Agentic Windows

2025-11-11T19:11:22+00:00

I ran across an article today about a post on Twitter by Pavan Davuluri, who is the current head of Windows for Microsoft. I just had to comment on it in long form.

So, what is this amazing comment?

Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere. Join us at MSIgnite to see how frontier firms are transforming with Windows and what’s next for the platform. We can’t wait to show you!

My first instinct? This is great news for Apple and Linux!

My second instinct? This is great news for Apple and Linux!

OK, stepping back for a second here.

In my mind, yes this is a great reason to give Microsoft and Windows the ole heave-ho. It’s more than that though. Windows has retained its market position because it’s annoying, but still mostly functional on a base level. It’s like the Internet that way. As long as it’s marginally workable and already there, people will use it because it’s just more annoying to go out and replace it with something else. Microsoft has managed to get away with a great deal of enshittification based on that alone. This could be a step too far though.

Microsoft has already thrown in features like Recall, which is something very few people wanted and was an absolute nightmare for personal privacy. It was received so badly that they pulled it back and then quietly put it back when no one was looking. This “agentic” Windows sounds even worse than that. As some of the comments spelled out unequivocally, no one wants this. Microsoft is doing it anyway.

I think we can all assume that this is not going to work offline, or it’s not going to work well offline. So, we’re going to have a version of Windows where half the functions don’t work without an Internet connection, full of ads, and chewing through processor and memory to give us slop we don’t ask for? There are going to be people that keep using this, but I need to assume that this is going to push a lot more people past their limits.

Zorin recently capitalized on Microsoft discontinuing support for Windows 10 by releasing their newest version on the same day. It was a pretty solid strategy for them. A smart one. All Microsoft’s moves to implement AI in virtually everything is giving their competition more opportunities to pull users from Microsoft. Linux is an obvious choice since people can just put it on the computer they already own and be back up and working within hours. Given, this won’t work for everybody, but for your average person walking the street who uses their computer for browsing and an occasional game or something, it’ll be perfectly fine. Other people could just jump ship entirely and run over to Apple. That comes with it its own set of challenges, but you can walk into a store in most large cities and buy an Apple computer. That’s going to give it a leg up on Linux unfortunately.

All this “agentic” garbage could very well be Microsoft shooting itself in the foot. Probably both feet. It remains to be seen if it’s enough to get people to leave the platform, but there are better and less stupid options out there. Maybe Microsoft will figure this out before that happens. Maybe not.

Class Dismissed

2025-10-26T12:10:26+00:00

It’s done!!! I’m so happy it’s done!!

Well, to be fair, it’s been done for a week now, but I couldn’t bring myself to write anything since then. Things didn’t go poorly, but it was a lot of work for a 100 level class.

This isn’t my first run through college, but I don’t remember things being this intense last time. I mean, it could have something to do with the fact that last time I was a full time student and this time I’m a full time parent and I have a full time job in addition to all the school work. There’s a lot more on my plate this time than was there was last time. Also, my grades are significantly better this time, so there’s that. They say Cs get degrees, and that’s true which I can verify from last time, but I guess I have a different impression of that philosophy than I did my first experience.

Regardless, I’ve moved on to my next class. Art. Photography.

Again, it’s a 100 level class, but this one makes me very nervous. I guess they all make me nervous on some level, but I’m not what most people would call “creative” or “artistic,” so this is definitely a stretch class for me. It’s already more fun than the last one, and I do enjoy taking my camera out when I can. The hardest part about this (other than trying to pretend to be creative and artistic) is just finding the time to get out and take photos. The professor has a solid list of “do not take photographs of,” which includes a pretty much everything I usually take pictures of, and he’s very particular about the types of photos he wants taken. He seems very into urban candids. That’s fine and all, but I don’t live in a super urban area, and it’s a pretty hefty drive to get one one. I have to do it when it doesn’t directly conflict with my job and family stuff.

I’m probably exaggerating a little here. The class is a couple weeks in, and what I’ve turned in I’m doing well with. If you do the MikeOne/MikeTwo I talked about in my last post, MikeOne is happy, but MikeTwo knows we’re not far enough into the class to have a passing grade even if I’d gotten 100% of the currently available points. This is October and the class goes until the week before Christmas, so that’s to be expected. Still, there’s a lot of hard work remaining to get this done right, so no sitting back and relaxing for quite a while.

