Posted inEntertainment

I didn’t like “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” I have company.

After learning that Everything Everywhere All at Once got eleven Oscar nominations, I wanted to see this movie. Through the good graces of Apple TV, I found that I could watch it at no cost on the Showtime App, courtesy of our DirecTV subscription that includes Showtime. After spending 132 minutes watching the movie over a span of several days and finishing it tonight, that was exactly how much the movie was worth to me. Nothing. Or at least, very little. Though there were brief periods at the beginning and end of Everything where I felt connected to the characters…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment

Bill Maher has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths

I've been watching Bill Maher ever since his Politically Incorrect days. When he turned up on HBO with his Real Time With Bill Maher, twenty seasons ago, I watched him there. I still enjoy Maher. But the past few seasons, and maybe longer than that, Maher often acts like a caricature of a one-time liberal who now takes excessive pleasure in attacking what he believes are overly "woke" Democratic/progressive positions. I've got no problem with Maher doing that, so long as he doesn't twist the truth to make his point. Which, he does with disturbing regularity. Last Friday's Real Time…
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Posted inArcimoto

Arcimoto seems to be going out of business

I've been a long-time fan of Arcimoto, a company based in Eugene, fifty miles south of Salem, where I live. Arcimoto makes the FUV (Fun Utility Vehicle), a three-wheeled semi-enclosed electric sort-of-motorcycle. In Oregon you don't have to wear a helmet while driving it, so it's a unique blend of a car and motorcycle. I've been following the fortunes of Arcimoto for a long time. Heck, this blog even has an "Arcimoto" category with ten posts in it, including this one. As I said in my first post back in July 2018, I've got both Arcimoto anticipation and anxiety: I've…
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Posted inHome life

Our dog’s hip dysplasia diagnosis worries us

Pets are almost as important as children to those of us who no longer have children in the house. Or, in the case of my wife, have never had a child. So when we got a phone call from our vet tonight, giving us the results of X-rays taken when we wanted to know why Mooka, our Husky mix, was limping at times, what she told us was really disturbing. But not to Mooka. That's a plus side of being a dog. You don't know that you've been diagnosed with right hip dysplasia with degenerative joint disease.  What shocked my…
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Posted inWeb/Tech

Apple Support hindered and helped my iPhone 14 setups

This tale of my three phone calls to Apple Support a few days ago has a happy ending. My wife and I are enjoying the iPhone 14 Pro Max devices that we decided to get after using iPhone 8's since 2017. So we were six freaking iPhone generations old, something that hasn't come close to happening since we joined the iPhone cult way back when. (Too long ago for me to remember.) When the new phones arrived in the mail after ordering them from Verizon, our cellular carrier, I waited a day before taking the plunge into setting them up.…
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Posted inWeb/Tech

Another reason to hate what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter

It wasn't so long ago that I looked upon Elon Musk with admiration. Maybe even with a bit of adoration. After all, his Space X Starlink satellite internet system had rescued me and my wife from the hell of 7Mbps CenturyLink DSL, bringing our rural south Salem home into broadband heaven.  And I visualized owning one of his Tesla cars someday. Though they have their downsides (don't like relying so much on a touchscreen rather than normal controls), Tesla jumpstarted the electric car revolution that's bringing the internal combustion engine closer to a well-deserved global goodbye. When he bought Twitter,…
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Posted inEntertainment

Streaming shows I liked (but you may not)

We're all different. That's a truism. But this doesn't stop me from wanting to share streaming shows I've watched recently on Netflix, Apple TV+, and Hulu that appealed to me a lot, in hopes that maybe others would like them as much as I did. Here they are. Slow Horses - Apple TV+This is a British spy series with an appealing twist. The MI5 agents who are the centerpiece of the show are castoffs sentenced to spy-world purgatory for misdeeds they committed. So they haven't been fired, just consigned to live out their days doing usually boring menial work in…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Web/Tech Weblogs

Social media reform is needed, but the market mainly should decide

Today NBC's Meet the Press devoted its Sunday morning hour entirely to a discussion of social media: what's wrong with the way things are now on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and such, along with what needs to be done to fix those problems. It's a complicated subject with no easy answers. Here's what stuck in my mind after watching the program. Algorithms. Social media sites typically use computer algorithms to determine what gets shown to users. (Twitter is an exception, at least if a third party app is used to access Twitter, which I do. I only see tweets from…
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