The PolyBlog

Today I choose to time travel (TIC00063f)

September 28 2020

Okay, so time travel might be a little extreme of a description. But back in 2017, I was playing with social media managers to manage my sharing of posts, etc. I tried Buffer, Friends+.me, Hootsuite, a few others. I was basically looking for a free social media manager, and for a while, it worked.

I could write posts on my blog, go to my account on one of the generic apps, call it “social media manager X” (aka SMM X), paste the link, add some text, and post. The goal at the time was to start scheduling posts in line with the “best advice” of the day. Which, essentially, was to schedule posts so they would go out multiple times during the day, allow you to post at peak periods that would solicit feedback and reaction, and let you “build your brand”.

The overall selling point for the companies was that you could basically plan out and schedule a week or a month’s worth of engagement, do it all at once, and forget about it for the week. The autoposter would take all your pre-scheduled tweets and IG posts, and share them at the appropriate times. You could even monitor analytics to see that perhaps Tuesdays were quieter than Wednesdays, or afternoons prompted more reactions than mornings, or 3:00 p.m. was better than 4:00 p.m. when people were starting to think about heading home.

And for awhile, I let it sucker me in. I was thinking that I should be doing these things from my two websites, polywogg.ca and thepolyblog.ca. Drive engagement. Build a brand.

But it’s not really me. Sure, I produce a lot of content. But I’m not trying to build my brand. I’m not planning on monetizing any of it, at least I don’t think so. Maybe I will once I retire for some of my publications, but even then, I’m not convinced that is the way I’ll go.

It all seemed just a little too “commercial” for what is and shall always remain a personal site. But the real reason I switched to a plugin within WP for my site was because FaceBook changed the way they let outside plugins or sites paste to FaceBook. They require that you register as an “app” in essence, to make sure you are authorized to post to specific accounts, and for the site to be able to track everything you do. While they claim it is about security, most of it is about future monetization as you get bigger and bigger. At some point, they force you to pay for a business account. And part of the “choke” point setup is blocking certain types of links.

I found a new solution, or so I thought when I bought it, but I’ve had some annoying little quirks of late with my website and autoposting. I was finding that the plugin, which is designed to help me post, was just a bit of a pain in the patootie. As I said, I paid for a one-year subscription, and I suspect I’m going to kill it shortly from the site. And then leave negative reviews everywhere I can think to do it because they basically advertise mostly-false claims to get you to buy it.

As a quick recap then, I started off posting just normal i.e., manually — cut and paste to FB, Twitter, Google+. Then I went with a social media manager site, pasting one link there and letting it share to all three sites for me. But that was starting to be a bit challenging to manage as I was also doing all my TV episode reviews through there plus meme creation, and it all started to feel a bit too commercial for my personal musings. So I killed off Google+, dropped a lot of my auto-sharing, found a new tool, and again, I’m at that point where I’m asking, “Is this really the best approach?”.

Lots of the original sites I was dealing with have gone the way of the dodo almost. Well, maybe not quite extinct, but also not at the top of the heap either. Other services have come along, most have shaken the bugs out of the industry, and they have all for the most part found ways to monetize the management.

My needs are simple. Soooo, I am trying Buffer.com again. My old account is easily revived, I’m grandfathered into a free albeit limited account, and I’m playing with it. It feels like 2016, 2017 all over again.

One part of that experience though is different. If I want to share with FaceBook, I have to share to a page, not my personal profile. Which all things considered, isn’t a bad idea. Some people have found my volume on my personal account kind of high and muted me accordingly. I’ve also picked up a few people who friended me on FB but they really only want my website feeds. I feel like a couple of them should be in the page category only.

So I’m going to let all my friends know I have a new page, and if they want my blog posts, they can look for them over there. I’ll give it a week, and then my personal stuff will truly only be my personal stuff, albeit including comics of the day. Hopefully, I’ll also be able to set all the privacy settings a bit more normally this way too.

Today I choose to time-travel back to an old technique I used about 3-4 years ago.

