Category: Life

11 auto features that we miss (titled “The Good Old Ways: Many once-common features removed from today’s cars are now sorely missed in the AAA Explorer magazine from which I tore the article one evening).

They are:

1. Uncovered engines; after about 20 years, the list plastic pegs disappear, so they gradually become less covered over time.
2. Oil dipsticks; the newest car amongst us still has one, as the oldest kept seeing a warning light and tried to use the dipstick but ended up overfilling his oil.
3. Analog instruments; two of the three vehicles have spinning pointers, but they’re probably electronically determined.
4. Buttons, knobs, and levers; two of our three still have buttons for heating and radio and whatnot. To be honest, I don’t know about the newest vehicle because I don’t drive it. One of our three even has no screen.
5. Unconnected infotainment systems; one of them has a screen, but it does not play videos–although it will play DVDs’ audio, as I have learned, so I can listen to DVD lectures.
6. Full-size spare tires; one of the three does. Which means it has one more Tire Pressure Monitoring System sensors to report low pressure at odd moments.
7. Glorious color; Well, one of the three is not black or white.
8. CD players; at least two of the three do have it–and one has an audiocassette player. If we get a newer car, I will want a CD player installed as I have lots of audiocourses to get through yet.
9. Unpainted bumpers; yeah, no, all plastic and will total the cars if bumped.
10. Printed owner’s manual; at least two of the tree have them, and I’ve looked in one of those two in the last week (story forthcoming, maybe).
11. Drivers; we don’t have any of the new lane assist or blindspot warnings even. I work in tech. I’m not sure I’m going to ever have a self-driving car.

Yeah, I am not looking forward to getting a vehicle which is later than 2010, ever.

So, gentle reader, I am the sort of person who puts dryer sheets in with his laundry, especially during the winter months. And I have vacillated between the warehouse club’s house brand and Bounce name-brand dryer sheets for years. Depending upon how miserly I was feeling, mostly. But the last time I was in the market, I decided to go with Bounce because even though we run the laundry all day here, by the time we got to the bottom of a box of sheets, particularly the two-pack bundles we got, the sheets had lost most of their scent. So I went with the Bounce, and….

Wait a minute.

Instead of a two-pack of sheets, I got a single box here instead of two, and you’ve cut the size of the sheet about 20% but have put two of them together, perforated, so I have to tear them apart myself. And for the same low price?

Well, I guess if you’re going to do shrinkflation, it pays to add as many variables to the calculation as possible to try to obscure it as best you can.

Best of all, you’re doing this for my convenience.

Jeez, guys, am I getting more curmudgeonly, or merely posting the same amount of curmudgeonishness and cynicism more often? More value for you! If you value that sort of thing, I guess.

As I mentioned, in January, I reclaimed some comic books from my youngest’s bedroom as we culled the children’s books from his shelves (and moved the bookshelves downstairs as depicted in the The Noggle Library, 2026 Edition).

I stacked up the salvageable ones, which includes not only some heavily worn comics from my youth but also things that the boys got at The Comic Cave back in the day or things they bought at ABC Books, whether with gift cards they received or as a bribe for coming with me to the book shop (not that they had much choice ten and twelve years ago).

And…. some of these Bongo Simpsons Comics Explosion books. They’re flat-spined collections of comic strips(?).

I have a bit of a conundrum: Do I count them as books or comic books?

As you know, gentle reader, I have in the past counted collections of cartoons as books in my annual tally and generally subject you to my twee musings on what I’ve read. Not so with comic books. But, as I mentioned, these have flat spines. Like graphic novels. Which I have counted in the past.

So, if I count them as books, I can use them for blog fodder. And I can just put them on my bookshelves. If I count them as comics, I have to acquire some magazine-sized poly bags and figure out where to put them–my short boxes are comic sized. Maybe I need to get a magazine-sized box as well.

Oh, the dilemma!

Probably, though, I will bag them and store them with the comics. Not that it will make much different at estate sale time, but it will leave the room on the bookshelves for actual, you know, books.

