Done with Google. Now paying $5 a month to use Kagi.com. Worth it.

OK Boomer has entered the chat. Seems most comments are from those looking forward. I left the paycheck life in 2019. Except for 2020 (catching up on every episode of The Office), I’ve been having a measured good time. I have lucky stars to thank. Got married in ’85. Adopted a daughter in ’91. Wife and I inherited a home when my mom died. We spent 30 years saving for retirement instead of paying a mortgage/rent. Was self-employed the whole time in marketing communications. Wife was a mid-level manager in health services, retired 2 years before me. We spent decades living below our means. I threw the towel in at 62. I think being self-employed (and a one-man show) prepared me for my after work life. I wasn’t going to miss the office life and friends because I didn’t have any, in the conventional sense. These days I work in the garden, getting dirt in my fingernails. I teach QiGong and Tai Chi pro-bono to a dedicated senior group at a local park, and I’m getting a similar gig with the city rec services to do the same. I’m a small-time landlord (one-unit granny flat behind the house). I recently transitioned from Mac to Windows (sorry Linux users, I know…) with great success. I drive a 25 year old stick-shift Toyota truck and hope it makes it to 300K. At 66, I exercise almost every day, and while I could be convinced to take a nap in the afternoon, I never do. My wife is a pickleball queen, and we manage to have lives together and apart. We both have pretty good health for oldies. Several of my peers have died recently, and the end of the road looms closer for me than ever before. My life is devoted to staying healthy and paying it forward as long as I can keep it together.

Forcing myself to watch this thing. I think I’m getting a rash.

Daily.

[ Like, totally deleted… ]

Kagi, Sider, YouTube Premium.

“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t wash that. This wardrobe is too important for you to jeopardize it.”

Resist as much as possible without getting killed. BTW, I’m an Old-White-Guy Boomer. Not all people in my generation are lining up to kiss Trump’s ass…

Graduated high school in 1975. BTW my niece has a Camden and a Corbin. My daughter is named Chelsea.

Guess when I was born… Went to school with James, William, Dan, John, Joseph, David, Elizabeth, Lisa, Margaret, Debbie, Carolyn, Bonnie, Susan, Karen, Michael, and Peter. Most of the Karens I knew were nice people. They don’t deserve the bad rap.

I love mornings because I wake up feeling optimistic about the coming day. Mornings are perfect for getting stuff done — exercise, catch up on work, and run errands before the afternoon crowds hit. The world feels fresh and full of possibility in the mornings before the stresses of the day set in. Waking up early lets me really seize the day.

My best thing happened unexpectedly on March 15, 1973. (Probably makes me the oldest person in the room.) My high school guidance counselor died in his sleep. Bummer for him, but lucky for me. Back in the ’60s, my school system had me pegged as a gifted student, which was a one-size fits all label. That tag followed me to high school, where as a green sophomore, I was assigned the “gifted” guidance counselor, Mr. Daly. Daly was also a history teacher, and greatly loved and admired. He was a retired USMC Vietnam vet, and suffered from Marfan syndrome, giving him a strange and imposing appearance. He was a force of nature, that guy. I was 15 when we first met, and I had no idea about what I would do with my life. Because of my label, Daly had it all figured out. In his mind I was on my way to become a doctor, lawyer, CEO, etc. Yeah — no thanks. I had no goals, only passions — Photography and Design. I wanted to enroll in my school’s tech classes and follow my interests. Daly squashed that idea. Wasn’t going to happen. I was heartbroken. As a kid of 15 I had no leverage, and didn’t know how I could get what I wanted. My parents were no help; “He probably knows best” was the best they could do. A few weeks later, when I came to school on the 16th of March, word was that Mr. Daly had died the previous night. While the school was in mourning, I was a pretty happy kid. My new counselor had no objections to me taking the photo and design track. :: After high school, university and some preliminary jobs, I started my own marketing communications business (then called freelancing, today gig work) and continued for 30+ years by myself. Of course the work had its ups and downs, but I was happy and always employed. :: Now I’m 66 and retired, and I always wonder what my life would be like if Mr. Daly had lived and imposed his vision on my life. Guess I got lucky. :: Rest in peace, Mr. D.

Subspace interference.

Groundhog Day.

Edibles from the local dispensary here in California.

Thanks I hate it.

So how will Apple craft this announcement in a way that avoids showing some kind of submission to the will and desires of the Android juggernaut? Let me guess… Anyone texting in from hardware other than an iPhone will still get the funky balloon color, eh?

I can only imagine that at some point in the future humans will be on deck for such modifications. Brave New World, eh?

An a.i. clarification of the article’s summary: Researchers proved that stem cells from mammals can turn into any cell type like cells from an early embryo. These are called naive stem cells. They’ve shown naive stem cells work great in rodents, but not as well in primates since the donor cells don’t match the host embryo. So they tried different conditions to produce naive stem cells from monkeys and got better at growing chimeric embryos. A chimeric monkey is one that has cells from two different embryos combined together. They created an aborted fetus and live chimeric monkey with high donor cell numbers. Testing showed the donor cells integrated into many tissues (including sex organs and placenta) of the chimeric monkeys, up to 90%. This is a big deal for researching naive stem cells and genetically modifying primates.

So, I’m sitting here in the “library,” where I do most of my best reading, holding my mobile device in my left hand and scrolling with my right thumb. I’m trying to imagine how this would work with a widescreen foldable device, kind of like a tablet, TBH. I just can’t see it. Holding a standard normal phone is super easy, a firm grip on both sides. A foldable would require some extra gymnastics… I don’t get this “really got to have it” feeling.