The Wasting of My Time

As I get older I do find myself thinking about time.  Not wishfully, mind you, or even wistfully, as other's seem to do.  There are those who lament about not having enough time, how they might been able to do more if only the hours hadn't started to run out.  This is not me.  Now, I'm not old, middle-aged to be sure, but neither frail nor feeble.  If continue taking care of myself and everything keeps ticking the way it's supposed to, I figure I'll probably squeeze another 35 years out of my life.  With medicine advancing the way it is, that number might actually be higher, which, as long as I have my facilities, wouldn't be bad.  Nary a day goes by without my seeing some octogenarian seeming to be much younger then their biological age.  That's how I want to be.  I've already told my friends if I end up turning into a professional invalid they have my blessing to put me, and the world, out of my misery.

What I do seem to be doing more and more is tracking the length of time it takes to accomplish a task.  For example, when I got Gert I worried that her puppy feet might have a problem with my staircase, so I put down a runner.  Now that she's 4.5 years old and Lilly is almost a year old, I decided the carpeting was no longer necessary.  It took between 15 and 20 minutes to do the job.  Once again you can see my staircase.  It's beautiful.  My house is 109 years old and the staircase is painted white with ivy stenciling on either side.  That 15 to 20 minutes was completely worthwhile.  However, what I'm disliking more and more is spending my time on things that have little or no worth.

These things tend to be those I am obliged to do, like losing 1 hour and 45 minutes of my time while I waited to have the Pa State Inspection performed on a new car.  Having to stand in line at Self Check-Out is another one.  In fact, here lately standing in line has become one of the biggest wastes of my time.  It happened at the movie theater when I went to see Maleficent because they only had one ticket register open.  It happened at K-Mart on Wednesday morning.  If you start adding up all of those minutes you waste waiting it's rather amazing.  I did something to my lower back a few weeks ago and decided to go to see my Dr. about it.  I waited for 12 minutes before they took me back to wait in an examination room for another 15 minutes.  In other words, I actually saw my personal care physician 27 minutes after my set appointment time.  In that half hour I could have taken the dogs for a walk.  I could have made some notes on a future blog, spent some time with Rosetta Stone working on my German, or even mowed my front yard.  Do you think they cared about wasting my time?  Hell no.   

    

Beef-aroni Blowout

I like to cook and there are several foods I'm very good at preparing, according to a number of people.  One of those is my pasta sauce, which is very vegetable chunky.  I never puree.  I believe that if you like your pasta al dente, then your sauce should have a bit of bite as well.  As a result I never buy anything which is jarred, canned, or frozen, most especially the pre-cooked pasta dishes.  Let me be more specific.  If "Boyardee" is in the name, I treat the product the same as if it were a Bio-hazard.  In other words, I avoid it like the plague.  Others eat these products though, most likely, I suspect, those with childish palates.

The foods were originated by Ettoire Boiardi back in the mid-twenties.  Supposedly, the name was changed to Boyardee so people would pronounce it correctly.  this may be, but let's be honest, back in 1928 Boyardee both looked and sounded a lot less Italian then Boiardi.  I hope that back then it also had more nutritional value then it does today.  Let's be honest, what sits on supermarket shelves today is just a lot of bad, bad, bad calories.  You want to scare the crap out of yourself?  Check out the expiration dates and see how long that pasta has been noodling away in that tomato goo.  You can buy a can today and let it sit in your cupboard until 2016.  Would you really want to eat something which has been sitting in a can for that long?

And the deal of the day is?

Now, let me be honest, when I was a young child my Mom did serve me Chef Boyardee for lunch, most often it was Spagheti-O's.  Even back then I could tell the sauce was bland.  Every body else's Mom was serving up Beef-aroni, but all I ever got was Spagheti-O's, and some sort of ravioli stuffed with phony, pureed meat. I don't remember when, but at some point my Mom wised up and realized that meals needed to consist of more then fat calories dosed heavily with sodium.  You would think in today's world with nutritional values labels on everything parents would buy smarter for their kids.  They don't.  I stopped by my local Giant Supermarket today and the Boyardee section is one of their specials.  Wow, they have more quantities available on an endcap.  It's cheap way to fill a little belly.  That's all it is.  Just think, for the current going rate you could have one helatious Beef-aroni Blowout. 