What choices are you making today?

Star Trek: Picard – Season 1 (TVR00013) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

September 27 2020

Overview

The new show takes place after the movies and the end of the Next Generation timeline. There has been what appeared to be an AI uprising and a catastrophic attack that led the Federation to ban all cybernetic organisms (like Data or more inferior copies) and to withdraw from helping the Romulans as their planetary system collapsed. Picard fought for both communities and lost, and he resigned from Starfleet. Now he sits in his vineyard estate and watches his body and mind slowly stagnate.

The first episode sets up the premise of the show with a bang. A young couple is hanging out, getting to know each other in an apartment, and suddenly shock troopers enter the room, kill the boy, and are targeting the girl. She goes into super combat mode, takes them out, escapes, and while she doesn’t know how she did any of it, she knows she has to find a man she has never met — Jean-Luc Picard. It doesn’t take long for them to figure out she’s actually an advanced android, a synthetic human, based on the neural pathways that Data had before he died. Making her basically Data’s daughter. One of two “twins”. She’s killed and Picard goes in search of the second daughter, Soji, before someone kills her.

Episodes That I Liked

Episodes 4 and 6 were pretty cool, with a warrior caste of nuns and some battles, plus Jean-Luc visiting a Borg cube to visit Hugh and the Romulan reclamation project. Can anyone say PTSD? I rated both episodes 5/5.

There are another 5 episodes that I gave a 4/5 rating to…Episode 2 where you learn about the reclamation project and Soji (with a great health and safety sign on the cube that says it has been 5843 days without an assimilation); EP 3 where they’re getting ready for the voyage and putting a team together; EP 5 where they meet up with Bruce Maddox again; EP 8 where they meet Noonian’s descendant; and the season finale, EP 10, with potential space battles, cubes, and androids galore.

Episodes That Were Watchable

EP 7 is a giant fan favourite because it introduces you to Riker and Troi and gives you some of their history after the movies. It has not been sunshine and roses, but they have found a way to make it work. And EP 9, the first part of the finale, shows you the life the synthetics have built, so highly watchable.

Episodes That I Didn’t Like

I described EP 1 in the Overview above, and it SHOULD have been awesome with the shock troops and the new synthetic. Instead, it was actually pretty slow. And the super genius who supposedly built her? Bruce Maddox. The same one who tried to have Data declared a toaster in Season 1 of ST:TNG and whose proposals Data found “intriguing”, yet he’s the God of Cybernetics who built the twin daughters? Yeah, right. I would have accepted his children or his protegé being the creator, but Maddox? He was fun in Season 1 but a bit of a joke.

List of Episodes from Season 1

S01E01	Remembrance	Really? Maddox is the new Noonian? Doubtful	🐸🐸⚪⚪⚪
S01E02	Maps and Legends	Best line was the sign: This facility has gone 5843 days without an assimilation	🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪
S01E03	The End is the Beginning	Can we go already? Yes, fine. Engage.	🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪
S01E04	Absolute Candor	Warrior nuns are cool, but Picard owes somebody a ship	🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸
S01E05	Stardust City Rag	Hey, Bruce, good to see you again	🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪
S01E06	The Impossible Box	If you can’t go home again, you might as well revisit your last trip to hell	🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸
S01E07	Nepenthe	When you need a refuge, find two old friends and couch surf	🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪
S01E08	Broken Pieces	Good news, the cyberneticist won’t kill anyone else	🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪
S01E09	Et in Arcadia Ego Pt 1	Well, as synths go, it’s better than Lal and Lore	🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪
S01E10	Et in Arcadia Ego Pt 2	One impossible thing at a time, plus an obvious one	🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The Bottom Line

This is not your father’s next-generation show.

Today I choose to grind it out (TIC00062f)

September 27 2020

For my website management, it is probably trite to note that some parts are more enjoyable than others. Writing posts is fun; managing plugin updates is not. Solving gremlin issues is not.

