Category: Life

4-island package on US-Canada border hits market fully loaded for $2.3M — boats included

It’s on the northeastern corner of Lake Huron (whose name I already know how to pronounce, thank you), so mighty cold in the winter (probably no ice bridge to Canada or they would have mentioned it). More of a summer home than anything else. But, dang, it looks awfully nice. As long as you don’t run out of bug spray.

I check in on two Daily Dammit, Gannett newspaper Web sites: The Springfield News-Leader and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. I don’t read much of them because their articles are mostly behind a very good paywall, but I do check out the local contests.

But I guess the ad pool is shrinking, because not only do we get ads for things that are not local in the “Shopping” section:

I mean, I listen to the radio all the time, so I know a lot of local jingles, but, brother, that ain’t one of them. Maybe it plays before streaming videos, YouTube content, or on obscure channels all the time. But, yeah, no clue what that is.

And we get contests clearly targeted to people in other regions, like this one:

At least, I presume the Michigan one is targeted to Wisconsin and Michigan people, but it’s on the News-Leader web site. I know that I’ve filled out the form before for a contest for a getaway at, what, the Indianapolis 500 or a golf getaway only to get denied (presumably after my contact information was saved somewhere for sale or rent) with a message that indicated they did not accept entries from my location.

Not cricket, and probably indicative of how the ad and marketing budgets are drying up for the big papers.

Oh, and I’ve also started getting calls and texts from one of the companies sponsoring the contests even though I meticulously opt out. So, in desperation, Gannett is courting a class action suit somewhere down the line.

Eh, free Internet content is worth what you pay for it, gentle reader, as you well know but are too polite to say.

WE NEED ANSWERS!

Ah, but to quote the universe, “However, the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”

Yeah, security sense says no clicky, no stoppy. Also, none of your business my honest opinions. You want them, you come to the blog like everyone else Rob.

Or, since I am reading fantasy novels these days (only one, but it’s relatively recent and top-of-mind), I could alternately title this The Undead Orchard of Nogglestead’s Revenge.

So I hit a stump two weeks ago, which bent the baffle on my mowing deck and one of the blades. It was the second stump I hit in recent weeks.

As it has become drier here in the Ozarks, which happens every August and September and sometimes even July, one of the mowings will turn the grass brown for the season no matter how much rain we get thereafter. So I’ve been delaying the cuttings. Which means a month or so back, I hit the more solid of the peach tree stumps in the front yard.

When a couple of pre-existing young maples lining the driveway were gutted by poor pruning leading to splits, I cut the maples down and replaced them with peach trees many years ago. I said that every year we learn a new way for peach trees to not produce: If the temperature drops to -10 degrees in the winter, they won’t blossom; a warm spell in early spring can cause them to blossom only to be deflowered by a cold snap later; if peaches grow, Japanese beetles come around. The one year when all the conditions were right, we got some very small peaches. Once. Well, I tried to properly prune one of the trees, and it died. The other one beside the driveway died as well, so it probably wasn’t me (and the one in the middle of the yard is half dead). Last year, I cut the two dead ones down for kindling (“You know what I grow in my orchard? Firewood.” is also a common quip).

So, as I said, a month or so ago, the penultimate mowing, I went over the more solid of the stumps in the front yard. The smaller I hit once or twice already and cut it below blade height, but I was still going around the big one. I’d meant to get out there with a pick/mattock to chop it up a bit, but I had not. So the mower grabbed the stump and pulled it out, trapping it under the mower deck. I tried circling the edge of the driveway to pull it out (perhaps damaging the mower deck in the process), but I had to jack the mower up almost a foot to work the new bit of kindling (big enough that maybe it’ll be a main feature although misshapen log) through the blades and then out the discharge.

This ultimate mowing, I had no more trouble with fruit tree stumps out front, but I hit the stump of the apple tree which toppled, but did not die, in a derecho in 2019. It had kinda lie in the back yard for those five years, sprouting some branches growing straight up but no blossoms. So I finally cut it down with a bow saw this winter, after the peach trees out front (it still lies atop the wood pile to be cut down to logs and broken into kindling). I’ve managed to mow around it all summer, but knicked it in the penultimate mowing and grabbed a hold of it this time, pulling much of its stump out. But the deck continued to make noise, so I brought it to the blacktop to check for something stuck under it, and I managed to cut my hand twice on the baffle discovering that the blade was hitting it.

Although my brother has now indicated this is an “easy fix” involving changing a bolt on the mower and hitting the baffle with a hammer a couple of times, I’ve already sent to mower to the local (and fairly close) shop to have them check the front wheels (the tires have trouble holding pressure, so I wonder if the wheels themselves are damaged and cannot make a good seal with the tubeless tires) and to adjust the steering bars so they do not overlap (a quick fix I could have made with spacers or by bending the bars, but my uncertainty and lack of historic success with small engines and equipment left me uneager to try).

And: It’s been two? almost three? weeks, and the grass has continued to grow. Scratch that: Some of the grass and other flora has continued to grow seedheads which make everything look untidy (except for the brown front grass, which I cut before I disabled the mower).

