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February 9, 2022 – No Secrets By Now

February 9, 2022 /

It is probably no secret by now that I am not home. It is another business trip and there is worse news. I wouldn’t have volunteered this information except for the fact that this is another birthday that I have not been home for. I wrote about it in November, my last business trip the downside of traveling.

I am on little bit of a junket type trip. I am providing training for a group of users so it is an 8-5 type hours. For a lot of the attendees, this is the first time traveling on the company dime. There is anticipation for the work to be over so they can gather in the bar and drink the night away. I chose to skip that and come back to my room and write.

Not too long ago, I travelled a lot. I have been on projects that had no limits on travel expenses. I have had $250 meals and 10 drink nights to get up and do it again the next night. I guess I saw it as a way to commiserate with my peers that I didn’t want to be there week after week.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a teetotaler, I am a little bit anti-social. More than anything, I guess I have been there, done that and want something different. When I started in this line of work, I was in my early thirties. I think that I have gotten to an age where fun has a different definition than a hangover. Especially when you are up for meetings at 7AM followed by presenting all day.

The truth is, I might be in a better mood if I wasn’t missing my son’s birthday again. A few years ago, it was half a joke that I was always gone for his birthday. The years 2011 – 2015 I was gone all of those birthdays on ’critical’ business trips. I had hoped those days were behind me, as long as I am in this type of work it is a risk.

I suppose that one difference with this trip was that I knew it was scheduled last fall. I was more prepared for the ultimate reality in a way. It doesn’t make it any easier when I have been working seven days a week for the last month.

I guess I will have to wait and see how it all plays out. I have always said that I don’t mind a couple weeks of travel a year. This year it is looking like three trips at least. You always have to temper that: Michigan/Minnesota/Toronto in the winter doesn’t really qualify as much fun either.

End Your Programming Routine: Most people I know have made the transition from exuberance to weariness on business travel in their careers. The people that did not were typically single and this was as much of their lifestyle as being home. Their social interaction was at dinner or the bar and they would be doing the same thing at home. I do try to find some kind of birthday gift from the places I have been. Maybe those trinkets will hold a special place someday.

February 8, 2022 – Review: Arteck Bluetooth Keyboard For iPad

February 8, 2022 /

A few months ago, I made this purchase. It was $30 and works in conjunction with my iPad. For my job, I am a contractor. That means that I logged my time worked in two systems. It also happens that my primary assignment computer is not allowed to connect to my actual employer.

All that is to say that I need two devices when I travel. Normally, when at home, it is not a problem. I also have the ability to put in time on my phone. It is a little problematic when I want to continue to write daily. So, I thought that I would give this a shot.

Since all of AltF4 is cloud based, all I need to access is an internet connection. I also need access to OneDrive to retrieve photos and video for pasting purposes. Typing on a screen is OK for small edits but it does not work well for lots of writing. This thing almost makes my iPad a real laptop when doing cloud based work.

On my trip in November to the midwest, I carried two laptops and that was heavy. It was so heavy, I decided to look for a better solution. I used this keyboard for the first time for my Thanksgiving trip and I was very pleased. The tablet simply snaps into the overall keyboard case and then folds like a laptop. It is definitely a smaller form factor but not unpleasant to use.

In fact, TSA said that it was a computer when I sent my bag across the scanner. The biggest thing that I miss is not having a trackpad. I find my fingers reaching for the typical location to move the cursor, then I remember that this is an iPad and I have to touch the screen. It is instinctive muscle memory.

I made my selection the way any typical Amazon shopper would. What can I get that is reasonably inexpensive because I wan’t sure how I would like it and can I get it before I leave? Yes, I did read some reviews but I don’t trust reviews with off-brands (like Arteck). I figured $30 was a reasonable gamble.

The keyboard is charged with a micro-usb cable and I haven’t run out of batteries yet, with my usage.

ScoreAdvantagesDisadvantages
Quality4Runs as advertisedPlastic-y feeling
Value5-Price to productivityNone
Performance5Huge productivity increase for iPad-No mouse or trackpad
-No battery life indicator

Needless to say, I am very pleased with it. I am happy not to have a second laptop on a business trip. It has allowed me to use my free time to keep writing on my trip, rather than doing it before I left. It has made my underutilized iPad a much more valuable device.

End Your Programming Routine: There have been a number of items that I have purchased since I started writing routinely. Most don’t warrant my time to write a review. I could probably write at least a review a week but I don’t necessarily want reviews to play such a major role. This keyboard is something that I have found helpful and valuable. I thought I would share.