A few months ago, I revamped the site. Mostly because I had accumulated enough little management issues that my site was running slow and I was starting to notice irregularities in different posts. You would expect that if multiple people were posting on a site, the back-end admin area might get a little cluttered. People might save photos in odd places, for instance. But my site is all me. Everything should have a place and everything should BE in that place. More or less.

Most of the time, nobody would ever notice. Except a lot of my posts are part of various series of posts. And on one page, I used “blah blah blah – blah blah” as the title, and on the next, “blah blah blah: blah blah and blah”. A dash in one case, a colon in another, and inconsistent wording for the blah part. Most people wouldn’t notice, but in some cases, it was off enough that it made me question what the title SHOULD be i.e, what was the goal of the post? Not simple pedantic naming conventions but actually what I was trying to communicate.

The images and tables were messed up in a number of places, and some people had noticed enough to point it out. But overall? It just needed an update.

So I did it. The last time I will be able to do that manually from start to finish, partly as I am close to 1500 posts in total. That’s a lot of chickenfeed.

I still have about 150 posts that are messed up somewhat for photos, and I’ll eventually “fix” those in the fullness of time. They’re fine as they are, I just flagged them so that when I finish some photo updating, I’ll fix those too. I’ve ground through a couple of layout and table issues in the last week. But I had a big one that was outstanding.

My book reviews list was not complete. I have 190 BRs on the site, all live. I failed to notice that #160 was messed up for format when I went through them earlier, but I caught part of it tonight. Anyway. The real issue was that the index only listed the first 50. There were another 140 to add to the index, and while I have a lot of the info in a spreadsheet, each item in the index needs to link to the proper post with the review.

I had done about 10 at a time previously and each batch was taking me over an hour to get into shape. I split it into a bunch of stages so that I could assembly-line-bulldoze some updates earlier, and it fixed the majority of layout issues in batches, but it still left me with the index not done. I figured this was something that would take me several months to update, perhaps 10 here or there, or even 20 in a day.

Earlier today, I started looking at it differently, and seeing if I could tweak my Excel spreadsheet to put all the info I could into a single “paste” and then just edit the remaining missing pieces. In the end, it worked. I added 130 records at once, complete with full HTML code for the links, and then just manually pasted the URLs one by one into the website’s database table. All together, it ran about an hour. The whole thing? Up and running? In about an hour? Woohoo!

Months worth of work the old way, and because I decided to just grind it out a bit today, I dug in, found a faster way to do it, and saved myself a ton of work. Plus moved my markers on what is “next” on my to-do list.

Today I choose to just grind it out on my website and update my Book Reviews index.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose choices over outcomes (TIC00061f)

September 25 2020

Some days it is really hard not to measure my commitment to making conscious choices simply by the outcomes that result. But the process of “making choices”, of doing so consciously, of recognizing what choices I am making rather than drifting, is the intent. It doesn’t mean I’ll end up with a perfect outcome or even a better outcome.

It is about being aware of my life and the choices I make throughout the day.

As a small sideways digression, people are sharing a popular twitter feed this week about advice from Nora Roberts about balancing work and life, with the idea that instead of saying you’ll keep all the “life balls” in the air and prioritize those over work ones, her advice was that there are glass balls that are fragile and plastic ones that aren’t as important. So you prioritize glass ones over plastic ones. Some days that means you might prioritize a big work project over a walk with your kid. Not that you prioritize all work over your kid, but that big work things are important too and sometimes small life things are in the plastic category. It’s a popular meme / series that gets shared, along with Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff / Know Your Priorities, blah blah blah, but honestly it is mostly worthless since the real challenge is when you have two glass balls in the air and you can only reach one. THAT’s the challenge, not plastic vs. glass, those are easy.

Anyway, the digression is that while the metaphor and methodology breaks down, the real value to me is that it reinforces the recognition that you are indeed making choices. And sometimes those choices are made with the best information you have available and it just doesn’t work out.