Ah, what to do? Last time we had an acquaintance starting out his lawn business do the deed, he charged us $300. Not eager to take on that expense, we demurred.

I have the small push mower that I used in Old Trees in the shed, where it’s sat for almost 20 years. I could try to clean the carb and replace the spark plug, I reckon. I think the fuel line might have been cracked as well. As I’m not sure about the availability of the parts locally and because I’m not very good with small engines, I’ve put this off as well. Perhaps that would be a good project for me to do sometime to, you know, get better with small engines. And maybe get my tiller started again. Ha, ha!

I also have a reel mower which was dull and had dry-rotting tires when I got it. Not likely given the state of the meadow.

So: I have taken the line trimmer to part of the interior back yard. I got about 20% of it with a round of battery charges. I think I will continue this course of action until I’m done with it or until the main mower comes back. The result is uneven but better than its overgrown state, and by pre-cutting, when I get the mower back, it will mulch this part of the yard better and not choke out. The rest of the yard? I might have to overlap the cut portion a bunch so that the uncut portion does not choke out the mower.

And, ah, have I used that extra space in the garage for other projects in the interim? Oh, but no. The last couple of weeks I have fallen back into the bad habit of sitting at my desk too much to too little end. And even writing long-winded blog posts count as an end.

Oh, the humanity. At least the cuts on my fingertip and palm have stopped bleeding and stopped hurting.

One of the things I unboxed from my closet last week, along with some DVDs, videocassettes, and books, was a videocassette cleaner.

For you damned kids, it’s basically a videocassette, except instead of a ribbon, it’s got a bit of a cloth attached to the reels, and you put a little rubbing alcohol on it and run it through your videocassette player (let’s be honest, they’re all VCPs these days; not a lot of R’ing being done). In theory, it will wipe any gunk off of the heads that read the information from the tape. I’m not sure if they really did anything, but in the 1980s, youngling, we were studious caretakers of our cassette players, both video and audio.

You know, I see these from time to time at estate sales, but it’s not something I would buy. Now I own one, I guess. Several years ago, I thought it worth sticking it in a box addressed to myself.

But, do I dare? And do I dare? The videocassette player does not seem to have much trouble with videocassettes. Well, some are degraded, but some are not.

So I will probably keep this in my back pocket until I experience difficulty that I think might be explained by dirty heads. Until then, where should I keep it? In the unwatched videos cabinet? In the cabinet with the tech stack? Ah! The closed cabinet with the extra video game systems in it. Perfect!

Every day last week, different “companies” have posted basically the same job every day slightly different:

The job descriptions are the same, basically:

Continue reading “It’s Not Hard To Spot The Grift” →

I did not go to the book signing at ABC Books yesterday; instead, the family went to the Crane Broiler Fest in Crane, Missouri, which has become somewhat of a family tradition.

But on Friday, I went looking for an audio course to listen to after An Introduction to Greek Philosophy. I have two boxes of audio courses and audio books on the floor in the closet (and some stacked atop them), and I had two boxes of books and things winnowed from my mother-in-law’s library and collection when she moved out of her house, what, four years ago? We culled the books for things we might want when we boxed them at her house, and then we went through them again after bringing those boxes home, and I ended up with two. Which have been in my closet for several years.

As I was digging around, I realized that the top box was half books and half videos. My book saling has been very measured this year; we have not made it to any one of the four Christian County library book sales, and it looks as though we will not make the autumn Springfield-Greene County Library book sale either. So I’ve made a little room on the bookshelves, and I’d trimmed the overflow on the video cabinets, so I unboxed one of the two boxes.

I did not take a photo of it to enumerate what she gave me, but the videos are a preponderance of historical dramas and romances/romantic comedies. So when I get around to rewatching Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (or Kenneth Branagh’s anything, but not Much Ado About Nothing which I read in 2024), know that it’s from this haul. Also, because this has pushed the overflow onto a second cabinet, you’ll probably see movie reports about them first (but not necessarily soon). The books are some contemporary (which means late 20th century and beyond) fiction, textbookish English and literature treatments (she was an English teacher, after all), and some poetry.

What’s more striking, though, is what was in the box and that I have bought in the interim. Skipping Christmas by John Grisham, which I bought in 2025 after watching the movie version, Christmas with the Kranks in 2023, and the DVD of Leathernecks which I bought and watched in 2023. Well, I guess I really did want them after all.

So that means I only have the three boxes remaining on the floor. “Clean office closet” has been on my Goal-Task-Chore (available on the Apple App Store and Microsoft Store) for months. I kinda started around the end of the last school year when I discovered I had a box of two-pocket folders, so I vowed to cull old school supplies to offer to the Lutheran school (which also explains the partial box of school supplies that has remained on my office floor since May).

Ah, the office closet. I don’t really go into it that often. It’s an archive of old Role-Playing Games, technology and certification books from the turn of the century (when I was at the community college studying tech, I came across a listing on Ebay for thirty networking books for $100, someone cleaning out what his employer had bought him, perhaps, and I got it–and then ended up not working in networking or hardware support), older computer magazines, bric-a-brac electronics, a couple of guitar and laptop cases, some batting from my crafting days (where I only used a little batting), several camera tripods, and various envelopes.

