Celebrating 60 years of Star Trek with a nostalgic view of the USS Enterprise model, an open book, and a themed drink, blending classic sci-fi adventure with modern fandom.
Star Trek aired three years before I was born, yet it has had a significant influence on my life. The only thing more profound and more influential has been my faith and salvation in Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior.
To me, Star Trek has long served as an earthly role model. It is more than a story or a television show. It is an aspiration for how a fallen world might come together and work for the common good. The ethos of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets represents an ideal that a world or species might pursue on its own, if there were no grand Savior.
TiVo, there is a name I haven't heard or thought about in a while. I used to love the hardware and platform. I thought I was the coolest tech-savvy person, and that TiVo was the way to watch TV. The tech was just so cool.
At one point, I had three of them. Most were the OTA version, though I had the cable version once with a CableCARD. That was an adventure to get working.
This has been some week for hardware and appliance problems in my household.
Thursday, I had a silent hard drive crash. It could have happened before then, but I didn't notice it until Thursday. The drive was there last week, but Windows 11 would not recognize it. I tried it in two different computers to rule out bad cables or a motherboard issue.
I didn't realize the drive was 10 years and 3 months old until I removed it and looked at it. It is kind of like a washer, you don't think about how old it is until something happens. I had a stale backup, so I probably lost 5 to 10 percent of the stuff that was not backed up.
Celebrating 25 years of blogging with gratitude, reflection, and a sweet slice of success surrounded by creativity and joy.
August 6, 2001, 25 years ago. I started blogging. I had a website made by Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GTE (now Verizon) in the homepages they offered back in those days for residential customers. In fact, your ISP provided everything for you. You had so much website space and an ISP-provided email, which you lost if you changed providers. That's foreign today.
But I started on Blogger before it was owned by Google on this date in 2001. Hard to believe it's been 25 years since I started blogging. Here is my first post ever. It's even harder to imagine I've been doing this for that long. I think blogging helps me get stuff off my chest, though very, very few people read it. I like to vent, review, or just get my thoughts down about different subjects. I like to think not only have my website and my blogging improved, but my knowledge has improved. Here's to 70 more years of blogging. I hope to be blogging and to have a website of some kind, no matter how they may change in the future. So Happy Blogiversary to me.
Do you ever have a bunch of blog post ideas bouncing around in your head but no idea where to start, what would actually be interesting, or how to flesh them out? That's been me lately.
My vision is improving, but my eyes aren't fully healed. My right eye, the first to be operated on, just hit the one-month mark. The left is about two weeks behind. I have one more doctor visit to get a prescription for reading glasses and maybe fine-tune my distance vision. Distance seems okay, but reading and intermediate vision are tricky. The intermediate could use some fine tuning, and my short-distance vision is definitely worse and needs more correction. With this better vision, I'm trying to blog more, get more done, and make progress before the next hurdle.
Catching up feels overwhelming. I keep trying to do five things at once, so I need to slow down and focus. On top of everything else, I have a backlog of podcasts to listen to or watch and a pile of unread items in my RSS reader. I'm slowly whittling the list down.
I'm trying a new program called Wispr Flow to compose this post and see how it works. I've always wondered if composing this way, using my voice, would be easier than typing and then refining. I'll give it a shot for a little while and see if it helps me focus. If it goes well, I might use it more for quick drafts.
I just wanted to say I saw the news of John C. Dvorak passing yesterday. I hadn't heard much from him in years and often assumed he had retired. I was first introduced to him by watching Leo LaPorte and TechTV back in the day.
I remember being introduced to Google Voice when Mr. Dvorak and Leo talked about it on a show. I can't recall the exact show or episode, but Mr. Dvorak talked about how he and his son used it to save on phone costs. If I remember correctly, it helped with long-distance charges, though I'm not certain. I also remember reading the articles he wrote for PC Magazine.
What I didn't know until he passed was that he came from a semi-famous family, the inventor of the Dvorak Keyboard (never used one).
It's getting to the point where some of the pioneers from the internet era are starting to pass, and that's a sad reality. I knew of John C. Dvorak more than Om Malik, even though Mr. Malik and I were closer in age. These losses feel like the end of a chapter.
