My Studio Overfloweth (And More)

Posted by on December 1, 2025 No comments

I don’t know what exactly prompted me to start this bullshit again, but here I am, in the thick of it.  Actually, now I do remember.  eBay sends me emails every day for my saved searches and one saved search is rackmount synthesizers.  In the email was an auction for a Roland MKS-70, a pretty rare and highly desirable synth.  I figured, why not, I’d give it a try.  It’s been a while.  While I waited for the action to draw to a close, I stupidly did some additional browsing and found a Korg M1R, which is something I had on my "eventually" list.  It was a buy-it-now and mostly in range with what I would pay, so I put it on the watchlist.

I’ve mentioned this before and I don’t think eBay does this, but they should.  They should know that when someone makes me an offer for something on my watchlist, there’s probably a 90%+ chance I’m going to accept it.  That is a metric that would be very useful to sellers.  But you can see where I’m going with this.  I got an offer under $500 and I took it.  The big MKS-70 keyboard auction is still days away from finishing and I have a mental top price of $650 for that.

The MKS-70 auction comes up and I’m seeing the interest in it and mentally up my top price to $720.  I tried to snipe the auction as I usually do with 14 secs remaining.  It didn’t matter.  I got outbid by six others in the final 10 seconds.  Oh well, I still had the Korg.  But wait, someone else saw the big money that was just made on that auction and quickly listed their own MKS-70, so now I had another chance in 9 days.

As I waited for that auction, I stupidly went on FB Marketplace and browsed.  And wouldn’t you know, there was another rare synth being offered.  An Akai AX60.  It had some issues, but nothing that seemed out of my league as far as repairs, so I jumped on it.  I’d pick it up the next day.  Since I’d be driving to get it, I stupidly went looking to see if there was anything else of interest available in the area.

*Sigh*  There was.  An 88-key controller with a lot of sliders and knobs and transport controls that I could use with Cubase (hopefully).  Price was ok.  It seemed to be at a store, so I asked the location and planned to visit the next day to see it in person.

It was a pawn shop, which is not what I was expecting, but I’ve bought synths from pawn shops plenty of times.  What I was really not expecting was exactly how many synths this place had- classic synths, collector synths.  Better than any music store in the area.  While I didn’t have interest in the eMu samplers or a humongous 88-key Korg 01W that dwarfs my Korg DSS-1, what I did see was a Casio RZ-1 drum machine.  I struck a deal and got the controller and drum machine for $500.  Keep in mind, I haven’t even picked up the AX60 and the MKS-70 auction is still a day away.

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To summarize what should be a post of its own, I got the AX60, did some troubleshooting and repair a little beyond anything I’d done previously. and it’s all good.  I’m pretty proud of myself.  I’m filling in my timesheet for work and eBay sends me a notification that the MKS-70 auction is ending in 15 mins.  Oh shit.  So I go to my desktop to bring up eBay there and… the computer is frozen.  God damn it.  Punch it in the nose and it reboots.  No wait, it doesn’t.  It can’t find the C: drive.  It doesn’t see my SSD drive at all.  What the hell is going on here?  Why now?

So I sniped the auction on my phone with 4 seconds remaining and my max bid was the highest, so YES, I won this one.

But now, let’s step back a minute and look at what’s happened over the past week or so.  I have two new rack units coming in the mail, I have a new 88-key controller that I don’t have space for (it will probably replace the QS8), I have a new drum machine, which is cool, and I have a new analog synth that is really neat.  My computer didn’t work for a bit, but opening it up and reseating the drive seems to have fixed it.

Today has been a day of successes and failures.  One of the biggest failures to go without further detail was my bowels after having Olive Garden for dinner.

The Givers And The Takers

Posted by on October 19, 2025 No comments

This is a story from the early Internet and also early in my software development history.  I suppose I was a budding professional programmer at the time, because when I had Internet access, I was working at the ISP that was providing that Internet.  I was primarily doing networking and hardware, but I was also writing software for them as well.  And, because programming is just what I do, I did it at home as well.

Also at the same time, I was into music.  I had some keyboards and I was probably getting started with MIDI recording and playback.  And I don’t remember exactly what the end goal was, but I was keen on using my programming skills with my music equipment.  And this required being able to write a program to receive and send MIDI commands.

Being a lifelong BASIC programmer and having advanced to the new Visual Basic language, I was probably using something between VB4 and VB6.  Now, if you’re unfamiliar with early Visual Basic, it was designed for simple business applications – data entry type stuff.  So having access to "the hardware" like you would need for reading and writing MIDI messages was not something that was built in.

