When I find a wine I really like, I buy a case or join their wine club.

George Clooney bets a little bigger.

The news about the delta variant the last day or so is troubling.

• As transmissable / contagious as chicken pox
• At least as deadly as the original strain, perhaps more so
• Definitely able to break through and infect vaccinated folks, though they appear to be 90% less likely to require hospitalization
• And, once infected, even a vaccinated person is highly contagious
• An equal opportunity variant, infecting young and old at similar rates

The US had already begun to celebrate the end of the pandemic (I know I had), and now…not so much. Yesterday I went to the grocery and I was the *only* person there wearing a mask, including the cashiers. And this is liberal CA, not the deep red south.

I’m worried about our extensive travel and family visit schedule coming up, starting in August. We made plans a couple of months ago when it looked like the end was near. Now we’re looking at 200K new cases per day in the coming weeks, focused on larger unvaxxed populations. And *if* we get back to 100-200K new cases per day, we’ll also get back to 2-4K deaths per day. Just doing the math, let’s say 100M Americans are still unvaccinated. If we allow the delta variant to run unchecked, it will kill approximately 1.5% of them, or 1.5M people! That’s an upper bound, but, wow.

It may already be too late to change the course of things much, but we do what we can do. Wear a mask indoors, stay out of high risk situations and evaluate every event with caution.

UPDATE: Nick Carroway over at Juanita Jean’s has a perfect take on this. Go read it.

Today’s a big day. My quantum encryption project has been on hold for about six weeks while the client decides if they want us to continue. Today we learn the answer.

I’ve already dusted off the novel and am ready to rewrite. So given a perverse universe and an egocentric view of it, the client will come back and say “keep going” just to keep me from finishing the book.

More seriously, I *am* taking steps to give me the time and energy to restart. Whatever the outcome of the project decision, I can get there. But it’s still a big day. And this guy wants to know the answer!

UPDATE: Curious vulture gets his answer – we are moving forward! Good for the project, right decision, and I now have to figure out exactly what it means to me.

Perhaps as a result of my pessimistic views about humanity (see previous post), I just signed up for two automation-driven behavior modification systems – Replika and Noom (I say automation because I don’t know if their interaction algorithms are based on machine learning, pure scripting, neural nets or some combination – but these are all automation techniques).

I’m interested to see if Noom is an effective coach/mentor/nag. I know I do much better in maintaining a discipline when I have a coach. In this case the discipline is eat better and exercise more, which I do for short periods and then give up. Perhaps with a coachbot I’ll stick with it.

Replika is more of an experiment in the Turing test. With enough interaction and derived facts, can a modern chatbot deliver a conversation natural enough to make me forget (mostly) that it’s a bot? Eliza was one of the first attempts at this oh so long ago, in the 60’s. Eliza was 100% script-driven.

Events of the last few days have reinforced my post-2020 pessimistic view of Americans – we’re not very nice or smart people, in general.

• In the nation’s #1 COVID hotspot, partying at Lake of the Ozarks is at full swing and being maskless and unvaccinated is the cultural norm. Wear a mask, you get cursed and shamed. Meanwhile, local hospitals are full and medical leaders plead for citizens to get vaccinated. The area is hovering around 35-40% vaccinated.
• After tens of thousands of dollars of executive coaching, multiple interventions and touchy-feely workshops, the management team at one of my companies digressed back into passive-aggressive sniping, fear, anger and mistrust this week. It’s incredibly hard for people to change.
• California is spending $200M for a recall election of a Governor made unpopular by stricter-than-average COVID rules and by pressure from conservatives. We’re spending $200M instead of just waiting a couple of years to the next scheduled election. Meanwhile, our fire to water ratio is burning the state down.
• Republicans and Democrats can’t come together to investigate the Jan 6 insurrection properly. Congress is 100% broken.
• On NextDoor, message threads about vaccination and hydroxychloroquine are cesspools of hate, misinformation and coded “us vs them”. It’s like 2020 never happened.

I’ve said it before. Prior to 2020 my world view was that 80% of everyone was decent, caring and fundamentally good. My world view now is that it’s more like 20%. It’s a tough world out there, and civilization holds together by a thread.

My views only apply to those I can observe more or less directly, Americans specifically. I’d like to think that some other national cultures haven’t devolved in the same way (I’m thinking of you, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, etc.).