  

Trump l'oeil

A few weeks ago there was some sort of a 'to do' up in Chicago about Donald Trump having his last name emblazoned on one of his buildings in very large letters, no doubt to match his ego.  The people of Chicago, or at least most of them, hate the idea.  He, on the other hand, doesn't care what the people think, he wants his last name on a building and he's going to have his last name on a building.  I thought the episode rather amusing.  In truth this is really Trump l'oeil, you know, the artistic term for making something phony look real.  Oh, wait, I'm wrong, that's trompe l'oeil... well, isn't it kind of the same thing?  Just because something is solid doesn't mean it has substance.  I was at the Trump Casino in Atlantic City a number of years ago and was simply amazed by how superficial everything was, how the eye was meant to stray not focus.  It was like being on a Hollywood set where illusion fools the eye.  Putting his name on a building in Chicago is the same thing simply because there is no permanence there.  Fifty years from now that building may have been razed to make way for something even more grandiose, or it may be a park, or, most likely, a slum tenement.  Things change.

Trompe l'oeil, the real thing

At 68 years of age, Mr. Trump may have 15 to 20 years left before he shrugs off his mortal coil.  Shortly there after, if not before, what ever relevance he had will begin to fade.  Those few people who actually cared will die off as well.  This is how history builds itself, with the passing of time.  A century from now no one will care about his silly sign, or his silly ego, they will have been forgotten.  Not that there will not be digital pictures, but the people one hundred years from now will look at them with the vague, passing interest we look at those take in the early 1900's.  This is nothing more then the blink of an eye, truly a Trump l'oeil.

The Breakfast for Dinner Revolution

For the past couple of days I've had this craving for pancakes.  So intense was this craving, I actually mentioned it to associates at work.  I was just really, really hungry for pancakes.  Last evening, on my way home from work, I decided to take action and quell this hunger.  Normally, when I make pancakes, they're made from scratch, of course that would have entailed purchasing eggs as well as flour.  It's just a craving I told myself, and convinced myself into buying a box of Hungry Jack Funfetti Complete.  How could I resist confetti pancakes.  Anyway, as my pancakes cooked on the griddle, I started checking out the box just see what it was I was eating.  I was really surprised to read the following blurb: Make  breakfast time family time! When your family is hungry for something delicious for breakfast give them Hungry Jack pancakes."  Holy Crap!  This was going to be my dinner, not my breakfast!  I must have missed the edict outlawing pancakes for any other meal.

Of course there was no such ruling.  There are a lot of people out there, however, who have been brainwashed into thinking you can only eat pancakes at breakfast.  Like bacon and eggs, where is it written bacon and eggs can only be eaten at breakfast?  Years ago, returning from a day trip to Washington DC with a friend, we stopped off to get something to eat.  Let me tell you, he was so excited to discover the restaurant served Breakfast for Dinner I thought for a moment the Rapture had arrived.  He was almost as surprised that I had been raised without any "breakfast food barriers."  That's right.  There were times when we had pancakes for dinner.  Sometimes we would have scrambled eggs and bacon!  My brother was a cold cereal aficionado.  Booberry, Frankenberry, Count Chocula and Captain Crunch were all he ate... ever.  Did they stunt his growth?  Did they do him wrong?  Nope.  Today he gets paid rather well to write code for things hospitals use, don't ask me what, I don't know.

 

At some long, forgotten point in our past, some pudding head sat at a desk and divided foods up into groups, those which would be great for you in the morning and those which might not be so hot.  What's interesting is that the box I bought makes both pancakes and waffles.  Paradoxically, while one is considered a breakfast staple, the other can be eaten any time of the days.  Ever hear of Chicken and Waffles?  With this mix you could have Chicken and Funfetti waffles.  Wouldn't that be a colorful dinner?  People forget that their stomach doesn't know what time it is.  When it gets hungry all it wants is to be fed.  You could feed it ice cream for breakfast and it wouldn't care.  I think we should start a revolution and start eating breakfast for dinner.  Tomorrow morning, instead of nuking a bowl of oatmeal, order a pizza instead.  Yum! 