Getting Grades

2025-10-09T11:10:44+00:00

This second time through college has changed the way I think about grading. I’m not sure if this is a universal thing, but my classes universally have been mapped from beginning to end before it’s even started. There’s a defined number of points. This has resulted in me considering my grade as a percentage of the whole right from the beginning. Instead of thinking about how I’m doing in a class based on the percentage of points I’ve gotten per assignment, I think about how I’m doing in relation to the total available.

What does this mean? Well, let’s consider a hypothetical.

Mike One is taking a class. Mike One is the first time I went through college. Mike One completes an assignment and gets 95 out of 100 points. Mike One thinks to himself, “Nice! I’m getting an A!”

Mike Two is taking a class. Mike Two is the second time I went through college. Mike Two completes an assignment and gets 95 out of 100 points. Mike Two looks and sees the class has a total of 800 total points. Mike Two thinks to himself, “OK, that’s about an 12%. At this point, I’m getting an F.”

I start to create milestones. At some point, I’ve gotten enough points that I’ll have a D in the class. Then a C. Then a B. Finally an A if I keep things rolling.

I’m not sure if this is a good approach, or even healthy, but until I’ve accrued enough points in the class where I’ll get a non-failing grade if I stop completely, I consider myself failing the class.

Today I hit a milestone in one of my classes. It’s an 8 week course, and I’ve got a week and a half to go. I’m getting a C. So far. An A or a B is still on the table. Just need to finish this thing off. I’m so looking forward to it being done.

Obsidian for the Win

2025-09-25T10:09:27+00:00

I’ve been getting more and more into using Obsidian lately, and it’s really simplified my note taking. Since I’m also using Jekyll for my web site, I figured I might be able to use Obsidian to simplify that too.

My blog writing setup is pretty sparse. I’m using Jekyll and Netlify to host out of a GitHub repository. I’ve gone through various iterations on how to upload posts. I had a fancy little frontend that Kev created for me for a while. That was fine. Then I manually created stuff at the command line. That was also fine. For the most part, the most annoying issue with any of this has been the frontmatter.

Frontmatter is always an issue for me. I always forget what things are supposed to be, so I end up copying a previous post and removing all the stuff in there and then updating it’s frontmatter to be what I want for the new post and then creating the new post. It works, but it sucks. I’ve created “blank” files that had the front matter in them in a general sense and then updated from that, but I always seemed to forget to copy it and I overwrote it a couple times with posts and it was just not working for me.

For a while now, I’ve just been directly entering the blog posts into GitHub. I literally just create a new file in the web interface and type everything out. This works, but again I always forget to copy the frontmatter from another post before I begin, so I end up opening another tab and blah blah blah. You know where this is going. Of course, none of this is really hard per se, but it’s annoying.

Enter Obsidian.

I’ve been using Obsidian for notes for a while now. Since I’ve gotten to the point that I type out my notes in markdown even in apps that don’t support markdown, Obsidian feels very natural for me. I mean, you can type out your stuff like you would in a normal word processor if you want. You don’t have to do it in markdown, but why would you want to do that? Since Obsidian and Jekyll both use markdown, I’d even started typing my blog posts out first in Obsidian and then just copy and pasting them into GitHub for publication. This works great, except for that stupid frontmatter.

Of course, and I think this is a well established fact at this point, I’m a moron. Templates exist in Obsidian. Frontmatter is supported in Obsidian. You can even do really fancy stuff like automatically inserting time and date stamps into your frontmatter.

How have I not done this before???

I created a template. It’s got all the relevant frontmatter already in it. The date and time is automatically inserted into the frontmatter. I can literally just start typing. The only thing I have to update now is the blog title and the permalink (since it’s based on the blog title). This is making things much easier for me.

At this point, I’m still manually copying these posts directly into GitHub. That’s still a rub. It’s annoying, but really it’s just a copy and paste at this point. Still, I’m seeing a GitHub plugin in that list. Is that the next step in my Obsidian journey? In theory, it could take the last really stupid part out of my current workflow. It might just be my next experiment.

Palate Cleanse

2025-09-24T01:00:00+00:00

Contrary to how it might seem, I’ve been writing quite a bit lately. I just haven’t been writing here. I’m taking a break from that writing to do some writing here because I need a bit of a palate cleanse.

