A Senior Moment kind of Day

I’ve been taking pictures of Lake Gaston since 1982 when Mom and Dad purchased a small lake-house. Through the years I have built up relationships with a few vendors who sell my pictures and posters and paintings and greeting cards and postcards. (I will never get rich but I enjoy the work and the occasional infusion of pocket change.) During those same years I witnessed the inevitable trend of people switching to email over all other forms of preferred communication methods; in no time purchases of my postcards and greeting cards dropped to ZERO. I am now considering wallpapering my basement with the 23,000 some-odd unmarketable postcards I have in storage.

No wonder the U.S. Postal Service is going bankrupt.

While chatting with one of my vendor/owners yesterday, it was suggested that I do something special for Lake Gaston’s upcoming milestone birthday. So I tinkered and twiddled for hours with the above 8 1/2 x 11 inch Photoshop image, eventually printing 10 of them on exceptional acid-free paper and painstakingly inserting them into modest picture frames. (Nothing fancy, but the pictures will certainly outlive me.)

Framing photographs or artwork is a nightmare. Little speck-thingies and other sorts of fingerprint-thingies that weren’t there moments before, mysteriously show up under the glass as if you had performed the framing dance while sitting in a dandelion field on a windy spring day. When the pictures were nestled cleanly under glass, I was off to sell my wares.

My first visit was to some friends of mine who own a local Mom & Pop sign shop, for whom I do occasional freelance graphic artist work. I showed them one of my framed Lake Gaston Birthday photographs — was that a little speck-thingy hiding in the corner? — and asked, “Do you think they will sell?”

“Yes, they will sell nicely.” A strange kind of silence followed. “Fifty years from now…”

I lost interest in the speck-thingies and drove home. Lake Gaston was celebrating its 50 year birthday, not its 100th. Sigh.  Just another senior moment kind of day.

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Non-Privacy Policies

How can we help (ourselves)?

 

I recently received an email from Lowe’s informing me they have changed their “Privacy Policy”. These are the same folks who — every time I purchase something and try to check out — matter-of-factually ask me for my telephone number. I always refuse. Why do they need my telephone number? I mean, chances are good (since I normally use a debit card for my purchases) they already have access to WAY more than just my telephone number.

The Lowe’s Privacy Policy Change email contained a link to their new Policy Page, no more or less frightening than other such policy pages, I’m sure. I spent some time reading through all the gobbledegook, finally taking a breather at their “Your Choices” section, wherein they pacified me a bit into believing I could remove myself from the insanity of online shopping data sharing, because everyone is in cahoots nowadays; Google, Amazon, Facebook — all of the biggies — wantonly swapping, sharing and receiving personal information and shopping habits as if it belonged to them, not you. How many times have I purchased something at Amazon and a day later the item I just bought is plastered on every browser page I visit? Depending on the item, that can be rather embarrassing if you have a visitor who asks to use your computer.

“Hey, Tim, how do you like that hemorrhoids cushion?”

I suspect the Lowe’s Privacy Policies are no different than most, but I gotta tell you, when I got to the part that said: “To be removed from all of Lowe’s official email, telephone and postal mail marketing, choose one of the following options: email customercare@lowes.com and type “REMOVE FROM ALL MARKETING” in the subject line…” I felt a shimmy of hope wiggle through me like a bolt from that first shot of tequila.

I opened my email program and began to reply. That’s when I read a couple more sentences and got down to the: “For any of these options, please include your name, address, phone number and email address in the request, and let us know how you provided us with the information.” part.

You have GOT to be kidding me. Let me get this right. They want MORE private information about me so they can remove my “old” private information  from their “Lowe’s official email, telephone and postal mail marketing”? How crazy is THAT!  Damn, they also want me to tell them HOW I provided them with “the information” they already have about me. Give me a break.

Little did we know — years back when we rushed like children toward the Google Candy Store and all the other personal information black- holes-from-Hell-blood-sucking-vampire-ish-mega-sites — the can of worms we were uncapping. Did I just say children and can of worms? Silly me. My bad. I really meant lemmings and Pandora’s Box.

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Video Curiosity: “Sooner than You Think”

VIDEO CURIOSITY

Shades of Isaac Asimov’s “I Robot“?

–submitted by “Eric”

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Tim says: if you’d like to submit one of your own You Tube “Video Curiosity” discoveries for consideration, use the “Contact” form at the top of the blog. Include the link and your first name only. Email addresses (if any) will not be published.

