Opinion/Editorial/Life

Totally Not Wildcard Wednesday!

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It’s time again for Wildcard Wednesdays! Ok no, I’m not actually calling this that. I have mentioned, I love alliteration and “theme days” but that’s kind of dumb. I have been using Wednesday as a sort of wildcard day to write about “whatever”. I created a vague “schedule” for Blaugust, as part of a way to keep myself motivated.

  • Sunday – Personal Series post
  • Monday – Youtube Videos
  • Tuesday – Blaugust related post
  • Wednesday – Wildcard Wednesday!!! (NO!)
  • Thursday – Code project, or some project, maybe, at least something “techy”
  • Friday – Music Album (I was already doing this)
  • Saturday – Journal/Weekly Wrap Up

The problem now is that I’ve started this little discussion about the blog itself, so now I’m kind of locked in, because if I start talking about something deeper well, it’s awkward. The original sort of idea was to use this space, on Wednesdays, to just write about more serious topics, thoughts on world issues and politics. I’m still kind of apprehensive about adding that sort of content here. I’m not really sure why, because I talk about it, about everywhere else.

I’m not even really talking about necessarily direct “left and right” political talk, more just general, “society is going to shit” and “climate crisis” sort of talk. Though a lot of this is hard to discuss without at least mentioning politics because somehow the concept of “for the betterment of everyone” has become a political issue. It’s also all become incredibly entwined with religious identity. I mean, the history of mankind is littered with people doing shitty things in the name of religion, so it really should not be a surprise.

Personally, I’m a bit out on the whole with religion. I like to think I am a bit more, “spiritual” than “religious,” if that makes sense. I have not regularly attended church in over 20 years, possibly 25 at this point. I do kind of find the idea of a sort of, community group like a church to be somewhat appealing, I just don’t care for all the bull shit surrounding it. There’s a meme out there from some Tweets, where someone says something like “How does an atheist know the difference between right and wrong”, and the response is something like, “If you need the fear of eternal damnation to do good, you’re not good.”

It’s also increasingly just, perverted, to serve this weird agenda of keeping the population docile and shameful of having literally any enjoyment in life. It’s weird. It’s used to put down so many people, and people doing things that in the end, don’t affect anyone else. Most often these days against LGBT folks, but often others.

What I like to say in response to this sometimes is, “Stop passing judgment over people in the name of God. If there is a God, that’s his job to decide, not yours.”

Basically, stop shitting on people in the name of religion. It’s a bad look. This is just one of many reasons that people are increasingly shunning religions, especially old-school shame-based religions.

Oops, looks like I did it, and did it anyway, I posted a society based rant after all.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Blaugust 2023 – Staying Motivated

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This week’s “Blaugust theme” is “Staying Motivated”. These days especially, I have to say, I have, almost zero motivation. There are a lot of factors as to why, I’m not really motivated to discuss them at this time though, maybe later, sometime (X-Doubt.jpg). Instead, let’s look at what keeps me motivated.

I think one thing that keeps me going a lot of the time is gamifying things. I think the idea of “gamification” seems really stupid on paper, but it also works pretty well. Achievement badges are actually kind of a weakness. I once spent an afternoon playing around with the chat program we use at work after discovering it has achievement badges. It’s basically fucking AIM.

I’ve gotten on a bit of a kick lately trying to 100% achievements in games, for example. I don’t super-push myself when some of the achievements are annoyingly bad though. Like Blaugust here, I don’t really know how it’s graded, it’s mostly an honor system, but there is a list of made-up achievements for it. Basically, the only one I have not done is “Pickup Group”. I guess I should try doing that to get the achievement for “doing all the achievements”. I am also on track-ish to do 31/31 posts for the month, this post being number 22. Numbers 25 through 28 should be taken care of as well. One of the five remaining needed will be my “Lessons Learned” wrap-up, probably on the 31st.