February 7, 2022 – What Does Eight Month Old Mozzarella Taste Like?

February 7, 2022 /

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but my threshold for food queasiness is pretty low. We had some mozzarella in the fridge that I bought last summer. It wasn’t open so there it stayed. The refrigerator in the garage, that is.

One more thing about that fridge. The door is slightly warped and the seal is bad. Occasionally, I will find that the kids got into it and didn’t close the the door with the proper technique. In the winter, it tends to not be an issue with the refrigerator portion but the freezer warms up. In the summer, the freezer tends to ice up but the refrigerator doesn’t keep stuff cold if the door isn’t properly shut. This cheese had the looked like it was melted a bit.

One time, I ate some yogurt that was probably three months expired. I look at it and then give it a sniff and if it seems alright, then I will give it a taste. If all goes well I will proceed without fear.

There is a little more to story, I am not going to go into today. But we also had a Costco sized tub of cottage cheese. I was looking up ideas to try and use that cottage cheese and decided to make some lasagna. I thought it would be a good time to use up the mozzarella if it was still good.

I opened the package, smelled fine. I cut a slice off and it was not what I expected. It tasted like sharp cheddar. I used it anyway and the lasagna came out pretty tasty if I say so myself. The one complaint I had was the cottage cheese was pretty wet, so the entire lasagna didn’t have a lot of integrity. But, it tasted good.

I happen to know a lot about mozzarella, probably too much. I spent years working for the largest mozzarella manufacturer in the country. I am not going to divulge information that I shouldn’t but let’s say I know where the bodies are buried. First of all, when buying at the store, it can already be months or years old. After the cheese is initially made, it is put into a freezer.

They produce so much volume of cheese that they will make cheese first before determining if it is any good. This is a common practice in food manufacturing. The food will be handled while fresh and then they will figure out the grade and characteristics and then sell as is, blend with other things or transform to something else. It called bulk-off/add back.

Maybe someday I will talk more about the process, but today is about the cheese. I usually find mozzarella bland and rubbery specifically the manufactured version. This cheese was not. It was soft as the variety is. Another process that drives me crazy is that they add nonfat, dry milk to some cheeses. This is to make it more inexpensive but I hate how it coats the knives and shredder. It is very difficult to clean.

The word cheddar actually means to age. Mozzarella is a fresh cheese or no aging required. It seems like in this case, it worked out alright albeit maybe not what some people want.

End Your Programming Routine: Just because something has a date on it doesn’t mean it is bad after the printed date. For instance there was a study on pharmaceuticals called the Shelf Life Extension Program to determine efficacy after the expiration date. It was found that most pill forms are still useful years after the expiration date. This is a liability limiter, not a quality indicator (in most cases). I say, if it looks and smells OK, why not?

February 4, 2022 – Introducing the “American Dream” Series

February 4, 2022 /

Even though I have been spotty over the last couple of weeks, I got really inspired to go deeper into Wikipedia’s definition of the “American Dream”. I realized that I talk around it quite a bit but I have never really defined it. According to Wikipedia, the American Dream is comprised of five values: democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity and equality. Each week, I am am going to take one of the five values and analyze the origins and the state of the value. I will sum it up with an overall score card when I am done.

In 2001, a bipartisan bill was introduced called the DREAM Act. While DREAM is an acronym, it is a play into the American Dream ethos. At the heart, the DREAM act is essentially an amnesty program for undocumented aliens that were brought into the country as minors (without consent). It even spawned a self-labelled generation of ‘DREAMERs’. My point being, from our history to our culture, the American Dream is something uniquely indigenous in our beliefs from the origin this country.

Have you ever really read Martin Luther King Jr’s I have a Dream? There is no doubt that that it was racially targeted, however if we take the speech out of context of it’s deliverance, the words are still relevant today. I cut some excerpts below.

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.“

“There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.“

“And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.“

“We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.“

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.“

Now, re-read those quotes and replace ‘white’ with vaccinated and ‘black/negro’ with unvaccinated. Or if you would rather, replace ‘white’ with liberal and ‘black/negro’ with conservative (or vice versa if it pleases your bias). I ask you, can we deny that we are living a civil rights conflict at this moment?

I realize that the comparison is not perfect. I am not saying that beliefs are equated to physical traits i.e. race. You can’t necessarily look at a person and know on what side of the argument they stand, unless maybe they are wearing/not wearing a mask. I am also not saying that this new dichotomy was something that we were born into and likely will never leave. here are aspects of choice to the conflict. We can choose compliance at the expense of ethics but isn’t that the opposite of freedom?

