Do people adapt faster than cats?

Once again, the ‘Spring forward, Fall back’ (or whatever you call it) thrusts us into uncharted territory. Do I get up in the dark, nap all afternoon, then go to sleep earlier (or is that later) … or something else.

The Time ChangeTM is a great opportunity to get all the clocks and devices that display the time to show the same time (whether it’s right or wrong).  Some of my devices are up to 10 minutes fast, others are up to 5 minutes slow. This occasionally causes consternation when I leave the house in plenty of time and by the time I get into the car I’m five minutes late.

But after a week, I’m fairly adapted to the ‘real’ time.  The cats, not so much. They know it’s time to be fed. They are on ‘stomach time‘. They sit by empty bowls in the afternoon and look pathetic until I give in and feed them early – 3pm my time, 4pm stomach time. And in the mornings, they are jumping on the bed, making piteous noises, generally being underfoot and complete a**holes until I produce food – in total darkness these days – before anything else.

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 …

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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.