All posts by Jack

Geek Stuff, General

Try Something New

I used to be able to write a post on my web page – https://www.stardel.com/eg – and it would automatically cross-post to my Facebook page. Then Facebook took that functionality away. Now, I can only cross-post to a Facebook page I manage, and, evidently, I don’t manage my own home page. So, I set up a FB page I called – Jack Heneghan’s Page – (in a burst of creativity,) and now I can cross-post to that.

However, I don’t have a lot of people looking at my NEW page since no one knows about it. So, I will try to share the post on the NEW page to the OLD page and see what happens.

One of the reasons for doing this is that I stopped using exemplia gratia for posting bits and primarily looked at FB to catch up with other people. I didn’t really use FB to post items for myself, just to comment on other’s posts. I would like to get back to posting my own thoughts and to keeping them in a central place where they don’t get lost in a torrent of other posts.

It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it works.

General, Preparing for the worst

A concern

Here is an article that lays out one of my main concerns of the past decade. Back when the markets tanked, the Fed began buying up those bad collateral debt obligations in stages and ended up with 4 TRILLION Dollars of bad junk on its books. As the article points out, other Central Banks were doing the same and globally they hold almost 15 TRILLION Dollars worth of bad debt.

This propped up the stock markets artificially for the big boom period that certainly helped me towards retirement, but what happens when that hyper pumping-up stops? We are probably about to find in the next year or two. I can only hope my portfolio (and my retirement) survives what is coming, because I have no idea how to protect it.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/stock-market-investors-its-time-to-hear-the-ugly-truth-2019-01-05

General

Happy New Year!!!!

2018 was a year of much change. We have sold one home and downsized into another. We have left the countryside and moved into town. Rags, our last horse, passed away at 33 (that’s old for a horse.) We had him for 25 years. We were homeless for a few months and wandered around the southwest, finally settling into a new-built home in Colorado Springs.

We are looking forward to 2019, hopefully a bit more stable than 2018. We are planning a trip to Ireland in August. I hope the Passport Office will reopen up in time for me to renew my passport.

I wish everyone a great New Year and may 2019 be better than the last.

General

Reading those Terms of Service

I have often been annoyed by Terms Of Service agreements you have to click on and agree to in order to install a piece of software.  It might be some software you just want to look at and once you try it you never look at it again.  Doesn’t matter, you don’t know if you sold your soul somewhere in some sub- sub- clause. At least I can use a throw-away email address when signing up for most applications.

But I think that all these End User License Agreements and Terms of Service agreements should be natural fodder for a peer-reviewed summaries of these agreements. And then I found ToS:DR, which seems to try this. I am still looking it over, but it seems to provide point by point elements of the agreements and whether those points are good, bad or neutral.  They are looking for the community to provide input on different services. I am going to make LibraryThing  the service I will experiment with.

The other part of this I would like to see are reviews of the phrases in the boilerplate template clauses for the Terms of service Agreements. What phrasing is considered user friendly, what is considered user hostile? Maybe taking each phrase and translating it into plain english.

AND WHY IS THE LIABILITY SECTION ALWAYS IN ALL CAPS?

General

Wright again

Jim Wright continues to write thoughtful monographs. This one is on the quest to find Judeo-Christian values, so often the subject of political demagoguery.

Schwartz defines ten basic human values based on the criteria above:

  • Self-Direction: independent thought and action–choosing, creating, exploring.
  • Stimulation: excitement, novelty, and challenge in life.
  • Hedonism: pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself.
  • Achievement: personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards.
  • Power: social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.
  • Security: safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self.
  • Conformity: restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms.
  • Tradition: respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that one’s culture or religion provides.
  • Benevolence: preserving and enhancing the welfare of those with whom one is in frequent personal contact (the ‘in-group’).
  • Universalism: understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature.

http://www.stonekettle.com/2017/10/the-myth-of-judeo-christian-values.html

General

Razors

1 Comment

From Wikipedia:

Hanlon’s razor is an aphorism expressed in various ways including “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

I am familiar with Clarke’s Law

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I heard this corollary today:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Which is attributed to several people, but the most common seems to be Grey’s Law.

 

Food Stuff, General

One goal reached

I weighed myself this morning at 199.2 pounds, thereby reaching my primary goal of 200 lbs. I started right after Labor Day 2016 so it has been about 200 days to drop 40 pounds.

I’m feeling pretty good, and, after some blood work I had done last month, all the blood numbers are in the good range. (I am no longer pre-diabetic.)

After seeing how my daily weight fluctuates through the day with my diet, I decided to  lose a few more pounds. I would like to end up about 195 pounds so my daily fluctuations don’t take me over 200 (keeping it under 90 kg).

A few  things I have learned over the past half-year:

  1. I am using lunch plates, 8″ across, instead of dinner plates, 10″ across. Don’t need as much food to fill the plate. 6″ bread plates are a little too small, my omelette flops over the edges.
  2. Using the online food diary really does help me keep focused on the total calorie and nutrient intakes each day.
  3. It is a lot easier for me to lose weight on a low/no carb (ketogenic) diet rather than a balanced carb diet with the same calorie total. I think I can maintain with a higher carb diet but I don’t seem to lose with it.
  4. Until I start getting out and getting more exercise, just less than 2000 calories a day seems to be a good number for me.
  5. There are a lot of good low-carb foods out there. I have found riced cauliflower or spiraled zucchini to be an excellent base for dishes. And I have learned a new appreciation for cabbage, in many forms.
  6. The biggest long-term concern is the amount of sodium I am taking in from processed meats. Once I go back to the regular carb diet, I expect the sodium intake will drop as well.

Off to the future.

General

Getting to the root of it.

Yesterday was a strange one. I headed into my dentist to get a cracked crown replaced. So they put me in the chair and started prepping me, giving me a ‘cold’ test to see if the tooth was feeling cold. I didn’t feel the cold on the tooth in question but they went ahead and numbed me up and took some x-rays. It is really amazing what those digital x-rays can capture . I had a lot of x-rays that day.

The dentist decided that the lack of cold response warranted another look and they took x-rays below the tooth only to find – an abscess. Since I was already numbed, their office found an endodontist that could provide me a root canal that day. I scurried on down to the endodontist and then went through a root canal procedure . Getting the numbing shots at that point was a piece of cake since I was already comfortably numb.

So they drilled out the roots, breached the abscess, and began to drain it, but I will need to wait 4 weeks for everything to heal up so they can finish. And then I can get my crown replaced.

It was good that the dentist recognized that something might be wrong when I didn’t respond to the cold test. I had not been feeling a tooth ache or swelling, so I have no idea how long the abscess had been there. Putting a crown on top of an abscessed tooth  would really be a waste of money since it would all have to come right off.

I do wish dental work was included in our overall health insurance plan but I guess that will have to wait for another administration.