  • Reading the Manual – Read the introductory blog post with the rules of the event.
  • Joining the Cause – Sign-Up for Blaugust.
  • Recruit a Friend – Convince another blogger to participate in Blaugust.
  • Spreading the Madness – Promote Blaugust on your blog or through your social media of choice.
  • Friend of Wumpus – Join the Blaugust Discord.
  • Sharing is Caring – Post your content in the “Share Your Content” Channel.
  • Forum of Friends – Take part in a discussion on the “Post Discussion” Channel.
  • The Pet Tax – Post a picture of an animal friend on the “Stuff and Things” Channel or create a blog post about them.
  • Friend Like Me – Answer a question posted on the Blagust Discord or help out a new blogger.
  • Shared Thoughts – Comment on a blog post from another Blaugust participant.
  • Federation of Bloggers – Sign up for a Fediverse account and follow the official Blaugust account.
  • Getting Inspired – Write a blog post inspired by a post from another Blaugust participant.
  • Pickup Group – Play a game or take part in an activity with one or more Blaugust participants.
  • Hot Topics – Write a blog post based on the Blaugust Prompt List.
  • Welcome Wagon – Write a blog post based on the first week’s theme of Welcoming Folks to Blaugust.
  • Introduce Yourself – Write a blog post based on the second week’s theme of Introducing Yourself.
  • Creative Appreciation – Write a blog post based on the third week’s theme Appreciating the works of some Creative or Company.
  • Staying Motivated – Write a blog post based on the fourth week’s theme of how you have managed to Stay Motivated.
  • Lessons Learned – Write a blog post based on the fifth week’s theme explaining some of the Lessons you have Learned through Blaugust.
  • Going Platinum – Complete All of the Blaugchievements for Blaugust 2023.

Completionism like this can be bad though, and sometimes I have to stop myself. Like, for while I was really bad about buying toys I didn’t really want because it would “complete teams”. Marvel teams, Transformers teams, whatever. It can certainly lead to some bad behaviors for sure.

Streaks are another good motivator. Possibly a better motivator. A few good examples of these in my life, that I may actually get into more detail on in full-fledged posts, I’m considering maybe doing a series of “Track all the Things” posts, maybe after my “Computing History” series. A lot of what keeps these going now is “streak motivation” of “I’ve been doing it, so I should keep doing it.”

  • I have tracked the gas and mileage on my car every fill-up since I got it. It’s all in an Excel book with graphs and such.
  • I track all my spending in categories and charts in an Excel workbook. I have done this for years.
  • I have almost a 1700 Day streak in Duolingo.
  • I use a daily mood and activity tracking app called Daylio that I have a 2056 day streak in.

The motivation is to not break these streaks of activity. Keep it going, keep it flowing. I would love to blog every day, and get that streak going but I find that much stress ends up killing the quality of posts (not that there is much there to start with on that).

My Computing Journey

My Computing Journey – Part 3 – The x86 Era

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This actually get a bit hazy here for actual computer models, and I spent a bit of time browsing through Vintage Packard Bell machines to see if I could figure out which machines cover this era of my computing. This would have been somewhere between 1991 and 1995, give or take a bit, after we moved across town when I was 11-12-ish and before we moved to Indiana for a bit when I was 14-15ish. I am not positive if there were one or two PCs in this era, there was either one 286 (for sure, for reasons I’ll touch on) and possibly later a 486. For simplicity’s sake, I’m just going to refer to this as one PC, that was a 286. If for some reason you’re keeping score, and notice something that doesn’t match for a 286, then well, assume there was a 486 in there.

I am pretty sure it was this PC though (not my picture, and that PC is filthy.).

Why am I so confident there was a 286?

That’s simple, Doom. At one point during this time frame, and for some weird reason, I have a lot of strong memories of this whole night and event, a bunch of my friends and I spent the night over at one of their homes. I know we played a lot of Jurassic Park on the SEGA Genesis because it was way cool that you could play as a Raptor and go around killing dudes. I remember we played a lot of Hero’s Quest, because we were super into Hero’s Quest at this time. I remember that they all got stoned, though I did not because I wasn’t really into that, though it’s likely I ended up “secondhand stoned” if that’s even a thing. Whatever the case, I remember that at one point someone got a bit upset at me because they were using a Bob Dylan CD I had brought for “rosin” which I still don’t know what that is, but I noticed my CD was dirty so I cleaned it off.

And the next day, we all went to the mall for a few hours, because that’s what you did when malls were still popular. After some careful thought and consideration, I decided to spend some of my allowance money on this cool looking game, Doom, or at least, the shareware Doom. It was basically like Wolfenstein 3D, except better, and I loved playing Wolfenstein. Then later, when I went to play it, I discovered the concept of “minimum computer requirements”. Because Doom needed a 386 PC. In the store I had decided that “Eh, it’ll work anyway.” Then it did not. Maybe if I were more computer savvy at the time I could have managed to make it work somehow, but in the end I think I just gave it to a friend who did have a better computer, or at least, let him install and use it.

Speaking of buying computer games. Though I had played plenty of computer games, it was around this time (possibly before actually) that I bought, with my own money, my first computer game. I had bought some console and handheld games, but this would be my first personal purchase of a PC game, with a game called War Eagles. War Eagles was a World War 1 plane dogfight simulator. No take-offs or landings, just fly in a biplane around shooting machine guns at biplanes.