Home Made Hair

About a week ago I dropped by Gamestop to see what used games they had for sale; it's a good place for inexpensive games.  The clerk was a young guy, maybe 18 or 19 and I know that when he saw me immediately registered me as an old fart, most likely buying a game for my grandson, of course he was wrong.  Had I been younger I'm sure I would have received a more enthusiastic sales approach.  Anyway, what I found more interesting then his lack of salesmanship was his hair.  It was stripped, orange, blond, and brown and the stripes were blended together.  It looked like he had naturally tri-colored hair. This was obviously something he'd paid to have done.  I'm serious, this kid had really great looking hair, unlike a lot of hair that I see.  I'm in retail, so I see a lot of hair.

There is a world of difference between professional hair and what I call "home made hair."  You know what I'm talking about.  You've seen those people who attempt to copy a style from a magazine or video and utterly fail.  They're trying to look like somebody they aren't.  Let me give you an example, there's this young girl who works the service desk at my local Giant Supermarket and she has more hair extensions on her head then is conceivably possible.  I'm serious.  It looks as though her "big" hair is mutating into something large enough to eat the Brooklyn Bridge.  When she turns her head it all moves as one unit, which can be a little frightening.  I was going to take a picture but I couldn't get far enough back to get all the hair in the shot and still let you see her face.

If you cut it, it will grow

This stripping thing seems to be really popular now.  I see a lot of it, boys and girls, men and women, and it's fairly easy to spot who's sat in a stylist's chair and who's done it in the kitchen, or the bathroom.  You know, 'home made hair."  There are times when I really have to bite my tongue to keep from laughing: when the stripes are irregular, or they look more like dots and dashes, as though some one's been practicing Morse Code on their head.  Sort of like an SOS except this most likely translates to HMH: Home Made Hair.

  

Aging with Relevance

The one thing which concerns me the most about getting older is the possibility of losing relevance.  The world has enough irrelevant people already, I don't want to join their forces.  Sadly, I suspect there are multitudes out there who don't even consider whether or not their lives have purpose, whether they are achieving something or just coasting through their days.  They get up in the morning, eat breakfast, go to work, come home and eat dinner, watch some TV and then go to bed; they call that living.  I suppose it is, but I wonder if they don't ever want to challenge themselves.  Challenging your self gives you purpose.  Now I'm not talking about being a Triathlete, or running for political office, though there's nothing wrong with either of those.  I am too old for the first and not rich enough for the later.  I do challenge myself, however, daily.

One of the ways is by learning a new language - German to be precise.  You know, working on building new synapse after new synapse.  I tell people that when the girls are gone I plan to sell everything and move to either the south of France or Bavaria.  So I'm challenging myself in order to be prepared.  Let me tell you, German is difficult.  A friend of mine thinks English is the most difficult language in the world because we have so many words which have different meanings.  Surprise, every language has words with multiple meanings.  In German there are at least 4 different ways to say the word "the," depending upon whether the gender is neutral, masculine, or feminine and how the noun is used in the sentence... at least I think there are 4.  I've been told there are actually 6 ways to say "the," though so far I've only encountered 4.  Now you say learning German doesn't keep you relevant.  Of course it does if you plan on staying in a country for an extended period of time.

I play video games.  When I told our Behr Rep (in his mid-thirties) he laughed and said he'd outgrown video games.  He then went and tripped over a piece of racking on the floor and was out of work for two weeks because he hurt his ankle.  The jury is not in yet, but from the medical documentation I've been able to read there is some connection between video games and hand /  eye coordination.  You know what coordination is?  It helps you drive your car, climb stairs, walk on a garden path without falling down.  And I don't play point and click video games, I play FPS (first person shooter) and RPG (roll playing game), games which require a controller and the use of fingers.  

Now I know there are people who think I should start to slow down.  I ask them why? Why would I want to stop participating?  Work your muscles and work your brain, cause when this life is over... well, it's over.  

