It was nice to get out and ride around in the city a bit. I actually prefer it to the greenways sometimes because it’s more engaging and there’s more to look at. Sadly, I paused my workout while taking photos and forgot to restart it when I was down by Pier 36, but that just gives me an excuse to redo the route next weekend.
I definitely need to find more time in the week to exercise. I feel a lot better after spending the day outdoors. I’m also thinking about getting another gym membership. The issue would be finding a way to fit it into my schedule. Something like Harbor Fitness might work. There’s a location close to where I work.
Now I have to be careful. The last time I had brake pads and rotors replaced on a car, it was totaled while parked a few weeks later. I’d also just had a major service performed, so I was out of a car and out of the money for the service. Luckily, the insurance payout was fair, but it still sucked having to eat the loss of the payments made towards the loan that weren’t reimbursed because of vehicle value depreciation.
This time, I didn’t wash the car or fill the gas tank, so I should be ok.
Yes, I’m feeling a little paranoid. And superstitious.
Kind of surprised that this scene from “Star Trek: Deep Space 9” made it onto regular broadcast television back in 1999. I could have sworn the only thing this risque on TV back then was “Real Sex” on late night HBO. But maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. Or don’t remember it too well. I don’t remember watching a lot of TV back then. I think I spent most of my time reading, doing school work, and then I joined the military.
I’m sad that I finished this show. I’d like to see some of the characters again, further on in their journeys, but given that Deep Space 9 ended 25 years ago I know it’s not going to happen. Man, I can’t believe it’s been 25 years. At least there’s some new stuff to see. I’m probably never going to watch Discovery, but Strange New Worlds has been very entertaining so far. I’m not sure how I feel about Spock seeming more emotional. Even T’Pring seems emotional. I’ll give it a chance though.
TOS, TNG, now DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, and a few episodes of Lower Decks complete. After Strange New Worlds, I’ll probably switch over to Picard.
I’m at the Subaru dealership in Englewood for regular servicing on our 2019 Forrester. Every time I come here, I love to look at this old Justy. It’s a subcompact car that hasn’t been manufactured since 1994 and the aesthetic reminds me of the first car I ever drove, a 1986 Toyota Corolla. When I was a teenager, my dad bought me my first car. It was a choice between an ’86 Corolla and a slightly newer hatchback, maybe an ’89 or ’90 Toyota. I don’t remember for sure.
At the time, hatchbacks weren’t fashionable so I went with the older ’86 Corolla. I think my dad paid about $1000 for it. If I could do it again, I would have gone with the hatchback. It would have been more fun. I also would have put more time and money into maintenance (if I could do it again, not because it was a hatchback). The transmission in the ’86 Corolla wound up failing about a year later. It had about 100k miles on it, but knowing what I know now about Toyotas, I should have been able to get another 100k miles out of it, easy, with proper maintenance.
The Subaru Justy would be perfect for driving on narrow New York City streets and squeezing into small parking spaces. I think I would have a lot of fun driving it, especially if I could figure out how to squeeze an upgraded stereo system into it.
I was thinking about my old Twitter account today and how most of what I posted there is lost to time. That’s probably a great thing considering most of what I posted on Twitter was shitposting garbage, but it just made me think that things like Twitter will come and go but my WordPress blog will always be here for me. As long as I pay for the hosting anyway.
Thankfully, I have an archive of my Twitter posts if I ever feel the need to go trawling through them for the rare gem or two, and I’m starting to realize that not everything posted to WordPress has to be long-form content. When Twitter and related services like Plurk came out, it was kind of a crisis, because then you had to ask yourself ‘should this be a Tweet or does it qualify for a blog post?’
140 characters (Twitter’s original post limit) seemed clever, and a way to push people to be more clever and concise, but in retrospect, it was bad for the internet and online discourse. I hate that culture of one-upmanship that you now find most prominently in Reddit comments. It’s not thoughtful and it doesn’t really add anything of value to my life.
A car on Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, NYC erupted into flames this afternoon around 3:00 PM near the garrison headquarters building. NYFD was very quick to respond.
The exact cause of the fire is unknown to me, though I imagine he had to have left something flammable in the car. It wasn’t that hot at the time though, especially in the shade where the car was parked.
The fire melted the tires off and burned the car down to the frame back to the trunk, so it had to be burning hot and it took the NYFD a while to get the engine block to stop burning. I wonder if it had something to do with aftermarket modifications to the vehicle, or if the fire was deliberately set.
I guess I won’t ever know, but I was asked to provide a copy of the above video to an investigations team, I suppose to find out if it was a criminal act or an accident.
In the Wallet app, when I tap into “Pay” and it shows the wheel with “Choose Amount”, there should be a way to quickly choose “Pay the amount for purchases that I made with my card” (as opposed to purchases my co-owner made with her card) so that each co-owner can quickly cover their own expenses without having to sit down and do a bunch of math and talk about what transactions have already been paid for, etc. Please make it easier to pay my bill.
Basically, it will tally up how much each person has spent over the course of a week in one UI element, but that doesn’t translate well to making payments, because what if part of what was spent over that week has already been paid? From a financial health perspective, I like to pay the card off weekly or even daily to make sure that I’m not spending more than I should, but making it hard to differentiate one person’s charges from another’s complicates my ability to use the Apple Card that way.
As with anything Apple, it should be a simple, but it’s not.
I was surprised to find out this artist was painting back in the 60s. I just assumed it was modern (2000s) pop art and was a print, not oil on canvas. His art impresses me more now.
Japan’s River People – watch for information about donating to help these people
I knew Japan had homeless people, but I didn’t think it wasn’t quite this bad. I’ve previously seen shows with people who were suffering from situations of homelessness, but they were taken care of by Japan’s social services system and had been placed in temporary housing. It was a long time ago and I barely remember the show, but it was a woman with a child. There were pathways set up to get people back on their feet and back into regular society.
The woman in this video says that a lot of Japanese people don’t qualify for those services, however, and some choose not to use them. I’m guessing it has something to do with pride, like the gentleman in the video above who lost his retirement money gambling in Las Vegas, so they wind up living on the fringes of society in makeshift dwellings, apparently until they reach a certain age, when they qualify for space in essentially old folks homes.
The sample set in the video above is pretty small. I wonder if all of the homeless people in Japan really live and act the same way as those pictured, or if this is designed specifically to show the best since they’re soliciting donations. I also wonder how Japanese people feel about foreigners coming to take care of them considering the rumored Japanese aversion to foreigners even being in Japan. Maybe when your situation is that precarious, you have to set aside pride and ego. Regardless, it’s impressive to see these people making the best of their situation, especially the couple that even had a garden set up.
