Writer, Dabbler In Things
I work in a corner of the city that seems particularly susceptible to power outages. They’re not unusual when the weather gets a bit hotter and people start cranking up the air conditioning. The area power grid seems to get tapped out before other areas do, and before you know it, you’re plunged into (relative) … Read more
Okay, I didn’t change the theme of my website for the season — although Toronto is finally getting some genuinely spring-like weather, which is very welcome — so much as hoping to post shorter stuff more often, so wanting a website look that would lend itself to (at least some) shorter content. Not yet sure … Read more
Happy belated New Year to those who celebrate! 2025 proved to be a wonky one for me technologically-speaking. Here’s what I wound up dealing with as far as its challenges and changes went: New email serviceI started 2025 by switching to a new email service when I clashed hard with comments of the CEO of … Read more
As of this writing, I have five active email addresses. That I can recall. There are quite possibly more I’m not remembering at the moment.That’s a lot. It’s entirely too many.The thing is, I didn’t mean for that to happen, the list just kind of naturally grew as things changed and came up.Now I’m trying … Read more
When I was preparing for this first swim into the waters of Blaugust, I was jotting down ideas for potential fodder for blog entries. It was just a simple checklist that I’d tick off as/if I used them. It struck me, though, that a number of them were negative in nature. Me pointing out bad … Read more
I’ve just heard about a phenomenon that’s been happening for at least a dozen years, called Blaugust. In short, it’s an annual celebration of blogs, of website owners posting their opinions, takes, reviews, etc., of anything and everything of interest to them. Like the section of this very website you’re reading at this moment, where … Read more
A definition of planned obsolescence, per a summary from Wikipedia:“In economics and industrial design, planned obsolescence (also called built-in obsolescence or premature obsolescence) is the concept of policies planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain predetermined period of … Read more
I recently checked out this article that was linked from Mastodon (my sole social media presence) and it’s a pretty quick read, if you’re interested: https://glassalmanac.com/netflix-disney-and-prime-video-are-too-expensive-and-full-of-ads-users-are-turning-back-to-illegal-methods/ Here’s my thing: For decades, I’ve been — and I’m still — not a piracy guy. To me, someone who worked on something and would like to make money … Read more
For those not familiar with what a chaos symbol is, here’s a basic version of one: The idea of it is that, being chaos, it’s as likely to go in any direction as any other. I’m realizing that there are (I daresay increasingly frequent) times when it really feels like my brain is doing exactly … Read more
I’d like you to cast your mind all the way back to… er… a month ago — was it only that recent? — when Trump started his second term as president and evidently decided that a wrecking ball made a handy tool to get some things changed. I won’t bother with a list of those … Read more