Month: January 2020

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Several times now in my life, people have found it curious when I’ve taken an easy going or kind attitude rather than being angry, or fuming about things. I too, sometimes find this curious.

Growing up, I can remember people’s anger reaching the point of destroying a room, leaving it trashed. One of my fond childhood memories includes a door being torn apart. My own realization as a youngster about needing to control my temper, left a hole in a closet door in the realizing.

It’s fair to say that I am the descendant of people known to have hot tempers, as well as for stubbornness. I certainly have both attributes, I just tend to manifest them differently. For one thing, I try to direct my anger where it is deserved, or warranted. Because I remember what people radiating anger can do. I also try to remember my grandfather’s outlook: try to be like a duck, and let it roll off your back. Ironically, he also had stomach ulcers.

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When I cook, typically I keep in mind the expense, and the servings in mind. But for cornbread, I find that rather difficult to estimate, aside from low cost.

Most of the ingredients in my cornbread recipe aren’t things That I use often. Cornmeal and flour are cheap, and I don’t really bake that much. Stuff like a box of baking soda, pretty much lasts forever. The only transient ingredients are the milk, and buttermilk. Not caring much for the taste of supermarket buttermilk, it’s only real use around here are things like cornbread and biscuits.

By contrast: figuring out the servings from a pone of cornbread is straight forward, and only thwarded by my habit of snacking on the stuff incessantly between meals.

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My delicious plan for chili and cornbread has been realized, and I have enough cornbread to enjoy for a while 😆.

Willow’s response was not as intense as when they got their own meat and gravy based treats, but she still wanted my plate.

Actually, it’s kind of sad that the camera missed the tongue licking the edge of the plate, lol.

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One of the things that I think people mocking tablets, often forget is how revolutionary desktops were once upon a time.

In its context: the IBM PC and many of its close relatives were not powerful computers by any means, yet they helped change the world. The 5150 was no where near as capable as expensive time sharing systems, but it was cheap, and it was good enough.

For under ten grand you could get a pretty nice setup, and for a few grand you could get something worth using. Most early PCs ran an operating system that was a simplistic piece of crap, compared to what you would expect to find on computers costing tens of thousands, but it was enough for getting things done. Combined with the very anti-IBM approach of openness and third party support it caught on, and exploded—effectively wiping out competition from previous attempts to build an affordable ‘Good enough’, and eventually becoming more ubiquitous than the more capable machines that came before.

Remind you of the rise of Android and iOS any? In many ways the extent, and methods that exploded Android into the dominate phone OS, and a major player in tablets, reminds me a lot of how we went from computers that were too expensive to be personal, and reached a point where literally everyone can have their own computers.

You know, that kind of makes me feel more positive at Microsoft’s efforts with Metro and UWP, lol.

Random neurons firing

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My habit of preferring the wall-facing side of the bed, and leaving the open side to the comfy dogs, remind me that I never tended to write much in bed.

Trying to update handwritten notes: the net result is not having enough room to starboard to move my arm: which impacts my legibility. I.e. having to micro-manage my finger muscles, both results in crappier writing and a more exhausting experience. Which also means my tablet will have a harder time converting my writings to more useful typed text.

This kind of got me thinking: about the days I used to keep physical notebooks and binders as my modus operandi rather than computers and things. And you know what the norm was back then? Typically, I’d be found on a step stool, in front of a tall dresser, because that was the only large work surface other than the floor. Plus that dresser was in my closet, owing to the lack of space we had, and offered easy access to additional storage.

By the time I really tended to update notes from bed, I had already reached the point of sleeping draped over a laptop and vaguely wondering how the screen stayed attached, lol.

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Things I should probably find alarming: when I start going to bed even before the dogs declare it to be bed time.

Either that, or that I’m becoming Ned Flanders.