Ms. K. yesterday:

This was the second time I drove myself there. The first time I did was back in 2022 when I took the Zed Drei, and on that occasion I stopped in Springfield, Missouri on the way home and fell in love with the twee little Holiday Inn right off I-44. It’s like a 5/8ths scale big city hotel, with an atrium and birdcage elevators and the works and if Springfield has an annual sci-fi con then this is where it happens and I’ll bet it’s adorable.

Missouri Comic Con is coming up in a week, and check out the guests. Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall, Jewel Staite, Alan Tudyk, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Vicki Lawrence (?)….

It’s at the fairgrounds, not the Holiday Inn.

Am I going? Nah.

PhrazeMaze: Psalms

I have successfully vibe-coded PhrazeMaze into a flavored app, which means I can build them using different themes and strings for puzzles.

So, basically, I can make them faster than people are buying them.

Like so much of what I do.

My boys are getting to be adults, and yet…. We have balls scattered around the fields of Nogglestead.

It was worse a couple of weekends ago; they had a friend over and played a variety of lightweight sports in the yard, including football and wiffleball. So I had to bring in a couple of gloves before the rain, and some equipment and/or the lightly-weighted professional folder that the oldest is supposed to be giving away to businesses about the company he is doing business development for…. That might have gotten blown away in the storms.

Ah, someday, and very soon now, they will be gone, and things will be where we leave them, and balls will not inexplicably erupt in various locations.

But, also perhaps soon, grandchildren might have the same effect.

Heaven help me (too late), but I suspect I will be a better grandfather than father. Although if my boys produce girls, who knows? I do not have experience with them.

Little Missmiss was nothing but a 野良猫, a noraneko, a stray cat on the streets when she was adopted into the International Fly Assassins Organization (IFAO).

There, she endured many years of brutal training montages to hone her skills in leaping, parkour, and swatting before she was ready for her first assignment.

And here it is: She is to rid her new adopted home of all intruding flies.

Help Little Missmiss in her efforts by tapping to leap onto the furniture and to leap to swat the flies in each room.

Jeez, that one was a long time coming, and then a short time realizing.

I had the idea for this game a long time ago–what, a decade? I read about a new platform for building games–GameSalad, which debuted in 2010, and I had this idea–I created an account, and then I got started with animating the cat, and I got…. One or two frames into it and abandoned it.

In 2026, it took about three weeks of prompting LLMs for everything from the graphics to the physics behind leaping and landing and swatting.

At any rate, if you have an iPad or iPhone, it’s under a buck here. It’s rated 13+ because of the cartoonish violence in it–a cartoon cat swatting a cartoon fly. I called that cartoonish violence in the age ratings wizard because I didn’t want to end up in the Hague because some Austrian toddler saw that and started torturing flies like he saw in the game. Where the flies are NOT tortured; they’re merely swatted.

As you might know, gentle reader, for major pieces of wall art, I’ve favored prints of master works from, er, the masters, starting with three prints I bought in college on a fresh new credit card in 1990 (The Man with the Golden Helmet by Rembrandt, Christina’s World by Wyeth, and A Saturday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat) which I got a deal on (3 for $18–and by the time we paid them off, in probably a decade later if we consider the money paid to the credit company first-in, first out, we probably paid $100 each for them including interest). Or personal relics which were gifts and/or inherited from family members now likely departed. My beautiful wife, however, favors consumer art which is mass-produced art of a topical theme, whether it’s the mere decorative squares and textures, Mediterranean landscapes, or Mediterranean cafes.

We have two such works in the bedroom, and, gentle reader, they are the same picture.

• Cafe facing out: ✔
• Alley upstage right: ✔
• Shopfront on right facing left: ✔
• Covered cafe tables: ✔
• Flowers: ✔
• Awnings: ✔

Basically, the artistic expression difference is packed dirt vs cobblestones, ainna?

