Trump presidency lessons

I was going to say 'lessons' learned', but I don't think he or his supporters get it yet.

• When people question your methods or ideas, attacking them doesn't solve the problem.
• Lying eventually catches up with you.
• Blaming everyone else for your problems makes you look weak.
• You don't need to gloat or belittle your predecessors once you're elected. You won. Now prove it wasn't a wasted vote.
• You're never going to get other parties to participate in your plans if you keep insulting them.
• If people accuse you of something, like collusion with a foreign power, assuming it isn't true, the smart thing to do is prove it.
• Next time you pick a political party to join, don't consider how stupid the voters are (your words), consider how stubborn the politicians are.
• If you're going to get behind a job creating industry, don't pick one whose days were already numbered (coal).
• When Elon Musk walks out of your panel, you've done something wrong.
• Listen to your intelligence community. They know their shit.
• The people you appoint to positions of authority don't have to agree with you. That's not their job.

Not on Google

Small things - 28 Jul

• I honestly don't understand how (in North America) a picture of a woman, topless, covering her nipples is not obscene, but get one glimpse of the nipple region and we've crossed into lewd territory.
• Remember the first time you washed a spoon under running water and got sprayed? How about the 50th time? Why do we never learn?
• I was going to get a new iPad, but then I thought - no, I need health care more. But then I realized I live in Canada. Here I come, Apple store!
• Do regular dogs see police dogs and think, "Damn! It's the cops!"?
• My cell phone sleeps in a different room. In a cupboard. Behind a door.
• I wonder what Shakespeare had to study?

Because it's 2017

Things I learned lately - 28 Jul

• In Helsinki Finland, on 22 Jun, the sun rises at 3:54am and sets at 10:50pm. But civil twilight doesn't end until 12:42am and starts again at 2:02am.
• Stonehenge is not technically a henge.
• The wastelands around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are about to be transformed into a large solar power farm, capable of generating half the energy that Chernobyl did. Solar power is the only way the radiation zone around the site can be used productively, as the land will not be fit for farming or anything else over the next few hundred years.
• A Big Mac only costs $1.57 in Ukraine.
• Only 3 McDonald's locations in the US serve pizza.
• Emmanuel Macron's campaign released an ad showing how American pundits predicted an easy win for Hillary, likely scaring a lot of French voters into voting. Macron won.

If I started a band, this would be our first album cover

Smartflower

What's neat about this solar power unit is that it tracks the sun from dawn to dusk, allowing it to capture more energy with less size and loss.

Even better, it's petals can fold up for protection against hail and other environmental threats.

They make other models with built in battery storage as well.

But what would it be named?

Things I learned lately - 22 Jul

• The movie Minority Report partly inspired the original iPhone design.
• Jon Rubinstein, who was Apple's top hardware executive when the iPhone was being developed, pushed to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini. One could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. The mini never got any traction.
• Bus drivers in Nantes, where the temperature has gotten to 38C, are not allowed to wear shorts while driving the bus. So they wore what is allowed for women, skirts.
• The war between Walmart and Amazon is so bad, Walmart has issued a warning to tech companies it does business with not to use Amazon's cloud services.
• George Clooney created a tequila company on a whim, Casamigos, and now it's being sold to Diageo for up to $1 billion.
• The winning word in the Scripps Annual Spelling Bee the year I was born was "smaragdine".
• For $50 per year, Backblaze will automatically back up all of your data online. You allocate how much bandwidth it can use, so the backup won't interrupt Netflix use. You have very granular control over which files you can restore. Backblaze can send you a 4 TB drive with your data through FedEx for $189, which they refund you if you return the drive within 30 days. Backblaze encrypts all data before it's uploaded and keeps it encrypted. You can also set up a personal encryption key, which Backblaze won't have access to, and two-factor authentication for even more security. The process is automatic, relatively fast after the first backup, and encrypted. 
• Chameleons are thought of as able to change their skin to fit any color or pattern in their surroundings. However, they mostly use this to maintain a certain body temperature and as a way to communicate with other chameleons, not to hide from predators.
• Roughly half of all PCs run Windows 7, one quarter run Windows 10.

Songs that are 40 years old this year (2017)

• Billy Joel - Just the way you are
• ELO - Turn to stone / Mr blue sky
• Elvis Costello - Alison / Watching the detectives
• Fleetwood Mac - Dreams / Go your own way
• Iggy Pop - Lust for life
• Peter Gabriel - Solsbury hill
• Steely Dan - Black cow / Peg / Deacon blues
• Talking Heads - Psycho killer
• Meatloaf - Paradise by the dashboard light
• Donna Summer - I feel love
• Rose Royce - Car wash
• Mary MacGregor - Torn betweeen two lovers
• Leo Sayer - When I need you
• KC & the Sunshine Band - I'm your boogie man
• Shaun Cassidy - Da doo ron ron
• Bee Gees - How deep is your love
• Heart - Barracuda / Dreamboat annie
• Commodores - Brick house
• Foreigner - Cold as ice / Feels like the first time
• ELP - Fanfare for the common man
• Chilliwack - Fly at night
• Supertramp - Give a little bit
• Steve Miller - Jet airliner / Swingtown
• Eric Clapton - Lay down Sally
• Carly Simon - Nobody does it better
• Boston - Peace of mind 
• Rod Stewart - You're in my heart

Coolest mailbox ever

Things I learned lately - 14 Jul

• Over the past decade, Disneyland has raised one-day ticket prices nearly 70% — up to $124 on peak days — to reduce wait times and ease crowding, to no avail, according to a new report from the Los Angeles Times.
• In fact, attendance at the Anaheim, California, theme park jumped nearly 20% during the same time period.
• Skin peeling from sunburn is actually your body’s way of protecting you from cancer.
• When Paul Brown joined Arby's as CEO in May 2013, he was an outsider brought in to tap the 50-year-old fast food brand's potential. He decided that he would begin his tenure with a listening tour. "I want to hear from you what you believe has worked and what hasn't worked in the past, and what we think we could do together," Brown said he told the company. Whether he was in a franchise restaurant or one owned by Arby's, he would ask, "What would you do differently if you ran this?" The question got both franchisees and all levels of store employees to not only weigh in on how they would run their own location differently, but how they would manage the entire Arby's brand.
• TransPod, a Toronto startup building a hyperloop system to disrupt commercial transportation, studied the viability of building an ultra-high-speed hyperloop line between Toronto and Windsor with multiple stops. They say that building a TransPod system will cost $10 billion, half the projected cost of a high-speed rail, in 30 minutes versus 2 hours for high speed rail. TransPod believes that high speed rail is an obsolete technology, citing that many countries are abandoning it in favour of maglev and hyperloop.
• Cracker Jack was the first commercial snack food. The caramel-coated popcorn and peanut mix launched in 1896, and by 1916 it was the largest-selling snack food in the world.
• Colonel Harland Sanders bought and lived in a bungalow at 1337 Melton Drive in the Lakeview area of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada from 1965 to 1980.
• The loonie turns 30 years old this month.