Mike

Uninstalling Adobe Creative Cloud

I uninstalled the Adobe suite this morning on my M1 MBP and I’ll tell you why.

It was consuming mass amounts of my CPU time. It wasn’t a fair amount. Yesterday it clocked the CPU at nearly 100%. Why? That is a good question for an app that I wasn’t even using.

I wasn’t using Photoshop, Lightroom, or Bridge. According to my monkey brain logic, that means that Adobe should not have been using any of my CPU. Even if you are checking for updates, you don’t need to check that often and you most certainly don’t need to keep phoning home about it.

The programming is ridiculous and I can’t believe that more people haven’t complained about it. I have 16 gigs of RAM and it was still an issue for me.

There are other apps on the market besides Photoshop. I don’t use it very often anyway.

Well, that is why I decided to remove it. I’ll spend some time today trying to find something that works close enough that I can continue to create the banner that I use it for.

Bye Adobe. No. You can’t have all of my CPU.

Last Day of the Month

I’m filing this one under shizz because it just should be.

It is snowing.

That is really all I have to say…

…or do I?

I started watching a show on Netflix called Fate which is a lot like Harry Potter except with all fairies. I’ll write a more appropriate review when I finish the first season. Of course, since we’re talking about Netflix it could only get one season and be really good but since Netflix decides whatever the show can get cancelled.

I’m not bitter about the cancelling. I get enraged about it. Why bother sinking all of your resources into something only to decide too soon that it wasn’t making you enough income? Look at Firefly. Jesus. That show should have lasted a shitload of seasons longer than it did. Everyone knows it.

Ok. This post about nothing in particular is over now. Everyone can resume with whatever they were doing which is probably infinitely more interesting than reading this garbage.

The picture is courtesy of this post who thinks that micro plastics are everywhere and we should all care about it.

1% Mob Mentality

I am by no means, a one percenter.

In fact, I am probably on the opposite side of that spectrum.

I do not desire to have anything that a one percenter has. If I did, I would create a task list and goals that would get me to that end. It is really pretty simple really.

We can do anything if we actually set our minds to it. We really can.

During this past “peak season” when online shipments are going through the roof, I am the busiest that I will be all year long. It is always a dreaded time of the year for me and the people that work for me.

This year I decided to do something really radical. I decided to try and write a short story during “peak season.” I set a goal with clearly defined road maps along the way and followed the plan. The result?

Not only did I write a short story during “peak season” but I wrote nearly three of them. I finished the 3rd story shortly after the new year.

I am currently finishing up the 4th story and will soon be onto the 5th story. The goal is a nine story set that I may plan on actually publishing.

There is a point to all of this. If you want something that someone else has that, in and of itself, is a problem. That not withstanding, if you want something that someone else has or even just their lifestyle you can do it. If, you work at it.

There lies the rub. People are lazy. People are stupid. People love lashing out in a pack mentality. I think it is perfectly fine to want what someone else has as long as you are willing to do what it takes to achieve it for yourself.

Thinking that someone else owes you something is retarded. Yes. I’ll use the word and if you don’t like you can fuck off. Only a retarded cunt thinks that way. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that if you think the world owes you a pickup truck then I think the world should run you over with said pickup truck. That is what you deserve.

It is no wonder that I think people are shit.

It is because they are.

Not. Bitter.

My Love Affair with…

…tattoos.

Well, not the permanent kind of tattoos. The kind of tattoos that can last for a couple of weeks and then go away.

My body is covered in them.

Why?

I have no fucking idea. I saw them one day on Amazon and then I bought them and now I am wearing them.

They look cool until they start peeling off.

That is really all I have. It was a stupid observation that I just made and decided to write about it.

Wow. I am a fucking weirdo. Indeed.

Oh, and yes. I love pussy too. Especially shaved pussy which you can clearly see in the picture that goes with the article. Yep. I chose it on purpose. Yum.

HDWGH – Story 17 – Minivan Excitement

HDWGH – Story 17

From The How Did We Get Here Series

Now: Amy Jo Foster is hanging upside down in the driver’s side of her minivan. The minivan is upside down slowly coming to a stop as it spins on the frozen ground. It is winter. Amy’s minivan is sitting in someone’s hedges just slightly off the roadway. As the responding police officer walks up to her side of the minivan to see if she is ok, the door is ajar and a little silver vibrating toy falls from the minivan and into the snow and continues to vibrate. Amy is crying.

