My birthday was pleasant and unspectacular, just the way I like it.

I’d buy that for a dollar (or $2.99 or $9.99 or maybe $12.99?)

kobo.com appears to have a bit of a problem when a daily deal expires but the ad for it is still up. Just how much do you have to pay for this book, anyway? So many possibilities! (The answer is $12.99.)

If I get to choose, I choose $2.99. But I don't get to choose anymore. :(
If I get to choose, I choose $2.99! But I don’t get to choose. 🙁

It’s not as bad as Apple’s original iMac mouse but it would be nice if expired deals didn’t actually still show up on the site.

Save

Oh, iTunes, why are you so easy to hate?

I recently and foolishly updated iTunes to the latest version. This new version allegedly makes the Apple Music streaming service part better. I wouldn’t know because I don’t listen to streaming music because I am a dinosaur (that still buys all of his music digitally now, so I’m evolving, slowly).

The one new feature I noticed, other than gigantic cover art that consumes much of the interface, is the new Random Shuffle mode. What is Random Shuffle mode, you ask. It’s where you listen to an album and iTunes–with shuffle turned off–will jump to a random song from another album. If you do something–switch songs, click the shuffle button a few times, stand up and twirl while invoking the spirit of Steve Jobs, it sometimes plays the songs in order again. But then it starts shuffling them in short order.

It is somewhat maddening. I think about possible fixes–re-installing, rolling back to the previous version, rebooting, drawing a pentagram underneath my computer, but in the end I just switched to Groove Music. Yes, the bare bones and sometimes awful music player included in Windows 10.

It seems a little better than before, even if it’s ludicrous that you have to restart it to switch between the light and dark themes. But it plays my music in order, so it’s good enough for now.

I’ll try iTunes again after the next version comes out. For the superstitious types, it’s going to get even better, because the next major release will be version 13.

Rain on me (2016)

The second day of fall was cool, wet and for good measure a strong wind would occasionally gust up.

One of the perks, such as it is, of global warming/climate change/more extreme weather is a trend away from our usual months of incessant rain and gray skies during the fall and winter. I like it, even as I secretly know we’ll eventually have penguins living in Vancouver as a result*.

This is my way of saying I miss summer even more than I did yesterday when it was still sunny and warm.

I also skipped my noon walk because of the rain and now feel slothful and lazy. I may run tomorrow as penance.

* I’m pretty sure the penguins will remain in the Antarctic, but you never know, maybe a rogue ice floe bearing a distraught penguin family will survive all the way up to the west coast

Fall on me (2016)

Today was the first day of fall and it was sunny and pleasantly mild, even almost warm. Good work fall, keep it up!

Note: tomorrow’s forecast calls for a chance of rain and a high of 14. I do not approve.

Also, the sun set today at 7:08 p.m. We’re probably only a couple of weeks away from it starting to get seriously dusky at the end of my runs and then too dark to run after work altogether. Plus cold and wet.

Basically what I’m saying is I already miss summer.

Birthday #1,000 or so (2016)

Today was my birthday. Birthdays are odd, because you’re essentially celebrating moving one year closer to death. Mind you, that’s better than actually being dead, so there’s that. Unless being dead is secretly cool and all the dead people are keeping it to themselves.

Anyway, a co-worker of mine brought a donut cake of sorts to me while I worked on the service desk today. It was massive and about 5,000 calories and I could not eat all of it. But here’s a picture of it sitting on the corner of my desk:

a cake of donuts
[joke about fire hazard if full number of candles were used]
I consumed the top donut, as Boston Cream is my favorite, but could only make a small dent in the apple fritter below (my second favorite–how did they know?)

It was delicious and unexpected and nice. I also got treated to dinner, received a gift card for more books, and got a back scratch and tummy rub. Everything but the donuts was from my partner, not my co-worker. A belly rub from my co-worker would either be terribly awkward or proof that I had slipped into a parallel dimension where such displays are considered normal, possibly even expected.

In all, it was a good ending to what was otherwise a grossbuckets day at work due to ongoing staff shortages/absences/alien abductions. Tomorrow it will just be grossbuckets again.

Fly, my pretty

Last night (technically early this morning) I had a type of dream that I haven’t had for many years. No, not getting chased by vampires, mummies, robots or driver-less vehicles (the staples of my childhood and I still have no idea what was up with that), but rather, I dreamed that I was flying.

I would normally associate flying dreams (at least ones where I don’t plummet to the ground) as something positive my subconscious is surfacing and while things have not been going badly for me of late, work has been very busy, I don’t have an idea for NaNoWriMo yet and I have other assorted smaller worries and concerns. There’s a lot on my mind, in other words.

And yet last night I dreamed I was flying over a park (a park was the location of one of my previous flying dreams, too). Sure, the people in the park didn’t seem to notice or care but it was still spiffy. The flying seemed to rely on momentum and inertia, so running and jumping into the air definitely helped. Once airborne, I remained upright and could swoop back and forth, sort of a fast hovering motion rather than using a Superman-style pose.

At one point in the dream a guy started following me. I didn’t know who he was or if he was dangerous but he definitely appeared to be trailing me. I should point out that I was suddenly not flying any more. I was instead scrambling up a steep hill covered in crumbly dirt and rock, the sort of thing that I find difficult to climb in real life. The dream mirrored this aspect accurately. The guy was going to catch up to me but I had to be careful, lest I fall right into his possibly evil clutches. When I made it to the top it seemed I remembered I could fly and so I started flying around again.

I don’t remember anything else after that, but still, it was neat to have a flying dream again.

A few more random questions (plus some answers)

  • Why do wasps exist? They don’t gather pollen or make honey, they just sting and do gross things like lay eggs in spiders so their young can eat their way out.
  • Why is it so easy for me to slip into passive voice when writing? You’d think by now I’d have learned but I’m only a bit better than I used to be.
  • Would it be more or less depressing to know we are the only intelligent species in the universe? On the plus side, no risk of alien invasion. On the negative side, humans are generally terrible people.
  • What will the internet look like in a hundred years? When you think back to cars a hundred years ago and compare them to today, all the fundamentals are still there, we’ve just improved on the core design. Will the internet still consist of people obsessively checking Facebook but doing so with implants instead of smartphones?
  • Shower or bath? (This one is easy: bath. Warm and relaxing and for extra fun you can add bubbles or Epsom salts or something crazy like that. Showers are just go in, clean, get out.)
  • Why is the four-day work week not a thing yet? Seriously, we don’t need five days. It sucks. I can be productive with more free time–let me show you!
  • Could you write a decent novel that consists solely of lists? Something to consider for NaNoWriMo 2016 (ho ho).
  • Why not crop squares?

At least they got the month right

On September 1st I received the following in an email:

Happy birthday whenever!

It’s a birthday wish from Xbox. It’s nice of them to think of me.

My birthday is September 19th.

This made me wonder–since they got the month right, do they just send a mass of email out twelve times a year at the start of each month that covers every birthday for that month? If so, why? Is it a money-saving measure? Email has to be cheap, I’m inundated with it all the time.

Or did they really send it nearly three weeks before my actual birthday by mistake?

Anyway, it’s a cute dog, so thanks Mr. Xbox for the kind-of-early birthday wish!