This is an exhibition - not a competition. Please...no wagering.
Friday, July 31, 2020
A Plesz PSA about phishing
If it's unexpected, suspect it.
That's my motto. I should trademark it.
If you get an email that wants you to click a link or open a file or complete a form, it's not going to end well if you fall for it.
If there's a doubting voice in your head that insists, "But what if it's real?", verify via alternate means. That means contact using a phone number or email using an address or number NOT included in the phishing message.
Don't reply. Don't engage. Don't click. Don't download.
In the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar................... "IT'S A TRAP!!"
Small things 31 July
- Masks are the new bras! They're uncomfortable! You only wear them in public! And when you don't wear them everyone notices!
- 2020. The year our hands are consuming more alcohol than our mouths.
- I used to be afraid whenever I'd hear the buzzing of a bee (I got stung in the ear as a kid). Now I love the sound of a bee.
- Don't kids wake up in the morning and say to their parents, "The weirdest thing. I fell asleep on the floor last night, but somehow I woke up in my bed."
- Has anyone done this joke at a bar yet: "I'll have a Corona, hold the virus." And did they get thrown out?
- Mask tan lines though........
- Ummm, where are the outspoken gun owners who want to be able to fight government oppression now that Fed riot police are in Portland and Chicago? Huh?! Where?
- Covid dad joke: "It's not a mask. It's a coughy filter."
- Fondant. That's basically just stale frosting, right?
- Who brags about passing a cognitive test?
- I like how some Americans are all, "Why can't you protest peacefully?" There was a time when whites were told they couldn't keep slaves and they started a war.
- If you won't wear a mask due to concerns your brain won't get enough oxygen, sorry but that ship has already sailed....
Things I learned lately 31 July
- 20 million more people visit the Dubai Mall than visit New York City every year.
- The first Toyota model built specifically for the American market was the Corona in 1967. Let the conspiracy theories begin!
- Soap and deodorant sales have slumped during the pandemic.
- Green Eggs and Ham was banned in China from 1965 to 1991 for its "portrayal of early Marxism".
- Things we've sent into space: human remains (including Gene Roddenberry and James Doohan); a Tesla roadster; salmonella virus; tardigrades; soda; pizza; Amelia Earhart's watch.
- In the 16th century, some person wrote GODBWYE in a letter as a short form of God be with ye. It was read as goodbye, which is why we say goodbye today. It's because of 16th century chat speak.
- Créées is a real French word. Three 'e's in a row! Tabernacle! (It means created)
Friday, July 24, 2020
This is racial reality
I wonder if mixed race couples have to deal with this crap in Canada too. I understand that not all people treat visible minorities, but that's not the point is it?
I hope one day this kind of nonsense is eradicated.
Ice cream!
Darlene really wanted strawberry, so strawberry it is. The ice cream base is very simple to make, the issue we found was what kind of cream to use. Depending on what store you go to results in what kind of cream you'll find. My first batch ended up using part half and half and part 33% whipping cream.
I decided to add more cream than the recipe called for once I got the mixture into the frozen bowl. That was a mistake, because as the ice cream mixture cools and churns, it expands. Lesson learned. On the upside, I had more than a pint in the end.
Attempt number one taste rating: 9 out of 10.
Next recipe: Butter pecan. Mistake number one. Toasting the pecans at too high a skillet temperature. Medium heat for 8 minutes my ass! More like low heat for 6 minutes. So the pecans partially burned. My bad.
Once the ice cream was made, we tried it out. It was definitely missing something. It just tasted like vanilla ice cream with pecans thrown in. Darlene thinks it needs a butter rum ribbon. I concur. Next time.