We don’t fear lynching, we fear being cancelled for having an opposing view. We don’t fear being barred from voting, we fear our vote doesn’t matter. We do fear our children will not be allowed into schools, we fear losing our jobs from lack of vaccine passport, we fear being barred from the lunch counter.

What I am saying is that institutions are starting to produce the same policy that put us squarely back to the 1890s, separate but equal (Plessy v. Ferguson). Isn’t ironic that the states with the most institutional segregation in the 1960s are the states that are implementing the least amount of segregation today and vice versa?

End Your Programming Routine: Why did I choose this to kick off the discussion when a good introduction should highlight what I am going to talk throughout the series? Because King’s speech is encouragement to fight for and problems within his socioethnic status from obtaining the American Dream. He directly uses the phrase American Dream, quotes the Declaration of Independence and heavily references the Emancipation Proclamation all in support of that effort. That is some of the most poignant works on freedom I can think of.

“And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.“

February 2, 2022 – I’m Not Dead, Just Really Busy

February 2, 2022 /

I had topics lined out for the rest of last week and I haven’t really even thought about it this week. I am coming into an extremely busy time at work that is consuming all of my free time that my family is not. So, those topics will stay on the back burner until this blows over, likely all of February.

I got a laugh at these two pictures. I think where the person in the second one got it wrong is that it is not SJW Canadians that are angry. It seems like it is the average, common sense citizen. If you have been following the truck driver rally happening in Ottawa, I think that you would agree with me.

From my sources, it sounds like a similar cross country convoy is being organized in the US; likely scheduled for the spring time. One person in particular expects that this is going to cause massive supply chain disruptions as if we don’t have them already.

To quote Eminem, “and get ready, this shit’s about to get heavy”. Here in my state, Oregon Health Authority (OHA) just approved permanent mask mandates and vaccine proof. That is with no legislation and of course pending adjudication but who thinks this is not going to be upheld, at least at the state level? Regardless of what side of the debate you are on, I don’t see us ever going back to tolerance of different opinions (even if the science is settled). We are witnessing an American empire collapsing from within.

If you are not paying attention, we have the crystallization right before our eyes of the blue versus red. People are leaving blue states in droves for the favor of the American Dream. Before the pandemic, the signs of division were clearly evident. However, some states (Oregon) has doubled down on keeping it that way. The tools of executive authority and administrative enforcement protect the legislature from being exposed, even though they don’t need the protection.

Let’s take a look at Wikipedia’s first sentence of the definition. The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, the set of ideals (democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity and equality) in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers. And, how are we doing with the ideals

  • democracy – I am going to give this one as OK despite election fraud claims and other problems
  • rights – We still have them but where is the right to state opposing view going?
  • liberty – Losing this one. the right to be an individual and act accordingly
  • opportunity – Losing this one as well, do you have your vaccine passport?
  • equality – this one has definitely gone out the door. Equality no longer means equal, it means super equal or stack ranking all of the other races and genders and whatever self identifier I want to make up.

The people leaving want an affordable lifestyle, opportunity to succeed and neighbors that don’t think they should be under house arrest because they haven’t been convinced by the flimflam from the medical establishment and political propaganda. You can debate my posted source and opinion, but it is one example among many. It represents policy and precedent that state governments are not addressing issues, but consolidating power. As I see it, protecting and enriching the establishment and power base for total control. If you look at this state, the legislature already has more than a super-majority of one party, it is pointless to resist.

End Your Programming Routine: Even if I am wrong at this juncture, I think you would have to be blind to see that there is serious doubt about the future of this country as we want to see it. Rampant inflation, supply disruptions and serious ethical division all the while we are trying to be convinced that everything is normal. What is that… do I hear Nero’s fiddle?

January 26, 2022 – Eating Crab

January 26, 2022 /

Most Americans have been to Red Lobster, Joe’s Crab Shack or some of these other chains. Based on what region of the country you live in, crab mean different things to different people. Blue, King, or Dungeness crab, I have had them all. And personally, I thing the Dungeness is the best of them all. Sure, it is a lot less work to breakdown king crab but to me the meat is bland (and not worth the effort). It is another reason that you typically eat it with butter because it needs more flavor.