But, for those that had the knowledge and skill, you could get access to "the hardware" using Windows APIs.  They were cryptic and poorly documented, but they did exist.  And thanks to having the Internet where I could search on these topics, I was able to find people that were also trying to use MIDI in VB.  My searches led me to some API calls that I could make and after a lot of experimentation, I actually made a small program that would print periods in a textbox when a note was played on one of my MIDI keyboards.

And that’s one of the moments that a developer lives for.  You started knowing nothing and you made it actually respond in a way that you wanted.  But the program wasn’t perfect.  While it could read and acknowledge data received, if you tried to close the program, it would crash, hard.  Now, with all my experience and knowledge, I know why that happened, but back then, I didn’t have a clue.  And there was nothing on the Internet that could explain it to me.  Search engines could find you some pages, but they didn’t have text-based searches like they do now, and there was definitely nothing like AI searches where you just ask a question and get an answer.  But, I did have that page with the discussion of people that were trying.

Back then, people welcomed being contacted.  Their public email addresses were readily shown to the world.  So I emailed the one who seemed to have the most knowledge, although he was also one who said MIDI in VB couldn’t be done – he tried.  I explained what I had accomplished and the problem I had with it.  And he replied that he would look into it.

Eventually, I did get a response from the guy.  He got it to work!  I suppose I had given him enough info for him to try things a different way and he was successful.  Awesome.  Or maybe not.  In his response, he attached a binary file of his working code.  He said I could have a free copy of the user control and that he would be selling his code online.  He might have thanked me or maybe not, but he did say he would not be telling me how he did it because that was now his intellectual property.  At least I didn’t have to pay for his code, right?  I gave up on the project and never returned to it.

I had forgotten about that story for decades and only recently thought of it when I was thinking about people who program for the greater good.  You know, open source and stuff like that.  And here I was, only a teenager, and I get taken advantage of for asking for help.  Surely he was much older and more savvy to the ways of the world, but the idea that if you provide information to someone and ask for help and not only do they refuse to give it to you when they could, but then try and profit from what you gave them…  Well, it almost sounds like AI data mining.  Huh.  Everything old is new again.

And That’s Why It’s A Dream

Posted by on October 14, 2025 No comments

In my near-waking hours this morning, I had something of a lucid dream.  Nothing of the fun stuff like flying or being superhuman, it was just a earworm of one of the songs I had heard the previous day:  The Entertainer, by Billy Joel.  Specifically, the lyric, "it was a beautiful song/but it ran too long/if you wanna have a hit/ya gotta make it fit/so they cut it down to 3:05".  And that line just really stuck with me.  I pretty much assumed it was a reference to his breakout hit, Piano Man, and it got me wondering, what would that song sound like in its full-length version.  I felt a little sad that the recording never survived and was never released, so we’d never know what the full vision of the song was.

And that’s where the dreaming set in.  I actually came up with other parts for the song in my head.  The rhythm was in 4/4 as opposed to the song’s existing 3/4 time and it would shift between the 4/4 parts to tell one part of the story and 3/4 to tell the story in the original song.  The extended version was a story about the protagonist, who is Joel, and two of his friends.  One of the friends became a culinary chef and the other went into finance – all of the them remaining in New York.  The beginning told a little bit of them as a young group before leaving school.  Then a verse would provide a small snapshot of each one’s lives contrasted with the Piano Man verses illustrating Joel’s life.

And along the way, it had a message that all three were serving other people in their own way and although Joel’s chosen path was the least glamorous, he was no less satisfied with his work and was doing no less for his customers.  It was quite the involved dream.  I had bits and pieces of music and how the vocal would sound (which is something I could never emulate and the knowledge of that saddened me that I couldn’t bring this dream to realization – the lucid part of the dream).

Upon waking up and trying hard to not lose the details (which is fruitless as everyone knows), I did some searching on the meaning of The Entertainer lyric and Piano Man.  Yes, I was right that 3:05 was a reference to the cut down version of the song.  What I was wrong about was that there was s surviving version of the full-length song.  It’s the one that’s on the album – 5 minutes, 40 seconds long.  The only version I had ever heard was the full version, so what I was doing in my dream was turning it into an epic, more like Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.

Still though, it was a pleasant and invigorating dream, of which nearly all the details are lost at this hour.

Botching A Bank

Posted by on October 4, 2025 No comments

You’d think it would be pretty important to "do a bank" right, right?  Well, I’m stuck in amateur hour right now and am attempting to get the fuck out of it by the end of the year.  Quite some time ago, T-Mobile had a great idea.  Why not offer banking services to our customers?  We can offer extra incentives for them and blah blah blah.  At the time, the huge draw was a 4% interest, so I jumped on board.  And it was fine for a long time.  Then the inevitable enshittification happened.