Praying for his family to have strength and resolve.
A man reflects with quiet satisfaction as he reviews positive echo results, surrounded by reminders of gratitude, strength, and progress in a warm, sunlit room.
I wanted to share a long-overdue health update about what has happened this year and why I can finally talk about it. I recently had my second Camzyos cardiology echo and doctor’s visit of the year. I normally go every six months, and this visit gave me my best numbers yet.
On Camzyos, my obstruction is much better controlled. My echo looked fantastic, so I included a table below comparing my results before and after starting Camzyos.
When I first started Camzyos, I was not getting my refills consistently because of REMS requirements and the timing of my echoes and doctor’s visits. This created gaps in treatment. Once my refills became consistent and those delays stopped, the treatment began working much better.
Celebrating 70 years of USF's rich history and vibrant campus life, where tradition meets innovation under the open skies.
As you get older, anniversaries and milestones hit you differently. I don't know why. I don't regret anything in my life, but I do feel nostalgic sometimes. The other day, driving to work, I learned that the University of South Florida is celebrating 70 years this year. That surprised me, because the first founding class attended in 1960, so the 70th anniversary is actually a few years off.
I attended USF from 1987 to 1990. I didn't graduate; I would have had about two years left. 1991 would have been my graduation year, but I was taking it nice and slow. Most people were taking five years, so 1992 would have been my year if I had stayed on track. What would have been my degree? Hold your chair and keep seated, but it would have been Music Education with a minor in Florida History.
Money ran out, I was loaned out, and I decided to join the workforce. Funny enough, I never moved very far from USF. I now work at a non-profit hospital on the USF campus, so for almost my entire adult life I've been connected to the university in one way or another. Technically I guess I can't call myself an alum, but in every other sense I am one.
Here's to USF, 70 years, and all the good you've brought to the community. Go Bulls! 🤘
At a pivotal crossroads, a nation contemplates its future between the pursuit of wealth and industry or the call to civic duty and democratic engagement.
I turn 57 this month, and with everything going on in the world, it almost feels like an afterthought. This year feels worse, more doom and gloom than others. I am not entirely sure why, but it is not just politics. The economy has been rough too, with gas prices staying high, in my case over $4.25 a gallon, along with rising costs across the board and ongoing tech hardware shortages. It all adds to the sense that things are off.
I have never seen as much upheaval as I have this past year. I have also never witnessed in my adult life companies and wealthy individuals fawn over a President to this extent, while much of the media seems complicit. Then they wonder why their trustworthiness is at an all-time low. I believe in a neutral, fact-based media, but in reality we have never truly had one in this country except when it suited particular interests.
A cluttered desk overflowing with DVDs, game controllers, and a computer setup highlights the challenge of balancing a busy to-do list with the pursuit of better health and productivity.
I haven't blogged lately for several reasons. I have been feeling much better from my Obstructive Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (I have blogged extensively about it in several past posts). I will just say my Camzyos and Metoprolol 200 mg ER twice daily seems to be working. I am sleeping at night and I hardly feel my heart symptoms anymore. The only lingering negative is a high heart rate most of the time, even when sleeping. But I have more energy, and that is actually why I haven't been blogging as much.
I know what you are thinking: if you are feeling better, why aren't you blogging? Well, it is because I am catching up on backlogged personal projects I have wanted to get done, and spending too much money in the process. Ever since AI came on the scene, I have been getting up to speed and, with its help, doing things I have wanted to do but didn't have the knowledge or know where to look. For instance, I have over 2,000 discs (DVDs, CDs, and Blu-rays) from over 30 years of accumulation that I am finally archiving and getting into my Plex server for my home. I had no one to ask and couldn't find resources, so I just had the discs sitting around, many never opened, as I relied on streaming services. But I have been on a purge of subscription services since early last year. I am also finding approximately 100 DVDs that have either disc rot or are scratched. That last one really hurts, as most of the disc-rotted and scratched discs have never been opened. So there has been a renewed sense of urgency on my part to get these things archivally backed up.
