Friday Notes (Sep 27, 2024)

Maybe it’s a hold-over from school days, or maybe it has to do with fall (my favorite season), but the year really does hinge on fall and spring for me. You’d think spring would be the logical year start, but I see September as the turnover point. Summer’s over, another (school) year begins.

In any event, it’s fall when I most often find myself thinking about, and planning, the year ahead. The last few years I’ve made a lot of progress but have slacked off the past year. For the coming year, I’ve decided to throw away a lot more stuff.

Including some piles of notes, but for now it’s time for Friday Notes…

Woke up two nights ago sometime after 4:00 AM and realized some device was unhappy and making an occasional (loud) beep. Wandering around I saw it was my carbon monoxide detector. Dug out the user manual and diagnosed its signals as the unit having reached its end of life.

Wait, what? When I had the smoke alarms replaced and this CO detector added, they said ten years. That was in 2019. [See Whadda Week.] Five years later, the smoke detectors got so bad I had to have them replaced. At a cost of over $800 because the warranty was only three years. [See Screaming Ceiling Cats.]

Besides coming out to deal with the smoke alarms, they did a “thorough” inspection for possible electrical issues including checking batteries in smoke alarms and such. Yet, I don’t think they even noticed the CO detector they installed five years ago.

Turns out, according to the user manual, the CO detector has a service life — you may have guessed it — of five years. Sealed lithium battery, so the whole thing has to be replaced. And old one disposed of properly.

Knowing they installed the device in 2019, and presumably knowing it has a five-year service life, how did they miss the opportunity to sell me a new one?

I can tell you who isn’t doing the work: Service Today. As far as I’m concerned, they missed the ball all around. I assume I can buy a new one at some local supply store, Home Depot, or whatever. I wonder if Amazon doesn’t have them. (If I decide I actually need one — somehow, I managed without until 2019.)

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A note that traces almost all the way back to one of my first posts, Wow; the interweb is… #1, which was supposed to be the first in a series. As it turned out, I never pursued it. Many of my posts have touched on the interweb, and I’ve mentioned it a lot, but the series idea died after the pilot.

As part of The Year of More Throwing Out, I’m officially giving up on it. Here’s the note I’ve had for a long time listing possible ideas for Wow; the interweb is… #2.

The interweb is…

• …not a human fiction (like money or government), but a high-speed cheap medium for fact and fiction. For tales tall or true (or utter BS).
• …a two-edged sword as with all powerful tools.
• …a revolution that’s changed humanity.
• …a right?
• …a standard utility, like water, sewer, electrical, gas, phone, etc.

All true, but perhaps these days all obvious, even tired?

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Something else I intended to write about since the early days was Robert B. Parker’s detective series, Spenser. Parker wrote 40 of those novels before he died.

My dad introduced me to them when I was in high school, and I became an instant fan. Spenser is a bit like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher character — an image of masculinity, even low-toxicity machismo. They differ in that Spenser is more of a homebody, and more introspective, though never plagued with modern-day deconstructive angst (which has gotten beyond old at this point).

Since discovering the Spenser books, I considered them my favorite detective novels. There are life lessons I took from Spenser, most centered around keeping your word. And not giving it unless you mean to keep it. And doing the right thing, even if it costs you.

[There isn’t much one can control in life, but one’s words and actions are things we do have jurisdiction over. They are part of our character, so we mustn’t squander them lightly.]

Parker has another popular character, Jesse Stone, and I never got around to exploring those. (Tom Selleck played him in several TV movie adaptations. They’re okay, but very 1980s.) A while back I finally tried some of the novels.

And didn’t care for them. Then I tried re-reading some Spenser novels and didn’t feel the old magic. I’ve apparently outgrown them. There is something a little outdated to Spenser and Jesse Stone. I say outdated because the Jack Reacher novels feel more contemporary. Some disenchantment may come from having read those books so many times over the years.

In any event, I’m not going to write any Mystery Monday posts about Parker or Spenser. One more thing to throw out. In general, I think I’m done talking about movies, TV shows, and books. Unless one strikes me strongly (one way or the other), and I can’t resist.

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I continue to be puzzled by the increased traffic on this and my programming blog. It’s now safe to say the traffic here is higher than it ever has been since I began:

This blog is up to well over 100 (always silent) views per day. A lot of old posts have gotten a lot more hits in recent months than they ever have before.

I wondered about that big bump late in late 2020, but then I realized it’s probably a COVID bump. Everyone was home with nothing to do.

When I mentioned this in the last Notes, things hadn’t taken off like this, and I now suspect they’ll drop back down, because a lot of the views are due to one post, Babylon (Anime):

When mentioned in August the bar hadn’t reached 200 views. As you see, it did (201, in fact), and this month so far it has 901 views. I thought it was dying down, but with 19 views yesterday, apparently not that much. I published it in August of 2021, and most months views were single digits. Suddenly, kaboom. Weird.