The first change was tinkering with the 4% interest.  I blogged about it too, but in short, you had to make a number of transactions per month to get the higher rate.  Then, although this should have been seamless, and it mostly was, they switched the bank behind the scenes.  So, another bank took over the duties of actually managing the money while T-Mobile maintained a consistent front end.  No change in routing or account numbers, no big deal.  But that wasn’t the end.

Then, T-Mobile decided they would recreate the site for themselves instead of using whatever software was used as the font-end before.  It would integrate into T-Life where it didn’t before.  They had some positive changes, like getting rid of the transactions per month.  No change in routing number, but uh, you have a new account number.  And that’s just the beginning of it.

I got a new debit card in the mail.  I don’t know how much weight this carries, but the card is flimsy as fuck.  In hindsight, it’s fully representative of the whole change.  And so I logged in to the new website, and now for some reason, my 2-factor authentication has become a 3-factor authentication.  Every time I log in, I have to verify a code from a text, then verify another code sent to my email.  As Ace Ventura would say, "Three factors is too much!"

Once in the website, things are, well, cheaper.  The previous website was nothing fun to use, but this version was even more disappointing.  But it was whatever.  I didn’t care too much how it looked, as long as it worked.  And until I had to pay my first bill, it suited my needs.

When I had to pay my first utility bill, which I do manually from the bank site, I logged in and found, what the fuck, all my payees were wiped out in the transition.  So I had to look up all my bill information and started creating a new payee.  And I found, what the fuck, you can’t use a PO Box as a payment address.  WHAT?  I assume it’s just some early limitation and because I need this bill paid now, I set up the payment in my other checking account at another bank.  I figure I might as well set up my other utility bill there as well since it’s due this month.

The next month I don’t even really think about seeing if the address problem has been fixed and just pay my utilities from the other bank.  But then, a couple of weeks later, I get an email from my mortgage company saying, "You need to contact us immediately."  You know, scams are always ASAP, world-ending, gotta do it now type stuff, so just to prove to myself it was a scam, I logged in to my mortgage account and saw, what the fuck, my mortgage payment is a month late!  Oh yeah, I guess that scheduled payment would have been wiped out along with all my payees… God damn it!

I get all caught up on my mortgage paying through their website and go back to T-Mobile Money to get this all straightened out.  They STILL don’t take PO Boxes for payees.  So I call them.  And I was very calm and matter-of-fact about the problem.  And when they confirmed that yes, that is how it works and there are no plans to change it, I was very calm and matter-of-fact that I would be migrating my account elsewhere.  Yes sir, would you like to take a survey rating the service you received today?  Nah.

Direct deposit is now changed at work.  Final bill payments have cleared, now it’s time to move the money out.  In a final example of "we haven’t done shit with this website", you can’t initiate a transfer from the T-Mobile Money website.  The instructions are to use the other bank’s website to initiate the transfer FROM T-Mobile.  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.  So I go to my other checking account bank and try to link the accounts.  For whatever reason, they say the routing number is invalid.  Unbelievable.  So I go to another of my banks and set up a linked account.  They want me to verify the account by logging in.  My credentials don’t work (maybe because of 3FA, who the fuck knows), so I have to do the old fashioned way of confirming trial deposits after 3 days.

So if all goes well, I’ll have most all my money moved by the middle of this month.  I’ll confirm my direct deposit goes to the other checking account next month, make sure I pay all my bills from that other bank, then move the final balance out and close out T-Mobile in December.  And then I’m back at MidFlorida.

It’s funny, I closed out MidFlorida years ago when I had a plan to move to Atlanta,  When that plan fell through, T-Mobile Money became my primary – I had previously only used them for the 4% interest.  I have a home equity loan with MidFlorida and they offered me $100 to open a checking account, so why not.  Home again.

Maybe I Was Wrong. It’s Both

Posted by on September 21, 2025 No comments

I had this thought a couple days ago and thought I should write about it.  Then I thought about it again on my hike today and thought I should do this post.  Then I landed on a Reddit post that was related to this idea and I just stopped and opened up Live Writer.  The problem at hand is kids these days. They don’t know shit.  They are failing basic lessons in school and have no desire to learn.  They can’t spell, they can’t do simple math, they can’t communicate.  Say what you want about elementary and high school being nothing more than a training ground for work slaves, but fuck, you have to start somewhere.