This time period was also my first experience with Windows and a computer with a Hard Drive. I am pretty sure it was 20 or 40mb. That’s MEGA with an M, not GIGA with a G. Just enough to install a few games, so they didn’t need to be run off of floppy drives. I don’t know the details, but I remember my dad installed some program called Stacker that would increase the drive space. But I still had to go through hoops occasionally of installing and uninstalling games. I believe the largest single game I had around this time was one of the Interplay Star Trek games, which had several install disks.

Windows would have been 3.0 and maybe later 3.11 for Workgroups. It was neat but you still had to dump back out to DOS to run a lot of games. The main thing I remember about Windows was playing around in Paint drawing things.

I also got my first experience with computer hardware and upgrades around this time frame. I can’t imagine why, I must have asked for it at the time, because at least one of my friends had a better computer, but for Christmas one year I got a SoundBlaster soundcard. So everything would sound cool with actual speakers. It also came with this super neat (for the time) talking parrot program.

This time period also had some exposure to Apple computers and the Apple IIe (which was quite data at the time). We started having computer classes in Middle School, which had these in the classroom. Most of this time was spent playing educational games, like Number Munchers and Word Munchers. We also had a typing speed program and I remember finding a bug in it where you could basically hold a key, I forget which, maybe like + or = or something, and it would count the letter as correct, so you could just, hold in that key and get something ridiculous like 200 words per minute.

Eventually, after we moved to Indiana sometime, when my parents upgraded the home PC to a Pentium (spoilers for next week), this machine became my first “in my room personal pc”. It also at some point gained an external dial-up modem. I’ll get more into all that next week though, because dialing in on this computer would be secondary to using the other PC.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (08.13.2023 to 08.19.2023)

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Another week of Blog Posts done, I’m in the home stretch now for Blaugust. I can assure you, and myself, that I will not be keeping up this pace. For a variety of reasons, probably most of which I will mention in a wrap-up post on the 31st.

But what about this week. The big event this week was going to see Alanis Morissette. I also had some overnight work at work, which I don’t usually have, which has thrown my whole schedule off, not that I am not tired, basically, all the time, already. Something fun that came out of my Instagram posts from that concert, Cedric LeMoyne, the awesome bass player from the show, liked my awesome photo of him. I really like the pic too, so here it is.

Anyway, I have some coding projects I want to get to but have not had time lately, or, probably more accurately, have not had the mental capacity to work on lately. I also have some code stuff I’ve been trying to puzzle out for work, and I am sure at some point it will “click” and just slide into place and work, and I’ll start running there, but other work issues, have been blocking that focus.

I’ve also started making an effort to read a bit more again, though not a lot of progress there. I go through ups and downs on how much I read. I just am ashamed of my massive book backlog.

Activity Log

I really want to, at some point, find a way to add things like, my Duolingo progress here. I could do it manually, but I also don’t really know how to format it.

I did get a new Marvel Legends this week, I didn’t plan to, but the two-pack of Endgame Captain Marvel and Pepper Potts Rescue was down to $20, and I had to jump on that. I’ve been sort of wanting it for a while, but mostly for the Endgame Carol, I already have the single-pack Rescue. The Pepper heads would mostly be a bonus. I’ve been tempted at $25 and $30, but at $20, it would be less than a single figure. If Endgame Captain Marvel had been a single-packed figure, I would have already bought it. At this point, the useless extra Rescue figure is just an accessory.

I picked up one book (for the embarrassing backlog) called The Little Book of Mathematical Principles, Theories & Things by Robert Solomon. What can I say, it was probably $2 and I like nerdy things.

I almost forgot that I also bought a game or a game bundle. Steam had a bundle of Mega Man games, half of which I already owned. Because of the way Steam discounts work, owning something, knocks even more off, so for a price I wanted to pay, I could get the Mega Man Zero collection. I’ve only played the first one a while ago, but it’s a series I have been meaning to play. I have beaten all of the previous Mainline Mega Man and Mega Man X games already. The Zero series is kind of a hole.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Cat Tax Day

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I’m all off this week thanks to screwy work and an extra post and just a general chaotic time. So I’m going to do a bit of a filler day and fulfill the “Cat Tax” for Blaugust. Against my better wants, we have 7 cats. We have the space and the people, but personally, 7 is too many. Also, they don’t always get along. At the moment, two of them we have to keep separate at all times, which is a pain, shuffling them between which is locked up in a room and which is not. If we don’t they will literally just, fiercely deathmatch, instantly.

I’ll go from oldest to youngest.

Scarlette (#10)

I’m going to throw some numbers on these, Scarlette is the tenth cat I have had in my lifetime.