I’ve been online writing a lot today and I made the mistake of checking in to NextDoor after months of ignoring it. Big mistake.

A year ago the site was burning up in Trump “patriots” vs liberal socialist posts and COVID-denier posts. Both were maddening so I quit reading or commenting.

Today the site is overrun with anti-vaxxers and a remnant of the Trumpists, those who still maintain that hydroxychloroquine is a COVID cure that is being blocked somehow in a huge conspiracy.

Hard to understand this, but here are some factors that I think come into play:

• People in general, including me, have too much free time on their hands.
• Most of the country is not strong in science, math and logic.
• Confirmation bias keeps people reading the same propaganda over and over – beliefs, proven true or proven false, get reinforced.
• There’s a lot of fear and helplessness out in the world, and it comes across as aggression.
• We’ve never had a connected world in the way the Internet connects us, and we don’t have good checks and balances for what it does to us psychologically.
• Assuming a constant rate of 0.5% purely bad people (a wild ass guess (WAG) estimate), with small populations that’s just a few bad eggs spread around. With 350 million people, that’s 1.75 million sociopaths, criminals, creeps and jerks. Social media gives them a place to shine.

These are all reasons to stay off social media. So goodbye again, NextDoor.

Amazon just announced that “The Wheel of TIme” series will be released this November! That’s big news for SF&F fans – it’s been a long time coming. Like, 40 years long. My introduction to TWOT is an interesting story combining my love of reading SF&F and using computers..

The year was 1994. The Internet was unknown to most people, and new even to technical types like me. I was playing around with the first web browser ever released (in 1993), NCSA Mosaic, and browsing through one of the early “social media” networks, Usenet. Usenet was a series of subject-based chatrooms where you could find a few enthusiasts posting messages to each other about…almost anything.

I forget how I stumbled upon the Robert Jordan Usenet group, but it was rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan and it was filled with thousands of messages. Thousands. They were all talking about characters from something called The Wheel of Time. How could I not know about this, being a diehard science fiction/fantasy fan?

I read a bit and then dove in with a message titled “Who the hell is Jordan?”. I quickly received dozens of replies, ranging from enthusiastic explanations to “fuck off, newbie”. Trolls have been a part of the Internet forever, it seems. But with that simple question I got turned on to Robert Jordan’s book and TWOT, and have been a fan ever since.

I bought all the books, read them at least twice (there are 14 books comprising over 11,000 pages and 4 million words!), and still have them in my library. I met Jordan once at a signing event in CO, and he was kind of a dark, weird guy. Unkempt. Turns out I met him only a few years before he died of a rare blood disease, so no wonder he wasn’t brimming with energy.

So I’ve got a long history with Jordan and his work. The Amazon series has a lot of fans to satisfy, and I hope they’re up to the task. Casting Rosamund Pike as Moraine is a fine start.

Jackson Browne released (announced?) his new album today, Downhill From Everywhere. Of course I’ll get it, but first I took some time to read the lyrics of the album’s songs. JB’s lyrics are poetry for me. Here’s an excerpt from a song I know I’ll like, “A Little Too Soon To Say”.

“I came for inspiration
I came looking for grace
And found my reflection
In every passing face
In everyone who gathered
Standing on that shore
Searching the horizon
Not knowin’ what exactly for

Searchin’ the horizon
For what we can’t quite see
When all we’ve ever needed
Has been there all along
Inside of you and me

I wanna see you holdin’ out your light
I wanna see you light the way
But whether everything will be alright
It’s just a little soon to say”

There’s a lot more, but I love that sentiment – “…all we’ve ever needed, has been there all along, inside you and me”. The guy was a musical/lyrical master at 18 and still going strong at 70-something. We get to see JB and James Taylor in Louisville next month, so I suspect we’ll hear this song in person.

Wow, I had no idea Eric Clapton was such a racist asshole. What a shame – love his music, but this will now forever be my memory of him.

As I tiptoe back into writing, I’m thinking of giving Scrivener a try. Its users are passionate about it, as opposed to those of us who slog about in Word. It is *very* different than Word, which I suppose is the point. I like the idea of trying something new and fit-for-purpose, in terms of being designed for long-form writing. But I worry that it will be such a distraction that it will, at least initially, be a negative for productivity.