Let me address that other point first, since I’ve mentioned some tangent and I have to get it out before continuing…  I have some different thoughts about how school should be done, but if pressed, I would probably say it’s really the parents job, but you know, parents aren’t parenting much these days.  My thoughts are that you need to expose children to as many different activities, hobbies, and professions as possible.  You never know what is going to catch fire, and when that fire is lit, the child will motivate themselves.  Of course, you have to teach the work slave basics, because everyone needs some basic skills to get by in life, as well as in work.  Calculus, probably not.  Addition, subtraction, and multiplication, definitely.

So anyway, my thoughts over the last couple days are that kids don’t want to learn and you can’t convince them to learn.  They don’t see the point.  Why learn math when you carry a calculator?  Why learn to write when everything is typed and voice to text exists?  Why learn when anything you don’t know about is a simple Internet question away?  And once you do know, why bother retaining it?  It’s always available for recall in an instant.  These are actually kind of reasonable arguments.  And at a certain level, I don’t have a problem with them, because I don’t know advanced math and I don’t know any details about old history and I’ve done just fine in my life.

The problem I see is, when you are absent of any skill or knowledge, what value are you?  And man, that sounds cruel.  it sounds exactly like what the conservatives that I despise are constantly harping on – if you don’t bring value to an employer as a work slave, why should you even be considered as a work slave?  Why should you even be allowed to exist in society?  And that’s probably a little exaggerated, but nowadays, not by much.  So to flip the problem around and try to find an answer before defining a problem, let’s ask the kids, what do you want to do?  What do you want to be?

The answer you get will probably be "I don’t know", which now makes me glad that I addressed my tangential thought early.  In my day, we used to have vocational centers that would actually assist you in finding a career, but my small experience with my local office was pure bullshit.  I was only evaluated for jobs that were in my local area, which were shit factory jobs.  And looking at my grades, I was excluded from any white-collar careers, not that there were any in my area.  How did I break away from this trap and become the successful person I am now?  It was a connection.

I’ve said in previous posts that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.  And that’s been a saying forever, with people that feel they are being held down envious of the ones that skyrocket because of a connection.  But you know what, there’s no secret force keeping you from finding a connection that can elevate or even jump start your career.  The only force stopping you is you.  (OOOoooo, Mr. Motivation dropping truth bombs, here!)

Ridiculously pretentious statements aside, consider the success rate of graduates from top-tier colleges.  Sure, they might have gotten really good grades, but somehow, even dropouts succeed.  They are surrounded by excellent people and those excellent people know other excellent people.  It’s a gold mine of possibilities to meet someone who can help you get what you want.  "But I can’t get into a top-tier college." I hear the youth saying.  Well, duh, if you can’t do simple math, you can’t.  But maybe you don’t need to.  Maybe you have some skill or knowledge that makes you highly valuable to someone who is very smart or well-connected.  But if you can’t even present the basics of skills and intelligence, will they even give you a chance?  You kind of have to be in their circle to begin with, and those people aren’t going to associate with someone who can’t do simple math.

So to wrap this up, it’s not only what you know that can determine success, but everything that you do know has value if you can make your case that it has value.  And it’s not only who you know, because if you don’t have any value to them, those people are not obligated to help you in any way.

So, young people, you might have been failed in your early years by not being exposed to careers or interests that could have inspired you to become an expert in the field despite not knowing how to make change for a $20.  But if you’re not able to make change at a register, you’re never going to get the chance to interact with anyone who might be able to change your life.  You have to know something to get ahead in life, and you have to show that you know something in order to connect with the right people who can make that happen.  If you can’t demonstrate the basics, you might never get a chance to demonstrate you are that missing piece they need.

Back On The Beltway

Posted by on September 19, 2025 No comments

With my recent fashion reboot, I’m revisiting something again: belts.  This time, it’s more out of necessity than fashion as I keep losing weight and now nothing really fits anymore.  It doesn’t feel all that long ago that I was saying and doing the same thing, but it was the other direction.

So, back then, as now, I had this idea that I would buy a buckle-less belt, which I’ve come to learn is called a "belt blank", and I would buy one or more buckles that I could interchange with the belts as needed.  Had I done this the last time I was thinking about it, I would just be buying blanks in the new correct size and I would already have the buckles.  But here we are again, with nothing.

So I made the leap and purchased one blank and now I’m researching buckles.  What I’ve come to find is, searching "belt buckles" gets you two distinct sets of results.  One is set of tiny buckles suitable for dress belts, that have such minor variations they might as well all be the same.  The other is huge, gaudy, western buckles where anything goes.  I’m pretty sure you can figure out which camp I fall in.  So my dilemma is not one of too much choice, but choosing the right minor variant that is correct.  And that’s much harder than it seems.

