I use an RSS reader and subscribe to a number of traditional news feeds like the BBC, Reuters, and CBC. I also have a collection of blogs and gaming related sites whose feeds I follow- but I’m focusing on the traditional news for the moment.
Lately I’ve been carefully curating which stories in my news feed I actually read, and I occasionally feel rather guilty for my choices.
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My new Mac Mini arrived earlier this week as I had hoped and has been set up in my somewhat re-organized office. I’ve had a bit of time to play with the new computer and have a few observations to make.
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I recently ordered the items necessary to replace my MacBook Pro in my office with a Mac Mini. That computer is over five years old now and portability is no longer a requirement so the change makes a certain degree of sense. My intent is to make this a good workstation for my computer-related hobbies: blogging, fiddling a bit with coding, and a possibly a few online learning activities.
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A lot of social media content is pure fakery. Accounts are created and posts generated entirely to attract eyeballs either for revenue generation, political manipulation, or simply because it is ‘entertaining’ to certain people. The algorithms amplify much of this content towards more and more extreme viewpoints because that is what keeps most of us engaged. This is true because humanity, in the larger sense, is horrible.
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I’ve been rather quiet here during December. It was a difficult month with the loss of my wife’s Mom Celina and my Sister Judy. I’d classify this as perhaps the saddest December in my life.
Irene and I had our usual quiet Christmas, short a few decorations. We did put up a tree, and I made a turkey dinner for Christmas day- but other than that it was just quiet times together for us. That’s perfectly fine and more or less normal, but both of us are struggling with emotions which casts a shadow on things.
I’m starting to think about what comes next, and that includes thinking about the upcoming year in general. I looked back through my blog and found that, as far as I can determine, I have only given ‘New Year’ predictions once since I started writing here. Back in 2007 I prognosticated about what 2008 would bring and, skimming through that post, I think my guesses were largely correct. I was even right about Google, shares of which dropped about 50% during 2008- but over the longer term I was very wrong on that one.
Predictions for 2025 might be fun: I see that Wilhelm over on The Ancient Gaming Noob has been doing this kind of thing consistently for quite a few years. I don’t have any intent to reach that level of ludicrous detail, but maybe I can make this into an annual tradition of my own. Certainly I should be able to do better than once every 17 years.
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Humanity has made a mess of the world over the last couple of centuries or so. We’ve also experienced an unprecedented amount of progress on many fronts. Halting our destruction of the environment is mandatory if we want to continue surviving on this planet, but halting all technological progress is also not the outcome I’d like to see.
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Life does not organize itself for our convenience or happiness. The past seven days have delivered two losses that have left my wife and I bereft.
Irene’s Mum, Celina, died on Thursday, November 28 after a brief stay in the ICU at Trail Hospital. My sister Judy passed on Tuesday, December 3 in the Agassiz Senior’s Community after a short couple of months of extreme decline from rapidly progressive dementia.
I’m trying to figure out how to deal with these events, bumbling my way through being supportive of other family members, and generally feeling quite lost and rather irrelevant.
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I did some driving over the past few days for some family-related reasons. It was about 1,300 km in total through mountain passes in the winter, but I was fortunate that the weather made the drive fairly easy.
I did something during the drive that I haven’t done in several years: I listened to music. I’m not some sort of weirdo who hates music or something, but the way I like to listen isn’t really compatible with my normal life. I like to play music fairly loud, and Mrs. Ubergeek (Irene) is not fond of my preferred volume. She also, to be honest, isn’t a fan of the same music I like.
I used to listen to music while commuting for work, but I’ve been either remote working or retired for well over five years now. And I kind of forgot to listen the last couple of times I drove a significant distance by myself- but not this time. I played my weird collection of music on shuffle for a total of about twelve hours during the sessions of driving this week. I even made a mental note of the artists from my collection I listened to.
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I’ve been trying to restart my aborted ‘go for a walk each day’ habit. I could not say I have been successful: I’ve managed two days in a row, and feel like that’s plenty of walking for the rest of the year.
The walks are lovely despite my quickly fading interest in my physical health. We are having our first ‘real’ snow of the season at the moment: it started falling early this morning before I woke up, and I’d wager it will still be falling when the sun sets in a few hours. It makes the world look strange and freshly-born, and with an accumulation of perhaps 8 centimetres so far it does nothing to make the walk any harder.
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I can tell when a holiday is near based on the volume of spam email in my inbox. I receive twenty or so spam emails per day throughout most of the year: this is the curse of having a 20+ year old email address. But when the taps open wide in holiday season.
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