Scarlette doesn’t really have any other nicknames. She is the oldest at around 13 years now I think. Like all of our cats, we got her as a kitten. She was actually a replacement cat, from the vet. We had adopted a calico kitten that the kids were calling Uganda. When it came time, we set it to be fixed at the vet, and the poor kitten didn’t make it. The Kids were of course devastated. Shortly afterward, the vet (who was sort of a friend of the family because our kids were friends) called up and they had another kitten that needed a home, so we adopted Scarlette. She had come from a “cat hoarding” situation I think, and she was extremely skittish. To the point of, we lost her in the house at one point for days.

Later we discovered that she had been hiding inside the boxed springs of the bed. For at least the first year she would regularly just, vanish into the boxed springs.

My family commonly refers to her as “My Girlfriend” (as in me personally) because I am definitely her favorite of everyone in the house and when I go to bed, I don’t care where she is, she will come running in to join me in the bed. I’ve also worked with her to get her to be less skittish and more cuddly. Even after years with us, she would cower in fear anytime you tried to pet her, despite that she may have just been trying to get your attention for pets. I have no idea what happened to her in the brief time before we adopted her, but it had to have been pretty horrible.

Simba (#11)

The next three are actually all from the same litter, so I’m not positive of the age difference, though whatever it is, it’s minutes. We sometimes call them “the Triplets”. Simba doesn’t have any nicknames aside from maybe “Jackass”, because he is kind of a bully sometimes.

Simba’s fun story. At our old house, eh loved to go outside and hunt birds and rabbits. We tried to keep them from going out, but that didn’t really work out sometimes. When we last moved, during the move, he got outside. He is, notoriously hard to catch. In the end, we left him behind, with plans to come back for him. Over the course of a month or two, we would periodically drive the 45b minutes (one way) drive down to the old house and see if we could see him. It was mildly irritating because he would come to the door of our old house, but the new owners refused to let him in. All they needed to do was let him in and give us a call, we would have been there and taken him away.

Eventually, our old neighbor called us up. He had managed to catch Simba in a Raccoon trap and he was recovered. Now he has zero interest in going outside ever.

His absolute favorite thing is when I refill the cat food container and he can come and eat the super fresh out of the bag food directly from the source. I like to let him indulge in that since it only happens maybe once a month.

Kiara (#12)

The girl of the triplets, sometimes called Dobby or the “Basement Troll”. Kiara likes me, and is pretty agreeable with people, but she hates all of the other cats except maybe Kovu, and especially after the move, she claimed the basement as her domain and hides down there all the time.

Kiara is our smallest cat. She likes to hide in the most random and strangest places.

Kovu (#13)

Kovu is the largest cat we own, though pure weight-wise, Simba is very close, though Simba is pretty lean and is basically all muscle. Kovu is sometimes called “Fatty”, which I’ll admit is a bit rude. He likes to think he’s not fat though and often climbs up all over the place and jumps between furniture, chasing people down to get petted. He’ll let you know too, because he’ll squawk at you and reach out for it.

He’s probably the overall best-behaved cat. He generally doesn’t get in fights with anyone else and he doesn’t cause any problems. His worst offense is being too pushy sometimes about getting attention, which is made worse because he is a fat ass and will knock things around getting to you.

Jackie (#14)

Jackie is my wife and I’s baby, though don’t tell her, Scarlette is probably my real favorite. Jackie came from my father-in-law’s shop as a kitten and we basically brought her home expecting her to die. which she did not. Originally she had one eye stuck closed so we called her “One-Eyed Jack”.

She is extremely spoiled and thinks she is my wife and I’s favorite and gets pissy and jealous anytime the other cats get attention.

Lettie Bug (#15)

My daughter’s cat officially, though Lettie prefers my wife over everyone. Also known as Lettie, Buggers, and (from me) Boogers. Boogers because she is an absolute bitch to me, at all times. Seriously, fuck this cat. She will attack me anytime I come near her, for no reason.

She is part Maine Coon and quite fluffy. She mostly avoids the other cats but only really actively attacks Kiara or Wilbur, sometimes.

Wilbur (#16)

Wilbur is the youngest cat. Sometimes I call him Kovu’s Boyfriend, because they get along well. Also sometimes, “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE”. He’s an ok cat but he’s also a dick to all of the other cats. He also pisses on things, a lot. He’s a little jack-ass. He likes to be in the middle of whatever you’re doing but doesn’t really like attention. If it were up to me, I would seriously consider rehoming Wilbur, because he is a bit over-aggressive towards the other cats and he’s damaged a lot of things, including our old TV. It’s not up to me though.

He’s a good cat, he just, could be better. I am hoping as our older cats start to “age out” for a sterile way to phrase that, he will get better. He could literally BE the favorite if he would stop pissing on things (yes, we had him checked at the vet, he is just an asshole).

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