Author Archives: momdude

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About momdude

Space cadet | Family dude | Photographer | Music lover | Traveler | Science fiction fan | Hugo Award nominee | Writer | 5x NASA Social participant | KC Chiefs fan | LA Kings fan | Senior Director of Finance & Administration for ALS Network | Member & former staff Finance Officer at the Commemorative Air Force SoCal Wing | Hard core left-wing liberal | Looking for whatever other shenanigans I can get into

Payroll Playlist

One of my major tasks for the day was spending several hours reviewing, coding, and then doing data entry for our payroll. It’s not rocket science, and it’s critical to get it right, but it’s pretty routine and a bit boring, which is a deadly combination. I find that having a good set of tunes helps.

I hit “Shuffle” on my “Favorites” list, and was well rewarded. I do love, love, love me some eclectic music mixes!

Amanda Palmer & Grand Theft Orchestra Want It Back
Paul Simon American Tune
Yes Owner Of A Lonely Heart
Huey Lewis & The News I Want A New Drug
Lee Ann Womack I Hope You Dance
Supertramp Gone Hollywood
Brad Paisley The World
Taylor Swift Teardrops On My Guitar
Loggins & Messina House At Pooh Corner
Stan Rogers Barrett’s Privateers
Jimi Hendrix All Along The Watchtower
Amanda Palmer & Grand Theft Orchestra Do It With A Rockstar
Travis Tritt Ten Feet Tall & Bulletproof
Brad Paisley Sleeping On The Foldout
Big & Rich 8th Of November
Genesis Anything She Does
Garth Brooks The Cowboy Song
Toby Keith A Little Too Late
George Strait I Can Still Make Cheyenne
Toby Keith I Love This Bar
U2 Bullet The Blue Sky
The Chicks Let ‘Er Rip
Kenny Chesney She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy
Gretchen Wilson Redneck Woman
Depeche Mode Master & Servant
They Might Be Giants Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
Elton John Indian Sunset
Rascal Flatts Oklahoma-Texas Line
Rascal Flatts Skin (Sarabeth) [Hidden Track]
Keith Urban Sweet Thing
“Chicago” Soundtrack Cell Block Tango
Rascal Flatts Fast Cars & Freedom
Collin Raye I Think About You
Billy Idol Dancing With Myself
Garth Brooks If Tomorrow Never Comes
Garth Brooks Much To Young (To Feel This Damn Old)
Jackson Browne Running On Empty
The Chicks Some Days You Gotta Dance
Queen Sombody To Love
Paul Simon Homeless
Linkin Park One Step Closer
The Pretenders Back On The Chain Gang (Live)
Garth Brooks Unanswered Prayers (Live)
Journey Open Arms
Pat Benetar Love Is A Battlefield
Martina McBride My Baby Loves Me
Oingo Boingo Dead Man’s Party
The Nails 88 Lines About 44 Women

For an added bonus, who can ID the six songs of these forty-eight had me turning the headphones up to ELEVEN?

 

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Some Days

Some days you’ve listened to one too many news reports about evil monsters trying to destroy our country.

Some days you’ve read too many comments by equally evil sycophants helping to spread hate and lies.

Some days you’ve gotten one too many incredibly frustrating and annoying emails asking for an explanation of things you’ve already explained too many times using simple words and short sentences.

Some days you just keep writing and deleting emails because you’ve still got that one brain cell that knows better than to hit send.

Some days you just want to do something simple like mail a package or hang a picture and you can’t because the whole freaking world has you tied up like the Lilliputians tied up Gulliver.

Some days the only things you want to do are the things you know you’ll probably regret.

Some days you just have to hold it all inside and hope for the best.

Some days.

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A Lunch Thought

I was making lunch today when I realized that, on the one hand, we’re getting really low on that spray bottle of Grey Poupon mustard, and on the other hand, there seems to be an awful lot in there considering that not much is coming out!

You can tap on it and pound it a bit on the counter top to move some of it down to the spout, but that technique has limited efficacy. My brain being what it is (sick, broken, warped, bizarre – yes, I think I like “bizarre” the best!) it occurred to me that what I really need is A CENTRIFUGE!!!

