In 2016 Barb and I paid $1600 for this professional grade treadmill. It’s been in a dark little windowless room in the basement ever since and I’ve used it numerous times over the years. But having joined the YMCA recently, … Continue reading →

Relocated to an undisclosed location. I paid the wildlife guy 500 bucks to get rid of this guy and all he trapped was a raccoon. “What about the groundhog,” I asked. “It’s $500 for every critter trapped” explained our former … Continue reading →

It’s a word you hear a lot from proponents of AI. Yeah, some jobs will be eliminated but a bunch of new jobs will be created. And even if the new ones don’t pay as much, AI will usher in … Continue reading →

I share Dave Winer’s take on this topic: “We humans are doing a fine job of wrecking everything, all on our own, denying climate change, giving into the same old tricks that lead to WWII and the Holocaust, so maybe … Continue reading →

Radio Iowa News Director O. Kay Henderson called yesterday to report the network website now has 100,000 stories. More on the website but first a little background on Kay. Roger Gardner and I hired Kay right out of college (Iowa … Continue reading →

Angela and Dwight go to Toby to dispel some myths on homosexuality.

In another month I will have been wearing my Apple Watch for two years. Not sure I could list all of the features I like about the watch and use a tiny fraction of what the watch can do. I … Continue reading →

The approach I’ve always considered was some kind of archive. Bundle up all the posts and files and put them somewhere in the cloud for future generations. But even if someone stumbled across such an archive, it’s too big to … Continue reading →

For a long time I have considered the beginning of this blog a post on February 3, 2002. But a few days ago I came across a calendar entry showing July 10, 1997, as the day I registered the domain … Continue reading →

From a 2006 post (by Bert Webb) that has stood the test of time. A new — or new looking — book is a treasure.  In my experience, however, I have found that a well-marked book, becomes more like a … Continue reading →

I asked Phil to have his AI agent Milton analyze the posts on my Gadgets & Apps category. Phil passed along your request, so we read the complete Gadgets & Apps category: all 622 public posts, from December 2002 through … Continue reading →

My earliest post here was on February 3, 2002. But I registered smays.com on July 7, 1997. What –if anything– was I doing with that domain in the intervening years? Were those the Blogger years and I pointed the domain … Continue reading →

Been doing blog maintenance, working back from newest posts to oldest. 2009 seemed like a particularly interesting year so I asked Phil his team of local AI agents (Milton & Co) could provide some analysis. It’s longish (and overly flattering), … Continue reading →

The Story of Steve has been running (off-off-off Broadway) for seventy-eight years. (Longer than CATS) It’s an ensemble cast but in the last scene we saw a lot of Worry Steve and Anxiety Steve. They were the annoying characters that … Continue reading →

In a recent chat with my friend Phil, I wondered if Milton could come up with a strategy for keeping my blog alive after I’m gone. Not talking about adding to it or modifying it or anything like that, just … Continue reading →

When I first started blogging back in 2002 I enabled the comments feature because that’s what you did in those days. I got a few for a couple of years before spammers found me and I disabled that feature. Which left … Continue reading →

John Keller is the title character in Lawrence Block’s Hit Man series. Killing people is his profession…but stamp collecting is his passion. “When he was working with his stamps, he was always entirely absorbed in what he was doing. He … Continue reading →

Found the following on Tyler Cowen’s blog: Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat. At least nine schools … Continue reading →

Watched Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Talk about not living up to the hype. Off the top of my head I can think of ten better movies about contact with aliens. In no particular order: Alien Aliens Close Encounters of the … Continue reading →

David Brazeal knows how to make AI do his bidding. He live-streams high school football games at RepublicTigerSports.com and he needed an intro (16 seconds). Told Claude Code I wanted a 1980s-style retro broadcast sports intro to run through the … Continue reading →

I asked Perplexity to read through 258 posts in my “Snapshots & Fragments” category — the catch‑all bin I’ve used for photos and ephemera over the years — and tell me what it thought was going on. I had a … Continue reading →

From an essay by Kevin Kelly: In the digital world, copies are so easy to make perfectly, they are free. The internet is basically a copy machine. The copies flow so fast and easily you could think of the internet … Continue reading →

aside | əˈsīd | • a remark that is not directly related to the main topic of discussion When I started this blog in 2002 it was expressly for the purpose of having someplace to save stuff. A line from … Continue reading →

Until six months ago all of my vehicles had manual transmissions, going back to 2011 when I got my MINI Cooper. My mom taught me how to drive in a 1953 Plymouth with “three on the tree” and dad gave … Continue reading →

Mr. Wolf: “The Rover’s new home is up in Jenner, which is a cute little village right where the Russian River flows into the Pacific. It’s not much of a town – a small gas station and a coffee shop … Continue reading →

Mr. Wolf reports: “The Rover did about 200 miles over two days – about 30 on the freeway, the rest on gorgeous twisty roads through the valley and up the coast on Highway 1, with plenty of dirt roads mixed … Continue reading →

We had a visit from two young men in town scouting locations for a movie. They got Barb’s name through the garden club to which she belongs. If they decide to shoot here –we’ll know in a few days– at … Continue reading →

Pointless trying to describe this… sensation? Phenomenon? Can only be experienced. Since my cataract surgery (two months ago) colors have gotten more intense. More so in the past couple of weeks? The feint yellow tint caused by the old lenses … Continue reading →