Busy days around these parts as the summer starts its decline. Both cars failed inspection and getting them up to spec was a nice chunk of change. Our younger kiddo is starting high school next week, while our older one is moving into her apartment this weekend before starting her sophomore year of college. My mother-in-law’s visiting for a couple of weeks after we get back from the…
This is a truly fantastic album cover: Is the guy on the left aiming to block the shot of the guy on the right? Or is he also aiming for the red ball, but has poor vision? What is the guy in the white suit (Isao, I assume) hoping is the outcome of this particular battle? Does “Three Cushion” mean something that I don’t know? The back cover creates more questions rather than…
Happy 150th birthday (yesterday) to my great-grandfather Andrew. He was born in Poland 99 years before I was born and died here in the US 20 years before I came into the world. He seems like he would have been an interesting guy to know. Look at that picture! Interestingly, that shot was taken on the farm he purchased from the family of Robert Purvis, an active member of the Abolitionist movement…
OK, so again a month has passed between Weeknotes. This time I’ve been spending time moving my site because, hey, it’s been a couple of years and what’s laze.net without a periodic server move? I wrote a bit about it on the site already, but I thought I’d comment a little more about the process here. Since I was moving from a service that had Hugo on the backend, I decided…
About three weeks ago, a neighbor down the street posted to a local group that she found an orange cat laying on her porch. She’d brought him in for the night, but was looking for his person. The next day, I was outside chatting with my next-door neighbor when a woman drove by asking if we’d seen two loose cats. I said, “No, but our neighbor down the block found one…
If you’re reading this, you’re seeing laze.net at its new home. And pretty much nothing should look any different. Any previous URLs should either be the same or automatically redirect. Old functionality is still there. Some things on the maintenance side have gotten easier for me (after struggling a bit with the initial set-up). My initial “comeback” a couple of years ago…
I’m not a typewriter geek in the least, but having grown up using my mom’s typewriter and, later, in middle school, an electric typewriter, I can certainly understand how people enjoy typewriters as a hobby to obsess over. And like any tactile hobby, it’s best to have a nearby physical brick-and-mortar store, one that allows you to try typewriters to see which have the desired…
Yesterday I went to Safeway–a grocery store in town we only go to once or twice a year–because they’re the only store in the area currently carrying the (very good) Waterloo Root Beer Float seltzer. Safeway was our primary our first year-and-a-half out of college, from 1998-2000 when we lived closer to the city, so we had a frequent shopper card tied to our phone number. I never…
This weekend, on the way home from a drive-in event at the mighty Mahoning (largest screen in the US! only 35mm projecting drive-in left!), the Simulwatch crew and I stopped off at Timeline Arcade in York, PA. We dropped $10 a piece for an hour of time in their substantial arcade. Their front room has a nice mix of newer games, classics, and pinball machines while the back room is packed with some…
The Occasional Weeknote seems to be getting every so slightly more occasional with each week that passes. It’s been almost a month since the last one. Sorry? Last week, I had my second ER visit of the year (I’m fine, but learned what it feels like to pass out… it’s weird and disorienting). I’d be OK with no more ER visits this year. I’ve been doing a lot of…
Today I scanned some photos taken by my grandfather, possibly during the late 1920s/early 1930s in California (at a period in his young life where he ran away from home and travelled across the country on the rails as a self-described hobo) or slightly later in Pennsylvania (when he was dating my grandmother). My grandmother said he raced in Pennsylvania, where he would drop her off at a dance and…
The conversation continues in favor of physical media over streaming (or at least working some physical media into your listening rotation). I’ve been listening to CDs, vinyl, tapes, even the occasional 8-track, especially in the evening and on weekends when I can sit down in my living room with a book (or without) and intentionally putting on a specific album, flipping through the liner…
Every so often I’ll search for a rare album and find a link to a Bandcamp page and get momentarily excited about it. But, sadly, it’s clear upon clicking the page that the page is a garbage spam page that has no actual music, no affiliation with the artist, and an album description that just points off to another site. What’s funny, though, is that I never expected a random tape…
Following Robert Birming ’s lead, for the month of June I’ll be maintaining a list of posts that I’ve enjoyed. I’m shooting to have a list of 30 by the end of the month, but they may not match one-to-one for the day that I find them. I’m also going to try and share a variety of writers and topics. They may be new, or a bit older. The idea here is just to share the…
I’m at the stage of life that I definitely don’t shoot for “productive” weekends as much as I do “relaxing” ones with lots of downtime. But, every so often, a productive weekend isn’t so bad and helps get the following week off to a good start. This weekend was one of them. I started Saturday by heading back to my alma mater for a reunion brunch with…
