Month: July 2020

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I Could Live There










Okay, I know this one is a little bit more pedestrian than my other "I Could Live There" posts, but it popped up on my Insta this morning and I really like it. I mean, it's a house I could easily see Ben and I living in. It's got a very low-maintenance yard, and—always appreciated in Phoenix—a swimming pool.

And in the interest of full disclosure, yes, this is one of my Dad's designs for Hallcraft back in the 70s. I like how they've preserved much of what initially appealed to me about this plan but also brought it into the 21st century with new finishes and the removal of the very dated sunken living room and decorative screens.

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Quote of the Day

In WW2, Londoners were asked to black out their homes at night so the enemy bombers wouldn't see the lights and know ehre to target. No Londoner said, "It's my right to have lights on," because others would say, "Your light endangers the rest of us." Substitute "light" for "mask." Now argue." ~ Jason Alexander

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A Thought for Today

Those who have stayed inside, worn masks in public, and have socially distanced themselves during this pandemic are the same people who are used to doing the whole group project by themselves.

Listen, I'm tired of being quarantined too (I'm climbing the fuckin' walls, truth be told), but that doesn't mean my needs are above of the well-being of our community. The virus is relentless and doesn't take a break because we are tired. I still want to pass the test and stay alive!

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The Shopping Cart Theory

(I must admit I'd never heard of this before now, but the source material is dated 2002 so it's not exactly new—and with the current pandemic of Karens and Donalds refusing to wear masks, seems more timely than ever.)

The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing.

To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being foRced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart. No one will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart. You gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.

A person who is unable to do this is no better then an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it.

The shopping cart is what determines whether or not a person is a good or a bad member of society.

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Quote of the Day

In the end, Trump did what he said. He built a wall around America and made the world pay for it. He just never told Americans they'd be stuck inside." ~ @indica on Twitter

American passports are—for the moment—absolutely worthless.

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Prophetic

Chernobyl came out on HBO just over a year ago, and a popular center-right talking point was that it showed how communist misgovernance inevitably led to preventable mass casualties (up to 16,000 deaths across Europe have been traced to that disaster).

Anyway, just thinking out loud.

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Quote of the Day

The praise that Trump got from his campaign staff for belatedly covering his face is the kind of positive reinforcement that any parent who ever tried to toilet train a toddler knows well." ~ Karen Tumulty, columnist

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So. Many. Duplicates.

You may or may not have noticed that my usual fevered pitch of posting has dropped off this weekend. There's a reason.

I needed to step away from the madness that is our world right now for a while and concentrate on something that wasn't related—at least not directly—to the downfall of Western Civilization.

As I've written before, I'm more than just a bit of a digital hoarder. That was brought into succinct focus last week when my laptop's drive dropped under 10% available, adding even more anxiety to my already frazzled psyche. I have several different archive drives available, but they're all nearing capacity as well and the last thing I wanted to do was add yet another one to the mix. So I bit the bullet and bought a 2TB Sandisk external SSD. (I have a 512GB  version that I use for my nightly Carbon Copy Clone that's performed flawlessly for over a year, so I felt comfortable committing to an all SSD archive strategy.) I figure since my archives are currently a bit shy of one terabyte this should hold me for a while since those archives stretch back decades.

Everything was going smoothly until in my haste, I accidentally deleted a bunch of old pictures that existed on only one of those archive drives. To be honest, they weren't that important—it was only about 12 years of old (1995-2007) "art prints." I knew the quality and resolution of the earlier stuff especially wasn't worth crying over, but it was still annoying that for someone who should know better, I'd lost it all through my own stupidity.

Turns out the stuff wasn't lost, but it was going to be a pain to restore it. I'd burned all those images onto a DVD optical disk in early 2008. Unfortunately, the images weren't as meticulously curated as I've been doing for the last fourteen years, all types of pictures existing in simple yearly folders.

Now any sane person would've just copied everything over in the yearly folders, backed them up on the new SSD and called it a day. But I've never claimed to be sane.

No, I was determined to put everything back the way it was before I'd wiped out those files from the archive; the way I'd done many years ago that matched the folder structure I'd been actively using since 2008. It was painful  then, and I knew it was going to be painful now.

I won't bore you with any further details, but suffice to say that two days into this project, I'm still not to the point where I can actually offload my "art print" collection in its entirely to the new drive. Everything else that had been on disparate drives (documents, non-pornographic pictures, software, etc.) was moved, but not the menz—because in my anal retentiveness, in addition to sorting the images into subfolders and renaming to match my existing nomenclature, I'm also weeding out duplicates, and OMG, are there ever duplicates!

I've sorted about half so far and have weeded out duplicates as I've run across them, but I can't do a thorough weeding until everything is in the proper folders and I can run PhotoSweeper on the master folder to find duplicates across all the yearly folders.

I know it's crazy, but it is providing a nice respite from the awful swirling about in the world, and it's kind of nice seeing some of the old…um…faces…that I haven't seen in a decade or more.