It could be one of those lab-type things, the size of a food processor that gets up to 1,000 G’s, but they’re several thousand dollars and seem to all be custom designed to ONLY hold test tubes. I need something more generic. More impractical. More…ridiculous.

I need to ride along with the bottle(s), to control the experiment. I need to get to NASA. Or Baikonur, either way. Russian centrifugal force is as good as any. Physics is physics. 20 G’s is 20 G’s.

We could do preliminary testing of the theory on a carnival ride. These things can pull 3 G’s – that would be a good start. I’m not sure how they would feel about me getting on with a collection of condiment bottles, but these things are run by minimum wage teenagers and carnival workers, so I’m sure that slipping them a fiver will grease the skids!

It will be an adventure!!

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Kubrick

I’m fried, don’t have two brain cells to rub together. I’m also out of new photos to share and I’m too tired to start hunting through thirty years of photos at this time of night to find something. And an actual conversation or thoughtful article? Please! NOT!

But I do notice that on cable (The Movie Channel) it’s apparently Kubrick Week – “Eyes Wide Shut” and “A Clockwork Orange” are on tonight, and I’ve seen “The Shining” on in the last couple of nights. Or maybe it’s just Psycho Week – I also see “Carrie,” “Dressed To Kill,” and “Basic Instinct.”

Anyway, let’s stick with Kubrick, one of the finest directors ever.

What’s your favorite Kubrick film, and why? Inquiring minds want to know. Answer in the comments.

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An Ancient Magik

How was your Monday?

I was busier than god, deadlines for work shooting by me like a biker gang in the slow lane of the 405 Freeway, when I got up to get a soda. When I came into the kitchen…

Why is there water all over the floor? Where’s it coming from? This seems “off nominal.”

Oh, the water runs all the way down to the other end of the kitchen and under the stove. This seems “way, WAY off nominal.”

It turns out that something in the fridge, where the water feed line comes in to supply water to the ice maker and cold water dispenser, had committed suicide and was spraying water all over. Couldn’t find a shutoff, couldn’t move the fridge, but I could hear water running back there, so the short term solution was to turn off the water main to the house.

In the end it got fixed, the water’s back on – but we have no ice maker for a while.

Oh! NO!

Worry not, my friendly readers. I am a practitioner of an ancient Magik, a dark lore handed down from father to son for generation on generation.

I… (insert drum roll!) …can make ice without an ice making machine.

It’s complex, involves incantations and ancient artifacts, relics from an older, gentler age. (The Sixties – work with me here!) The ice will be in a different form than you are used to, a manifestation of my ice making abilities which will leave you in awe.

The cult’s rules forbid me from revealing all, but I can give you a glimpse into the mystic realm…

Use this ancient wisdom carefully and wisely!

(Now, wasn’t reading this drivel better than watching the RNC tonight? You’re welcome!!)

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Filed under Disasters, Farce, Photography

WTF Facebook!

I’m looking for a bit of feedback if anyone cares to give it.

I’ve been on Facebook for over eleven years now, joining at the beginning of 2009. I find it useful for some things, and there are certain groups (in particular, my high school friends) for which I still use it as my primary communication and news conduit. And being active on Facebook (as well as Twitter, this site, Instagram, YouTube, and so on) is a big plus when trying to get accepted to NASA Socials, which I dearly love attending.

Facebook isn’t without its benefits.

But let’s face it, Facebook just becomes more actively evil by the day. It gets harder and harder to get content and stay connected to friends and family because what you get to see and who gets to see your posts is controlled by vague, mysterious, out of our control algorithms. More to the point, groups of fascists, terrorists, Putin’s kompromat, and the insane fringe elements of our society are using Facebook to disseminate lies, misinformation, propaganda, and outright bullshit to people who should know better, but don’t.

Facebook sucks.

With all of that being the case, what I’ve seen in the last month or so is the most frustrating bit of all for me – a DELUGE of ads. However, I don’t know if I got lucky for eleven years and somehow was never exposed to the horrors of Facebook ads every third or fourth post 24/7/365, or if something’s changed for everyone now.