Today t'was Norton, yesterday the Vomitrix

This morning I spent over 2 and a half hours on the phone and chatting with the IT guys at Norton while they remotely tried to correct a problem their last update caused.  It was the same problem I've had every time they've updated:  my Smart Firewall becomes super protective and denies me access to the Internet.  I actually have to turn off the Firewall in order to contact their Support Center.  If it weren't such a hassle, I probably wouldn't let it bother me, but it is.  Today they escalated it to the "2nd" level.  One of the first things the Tech told me was that I was running too many apps (6?) at start up.  I pointed out to him that this is a "gaming laptop" built specifically for games, that it has not one, but two 500 GB hard drives and has enough RAM I could drive it to Minnesota and back.  His response "oh, yes, you are not running too many apps."  So, while in "Safe Mode" he opened files, changed extensions, and closed files.  Supposedly the problem has now been corrected.  Not only did they spend over two and a half hours on this issue, they add an additional 6 months free service to my contract.  We'll wait and see.

Yesterday, the Paint Desk was visited by the Vomitrix, at least that's what I'm calling her.

Beware the puke monster

That's right, we had a biologically hazardous situation.  Vomit.

It was around 2 in the afternoon and my shift was just about to end when the Head Cashier called out "Hey, Dave, who cleans up vomit at the Paint Desk?"  I turned to see what he was talking about and there she was - the Vomitrix, a woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a white and pink striped blouse, emptying the contents of her stomach onto the floor in front of my paint desk.  Now, we're not talking about a small little splash, like maybe an overly aggressive burp.  Nope, this was a gusher.  She stood there till she was finished.  I find the whole thing rather perplexing since there were quite a number of empty, five gallon buckets within 8 - 10 feet of her yet she chose to disgorge on the floor.  I don't believe there is such a thing as spontaneous regurgitation, so she should have had a few seconds warning, yet she just stood there creating a hazmat situation - bodily fluids, you know.  Neither she, nor her friend, offered to help clean up the mess, that dirty chore was left to a hazmat certified associate - me.  What she did do, however, is casually pick up the two quarts of paint she had ordered and proceeded calmly through check-out.

Now I don't know about you, but I would have been fairly mortified if I had puked in public.  There are certain things which are considered acceptable behavior, and others which society tends to frown upon.  Throwing up in a busy, home improvement store is one of the latter.  Leaving the mess for a store associate to clean up is approaching the reprehensible.  A note of apology to the store might be nice, but I suspect the Vomitrix will feel guilty for a short time and then forget about it.  Of course I don't know, maybe this isn't an isolated incident, maybe it happens on a regular basis.  For all I know she may target stores.  She truly may be "The Vomitrix!"

Internet Security and Ben Affleck

This morning, as I went into my bank's website to transfer funds from my savings to my checking, I was presented with one of those little security questions I needed to answer when I set up my online account.  Of course, it's not only banks which make you provide answers to these preset questions, any website which maintains even the mildest forms of security is going to ask them.  They are all pretty standard:  where did you go to school?  What's your mother's maiden name?  How old were you when you lost your virginity?  Well, maybe not that last one, but wouldn't it be funny if it was asked?  If you think about it, those "personal" questions they ask are really not that personal.  It's not that difficult to find out what my mother's maiden name was, but finding out when I lost my virginity is a completely different story.  I'll give you a hint... it wasn't in the United States.  And I'm speaking about my straight virginity, not my gay virginity, because, again, they are two completely different thing, like drinking coffee.  Do you prefer your coffee black, or with cream?  I like mine with cream, no sugar.

Another funny question they ask is "What was the first musical instrument you learned how to play?"  I almost always answer that one.  So, which answer to do I give?  Piano, clarinet, french horn, skin flute?  Of course I can't tell you because then I'd blow my security.  I'll be honest, I do sometimes provide answers that are both inappropriate and incorrect.  A lot of times they will want to know who your best friends were.  You wouldn't believe some of my best friends:  Grover Cleveland?  Nah, dead too long.    David Arquette?  Hhhmm, maybe once or twice.  Brad Pitt?  Too married.  What I'm trying to say is they don't really know who your best friend was, so why not have a little fun?  They are not going to send you a nasty email shrieking "You were never friends with Ben Affleck!" because they don't really care, it's all digital to them.

