Saturday, September 17, 2022

10 Things from This Week

In no particular order...

  1. We had a great monsoon season this summer!  Rain, clouds, even flash floods, but now the weather is settling down and it is nice and warm--not hot--so hopefully we will have a nice fall (and hopefully we won't need to use the AC or heat for a month or more which will save money on electricity!).
  2. I love this list of odd things, several of which I think I need to buy!
  3. Here are some good ways to get glasses or contacts without a recent prescription.
  4. I'm debating whether or not to delete my Facebook account.  It is not a good company (examples here, here, and here), their algorithm is whack (I clicked like on one fishing picture, now I get nearly 100 fishing pictures a day on my feed ?!?), and I believe that some of my factually correct (I site my sources) yet politically incorrect comments are simply not shown to anyone.  It's extremely biased and overly invasive (even with browser isolation) so I am looking into other ways to connect with people so I can leave Facebook in the dust.
  5. The same with Blogger which is owned by Google.  I inherited another blog/website from an old client many years ago which I still keep updated.  Imagine my surprise when I logged in a couple weeks ago and several posts and one page had been unpublished (there is no way to hit publish on them now) because they were contrary to their terms of service.  These posts had been on the blog for nearly ten years and NOW they are contrary to Bloggers terms of service?  And they weren't even on controversial topics so that was weird so I may be looking at other hosts for all of my Blogger blogs including this one.  I did a quick search and I guess it is common for Google to censor Blogger blogs.
  6. Speaking of tech, OSINT is a new hot-button tech issue.  OSINT stands for Open Source Intelligence and it's a way to scan, parse, and aggregate all of the info people post online which can then be used against the person in shocking and scary ways.  Here is a good explanation about why this is/will become a serious issue.
  7. Customer service is still god-awful.  My neighbor asked me to swing buy a fast food place on our way home and pick up lunch for her kids so we stopped by a restaurant, went up to the door, and found it locked.  Several places in our city have kind of perma-closed their dining rooms either because they can't find staff or don't pay well enough to attract staff so they go to drive-thru only.  There was a sign on the door, which we couldn't read because the writing was facing the inside of the restaurant, and it was posted upside down (we looked through the facing window to read it) which said no more dining room, just drive-thru for now.  I mean, people can't even post a sign correctly???  ayayay
  8. On September 24, all National Parks will have free entry.  I checked our state parks website and our state will have free entry to all state parks on that day as well in honor of National Public Lands Day.
  9. I spend way too much time online.  I really need to get out and move more which is now possible since the weather isn't hotter than the surface of the sun.  Also, spending so much time online is not good for my stress levels; it seems like all news is bad news and most interactions with others online, like on reddit or Facebook, devolves into a flame war over the stupidest of topics.  eeekkk
  10. Finally, hubby and I went to the dining hall at the local military base last week and had a very nice, and very inexpensive, lunch.  For some reason we never thought to check this place out because at other bases we had been to, their dining facilities were only open to active duty personnel.  We were pleasantly surprised that this base opens their dining facility to active duty, retired and DOD/base personnel.  And the food was actually very good!

2 comments:

  1. I really wanted to read #2, but there are ads over the text that I cannot remove. And, I have ad blocker on my computer. That was weird about the sign on the door. I wonder what are the problems that google removes blogs or stops posts. Do you know? I read lots and could never find a reason.

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    Replies
    1. I'm not sure about the Google thing, I have read this has been happening to other people's blogs too.

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