I Am Quite The Mike

 It was just before noon.  My brothers had just come back from driving little water scooters around on the ocean, one brother trading places with our close friend on the lounge chair in our beach shelter tent.  Three of us went to the shoreline and began swimming for the edge of the swimming area, a floating rope out in the ocean about 50 yards from shore. This is nothing out of the ordinary, it's a swim we do every time we go to this beach island.  Surrounded by hundreds of other tourists playing around in the water, the 100 yard swim isn't a race, it's just a fun little thing we do. Today the sea was a little more rambunctious than usual.  Nothing serious.  No whitecaps or actual waves, just bumpy water with swells maybe a foot tall.  The waves came all the way up the beach to the first row of loungers.  Partly cloudy and warm, it was a good day for a swim. So swim we did.  My brother and friend were perhaps 15 yards in front of me as I too...

 Not long ago I took a cruise on Holland America Line to the Caribbean, and being the adventurous technology lover that I am I chose to bring my VR headset, the Oculus Quest 2.  As it turns out, it's completely OK to take the headset on the cruise ship with you.  Related, the TSA didn't even blink as my headset rolled through security.  All is well on the security front. VR on an airplane, for what should be obvious reasons, is awkward.  It is doable, but probably only for things like Netflix or something to simulate a big screen TV.  Beat Saber is right out of the question.   Your headset will of course work fine in the hotel room the night before your cruise.  If you're lucky you might even be able to stream your gameplay to the hotel room's television and let your cruise partner(s) enjoy some of the fun too! But, how about on a cruise ship?  Your stateroom surely has enough room for you to stand and swing at things, right?  Well,...

T he old adage always says "the victor writes the history".  I am coming to question the universality of this statement.  It seems to me sometimes the historical account pushed into record recounts in great details all the atrocities committed by the victor, while simultaneously washing the vanquished in guiltless attire:  Their atrocities never to be remembered in common society, especially not in polite society.  Any public evidence of such destroyed or removed to the fullest extent possible, and where impossible to erase:  Ignored, defaced, and buried. ... And because now some are trying to ascribe some devilish horrible vision of myself, I assure you I speak not of any specific person or people.  The concept stands for itself.  Very few societies are guilt-free.  I just find it interesting that as time goes by I find more historic reminders that no conflict is one-sided, more often than not, both sides were wrong, and most astonishingly there ...

This article contains a promotional link. The author of this article is not a financial professional of any sort.  He is also not licensed to provide any manner of advice, financial or otherwise, by any governing body.   It's funny, I think, how my education touched on many things, math, literature, science, and history, I never really learned a lot about how money works until I was out of high school.  Even then, while that education came at the hands of a most excellent math teacher, it was not complete. My first lessons about how money works were all about interest and the magic of compound interest.  It's true, compound interest turns small quantities of money into enormous quantities of money.  What's not really expressly shared is you can only make money via compound interest if you are the bank.  A savings account will never keep up with inflation.  In order to make money with compound interest, you need to be making at least prime, if not ...

 So, random lessons from a ... very... random guy. Bros.  She's cute.  That's great, but you can't see what's going on in her head.  Talk to her before you crush out on her.  It'll work out better, you'll make more friends, and likely you'll find out really quick what's cute on the outside is not always even a little bit cute on the inside.   Ladies, This goes for dudes too.  Cute on the outside might just be Manson on the inside.  Find out before you crush out.  It's also possible he's completely clueless, so get his attention, twice.  I can't tell you how many times I've realized HOURS too late what was really going on. The above two work just as well if you're of the opposite persuasions, just switch pronouns for me there, okay? Weirdly this works for buying cars too.  It can look fast and be not so dreamy on the inside.  Do test drive, and while you're in the car take in whether the cockpit experience is any fun, becau...

So those who collect data on my interests know very well that I have a thing for luggage and travel solutions.  No surprise I get lots of ads for travel bags and accessories.  I like to travel.  No secret there. I was watching one such advertisement, because there are lots of people who think they have the perfect bag solution, and there are a ton of good ideas out there.  I have one recurring thought though when I see these bag advertisements.  They all try to purport that they're the perfect solution because they have more pockets than the other guy... So, here's the rub about carry-on bag design.  The fact of the matter is you have to fit the whole bag in a 9x14x22 inch space.  The more pockets you have, the more space within that 9x14x22 space is taken up by supporting material.  This means the more pockets you have, the less total space you have. Now.  Are pockets, padding, and separators bad?  No.  But... be careful in your de...