And the blocker: My old notepads and notebooks. I have given some thought to discarding those; it’s clear that no university will want the archival papers of the successful poet. I’ve often carried a pocket notebook or the leather binder with its pads and jotted down drafts of poems in them. I have been shredding drafts of my poems recently after I have completed them, but shredding the old stuff seems a little…. Permanent. Maybe I should wait until we get our fireplace repaired so that I can throw them into the fire like a proper literateur. Maybe I’ll also throw in the marked-up copies of John Donnelly’s Gold which I had tech people I know review twenty years ago right after I finished it, or the copy of Marquette Minus One, my first completed attempt at a novel (1 of 2 completed attempts, by the way), marked up as a trade by my college crush as exchange for a theatre ticket for one of The Norman Conquests (not a date! she insisted). They were in the closet until I moved them to the store room. Ah, there are boxes and file cabinets worth of material in there I could discard before leaving it to my heirs.

But I haven’t made that decision yet, and so I’m in a bit of a holding pattern on cleaning the closet. Gentle reader, visit Polymarket or Kalshi to predict whether I finish cleaning my garage or my office closet.

Regardless, I have three things for the Free Book cart this morning: Leatherheads, Skipping Christmas, and a paperback copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not sure why I preserved this; I have a simlar paperback copy of my own and the leatherbound More than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from the turn of the century. Since I do not think my boys will be interested, I’ll put it out for anyone who might be, or for the church official who removes non-theological books from the cart.

For some reason, Facebook thinks I’m a big vintage toy fan and feeds me a steady diet of people’s purchases mentioned in groups to which I do not subscribe:

Flash was my first G.I. Joe figure; my father’s then-girlfriend, later-wife bought it for me. When they were dating and first married, she got us several toys to, I guess, endear us to her or whatever. Once her son was born, though, we became the other who needed to be put down in favor of her issue. Probably didn’t help that this time coincided with our moving to Missouri and only coming to Wisconsin for a couple of weeks in the summer, and we were pretty off the hook when we did.

I might even still have it, albeit in pieces (and he’s probably missing his thumb). I don’t see it on the post from eight years ago when I finally let my boys play with the G.I. Joes.

He was a soldier. With a laser rifle. C’mon, man, that was cool. And it predates the cartoon, where they all had lasers somehow.

MfBJN, 2012: A Brief Dissertation On Where To Shoot An Evil Reanimated Skeleton

Forget zombie kitsch; that’s been covered ad nauseum on the Internet. What weapons to use on them, what specialty kitsch rounds to buy for your gun to shoot them, zombie targets for the shooting range, et cetera and et cetera. Have you reached nauseum yet? I have.

One important bit of useful information remains unexplored, however. I have not seen anyone cover on the Internet how to shoot a reanimated evil skeleton, and believe me, I have researched uncountable hours for the answer (uncountable, in this case, because the number is zero, and anyone who tells you you can count to zero is either a higher mathematician or someone about to pitch you zombie and/or bacon-related products. In a word: insane).

So I’ve done some musing, as one would expect I do given the name of this blog, and I’ve decided the following.

Now with people and, presumably with zombies, (I don’t care for zombie kitsch, so I have done only slightly more research on zombies than on reanimated skeletons, which means I watched Night of the Living Dead twenty-five years ago and Evil Dead this last Valentine’s Day), one shoots for center mass. Well, no, scratch that; in zombie films, I guess the head is the key based on some commercials for zombie movies I’ve seen.

However, with a skeleton, there is no center mass to aim for. The trunk of the body is just a bunch of ribs and a tiny little spine running up the middle. When Zhrotor the Destroyer summons his dragonscale-seeded armies to ravage the land, are you going to trust you’re going to hit that little sliver of bones? Let’s face it, if you hit a rib, you’re probably not even going to annoy the skeleton.

Of course, you can shoot for the head as movie-based zombie hunters do, but you have to be really close, really still, and/or really dependent upon special effects to hit that target.

You could shoot for the clavicle or sternum, I suppose, but a clavicle shot is just going to partially incapacitate the clackety-clacking doom marching on you. I suppose it’s better to deal with a skeleton whose sword and sword arm are lying on the ground than a skeleton still bearing arms, but you can do better.

Friends of mine among the living, I urge you to do what I do: Aim for the pelvis.

Shooting News Weekly, 2026: Shot Placement: Is the Pelvic Girdle Really the Best Self-Defense Solution?

One could wonder if the Internet got the idea from my post, which was passed around in geek quarters back when people linked to MfBJN. Maybe not;

(Link via Instapundit who linked here a couple of times back when blogs were a thing.)

The Polaris detached from the pool wall last week. The Polaris is a pool cleaning “robot” which is not really a robot, but a changing water pressure system that stirs up detritus from the bottom of the pool and sometimes catches larger things in an attached mesh bag. Some years, I spend a lot of time on reattaching the Polaris–sometimes, the water pressure causes one of the nuts holding the line (hose) to the housing or its various joints. This time, though, it was not a matter of simple detachment at the quick-release attachment which had been a bit of a recurring problem until I re-trimmed the hose and tightened its nut with a pliers instead of finger-tight. A nut had actually cracked and was no longer usable.