Before: Amy Jo Foster couldn’t explain what it was about Vince Lobos that made her feel the way she did. Every time she laid eyes on him her body started to tingle in the places where you wanted your body to tingle. The problem was that he barely noticed her. This morning after watching a video about practicing your personal assertion techniques she felt brave enough to ask Vince out on a date. They worked in the same office but in different departments so dating was allowed by HR.

She dressed up a little more than usual this morning. She wanted everything to be perfect. She jumped into her minivan and headed for work. On the way, she started fantasizing about being with Vince. It was at this point when she decided to utilize external stimulation and reached into her purse for her little “friend” as she called it.

It was at the height of the biggest orgasm she ever had that she realized she had ran through a stop sign just in time to see a Toyota pickup truck hit her in the rear quarter just enough to tip the minivan over onto it’s roof sending it sliding into the nearby hedges of the house on the corner. Her legs were shaking and disbelief rolled through her body. She just hung there inside down for about 10 minutes. Then, the police arrived…

Distractions

Distractions are the mother of everything wrong in the world. I just took a quick course on LinkedIn Learning about this very topic.

At my age, I’ve seen a lot of things and I’ve read countless self help books. The material in the course wasn’t necessarily new but I like that it sparked some ideas and reignited thinking and patterns associated to why we get so damn distracted.

Email is always the 900 pound gorilla in the room. It is very difficult to get away from. Many people have different ideas and ways of dealing with it. Checking it at certain times during the day is a good way.

The course instructor used two flags on email. The red flag was for what needed to be done today. The yellow flags were things that could wait to be answered. Those he would set a specific time of the week for. I don’t think that would work for us but maybe we could spend the last hour of the day on the yellow flag items?

Turning your phone off or turning off notifications or even turning on your phone “driving” mode can help mitigate distractions.

I thought the course was interesting. Liked the instructor and always like listening to Arianna Huffington’s accent. I am shallow in that regard. I admit it.

Irrational Behavior in Action

There are many forms of irrational behavior but nothing more interesting than that of the female variety.

Scenario #1: The woman has a dog. It is a dog that hates people and bites everyone and everything. The dog is so bad that it can’t be taken out in public if there are people around. The dog is so disruptive that the family has to make plans base around this disruptive dog’s behavior.

A rational view of this situation would dictate that the woman get rid of the dog. That can be in any appropriate manner.

The irrational side of the woman will not get rid of the dog because she feels the dog needs love and she loves the dog. So, the whole family will continue to suffer until the dog dies or divorce happens.

Scenario #2: A certain religion who shall remain nameless has been discredited. The woman’s irrational behavior will still believe in this religion even though it has been proven to be a lie and complete fabrication.

Realism Versus Happyism

This particular jewel of a post is about why my website seems to be so damn negative all of the time. It’s never about anything happy. All of the stuff I write seems to be from the perspective of some old guy who hates everyone.

I prefer not to live in a bubble. The world is not a happy place. It is a dark and sad place. When you look at the terrible things that human beings do to each other each and every day it sickens you. You wonder to yourself how we’ll ever evolve to beings better than where we are now.

I don’t believe we’ll ever see an evolved society like you might see in a science fiction movie or television show. Human beings are way too fucked up for that. And disagreeable, did I mention disagreeable? I think you only need to look as far as our current political system in my country to see how far we have to go as a species. Everything in Washington is a fight, a war, a stand, or some other damn thing that is more about the politicians themselves than the people they are supposed to serve.

We have a representative government which means I don’t give a fuck what the guy I elected thinks. He or she is supposed to vote exactly the way I tell them to. That is how it is supposed to work.

I often post that I wish a big asteroid would smack into our planet and knock humans off of it. We have a habit of dragging everything down with us and I think Earth should be allowed to continue.

We’ll never evolve as a species if we can’t get past our differences and start treating each other better.

I guess that means we’ll never evolve. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to go back to flinging poo.

Death

Wow. I did not realize that I already had a category about death.

The reason that we are all afraid of death is because that we’re afraid of the unknown.

I would argue that death isn’t unknown. I’m sure we’ve all experienced it in some form or another over our lives.

Have you ever blacked out?

Have you ever fallen into a nice deep sleep where your head hits the pillow and the next thing you remember is waking up after that? No dream.

That period of time between your head hitting the pillow and waking up is exactly what death is like.

You obviously won’t even know you are dead. You will know when you are going to sleep but will not realize when you have achieved it. The only thing you’ll know is that you woke up. If you never wake up, then that feeling of knowing you are going to fall asleep will literally be the last thing you remember.