Quality food is best handled with simple treatment. I love Indian food and heavy spices. In that case, I think the recipes are showcasing the spices more so than the ingredients. Even in the case of crab cakes, I tend to make them when the meat starts to get a little fishy. A few nights ago, I made Fettuccini Alfredo and just sprinkled the crab on top. Even then, I think the parmesan overpowered the crab and to do it again, I would probably use olive oil and Italian seasoning with the crab.

I want to focus on the crab today, so I am not going to talk about how to make alfredo or boil pasta. But suffice to say, it is really easy.

I start with the legs. Break them off from the carcass and split the shell. If you are careful, you can get whole segments out as you work down the leg. I use a specialized shell cracker, but I have also used a nut cracker and also pliers to do this job.

Once the legs are done, turn to the body of the crab. This is called lump meat and it is not nearly as sweet as the legs. If you have a lot of them to shell, then you might want to separate for different uses. But essentially, you break the body apart and pick out all of the meat. Avoid the mustardy looking stuff called ‘crab butter’ it is edible, but not tasty. I try to rinse all of that off before I start shelling.

My wife snuck one crab while I wasn’t looking so one crab yielded about 1 cup of meat. If you think about it, this took one day and $54 in rental and license fees to yield 1 cup of crab meat. You bet it deserves special treatment for all of that effort.

I will take one detour before I finish today. I heard probably the best discussions on food and culture over the weekend. It was an interview with Wade Truong of Elevated Wild on the Orvis Hunting and Shooting Podcast. One of the sentient questions I took away was ‘How can we possibly value food when we can have anything we want, whenever we want show up in our doorstep in a bag?’.

I don’t think every meal has to be an affair, I think that there is a place to just getting it done (see yesterday for more of my thoughts on that). However I think that there are too many people that have no connection to hunting/gathering/growing food whatsoever. There are certain emotions that are related to killing something. It is a combination of sadness, disgust, reverence, gratefulness and jubilation at the same time. That is a connection with our humanity.

End Your Programming Routine: I had a good run with this trip to the coast last weekend, I will be moving on tomorrow. Clearly, it was a good experience since I wrote so much about it over the last three days. The two points I was trying to get across today were 1) treat quality ingredients simply and 2) look for ways to reconnect to humanity. If you cant (or wont) hunt or fish at least cook. Treat ingredients with the respect that they deserve.

January 25, 2022 – I’m a Gulper, Not a Sipper

January 25, 2022 /

It’s probably a bad habit, but when I drink out of an aluminum can, it tends to be with a meal or out of a sense of thirst. I am not a same can all day person, I want to get it done and move on.

Over the course of the last ten years or so, wine has started coming in a can. While my wife and I were visiting the coast over the weekend, we picked up a couple of cans of wine along with some snacks to enjoy the day.

I did some quick calculations. A bottle of wine is 750 ml or roughly 24 ounces. That means that one can equals about half a bottle. So, at $8 a can I suspect that cost is about par with a bottle. The truth is, I don’t really know who made the wine in the picture, however most of the cans I see are labelled Underwood or 14 Hands which would be on the mass market (cheaper) end of the wine industry. I am pretty sure that it cost more per bottle when all the variables are compared apples to apples.

There is no doubt that this is a convenient format. The can is more compact, it is light and looks a lot better than drinking out of the bottle (meaning, a glass is not required). Aluminum blocks the light, so there would be no photo degradation like glass and chills quickly. However, there are some drawbacks, especially if you are a gulper.

What I learned from reading ‘Cork Dork’ a couple of years ago is that with sommelier training, the glass is important. I won’t rehash the book but how the residual liquid slides down the glass is an indication of the wine’s composition. And of course, the glass is designed to trap the nose and the aroma as you drink. Red wine glasses are bigger to expose more surface area to oxygen and provide more aroma, which is at least half of taste.

It was very difficult to drink directly out of a can and get the same experience. Add to that my propensity to take a slug rather than a proper sip and it was half gone in no time before I realized that I was doing it.

The wine itself was OK. In my opinion it was clean but unremarkable. That tends to be a characteristic of industrial wines. They tend to be more homogenous vintage over vintage due to blending and post fermentation alterations. So, here is the verdict.

End Your Programming Routine: I like the format, but I would still bring glasses if possible significantly reducing the convenience. I would also recommend red over white as they are not intended to stay as cold to drink. Maybe a Yeti or equivalent can coozi would be appropriate to drink directly out of a can so as not to feel the rush of beating the can warming up. I am not turned off enough to not try it again but I think that this is a situational use container.

