Friday Notes (Oct 2, 2026)

I’m off to a late start (it’s nearly noon) starting this early-in-the-month Friday Notes post. The delay is because I spent several hours this morning updating my Movies page (which lists my favorite movies as well as my rating system).

I’m not done updating it; I want to add some lists of films by favorite directors (Wes Anderson, Christopher Guest, Quentin Tarantino). Wikipedia has those lists, of course, but I like having a reference page with links I most care about.

But enough about movies. On to the Notes!

Between the last sentence and this one, I lost even more time today from trying to figure out what was wrong with my shows.md file, which (as of opening it today) lost all its formatting.

After several tries with Copilot (Microsoft’s Ai), it finally coughed up that [A] Microsoft’s NOTEPAD utility only supports its own flavor of markdown text and [2] a recent update made it strict about its markdown syntax.

At first, it claimed the file was a .TXT file rather than an .MD file, which accounted for the lost formatting. I had to point out the filename I’d given it was clearly an .MD file. Then it blamed the problem on bad markdown text. I assumed Copilot could open the file given the filename but apparently not. It wanted me to paste the whole of the text into its dialog box. (Okay, fine, whatever.)

It was only when I pointed out that my file had been fine until opened today that Copilot admitted the problem was Microsoft Windows’s NOTEPAD utility and its particular version of markdown. Apparently, previously it was very forgiving of stuff it didn’t support but the recent update made it stricter.

It took a few passes to get it to do what it offered to do: convert the existing .MD text to a version that NOTEPAD would be okay with. It asked a ton of questions about how to handle the embedded links, each one prefaced with “One more question before I begin…” After too many of those, I told it to ‘just do it!’

For ease of verification, I had it convert each section separately. It got through the first few okay (though I still have to verify it line-by-line), but then it started hallucinating. The section of Hulu shows had no connection to the original text. It has the shape of the original, but the data was… weirdly close but completely incorrect.

I scolded it and it was like, ‘oh, so I shouldn’t infer anything?’ Yeah, dumbass; I would’ve said that went without saying. In what reality would you, on a task like this, think it was okay to infer anything?

I finally got a complete .MD file, but it needed a lot of editing to clean it up, and I still have to crosscheck it against the original text (but didn’t want to spend any more time on it with this post to write).

OTOH, exploring what markdown text is all about is a new path to wander for a bit. Always fun to learn something new!

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Bentley enjoyed her annual ten-day vacation with her Uncle Me. The weather was just about perfect, so we spent some time just sitting outside:

Her new name is Standing Dog Long Toes because, in her old arthritic age, she loves being outside but not walking so much. If she just stands there, the breeze brings the smells to her. (And she has notably long toes.) Many’s the time on our walks she’d decide to just stand and smell the air for a while. Indeed, for as long as I have patience for. I think, of all the times she just stood for a wile, only once or twice did she decide it was time to move on.

We’re both getting old and slowing down. Years ago, I was usually the slower one, or at least the one really pushing to keep up, but these days it’s just a slow stroll for me. Between all her close nasal inspection of many, many seemingly indistinguishable points along the way and her pace, there’s no more struggle.

Which makes me sad on multiple levels. Regardless, we still enjoy our walks strolls through the local woods:

I got very lucky back in 2003 when I picked this place to live in! There has been a fair bit of new construction in the last years, much of it as large apartments or huge condo buildings. Pity: former forests and fields turning into more masses of humanity. If this keeps up, I may have to find a new place to live!

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For many years I’ve had a notion of a “timely theme phrase” as a point to ponder. And as representing a key aspect of our times (as I see it, of course). I’ve presented the list of these in passing before but have never really remarked on any of them (let alone dug into them).

The current list:

• Lies & Illusions (Smoke & Mirrors) — All the deceitfulness, on small and large scales, that inundates almost every aspect of our lives.
• Wasteful Nature (Verdant Life) — Mother Nature is a spendthrift when it comes to life. Even our own lives are filled with unavoidable waste.
• Semantic Confusion (“Center cannot hold”) — All the deceitfulness, along with an obsession for deconstruction, has eroded previously cornerstone foundations. We’re all hopelessly confused now.
• Death of Idealism — Because of the deconstruction, born from the recognition of high-level deceit in politics and marketing, we’ve lost trust in everything and no longer seem to find the mountain worth climbing.
• Pavlov’s People — Marketing, advertising, political propaganda, and social hacking all rely on the notion that people are no better than Pavlov’s famous dogs salivating at the sound of a bell. Is our intellect really unable to rise us above mere behaviorism?
• Shameless & w/o Grace — Anything for views or attention. Large amounts of our endemic deceitfulness play a big role here. Anything for views. We seem to have lost all sense of shame or even that such a thing should exist.
• Loss of Physical Reality — Wrapped in deceit and fantasy, the physical world becomes disfavored over the imaginary digital one. Ai seems positioned to help us even further distance ourselves from the real world.

