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.)
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.
It’s that time again. Cats!
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
That’s kind of how I feel today–like taffy. Twisted, stretched, but still sweet.
I think I’d rather be a cupcake.
On September 1st I received the following in an email:
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!
Having given it some thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that no, I do not like dog owners.
I should add that I am only referring to ones I’ve encountered. I have no opinion on all of the others–yet.
But of those I have met, yep, I don’t like most of them. They are irresponsible and selfish, they often have poorly-trained dogs and show little regard for the safety or comfort of others.
Dogs can be dangerous, even tiny toy dogs can bite hard and if they’re not healthy, they can spread infection or worse. A dog that is off-leash is not under the owner’s control, no matter what the owner may think. “Oh, he always comes when I call!” may seem ironclad because that’s always what has happened before, but if the dog decides to ignore you, your ability to control it lies in how long it will take you to get to it and grab it by the collar–assuming it doesn’t turn on you.
Tonight I went for a short walk through Hume Park and back. I follow the usual route I take when running, going down the stairs to Lower Hume Park. Just past the bend on the trail is a large dog sniffing about. It’s off-leash. There is no way to physically get past the dog without getting within range of its mouth, which is presumably full of sharp doggie teeth. The dog hasn’t noticed me and may very well be as friendly as all get-out. I have no idea, as I’ve never seen it before. Its owner is not within view. I back off and decide to wait thirty seconds or so, thinking by then the owner will have caught up and both dog and owner will move on.
That doesn’t happen. Instead the dog is still there. I wait again. After the third strategic retreat the dog has moved over to the parking lot and is standing next to the open door of a truck, which presumably belongs to the owner, unless the dog has the amazing ability to drive motor vehicles. I am then able to proceed forward on the path without facing imminent potential mauling.
I’ve been attacked and bitten by dogs before, having done nothing to provoke them. I’ve just unluckily been within proximity when they decided to flip out for whatever reason. My childhood was a series of tetanus shots. I don’t wish to repeat this as an adult.
This could have been avoided by the owner simply leashing the dog, as required by law. But the majority of dog owners I see don’t do this (I should add that a lot of them do and are nice people and usually the leashed dogs seem pretty nice, too).
I walk up the hill past the off-leash dog park. This is a fenced-in area that nonetheless has signs warning people that they must still keep their dogs under control at all times. As I walk by–keeping well away from the fence–a large dog with the coloring of a doberman runs up to the fence and starts following along, growling at me and taking on body language that says something to the effect of, “I would like to snack on you.” This does not amuse me.
The dog’s owner is oblivious.
I mutter obscenities and finally offer the dog advise of a carnal nature, while continuing to walk along. The dog either listens to my request (doubtful but not entirely impossible) or more likely reaches the end of the imaginary territory it needs to defend and backs off. The owner continues to remain oblivious.
A responsible dog owner would not have a dog that would follow and growl at a stranger when in public for no reason. An irresponsible one would.
I do not like dog owners.
Also, here’s a sign that’s posted on the same path I was walking along. If only all dogs were this cute and cartoony.
I’m not sure if the fine is for having your dog unleashed, not cleaning up its poop or a combination of both. What I do know is $2,000 is a heck of a lot of money to risk for the sake of letting Spot walk around unleashed.
Also, that cartoony dog is apparently owned by the invisible man.
I’ve always been intrigued by UFOs. I loved Close Encounters of the Third Kind when I saw it at the age of 13. I wrote my own spin on the subject after seeing the movie, cleverly calling my story “The UFO Experience.” I watched every episode of NBC’s ill-fated Project UFO series in the late 70s, which was based on Project Blue Book and came about after the success of Close Encounters. I read books about the subject and continue to do so to this day.
The fascination has several sources. One is simply the tantalizing mystery of the unknown. Another is that UFOs–or at least some of them–carry the possibility of confirming the existence of extraterrestrial life. With our pop culture inundated with science fiction and its depiction of aliens in all forms, the idea of not being alone in the universe may not seem as immediately striking as it once was, but getting actual proof would still result in a profound change in how we view our world and everything beyond it.
Mostly I think it would freak a lot of people out.
In recent years it seems the number of UFO sightings has exploded. Smartphones have made it far more likely now that people will capture footage of sightings, even if that footage typically remains grainy, blurry, shaky or otherwise iffy. Maybe in another ten years Apple will have a super-amazing camera in the iPhone 15 that will capture shots of UFOs with such clarity you’ll be able to clearly see the little green men waving from the windows.
Along with the increase in the number of sightings has come a parallel increase in UFO TV shows. Where Project UFO stood out due to its subject matter, you can now watch Hangar 1: The UFO Files, Close Encounters, UFOs Declassified, Ancient Aliens and a bunch more than have come and gone or feature UFO incidents as part of their regular subject matter (The Unexplained Files, etc.) The approach of these shows ranges from relatively serious and sober (Hangar 1) to completely bonkers (Ancient Aliens, or as I refer to it, that show where you hear the phrase “ancient astronaut theorists say yes” roughly a billion times per episode).
All of this activity and interest has been greatly entertaining for me, even if much of it happens outside of mainstream media (though the TV shows do appear on channels like Discovery Science, of all places). The one thing that puzzles me is how some still deny the existence of UFOs.
I think it goes back to the freaked out thing.
A UFO is literally an unidentified flying object. If a runaway weather balloon is seen in the night sky but is never positively identified as such, it is by definition a UFO. Even if only a handful of sighting remain truly unknown, that’s more than enough to definitively state that UFOs are a real phenomenon. There are objects in the sky that we cannot always identify. So why deny the possibility?
It’s commonly (and logically) thought that any extraterrestrials that have made it to our planet would be technologically advanced and that frightens a lot of people. They think of Martian death rays, planetary conquest, enslavement, basically all the horrible things we humans have always done, just on a grander scale and with more sophisticated tools. And done by evil aliens instead of us.
I think if aliens were here and they wanted to turn us all into soylent green, they’d have probably done it already. But that’s part of what makes all of this so interesting for me–the possibilities are endless.
I couldn’t say what is behind most UFO sightings, whether they’re ETs from across the galaxy or from a parallel dimension, or even humans come back from the future for whatever reason. Or maybe they’re all runaway weather balloons. I keep an open mind on the subject. The universe is a strange place and we know very little about it. Heck, it’s been less than 50 years since we started wearing digital watches*. We’re still taking baby steps when it comes to technology and getting out to check our cosmic neighborhood. We have only ever had a single spacecraft leave our solar system–Voyager–and that was never the probe’s purpose, it just happened to keep on truckin’ after it completed its mission.
Having written all this, I’m not hoping for some weird abduction experience or implants or anything. I’m mostly content for the world to remain predictable and stable. I don’t think either is true anymore, if it ever was, so I’d like to think I’m prepared for whatever comes. I’ve got a smartphone with a decent camera, anyway.
* remember when digital watches were cool? Smart watches are the new digital watches. I’ve owned both because that’s what a good nerd does.