Time to Quit

There comes a time when what seemed fun turns into a scramble to get ‘great’ content on this website before I forget why I once thought something was well worth the (small) effort to complete the task.

Covid took me close to the ‘meh’ tipping point, but..

Still going

It’s been some time since I made a constructive effort to update the site. But it is (IMO) worth continuing … so we look forward to some amazing (??) fresh content appearing as well as some of the obvious under-populated sections being filled out.

Stay tuned.

Spot the bargoon

For those of you (and hopefully, that’s a single-digit number) who are utterly innumerate, which offer is the best?

And whoever approved publishing this in a ‘paper’ needs help.

Merry Christmas – whoever/wherever you all are (2022 edition)

Sometime in the past 12 months my predictive skills appear to have been rendered useless – so Nostradamus, how do you do it?

I have not become octuple vaccinated. For COVID, all I managed was five vaccinations plus one actual case of catching COVID-19 (on holiday in Europe!) – sometimes noted as equivalent to vaccination so close to octuple vaccinations. I can confidently state that ‘brain fog’ is a real thing, that COVID really sucks, and in a stunning literature moment my WOTY (face-to-face) got trounced by GOBLIN MODE [no shit!].

For all you readers out there that are not woke, here’s the poop on Goblin Mode  which caused a stir from people who felt Goblin Mode was a ridiculous suggestion, unused by billions on my planet … I agree!!

Merry Christmas – whoever/wherever you all are

It’s Christmas Day 2021. Traditionally a day when the family gets together and … does whatever families that get together do when they get together.

Present score is

  • Connected by phone to my elder sister.
  • Connected by phone to my younger sister’s telephone which has no ‘your call is important blah blah’. Pro Tip Sheila – turn it on.
  • Imagined connecting with my younger brother who apparently is still conducting a no internet, no email campaign. No old school spirit there 🙁
  • Kids have organized two separate web events – one Zoom today, one Webex tomorrow. Hoping to see/hear all of them allowing for grandchild-centered emergencies
  • Could this be the year my sister-in-law calls?

Looking forward to Christmas 2022 by which time everybody will be octuple vaccinated* and face-to-face becomes the ‘word of the year’. In the meantime, here are some previous WOTY winners

*  not counting seasonal flu shot

Harbingers of Doom

The ‘Internet of Things  – a network of ‘smart’ digital devices – represents the future. In the context of the IoT, a thing can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a biochip transponder, an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when tire pressure is low – or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address and provided with the ability to transfer data over a network.

If you feel the need for more detail on the IoT, then Dr. John Barrett’s presentation at TEDxCIT on YouTube is a great place to start.

Experts estimate that by 2020, the IOT will consist of almost 50,000,000,000 smart things.

So, the future is bright. Right? Not so fast …

Continue reading

Hello world. Again.

If only my database had been more secure and/or I had been more diligent, there would have been just a single instance of my ‘blog’.  Even then there would have been serious discontinuities in my blogging for many reasons – mostly categorized as ‘reality’ intruding into life.

My earliest attempts at a blog used a very home-brewed piece of software running on an HTML personal web site which has disappeared. Fortunately or unfortunately – depending on your point of view – not all was lost. I had a series of what I called rainy day stories – a collection of short, this-is-what-real-life-is-like, accounts of what was happening at the time. So, old news is it. And Now & Then is where to find it.

Welcome to ‘Hello world version 3 or 4 or whatever’. I’ll try harder this time.