This morning, Andrea had a big dental surgery appointment. It wasn’t in our shared calendar last week when I booked a weekly chiro appointment, so I booked it for 8:30. It gives me enough time to get back home to start work. Then Andrea’s appointment overlapped, but we discussed it and decided that I could fit both in — take her to the dentist, rush back across town to the chiro, rush back down to the dentist. It was a good decision to allow me to keep the appointment, which my back needed, albeit rushed. So we did.

Except getting back to the chiro was more hectic than I initially expected. The highway was clogged so I rerouted, and some annoying traffic, but made it, and I thought I was late as I normally go for 8:15. I forgot I had bumped it to 8:30 this week, so I actually hurried only to sit and wait. No biggie. And my back decided not to cooperate. Whereas normally I can get three good adjustments down my back, we tried 7 adjustments and only 2 went a little. For my neck, normally I get good releases on both sides, and this time my left side refused to release at all. Whine. We do a bit of electro-stimulation, which I normally do on my back, but since my back didn’t release, I had to do it sitting up. I don’t know if I slept wrong or was just tense from rushing, but again, I made the right decision, just didn’t lead to a great outcome.

Back downtown to get Andrea, didn’t want her waiting too long, made it in time for the end of her appointment. But no Andrea. Sent her text, no response. Which meant she was still with the dentist. Wait a bit. Wait a bit more. Move the car to an open parking spot. Wait some more. About 25 minutes past when she was supposed to be done. Hmmm. I phone the clinic who informs me that the appointment was not 1 hour, as Andrea had thought, but THREE hours. Wait, that’s not what we were supposed to do. They changed the approach to the appointment from what they’d originally discussed, she didn’t even know. Again, right decision, but now I’m looking down another 90 minutes. The nurse checked, actually they’ll be done in 30 minutes. Do I want to park in the free underground parking (normally cramped lot) and wait in the waiting room? Umm, during COVID? How about never?

So I drive over to a Tim Horton’s. Again, perfectly reasonable decision based on what I knew. Except I didn’t know half the roads were ripped up nearby nor that the Timmy’s I was going to actually doesn’t have a drive-through. And considering the sketchy location, not the best place for health protocols either. Okay, I’ll drive a bit farther. Again, construction was TERRIBLE. Slow going, finally get to where I want to be and huge lineups. Much longer than I have time for. So again, I make the right decision and head back. About half-way back, Andrea phones to say she is done, and while I would be about 5 minutes away normally, it was almost 10-15 by the time I made it.

Okay, let’s go home. No, wait, we have to stop for prescriptions. We have a good pharmacy we use, normally it is super-reliable. Today the woman wants to push me to pick up the pain meds tomorrow. Yeah, no. I need them now. She’s in the car waiting. Oh, okay, how about after 12:00. It was only 10:30…I negotiate 11:30 and head out to take Andrea home. She’ll have to settle for Tylenol in the meantime.

All right decisions, just not breaking my way.

I do a dance at catching up on work for an hour, but I’m really just shuffling meetings and poking people for info. Nothing really productive. I have to miss my weekly divisional meeting because that’s when the pain prescriptions will be ready, and so I decide to just take half the day as leave. I could have taken the whole day, and I don’t know if either of them is the “right” answer, but it’s functional anyway. I go back to the pharmacy, hoping to be quickly in and out, but no, they have to talk to me about the new prescriptions.

Meanwhile, while I’m standing there waiting to talk to the pharmacist, I realize I’m standing about 10 feet or so from someone in a mask who is actually there for a COVID test. I don’t need to be anywhere near them, so I kind of wander into some other aisles to wait to be called. Did she have COVID cooties that I needed to run away from? Probably not, but I just don’t need to be there. Grab some other items, get the info on the prescriptions, back home, hand everything over and try to work.

I was really struggling to concentrate. So I’m ticking off little items. Nothing important, just small to-do list items. Again, the right decision since I couldn’t focus on big things, but mediocre results for the day.

