Episode #147: I Are Not Smart!

This is my punishment for what I had inflicted onto my family this week and the main reason for the extreme lateness of this post.

Flashback to Wednesday, October 26, 2022. It was a sunny day in suburbia and I was sitting in my basement jamming to some tunes on my phone when all of a sudden I lost my WiFi. I said to myself, no biggie, I'll just reboot the modem. So I did. Nothing. Did it again. Nothing. Did a few more times. Nothing.

Call our ISP and they try to fix it via the phone. Nothing. Said the earliest appointment they had was Monday, October 31st. Fantastic.

We spent the next five days eating our phone data like it was a Monster Energy drink. We even learned how to hotspot our phone for about 1 1/2 hours of daily computer use. We spent that week writing a particularly difficult chapter, helping my daughter just a tiny bit for her Halloween party (she and bf dressed as Cheech & Chong. Yes, you read correctly) and being an all-around mega grump.

Fast forward to today. Technician comes out, spends exactly thirty seconds checking things out, comes back upstairs from the basement and says it's fixed. We ask what was wrong. He says it was off. He asked if I had seen any of the lights on the front of the modem on. I say, with the way it was situated, I had to climb on the washer to reset it, so no I didn't see the front of the modem.

We now present the lamest excuse ever, right up there with anything that a Democratic politician has uttered with a complete straight face. At the time the modem hiccuped, there was no ready access to the modem as there were two doors in the way, so the only way to get to the modem was to climb on top of the washing machine. Thus, I was unable to see whether or not the lights were on.

So basically, while trying to reset the modem by turning it on and off, the last time I pressed the button was to turn off the modem. I will note that my daughter's bf was able to move the other door out of the way after they took the first door upstairs to use for beer pong. Doors were down because the new dryer was too wide with the doors attached.

So, to quote a certain political spokesmen, let's circle back to the title of the post and confirm that salient point: for five days, I made my entire family suffer with no WiFi and with no landline (connected to the WiFi so no great loss with that one). All because I didn't press the shiny red button one last time that would've turned on the modem, bathing the house in the rapturous spirit of WiFi, and making the family's inner chi balanced once again. 

We are not smart. We do not want fries with that level of smartness. Instead, we deserve candy-corn flavored PEEPS for our transgression. And maybe pineapple on our pizza.

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #146: Let's Get Commercialized!

Back in the day, I used to be a devotee of t.v. and radio commercials. Mostly because the shows sandwiched around the commercials were crap, but partially because I liked to see if I could recognize any of the voice actors who did radio.

But this isn't about that, although that would make a very cool post someday. This is about the migration of annoying commercials from radio and t.v. land to You Tube.

You Tube carries a variety of both regular commercials and infomercials that they are more than happy to annoyingly insert into the videos that you're watching unless you deem yourself to be Mr/Mrs Moneybags and how no problem paying a hefty monthly fee to have them removed. But this isn't about the semantics of making money hand over fist either. This is about the time of bizarre commercials being shown.

I will touch upon briefly the various commercial lengths, which go from 6 seconds to bother skippable and unskippable 15 seconds to 15 minutes and beyond, and all lengths in between. Now that's out of the way, onto more annoying things.

Anyways, most of those late night commercials touting almost every conceivable medical/doomsday/clothing/everything you can possibly think of have migrated to YouTube to annoy you.

Want to listen to crappy political PSA's from politicians bragging about solving a budget deficit that their own party helped create previously? You got it here. You want to watch ads touting men's personal grooming products*? You got it here, among other places. Want to watch ads touting all kinds of insurance companies, including one where a guy snorts his beard*? You got it here. You want ads touting all kinds of weight loss products (you, yes you! have toxic poop!*)? You got it here. Want to advertise your "medicinal" marijuana mail order dispensary*? You got it here.

Almost every single product you can possibly think of, can be found on YouTube. Why? Because it's cheaper to shoot a few commercials and have them inserted into various videos to hit your target audience than it is to advertise on television. Both well known companies and smaller niche companies will advertise on YouTube because it's easier and cheaper to do. Plus, you can do commercials as short as 6 seconds to get your point across, as opposed to doing a fifteen to thirty second advert on television, and become more memorable in the process.

The asterisk. Two paragraphs back I noted some of the more memorable commercials I've seen with an asterisk. That was so I could elaborate more fully later. This is later. In order noted, a short description of the product is as follows:

1} Political PSA's. 'Nuff said, although the Dems are doing better than the GOP with socialized media.