Ah, I cannot talk; I inherited two H. Hargrove prints from my aunt and then bought another at a garage sale, and we still have two on the walls (one has been stored to make room for one of the cafes above). So they come from a personal relic source and not just a catalog or home goods retailer.

Because I like to look at them and think about them, not just have them as visual background music. But maybe that’s just me.

Well, after watching all those Bruce Lee movies, I planned to go into my martial arts class yesterday morning and say that I’d watched them and picked up some bad new habits for sparring:

• A lot of kung fu kata peacocking between strikes.
• Happy feet making like Irish dancing before beginning.
• Making single strikes instead of combinations, and making them big so the people in the last row can see them.
• Using my forearm to block everything: Spin heel kicks, bo staffs, sticks, speeding trucks, anything. And the forearm stops them cold.
• Hooting when I strike. You’re supposed to exhale to tighten everything up, which leads to the “hi-ya!” Which my school has seemingly stopped emphasizing. As it stands, I already make martial arts sound effects a lot of times when I strike.
• Thumbing my nose mid-bout. Although it will be harder to do with boxing gloves on.

At any rate, I didn’t get to lay the spiel on anyone since renshi asked me what I was listening to (my question to him often is “What are you listening to?” because, in the past, he’s been in charge of the martial arts playlist and picked out metal). So I had to talk about the new Frozen Crown CD instead.

And, as part of our warmups, we had to run to the edge of the mat, do a couple pushups, and then run back. Across the room, kyoshi joked with someone about doing them on fingertips like Bruce Lee, so down on my side of the mat, I tried it. And I could.

So that has been delighting me and bringing a smile to my face since. Because, you know, I am just like Bruce Lee. Although I will likely never get to one finger pushups because I do not have kung fu hands.

And, the same day, I was listening to my workout playlist whilst dusting the lower level, and Eminem’s “Monster” came on, and it mentions Bruce Lee.

Fame made me a balloon ’cause my ego inflated
When I blew, see, but it was confusing
‘Cause all I wanted to do is be the Bruce Lee of loose leaf

Again, it’s an illustration about how outsized an influence Bruce Lee had. The man only made a couple of movies, but what an impact on the culture that he’s mentioned fifty-some years later in a martial arts class.

Ah, gentle reader. I fell into an Internet lead generator and feel dirty.

I’ve worked for one, and I might again, but I try to avoid them when I can because I don’t like someone making money off of my contact information since I’m not making any money of my own. And my experience with what I thought was a real company that had subcontracting appliance repairmen but was probably just a lead generator where independent contractors bought my job took a turn for the worse when a repairman drove down from Marshfield, an hour or so away, to give me an estimate which was more than the washing machine cost. So when I need something, I don’t do an Internet search only to see that the six or eight (or more) top results are funnels. I do the right thing: I remember who advertised on the radio or whose trucks I have seen nearby (but the cost of buying leads might be built in).

So: We need a new roof at Nogglestead, and given our current circumstances, we were going to need to finance it. I called the roofing company we’d selected, and I expected the estimator to come with application paperwork because the last time we did something like this–but that was probably 25 years ago. The adjuster told me I could use the Web site to apply for financing through their partner.

So I got on the Web site, and the link in the heading navigation to financing was broken–it led to a 404 error on the Web site of a local bank. So I thought the “partner” was the fancy tool used by that bank. A little later, I got to exploring the Web site a little and found another financing link which led to a form with the tool’s name on it. I entered basic information, and….

Immediately I was presented with a list of 400 different loan offers from Internet lenders of various stripes. And my inbox was immediately blitzed by marketing emails from the tool and from the people to whom it had sold my information.

Aw, hell. So now my name and Social Security Number are everywherer on the Internet again.

So, yeah, no. I went back to what I should have done in the first place: Go to my various banking institutions and see what their offerings are.

I don’t know why I’m so averse to lead generation and management. It does, almost, make one’s life easier if one doesn’t want to research services in their area. But the cost of buying leads is now priced into services everywhere, so it’s not helping me enough to offset that.