Well, that’s a trip to the pool store unless I have one in the pool parts bin in the garage. I’ve collected a number of bits out there because I cannot throw anything away. I have a bit of hose that’s petrified now. The old skimmer basket which is cracked, kept because I can envision a time when we’re skint and the cracked, replaced skimmer basket is our only option. And, to my delight, an extra hose nut in official Polaris packaging which probably means it cost $20 on a trip to the pool store in a past summer. Good thinking, me. Just in case I would need one, and I did.

Though, to be honest, that’s not much of a gamble. I might have mentioned that Nogglestead is overdue on a number of major maintenance due to its owner’s poor fiscal decisions (mostly, overphilanthropy when flush). But, strangely, we’ve taken care of the pool. A couple of new liners at a couple thousand per. A couple new pump motors and secondary Polaris pump motors. We even got a solar cover to keep the pool water warmer earlier and later which we used only the year we bought it because it’s a lot of work to deploy it, and in the first couple of years (and a decade), we didn’t use the pool that much (and, now, we open it early and keep it open later and I get into it for a cold water dunk / cryotherapy). We’ve been told that the newer models of the Polaris are not as good as the old ones, so we’re likely to keep cobbling this one together as long as we can. So buying a couple commodity spare parts for it makes sense.

But other times, I’ve gotten burned buying spares for appliances we have replaced.

Ah, gentle reader, I have mentioned many times how often I had to fix my dryer(s). We had commodity Maytag/Whirlpool washers, mostly under the hood the same units, and I was forever replacing wheels whose ball bearings seized up, slipping belts, or bad fuses/thermometers on them. They were not even electronic dryers, dammit, but the lubricant on the wheels or the bearings were trash. I ended up having a kit on hand so I wouldn’t have to wait for an order to be able to keep the multi-load daily laundry running. And when we got the postless Samsung washing machine, which sat on shocks and if one of the shocks went bad, the washing machine was useless. After replacing them once, I ordered an extra set on hand for the next time since the Internet informed me it happened pretty often. But as it happened, a seal at the bottom failed and the repairman sent to me by a lead generation service proposed a fix that cost more than a new washing machine. As a result, we have a matched set (bought at two different times when each unit failed me for the last time), and we have parts for machines we will never own again.

I’ve also mentioned that I have had to replace the heating element on the forty-year-old wall-mounted oven a couple of times (jeez, just this January?) and have had trouble with them arriving bent or broken. I want to say earlier this year I also ordered a spare, and it arrived bent, so I sent it back and did not order another spare. I mean, we can’t replace the oven without renovating the whole kitchen because it’s a small oven built into the wall, and they don’t make ovens that size any more). So we’ll have to ride it until we absolutely cannot any more. But, eesh, I’ve not been happy with the heating elements I have ordered from Amazon.

So buying spares really does seem like a bad idea in these cases. Parts I don’t have on hand fail, and I end up replacing the unit.

The one exception I have is for our family room television. It’s a rear projector kind which uses a giant, expensive lamp. The lamp on our twenty-one-year-old television has failed twice, and the last time it did, I ordered a second lamp because I figured that in a decade from then when it failed again, the part might not be available. So it’s gathering dust in a cabinet in the storeroom. Hopefully, if I need it, someday, it will work. But history has proven that’s not often the case–something else will fail, and we’ll end up with a modern telescreen of some sort.

Meanwhile, my garage collects these spare parts, and I’m not sure what to do with them. They’re new, so I hate to pitch them. They have fallen out of the return window by many years. Perhaps if I get into listing things on Ebay again, I’ll give them a try there. Or, more likely, leave them for my estate sale.

So I had a job interview yesterday, the first in…. Well, I would say “months,” but I did have a “record yourself talking to an ‘AI'” thing last week which was almost like a job interview, but not really. One of the things on the job posting was “Comfortable pushing back, including with senior engineers, when a process or PR isn’t ready to ship.”

The best story I have for this comes from my days at the digital marketing agency almost 20 years ago. The client’s product, secondnature™ brand dog litter, was going to be featured on Good Morning America, so the agency hired a consultant to optimize the Flash presentation/video. The consultant was auto-didacting Flash as she went, or she was trying to, but it came down to an all-nighter the night before the product appeared on a network television news show. My role was basically waiting all night for something to test, and her role was to say, “I’ve almost got it now, it’ll be ready soon.” So I undoubtedly watched a couple episodes of the early The Simpsons seasons on the eMac and stretched out on the floor for a nap with the volume turned up on the PC speakers so I would hopefully hear the instant messanger ding. Around daybreak, before air time, she delivered…. Something. Something not better than we already had. So I vetoed it. And the agency, presumably, ate the cost of that failed effort (the agency, as it happened, ate a lot of costs of failed efforts both while I was there and after).

It’s a good story, but: I would have probably had to explain what Flash was.