Cross your fingers for me this weekend as I attempt a supposedly “easy” fix of the lid switch on our 26-year-old washing machine. I tried one super-simple tip involving zip ties that, sadly, did not fix our problem, but fully replacing the switch should hopefully fix it for a total cost of $8 (if you don’t count the $100 I spent on an overdue purchase of a wet/dry vac). And on…
This week I read Ben Lerner’s new book Transcription , a fictional dive into the early days of the pandemic, technology, and the effect of both on memory and experience. One particular sentence (actually, just a part of a sentence) late in the book really hit for me: "I felt eight and eighteen and forty-five all at once..." It evokes that feeling that you are well beyond your youth, but so…
I was 20 years old–a college sophomore–and civil rights leader/anti-gangster rap activist C. Delores Tucker was coming to speak at my school. I wrote a piece for the school paper about her forthcoming visit: *Mary Washington College Bullet*, Fredericksburg, VA; February 15, 1996, page 5. Article transcript Dr. C. DeLores Tucker, Chair of the National Political Congress of Black Women…
My company’s new health plan covers an online personal trainer, so for the first time, I’m giving it a shot. For all the running I’ve done over the last bunch of years, I’ve neglected any strength training and done only very little flexibility or balance work. I’m at that age where I need to break that streak and prep this bag of bones for the next stages of life. In…
Our internet bill was too high. It had gone beyond the promotional contract period and the triple-play bundle for 300/300 net, medium-level TV package, and home phone (yes, a landline!) was just too much considering that we almost never watched live TV/DVR anymore. My goal was simple: Increase our net to gigabit, keep the home phone, completely ditch cable. After struggling with their terrible web…
I once again have a functioning 8-track player, so now I can play my grandfather’s old Sons of the Pioneers 1 cartridges as well as knock off Monkees and Beatles groups doing covers. Yay! It involved opening up my Lear Jet H-300 , poking around a bit, and finally determining it was just a belt that needed replacing. I hadn’t played anything on it since 15 years ago, so it’s not a…
It’s been a while since I’ve posted an #ArchiveTheUnimportant item. Today’s is a 28-page paper newsletter from April 1990 that I found in the basement. Used Computer Locator billed itself as “The National Guide to Used Computers and Surplus Electronics.” One of dozens (or hundreds), I’m sure. The content was primarily want ads and larger ads, but also had some…
Richard MacManus wrote a piece last year titled “ Replanting Articles: Bring Legacy Posts to Your Website ” and it resonated with me before I even got to the text. It’s exactly what I’ve been doing since relaunching my site last year. In addition to writing new posts, I’ve been digging through old favorites that used to be on the site and bringing them back, dated…
Sometimes catching someone else up on your life (or writing such a blog post) is like those weekly status calls at work where it feels like you’re justifying your continued employment to your co-workers. Kinda weird, right? Instead of giving a summary of what I’ve been up to, I’m going to share a couple sentences from Craig Mod ’s Things Become Other Things that I liked:…
Quiet days are a must. Days where you don’t foist the “need-to-dos” on yourself. Days where moments of sitting outside and listening to the birds or feeling the wind blow make up the majority of the day. When reading a book or listening to music or writing a blog post or rearranging a room or taking a nap or just… thinking is what defines your time as…
The 25th weeknote is a bit short and uneventful. No real reason other than I’m just in a bit of a creative funk for the moment and wading through some general Life Overwhelm (which I feel like needs to be a Slack status or something). How about we just get into a few links and things? Some Links Worth Sharing The State of Black Bookstore report ‘human oversight’ is a meaningless…
A few things I’ve learned in the last few weeks: Good stress is still stress. The way car insurance operates makes very little sense to the average person (me). Almost everything you’d think works one way, works another. (Also: if your insurance company offers towing coverage, it’s not a “nice add-on feature.” Each time you use it counts as an insurance claim and…
(Read part one here, where I discuss my month with Qobuz.) I started with a free month of Qobuz and then used two months to try out Deezer. Let’s run down the list of my observations of how Deezer stacks up against Spotify (with some Qobuz commentary tossed in): Vs. Deezer Advantages Live radio - It’s pretty cool to see live radio integrated into a streaming app. Unfortunately, it…
Streaming sucks for artists because the major players pay squat per stream. And in Spotify’s case, artists who don’t get many streams may get literally nothing . One alternative to traditional streaming services is to bring focus back to your own personal music collection. That could be simply playing music locally on your PC/phone/DAP. It could also be streaming your music from a…
I was thinking today a bit about the first records I ever bought myself. It’s going back 40 years, so my memories be slightly switched about which purchase came first, but I know the two records and the two stores I got them from. The first record was Big & Beautiful , the Fat Boys’ third album, which came out in 1986. It was not exactly their best release and I wasn’t even aware…