Does Apple really care what your first musical instrument was?

Now I know there are those of you out there who are wondering  what happens if you forget your smart ass answer to one of these security questions.  Let me tell you, it happened to me once and, if you look out the nearest window, you'll see the world did not end.  Sad to say, there are a lot of people who answer these questions and then can't remember the answers.  Then they sit their thinking "was it my stepmother's maiden name or my birth mother's maiden name" and inevitably they make the wrong choice.  Or they forget that Droopie was officially their brother's dog, and that their first pet was actually a gold fish named Cleo, which is what they were thinking about when they answered the question.  It doesn't make a difference.  No website is going to bar you forever if you happen to answer the security question wrong.  Getting access again my entail calling an 800 number, sometimes it doesn't, and is normally not a very lengthy process.

If you're wondering, Ben Affleck was never one of my best friends when I was growing up.

Tom Cruise Flop-Flops

When I first saw the trailer for Edge of Tomorrow I was excited, since I like the sci-fi, action genre, until I saw the star was Tom Cruise.  The minute I saw he was involved I sighed, sat back in my movie theater seat, and wrote it off.  Evidently I wasn't the only one.  Opening weekend for Edge of Tomorrow was very bad, in fact I believe it was one of the worst openings ever for a Tom Cruise film.  It's a shame about the movie, since I'm sure it's probably very good.  I, however, like a lot of other people, don't really want to pay money for a Tom Cruise film.  In fact, I don't even rent them.  I'd like to watch Oblivion but something inside keeps me from renting it from Netflix.  In case you don't remember, Oblivion was last year's Tom Cruise flop - hence the flop - flops.  It's also a shame for his co-stars, last year it was Morgan Freeman, this year Emily Blunt; when you make a movie you want people to go see it.  The saying in Hollywood is "you're only as good as your last film," and these actors deserve better.  On a bright note for Mr. Cruise, the audiences seem to like it in South Korea and China, it's just everybody else who seems to pass on his films.

Ten years ago Edge of Tomorrow would have been a home run, but then a lot of things can happen in ten years.  Tom married Katie Holmes, they had a daughter they named after an Iphone assistant, then they were divorced.  He starred in the remake of War of the Worlds, which I did pay to see... and I hated.  He showed up a couple of years ago at the Academy Awards and instead of people talking about how good he looked for hitting 50, they gossiped about how much plastic surgery he must have had.  He's a Christian Scientist and they don't believe in anesthesia since it renders you unconscious, so if he has gone under the knife it had to have been with a helatious amount of local anesthesia.  Can't you hear some crazy doctor saying "in order to make you look younger, we're going to shave away some of your cheekbones to keep them sharp and youthful looking."  Ouch!

Emily, blame Tom!!

People just don't care about him anymore, and they don't care about his films.  This happens to most actors and they move onto supporting roles.  I doubt if Tom Cruise will ever be a supporting actor.  He's too odd.  Audiences don't mind if the actors they are watching on the screen are eccentric, they don't, however, want them to be weird in an "euwh" sort of way.  Unfortunately for Tom, I suspect most people feel he is so very, very close to being borderline.

I'm sure he's placing the blame for lackluster ticket sales on the way the film was merchandised.  He's wrong, of course.  If this film had starred anybody else I'd have been to see it already, except maybe Shia Leboef.  Anyway, now we're all going to have to wait, without baited breaths I might add, to see if Tom continues his series of flops.  Will a pattern emerge that sounds a lot like flop,flop, flop, flop, flop? 