January 24, 2022 – Don’t Be Crabby, It’s a Beautiful Day

January 24, 2022 /

I have said before, my favorite kind of fishing is the one that I am doing. My boys were headed out to a campout and we had a free day. My wife wanted to go to the coast and do some crabbing.

There are some people in my family that are pretty ‘coasty’ (including my wife). Both my grandfather and uncle had houses at the beach and looked for any excuse to go, including I remember checking the mail. Me on the other hand, I want a compelling reason but crabbing seems like a good one.

People not familiar with the pacific northwest coastline may be jealous that in less than an hour we can see the ocean. Don’t get me wrong, it can be beautiful. I think where most of the disconnect between perception and reality with me is that it is a hard formula to figure out whether it is going to be nice or miserable at the coast.

One thing I know, if it is hot here where I live, it is often can be cloudy or even rainy at the coast. In the summer time, even when it is sunny the wind blows pretty stiffly to the point that it is 70 degrees and cold (or sand in your face) because of wind chill. I think many of the best days are in the off season. That happened to be Saturday.

The conventional wisdom is that crabbing is best done in months that don’t contain an ‘R’. That means May, June, July and August are out. It is not that you cannot crab, it is more that it is molting season and the meat doesn’t fit the shell and tends to be soft rather than firm.

There is also a best time of day to do it. The best time is slack tide or the time in between incoming and outgoing tide. The incoming tide pushes crabs closer to the shore and the outgoing pulls them out. I will also say, the tides can also move your gear around as well. One time, my family lost all of their pots to a strong tide and could never find them again.

The technique is pretty simple. You attach some bait to the ring, throw the ring in the water and wait. After 15-30 minutes, pull up the ring keeping tension on the rope so the crabs don’t slip out as you are pulling them up. Once the ring is on the dock, you have to check for sex and size. Males, wider than 5 3/4″ are keepers. Crabs should be kept alive until boiled. They should be immediately cooled and cleaned and they should also be kept as close to freezing as possible until eaten. And, they should be eaten within a couple of days if not frozen.

We dilly-dallied our way to the place that we were going to crab. Consequently, we got there at 2pm and they closed the dock at 3pm. It was such a nice day that we did it anyway and we got two keepers in our 45mins of fishing. I would say that this is not always the case. I have been on days where all day yielded two crabs. So, we got lucky but that is fishing.

One last thing about inexperienced crabbing. Sea lions have figured out that the crab traps contain food. They will tear your traps apart and eat your bait and crabs. Traditionally, bait is the remains of filleted rock-fish. Some people use chicken and claim that has less problems. I have even heard of people using road kill as bait as well. But, what I am trying to say is that if you see sea lions, crabbing can be pretty poor. Fortunately, we didn’t have that problem.

End Your Programming Routine: Oregon requires a separate shellfish license to crab. It is good for the calendar year and with that we can also harvest clams as well. This is also something that I have never tried. I see more trips to the beach this year to harvest the bounty of what we have available.

January 21, 2022 – A Brave New World, Analysis

January 21, 2022 /

I eluded to this but I almost gave up on this book. It really wasn’t until chapter 17 that things started to make any sense. That was page 184 out of 220.  The interesting thing to this book was that Huxley wrote a forward to the 1946 edition of the book.  He unlike Orwell lived to see his work actually have some longevity and gain traction in the world.

I found it interesting that Huxley’s greatest regret was that he was unable to anticipate the coming of nuclear energy in 1932.  Therefore, his science fiction was ‘dated’.  For the twenty-first century reader, I think it is pretty forgivable considering all of the other technological changes we have seen since 1946. To his credit, he also admitted that if he were to redo it, he would have rewritten a lot of it (without getting to in depth to precisely what he would change).

From Huxley’s own words, this was intended to imagine a society five hundred years in the future.  Also, by observation the trend toward comfort over freedom was beginning.  I am not totally sure of his influences but I do think it was a stroke of genius to imagine totalitarianism as a gentle blanket, a much more likely scenario than the failures of the iron curtain or China.  Only North Korea seems to embrace the iron fist type totalitarian regime and even then I think it only kind of works because of it’s small size and population.

As I said at the beginning, the influences to the book were  supposed to be 1) the industrial revolution, figure headed by Henry Ford 2) Jazz and 3) Frued.  I could certainly see many references to Ford.  In fact, there is a quote late in the book ‘…Industrial civilization is only possible when there is no self denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.’  Everyone has a job and a place.  People need to keep consuming so that everyone keeps working.  Everyone needs to keep working so that they don’t have idle time.

