Category: Uncategorized

I flew out to San Jose, CA last Sunday and was picked up by my sister and brother in law. They very generously provided me with a spare bedroom and a desk from which I could sleep and work during the day (mostly on an East Cost schedule) while hanging out with my Dad in the afternoons and evenings. We’ve lost several relatives this year and it is important that I got to spend this time with him (and of course my sister and brother in law to whom I am extremely grateful for feeding and hosting me this week).

My dad and I hung out in the evenings, working on a puzzle and watching football.

My sister took Dad and I to Fremont Peak, which is something I had not been to before. Great views from the top of Monterey Bay and all the land leading up to it.

While I was here we needed to do some standard Santa Cruz things such as visit the “frozen surfer” (reference to Han Solo frozen in carbonite) with the surfer memorial bench next to it.

I’l be heading home tomorrow, back to good ‘ol Georgia. It’s been a great visit but I’m ready to go home.

This is another post to see if ALT text is coming through correctly.

I’m new to using the iOS app for WordPress so here is a test image to see what the post spits out from the information I put on the image in the media library.

Our family has a long history of traveling with the critical stuffies from Griffin’s life. This particular stuffy is Baby Foxy. Baby Foxy’s name is a long story but suffice that there is a Foxy also.

Baby Foxy is traveling with me to Santa Cruz, California this week where I will work from my sister’s house on my own childhood furniture, and hang out with my sister and my dad in the evenings.

Baby Foxy (to date) has traveled to England, Netherlands, Thailand, many US States, and has been present for important meals and events over the last ten years. I foresee their travel experiences continuing.

There has been a mega-long hiatus on this site, as you can see if you peruse the posts below. But as of November 26, 2024, it’s back. The hiatus was caused by many things, primarily the increase in microblogging by me on Twitter and the reduction in long-form pieces I was writing. Plus, I had a child, and my job responsibilities were increasing, and, and, and.

But now with Twitter dead, and Bluesky growing, I was motivated to recover the Eyebrow so that I could point my Bluesky site at it (Bluesky’s version of “verification”) and so that I can place some thoughts here, where I own the site and no one can throttle me.

Welcome back, and I expect that I’ll have a few items to say over the next few weeks.

1. We have been lied to by all our health classes in High School. The Great Sperm Race is…a bit over-masculinized.

2. The new iOS update, or maybe my new phone, now forces the volume down when it detects that the headphone usage has been too high. I applaud apple for watching out for everyone’s hearing; that’s a good thing. I was going to be all upset about this because this message popping up is due to my bluetooth line-in plug for my car. And that needs to be volume 100%. Every time it popped yesterday on my longer drive it would turn down the volume. That was highly irritating.
3. Turns out the iOS volume monitoring for bluetooth can be adjusted by assigning different categories to the bluetooth devices that are connected. All I had to do was assign the car bluetooth as “car stereo” rather than headphones. Works like a charm.
4. “Bluetooth” should be capitalized, but I refuse. Bluetooth has become like xerox and kleenex and frisbee. It’s too ubiquitous for me to capitalize it.
5. Speaking of bluetooth, I also learned that good-quality noise-cancelling headphones are amazeballs.

Zoom school finally pushed me over the edge to spending this months discretionary money on some noise cancelling headphones.

— Bill Ruhsam (@bruhsam) March 5, 2021

1. When you have a cat who gets a perineal urethostomy he might just decide to pee on anything everything. Casualties so far: Bean bag. various piles of clothes.
2. How to backup your iPhone using iTunes to a place not on your local hard drive. Because if you have a 256 GB iPhone and only a 400 GB hard drive, that won’t work after a while. Make sure you follow ALL the instructions.
3. Moving over 100,000 images from various locations on various hard drives and external hard drives into a brand new, Lightroom-managed photo catalog, and creating all their thumbnails takes three full days of computer time on my computer. But hey, now everything is in one spot, thank god.
4. On the same theme, Lightroom is currently moving at a pace to do the auto face recognition thing on 100k photos in about 5 days of run time.
5. Lots of other things I didn’t write down.

1. It’s week 8 already. Time flies.

2. I learned some methods for getting these stupid felt feet to stick to the bottom of my wooden chair in my home office. Here’s one. Here’s another that honestly looks dumb so I’m not going to do it. There are others but it seems that the way to go is to clean/sand/level the chair legs and then reapply and hope for the best.
3. I learned that I had absolutely no idea how to spell “Perseverance.” Go Percy! The first image they showed at the press conference post-landing was the shot of the rover from the descent stage. I shouted “wow!” out loud in my office.
4. Once again I remembered the utility of pressing SHUFFLE on my enormous collection of music on the supercomputer in my pocket. I’ve got over 60 GB of music and audio on my phone. Maybe 2% is regularly listened to. It’s useful to have it serve up things I don’t normally, ’cause once upon a time I found something likeable about that music.
5. Speaking of music, been listening to this album quite a bit the last couple weeks. Good stuff by Lemoncello.
6. Bean bag chairs are apparently an excellent substitute for a litter box by our post-surgical cat. Whee.
7. La Citadelle de Lille in Lille, Fr. Wow. Check this out. Here’s a zoomable map of the layout of the fortress.

1. I still have not learned how to switch the new fancy-schmancy WordPress Block Editor into an HTML mode so I can see the code. It literally took me weeks to be able to list things using list numbers in a way that didn’t break.
2. And now I have. Turns out there is a triple-dot icon on the top right of the screen, next to the Settings button which I’m assuming is why I never clicked on it before. That will take you to Code View, thank god. All the time I’ve been writing on the Web, since the web 1.0 for dog’s sake, I’ve been doing it with the HTML right in front of me. I’ll say, the Block Editor is nice because I know it’ll be compliant, but sometimes it tries to be too helpful, just like any other GUI.
3. I learned how to play Mancala. I also learned that there are at least 3 different distinct games played that are all called Mancala. As I was taught to play by a 7 year-old, I went and looked up the rules afterward and there were some serious variations demonstrated online, all of which materially affect game play. Here’s the rules to Mancala we’re using when we play.
4. I learned about NAICS numbers for classifying businesses in North America. My firm would be under 541330 for Engineering Services.
5. There is a website that tracks the planes of dictators.
6. The Baen Bar is shutting down (temporarily) because of the amount of political violence being bandied about there. If you follow me on twitter, you may remember this:

Hey, @BaenBooks. One of your authors is advocating for armed insurgency on your forums. Seems like something you might want to look into right around now. https://t.co/29n5Me0OEP

— Bill Ruhsam (@bruhsam) January 10, 2021