Some might remember that I mentioned that I’m back in class this fall, and I’m taking an English class. I’m not going to delve into details as to the why I’m taking a freshman English course, suffice to say that I am. I’ve elected to compress my schedule down to eight weeks instead of the standard sixteen just so I can get this thing over and done, but that means multiple writing assignments per week.

See, here’s the thing. I like writing. It’s fun. It lets me take the ideas that are banging around between my ears and put them out into the world. That helps me quiet the noise in my head. I won’t claim to be particularly good at it, but being a crap writer doesn’t take the enjoyment out of it. The problem I’m running into is writing on a schedule about a topic I couldn’t care less about takes the joy out of writing. It’s like taking a nice, juicy orange and putting it into a juicer. When you’re done squeezing every last drop of goodness out of that orange, you throw away the juice and keep the dried and crushed remnants. That’s what my writing feels like right now.

I’m halfway through this class, and I only have maybe six or seven more papers to write. I’m also starting another class in five days: Photography. I’m hoping that class doesn’t do for photography what English has done for my writing. I enjoy taking pictures. It’s fun, and if I can capture even a fraction of the beauty in the world and preserve it in a photo to share with others, I consider that a success.

I’m looking forward to being done with this class. I was hoping to write more on this blog, but after this class I’m think I’m going to need to step away from the keyboard for a while just to try to cram some of that juice back into the orange. Sadly, I was really hoping this class would inspire me to write more and maybe even get back into the habit of writing regularly. Now, I just don’t think that’s going to happen. At least not for a while.

Results of 100 Days To Offload, Again

2025-08-21T01:00:00+00:00

On the 8th of August, 2024 I was challenged to complete the 100 Days To Offload. This is a challenge I’ve successfully completed before, but have failed even more. This new challenge came with an even tighter timeline, to complete it by the end of the calendar year. So, how did it go?

Badly. It went badly.

By the end of the calendar year, I’d completed 31 out of the 100 posts I was hoping to complete. You don’t have to be good at math to understand that’s not close. So, it’s hard to call this anything other than what it is, and that’s abject failure. Still, the 100 Days to Offload challenge is for a full year, not the 4 months specified in this new challenge, so that was still a possibility. So, how did that go?

Badly. It went badly.

By August 16th, 2025 I’d completed a whopping 46 out of the 100 posts I needed to make to complete the challenge.

So, in the first 138 days, I completed 31 posts. That’s one post every 4 to 5 days or so. Not great. I wouldn’t have completed the 100 Days at that rate if I’d kept that pace. In the next 227 days, I completed only 15 more posts, which is about one post every 15 days or so. That’s approximately 2 posts per month, which would have given me a total of 24 posts in a year. I did manage to beat that number, thankfully.

So, what’s the excuse here? I mean, writing a blurb every 3 or 4 days shouldn’t be that hard, right? It’s not like this needs to be War and Peace. Just a quick little something about something.

I think the biggest issue for me is that my desire to write comes in waves. Sometimes I have things I want to talk about, and other times I won’t even post on Fosstodon for days at a time. Also, I’ve traditionally written mostly about technology, which is a field I’ve felt particularly burnt out on lately. Once upon a time, I’d track the news for the latest and greatest stuff. These days most of my tech is years old and I dread even running updates.

What else could I write about then?

Well, I have a family and I have a job. I could write about that stuff, I just don’t want to.

For the privacy of my wife and kids, I don’t like to get too much into discussing them. I’m happily married, and I have kids that don’t seem to completely hate me at this point, and that’s usually where I’ll draw the line.

I could write about my job I suppose, but there’s quite a bit of crossover between my job and technology since I work in a technology based job. The previously mentioned burn out comes into play here. There’s also the fact that I work in a field where privacy is a huge factor and there’s a lot of concern about corporate secrets. I’m contractually not supposed to mention a lot of what I do or who I do it for, so that would only make writing about the job in a field I’m burnt out on more complicated and annoying for everybody.

So, if I’m not writing about my family, and I’m not writing about my job, and I’m not writing about technology, what do I write about?

I think the answer is obvious at this point: I don’t.

I suppose I could write about school. For those who don’t know, I’m an approximately 50 year old college student. Next week I start the oh so exciting class of English 101. Seriously. Maybe I’ll regail you with tales of nouns and verbs and dangling participles? For some reason I don’t see that happening.

Another class I have coming up is I’m going to be taking a photography course. I require some humanities credits, and I like taking pictures. I’m what most people with cameras would refer to as a “rank amateur” (heavy on the “rank”), but I enjoy doing it. Maybe that’ll be enough to kick off a blog post or two. I guess we’ll see.