I mean, HTML 5 did not come around until 2008. Before that, it was Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash, a browser plugin that handled video and rich applications. Because neither Microsoft Silverlight (a johnny-come-lately) nor Java applets (write once, run anywhere, riiiiiight) did it quite as well. It eventually became a rich attack vector, though, and HTML 5 with its new tags killed it.

Ah, gentle reader. I said yesterday:

But too often the ATSes and other parts of the over-the-transom job application/hiring process these days, again, winnow on arbitrary measures and don’t allow for perspective and context. And, boy, mister, after almost thirty years in computers (more if you count programming Commodores and Apples), do I have context and perspective.

I’ve been around long enough that I know the problems that newer technologies and processes are trying to solve. Git and distributed version control systems? Developers were tired of finding files locked in Visual Source Safe–so, have pull requests and merge conflicts actually made things better? Dunno–that’s just how we do it now and come up with ever more creative and time-consuming ways to fix the new problems. (Aside: You know, some job postings still mention that the applicant should be familiar with source control systems and include Subversion aka SVN which was a 20-year-old proto Git. I cannot imagine anyone is still using Subversion, but I guess one never knows.) People tired of frames and table-based layouts created Cascading Style Sheets and now the widget-based responsive design front-ends which rely on hard-to-nest blocks of code whose methods change seemingly every release of the framework, and…. Okay, frontend stuff is not my passion.

But that perspective is not valued, old man. What companies want is for employees to do it the current way the bestest.

I know, I know; when I complete a job application in an Application Tracking System (ATS), I click a checkbox that says “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help me, God” or the slightly less enforceable equivalent that indicates the company will discard my application if its employees discover a falsehood. Ha! I am ahead of the curve, as they discard my applications far before anyone actually looks at them.

But I must confess to you, gentle reader, I sometimes (often) select values that are not truthful, often very early in the process.

Workday, one ATS, makes you create an account with a password (do I save the password? Hell, no; otherwise, I would have several hundred saved Workday passwords in my password manager for accounts into which I will never log in again–and if I do find myself applying, a year or two later, to the same company, I will use the Forgot Password feature and set another strong password I will not seek to remember naturally or artificially). On the second step, your “Profile,” it asks for phone number, address, and whatnot.

And: It often asks “How did you hear about this job?” followed by a drop-down list or nested selector control that has social media sites, job boards, in-person events, and so on. And often not an “Other” to select.

I conduct Google searches on several job boards every day, so I often find jobs hosted in the Workday ATS this way. But it doesn’t let me explain this. So I have to select another value for this required field. I often select Indeed, LinkedIn, or the Corporate Website (which, I guess, is the closest to it). The field is required, and it does not let me select or enter the true answer.

It’s the same with Greenhouse, which has a type-ahead selector for Location (city).

Ah, gentle reader, I live in unincorporated Greene County. I do not live in a city or a town. The zip code resolves to Brookline (or Brookline Station). But the city of Battlefield ends at my farm road, so I am right across the street from Battlefield, Missouri, so I select that one. And if I type my full address, I use Brookline as the city/town (although the zip code covers Battlefield, so one could get mail addressed to Battlefield, MO 65619). So immediately, they can see that difference and think, “Is this guy for real or is he a North Korean who doesn’t know United States geography?”

Not to mention that the Locate me link will probably resolve to Kansas City, Jackson County, or wherever Starlink says I am today.

But too often the ATSes and other parts of the over-the-transom job application/hiring process these days, again, winnow on arbitrary measures and don’t allow for perspective and context. And, boy, mister, after almost thirty years in computers (more if you count programming Commodores and Apples), do I have context and perspective.

You know, in the olden days of the last century, when you were hard-pressed to give someone a gift, you might get them a gift certificate which was a piece of paper with a dollar value on it. The gift giver paid that amount, and the gift recipient could present the gift certificate at the establishment in place of cash. Because the gift certificate was a static thing, the retailer generally gave you change in cash. This was a boon to me in college, as I would buy the cheapest possible thing so I could get the cash because I was putting myself through college (having sacrificed scholarships and grants on the altar of auto-didacticism and skipping classes to read whatever struck my fancy in the college library–it only took one midterm D to scare me straight, but the scholarships were gone anyway). Even McDonald’s had them in books with $1 certificates. Back when $1 would buy you a meal at McDonalds.

At any rate, in the 21st century, as you know, the gift certificate gave way to the gift card which had the amount on it, and when you presented it, the amount you actually spent is taken off of the gift card. That way, retailers are not dishing out that change in cash. In the olden days, the issuers (sometimes the same as the retailers, sometimes not) would then start nibbling at the balance every month to drain some extra profit for themselves. But the government started making noise and might have even legislated or regulated a stop to that. But: They have a new solution.

In those olden days, you could sometimes run a partially or mostly used gift card, and the remaining balance on the card would be applied to your purchase, and you could pay the rest–and let’s be honest, from the time of gift certificates immemorial, they hoped you’d buy more than the amount you were given. But point of sales systems (seemed to) be able to easily drain that balance for you. That’s how I remember it. As so much of what I “remember,” maybe it’s not so.

