Musings from Brian J. Noggle

So my beautiful wife and I watched a couple of Network+ Certification training videos on Thursday night.

She is accumulating a number of certification letter sets behind her name on LinkedIn, and she’s brushing up on her network skills which she is light on (she’s got lots of process stuff and actually taught a community college section of the A+ Certification preparation). Me, I got an A+ certification around the turn of the century, so old that it’s no longer recognized (the new program has requirements to do the continuing education thing and to recertify periodically, but I got mine in the olden days, before the certification-as-a-service and everything-is-a-rental-or-subscription world took hold. Since I’m between contracts, I’m thinking of maybe getting a couple of these low-level, inexpensive (only $400 for the exam–cheep!) so I can apply for starting cable-puller jobs and not get hired for those because I’m old. Or, mostly because I have the time and I’ve historically been a good test taker. The intro streaming classes we watched were under 10 minutes each and were kind of a review–when I got my A+ certification in 2000, I was taking community college classes of my own, scattered among hardware and networking and different programming languages.

So, to watch the videos: Apparently, we have free access to a Dion Training course hosted on Udemy because our library offers Udemy classes for free. So my wife could watch them on her iPad. And I pointed out we could stream them on the big television using the Roku and the iPad’s sharing (but you cannot do this with football games, gentle reader, as I learned several years ago). So she did a proof of concept a week ago, and on Thursday was a little flustered because she did not remember what nested-app-and-menu-path on the iPad and what nested-app-and-menu-path made this work. After only a few minutes but demonstrating the dread that it was not possible or she would never find it, we watched 40 minutes of intro to how the course (a $300 course on Udemy, I guess) and explanation of the exam (following this course and watching a couple hours of the day, I could be Network+ certified in thirty days–wow!).

Yesterday, on Facebook, I get:

An ad for the training company.

It was my wife’s iPad, my wife’s library account, and her free or subsidized login to Udemy, but the Roku account is in my name/email address. So I think I can know it was the Roku. Either parsing the content of the video or reading the metadata and selling it to Facebook to present me with those relevant ads.

But, ah, how used to it we are getting! How normal it seems!

And: I think I quipped somewhere, probably on Facebook, that it’s nice that Facebook shows us people’s birthdays on their birthdays, but we could really use some advance notice to buy cards or presents. Well! My Facebook feed is full of Chinese catchkes and t-shirts in the weeks leading up to my wife’s birthday. So, good? Although I’m unlikely to click through ads and buy from shops of unknown provenance these days. But they’re good for gift ideas: SHE LIKES CATS. Which is my knowledge which trained Facebook to give me this valuable insight.

Tech. Meh. I should maybe become a shepherd. I saw a house on one of my regular driving routes has new tight fences and baby goats. I wonder if they’re hiring.

In the past, it took several days to get my apps through the Microsoft Store process. This one went through in an hour.

It’s basically a little app to track your writing submissions to magazines and whatnot. After I transitioned from a notebook to an Excel spreadsheet in 2020, I’ve found it a little challenging to know what I have that’s available for submitting and to see where I’ve submitted things. This app makes it easy and warns you if you try to submit something to a place a second time, if you try to submit something that’s been published elsewhere, and if you try to submit something somewhere before it’s been accepted or rejected elsewhere.

Of course, now the trick will be to use it myself and to separate the database I use from a test database if I have to build and test it again.

Whenever Lileks posts an entry Main Streets: Remnants of the American Downtown, I like to check to see if I’ve been there before.

And I have:

• Berryville, Arkansas in 2021 and 2024–and remember to carry cash, because a couple of places on the square, including the book store, did not take credit cards into the 2020s
   
• Sarcoxie, Missouri (which he posts about today). Sarcoxie is the exit you take off of I44 if you’re going to a middle school basketball game in Avilla, Missouri, which we did a couple of times. You can take US96 due west, or you can take I44 southwest and get off at Sarcoxie and then take US37 north. They take about the same amount of time due to the higher speeds but greater distance via I44. A couple times, though, when going the I44 route, we stopped in Sarcoxie. Sarcoxie is one of those pseudopod towns where the big highway runs outside of the existing town, so the town annexes land to reach out to an interstate interchange. We’ve eaten at the gas station Subway more than once. One time, we went south into town itself and could not find somewhere to eat, so we probably ended up at the gas station Subway again.