Trying to buy clothing online is just plain hard.  This is something you really should see in person and handle.  But there’s not going to be any stores that sell this stuff, and not with any large variety.  So, trying to figure out how a buckle will look, with the slight variations in curves, thickness, and finish, is probably just going to be guessing game.

And while I was doing all this guessing, I had the thought, maybe I should just go somewhere like Ross or Bealls and buy a cheap belt and harvest the buckle.  Wait, why don’t I go to a thrift shop and buy an even cheaper belt and harvest the buckle.  Wait a minute, I have two belts that I’m going to throw away because they no longer fit and they have buckles!  Wait a minute, I’ve thrown away countless belts in my life and they all had buckles!!  Why don’t I already have a huge stash of belt buckles just waiting for a blank in which to install them?  Now I feel stupid and wasteful.

So I guess that’s going to be the fun this weekend is hitting thrift shops looking for belts.  Should be a fun diversion.  But I’ll share a little secret.  Those big gaudy western belts?  I have one.  It’s getting close to being 50 years old.  When I was very young, I went through a phase where I was obsessed with unicorns.  This buckle is (I think) pewter and has a starburst pattern with a unicorn filled with tiny turquoise stone chips.  I still have it in my jewelry box.  No, I don’t think I’m going to be wearing it.

Quick post-publish note: I dropped in at Bealls after dinner tonight and I am so fucking glad I didn’t go buying some belt buckle on Amazon for anywhere from $15 – $60 fucking dollars when I can get a whole damn belt for $9.99.  At that price I’m not even going to bother with thrift shops.

I Was There

Posted by on September 11, 2025 No comments

Just dropping in a quick two-for-one note on my vacation shopping extravaganza for my wardrobe reboot.  Three days, $550, 16 shirts, 2 pants, shoes, socks and undershirts.  I don’t think that’s too bad since I haven’t shopped for clothes in literally years.  Day one was my old standby, a tiny factory store plaza that no one really cares about.  The shops are really having a rough go there.  There’s only two that I bought anything from.  But the plaza was empty, which was awesome.  Day two, I hit Tampa premium outlets.  Not busy, but definitely not empty either.  I found this surprising on a Tuesday morning.  Day three was two Orlando premium outlets and… HOLY.  SHIT.

I arrived at the first one a half hour after opening and the parking lots were full.  Not can’t-find-any-parking full, but you’re-going-to-have-to-walk full.  This is a Wednesday morning.  There are a ton of people here.  I thought tourism numbers were cratered for Florida?  I thought the economy was a disaster?  I thought no one had money or jobs.  Where did all these damn children come from?  Isn’t school back in session??

That was shocker #1.  #2 was seeing queues leading into stores.  They’re empty queues, but still.  You have to be escorted into Prada, Versace, and a few others.  I don’t know if this is a security thing now, where you can’t be trusted to browse a high-end store due to shoplifters or if it’s some "exclusivity" bullshit.  Either way, it’s not my thing AT ALL, so I just keep on going to stores that are for people like me.

About halfway through my trip, I see another store with a queue, and the queue is FULL of people – and it’s looping back on itself!  It’s the Disney Character Warehouse.  I have memories of this store from my ex-wife, who was a Disney fanatic.  It was never like this when I used to get dragged there.  What the hell is going on?

After lunch, I went to the second outlet.  This was like the other one but on steroids.  Now we’re in the can’t-find-any-parking situation.  I ended up parking behind the outlets where the employees park and had to walk all the way around to get to the entrance.  There was easily double the number of people, I had to dodge left and right to make my way through the throngs of people and the few stores I did get into had crowds.  I bought nothing and left for home.  This is a Wednesday!

And now for part two.  As fate would have it, I got my answer on WTF was going on at the Disney store later in the evening via this video posted on social media.  A woman was at the character warehouse and was expressing incredulity that all the other shoppers were running livestreaming shopping shows.  These people would show an item from the store on their stream, the stream viewers would indicate they wanted it, and the streamer would buy it for the viewer – I assume there is a markup involved here as well.  And what you ended up with is 20-30 people doing QVC in a store and their shopping carts are literally overflowing with merchandise.

This is the next evolution of "flipping".  What used to happen is, you would source a great deal, buy it all up, then sell it at a profit.  There’s risk to that, because maybe it won’t sell at a price that has a good return or even sell at all.  And flippers are the worst.  Before they existed, there was an actual desire to help other people.  You would find a good deal and you would pass along that information so that the people that really needed the product could get it for cheaper.  Somewhere along the way, someone said, "why shouldn’t I get something out of this?" and thus, flipping was born (along with affiliate links).