My programming blog, The Hard-Core Coder, is getting more traffic as well:

Again, higher than ever in the blog’s history. (There seems to be a COVID bump here, also.) The bulk of the new traffic is from one post, Calculating Entropy (in Python):

Over 2,600 views against a site total of just over 15,000, so about 17% of the total traffic since the blog started in 2014. This year it’s almost 1,200 views compared to just over 2,600 total, so 46% of the views this year.

But another post entered the running last month (also mentioned in the last Notes), Full Adder Code:

Last month it hadn’t cracked 200 views, but ultimately it almost cracked 300. Considering this month is on the wane, I think the traffic is dying down. Someone rang the post’s bell, but not that loudly. But again, weird to watch.

By the standards of popular blogs, these numbers are still pretty quiet, but I’m bemused by the irony of this increase in traffic just when I’m in the throes of possibly moving on. (At the very least diversifying and directing much of my focus elsewhere.) I know I keep saying this, but it’s just so… weird.

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Something that’s always bugged me. In movies or TV shows when a character has an invisible companion of some sort, why are they so unable to stop themselves from blurting things out loud and looking stupid or crazy?

By invisible companion, I mean someone really there, usually as a ghost, but I’ve seen other twists where the protagonist is the only one that can see the invisible person. And somehow, they can’t seem to keep in mind that no one else can.

In some cases, telepathy is involved, so the invisible person isn’t even speaking, and the protagonist knows the I.P. can hear their thoughts, and they still blurt things out for the amusement of the audience.

Which is the real reason, of course, but it annoys me the protagonist has to be so dumb for our entertainment. I am not amused.

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I liked the New Scientist review of Nexus, the latest book by Yuval Harari. His earlier book, Sapiens, was popular when it came out, but I wasn’t impressed by it [see Sapiens: The Book].

The review starts off:

“Reading Nexus is a strange experience. The quality of the text lurches up and down: one minute you are reading something incisive, the next you are wading through banalities.”

I read that and thought, yes! I felt the same way about Sapiens. The banality is almost striking.

The review mentions Sapiens and its key point, that we took over because we invented fiction, which I did find worthwhile [see Sapiens: Storytellers]. But in terms of the power of our belief, the reviewer (delightfully) goes on to say:

“This isn’t original: Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather said the same thing with more wit and less verbiage in 1996.”

Delightful, because Terry Pratchett is my favorite fiction author, bar none, Hogfather is one of his best [see Pterry Psnippets #1], and it’s absolutely correct about more wit and less verbiage. Pratchett explored the power of belief in many of his Discworld novels, no less so than in Small Gods (a rare standalone Discworld novel).

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Speaking of belief and God(s), where does the human power of belief go when we’ve killed our Gods? Which, in these deconstructed secular times, we seem to have done.

Humans are going to believe in something, we’re wired that way.

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Notes for a post I planned to call My Stages of Self-Disgust:

Stage 1: The “Death of a Liberal Arts Education” — a phrase I came up with back in the 1970s to describe the anti-intellectual currents I sensed then. Culture seemed to devalue critical thinking, historic background, and foundational knowledge. We seemed to give up on self-examination.

Stage 2: To some extent, being smart isn’t like being fit, it’s like being tall. It’s a native trait, not something you can train for. Until this stage, I didn’t understand why people didn’t try harder. But you can’t try to be tall.

[That said, some tall people are very short-minded, and some short people are larger than life. One size never fits all, not when it comes to humans.]

Stage 3: Some brains aren’t awake (and I don’t mean “woke”, I mean not fully conscious). Stupid can’t be solved easily, generally not from without, and it’s dangerous.

The saving grace is to be good of heart and accepting of others. By definition a spectrum includes a broad variety. There is always room at the table for the good of heart. That’s really the only entry ticket to humanity — be good of heart.

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The above and notes like it, I’ve decided to trash. On some level it helps to rant about the stuff that seems so wrong, but a combination of a decade of retirement and over 13 years of blogging has me [1] tired of ranting, [B] seeing no point to it, and [iii] basically wanting to just ignore the crap and keep life small and quiet and nice.

On the other hand, I do like a good rant now and then, so I’m not so much hanging up my guns for good as just setting them on the shelf (near to hand).

[The two paragraphs above in place of the full page of notes titled “What We’ve Lost.” But … it’s nothing I haven’t said many times before.]

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Every so often — on a scale of years — I get thoroughly sick of myself and start casting about for ways to change. I think I’ve hit that stage again recently.

Definitely time to start tossing more stuff, including, I think, this computer desk. I’ve decided I want a corner unit closer to the window and a lot more useable horizontal space. And a much better desk chair. Looks like I have a remodeling project.

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Speaking of the Year of (More) Throwing Things Out, let’s be sure to throw out Trump and all the other crazy people this November. Big Blue Wave!

Vote Blue, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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