Ongoing Letter - Allan's Place
Allan's journal to the world. (Sounds important, doesn't it?)
This is where ranting and raving occurs. Venting. Blowing things out of proportion. That kind of thing.
It used to be that everyone my age was older than me. That is, until this accident. Now I’m really slow, or have been since the crash. Whiplash is an unforgiving thing. If I should meet the guy who drove his van into my car, I’d kick him in the ass. My back aches, and my neck is constantly stiff and sore. The good news is that my headache is finally clearing up. I go for physiotherapy twice a week. It apparently will last about 90 days before it clears up. I look forward to it.
The Guardian reports that we’re seriously boned unless we change our ways … now.
I planted native southern Alberta wildflowers near the house this spring instead of watering and expecting green grass to grow there. It’s supposed to be conducive to the lives of birds, bees, butterflies, and or course beauty.
Yes, I bought a larger van, but you have to remember that the embodied energy needed to invest into a new vehicle is quite serious – the fuel equivalent to somewhere around 130,000km of driving. I didn’t even get that far in seven years in the Kia Soul.
I plugged in my little electric foot scooter today. It costs – and I don’t care if you don’t believe me – I’ve done the research and calculations – about $1.00 of electricity to go about 1000km on this. Of course, I can’t carry lumber or a family or suitcases and cannot drive in winter. But it serves its purpose.
And of course there’s my favourite – my bicycle. But my physiotherapist is frowning on using it just yet. The bonehead to T-boned my car made sure of that.
This is amazing. People are weird. I switched from a plastic garbage bag in my home office space to a paper bag. I don’t dump grease, spit, coffee, or any other liquid in it. Never have. But people feel compelled to carry plastic around with them anyway. Aren’t there enough doo-doo bags out there? You’d think that people would have wax coated paper by now. “I don’t wanna cut down trees!” Okay, then don’t. Use recycled paper. “Recycling’s not the answer! Reducing is the answer!” Okay, then get a smaller dog. Besides, waxed paper can degrade, and so can poop. Don’t like paraffin (fake wax from petrochemicals)? Then walk quickly home with your poop.
The issue is that people don’t want to change their habits. Back when I was a kid, my mother used a paper grocery bag for garbage with a couple of newspaper sheets at the bottom and stapled an old newspaper to the top of it when full. Nothing leaked. All good.
According to CNBC, the US bond yield curve has inverted, a significant indicator of a slowed economy.
Now I’m no professional economic analysis expert by any means – but is it not just as simple as knowing that the industries and, indeed, industrial models you’ve relied upon for “growth” all this time have started to fail because they should? Did the steam engine not get replaced by the Diesel? Then the Diesel-electric? Did stone houses not make way for brick, then wood, then steel & glass?
Is Alberta not suffering now because people have a poor idea of the reputation of oil sands? Lethbridge, for example, has an enormous amount both of sunlight and wind. Isn’t the writing on the wall stating that, within 20 years or so, oil will seriously on its way out? Now I’m not getting on the Liberal bandwagon and saying we should all convert farmland into solar panel land. … Then again, you’re building huge advanced greenhouses to grow pot. Good for you. (There’s a facetious tone to my remark, by the way, in case you couldn’t hear me.)
Instead of looking at this as a doom-and-gloom thing, this seems to me to be a sure indicator of the need for innovation, changes to the status-quo, advancement of “alternatives” (as though oil is the benchmark and everything else is an alternative). In short, the stuff you’ve invested in is losing ground. Stop trying to prop it up with make-shift measures. Let it die. Move into something else.
And Trumpy wants to open up more coal mines and “put Americans to work again”, as though going back in time will save us all. Fool! And you’re dragging everyone else down with you.
I am reading a book called You Are a Badass. It’s about having good intentions, good thoughts, good vibes, for lack of better explanation. “The Universe will match whatever vibration you put out. And you can’t fool the Universe.”
“Can I get a name?” Starbucks staff asks when I order an Americano. “Allan.” (Yes, you already knew that – but she didn’t.) Why a name? Because many people might order an Americano. So the woman after me, after being asked her name, said, “No.” … Uh … “Okay, I’ll just leave it here for you.” Is the world this concerned with privacy that she can’t leave a name? Maybe she should say, “Esmeralda” or “Lapodopolis” or even “Steve” or “Jesus”. Sorry, but I have no tolerance for people like that.