Songs that are 50 years old this year (2020)
The Carpenters - (They Long to Be) Close to You
The Guess Who - American Woman
B.J. Thomas - Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head
Edwin Starr - War
Diana Ross - Ain't No Mountain High Enough
The Jackson 5 - I'll Be There / ABC / I Want You Back
The Beatles - Let It Be
Three Dog Night - Mama Told Me (Not to Come)
Ray Stevens - Everything Is Beautiful
Vanity Fare - Hitchin' a Ride
Neil Diamond - Cracklin' Rosie
Sly & the Family Stone - Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
Eric Burdon & War - Spill the Wine
Norman Greenbaum - Spirit in the Sky
The Temptations - Ball of Confusion
Free - All Right Now
Stevie Wonder - Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours
Blues Image - Ride Captain Ride
Shocking Blue - Venus
John Lennon - Instant Karma!
The Beatles - The Long and Winding Road
Anne Murray - Snowbird
Marmalade - Reflections of My Life
The Hollies - He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother
Simon & Garfunkel - Cecilia
The Kinks - Lola
Mungo Jerry - In the Summertime
Joe Cocker - The Letter
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Woodstock
Chicago - Make Me Smile / 25 or 6 to 4
The Carpenters - We've Only Just Begun
James Taylor - Fire and Rain
Mountain - Mississippi Queen
Things I learned lately 24 July
- Europeans don't typically grocery shop for more than a day or two's worth of food. In Amsterdam, most grocery stores don't even have parking for cars because they're usually walking distance from where people live.
- In Canada, passenger trains have to yield to freight trains. This is due to the fact that our passenger rail companies don't own any track.
- Wendy's Baconator flavoured Pringle chips are a thing now, well because 'Merica!
- The claim that Covid-19 has a lower mortality rate than the flu was started as a meme on Facebook by self-proclaimed antivaxxers and has no basis in fact.
- Apple is producing a TV series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.
- Sharks have existed on our planet longer than trees.
- Chinese Checkers was invented in Germany.
Friday, July 17, 2020
I can hum it....
The Korgis - Everybody's got to learn sometime
History, oversimplified!
I was not wrong. They made a very witty video that really helped me to understand what happened. Kudos.
Once you watch it, you'll see the link to part 2.
Small things 17 July
- Before you could store phone numbers in the phone, maybe our memory was nature's way of weaning us off of phone calls. If you couldn't remember someone's number anymore, you just stopped calling them. Possibly for good reasons.
- I really don't know why I felt it necessary to put my mom's phone number in my contacts. I've managed to remember it for 44 plus years now.
- Is it really necessary to stand right next to the airport baggage carousel before you even see your luggage?
- I think the markup on beef jerky is out of control.
- Puns are meant to inflict punitive damage.
- To really simulate the Broadway experience, stream Hamilton in your living room, but watch it from your neighbour's roof.
- Jesus backwards sounds like sausage.....
- British people be like "I'm bri' 'ish."
- What do you say we put the 'all-in' price on stuff from now on.
- Minimum wage isn't a suggestion. Also, it should be renamed shameful wage.
- When we tell our great grand-kids about the toilet paper shortage of 2020, we have to make sure we really embellish. "We had to drag our butts on the lawn. Uphill. Both ways. Dodging murder hornets.
Things I learned lately 17 July
- Competition hot dog eaters can eat as many as 84 hot dogs in 10 minutes.
- Lake Superior contains enough water to flood the entire North American land mass to a depth of 30 centimetres.
- If you store cookies in a sealed container with a piece of bread, they'll soak up some moisture and stay soft.
- There is a movement afoot to completely decriminalize personal drug possession of any kind in Canada. And many police forces support it.
- You can order a Toblerone with a personalized message instead of the name Toblerone! I'd make mine TBBLOBNOERN so it looks like a defective bar.
- If you have somewhat of a double chin or you want your jawline to be more defined in a picture, put your tongue on the roof of your mouth.
- If you live in the EU, Google has a URL removal tool to wipe certain instances of personal info from their search.
- Over 1,000,000 Mazda Miata cars have been sold. They broke the one million barrier in 2016.
- Shipping containers don't really make good, practical homes. Every cut you make in the structure has to be accounted for in expensive reinforcement. Also, metal is a lousy thermal insulator.