OK, time to wrap things up before I meander further from the point. 100 Days to Offload? Failed. Super failed. Excuse excuse excuse. Moving on. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

Book Report - The Ministry of Time

2025-07-15T01:00:00+00:00

I just finished Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time. It was definitely not my usual reading.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.

I got hooked into reading this book because I’m a fan of Science Fiction, and I do enjoy a good time travel story. I don’t remember where I heard about it, but I’d never read any of the author’s work before. I was unsure what to expect, but I really enjoyed it for the most part.

Most of the reading I do doesn’t tend to be particularly advanced. My vocabulary is probably about average and I rarely have to look up any words in my usual fare. This book wasn’t an exception though there were a few places I had to figure out meanings based on contex.

This book was not an action book. For the most part, it focused on a relationship between two people and the people who surround those individuals to a lesser extent. The SciFi aspects of the story were more background and less relevant in the day to day, which usually took place in a home. Not a home on a space ship or anything like that. Just a house in a quiet neighborhood near London.

Despite not being something I’d usually read, I found I really enjoyed myself. For some reason I took some time getting going, but after I made it about a third of the way in I burned through the rest of it in a day. I’d recomend this book to people who enjoy a book that doesn’t require a fight every other page.

Day 46 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

Reading of the Day

2025-05-25T01:00:00+00:00

Reading list for May 25th, 2025.

These are articles I read today. The appearance of an article in this list does not mean I endorse it’s content or support it’s source or author. It’s just something I read. Take it with a grain of salt. It’s not in any particular order other than the order I put them into this list. That includes chronological order. These are things I read today, not necessarily things that were written today. Check dates if you decide to read something from this list.

Today’s Reading:

Day 45 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

Reading of the Day

2025-05-09T01:00:00+00:00

Reading list for May 9th, 2025.

Today’s Reading:

Day 44 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

Do What You Love

2025-04-28T01:00:00+00:00

Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.

My dad used to say this to me. He didn’t come up with it of course. Searching for the source, I see attribution to Marc Anthony. How it came to be a 70-80 year old man was quoting a singer to me I’d bet money he’d never heard, I’ll never know. Maybe he didn’t either.

The basic idea behind the quote is that what you’re doing won’t feel like work if it’s something you love doing anyway. I mean, think of the thing you want to be doing right now instead of reading this post. Your favorite thing in the world. Now, along comes some idiot who offers to pay you to do that very thing! How can you possibly say no?

There’s a darker aspect to this quote that I don’t think people consider though. If you take the thing you love and do that for work, you’re turning what you love into a job. This is a trap that I’ve fallen into. Multiple times.

Technology

I love technology. I’ve loved technology since I was a kid writing short little basic programs on a Commodore 64 that looped rude comments on the two computers at KMart. When I was really little, all I wanted to do was build robots. It seemed like the coolest thing ever. When I got a little older, I realized that robots were just machines controlled by computers. Computers were the really interesting part. When it came to choosing a major for college, I went with Computer Science instead of Electrical Engineering.

During college I had to pay my own way through, so I got a job at the local IT shop building computers and fixing the broken ones. When I finished college and got my first job coding, I realized I missed the IT work, so I went back into that.

I took the thing I loved and I got a job doing it! Win! That’s a win, right?

Looking back, I don’t know if it was. Sitting here today, years and years later, I’ve made a career out of computers. There’s a company willing to pay me to sit at a computer every day and do all kinds of things people walking around on the street couldn’t begin to guess even exist. Still, when 5:00 comes that laptop lid slams shut, and the last thing I want to do for the rest of the night is touch a computer.

The thing I loved has become a job. In doing so, the love I had for it has been leeched out and all that’s left is work.

About eight years ago, by failing to learn from this experience, I did it again.

Fosstodon

Google+ was shutting down, and I was looking for a new place to socialize about tech. Mastodon was one of the options that was suggested, and so I created an account. I immediately loved it. I loved it so much I started dragging friends over that were leaving Goolge+ too. One of those friends was Kev.

Kev seemed to be having a great time with Mastodon too, and at one point he approached me about creating our own instance. I thought it was a great idea having our own vanity URL, and so I was all in. Fosstodon was born on July 31st, 2017.

Fosstodon was great. I followed friends and interesting people. Had great conversations. It was better than Google+ because no one was selling my data. Nothing to complain about at all. But we made a mistake.