My biggest problem getting restarted is deciding which version to restart – the long version with substantial intro/backstory, or the shorter version? Or something in between. I’ve had soooo many rewrites that I’ve kind of lost track. Version control is not my strong suit.

Maybe the right thing will be to take the long version and port it into Scrivener – that’ll give me a chance to review each chapter and explore Scrivener’s functions as I go.

After weeks of travel and entertaining, today is the first day with just the two of us and no planned activities. Time to catch up on Board work, consulting work and some neglected home maintenance.

But first it’s time to watch the Bezos Blue Origin / New Shepherd launch. I’ve been privileged to witness the beginnings of the space “industry” starting with the US’s Gemini and Apollo programs in the 60s and now the competing billionaire space programs of the 2020s. In the 60s we were competing with Russia for space supremacy. Then we allowed ourselves to become dependent on Russia for launches in the 2000s, a situation I hated. And now we have corporations leading the way, with three competing private launch systems all working with NASA. I like where we are now – the privatization of space is the most likely way that we’ll establish any kind of off-planet presence. Mining the asteroid belt – the starting premise of The Expanse – should start an industrial revolution similar to the advent of the steam engine and the integrated circuit. I wish I could be around to see it all happen.

UPDATE: Bezos and his three passengers had a successful flight. Happy for him, dumb-looking hat and all.

Another summer weekend, another pool party/cookout, another birthday. Great times and a little too much wine – that’s pretty much the summary of summer 2021 so far. Could be worse. For the next three weeks things slow down and get back to normal, whatever that is these days. Maybe catch up on sleep and repair the blood chemistry.

Been thinking about making a single big push to finish the novel. I can hardly call myself a writer for the past nine months, as the only things I’ve written are technical documents and this blog. I’m ready to dive back into attempting to be a creative writer. More than ever I feel my window is closing – I won’t have the drive or mental acuity to write forever. I’m torn between writing the book with the structure I want (a long backstory opening, explaining each of the characters and how they came to be on the Moon) versus the structure everyone else seems to think is better, which is jumping right into the action on the Moon. We’ll see.

Finally, in the best news I’ve heard this summer, NASA found a way to revive the Hubble Telescope after a month in “safe mode” (aka not functional). Losing it would have been a technology tragedy.

File this under “travel mistakes you want to avoid at all costs”.

I left Louisville to head west for San Diego. My first flight, to Denver, was fine. No complications. I landed in Denver dreading the 2.5 hour layover, so I looked for flights that might leave earlier. Jackpot! There were three total flights headed for SD, mine and two others that seemed to be still on the ground. I headed for the first one and it was almost finished boarding. The gate agent told me it was 100% full, but I hung around just in case. After they closed the door I moved on to the next one at gate 36. There the door was closed but the guy scanning passes told me there were seats, but I’d have to go over to the gate agent for a pass.

I husteled over and asked her if I could get on the flight, and that it would get me home 2+ hours earlier. She was on the phone but took my boarding pass (for San Diego, of course), took a look, tapped something on her terminal and printed me a new boarding pass. Double jackpot! I grabbed the pass, gave it to the scan guy and boarded. Within seconds of my sitting down the plane pushed back. I was very proud of the move I’d made to get home early.

About 90 minutes later I looked out the window and noticed something weird. The sun was on the back of the clouds, and heading west in the evening I would expect it to be on the front of them. Hmmm? Another 10 minutes or so passed and I checked again, thinking maybe we were just on a weird turn before. Nope, sun still squarely behind the clouds. I then used SW’s wifi service to check on the flight route/status, and saw that were were only 110 minutes away from landing…in Orlando!

I turned to the two ladies sitting in my row and asked them where this flight was headed. After they answered “Orlando”, I said something stupid about “that can’t be” and “you’re joking, right?”. They edged away from me a bit, probably thinking I was a nut case.

After a while I pinged for the flight attendant and he was flabbergasted. This just doesn’t happen in the modern system of scanners and computer controls. The rest of the flight was nauseating, knowing that every second I was traveling away from home at 550 miles per hour.

I landed and customer service helped me out, though not much. I got a seat on the first/fastest flight to SAN, leaving six hours from that moment. I found a hotel room where I was able to hole up for about 4.5 hours. And I found that my luggage was on its way to SAN and would stay there.