Friday, July 10, 2020
Long lost songs from my childhood that I still love today
- The Korgis - Everybody's got to learn sometime
- 10CC - I'm not in love
- Terry Jacks - Seasons in the sun
- Starbuck - Moonlight feels right
- Player - Baby come back
- Pilot - Magic
- Orleans - Still the one
- Marc Jordan - Marina del Ray
- Lighthouse - Sunny days
- Leo Sayer - When I need you
- Jay Ferguson - Thunder island
- Ian Thomas - Coming home
- Gilbert O'Sullivan - Alone again naturally
- George McCrae - Rock your baby
- George Harrison - Blow away
- Firefall - Strange way
- David Gates - Took the last train
- Cliff Richard - Devil woman
- The Brothers Johnson - Strawberry letter 23
- Boney M - Daddy cool
- Bee Gees - Jive talkin'
- Bob Welch - Sentimental lady
- Andrew Gold - Lonely boy
- John Stewart - Gold
- Alice Cooper - School's out
- ABBA - Knowing me knowing you
- Harmonium - Pour un instant
Change is hard but necessary
We are always more inclined to embrace traditions that are entrenched in our way of life. Change is hard, and drastic change is even harder. Change precipitated by societal ignorance is especially difficult, but not impossible. You can't possibly know what it's like to be a person of colour or first nations if you aren't a person of colour or first nations yourself, for example.
I had a long, serious think about how I felt just about tearing down monuments to past leaders who no longer meet our evolving measuring tape of decency. Is it worth keeping monuments to people to preserve history? There are no statues of Hitler. Have we forgotten about him? No, we have not.
It's much easier to dismiss, reject, make excuses against, challenge, resist, fight and curse change. But it is necessary. We are not a perfect society, far from it. But we must evolve into better versions of ourselves if we want society to continue as a sustainable, desirable thing.
We must always remember, genocide was once acceptable by our ancestors. Slavery was once accepted as normal. Religious inquisitions were a part of life. Being a single mother was considered grounds for being shunned from society and suffering forced adoption of their children. Mixed race marriages were taboo.
Look how far we have come. Some day, we will look back and wonder how people tolerated gender and racial inequality, domestic violence, harassment, abuse of power and religious superiority complexes. It is up to us to make these changes a reality. But you can't do it on your own. Change requires discussion, awareness, empathy, honesty, and humility. It's not easy. But I remind myself that it's not easy for people who were, and still are, victims of various kinds of abuse just because they look or sound or live or love different from me.
Small things 10 July
- I want to speak to the dentists that didn't recommend this toothpaste.
- Give a crying child a glass of water. They can't cry and drink at the same time. It also gives them a chance to calm down. Bonus: Tell them they'll run out of tears, so drink the water.
- Canadians: "OMG there's a concert near my house. It's like only a 3 hour drive!" Europeans: "A 3 hour drive? Are you kidding me? I'm not going all the way to France for that." Australians: Silent sobbing
- Laziness is the instigator of efficiency
Non-medical perks of wearing a mask
- You can pretend not to recognize people you know
- Men don't tell masked women to smile
- You finally get to sense how badly your breath smells
- You can have fun mumbling on purpose and people will think it's the mask
- Good way to recycle old bra cups
- After you cut someone off in traffic, they won't be able to tell you're laughing
- You can skip the makeup or the shave
- After someone cuts you off in traffic, they won't be able to tell you're swearing
Things I learned lately 10 July
- There is much more energy potential in the rotational energy of small black holes than even the total fusion energy of stars.
- Over the years, Ford owned or had major stakes in Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mazda, Mercury, and Aston Martin, but these brands have either been sold or disbanded.
- Cadillac was formed from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company. After a dispute between Henry Ford and his investors, Ford left the company in March 1902. Engineer Henry M. Leland persuaded Ford's financial backers to continue manufacturing automobiles under a new name, the Cadillac Automobile Company, re-purposing the original factory. It was named after French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who had founded Detroit in 1701.
- The reason traffic circles are inherently safer intersections is that you have to slow down to go through them, and no roads intersect at 90 degree angles, making any collision that does take place much less dangerous.
- Europe, especially the Netherlands, does not make much use of stop signs. In fact studies show that stop signs make intersections more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists.