So I have released two apps to the Apple App Store this week:

Goal-Task-Chore is a to-do list app which not only lets you add one-time tasks to the list and to mark them off but also lets you create multiple-time chores which can appear on the list at intervals you set and Goals, which are groups of step tasks working toward a larger outcome. You can find it on the App Store here. I use it every day, and to be honest, I’m sometimes not pleased with it because there’s always something to more to do.

PhrazeMaze: Proverbs is like a word search except you have a whole phrase or sentence to find in the letter grid. This particular app has 120+ puzzles from the book of Proverbs in the Bible. You can find it on the Apple App Store here. If it proves to be popular, I can easily build similar apps with different puzzle phrazes.

So, to launch them, I announced them on LinkedIn and Facebook (and here, obviously). And if they sell four copies each (total to me: $5.60), they’ll be the biggest selling apps I’ve produced.

I’ve been attending this weekly entrepreneur meeting which features a presentation from a new businesses on Wednesday mornings. One of the questions that the audience, generally coaches and other service professionals who would sell to the presenters who are generally coaches and other service professionals trying to sell to the audience, one of the questions that the audience often asks is “What is your social media strategy?” Because someday I might pitch my apps to the group, I’m preparing my answer rant in that regard:

You know, I had an email newsletter in 1997 which got me…. nothing.

I had one of the top 500 blogs in 2004, and after many years of posting, often multiple times a day, when it came time to sell books, I sold…. What, 100? 150? Mostly on Kindle, and certainly not enough to pay for the cover of the book (professionally designed) or the outlay on books I sent to magazines and various bloggers for review and comment–not to mention 16 years of hosting (starting with the move from Blogger in 2010.

I joined Twitter in 2009 and was active there, professionally (well, sorta) for nine years, posting multiple times a day and getting to around 5000 followers organically. And it yielded me, what, a couple of paid writing gigs and a sub-sub-sub-contractor gig that did not go well. Total business closed in almost 10 years of social mediating? Maybe $2000. Which is the high water mark of the “value” I’ve gotten from it.

I’ve been on LinkedIn for over 20 years, and I’ve written articles and posts on it throughout, and although a recent post got almost 40,000 views–which I’ve been told is a lot–I’ve not actually gotten any work from it, whether it’s responses to job posts or people I’ve met there. I’ve been on Facebook for fifteen years or so, and it was not supposed to be a thing to build “my brand,” and it is certainly not doing that any more. Nor is it really showing me updates from people with whom I’ve connected over the years.

So what is my social media strategy for my yet unnamed app venture? To not.

Because they’re structured so that they will take all the content you want to provide for free and, when you want to share something saleable to your connections, they’ll bury it unless you pay the money to boost it (which is thousands of dollars for “impressions” which will probably not yield conversions). TikTok? Instagram videos? Make authentic videos or silly dance videos? What, spend hours and money to sell a $.99 app? No thank you. Doing that, you’re working for the social media platform, providing free (to them) content which might or might not increase its user engagement.

I get it why some people think this is a way to go: Because it’s fun, and it’s easy. Clearly, I’ve gotten something out of writing a blog all these years (mostly memories that I can scroll through). I had fun with Twitter back in the day (and my other blogs). You can spend hours on it and get some dopamine when people like and respond to your content. But that doesn’t necessarily convert. And I get why so many people promote it–because they work in the space, and they will make money off of it if you hired them to do your social media.

So, what to do, what to do? Continue to show the app to as many people in person as I can stand to (which is probably less than could stand it) and hope that one catches fire. Think up an idea for a brand name and maybe spend a couple bucks on a Web site.

But social media? Nah.

So, if you’ve got $.99 and think they look interesting, give the apps a try. Or my books there in the sidebar, for that matter–you can get them for $.99 digitally, too. And as the Philosophers said, “Thanks for your support.”