I don’t know if Kev knew about this before I did, but one day we looked up and there was someone else on Fosstodon. I don’t remember who it was, and it doesn’t really matter, but it wasn’t Kev and it wasn’t me.

I recall this person being very polite. Asking if it was OK if they had an account there. They liked FOSS too, and they thought it was a cool idea to have a Mastodon instance that focused on free software. Kev and I probably sent a message or two back and forth. “Do you mind?” “Nope, do you?” “Nope.” So we opened Fosstodon to anybody that wanted to join. In retrospect, this was our first mistake regarding Fosstodon. Not because the people who were joining us at the time. They all seemed great. The problem is that when we started letting other people into the instance, we started the process.

There was a point in the last almost eight years were Kev and I started getting alarmed. Fosstodon was growing, and growing really fast. We got our first report on February 25th, 2018, and at first it was a novelty. It rapidly became less of a novelty, and Kev and I were dealing with reports often. We decided we needed help. If we were going to be asking for help, we needed to have guidelines. It was about this time that we came up with our first Code of Conduct and all the official rules an such. We needed something for our moderators to go on.

We brought in moderators, and we made an effort to try to keep things as neutral as possible. This was probably the next mistake in our line of mistakes. Another step in the process.

We wanted to make sure individual ideology didn’t become a determining factor when dealing with reports, so the SOP was that tickets were handled by a group. There are exceptions to this of course. No one needs to gather everybody together for discussion if an account is posting 10000 messages an hour begging for bitcoin. We also tried to make sure our moderation group was diverse. We didn’t want to have group of all straight white guys from a particular part of the world. That would have been pretty close to the same thing as just letting individual moderators moderate as they saw fit. Without a diversity of opinion, there’s no discussion or nuance to decisions.

We let Fosstodon continue to grow. Another mistake. Another step in the process.

At one point we came to the realization that this just wasn’t sustainable for us. We either had to cut off the growth or do something drastic. Bring in more moderators and administrators. Maybe create a foundation or something to help with running things and keeping things on track. This was something that Kev and I talked about for quite a while. We knew it was necessary if we wanted to continue to grow, but neither of us actually wanted to take that step.

Fosstodon went invite only. You may or may not disagree with this decision, but there were some very specific reasons we went this way. One, Fosstodon was already too big and we didn’t want it to get bigger and two, this protected us from spam account registrations that kept coming in constantly that had to be dealt with.

We were hoping that by cutting off new registrations for the most part and people leaving through attrition for whatever reason they chose, Fosstodon would shrink back down to a level that was more manageable. Maybe that was naive. No, that was definitely naive, and it didn’t happen. The growth slowed, but it didn’t stop. More people still came in than were leaving. We could have cut off the invites I suppose. We didn’t. Another mistake. Another step in the process.

That brings us to today. I’m sitting here and looking at the fourteen reports that haven’t been resolved. I’m looking at the 100+ messages sitting in my notifications.

This is work. This is not something I love. The part of this that I loved leeched out a long time ago. I wake up in the morning, and I dread signing in to Fosstodon. To make matters worse, this is the worst kind of work. It’s not something I’m being compensated for in any way. I spend hours of time away from my friends and family. I spend my own money to keep things going. I burn my own mental health. For what?

This morning Kev posted to his personal blog that he was done. This was partially a response to a recent drama we’d been experiencing with one of our moderators, but honestly it’s been a long time coming. I’m pretty sure Kev is only on Fosstodon today because I asked him to stay. I’m grateful for that.

I’m Done.

I understand that Kev is at his limit. I am too. I’m done. Enough is enough.

I do want to say that it hasn’t been all bad. Occasionally, someone will do something or say something that puts a smile on my face. Unfortunately, those times are like drops of water in the dessert. There will be far more people lining up to tell me I wrote “dessert” instead of “desert” than will have gotten the point I was trying to make.

Kev and I are still talking about the future of Fosstodon. I don’t know what that will be at this point. I don’t know if we’d hand it off if someone made an offer to take it, or if we’d prefer to turn the lights off behind us. What I do know is, if Fosstodon continues on it’ll be without me. I don’t know if I’ll keep going on Mastodon. If I do, I might just start an anonymous account somewhere and get back to talking about things I used to enjoy. Kev and I will honor the three months notice we promised we’d give, but this is no longer something I love. I’m going to go and try to find some of that again.