Jazz is a curious one, maybe it was situational like the instrument named the sexophone (sounds like saxophone, it was never defined). There were many places where lyrics came from the characters mouths in song or rhythm.  I am far enough removed from Jazz that those lyrics may have been adaptations of popular songs, not quite sure.  Certainly music was part of the conditioning in civilization.  Like all entertainment, if it can be subverted to push a useful message, there is no doubt that can be leveraged for propaganda.

That leads us to Freud.  I think that you will all remember my analysis to Freud and 1984.  To me, that was clear and and easier link to make.  In this case, I have a harder time making the outright connection.   I think you could easily overlay Id, Ego and Super Ego to characters events and circumstances.  But I didn’t get the sense that the story was laid out to prove the theory.  Rather, it seems like Huxley was aware of the theory and said “that makes sense, that is how humans behave” and then wrote the story.  I think those looking to make Brave New World justify Freud would have an easier time than saying Freud’s influence drove the text.

Knowing the Orwell was a student of Huxley makes a lot of sense.  It does seem fairly  evident that Brave New World was highly influential in 1984.  I am sure that they shared some fairly poignant discussion and had similar thoughts.  In some ways I am glad I didn’t know that they had a connection before I read and analyzed 1984.  It was easier for me to be objective and follow my instincts. 

I think there are aspects of both that could be combined together.  For instance, I don’t know about ‘hatching’ civilization but I do think the kinder, gentler totalitarianism is the more likely play than Big Brother.  Society seemed more realistic in 1984 as well as the propaganda techniques but conditioning and chemical control also seems possible.  

I learned something during this process.  I don’t do well analyzing something until I have seen the whole picture, that is read the whole book.  I was struggling to even identify the concepts until I was done and then they seemed so clear and words began to flow.  I even cut out things that were more minor because I had so much to say about what I considered major concepts. 

End Your Programming Routine: If it wasn’t for chapters 16-18 being so outstanding, this book would have been a hard no from me.  If you are choosing between 1984 and Brave New World, I recommend 1984 any day and every day.  Not only does it seem more plausible, the storyline is generally more interesting.  Brave New World takes too many unnecessary detours for character development that simply don’t matter and don’t impact the story.  That being said, this is a good companion to 1984 and I would read them in that order.  As always, additional knowledge and perspective are helpful when preparing for the quiet revolution.  

January 20, 2022 – ‘Tacticool’ Thursday

January 20, 2022 /

Can I be honest? I suppose that I am as much of a voyeur, or lurker or however you want to describe it as I am a doer. I have talked about my disdain of social media and my real lack of participation at most of any level. I don’t care to interact and I suppose that I don’t understand the ‘rules of participation’ because I don’t.

Where is the going? I am a sucker for looking at people’s pictures of their survival backpack contents or reloading bench setup. Some years ago, I liked to periodically check-out https://www.edcforums.com/ to see what people carried with them everyday. It was as much evaluating what I did but also some people really go artistic with these things.

Somewhere along the line, I started noticing not just people’s gear but people also did stuff. I guess that is what occasionally draws me in. I probably could find as much inspiration in Pinterest, Instagram or other platforms as a lot of the forums seem pretty dead now. I am not specifically looking for inspiration, I just like the more deterministic view that forums have and I open what interests me rather than scrolling through a bunch of things that I don’t care about.

That is what leads to today’s post. Because right now, what is on the bench is not really Tacticool related. I am rebuilding a chainsaw. I use my bench for reloading, gun cleaning, Christmas wrapping, antenna building, record player rebuilding and many other things.

I actually built the bench to do fly tying and ironically, I have never done that. Fly tying is something that I have had an interest since I was a child. I actually took a community college class when I was in high school. It is also something that I haven’t done since I was in college. I still have an interest in doing it, I should probably put that on my goals for this year.

My bench was my first real woodworking project. It’s not completely fine woodworking because I used some fasteners to attach the drawer unit. However I took raw, rough cut lumber and built the bench about seven years ago. The drawer that you see is constructed of plywood that was a drawer that I built as a router table in the late 1990s. I saved the drawer but I sold the router and burned the bench because I didn’t want to move it from South Carolina.

End Your Programming Routine: The bench is a very important part of my tools. It is a space to work and I don’t have to be fussy about spills, scrapes and dents. It is probably redundant to say that people need a space to work. It needs to be comfortable height and clean. Normally, I would have done this work in the shop, but this way I don’t have to wait for it to heat up.