The last item is a new one that I’ve been thinking and writing about quite a bit here in the last years. At least since the related Our Own Words and Our BS Culture posts in December of 2020 where I coined the acronym FBS and phrase it stands for, Fantasy Bullshit.

And as I’ve said many times, the proof of the pudding currently squats in the Oval Office. Our society has manifestly and blatantly moved way off rational social norms. The “new normal” is bat-shit crazy (or bat-poop bonkers if you prefer a slightly more polite version).

My thinking lately leans towards putting a big share of the blame on generations raised on television shows. Especially lately, the way we discourse in public has become filled with snark and irresponsibility and irrationality just like our heroes on TV.

I can’t help but wonder to what extent it has programmed our minds.

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Just to record a few details from my home improvement months, one thing I’ve been meaning to do for ages is replace the eight cheap wooden knobs on my cheap accordion closet doors with something in metal:

The various closet doors are still cheap AF (hollow-core fiber board with a thin veneer on the outside), but the knobs dress them up a bit, plus they feel much better. And hopefully will not constantly work loose no matter how hard I tighten them (so far, they’ve remained tight).

My furnace/AC feeds the house through floor vents. I mentioned replacing the grill over one by the front door because tracked-in salt and water had over the years made it grody. That one I replaced like-for-like. [See Friday Notes (Sep 4, 2026) and the picture of my new front door. Floor vent is in the lower-right.]

I didn’t realize they came in a variety of patterns and styles (including wood) until I happened to walk down the right aisle at Menards. I thought, what the heck, why not replace all the grills in the floor vents with something that looks nice:

That’s the pattern I picked for the living room and office. For the bedroom:

A different kind of geometry, just for fun. There were other possibilities but none I liked as much as these.

My new blinds for the bedroom and office are almost exactly like the old ones. (Likewise, the ones for the patio door/window.) Other than minor manufacturer differences, the big difference is that the new ones are cordless. The old ones had cords on each side: one to control the top edge; one to control the bottom edge. Now, one grabs the top or bottom and moves it.

Which, if one is short, is a bit of a pain for the putting or getting the top edge to the top. They present “cordless” like a feature, but to me it’s a bug.

I thought my friend was kidding when she said blinds are cordless because the old cords were a strangling threat to kids and pets. Which, I guess, maybe, but how large is the threat compared to all those who benefit from cords? Why can’t there be blinds with cords for those of us with no infants and sensible pets?

Why does everything have to be for the lowest common denominator?

There is also that this manual raising and lowering of the blind edges results in:

Which, yes, is an exaggerated example for effect, but my eyes notice even when the angle is small. There are so many hard horizontal and vertical reference lines that a canted blind edge stands out.

On a more pleasant (and equally trivial) note, one of the LED segments in my bedroom clock burned out, so I found a fairly similar one on Amazon:

It turned out to have a switch for 24-hour time rather than 12-hour with AM/PM, and I’ve been training my brain to be as comfortable with 24-hour time as it is with 12-hour. (For instance, I have my phone set to use 24-hour time.)

My love of numbers is tickled by times like 10:10 and 11:11, and now it can be tickled by times like 20:20 and 22:22. Those aren’t something my brain is used to seeing!

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I happened to read a post from four years ago: Smolin: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. It’s about a book by theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, whose sensibilities I have long admired. Some of it struck me as even more relevant to our disconnect from physical reality now than even just four years ago.

WTF happened to us? How did we get so confused?

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I’ve tried to use Microsoft’s Sticky Notes app for a variety of note-taking purposes, but the more I’ve used it, the less I’ve liked it. I’m to the point of phasing out my use of it.

The problem is that it insists on syncing every change, no matter how minor, to the cloud, but the app seems to have trouble maintaining its connection to said cloud. So, it spins and spins, for hours even, never succeeding. It requires a reboot to fix, which means any changes — the very changes that drove the need to sync — are lost unless I have the presence of mind to save them to some note-taking app that’s reliable.

This may be related to something that seems to happen if I put the laptop to Sleep at night versus Shut Down. Very often, once woken up, the network connection becomes intermittently incompetent. I’ve been unable to diagnose whether it’s MS Windows or this Lenovo laptop (which is now out of warrenty).

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For some reason, there is a markéd decrease in the spam emails in my now-ancient email account (one I’ve had since the 1990s but can’t give up because it’s on a domain I’ve owned since then — something along the lines of smythe.com, but my last name isn’t actually Smythe):

Not sure what accounts for it, but the rate is considerably below recent months and noticeably below earlier rates from when I first started tracking it.

I am not complaining!

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I’ve posted before about how the Microsoft grammarian used to be more useful but of late seems to have become senile [see Bad Grammar]. Working today on a draft of a future post, it served up this whopper:

Huh? In what universe is “many years to paint we into this corner” anywhere close to being correct grammar? I gave Microsoft some feedback on this one.

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This early-in-the-month post helps shift the distribution away from the weighting towards the latter half of the month I noticed a while back:

And even fills in a day that previously had no occurances!

Stay grammatical, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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