However, now, the point of sale systems at the shops where I do my marketing don’t do that automatically. You can run gift cards for a certain amount, and if the card has that much, it is debited/applied to your purchase. After a couple of purchases, though, if you’re sort of mindful (the gift card is for $100; this purchase is $67.95; this purchase is $14.07), you end up with a gift card with a balance of a couple dollars and change. Not enough to buy a meal at McDonalds. So you end up with a purse wallet (in my beautiful wife’s case) or a desk basket (in my case) with several (dozen) gift cards with minimal value to them. If you don’t use them, they’re still pure profit to the issuer.

So I check the balance on the cards and write the amount on the card. And then when I hit the grocery store, mostly in the middle of the day when there’s no line, I make Sam or Ashton or the new guys other Sam and Chuck run bunches of gift cards: This one is $2.90. This one is $14.23. And so on.

I mean, we’re not skint, but I do like to not to be part of the laziness profit margin that’s padding Visa and Mastercard executive’s quarterly results. However that value is eventually lost (you cannot nibble at the balance, but I do see the cards have expiration dates like real credit and debit cards; real ones get replaced, but I expect that the gift ones just get applied to quarterly spreadsheets and dashboards somewhere).

Sorry, Sams. Sorry, Ashton. Sorry, Chuck. But when I get into a high dudgeon, sometimes others must suffer peripherally whilst I stick it to some Man.

Springfield finally fielded a Lutheran High School, after at least two attempts while my boys were in the Lutheran elementary and middle school, and it has opened a thrift store to raise funds. So we visited at the end of its first week to provide funds since we’re not paying tuition. It’s a really nicely appointed space, more boutique-looking than most thrift stores, but the prices, at least for media, were pretty good.

Here’s what we got:

I got two albums, Evie Again by Evie (I told my beautiful wife that I am the biggest Evie fan in Springfield, and it might be true, and I’m not that big of an Evie fan) and Crystal Illusions by Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66. I got one DVD, The Bourne Identity, since I got The Bourne Supremacy last year–the thrift store had all three, but I was not sure which I was missing, so I can go back and get The Bourne Ultimatum if I happen to finish these two films sometime soon (unlikely). And I got two books: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Tae Kwon Do, which is timely because I am currently reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate which I bought in 2022 and because next week, in our BJJ school’s striking class, the instructor is going to show some spin kicks which he said the tae kwon do kids were going to like, and I need to brush up on the spin heel/spin wheel and spin hook kicks to not look silly, and I also got Living the Martial Way which is a former USAF guy writing about something something the ancient Eastern martial arts. I picked it up ’cause it was a buck or two, and it would be far more expensive at ABC Books.

My wife got a puzzle and some cook books, and we also came away with a throw blanket and a skirt (for her), and we spent $29 total. Apparently, they have more records (and other merchandise) than they can display, so I’ll probably visit every once in a while to see what’s new. Of course, even with but these two new records, I’m finding that I am about out of storage space, so I’d better pick up some 2x4s when the heat breaks before the autumn Friends of the Library book sale.

I thought I’d lamented this before, but Microsoft is killing Microsoft Publisher, and because nowadays it’s all by subscription, when they kill it, it will go away and you won’t be able to access your desktop publishing files.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I have been a Microsoft Publisher user for over thirty years. I first ran it on a Windows 3.11 desktop and the St. Louis Artesian transitioned from rubber-cement-at-Kinko’s layout to desktop publishing (remember, briefly, how that was a business type and/or career possibility for about five years in the 1990s until those meddling kids in Illinois built Netscape Navigator?). I also laid out my second chapbook, Deep Blue Shadows on that old Packard Bell. When I was working on a government contract in about 2019 (just or recently in my recounting), I was working with a bunch of ex-military types on a group project in some training exercise or another, and when it came time to build some visual thing, I cracked open Microsoft Publisher instead of PowerPoint–how gauche and unprofessional! And although I’ve only used it for Christmas letters and Winter Reading Challenge forms in recent years, they’re taking away my ability to use something for which I’ve paid, many times, and sorta orphaning decades’ worth of work.

But I’m not here specifically to lament this particular loss or to reiterate that I’m about one Microsoft Account debacle away from quitting Microsoft for good (after over 35 years starting with MS-DOS)–a recent Windows update, probably designed to “improve” my experience by hoovering up more of my information for Microsoft’s purposes, required me to sign into my Office subscription–which, fortunately, worked (and I’m ignoring the email about my Microsoft Entra account needing a new something something different form of multifactor authentication?–I’ll get locked out of that bridge when I get there and onto my Linux box ricky-tick).

No, I am here to wordily say that professional communications are eroding trust in companies and institutions.

“Microsoft is committed to improving your Microsoft 365 subscription.” No, it is not. It is dedicated to increasing profitability in indulging my usage. That’s why we went from building software I could install and use, paying for it once unless you put more features into it and improved it so I would want to buy a newer version or so I would stick with it and buy a later version on later computers. No, instead, Microsoft forced me into a recurring revenue “subscription” model (coming soon, mayhap, to the OS itself, if Microsoft thought it could get away with it). And now it’s “improving” my subscription by taking something away and orphaning my data. No, Microsoft, we know that the improvement is all for you, none for me.