Expire this

I don't know about the rest of the world, but as a nation quite a few of us have a legitimate concern about expiration dates.  When you buy a quart of milk you do want to know how long you will be able to let it sit in your refrigerator before it starts to turn.  I'm sure most of us who enjoy cream in our coffee have experienced that one moment when the flavor was just a little bit off, or looked down to see flecks of curdle swirling around as we stir our spoon.  Expiration dates also give us an idea of just how long that quart of milk has been sitting on our grocer's shelf.  Some people, however, don't understand expiration dates.  They feel that at some point in it's life a product is going to expire.  I have had people ask me if the batch number on the top of a paint can contains the expiration date.  No, it isn't.  I'm sure if you contacted the manufacturer they could tell you when that paint was manufactured, but that's about it.  I always tell people, paint is not like food, it doesn't go bad.  Keep it tightly sealed and it will last for years, and years, and years.

There are those who think the day a product reaches its expiration date you need to throw it away.  Let me give you an example.  I was in the produce section of my local Giant supermarket filling my cart with fresh vegetables (I almost always eat fresh), when I noticed a woman in front of the baby carrots.  I like baby carrots, they're a nice snack.  Grate them up, add a dash of olive oil, garlic salt, salt and hot pepper flakes and roast them for a nice side.  As I slid my cart in beside her's and reached for a bag, she stopped me.  "Those are expired," she said.  Reaching into her own cart, she grabbed another bag.  "Here, take these, they're still fresh."  I thanked her and moved onto the mushrooms, wondering if I should tell her that carrots are a root vegetable.  Before refrigeration, people used to hang them in root cellars, in bunches, for months at a time.  They may not have been as fresh and crisp as the day they were pulled from the ground, but they didn't make people sick.

Now I can understand the rationale behind expiration dates, making sure your grocer rotates his product so you don't end up purchasing food which has been sitting on the shelf for nine or ten years.  But they've also become an easy way to get shoppers to buy more.  There are a lot of people out there, like the woman with the baby carrots, who believe that once a food has hit it's expiration date it needs to be thrown out.  Produce shouldn't need to be dated.  If you can't tell when it's going bad, then you shouldn't be buying it.  If a peach has little, fluffy mold spores building a metropolis, then it needs to go in the trash.  So what if the Rotini pasta in your cupboard expires in a week or so, it's dried.  It's not going to cook up differently because it's passed its expiration date.  Just use a little common sense.  Unless you're one of those people who needs to be told what to do and when to do it.  When I meet people like this I usually just smile.  What I really want to do is say "expire this."    

CTR and the Fail situation

Years ago, when I first started blogging, I had thought if you become popular enough you can actually make money by sharing your opinions.  It didn't turn out that way.  The first blog I had was through Typepad and I was not impressed with the Ads, neither were the people who read my blogs.  As a result I dropped the ads and eventually Typepad, moving over to Blogger.  I could get ads here but don't really see an in point in that.  Advertising only pays if people click through your ads, and by people I mean multitudes.  Being the inquisitive sort of person I am, I educated myself because you never know, some day advertising may actually be relevant... probably not.  You see there is something called a CTR or Click Through Rate, which is the % of readers who actually click on the Ad.  The average CTR on an average blog for a Banner Ad is about 1.1%.  This means that for every 500 readers you can expect 5.5 people to check out the Ad, which earns you nothing.

The whole thing is rather interesting.  If you have a high volume blog where millions hit, advertisers will actually pay you for space.  Then the CTR is their worry, and CTR's are usually low.   But then, to the rescue, comes "The Impression."  For all of those people who are looking at the Ad and not clicking through, there is a formula for calculating how big of an impression the Ad is making on them.  Think of it as subtle brainwashing.  It's been around for years.  You see Impression advertising in print and on television and now tacked on to videos on the Internet.  Any time you click on a video at a news site you're going to be tortured with a commercial.  In fact they are every where.  Muting them out doesn't help because in the Advertiser's minds they're still making an impression on you.  You may not need to buy a car right now, but when you do they're betting if you've seen enough Toyota Ads you'll consider buying a Toyota.

Do a Google image search and you'll be amazed at how many charts have been published detailing all sorts of minutiae about the CTR.  Some of them are amusing, like this one which shows that Ipad and Iphone owners click through more often the Android users.

This information is important to Advertisers because it lets them know what kind of Ads to place on what kind of blogs or websites.  What's sad is this information is based on 45 billion monthly impressions.  To this means advertising on the Internet is pretty much a fail / fail situation.