This is where I can use some feedback from y’all. Is it me? Or did Facebook suddenly decide to fuck us all over starting a couple weeks ago?

For me, I would occasionally see an ad here or there, maybe a couple a week, for at least the first at least 8 or 9 years. It wasn’t a big deal. Most days I never saw an ad at all.

Then, about a year or two ago, I would have “ad days” every couple of months, where when I first logged on I would see an ad every third or fourth post. I would see three or four as I scrolled down my timeline, but as I deleted them, they would go away after seeing five or six, and that would be it. They were annoying, but there seemed to be a limit. Maybe 15-20 a day for a single day every now and then.

Then it was 20-25 a day for a single day maybe once a month.

Then 30-40 a day for a single day maybe every other week.

But always, when I got to that limit, it was like having survived a week of being bored to death waiting to be called for jury duty. Once I hit my limit and had paid my pound of flesh by going through X ads, I was off for a few weeks or a month.

Until late July, about a month ago.

Since then, EVERY time I connect, whether it be on my desktop, my phone, my iPad, EVERY! SINGLE! TIME! it’s an ad every 3rd or 4th post, all day, every day, 24/7.

And it’s like nails on a blackboard.

So before I walk away from Facebook permanently and just delete my account, or at a minimum just stop using it except maybe to check for messages once a week from high school classmates, I’m looking for context and a little information from you.

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Make Art – August 22nd

Because it’s been a while. Playing with the latest version of Photoshop.

What is it?

“Take a picture of something routine, mundane, and ordinary – make art.”

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No Context For You – August 21st

I thought one of the advantages of renting (which I hate) instead of owning (which I hate less) is not having to fix things.

So, yet another lie.


The happy subject to talk about is noting that it was three years ago today that we were in a gas station parking lot at an intersection of two state highways in the middle of a gazillion square miles of corn and soybean fields in Nebraska, praying for at least a little thinning to the clouds.

We got it, sort of. (Photos here and here.)

And our next shot is coming up on April 8, 2024. I’m thinking Indianapolis or Ohio, with a maximum totality of over four minutes.

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Today Was Wednesday – No, Thursday

Getting to the point where a couple times a day I literally have to check my phone or watch to remember.

As we’re discovering, “working from home” can be much more like “living at work.”

The good news is that thanks to some heroic efforts by a couple of San Luis Obispo fire crews last night, while the fires got very, VERY close to the domes at Lick Observatory and did destroy one currently unused dorm building, none of the telescopes or other primary buildings appear to have been damaged.

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Filed under Disasters, Paul

Hazy Here – Infernos In NorCal

Here we had a bit of haze, a bit of smoke, enough to make the sunset orange-ish.

There are still three major fires in Southern California and a handful of smaller ones. The closest and biggest is about fifty miles to our northeast. All of them are still less than 20% contained, but burning off into some extremely steep, rugged, and empty terrain with few structures, homes, or power lines which would need protecting. Given how thinly stretched the air resources and ground troops and equipment are, they may just have to burn for a few days or few weeks.

Up north, in the Bay Area and over toward Davis and Sacramento, a series of large storms went through a few days ago with thousands upon thousands of lightning strikes into tinder dry terrain. It seems like everything is burning up there. The only county anywhere from San Jose to San Francisco to Oakland to Sacramento to Reno that doesn’t have out of control brush fires is San Francisco County, because it’s about 99% urban.

Elsewhere there are tens of thousands of people evacuated, and it might be 100,000+ by now. Nearer and dearer to my heart, tonight we’ve been watching the webcam (here) that looks over the Lick Observatory. It’s not looking good.

(Image: University of California Observatories / Lick Observatory)

The big dome’s the 3-meter telescope, with five others scattered around the peak near it. While the original observatory was build in 1888, the first observatory built on a mountain top, the current telescopes are still in use constantly.

Given all of the homes and lives threatened, I don’t know how many resources CalFire can put into defending Lick. Let’s pray that it’s enough.

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