Category: vision

  • Being on this planet…for a while…Does your head in. Seriously.

    Being on this planet…for a while…Does your head in. Seriously.

    Each year. Every month. Down to the day. Sometimes to the hour or the minute. Our perceptions of change, and sudden realizations, push on our stabilizers. Like a sudden wind that blows you nearly off your feet, you have to be prepared for that. In my observation, people react in different ways…

    One. Some people freak out. They just panic. Someone else has to settle them down.

    Two. Some people kind of freak out at first, then settle down and sort stuff out. They analyze and examine, and re-examine, until they think they understand as well as they can, then maybe they go outside and ask someone else to help them analyze the situation and sort it out.

    Three. Some people say “whatever”, and let the wind blow, holding on, until it settles down, then they move along. They don’t take the time to sort anything out. They just consider it to be “something that either is going to happen regardless, or something that could happen, but it doesn’t matter – it’s out of the reach of control…”

    Four. They just simply pray. They don’t do anything but pray. They pray to their God, or their whatever… It depends on where they are in the world.

    Five. They say, “Yeah. I’m a shit magnet. Stuff always happens to me. I’m doomed.”

    OK, so I think I have the categories pegged. And probably, at different times, some of us react one to many of those ways.

    We are all in the family of man, like it or not – you must admit it. We are also survival oriented. It’s in our DNA. We generally cannot help this because we are hard-wired to react mostly that way first, until our culture or something has us altering our basic belief systems and points of reference – that’s were we tend to morph and whether it changes our DNA, or not, it definitely changes our behaviors and our reactions to sudden change in our daily lives. I am convinced of this, 100%.

    These are my observations. Right or wrong, “these opinions are not those of the management, but strictly those of the individual”.

    There you go.

  • Another one bites the dust…  Maybe we really weren’t friends…

    Another one bites the dust… Maybe we really weren’t friends…

    In my life, friends have come and gone – some really have gone, but that’s another subject for another day…

    When you look back on your life, you reflect on your actions, the setting, and mostly, the people, at least I do that. Who was there…what we did…the memorable conversation… And what? It ended, we moved on or we maybe still have some semblance of a relationship. We can think back and go, “Oh, that was really a great time..” Sometimes we forget about most of the bad parts of our episodes in life, thinking that things were hunky-dory, then someone else who was there brings up that thing that wasn’t so hunky-dory – and so it goes – everyone has their own perspectives.

    And then, there are the aspects of aging and the memories (the old noggin hard drive is getting packed with them) – and the memory capabilities – apparently, from about 40, it goes downhill from there – yet many people have very good capabilities of retention of certain memories, and zilch for others – selective…

    Then there’s the replay that we cannot seem to control. Over and over it plays, keeping us up at night when the sleep robbers are most active…

    When I think of a twenty-plus year relationship, and then suddenly you realize that it wasn’t what you thought it was, it’s that Winnie-the-Pooh quote:

    ” When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

    It’s how it is when this happens… What your premise was, is not what the other person’s premise is and suddenly, you find out in a situation whereby you go, “Wow. Really?” Then you must process that, come to grips with it, like anything else, it’s a “change management” process that your mind must go through – your emotions included – to adjust. Here we go again.

    Then, there’s the ego threat – am I right, am I wrong, is it “no-fault”? Is there any peace? Yes. There might be some peace, but you have to work for it.

    Existential Thought of the Day: “If I just sit here and be quiet, will anyone call? Will anyone write? Will I just eventually disappear?”

  • corporatization – anything is a commodity these days – so much for STEM and the ability to understand without a cost

    corporatization – anything is a commodity these days – so much for STEM and the ability to understand without a cost

    Today, I discovered that one of our old standby weather outlets has discontinued it’s API for hobbyists and kids (which apparently, some companies have been using as their standard weather feed – that was a violation of the terms of use – which many people just click-through anyhow…) – but, actually, most of the folks are weather nuts, like me, and want to use the API to bring in information to look at weather data trends, and such because they just want to do this.

    Some are people who have these weather stations in their backyards that they purchased, to contribute to the “micro forecasting” or just have their own more reliable weather info, collected by them.

    I will mention that during Harvey, these were helpful for our local neighborhood rainfall amounts – and we used them (those that remained “UP” during that event – some didn’t).

    So the Weather Underground (cute name, huh?) is instructed to pull the plug on this API service.  They “can’t cope with the number of calls” – yeah right – it’s more that The Weather Company doesn’t want to – wants to charge money for it – parent company of The Weather Channel, et. al. – commercial circus and dramatic weather reporting as evidenced by the guy acting like the wind was extreme while people were walking normally behind him – caught on video during Florence this year.

    It’s run by IBM.  That’s right — how big can you get?  I don’t think I want to give them my credit card number.  I also don’t want them to be connected with my website because I’m using their API.  It’s the principle of the thing.

    So much for “giving back”  by making data available to people who want to use it to teach their kids how weather data works and understand their world better.

    Yeah.  So much for that.