I’m Garbage At Email

2025-04-21T01:00:00+00:00

I wonder if the reason I’m so garbage at updating my blog is the same reason I’m garbage at email.

There’s something about updating a blog that feels like it requires some introspection. Some thought. You can just toss off a social media post, and if it’s trash no one really thinks to much about it. If feels ephemeral.

A blog post feels more concrete. More static and permanent. In my head I feel like this thing I’m writing now could be around for literal decades. That could be because some of the garbage posts I made decades ago are still on this blog. Not only are they still here, but they’re still something anybody on the Internet can read.

I mean, my Why Linux post is 23 years old. How am I going to feel about this post 23 years from now?

I don’t even like doing email, and that’s not nearly as public or permanent. Still, it feels like it’s an investment. It’s a letter basically. Something someone else may keep. Something someone else will control once I hit that Send button. I feel like I need to get it right the first time. I need to make sure my ideas are represented accurately and completely. If someone reads that email in 20 years, are they going to know what the hell I’m talking about? Will what I’m saying even make any sense?

I realize that this is a lot of pressure to put on an email, or even a blog post. I didn’t say it made logical sense. I just think it might be my hang-up when it comes to blogs or email.

Day 42 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

Questions Smart People Hate

2025-02-10T01:00:00+00:00

I ran across one of those click-bait articles today about 12 questions smart people hate being asked. I’m not going to link you to the article because it absolutely is stupid click-bait and I don’t want you clicking their stupid crap links.

What I will do is give you the questions that the article said smart people hate being asked so you don’t have to click the link and be annoyed by the advertising.

What’s your IQ?
Are you always this quiet?
What’s the point of thinking all the time?
Why do you care so much about that topic?
Do you always ask so many questions?
What’s the meaning of life?
Can you solve this problem for me?
Why do you overanalyze everything?
Shouldn’t you have all the answers?
Don’t you ever have fun?
Why do you always need to be right?
Do you think you’re smarter than everyone else?

Now, I can honestly say that I almost never get asked any of those questions. I think there’s two reasons for that.

I’m not actually that smart.
I like to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am.

Now, number one has a lot to do with the number two. Because I choose to associate myself with people who are smarter than I am, I realize that there are people who are so much smarter than I am in basically all respects, so the realization regarding my own intelligence is impossible not to reach. If you’re a person who doesn’t surround yourself with smart people, that odd person out who is intelligent probably sta nds out quite a lot more.

I’m not claiming I’m stupid either. I’m on the smarter side of the bell curve, but half the people in the world are, so that’s not much to brag about. Despite that, I find these questions really odd. I guess I ‘ll have to defer to people who are smarter than I am. Do people really ask you these things enough for it to be annoying?

Day 41 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

Superbowl Sunday

2025-02-09T01:00:00+00:00

I’m not much of a football guy. I played in highschool, but I’m not the sort that knows the plays and the players and the coaches and everything they’ve ever done their entire careers. I do appreciate a good game though.

The Superbowl is quite probably the only professional game I’ll see this year. My kids have a habit of monopolizing the TV, and I have enough on my plate with being a parent, working full time, being the admin of a mastodon server, going to college, and trying to keep our house in working order to keep me busy most weekends.

So, Chiefs vs. Eagles. Again. I can say with complete honesty I don’t care one bit who wins this thing. I’d probably lean towards the Eagles just because the Chiefs have already done it enough times, but I’m not going to lose sleep either way.

Day 40 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

The Air Is Fine

2025-02-05T01:00:00+00:00

It’s pretty rare for me to test out a new browser, but there’s a new one running around out there that I just had to give a shot. Opera Air.

TLDR: It’s fine.

If you’ve read more than a single post on this page, you’ve probably run into me talking about my favorite browser. I’m kinda insufferable about it. Just because Vivaldi is my favorite browser doesn’t mean I don’t go window shopping on occasion.

I saw a post recently about Opera Air. To be quite honest, there’s a bunch of stuff in this browser that I’m frankly just not interested in. Some of the listed “features” are scheduled breaks for breathing exercises, neck training, and meditation. It’ll also play soothing sounds and music, which is something I guess. Honestly, the feature that most caught my eye was the minimalist design. It looks slick.