Now the latest generation of flippers is intent on removing the risk of making the purchase up front.  They want the sale in-hand before they commit their money.  So now, the only investment for the flipper is time, and they get paid for that too, because the livestream can pay out too.  And underpinning all of this is rabid consumerism, my hatred of which is well-documented here.  Disney has ALWAYS left a bad taste in my mouth because being in their brand stores was like, here’s a pencil.  We’ve put the Mickey ears on it so it’s instantly worth twice as much.  Do that with any (and I mean ANY) other product and you have the Disney store experience.  And people believe it.  It’s more valuable because it has a brand on it.

Reflecting on that kind of brings me full circle to my fashion style, Old Money.  One of the tenets of that style is to have high quality clothing that doesn’t scream the brand name.  One of the stores I dropped in was Michael Kors, who I think has some nice designs, but when I went in, everything had huge "MICHAEL KORS" and "MK" labelling on it.  I was disgusted and walked out.  It’s the same with Calvin Klein – you can get stuff that’s garish or you can get stuff that’s understated.  I’ve never understood why people pay to be a billboard.

Another Renewal

Posted by on September 9, 2025 No comments

I’m having sort of a forced vacation.  At work, you’re only allowed to bank so many PTO days before you either have to use it or cash it out.  So this week, I’m taking off.  It wasn’t that long ago that I had taken another week off and that one was purely recovery from burnout.  To summarize that week, I allowed myself to not do anything until Tuesday – which also included the weekend, so four recovery days of doing absolutely nothing.  What actually happened is I didn’t leave the house until Thursday and even then, I didn’t do much for the rest of the time off.  So I wasn’t really refreshed at the end, only recovered.

This week though, I actually have a plan.  It’s nothing grandiose, but it is fairly significant.  I’m refreshing my wardrobe and getting back to where I used to be.  So here’s a short post on my history with fashion and the "eras" I’ve been through.

My Upbringing
Looking back, I can say I was raised pretty upper class, but clueless.  Obviously, when things are bought for you, but never explained, you just sort of go with the flow and you get what you get.  I wore a lot of designer label clothes, but I didn’t understand what any of it meant.  My mom was definitely into high fashion and trends and whatnot, since she was in clubs with other high society women.  Even if we were in a small town, we could drive to bigger cities to get clothes.  I can’t say any of that time had much influence on me, but some of the brand names and labels might have stuck in my subconscious.

Young and Dumb – mid 20’s – mid 30’s
During this time I was living in a tiny town working minimum wage jobs.  I didn’t have a lot of money and my primary shopping source was a closeout store in a neighboring town that would be similar to a TJ Maxx or Marshall’s.  Even though my funds were limited, I wouldn’t buy any typical utilitarian clothes, what i chose always had to "speak to me" or capture my attention.  I don’t think I always bought good things, and I didn’t always dress to impress.  I had some favorites, but my fashion wasn’t intentional.

Stumbling into Professionalism 30’s – early 40’s
When I got my first professional job, the guy that brought me onboard actually had to have an intervention with me and explain that my dress had to change.  He was already levels above me, wearing button down shirts, ties, sport jacket, etc.  Tennis shoes – out.  White socks – out.  Stop it with the fanny pack, people are talking about you.  So I ended up with polos, khakis, and loafers.  That was pretty much my staples for that era.  It was extremely bland and didn’t have a lot of room for expression.

Refinement – 40’s – 50
I started experimenting with dress shirts, learning the importance of undershirts, belts, and ties.  My shoe collection bloomed.  I primarily wore khaki’s but transitioned to jeans with dress shirts, after finding a brand of jeans that suited me.  I would say I was 80% button down and 20% polo during this phase.  It was probably the most confident I’d felt, fashion-wise.  I owned two suits and a tuxedo and actually had occasions to wear them.

The Fall
And the last few years, I fell into an ultra-casual style, literally nothing but jeans (later, shorts), t-shits, white socks and tennis shoes.  Instead of being refined and attracting attention that way, I wore shirts with silly and clever designs.  It still engaged people, but it was labelling me as the "old guy with the shirts".  And there’s nothing really wrong with that, I’m just sort of tired of it.  I want to go back to where I used to be.

So
Today and tomorrow I’m spending the mornings clothes shopping.  Some years ago I had purged my closet of all my dress shirts, since most of them didn’t fit anymore and I didn’t see myself wearing them anytime soon.  So I had a couple dozen hangers to fill.  After the first day, I got four button down and four polo shirts.  Some are more outdoor-oriented, so I can use them for hiking and they’ll also fill the casual part of the spectrum.