I definitely have better chances in southern Missouri than Wisconsin because I’ve had more time to wander in a car down here, but if he picks a distant suburb of Milwaukee, I might have a chance. Although many of them do not have the traditional downtowns because they’ve grown up later.

What if the political drive to ban data centers actually saves American businesses when the AI bubble bursts, and the capital expenditures to BUILD BUILD BUILD occurred more in other countries, leaving their economies even more shattered?

Is this glass half full? Is the glass half empty? Who cares? It’s somebody else’s glass.

As I might have mentioned, I’ve been reading some Alexander Pope recently (I read a 100-year-old textbook copy of The Rape of the Lock, and I later found another 100-year-old edition). After all of that hyperlinked living, I found another 100-year-old textbook copy of Alexander Pope, and I’ve been working through it because it contains “An Essay on Criticism” in it, I decided to read it and the other poems in it to count it for another book in the annual total plus a brief Alexander Pope schtick on the blog, and….

So I might have mentioned, I’ve been working on an audiocourse on ancient Egypt, which… mentions “The Rape of the Lock”. I don’t think that the professor quite got the point of “The Rape of the Lock” as he mentioned it as part of a lecture on Egyptians tearing their locks out in mourning, which is not the point of “The Rape of the Lock” at all, but anyway….

I picked up a fiction book to work through while reading the Pope (blocking because I’m lazy the other thick books on my chairside table which I should be reading), and it mentions Queen Nefertiti of Egypt. Aw, yeah, the main wife of the “heretical” Pharaoh Akhenaten. I know the difference between Nefertiti and Hatshepsut, brah. And, briefly (set to expire in December of this year), I can tell the difference between the 18th and 19th dynasties of Egypt.

But, ya know, dang. How learning reinforces learning.

Interesting looking job on LinkedIn; self-hosted application, though, is non-descript and does not mention the job title or function. And step two is:

Sign up for a paid monthly subscription and put some money, as little as $5, in it?

Erm, no. NO harder than job applications with subsidiary third-party applications of unknown provenance to determine whether the employer would get a tax credit for hiring me, applications which require my social security number right out of the gate.

You know, I “meet” a lot of my clients just via the Internet, and I always have some trepidation before I receive my first payment. But making a payment to apply? Yeah, no. I still avoid, for the most part, submission fees and entrance fees for writing submissions (which puts me out of the running for a lot of target outlets).

So my new BJJ school is a couple of doors down from the Nixa branch of the Ozarks Elder Law branch.

Last Thursday, I stopped at the Republic License Office to get tags for the car, and it is a couple of doors down from the Republic branch of Ozarks Elder Law.

As part of my tour of bill-paying errands, I ended up at the pool store in Nixa, and on the counter, I found…. business cards for one of the attorneys at Ozarks Elder Law. “Someone is telling me I need to make a will,” I said to the pool store employees, explaining the situation.

“You’d better take a card, then,” one of them said, and I did.

And, on Saturday, we sat on a curb in Marshfield for the parade….

….right across the street from Marshfield’s branch of Ozarks Elder Law.

I’ve seen a lot of billboards for them, too, with Lori Crook front and center (that’s a story for another day), but to find myself Thursday, Friday, and Saturday outside three different locations of the law offices…. Well, that’s detecting a pattern in something.

So yesterday, I mused about parades I’d been to since I went to a rather large parade this year. This year, we also had a bit of a fireworks show, of sorts: For the second year in a row, my adult children had some friends over, and they lit off some fireworks. My beautiful wife and I did not watch the show–she because she feared for their safety and me because, like Renaissance festivals, just don’t enchant me any more. Although I’m not sure if fireworks shows ever did; they were just family and communal things we did.

When I was a kid, Smith Park, the terminus of the parade that passed by my grandparents’ house, had a small fireworks show, and we attended it all the time more than once, enough to think it was an annual tradition, but I have no idea how annual it was. Maybe most of my life up until I was seven years old. As I recall, everyone brought blankets, and across the field, the “professionals” lit the fireworks. But it couldn’t have been every year to that point.

Because my father was, for a couple years, one of those “professionals” who had been drinking all day and then went to light fireworks shows over a couple of beers in the night time. He brought us to the shows, the whole family, but instead of us watching on a blanket with the other spectators, we got to watch the show from inside the car by where the “professionals” were. It meant the fireworks were right over us, but this was in the late 1970s, man. I watched parts of more than one show sitting the wrong way on a Chevy Impala bench seat, dangling my head into the foot well. Which was not comfortable even then.