 Ocean cruising is coming back!  Here's some unsolicited advice: 5 and 7 day cruises are usually almost the same price and itinerary.  Get the 7 day version if you can.  The first and last "day" are included in the count.  And frankly, half of day 1 is all work getting aboard and situated, and all of the last day is work getting off the ship, to an airport, and going home.   WiFi is slow and expensive.  Trust me if it's Netflix or the like that you're worried about, the cruise line has you covered with huge movies and shows in the ship's library streamed directly to your stateroom TV for free - no internet required.  For little things, most of the time there's almost always free internet you can find in port. Unpack everything as soon as you're in your stateroom and put it all "away" in the wardrobes and drawers of your stateroom.  Then, as you enjoy your cruise, dirty clothes and souvenirs get packed as you go.  This will make ever...

 I see this a lot.  So much in fact it surprises me anybody still falls for it. Someone sends you a message, usually claiming to be someone important, saying they have a very large sum of money they would like to give to you, but first you have to pay for some thing related to the gift and then the gift is yours. Let me point out something that should already be abundantly clear:  If someone is honestly going to give you a very large sum of money, they will pay for the related things out of said sum and give you the rest free and clear.  If they say you need to cover this or that before you receive the large sum of money, walk away, don't waste your time.  That is the tell:  The large sum of money does not exist and you are being told a lie.   The most recent version of this scam has come in the form of a "contest winning" where you've "won" a certain quantity of bitcoin (BTC), saying all you have to do is sign up on this BTC exchange and use a co...

 What is "art"?  Webster's Dictionary has a long list of definitions.  I think it's easier to boil all that down to its root: Art is a creative expression that evokes thought or emotion. We can go one step further and drop the 'creative' since it's partially redundant, and in itself requires several pages of definition, unnecessary to this article. The type of thought or emotion does not matter, nor does the medium of expression.  Was it an expression?  Check.  Did it evoke thought or emotion?  Check.  Great.  That's art.  The bigger the evocation the "better" the art. The type of expressive medium does not matter.  Examples include all manner of image, regardless of permanence some lasting merely an instant, others seemingly to last for all eternity.  Sounds likewise, be they spoken word, music, or simply a noise without language or structure. Whether a thing is art also depends upon the audience.  Not all art will evoke ...

A friend of mine posted a story from a well known rag, the headline was VERY deceptive.  He handled it very gracefully and I think I learned from his example, so that's cool, but it got me thinking on a tangent. What is a lie?  Well, the dictionary says it's an intransitive verb "to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive."   That seems pretty accurate.  I mean we... most of us?  ... people make false statements all the time not realizing they're wrong.  Generally getting told you're wrong is one of the most annoying things, too, so I guess that's incentive to be wrong less, but it's not a lie to be wrong.  That's just... wrong. It gets deeper though.  So someone's wrong, they get told they're wrong by someone who does not have authority in their eyes.  They don't see it that way, so now they dig in.  Well shit?  Now they're wrong and fortified.  Still not a lie. OK so lets back out of that hole realizing we have t...

Long post warning: This one is about three pages. Click 'read more' at your own peril. Just going to put my thoughts here. May be accurate, may not be. Just thinking where the general public can see it. Risky I know. Bad habit I know. I've had friends turn hostile because of it. I'd urge you to talk it out with me rather than just holding a grudge for years. Y'all know who you are. This stupid disease. If you come into contact with it, from all I've read, you have a stupidly large chance of catching it. And after just a few days you'll be running a slight fever and otherwise no idea you're even sick meanwhile spreading it to potentially everyone you get close to. You won't know you're spreading it for at least a week. Maybe you can tell me exactly every person you've come into contact with in the last week... maybe. Most can't. If you ever figure out you had it because many people - especially teenagers - won't hardly ge...

So, there's a small push going right now for people to pick up as much survival gear as they can because you never know when your bugout bag might actually become a lifesaving device. That's great! But I have a problem with it. Of course I do and I'm posting about it on the Internet because that's where people go to post brain-dumps about their ideas both good and bad. Especially when it's a brain dump about a problem they want to complain about. Single use survival gear is the least effective thing you can get, and the most wasteful, and worst of all, in a true SHTF (look it up) scenario will be insufficient to meet your needs. So, when building a survival kit, consider why you might use it, and in the case where you cannot make yourself NOT buy a single-use emergency item, buy SEVERAL. Why? Because when SHTF and you need a solution NOW, you will not have TIME to "figure it out". PRACTICE is a major key to survival. Buying a bag/tent/blanket combo...

This space intentionally ... blank? Not quite, but close. I used to have a blog here with some solid history, sage advice, musings over many years' visits to E3 (The Electronic Entertainment Expo), and other random thoughts. Unfortunately I tried to monetize my blog by letting Google display ads on it. After much frustration, I a software engineer by trade could not make their automated algorithms accept my blog for display of ads not for content violation or lack of content or lack of longevity, but rather configuration issues that the automated system was loathe to elucidate upon.  To make it worse the configuration itself is all automated and Blogger is owned and run by none other than Google. I am not so naive as to believe all the products owned by a single entity should work together, but if you're going to hype the fact that it's all magically pre-configuring, you should at least make sure it works and be willing to take bug reports for those who it does no...