- Getting a better deal when you buy a new car at the end of a month, quarter or season is generally true.
- Waiting until after you negotiate the new car price to mention the trade-in is NOT necessarily a good idea because the dealer will just low-ball you on your trade-in.
Friday, July 03, 2020
OMG cookies in my cache!
Cookies are small files that the web sites you visit leave on your computer to indicate that you have visited before. They are mostly anonymous bits of information that, when you pay a return visit to a web site you've been to before, it uses the data in the cookie to configure what you see on the site based on previous choices and preferences.
So what happens when you delete them? The best case scenario is that the web site behaves like it has never seen your visit before. It doesn't recognize your computer as a previous visitor. This might be a mild annoyance. The worst case is that the site won't even let you do anything because it doesn't recognize you as a valid visitor. This would be more common for work related sites.
So why do you keep hearing about how bad cookies are? Marketing. That's right. There is a whole industry built around the idea that your computer is riddled with unnecessary files that are making it slow and that a regular cleaning is paramount to keeping it functioning well. And it's all complete B.S. There is no definitive study that can prove that your computer runs any better post-cleanup. Unnecessary programs? Well that's another story.
But Karl, aren't there such things as malicious cookies? Yes there are. But they are rare, and are typically only a danger to you if you are visiting unscrupulous web sites and not regularly updating your web browser(s), operating system and security software. I have yet to meet one single person who fell victim to a malicious cookie file.
Meanwhile, here's a fun video about cookies in the case.
Small things 3 July
- Never take anyone's word for anything. Do your own research and think for yourself.
- Just when I was beginning to have a little respect for capitalism, now the grocery stores want to take the wage increase back. [slow clap]
- A gathering of covidiots is known as a covfefe.
- I guess we can't use the saying "avoid it like the plague" anymore because, well many humans are dumb now.
- "It's important to realize that if society meekly submits to an expert and that expert is wrong, a great deal of harm may occur. We shouldn't presume that a group of experts somehow knows what's best for everyone." ~Rand Paul
- All the people worried about 'erasing history' by taking down statues are going to lose their minds when they find out about lack of funding for historical research and cuts to university history departments.
- Everyone: Why did the movies come out in the order 4,5,6,1,2,3,7,8,9? Yoda: In charge of scheduling, I was..... [Yoda laugh]
- Don't think about it as "Only black lives matter." Think about it as "Black lives matter too."
- Saying that it's unfair to focus only on black lives right now is as ridiculous as saying it's unfair to focus only on Covid-19 right now.
- A co-worker is pretending to be mad at me because my name is attached to an online course he hasn't bothered to take since he was invited over 3 months ago. The reason he's mad is because the online course platform is now in hyper-nag mode and has taken to texting him reminders in the middle of the night. I just keep asking him, "So, did you finish the course?"
- Afterbirders n. When birds fart to fly faster.
Things I learned lately 3 July
- A cough can propel saliva droplets as far as 20 feet.
- Florence, Oregon once tried to blow up the rotting carcass of a beached whale with dynamite. It did not go well.
- Target has a 'try it on' mirror by the non-medical masks so you can see what you look like in different masks before you buy one. Well, that's a fail.
- If the sun was as small as a pea, the earth would be a speck 70 cm away. Jupiter would be a poppy seed 4 metres away. Pluto would be 30 metres from the sun. Voyager 1 would be almost 97 metres away. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri would be 202 km away.
- There is a small landlocked enclave of Spain inside of France called Llívia.
- If you try to get Google Maps directions to anywhere in South America (by car), you'll get an error. That's because the 100 km wide "Darien Gap" (pictured) between Panama and Columbia has no paved roads. Someone tried driving that gap and then some (200 km) through the jungle and it took them 741 days.
- Edmonton and Toronto are close to being named as hub cities if the NHL resumes playing this year.
- Rhode Island's official name is "the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations". For now anyway. By July 2020, they may have voted to drop the "and Providence Plantations" part.
- Microsoft is closing all of its stores.
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