I remember July 4, 1980, though. My mother was at an inpatient rehab facility, so my father took my brother, me, and Rosemary to a job site to watch the Milwaukee lakefront fireworks. Rosemary was or had been married to Bill, the first of my father’s circle to get divorced (and my father lived in Bill’s basement immediately after getting kicked out by my mother in 1981 for being the philandering sort–oh, yeah, now I get it). At any rate, the spot must have been a great view: It was on a sloping roof three floors up. Just the place to take an eight-year-old and a six-year-old for fireworks (although I guess it was not us he was trying to impress). Do I remember anything of the fireworks? No, but I do remember being terrified of falling off the roof.

In Missouri, after the move, we really didn’t go to fireworks shows–my mother was not one to go out after work–but in the trailer park, we managed to get some firecrackers, bottle rockets, ladyfingers, jumping jacks, and other spinning ground things, so that was our fireworks shows in the trailer years.

I went to the lakefront fireworks show once or twice in high school or college, but after college, I’m not sure I have gone to see fireworks since.

After we moved to Nogglestead, we had a clear view of the Battlefield city fireworks, except the ground effects, for a couple of years until the untended fence line across the road turned into an untended row of trees. For a couple of years, neighbors on the next farm road to our west put on shows, maybe even competing against one another, so we got a really nice display there.

In 2019, we spent the night in Poplar Bluff, and my nephew and nephew-by-marriage-by marriage (my brother’s wife’s daughter’s husband) drank, doped, lit off fireworks, and set a bad example for my boys.

One year, I bought some fireworks–the kind I bought in the trailer years–and I realized those are fireworks that are fun to shoot off, but not fun to watch. The next year, I got some of the rockets that burst and whatnot. Eventually, I let my sons light some fireworks themselves once they were teenagers–and they had a blast, literally, even though I made them wear safety glasses. And, in the years since, they’ve taken over their own fireworking. They did it on their own two years ago. Last year, a couple friends from their Lutheran school days came over, and it was the same this year. Enough for them to think every year when it will have been only a couple of times.

But I got to see a couple of the fireworks from the deck, directly overhead. And when my youngest came into the house to secure soft drinks for everyone, I was pleased to see he was wearing safety glasses.

Last Independence Day, I mowed my lawn. We don’t generally do much with on the holiday. But last year, while mowing the lawn, I heard the radio station on location at the Marshfield, Missouri, Independence Day Parade, billed as the oldest continuously running July 4th parade west of the Mississippi. And I thought it might be an interesting thing to go to an Independence Day parade. For we hadn’t been to one since… what, 2009?

When I was a kid in Milwaukee, it was just a thing. A small neighborhood parade went past my grandparents’ house on 33rd Street and ended in Smith Park, so we did that all the time at least a couple of years so I thought of it as “all the time.” The parade was chock full of marching bands, veterans’ groups, and neighborhood kids on their bedecked bicycles and Big Wheels. When the parade had passed, the neighborhood fell in and followed them to Smith Park for little ice cream cups with wooden spoons.

After my parents divorced, we came to Missouri, and… Nothing happening down here, parade-wise, but a lot of times where we kids convinced, easily-because-they-wanted-the-money, operators of the fireworks stand up the hill from the trailer park that we were 13, and so we did that instead. Many summers, though, we spent in Wisconsin with my father, and his new neighborhood might have had a parade–but I know think that they had a festival, with ice cream and wooden spoons and all, up there. But a quick search indicates that those parks no longer have events, probably to save money and probably because neighborhoods are temporary these days, so who would go to a neighborhood event? Also, they’re probably not very safe these days anyway (say, why isn’t this footage being seen on stateside news outlets?).

After that, what, 1994 ish?–I didn’t go to parades, Independence Day or otherwise, very much. We went to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in St. Louis around the turn of the century, downtown whilst we were living in Casinoport. That was at the invitation of one of my beautiful wife’s co-workers, although we never saw him there.

After we had a baby (and moved to Old Trees), we could walk down to the Old Trees parade, and we did in 2007 and, maybe? 2009. It was the first of the modern parades: Light on bands and marching and elaborate floats, and heavy on cars–the Corvette club, the Mustang club, the old cars club. They had a good representation of old military vehicles, jeeps, two ton trucks, and whatnot. Political candidates and local organizations and probably youngsters from the high school vying for a crown of some sort. I rather enjoyed it, and it made me feel like a dad in a family, for sure.