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How to Get to Mars

VIDEO CURIOSITY

These two animations are the best compilations I’ve seen depicting the amazing processes that have evolved in order to deliver NASA rover missions onto the surface of Mars, safely. The first video shows how previous missions (“Spirit“ and “Opportunity”) of rovers were deployed on the surface, similar to dropping a bouncing beach ball. Can you imagine? The second video details how the most recent Mars lander, “Curiosity“ was set gently down on the Red Planet, August 5, 2012.

Part 1: “Spirit” and “Opportunity” missions.

Part 2: “Curiosity” mission.

–submitted by “Rich”

Hats off to NASA and its dedicated team of employees — What an incredible feat!

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Tim says: if you’d like to submit one of your own You Tube “Video Curiosity” discoveries for consideration, use the “Contact” form at the top of the blog. Include the link and your first name only. Email addresses (if any) will not be published.

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Lost Luggage, Last Men Standing

Yesterday, I was snipping rosemary from a very large rosemary bush growing in a pot on my deck. Rosemary is one of those plants whose leaves exude an oily essence. That’s the only way to describe it. This rosemary essence is incredibly potent and, for me  — like lusty Patchouli oil aroma from sweaty 60s-era girlfriends past — fires memory synapses only the way aromas can.

Which is how I found myself remembering being picked up by my friend, Rich one evening at the Norfolk airport. I had been returning from a trip to visit Mom in Florida, and I was ready to come home. About an hour later, it was Rich who noticed that we were the last folks standing in a now empty baggage area. “Uh, Tim?” he asked.  “Why are we the last people standing in an empty baggage area?”

I thought about my golf clubs. I thought about my hang bag, filled with my favorite tee-shirts and shorts and suntan lotion. I thought about *Tad Williams’ yet unread “Mountain of Black Glass“ (Otherland, Volume 3) novel. I thought about my brand new prescription sunglasses sitting, perhaps, on my seat as I had hastily deplaned, and I thought about Stephen King’s “The Langoliers“, a novel about parallel universe-hopping airline travelers who find themselves stranded in an airport from Hell whose reality is in the process of fragmenting into nothingness, just like my hopes for ever seeing my luggage again.

“I don’t want to think about it,” I said.

After a while, I noticed a tiny glass room set off from the rest of the baggage claim area. Inside, leaning against a scuzzy wall and bathed in the sickly green glow from an overhead fluorescent light, sat my golf clubs and Samsonite hanging bag.

“Those your bags?” asked a security-looking-type guard, gruffly. A handgun hung loosely from his belt.

Uh, oh, I thought, suddenly remembering my sister, Pat having stuffed a HUGE bundle of fresh rosemary into the golf bag just before she drove me to the airport in Florida. Maybe they found some hitchhiking bugs being transported across state lines. Maybe — I was about to get busted!

“Yes, they’re mine!” I exclaimed. “Is there something wrong?”

“Nah, they came in on another flight,” said the guard. “You got your baggage claim tickets?”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

A few minutes later Rich and I were standing in the parking lot. A cool evening breeze blew in from the nearby Chesapeake Bay. “Hang on a second, Rich,” I said, unzipping the golf bag. I slipped on a Zebco Pro-fishing jacket. The inside of Rich’s truck smelled like rosemary all the way to a sushi bar.

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Tim Says: *Author Tad Williams and I have a somewhat twisted relationship, culminating in years of a rather rage-hardened distrust. Sounds like a Simply Tim to me!

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Yawn. Stretch. Scratchscratch.

Finger thingies.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but I gotta admit my fingers are getting all twitchy and my brain is beginning to itch. Words are beginning to bounce around inside there, co-mingling with a few rational thoughts from time to time, and I know it’s just a matter of time before they hitch a ride down the ol’ spinal column and link up with whatever mechanism it is that shimmy-shoots those words into phrases (and perhaps even a proper sentence while en route) trickling them down past the elbows to my hands, which Wekipedia informs me are the “multi-fingered extremity(ies) located at the end of an arm or forelimb of primates such as humans, chimpanzees, monkeys, and lemurs”.

In other words, my confused hunt-and-peck metacarpals.

It seems I still have no problem throwing words together, even though I’ve taken an extended leave from having done so these past many weeks. So, I suppose it’s safe to say something like, “Be on the lookout. Fair warning.” Just in case.

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ZZZst ZAP!

This post is a friendly reminder that Mother Nature — and lightning, in particular– are not friendly to electronic equipment. Like most folks, my computers and TVs are hooked up to “Uninterrupted Power Supplies” (UPS) that also act as sophisticated “surge protectors”, designed to minimize the risk of serious damages to your expensive equipment during such events as — let’s say, THUNDER STORMS.