I still don’t know exactly what happened. I know that gate 36 highlighted San Diego on both the big board and the digital board at the gate. It’s possible that the flight parked there had originated in San Diego, and in my hurry to board I didn’t see the Orlando part. But when I gave the gate agent a San Diego-bound board pass and asked to get on her flight to get home earlier, I would think that would have triggered a question or two. But she was distracted and just printed my new boarding pass with the new destination. And I assumed the destination was the same, so I never looked at the thing. Mistake upon mistake upon mistake.

And so here I sit at 530am, writing this and waiting to board my flight. This is a direct flight (not nonstop, but I don’t have to change planes at the layover point). Hard to screw this one up.

Sometime soon this will be a funny story. Right now it’s just painful. About 18 hours extra travel, 50K miles for my new ticket and a $200 four hour hotel nap. We’re having some fun now…

Just as humanity’s spread across the globe is disrupting the environment (pollution, toxins, plastics and (probably) greenhouse gas-induced climate change), the twin black swan events of of Trump and COVID are disrupting American democracy. We’re pretty unstable after 2016-2020, as evidenced by some of the headlines from today:

• From the Tennesseean: Tennessee abandons vaccine outreach to minors — not just for COVID-19
• From The Atlantic: There’s a Word for What Trumpism Is Becoming
• From CNN: Politics is causing needless deaths in the fight against Covid-19, and Biden: We Are Facing the Most Significant Tests to Our Democracy Since the Civil War
• From Redstate: Texas Republicans Say Enough and Officially Vote to Arrest Fleeing Democrats

And I could go on and on. The news is full of things that would have been considered crazy just 3-4 years ago. The two-party system is breaking down – two parties can’t govern when they each think the other is evil or crazy or both. Our elected representatives aren’t governing for the good of the people, they’re fighting each other in what they consider a holy war. Politics is the new American religion. The Constitution’s First Amendment clause declaring that church and state must be kept separate has been subverted not by declaring a national religion, but by political parties becoming religions. It’s insidious, and it’s tearing the nation apart.

It’s clear to me what has happened, but it’s not clear at all how to fix it. The national rift over slavery, the definition of a person and an American and yes, voting rights, drove us to a violent solution called the Civil War. Surely we are intelligent enough to avoid this a second time.

During my rainy day of rest yesterday I watched the new Amazon movie “The Tomorrow War” and liked it a lot. It was a classic humanity-vs-aliens movie with a few nice twists. Chris Pratt did a good job just being his likable self, and the supporting cast were all good. In particular, Yvonne Strahovski and JK Simmons did a great job with their roles. In addition to the nice plot twists, one big mystery is how the hell did JK Simmons get so jacked up at age 65? He looked like a weight-lifting biker…he’s either a CGI creation or an inspiration to guys like me.

SPOILER ALERTS

The first big plot twist was the writers’ take on time travel paradoxes. They maintain that paradoxes can be avoided by simply not having two copies of any person in space-time simultaneously. So, the only people who can travel forward are those who will be dead in the target timeline. And the only ones who can travel backward are those who have not yet been born in the target past date. It makes a certain amount of sense though it is extremely anthropocentric. The implication of that, if it were a fact, would be that human consciousness defines reality. And that doesn’t make much sense in a universe where you have other sentient beings, namely horrific man-eating aliens.

There’s another 2-3 plot twists around the aliens that I won’t get into, but I liked them. They tied some loose ends up nicely.

The other big plot twist was the time-bending father-daughter relationship between Pratt and Strahovski. As the father of a daughter, it was uplifting and heartbreaking. Well-written.

All-in, I liked this movie a LOT. IMDB critics generally hated it, but…discount that. Many of the reviewers/commenters hated the same plot twists and paradoxes that I liked. The whole point of watching a movie is to suspend your disbelief, to escape from reality, so why pick apart a fantasy story based on it not being “real”? It’s a return to militaristic space opera movies like “Independence Day” with some memorable characters. And a few new takes on a very old trope.

It’s my birthday weekend and I’m spending it on a golf trip to Oakmont CC in PA with some great friends. We played our first hot, humid round yesterday and I survived. It’s a way for me to re-assert some athleticism in an otherwise way-too-lax lifestyle. I probably lost 5 pounds just walking the course and sweating yesterday.

This is the Medicare birthday, and I take no pleasure in that. It’s a bigger milestone than I would have thought – signing up for Medicare just makes you feel old.