Lunch with Jacob was McDonald’s for a treat, and Pizza Hut for dinner to celebrate the end of the first week of school. Good decisions, blah for outcomes. Not very healthy.

Then Andrea — yes, ANDREA — suggested we go out for ice cream since it is one of the few things she can eat. Sure, work our way over to DQ to go through a drive-through, and it is in SLOW MOTION delivery. I took the long way to get there which was fine but then we sat in the line for close to 20 minutes before we got a small cone, a small sundae, and two Misty Freezes instead of the two Misty Slushes we ordered (Freezes add ice cream). It was clear the guy was new, was having a bad day, maybe even a bad first day, and I was too tired to ask him to correct the order. I figured we’d make it through, but of course, as it turns out, Jacob doesn’t like Misty Freezes with the ice cream added. Sigh.

I felt like the whole day I was making good decisions, even the “right” decisions, in conscious ways, prioritizing the right glass balls, while plastic balls rained all around us. It felt like a crapfest of a day for outcomes. Each one seemed to go slightly wrong.

But that’s the rub. I can’t control many of those outcomes. I can just control that I’m making conscious choices as I go. I could have cancelled my chiro and had NO adjustment; I could have showed up at 9:00 and just waited across the road for an hour; I could have waited for the prescriptions for an hour; I could have heated up leftovers at home for lunch and dinner; I could have gone to a different place for dessert; I could have taken the whole day off. And the outcomes wouldn’t have looked much different.

The “goal”, if there is one, is to be aware of the choices I’m making as I make them, which I did.

Today I choose choices over outcomes.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to buck the new normal (TIC00060f)

September 24 2020

I went old-school today to combat some of the impacts of COVID isolation. Early this morning, I had coffee with a friend and coworker at a local Starbucks. She and I have future plans to do ice cream, etc., but today we started with a coffee at Starbucks. We wore our masks in the store, sat outside on the patio a decent distance apart while we noshed and sipped. It was so much fun, I made her late for her 10:00 a.m. meeting, just sitting and chatting. Like normal people used to do.

I posted to our work chat area that I had done that, and that it was almost worth having showered, shaved, and put on real pants to leave the house instead of living in track pants and shorts. I had whip cream on my hot chocolate, but if I had remembered chocolate or cinnamon powder to sprinkle on top, that would have put it over the top. 🙂

And yet, it’s not going to last as an option once the cold weather hits. We sat on the patio, which was fine, nobody else around. Meanwhile, inside, there were people set up like old times with their laptops, just hanging out. None of them wearing a mask. Because of course they’re sipping, in theory. Although most of them were sitting with empty plates and empty cups, just typing on their laptop or playing on their phone, no mask on. It wasn’t crowded, people were still distanced, but I did NOT feel comfortable. I had thought that maybe we could go to Tim Horton’s some time, perhaps Jacob, Andrea and I, for lunch, but apparently it’s relatively the same. People with no masks on lingering long after they finished their food. Sigh. Is it any wonder we’re in a second wave?

Later today, I had to run out to get groceries as I keep forgetting to do the grocery list online at night to order stuff. But today, I managed to plan ahead sufficiently earlier in the week and charge my bluetooth headphones. Which means I could listen to music while I shopped. Oh. My. Goodness. I’ve forgotten what it is like to just tune out the world and tune into the music. It used to be one of my favorite things with grocery shopping. 30-40 minutes of just me listening to music, no need to think, or talk to anyone. Just drift off and zone out. I can’t quite zone out in a COVID world for shopping, but it was still pretty great. The GoGos still had the beat. Jim Stafford had Spiders and Snakes and no clue what he was doing with his girlfriend. Bob Seger reassured me through Shakedown that no matter what, he’s going to take me down once I step across that line. I didn’t care, I let Apple choose the music, didn’t even bother with a playlist. It was a small piece of heaven. Even if it took a little work to figure out what order I had to follow to put on my mask, glasses, and headphones (MGH, for those curious).

Today I choose to buck the new normal and kick it old school, albeit safely.

What choices are you making today?