Well, about 2 weeks ago my house was struck by lightning from an errant, but tiny and easy-to-ignore “THUNDER STORM”. Okay. Wait. Let me rephrase that: about 2 weeks ago my TELEPHONE WIRES were struck by lightning from an errant, but tiny and easy-to-ignore “THUNDER STORM”.

Sadly, like most folks, I had NOT routed my telephone and DSL lines through my UPS, and had them wired directly into my DSL router and computers. Same thing with my TV, wherein I had the phone line connected directly to my DIRECT-TV box.

POOF. When the lightning struck: PZZZZZzzz! Off went my computer. Off went my TV. And off went my telephone. In other words, “OFF WENT MY HEAD!”

That’s where I’ve been these past 10 days. No TV. No telephone. No computer. The ultimate “OHHhhhh, NOoooo Land!” I could not believe the disruption this caused in my daily goings on. I was in — shock. It was like I was wearing a concrete suit.

Which leads me to the point of this post: make sure you provide surge protection for all your phone outlets before it is too late. Trust me, the “Everyman Nightmare and Cyber$pace Blue $creen of Death” is NOT where you want to end up.

UPDATE: Well, my Mac died again. Seems like I haven’t seen the worse of that lightning. The Black Screen of Death, so very rare for a Mac. I am now on my PC, which has just finished 4 hours of Windows Updates because I never use my PC. (I put the PC in the shop last week, too, and picked it up today.) The Mac goes back into the shop tomorrow.

Sigh.

Each trip to the Apple store is a 160 mile round trip for me. Sigh all over again.

At least I’m online again.

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Never Again (yeah, right)

I’ve said “DON’T DO IT!” to myself a zillion times. And yet I still DO IT in moments of weakness. I’m talking about buying those cheap, store-brand Ziploc-types of zipper freezer bags with prices so low they’re hard to pass up. And, every time I falter in order to save a few bucks, I wind up cursing myself for being so stupid. Either the zippers work one time only and then derail, or the bag itself splits open upon trying to seal it up. And every time it happens I say “NEVER AGAIN!” out loud one more time.

Yeah, right.

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Goodbye, Mr. Bradbury

I remember writer, author, lifetime friend, Ray Bradbury’s past television series in which — at the beginning of each episode — Mr. Bradbury climbs a set of stairs next to a garage, unlocks a door, and steps into his mysterious writing chamber. The room is filled with curiosities of all sorts. Knickknack items crowd every square inch of shelf space and windowsills. While the television show’s credit music dies down, Mr. Bradbury peers around the room through his thick glasses and explains he’s waiting for inspiration: that broken clock over there or that odd piece of jigsaw puzzle here; or perhaps the cracked African voodoo mask in the corner sitting next to a mirror in whose reflection dangles a Cupie Doll hanging by the neck from the ceiling. He feels a story in that one, he tells us. A story waiting to be written if he but — listens.

Mr. Bradbury passed away on June 5th at the age of 91. His contributions to the literary world are far too numerous to mention. He opened up my teenage mind to the wonders of what if like no other writer, an unsung and secret mentor to, I’m sure, millions of aspiring writers like me. I admired him. I will miss him. And, thanks to him, I will always remain a — listener.

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Sooner than We Think

VIDEO CURIOSITY

I was chatting with an UberStrike gamer earlier today, discussing how my generation became the “TV Generation”, and how today’s generation is one of “technology”.  Every time I turn on the Discovery Channel, or the Science Channel, or the Smithsonian Channel, I am reminded that, in a sense, we all are still living in the “TV” generation, that the Information Age is everywhere. But, I have to admit, when I peek at, purchase, play with all those things that technology is putting in our grasp, I am more than a little bit jealous about not being more of a part of it.

I suppose that’s what every generation has felt since civilization first began to crawl from the primordial muck: a feeling of being left out of a grander scheme of things we can never quite obtain, but one destined for — in the words of “The Moody Blues“, circa 1969, “our Children’s Children’s Children”.

Here is a video link my new UberStrike friend, Adam, passed along to me. He said, “Next generation will have…”

–submitted by “Adam”

Can you imagine?

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Tim says: if you’d like to submit one of your own You Tube “Video Curiosity” discoveries for consideration, use the “Contact” form at the top of the blog. Include the link and your first name only. Email addresses (if any) will not be published.

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