We’re probably more afraid of how we’ll die. I believe that is something that is mostly unknown unless you are suffering from a terminal illness or you plan to end your own life.

Ok. Not sure why I wrote about such a morbid topic.

I hope everyone has a super sparkly day. Whatever the hell that means.

Cryptocurrency

Here is a good analogy for anyone who has been around computers for any real length of time. I’m talking at least 20 years.

My quote of the day.

Anyone who has ever used an encryption program to encrypt personal files and then forgot the password and forever lost the data can understand why cryptocurrency is a bad thing.

Relying on a digital file to hold something of real world value is fool hardy. Holding a coin in your hand is always better than holding a flash drive that could easily get corrupted, accidentally wiped, or stolen. You could make the argument that the thief can’t access the money either but you could always forget your password and then you’d be in the same boat. This has happened before to the tune of millions of dollars. Well, digital made-up dollars at any rate.

The undoing of society will come from a combination of human arrogance and an unnatural reliance on digital creations of our own making that we neither understand nor fully control.

HDWGH – Story 16 – Substandard Gravy

HDWGH – Story 16

From The How Did We Get Here Series

Now: Pete Giovanni is face down in his salad plate in front of him. At this point, we’re not sure if Pete is dead or just napping.

Before: Sarah Giovanni spend most of the afternoon preparing one of the family’s favorite meals. One of the last parts of this culinary masterpiece was the beloved gravy. However, when Sarah went to grab a jar she realized she didn’t have any more.

Without another thought she grabbed her face mask, grabbed her coat, and grabbed her car keys and hurried down to the local store. Much to her horror, they were out of the exact brand of gravy that her family enjoyed. Sarah gave it some thought and decided that rather than ruin the entire meal she’d make a substitution. The day was officially saved.

Later that evening, the family sat around the dinner table. After the tradition of saying “Grace” Pete looked at the delight in front of him. He picked up his fork, picked up a rather large portion, and gingerly placed it in his mouth. It didn’t take long for his look of pure joy to turn into absolute horror.

“What is this?” He yelled at Sarah.

“I had to substitute the gravy sweetheart, we ran out and the store didn’t have the brand we like.”

“I can’t eat this. This is disgusting!” Pete exclaimed.

With a tear forming in her eye, Sarah told Pete she was sorry and picked up his plate and took it into the kitchen.

The children heard Sarah walking back from the kitchen. Then, the children heard the sound like the chime of a deep church bell and then Pete doing a face plant into the salad plate in front of him.

Sarah was standing behind him with one her favorite frying pans.

I guess you could say that Sarah didn’t appreciate the feedback.

The children promptly ate their meal smiling as they did so.

Aliens: Come and Get It!

This is my #1 reason why I think aliens will have an easy time of conquering our planet should the need arise.

A vast majority of the human race whole heartedly believes (sights unseen) in completely made up and imaginary things. That makes them gullible as a species and deserving of eradication. Humans are simply too stupid to exist in the grander universe at large.

The #2 reason is that the human monkeys kill each other. It is difficult to say which should be #1 and which should be #2. They are both just as bad.

People say that we should focus on the good things about humanity. To me, that is like asking the same thing when talking about a serial killer. For example “sure, he killed 15 people but he donated to charities.”

As I was searching for a picture for this post, I found this…

In conclusion, aliens should invade and conquer us at their earliest convenience or at the very least, hurl a huge asteroid our way.

Thank you in advance.

What Today Feels Like

Today feels like…

…we’ve been chased around the neighborhood by a bully who has a large super soaker. He is shooting everyone he finds.

Everyone is wet and no one is happy.

Then, one morning the old man down the street sticks out his leg as the bully runs by. The bully trips and falls and breaks both legs.

In fact, the bully becomes paralyzed. He can no longer run around terrorizing anyone.

Everybody is relieved that they will no longer be soaked by the bully.

The old man is a hero.

The inauguration today. It’s like that.

Deleted Police Records in the UK

This story is both interesting and frightening at the same time.

Britain’s policing minister said Monday that “human error” led to hundreds of thousands of DNA records and other data on criminal suspects being erased from the national police computer.

Oops.

Kit Malthouse told lawmakers in the House of Commons that the mishap occurred during a “regular housekeeping process” on the computer, which holds 13 million records. He said some 400,000 records were wiped, including 213,000 offense records and 170,000 arrest records.