2} Men's personal grooming. The biggie here is a company called Manscape. They make male grooming products for below the waist. Not only have I seen ads on YT for them, but I've seen other YT channels pimp them, as well as podcasts pimping them. I have also seen ads for manly soap and butt deodorant, so yeah.

3} Stare Farms has a series of vignettes for their product line, including one featuring a man who likes to sniff his beard after a meal. That one is skippable after 6 seconds.

4} Yes, there is a cleansing product that promises to help you get rid of your 20 pounds of toxic poop.

5} The medical Mary Jane mail order dispensary bugs me the most, because the company hired, at least to me, very old dedicated potheads who did absolutely nothing with their lives in the last 40 years. 

These are just small select sample of ads you can involuntarily watch on YouTube that have managed to stand out to me over the past few years of watching videos on everyone's favorite mindless platform. Have you seen any that have sadly stuck out to you over the preceding weeks/months that you're willing to share? Inquiring minds want to know.

Oh and, Grammarly is big on YT as well. And liquor, yuppie hard seltzer and bra ads for those of you who are either top heavy or...the first letter of the alphabet.

Note: I can 100% verify that every type of commercial just mentioned I have personally seen on YouTube, especially in the last paragraph. I give major props to the women who participated in those types of commercials.

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #145: Granddad Finds Things In The Mountain

I've often found/seen unusual things over the many years of hiking around Cedar Mountain. Kind of amazes me over the fact on how determined the younger generation, for they are the only ones that can really accomplish these feats of daring do, is when it comes to doing stupid things.

Prime example is this liberated stop sign staring out at you. Obviously it came from a street somewhere, but there it is, leaning against a concrete bunker imploring the vegetation to stop growing.

I have seen the remnants of a television that somehow got tossed/brought into one of the street entrances about a dozen or so feet. Also, roughly a hundred feet or so from this picture are the remains of what used to be an appliance of some kind. Now, we're not talking about something tiny, we're talking about something like a stove or something similar that someone had lugged deep into the mountain.

If I continue down then up on one of the trails, I'll come across a very old 1970's style one piece rear seat that someone lugged up and wedged against a tree. Still usable, but very unsafe just the same.

And you can't forget about the fire pits that are scattered all over the mountain. Now these aren't dormant, but are very active in the summer time, as you can see them being used as you're driving down one of the side streets towards the mountains. Now these for the most part are somewhat accessible in the day time, but quite dangerous to seek out at night, even with flashlights, as the footing to the pathways are very treacherous to begin with. 

Another odd thing I've seen in the past few years are the end results when chainsaws are used on the trees. Now it's not sure much as people are illegally cutting lumber and hauling it away, but more like some necessary clearing of the landscape. To elaborate, we've had some nasty rain/wind storms in the mountain, which has allowed Mother and Father Nature pursue a prudent campaign of selective clearing out the old and dangerous trees, in order to make room for new growth.

Most of the time, these trees fall in areas where there are no trails or so far away from a trail, that there's no real danger to people walking on the trails. However, there have been times when some rather large old growth trees have fallen across the hiking trails, which in turn makes it a tad hazardous/difficult to walk around them. So what some people have down, either private folks or town employees, have taken chainsaws to those trees and removed just enough of the tree(s) to make the trail passable again.

They have also taken out some dead/dying/rotted trees down so that they don't have the potential to injure folks walking/hiking the trails. So for 2022, the trails have been remarkably, save for one, user friendly due to the selective dead tree removal.

Overall, this year the mountain has been remarkably stress free to partake in, in that there's no stray trees to really worry about hiking over or around. Walking and hiking is always good, especially when you can go on trails and not worry about major obstacles impeding your way. Just the occasional animal.

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #144: Granddad Is Enjoying Life

This fascinating picture was taken by me from my car while I was driving home from grocery shopping. I happened to see the mountain's resident deer foraging in the front yard of our local group residential home yesterday. So I carefully came to a stop and gently reversed under engine power, then whipped out the smart phone and took several zoomed in pictures from my car. Then, with great reluctance, I carefully put the car in 'drive' and drove the twenty or so yards home.

So this is basically the highlight of a very young week so far. Last week was pretty good, as we managed to take a few short afternoon trips into the mountain, and boy was it worth it.