Flew to St. Louis this morning, and later on to Pittsburgh for the great Oakmont boondoggle. I enjoyed the flight, the first of six (!) I’ll do on this journey. On time, not terribly crowded, and peaceful up in the air with my iPad and trusty Bose 700 noise cancellers. When travel goes well, it’s great. An interlude at Vino Volo with a decent Negroamaro in the STL airport is my little treat at the layover.

A few things were different today. First, the TSA seemed to have regressed at the security checkpoint. In the TSApre line, you had to take laptops out, and as I learned too late, iPads also. Perhaps there was a security alert that caused this old rule to be re-invoked.

Next, I planned on getting some cash for the trip at an ATM in either SAN or STL, but…there are no ATMs to be seen anywhere. I wonder if that’s just where I am or if it’s an industry-wide thing. Weird.

The third difference was that I checked my bags, due to one of them being the golf bag. Getting on with just a backpack full of electronics was luxurious. I may check my bags a little more often, though one lost-bag incident and I’m sure I’ll reconsider.

All in, I continue to be very happy about recovering the privilege of air travel. I said it before, I won’t take that for granted again. Pandemic lesson 101. The bad old days were pretty good.

Happy 4th of July weekend!

We’re having a big crowd here tomorrow – the kids and grandkids, cousin Donnie and family from Louisville, my brother and his wife Deeanne, a close friend from NOLA and his brother, K’s Marine nephew Erik…about 14 people. Today, the warm-up afternoon, will be about half that headcount. Tonight’s meal is my own recipe, clay pot chicken. Tomorrow it’s pulled pork, cole slaw, roasted veggies and what should be an epic charcuterie plate. With olive oil and wine tastings each meal.

Yesterday I took the afternoon off and visited this amazing, private, invitation-only establishment. I got to listen to my favorite music on a first-class audiophile rig, as loud as I wanted. I was able to taste four great bourbons – Noah’s Mill, Maker’s Reserve 101, Jefferson’s Reserve and Basil Hayden’s. Finally, I was able to gaze out across the treetops and watch hawks spiral on the breeze. This place was so great that I think I’ll go back there soon. The place’s name is, oh, what was it….oh yeah, it’s My Living Room. Not visited often enough.

Annnnd, we’ve stumbled into the second half of 2021. It’s gone by quickly, and it’s already been a great year compared to 2020 (Low Bar Alert, a giant asteroid hitting Socal would be a great year compared to 2020). Notable 2021 events include:

• Getting vaccinated!
• The worst KY spring basketball season ever
• Getting back on airplanes
• The Biden inauguration!
• Buying the KY house
• A great Hawaii trip
• A lot of consulting work, now winding down
• A quick but nice trip to Napa and Gardnerville
• The kids visiting us in Fallbrook

Things aren’t completely back to normal, but they’re heading that way.

In interesting tech/environment news today, MIT researchers have found a way to produce practical amounts of potable water from seawater using sunlight alone. This is a huge development for arid coastal regions, including the one we’re living in.

Also, a Silicon Valley startup is betting on microreactors that use waste fuel from traditional nuke plants to generate 1-10 megawatts quietly, cleanly and safely. Again, a green energy game changer (to use a much-overused phrase). I think microreactors are a key part of a greener energy future.

I just finished reading Eliot Peper’s wonderful book Veil for the second time, and I enjoyed it even more. It’s an entertaining book with some very big ideas and some great characters. Highly recommended.

Also this morning, in a spasm of amazingly good customer service, Southwest Air just sent me a $250 travel credit to make up for the reservation screwups last week. Unanticipated and appreciated. Thanks SWA!

Lots of news today. Finally, someone is charging the Trump Crime Family with a crime. Better late than never. I can only hope that the Trump Org CFO flips hard on the family. You know they would flip on him.

And in the “you couldn’t make this shit up” category, a conservative billionaire is paying for the South Dakota National Guard to be deployed to the Texas border to do…something?

What’s wrong with this picture? One state sending armed forces into another, check. A state subverting the federal charter to defend borders, check. A billionaire buying his own army to do his bidding within our borders, check. There’s just no way this ends well. The SD Governor should be taken down over this. Or maybe California’s Governor should ask Jeff Bezos to fund an expedition of the CA Guard into South Dakota to discover WTF is going on.

In any other era, this would be unthinkable. But post-Trump, it seems that our capacity for outrage is exhausted.