There’s a little bar on the side that offers kind of similar functionality to what we see in Vivaldi’s side panel. It looks significantly more limited, but prettier. I also like the look of the address bar and the tabs, but the Opera Air version of Speed Dial is super annoying with it’s asymmetric icon/search layout. There’s also a little bar above the side panel for workspaces. This is also similar to the functionality you find in Vivaldi, but again more limited.

To be fair, Opera Air is in Early Access. Being a full blown browser can’t be expected at this point. What I can say at this point is the browser looks really good. It’s lacking in almost all the features I really like about Vivaldi, and the chances of me migrating to it on a permanent basis are almost zero, but it looks really good. I hope Vivaldi pays attention to this release becasue I think there’s some thing they could incorporate to their theming capabilities. Functionality wise, other than adding a sound track to the web, Vivaldi wins on all fronts.

Maybe after Air gets out of early release it’ll be more fair.

Day 39 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

Reading of the Day

2025-02-04T01:00:00+00:00

Reading list for February 4th, 2025.

Today’s Reading:

Day 38 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

Annnd We’re Done

2025-01-31T01:00:00+00:00

Aaaaannnnnd we’re done. The house is empty. Nothing to do now except turn in the keys.

This move has been a lot of work. We’ve been going constantly for over a month now getting the new place ready to move in and moving our stuff over. Cleaning the old house so it’s ready for whoever comes after us. I’m exhausted. I told my wife a week ago that this Saturday, I’m doing nothing. I’m sitting on the couch and letting the world pass by. We still have a lot of stuff to do with the new house. It’s cluttered with boxes that were urgently moved and then stacked in corners and along walls. We haven’t had a chance to fully move in we’ve been so busy moving out.

We have a last minute cleaning crew coming in about 30 minutes. They’re going to do the deep cleaning stuff we just don’t have the equipment, inclination, or time to get done by today.

As exciting as it is having this new house and getting ready to make it ours, it’s still sad to see the old place empty. It echoes weirdly without our stuff in it.

Day 37 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

Stupid Design Decisions

2025-01-27T01:00:00+00:00

I want to point out how even small design decisions can impact the lives of others in tangible ways. There are people out there who are making decisions on design that don’t seem to be thinking overly hard about what those decisions are going to mean. I’m going to take a relatively minor example from my own life to showcase this. This event is a tiny thing, and recent. It’s also not the only time something like this has happened.

I woke up late this morning because my alarm failed to go off. I was confused because I distinctly remember setting it last night. I have multiple children that have extracurricular activities this morning at multiple schools, so things need to get going earlier on Mondays than they do on any other day of the week.

When it comes to alarms, I’m pretty lazy about the whole thing and just use my phone as my alarm clock. It’s handy because I charge my phone next to my bed. I shouldn’t have my phone on my nightstand if I want a good night’s sleep, but even when I’m not on call I’m kind of on call so I need to be reachable at all hours of the night, so nightstand it is. Phones adjust with time zones, so if you’re traveling you’re always going to have your alarms available to you and at the time zone appropriate time. Handy.

I checked my phone I found that I didn’t get it plugged all the way in so the battery didn’t charge. I was sitting at 9% and in “Extreme Battery Saver Mode”.

Annoyed, I got it plugged in all the way so I could have SOME power in it when I was dropping various children off at their various activities.

Immediately when I plugged it in, my alarm started going off. I have one of those alarms that starts quiet and increases volume slowly so it doesn’t just scare the crap out of you first thing in the morning to get you out of bed, but immediately upon plugging the phone in, the alarm was at full volume. This tells me that my alarm was going off, but wasn’t producing any sound.

Why wasn’t the phone producing sound? Well, because when you’re in Extreme Battery Saver mode, it doesn’t do sounds. So, someone somewhere made the decision that if your phone battery is low, you don’t want your alarm to go off? That’s not good. That’s really not good. An alarm is an alarm. It’s there for a reason, and it’s probably something you want to go off regardless of the state of your battery.

So, because of this design decision, my children were all late for their various activities this morning. Not by huge amounts, but late is late. I’m annoyed. My wife is annoyed. Everybody’s day started off frantic, and that’s not how I like to start my week. I don’t think my kids do either.

I realize that when it all comes down to it, this was my fault. I should have double checked to make sure my phone was charging when I plugged it in. A simple check would have made everyone’s morning a lot less annoying. I didn’t do that and so everyone was late. Despite that, I think my point stands. This was a stupid design decision and I hope it gets fixed. I’ll be sure to double check my charging status, at least for the next few nights until I forget all about it. I’m sure that means this will happen again in the future, and I’ll be kicking myself for letting it happen again.