Wonder Woman 1984

I am not watching Wonder Woman 1984.

It’s not that I don’t like the franchise. I think Gal Gadot is perfect for the role. I loved the first movie.

I’m not watching Wonder Woman because I can NOT BUY Wonder Woman. I don’t give a fuck about HBO Max and I’m not signing up just so I can watch one fucking movie. It is fucking ridiculous.

I was completely shocked that for the first time in a very long time, I couldn’t just BUY a movie.

Fuck you Hollywood. If that is the business model you want to go with good luck with that.

I will always gladly either watch or rent a movie but I sure as fuck won’t be made to use a service that I wouldn’t otherwise piss on just to watch a goddamn movie.

Warner Media can eat a bag of dicks for all I give a fuck. They completely ruined the experience for me.

You want to vindicate yourself?

Let people buy it. You fucksticks.

I’m not bitter. Just have a strong opinion on this one folks.

Thoughts on M1 MBP So Far

It has been a full day with the new laptop and I have to say that I’ve been doing almost everything with it.

I had to install a crap ton of things and I have been doing all of that (including an operating system update to put this machine on the beta version of Big Sur) with the laptop only being charged up when I first got it.

I haven’t plugged it in at all and I still have a 55% charge even though I’ve been writing on it all day long.

My journal is one of the longest I’ve ever written, I wrote over 500 words for the latest short story, and tons of other things including this blog post.

The battery is amazing. I can’t see what I can get out of this thing.

M1 MacBook Pro 13″

I am happy to report that I just got my new MacBook Pro. I’ve been waiting for about a month as Apple had a backlog.

So far, I love this thing. My previous MacBook was a 15″ and I actually wanted the smaller version. It has all of the same things and the keyboard is tons better.

I’m not going to review it. Tons of people out there already have and would go into way more details than I would.

Mapping The Universe

This story caught my attention for a very specific reason.

Arrogance.

We haven’t seen nor are we able to see anything beyond a mere fraction of the universe. For someone to think that they can “map the universe” is probably one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.

The scientist clearly has no idea of scope. This is the same situation as “you don’t know what you don’t know.”

We literally have no idea how big the universe actually is because we are severely limited by our ability to view everything from this spinning ball we all inhabit.

You can’t map something you can’t see.

I’m not even sure we can map our own galaxy very accurately. I’m sure mis-applying Einstein’s theory of relativity doesn’t help matters either.

It would be interesting to get a chance to see where we are scientifically 1000 years from now. If we survive as a species that is.

I think the odds are against us. As long as we keep killing each other aliens will probably stay away and we’ll just end up killing ourselves off.

We’re probably not the first civilization that did it and I’m sure we won’t be the last.

Earth to reach temperature tipping point in next 20 to 30 years

Good article about something that hasn’t happened yet and may not happen. Written as a doom and gloom document, I don’t think there is any doubt about what this article says. I believe it.

Unfortunately, unless we address the population issues there is nothing we can do about any of this. You can’t have it both ways. You cannot keep increasing the population and stop the environmental impact too.

This article gets it right in that it presents the problem. I would also like to see articles like this propose a realistic solution.

Pink

I used to hate the idea of pink anything. I didn’t even want to be near it.

As I am getting older, I am finding that not to be as true as it once was.

I saw that they had a pink robe on Amazon for a guy and I almost considered it.

Times, they are a changing.

Seek to Understand

From the Franklin-Covey system

Seek to understand before seeking to be understood.

In light of recent events, this is even more important.

To extend the quote…

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.

That was a quote from Dr. Franklin Covey.

I try to live this every day. I do not go around telling people how to live their lives or what they should or shouldn’t be doing.

I think that is a good way to live. I’m not a stand up guy. I never have been. I’m not a great leader nor do I wish to be. Those are external definitions and really don’t mean a lot to me personally. I like to focus on me.

If at the end of my life someone can point to me and say “He wasn’t a bad guy” I think that would be a nice thing. Will I care after I am dead?

Of course not. You know. Because, I’ll be dead.

Planning

Planning.

We all plan. All of the time.

We may not know that we are doing it but we do. When you get up in the morning, you may have thought to yourself that you’ll visit an old friend.

You don’t necessarily tell anyone but you just stop by his house for a visit.

I don’t like that.

I don’t like it because you knew that you were going to do something and I think you have a basic obligation to let that person know that you are planning on stopping by.

I guess this is kind of a rant.

I’m not sure.