Out There

This morning while I was scanning through the Internet I came across this photo of our Universe.  This is, albeit a small section, still it does make one wonder.  For centuries, when mankind looked up, he thought he was seeing only stars and nothing more.  The idea that all of this was out there was totally inconceivable.  The Earth was flat and was the center of the universe and everything revolved around us.  We were chosen.  Religious debate did not even take into consideration we might actually be a very, very small part of something greater.  Had they known this, one can only wonder what Christianity, and Islam, and Buddhism would have looked liked today.  You'll notice I don't include Hinduism because there are certain sections in their Holy Books where there seems to be some sort of awareness.  I don't know if it's Shiva or Vishnu, but one of them claims to be the Destroyer of Worlds.  Many of us find it almost amusing to think of Galileo being jailed for blasphemy for daring to suggest we were not the center.  Of course he recanted and was later proven correct and still nothing changed.

It's filled with galaxies

Even today, with new planets being discovered almost weekly orbiting distant suns, the subject of our being infinitesimally small is never brought up by the devoted.  Their main concern, as always, seems to be to proselytize.  They can't question.  They need to rely on blind faith.  I know people who are extremely religious and if you mention "the Goldilocks Zone" they look at you incomprehensibly, and then they smile because in their minds they've decided that you're a little out there.  They can't concern themselves with the idea that there we are a small planet on the outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy.  The fact that with all those millions of stars circled by millions of planets means there is the good possibility of life out there might get you a smirk.  As a result, I suspect someday, maybe sooner then later, something is going to happen and they're going to find themselves blind sighted.  They may find themselves horrifically challenged simply because they never took the time to think there might be something else  out there. 

Apple Heads and Me

A couple days back Apple had its annual celebration of all things Apple.  I wasn't there, of course, I wasn't invited.  Announcements are usually made at the WWDC, hints of wonderful, new toys coming down the pike.  This year, however, the only really momentous moment seemed to center about the reveal of Yosemite, the new Apple OS.  The Apple Heads went wild.  Everybody else scratched their head because Yosemite is edging towards compatibility with other Operating Systems.  I'm not up with all of the lingo jingo, but apparently now you'll be able to use other, non-Apple keyboards with Apple computers, and some of the changes will replicate services already performed by Android Apps.  This makes me wonder if maybe the Pudding Heads at Apple have realized their future as isolationists is limited; the entire world will not go head over heels for Apple.  This is something Microsoft learned with their Xbox One fiasco, hence the big shake-up rattling through the rafters over at Microsoft.  There will be no Number One but there will be a lot of peaks.

For those of you who don't know, Apple Heads is the collective term I use for all of those individuals who are totally entranced with everything Apple.  They Love It.  From Ipads, to Ipods, to Mac Pros, to Imacs, to you name it, they own it.  This doesn't mean I'm anti-Apple.  I have two Ipods, one syncs and one doesn't however all of the downloaded music on them was not purchased through Itunes, but rather through Amazon.com.  Amazon is less expensive then Itunes.  An Apple Head doesn't care about the price.  

I actually own four computers, six if you count the tablet and the phone, one of which is a very large Imac located up in what my friends call The Compu-Gym-Music room.  I use that computer almost as much as the Samsung gaming laptop down in the down in the dining room.  It's a decent computer even though I hate stacks.  I have a friend who owns everything Apple, he thinks stacks are the greatest.  That's why he's an Apple Head and I'm not.  I don't hold it against him.  He's a very nice guy.  He is the perfect Apple customer.  If they put it on the market, he will buy it.  

Of course this is nothing new, manufacturers have always wanted to build a loyal customer base who would return over and over and over again.  At one point in our electronic history, General Electric was the "go to company."  Radios, televisions, washing machines, power generators at the Hoover Dam, if it ran on electricity it was made by General Electric.  Times have changed.  This year at the WWDC Apple seemed to be signaling to the world that they understand.  Apple Heads will always be Apple Heads, they will change as does the company.  Will they understand what's happening?  Probably not.  If they do, all Apple needs to do is flash a Purple Plaid Iphone in front of their eyes and whisper "look what's new this year."