I’m just in a foul mood this morning. Might have something to do with how I woke up.

Day 36 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

Almost There

2025-01-26T10:36:37+00:00

I know I’ve written about this multiple times by now, but it seriously is about the only thing I’m doing right now. We’re done with the old house on Friday, and today is Sunday. Five days and we’re done. Almost there.

It’s 7:37PM (19:37), and I’ve been moving and packing stuff for close to 12 hours. Our new house is close to the old house, so we’ve been combining the packing and unpacking process. Kinda. We pack up a load of stuff at the old house, throw as much into the back of our Toyota Highlander as we can fit, and drive to the new house. Some stuff is getting unpacked right away, and some isn’t. What isn’t is building up in columns of boxes that will need to be dealt with next week. What is is being unpacked into it’s respective locations. Once the boxes are empty, we put them back into the Highlander and drive back to the old house and do it all over again. Both houses are two story, and according to my FitBit (grain of salt here) I’ve gone up 178 flights of stairs today. Your guess is as good as mine how accurate that is, but I can confirm I’ve gone up and down the stairs today. A lot. I sat down at my computer today for the first time while I’m grabbing something quick to eat before heading back over for what I hope will be at least one more run before I gotta get the kids off to bed. I’m probably going to fall down hard when this is all over, and I’ve already told my wife I’m doing as little as possible next Saturday. We’ve been at this for weeks now, and weekends are harder than weekdays. Weekdays I have to sit at my computer to do my job. Weekends I’m off so I don’t have that benefit. Still, I might have to take some time off work this week to finish things up.

Time is running short.

Almost there.

Day 35 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

Reading of the Day

2025-01-24T10:36:37+00:00

Reading list for January 24th, 2025.

Today’s Reading:

Day 34 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.

New House

2025-01-19T10:36:37+00:00

I haven’t been around much lately. It has nothing to do with not wanting to be here, but I just haven’t had free time to do much of anything. I have my usual collection of things going on, and to top that off, we bought a new house at the end of December.

We’ve been renting now for a long time. My wife and I bought our first house almost two decades ago, and the market promptly fell out from underneath of us. It wasn’t a huge deal at the time since we had no intention of moving. We figured we’d ride it out and when maybe upgrade the house when the market recovered.

Then my wife applied for a new job.

In Phoenix.

We were living in Reno.

My wife and I talked about this development, and our plans. Both of us really loved living in Reno. It’s a nice little town, and it was kind of middle ground between her family and mine. We decided that the end goal was going to be to return to Reno after a couple years in Phoenix.

We packed up our stuff, put some of it into storage and moved the rest of it down to Phoenix. We rented a place in Phoenix since we weren’t planning on sticking around long.

After a couple more years, we moved to another house in a different part of town. Better schools and all that stuff since more kids had come into the picture. We rented again because, you know, we weren’t going to be here long. Then we had more kids and needed a bigger place to put them in. So we moved to another house. We rented again because, you know, we weren’t going to be here long.

We really loved this house. It was a good size and configuration for us. All the kids fit nicely and they all loved their various schools. The landlord was a disaster, but everything else was good.

Then a new house showed up with a similar floorplan and size, close to the kids schools, with a pool in the back and a nicer yard and most importantly, a much better landlord. So we rented again because, you know, we weren’t going to be here long.

Five years later, we realize that we’ve been renting in Phoenix for almost fifteen years and we are in fact going to be here long. We started looking at houses of our own. We looked for close to a year and we had a couple false starts. There was a growing level of frustration that came from constantly looking and never finding. Finally we found a place. Again, the floor plan was very similar to what we already had. The backyard was bigger and the neighborhood was nice. It was close to the kids’ schools so they wouldn’t even have to change. We jumped at it.

We closed on the 20th, and we have until the 31st of January to be out of the old house. There has been painting, and painting, and moving, and redoing floors, and purchasing appliances, and moving, and oh my god so many boxes and so much dust. Every spare moment seems to be absorbed into getting all of our stuff from point A to point B. Moving services like Internet and power. Tomorrow, I think we’re going to have most of the big stuff moved over. All the furniture and most of the general stuff. We’ll have eleven days to get things cleaned up and ready for landlord inspection and we can finally kiss the rental market goodbye.

I’m so tired right now.

Day 33 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.