Like when Sam’s Club removed most of the checkout stands “for your convenience.”

The constant drive of the professional communicators and business people to couch the changing terms of their existence to improve their profitability and to meet internal metrics in language of “we’re doing this for you” is really cheesing me off to behavior-altering and not just blog-posting levels. I lose faith in any company and institution that starts taking the “I’m hurting you for your own good” language of an abuser. I know modern business practices, especially at large levels, are all about optimizing and spreadsheeting trendlines going up on daily/monthly/annual reports and real-time dashboards regardless of whether they’re providing value to customer (and I am paying for this, you know, so it should not should not be a matter of “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”–too damned much of modern business best practices are “You’re paying for it, and you’re the product”)–hang on, I got up a head of ranting steam there and forgot the first part of the sentence was going–never mind, I think I hit both sentence and predicate before getting lost in the parentheticals and asides; have the period here:.

(Note I watermark my writing in such a fashion to indicate it’s not AI-generated, and, brother, if you trust any content based on this blog as training material, you’re lucky with whatever result you get. You deserve it.)

I mean, I have done some marketing writing where I tried to put the best shine on something. I’ve written technical documentation where the steps and procedures route users around bugs. But I don’t know that I’ve ever told the reader/customer that it was all for his or her benefit (how long ago was I writing like this? In the before days where we used “his or her” to be inclusive). Maybe I did. But now that it’s omnipresent and obvious, I am running out of tolerance.

And, gentle reader, have you noted that I’ve posted some business-related posts here lately (and recycled a post from Microsoft’s LinkedIn). That’s because Microsoft’s LinkedIn is improving my user experience by throttling things I post there. So why provide that outlet with free content when I can post it here and get a slightly smaller audience? For whom do I work anyway? For you, gentle reader, for you. And my own narcissism.

Okay, maybe debacle is overstating it for a clickbaity alliterative headline. But.

So the church has been throwing more potlucks of late, which means a couple per year. And I’ve started to notice that some staples of potlucks have started to get a little thin. Not hotdish; we’re a little south for that, and I’ve not seen that much ever. Things like deviled eggs and creamy potato salad. I guess the old German and Polish Lutherans are passing away and taking these delicacies with them. So I guess I have to be the old German lady now.

Our church was having a potluck this spring, and a couple of weeks ahead of it, I bought two dozen eggs to try some recipes. I went to the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, the one with the red gingham cover for the basics. I’ve hard-cooked eggs in the oven on various Whole 30 months in the past, and I’ve done it to have a quick peel-and-eat meal other times as well, so I loaded up a mini-muffin tray and cooked them. I had boughten several different types of mustards (yellow, Dijon, horseradish) to try out–the recipe size uses six eggs, so I could try three different types of mustard and an alternative recipe which uses creamy Italian dressing and Parmesan cheese.

So I mixed up four different sets of six eggs/12 halves with each formula and sampled them, inviting my family to do the same. I rather favored the Italian deviled eggs–maybe it’s the cheese.

But: I was taken ill that week. The eggs. I thought. I somehow made bad eggs. Maybe they were too old. Maybe I didn’t cook them long enough. Maybe I overloaded them with red pepper. But I could not subject the aging population of the church to this. I could kill someone. (Which is why I have a spoonful or slice of whatever I bring to the potluck–so if anyone gets ill from what I’ve made, I get ill too.)

But: My beautiful wife was also taken ill that week. And she does not like eggs. Or mayonnaise. Or mustard. I think the only parts of the deviled eggs she likes are the vinegar and red pepper (and the Italian dressing and Parmesan, although that’s odd–creamy Italian dressing is almost mustard, but a little thinner I guess). So maybe it wasn’t the eggs.

Church had another potluck last weekend, and I had almost three dozen eggs in the refrigerator (I’ve been rolling through them, hard cooking them mostly, because one day, someday, I swore I would make deviled eggs for the potluck). But I chickened out and went with the standby apple pie, and I cut up a couple of cantaloupes from the garden (which represents the bulk of the harvest at Nogglestead in 2026).

But earlier this week, I hard cooked the oldest of the eggs and deviled them. I was low on mayonnaise (the accursed squeeze bottles let you trade the convenience of the squeeze bottle at the cost of not being able to get the last couple of ounces from within it because the neck is not big enough for a knife), so I mixed in some ranch dressing, and…. they were all right.

So today, I’ve hard-cooked the other two dozen (jumbo, because I hope they’d prove sturdier throughout the bedeviling process). I’ll bedevil a dozen and probably just eat the other as-are.

But, someday, I’ll feel comfortable enough and get good enough to bring some to church. Or I will get really good at them and not want to share.

The movie? There’s Something About Mary. The bit in the movie? That 7-Minute Abs was going to trounce 8-Minute Abs:

Inspired by the headline: 10 Fitness gym to close Springfield location

The gag? I was going to say that 9Round Fitness won out.

Except: It looks as though the 9Round in Springfield is no more (“Temporarily Closed” it says on Google Maps, but the 9Round Web site no longer lists a location in Springfield.