Right now, the mountain hasn't really start to turn to fall yet, so everything is cheerfully lean, mean and green, although, the birds have begun to get the message about the weather, as it's been abnormally quiet in those trees. But, it's still good just the same, as I actually love the peace and quiet while walking and hiking. Fortunately for me, the northern end of town where I live is basically dead between the hours of 9a and 4p daily. My end of town is simply a drive-thru to the more populous southern end of town.

So the quiet time has been doing me a world of good, especially with my writing. My current story with the placeholder title of Hot Mess is sitting at 107k+ words, with one three ring binder completely filled and a second one a fifth of the way there. Scary part is that if I get this one filled up, that'll put me over 400 pages written and that will simply blow my tiny little brain. Why? Because I didn't actively plan to write a multi-volume series, unlike the last time (yes, I have a trilogy that is one third published and two thirds completed) when I did actually plan to write a multi-volume series. So there's that.

Overall though, I've been simply enjoying my retirement, going on two years now. I have the almost empty nest, a grandson and my mental well-being has been soooo good that I kick myself for not doing my retirement earlier. But, rules are rules and I didn't have the numbers until I had turned 55 in 2020, with more than 20 years in.

All in all, this post is the best I could do for a Monday, because you know, we're simply enjoying life too much to worry about a blogging deadline. But I promise, with the weather starting to change, I will start hitting my deadline earlier. 

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #143: Granddad Is Iffy About Cadillac Products

There are times where I want this dog's life. This, is one of those times.

Yes, the title of the blog post accurately reflects a proper change in parental status. Young Master Colton made his entrance into the world back in mid-September 2022.

As I'm want to do from time to time while perusing social media, my mind has a tendency to wander. Occasionally it'll latch onto a certain idea, which in turn makes me pause and squee in delight because it means I have something to blog about.

Today's idea is what I like to call, "Cadillac products". No, I'm not talking about the car, but instead I'm talking about the various products that set the gold standard for their line and make everyone else in that product line pale by comparison. Let me share with you a few examples and you can let me know if you agree or disagree with my examples.

Cable t.v., specifically, HBO. Now, most of you know that I'm the original MTV generation, that channel started when I was a junior in high school {1981}, but you can call me an HBO Boomer as well, as the channel was founded in 1972. Now, I consider HBO to be the gold standard for pay t.v. channels, simply because of the high cost of adding/maintaining it to your cable subscription

Note, the quality of the content HBO presented coupled with being the originator of the premium cable channel, made it on one hand, the channel to have when you were getting your cable t.v. subscription set up (this was waaaaay before streaming, etc.), while on the other, it often became the first casualty of your subscription when you were looking for cut costs to your subscription, simply because on how expensive it was (in the late 80s/early 90s, it was about $20 per month with about 2% increases every couple of years with our subscription). Ultimately, it became the channel that everyone wanted to aspire to be like.

Commercial coffee stores. Now granted, my opinion is regional, but I find that both Starbucks and D&D have set the gold standard for commercial coffee product. I give them a tie only because each one has a particular customer base that is often hard to float between. A close third would be those solid mom & pop stores that sadly I don't have in my local town.

Coffee brands: again, this one is personal preference, but this is based on instant coffee, as I do not do K-cups. I think I've consumed only 48 K-cups during the entire existence of the K-cup, and those were in the 4 months preceding and 3 months during the pandemic when I was still employed. I've tried about a half dozen brands, so I have a strange three way tie for the top: Nescafe, a niche brand called Juan Valdez and single serve Tasters Choice. Everything else for instant pales by comparison. Those three mentioned are actually worth the high price you pay for them.

And finally, just to throw everyone a slurve, computer OS. Again, this is a personal preference. I have never used a Mac, nor any Apple product for that matter, in my entire adult existence. I neither like nor hate Apple computer products, they're just not my thang. But, having used Windows 6.0; XP, 7 and 10 (all four work related, with the middle two personal), and ultimately detesting all Window OS, my personal preference has been, since 2019, Chrome OS. I found that OS very easy to use, and their various office suite programs equal to, if not slightly better, than the Windows office suite programs. And most importantly, quite convertible going both directions. Overall, I find Chrome way less aggravating than Windows to use.

So, my fellow readers, what products do you feel are the gold standard for that particular product line?

{c} 2022 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved