Night Wolf will now barf up the Sun Maiden

Happy Winter Solstice to my fellow SADsers! We made it! 

 52 days until pitchers and catchers report!

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End-of-Week Memes...

New (to me) Cyberspace Deck...

So the refurb M1 MacBook Air showed up and I got all my Microsoft Orifice and Adobe Creative Cloud apps installed and I'm ready to get down to writin' on it. Even stickered it all up so it feels lived in.

This thing is blazin' fast compared to the old one, which is unsurprising because the old one was a dual-core i5 machine from early 2015 still running the Monterey OS. I'd go to start up Photoshop and then find something to do for the ten-Mississippi count it took for the icon to stop bouncing in the toolbar and the program to launch. Now it just pops right up. I can't imagine how fast the M4 mini is gonna feel when it gets here.

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Awful Night...

Woke up from a nightmare involving a bear snuffling at the door of this flimsy tool shed like building where I was camping in the woods to find my heart beating hard enough to make the bed vibrate like someone'd put a quarter in it. Lay there tossing and turning and unable to do more than doze fitfully for a couple minutes at a time for the next few hours.

I do not recommend this if you want to wake up on Friday morning feeling all rested and refreshed and ready to attack the day.

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Tab Clearing...

• Marko has pictures from a working vacation in Quebec.


• Jim Grey's ten favorite Old Cars Parked from 2024.


• No, Don, you can't revoke the FCC licenses of networks that say mean things about you. Does not work that way.

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Christmas Themed Memes...

Ugh, Nextdoor...

I rarely actually peek in at the Nextdoor website... or as I like to call it, "Karens.com" ...because it's mostly people panhandling or looking for a lost pet (from three neighborhoods away) or reporting that they saw a Black person walking around.

But I still get email notifications, which I routinely route straight to the trash. My favorite posts are the ones that are "Be alert! Our car got broken into!" and when you go look, what happened was they left their car unlocked with stuff visible inside it.

Friend, if it's not locked, it didn't get "broken into", by definition.

In my opinion there are two approaches to automotive security. Either leave nothing of value in the car, at least visibly, and lock the doors. Alternatively (and this works best if you have a detachable faceplate stereo) leave literally nothing of value in the car and leave the doors unlocked.

That's what I did when I parked the Porsche and Fiero on the street back when I lived in Atlanta. There were a few times when I came out to find my car's door ajar and the windows on the car on either side broken out.

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Tuesday Memes...

For the nerd in your life...

A twee little retro-looking "television" that'll store ten hours of video (but only has a 2-hour battery). It even has a speaker, so presumably the volume knob is an actual volume knob!

Just in time for stocking stuffing!

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Meme Dump...

Well, it finally happened...

Adobe was pestering me with popup windows to let me know that I was using an out-of-date version of Photoshop.

"That's weird," I thought, "I'm pretty sure I have it set to update automatically." So I went to the Creative Cloud control panel and went to update it manually, only to get the admonishment that the latest version of P-shop would run like hot ass on my creaky old Mac mini.

I knew this day was coming. I already was largely unable to use the AI features in Photoshop which was fine because I don't do much in the way of 'shooping anyway, just removing dust spots and the occasional power line.

But this computer, a Late 2014 2.6GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 mini that was already no longer cutting edge when I bought it and a similar-vintage MacBook Air from Marko back in 2018, is only still usable because of how long Apple hardware stays viable and the fact that I don't use it for gaming. I'm already a couple OSes behind as it is.

So, ho-ho-ho and Merry Christmas to me, I just blew a smoking hole in my bank account for a new Mac mini and a refurb M1 MacBook Air.

If they last as long as the previous duo, this is gonna be about $100/yr for a decade's worth of computing, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

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