By the way – her coffee sat there and waited for her, exactly where the barista said it would be. The woman was miffed. <puff, pant, huff, snort, throat clearing, cough> Good fracking hell.
I met a Canadian in Korea who refused to walk with the crowd. “I’m going this way, not that way. I don’t care if people are on this side of the sidewalk.”
I know – I used to be this person, a million years ago.
Okay, so this isn’t 1990 anymore. Websites are dynamic, not static. No one uses .html (hypertext markup language) anymore. Instead, modern websites use https, .asp, databases, interactivity, splashy advertisements and pictures that fly across the screen, areas of the page that stand still whereas others move around … all that is terribly impressive.
But, after fidgeting around with with WordPress, Moodle, Joomla!, add-ons to those, databases from MySQL and Microsoft SQL, and various other CMS packages made for teachers & students & school admin, I’ve decided they all suck.
I had to replace the pen on my Surface Pro 4. I lost it. Don’t ask me where. Somewhere between here and the college, I suspect. I’m a boo-foo. $120 for a pen. Wow.
Then came the power supply. It packed it in somewhere in Manitoba. The only way to charge it was with the car charger. Luckily, the machine works on 12VDC, not some weird number like 18 volts or 21 like one of my old laptops. Why not make 12 volts a standards? Oh, wait, it already is. Then why not use that standard? I tried ordering a new one from a computer shop. No go. Online only – that is, if I didn’t want to pay double. Finally, long after returning from Manitoba, it came.
Then … the machine quit. Well, it didn’t really quit. The keyboard (Type Cover, they call it) stopped working. Several hours over several days chatting and talking with Microsoft later (once actually being transferred between and chatting with seven different people), they found out several things were physically damaged on it, making the type cover and USB useless.
So, the long and the short of it is, everything but the keyboard is actually replaced. <sigh> What a world we live in.
To combat the idea of disposable electronics and dwindling world resources, I made a cover out of jeans. I can see that I am winning the war against waste. Yay. … Yes, that was tongue-in-cheek.
I’ve given up on something I’ve used for … a long time.
Firefox.
I have my replacement Surface Pro 4 tablet and am setting it up the way I want it. I installed Firefox ver. 64.x. It stole half an hour yesterday and 45 minutes of this morning’s time out of my life to figure out why Ctrl + Tab and Ctrl + Shift + Tab was not working. I went through the web trying things like nVidia / GForce, antivirus, and other software that this tablet does not have. I finally found a blog somewhere that said I needed to go back to an older version of Firefox to get this feature back.
Well why the hell did they change it in the first place?
Good bye, Firefox. Last straw. I’m on Edge now.
I received an email from “Apple”, or “iTunes” a bit ago. I have to admit, this is one of the better looking spam emails I’ve gotten. They even took the time to encode each character so as not to be recognized by Yahoo! Mail as being crap. However, there is an error. Can you spot the error?
I got an email today from National Geographic. They have a series called Bible Hunters. Some investigative journalism on the history of the Bible, I guess, which is all well and good. It’s a pretty well-known set of texts (if not accurately known).
But I was also watching a YouTube video produced by National Geographic called The Bible’s Buried Secrets National Geographic Documentary HD. I very rarely see such bias ‘journalism’ from reputable names like yours. My comments:
This video begins interesting but not too much later gives a poor impression. At 12:00, the video loses ground (no pun intended). Genesis chapter 8 states the rains lasted 40 days & nights. It says the water subsided, not the rains, after 150 days. These are two different concepts. One sentence states it rain, and one states the waters started receding. As well, it clearly states that first a raven was sent out and then, later, a dove. Why is this contradictory? It seems to me that it isn’t. I thought this documentary would rely on ‘documents’ (“documentary”?), but so far it doesn’t hold water (again, no pun intended). It’s like someone saying, “I ate eggs for breakfast and pasta for lunch,” and someone else saying, “Well which is it – which did you eat – eggs or pasta?”
So forgive me, NGM; although I have thoroughly enjoyed your magazines, have a collection of them in paper and electronic form, and have a library of your videos, your journalism shows your true colours.
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