But when we moved to Nogglestead, we’re a bit afield of parades. I don’t think Battlefield, the closest town has one, nor to my knowledge does Republic. So we went through another long draught, for sure, broken by attendance at a Christmas parade in Springfield the year after we arrived (where my oldest saw a girl in his class in one of the Corvettes, so he really thought Springfield was a small town) and one or two in Republic, including one that a couple when the oldest marched with the high school band (the youngest was supposed to his only year in the marching band, but he turned up at the parade without his band shoes and was kept out). It doesn’t help that many of the parades are time-shifted–the Independence Day will come on a Saturday before or after July 4, the Christmas parades are sometime in the beginning of December.

But this year, ah, we would make the trip. Marshfield is not so very far–although it does seem a long ways from home when we are coming back from St. Louis, and Marshfield is almost home but not just minutes away–but our trip to an estate sale last year (already?) put it into its rightful orbit around Nogglestead: A little under an hour by car, so as close as Aurora or Crane, but it seems further because we have to swing out and around Springfield to get there. We left a little after 8 to get to Marshfield, leaving plenty of time to find parking and to walk–which turned out to be just the right amount of time because by the time I hit the head and we walked the (crowded) parade route to find a spot which turned out to be a curb right outside the city courthouse (not the federal courthouse on the corner to the west or the county courthouse on the corner to the east). Right outside…. Well, that’s another story.

The parade itself was two hours long, but: Only one marching band, the high school band. A couple of veterans’ groups on flatbed trucks or trailers–with very few veterans from the mid-20th century wars left. Not depicted: Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Iraq II, or Afghanistan.

But depicted: The Sons of Confederate Veterans:

With a confederate flag and all. Wikipedia unhelpfully sermonizes:

The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) is an American neo-Confederate[1] nonprofit organization of male descendants of Confederate soldiers[2]: 6–9  that commemorates these ancestors, funds and dedicates monuments to them, and promotes the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy.

The SCV was founded on July 1, 1896, in Richmond, Virginia, by R. E. Lee Camp, No. 1 of the Confederate Veterans.[3][4] Its headquarters is at Elm Springs in Columbia, Tennessee.[2]: 29 

In recent decades, governors, legislators, courts, corporations, and anti-racism activists have emphasized the increasingly controversial public display of Confederate symbols—especially after the 2014 Ferguson unrest, the 2015 Charleston church shooting, and the 2020 murder of George Floyd. SCV has responded with its coordinated display of larger and more prominent public displays of the battle flag, some in directly defiant counter-protest.

Some of that is undoubtedly true. But not all of it.

At any rate, again, it was heavily motorized–the marching band might have been the only marchers in it. The Springfield Shriners were in heavy rotation, with a variety of motorized vehicles including little trucks, barrels on wheels, motorbikes, and motor trikes spaced throughout the parade. A number of candidate presentations, but few actual candidates. And, at the very end, a number of horses and carriages, mostly promoting a local cowboy church–but nobody scooping horse poop, which was unfortunate. One of the early horses left a deposit right by us, and the rest of the horses decided that was the official horsebox and started going in the same place. Within minutes, our spot smelled like a barn, and if they hadn’t been at the end of the parade, we would have left anyway.

But, in addition to the normalcy of the stars-and-bars: So. I was gorging on the thrown candy that came our way (except the suckers), and I tucked the wrappers in my shirt pocket. I took a couple of photos and stuck the camera in my shirt pocket. I sent my youngest looking for cold drinks with a couple of Jacksons, and when he came back with free cold water, I stuck the money in the shirt pocket. When I was going for candy, the phone fell out of my pocket, so I put it back into my pants pocket. And when the parade was over, I went to a trash can to empty the pocket, and I mindlessly tossed the money into the trash. Fortunately, another guy was throwing something away, and fortunately (by design), we’re in southwest Missouri where people are generally good, and he said, “Someone’s throwing away money.” So I was able to recover the cash. I mean, he could have just grabbed them himself, but he did not. So I’ll trade having to see “evidence of pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy”–just the celebration of regional heritage, and if you know your regional history, you’ll know it was not homogeneous and it was awfully bloody–for honest people.

But: Having been, we will probably not go next year. It was a whole family excursion, and I think my oldest is coming to realize how few of those we have left now that he’s looking, at a distance but in sight, at moving out.

But: I see on the local news sites stories about a local neighborhood Independence Day parade with kids on bedecked bicycles and Big Wheels. Maybe that’s where the real action is. Maybe next year.