I still have room for about 10 more shirts, maybe a couple more pants and I need fresh socks and I have to decide where I’m going as far as shoes.  People really notice shoes.  When I last changed from New Balance to a classic Reebok style, I had people pointing them out.  Whether it was out of ridicule because it was cliché, I don’t know.

Because I have a natural curiosity and also a desire to do things correctly, I did a quick search online for "find my style".  This is actually what prompted this post, so as usual, I’ve created a big lead in for what I really wanted to talk about.  And my search landed me on a site that offered a quick quiz and an assessment.  It was maybe six questions, asking me what shirts, pants, accessories, etc. I would choose from a small selection.  And my result was labelled: "Old Money".  I found this was as funny as it was accurate.  So then I did a quick search for Old Money Aesthetic.  And wouldn’t you fucking now, it’s current.

Apparently Gen Z wants this look.  It’s a show of upscale living, even if they can’t really afford it.  And the hilarious part to me is, I can afford it and I’m old.  I am Old Money.  But here’s the thing, I want to believe I have a pretty good sense of value.  As the AI readers have pointed out, I value quality and am willing to spend to get it, but if I can recognize quality at a cheaper price, that’s just a bonus.  And that’s kind of how my shopping went today.  Total sticker shock looking at the original prices.  Really?  $70 for a pair of pants?  $109 for a linen shirt?  But after all the discounts and coupons at the outlets, I’m getting items for $15-$30 each.  I suspect I’m not going to get to get lucky on shoes, and I’m prepared for that – they’re somewhat important.

But anyway, I think this is going to be really shocking to the people I work with every day who have only ever seen and known me in t shirts, coming back after a week off with a completely new style.  A new style to them, but an old style to me.  And that’s funny to me, because when I started the job, I also had (and continue to have) long hair, and no one at any prior job (except for my fast food days) has seen me in long hair.  So it’s like two different versions of me switching around the details.

Living In Oz

Posted by on August 30, 2025 No comments

There’s something about me that I don’t bring up often here and don’t really mention to anyone in person.  That is, the fact that I’m diabetic.  One of the self-made ones, not one of the born ones.  I’ve recently decided to describe it as having a long, abusive relationship with sugar.  While thinking this post out, I had a lot of ranting and validation I wanted to say, but I’m ditching all that.  The bottom line is, this condition doesn’t define who I am and I don’t let it stop me from being me.

That prelude out of the way, I’ve been on a cluster of medications to manage this condition for years now.  I thought I had reached a point where I was satisfied, but it was not what my doctor was satisfied with.  I steadfastly refused to begin insulin injections, and that was pretty much the final step that could be made.  That is, until recently.  After a lot of deliberation, I accepted that a GLP-1 med would be acceptable.  And so we swapped out one of my meds for Ozempic.

Before I get into the details of my experience so far, I feel it’s worth saying that going on Ozempic gave me a little bit of guilt.  It is a very high-profile drug, very headline-grabbing.  It’s been tabloided as a quick fix cure for famous people to lose weight.  It’s been hyped to the point of supply shortages, where only the rich people can get it and the ones who need it for actual diabetes are left short.  So being associated with that whole thing is a little shameful.  I never really feel I deserve any special treatment, especially with how I treat myself.  But here I am, five weeks into treatment.

Oz has a unique feature in that it slows the emptying of your stomach, so you feel full longer.  That is how it achieves the weight loss.  My doc said I need to lose weight, but I didn’t believe so.  I’ve been hovering around 200lbs for years and while, yeah, I do have a gut, I’m not what I would call obese.  And I’m generally pretty body-positive, so I’m not ashamed of how I look, and losing a lot of weight by taking a drug that rich and famous people take to lose weight is not what I’m about.  I’d rather be somewhat fat.

I said that I’d been maintaining my weight for a long time.  And that’s despite the diet I was keeping.  Prior to my first dose, I would consume a full bag of pretzels each day.  That’s about 10 servings, 1200 calories.  And on top of that, I would have a couple packs of peanut butter crackers, sometimes a small bag of gummy bears, and my typical morning apple and portion of carrots.  Lunch would be the same as ever, a small pizza or a burger meal.  Dinner, could be whatever.  This was a routine.  And balanced with the exercise I was doing, everything seemed stable.

I took my first .25ml dose on a Sunday morning and assumed nothing would immediately change since it’d need to get into my body, and I was correct.  But Monday morning, everything did change.  Like my experience with the SSRI, Ozempic is literally magic.