Maybe F45, which was almost across the street from 9Round, ate their lunches as it seems to be open. When it opened in like 2018, I thought F45 meant something political. Kind of like the new and always busy Burn Boot Camp by the Sam’s Club, the first thing in The Ridge development by the realtor who pulled his six-year-old from my little league team in a huff because he had big baseball plans for the lad and the four-year-olds on the team would keep the boy from The Show–sorry, I was not going on a list of all the successful realtors and real estate developers I know in Springfield cannot stand me, I was talking about Burn Boot Camp, and I was going to say: When I drove by signs pointing to it in the back of the empty lots, I thought it said “Bum Boot Camp.”

Given that the area had a couple of homeless encampments nearby, I wondered exactly what that was. Poor kerning is the answer.

At any rate, well, that’s a long way to go for a gag. But here at MfBJN, we go that extra mile for you.

Maybe I’m just cynical, but whenever I see that a job posting seeks people who are “continually learning,” I think that the companies are looking for candidates/employees who strive not for learning but for ways to make themselves more valuable to the company.

When I was working for a government contracting company, the company had an initiative for people to learn a no-code/low-code tool called Pega. The company set up working/study groups for employees who wanted to get the certification. BUT: You could not go through any of the learning modules on company time. That’s billing time, employee, and if you’re not making billable hours for the company, you’re worthless. Many people were excited to get certified in Pega, which is one of those technologies which solely exist because different departments in the government have bought it at some point. So Pega certification is mostly irrelevant in the real world, and it’s most likely becoming less relevant as time passes and the new hotness (AI!) comes along to soak up all the government contracting money. I started a bit of the program, and then I realized how daft the technology was, and I tailed off on it.

Ah, gentle reader: You might know I am a continual learner. I just finished a course on Ancient Egypt. I’ve started an audio course on Ancient Greek Philosophy. I’ve picked up the Durants’ The Life of Greece again (and I’ve actually reached the spot covered by the audio course for a little reinforcement and seeing how the names are spelled). I read poetry, philosophy, biographies of poets, and oh so many pieces of genre fiction. And although this might make me more interesting (but probably not) and it might give me broader perspective to apply to business problems (it does), that’s not what they meant.

I dunno why I post on LinkedIn these days. It has limited my reach to a few and then doesn’t bother to tell me if people respond. Maybe that will increase my desperation for algorithmic approval engagement.

At any rate, I recently wrote a bit about an experience I had with a recent job application which required a thoughtful, non-boilerplate cover letter answering questions posted in the job application–only to autoreject me because I failed on one of the “knockout” questions. These delightful things are ways to automatically reject resumes for arbitrary job-based reasons.

At any rate, here it is:

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Career coaches often encourage job seekers to customize their resumes and to write focused cover letters even when an application doesn’t require it. I don’t think so.

I recently applied to an ecommerce QA Lead job for an ecommerce company which had a strange ask: Create a single cover letter+resume file, answer a series of questions, and explain your experience testing ecommerce Web sites. Do you have ecommerce experience? Oh, boy, mister, do I!

I went on at length, more than 2-3 sentences, about experience I have with ecommerce sites. I’ve handled tourist attractions which not only offered tickets and t-shirts but allowed room bookings with catering options (but the site did not have a sandbox, so testing stopped at the checkout step). I’ve handled user-posting storefronts where users post items and both pay and get paid. I’ve handled sites where content writers get paid affiliate fees on purchases, so you not only test the checkout through the process with the payment handler but that content writers get the appropriate fees credited to their account.

One of the questions was “What are the last three books you read?” Aw, yeah, right in my wheelhouse. At the time, the three were The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, The Law of Gun Barrel City by O.C. Marler, and River City P.I. by James R. Wilder. Since then, I’ve also completed The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, A Hereditary Book on the Art of War by Yagyū Munenori, and That Dunbar Boy by Jean Gould.

I didn’t spend two hours on the cover letter–probably just over an hour writing two pages answering the eight questions thoughtfully. I uploaded it into the application tracking system, and the next page had a series of questions, including The Knockout Question.

All of them were, probably, but this one had a yes or no answer to a presumed requirement which was not mentioned on the job board posting nor the job posting on the ATS. I answered honestly, and I was rejected in less time than I took in crafting the letter.

It makes sense to write personal cover letters for jobs for which your network connections recommend you and sometimes if the job is really for you, but job seekers have to balance the time required for each against the very real probability that the effort will be futile and the extra work will be unread.

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Mostly, I just wanted to create a meme.

Bandit’s Naughty Dog Adventure.

I mentioned Bandit last year; he was a puppy with too much energy to be left in a trailer all day whilst we were at school and when my sainted mother was at work.

But the inspiration for this game came from a casino commercial that came on in our hockey-watching days: A little terrier mix is walking down the street, getting into trouble, and when the dog catcher throws him into the back of the animal control van, there are two poodles there, and the message is that the dog, like casino attendees, would be lucky?

At any rate, at some point, I started jotting down a treatment for a television series based on the concept of a naughty dog called The Naughty Dog Show. I didn’t get beyond a couple pages of notes on it, but here, decades later, is a little LLM-developed game.