Fifteen years ago:

I probably did not intend to include a copy error in that post on Facebook. I was just hearkening back to the fact that, in early proofs of John Donnelly’s Gold, the gun also had that special feature–a revolver with a magazine. It also featured a week that was eight days long.

I’m told it still contains three typos. You’re welcome to order it and find out.

US track star cost half marathon national title, $20K prize after being mistakenly led off course

Although, to be honest, I was nowhere near the top, but at my first Republic Tiger Triathlon (RIP), when I transitioned from the bike to the run, somebody ran through the transition area and out. I followed him, but he was not a participant, and he ran the wrong way down the trail outside the exit. Loud spectators corrected me, but I got a few extra steps in in my quest to climb from the very lastest to the top 50% of finishers. Which might actually have been my best result ever anyway.

Cardinals baseball finds new Springfield home on 102.1 The Won

As I’ve mentioned, the stubby antenna on the radio-playing headphones still going strong sixteen years after I bought them can pick up, clearly, two stations in all corners of Nogglestead: 92.3 which was country and 105.1 which is now “old” country (see also).

But! 105.1 was also the home of Cardinals baseball. Which meant that while I was on the lawnmower or, sometimes, painting record shelves outside or painting the fence, a song, probably a good one, would abruptly end and “The St. Louis Cardinals are on….” would replace it. And not the game–an hour of pregame interviews and things. Ah, gentle reader, I sometimes scheduled my lawnmowing around the baseball games just so they would not interrupt me.

Sorry. I know some of you (Friar) are baseball fans. But although I did grow up having ball games on in the workshop or whatnot, I’d rather listen to music when I am on the lawnmower. And now I won’t have to worry about it.

As long as 105.1 doesn’t become the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today or, heaven forfend, hot country.

So, the weekend before last, I mentioned moving some books from the table beside the sofa upstairs which had been on the table for years, mostly untouched–I’d placed them there whilst I was awaiting my high-school-aged son to come home from closing the restaurant where he worked at the time so I could read them while waiting.

Well, a week after I cleared it, other books moved in.

I have finally convinced my oldest, for whom we waited but now he’s almost done with juco, to not only watch videos on things but to read primary sources, of which Nogglestead has many.

So he’s started to nibble at them, and he’s stacking them up. The copy of Meditations is the one I gave him during the coronavacation in 2020–the one I read in 2019, not long after we moved to Nogglestead, was a Classics Club edition, one of the only ones I’ve read. Jeez, sixteen years…. Maybe I’m due to read it again myself.

Still, I hope he continues to actually read, or at least continues to start to think it would be a good idea.

On this day in 1972 (Richard Nixon’s first administration, gentle reader–basically pre-history), I was born eight weeks early and weighed four pounds, four ounces. Which was about too small to survive in that era. The doctors gave me a 50/50 shot of surviving the first night.

Ah, but, gentle reader, an even more statistically improbable event occurred 25 years later.

A poet in Columbia, Missouri, read a poem I posted on a newsgroup and asked me where you could read in St. Louis. Which was right in my wheelhouse because I knew all the places, which nights of the week they were, and what kind of crowds to expect. I would later quote an Iron Maiden poster to her, she would come to St. Louis to read on a Sunday night (on the very day that Brandt’s turned their weekly open mike to a bi-monthly)–so we walked around St. Charles and the Central West End for a while, and I was greeted by name by two different groups, so I must have seemed like quite the poetry big cheese at the time (and she had to come back the next week, too), and then I would recite the entirety of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to her mother the first time I met her.

At any rate, my oldest is currently in a “girls are icky” phase. He’s dated semi-seriously a couple of times and has had many “appointments” with young ladies his age, but he’s starting to think modern girls aren’t all that.

I thought that, too, in the middle 1990s. I thought you had to pick either a smart girl or a moral girl, but that modern (1990s) girls had little overlap. But, as the philosopher says, out of the blue one appeared who was also hot.

I guess sometimes you have to trust the process you have no control over.