I did not snack.  AT ALL.  I did not open a bag of pretzels.  I did not eat any crackers.  I ate my morning apple, but didn’t eat any carrots.  Lunch came and I could only eat half of my normal amount.  Dinner came and again, less than half before I was full.  And as others on Oz have said, I didn’t even have to eat.  I wasn’t hungry.  I only ate because these feeding times were a strict routine for me to get out of the house.

As the days and weeks went on, this pattern became the norm.  I wasn’t hungry.  I wasn’t exactly nauseous, but I didn’t feel good.  Food wasn’t appealing.  I didn’t get any increase in energy, I only got lethargy.  Today, as I write this, I’ve spent more time lying down than up and around.  This isn’t the utopia it was supposed to be.

Some days are better than others.  Today just happens to be a worse than normal day.  I can still get out and hike on good days.  Some days a meal can be satisfying.  But right now, it feels like I’m holding out for some payoff.  I’ve lost 12 pounds at my last weighing, but I won’t know the effect on my guiding star, the A1C, for another couple months.

I’ve searched before for Ozempic malnutrition and that does appear to be a thing.  While the core of my diet isn’t super heathy, the cuts to my diet have all been useless calories.  But they were a massive source of carbs which gave me energy – the energy I am severely lacking right now.  And this goes back to something I’ve repeated multiple times here in my blog, why live a long life in misery?  If you’re not happy, why are you living?  I’ve got like 10 bags of pretzels in my cabinet that have expired because I haven’t opened any in over a month.

I’m going to wrap up this post and go lay back down.

Gen-Z NPCs

Posted by on August 28, 2025 No comments

The Gen-Z Stare has gotten plenty of press and mixed reactions from people who either say they’ve never seen it or they always see it.  I was in the former camp, but today I just had my second instance.  The first one just had me rolling my eyes, the second one infuriated me for no real reason.  So here I am, trying to work it out.

These cases I’ve experienced, aren’t exactly in line with the "stare", I would just generally call them disengagement.  In the first instance, I was at a Burger King waiting to order and the one kid there (because understaffing is chronic everywhere) was doing a dozen other things and when he was finally available, he just walked up to the register, punched in a few things, and looked at me.  I understood that this was my prompt to begin ordering.  It’s probably the closest thing to the stare I’ve gotten, but in most reports, the stare is in response to an initial interaction.  This was just a non-existent greeting.

The second example was at McD’s drive thru where I was waiting for food.  The kid bringing the food to me was glued to their phone screen, walked up beside my door and just sort of lowered the bag towards me.  I took the bag, said thank you, and they just walked away, still staring at their phone screen.  A robot would have had more personality.  And that’s the one that pissed me off.  Maybe I was hangry.

So on the drive home, I thought of rationalities.  These are both fast food workers and you know, why should they care one bit about their jobs?  Maybe this has come about as the end result of corporate abuse?  Maybe this is a chicken and egg thing.  Who gave up first – the company stopped treating employees as humans, or employees stopped acting like humans at work?  My guess would be that it’s probably companies that started it, but after thinking about the progression of how things used to be to how they are, it didn’t seem to fit that well.  The problem is, it shouldn’t matter that they don’t care about their jobs, they don’t care about other people.

Most articles about the Gen-Z stare talk about the stunted social skills that are the result of the pandemic, where everyone had to be locked inside and didn’t have any face-to-face social interaction.  That has some weight, but really, we weren’t locked down for years on end.  Less than a year, maybe?

Some articles, and these are the ones I’m coming to think have it right, are the ones that say that Gen-Z is disconnected from society because of constant screen interaction.  To them, people in real life are no different than people on their screens.  They don’t talk to people on their screens, they just consume whatever is happening.  In this regard, they’re like NPCs – non-player characters – just going through life experiencing what life has to offer whenever it’s available.  or maybe I have that backwards.  Maybe they see everyone else in the world as NPCs.  Regardless, it’s like they’re playing some video game.  And some of the other behaviors seem to bear this theory out.  The lack of understanding of consequences, the lack of empathy.  If GenX were the kings of apathy, their offspring are heirs supreme.

Here’s my take.  There is a protocol that has to be followed and Gen-Z is not following the protocol.  When we developed computers and built them to communicate, we patterned it off of we humans communicate.  It’s not hard, it just involves greeting the other computer/person and prompting for a response. These prompts and responses make communication efficient, predictable, and accurate.  If a computer connects to another computer and doesn’t get any prompt or any response, that’s a dead connection and the computer disconnects.  If you call someone and no one says hello, you assume the line is dead and hang up.  And wouldn’t you believe it, there are anecdotal reports of this happening when you call a zoomer.

So, are we living in a simulation?  Some of us seem to be.