2025-07-13 12:00:00
As I mentioned yesterday in the weekend update, our car is at the shop, not safe to drive, waiting for a part to be delivered. After 4 days of no vehicle I decided to rent a car for a couple of days as we have shit to do, plus we both have appointments Monday morning. The math on rental car vs. Uber was a wash.
I hopped on the city bus for the 3 mile ride to the airport, and upon arriving stood in line for 15 minutes while the 2 Budget/Avis agents dealt with a grand total of 3 customers. When I got the front I was told that there were "no cars in the garage" and that I could have a seat and wait and eventually maybe somebody would return a car and I would get the rent the car I had reserved the day before.
Cue Seinfeld. That bit was broadcast in September 1991. So it was already enough of a recognized problem then to be worthy of pop culture skewering. And here we are 34 years later, and the problem hasn't gotten better, if we are being generous. If we are realistic, it's worse. Budget tried to blame it on the storms in RVA yesterday. Apparently a bunch of people with afternoon flights decided to skip the flights instead of returning their rental cars in the rain.
Right....It could have been 78F and sunny, and they would not have had a car for me.
There were 8-10 people ahead of me in the desperate suckers line. Unlike all of them, who were visiting RVA and thus needed transportation, I could say FU to Budget and just go home. The bus was leaving in about 10 minutes so that is what I did. I canceled the reservation on my phone and rode the three stops back to the bus stop closest to the house.
At that point both my wife and I really needed to get out of the house, as we had been home bound without a car since Tuesday. So we walked the one mile to the local pub for dinner. While walking I realized that the last time either of us had walked one mile for a dinner date was college. Fish and chips, a burger with fries, two beers, and an iced tea didn't cost $55 after tip in college though.
In grad school (and undergrad) I was taught that a market with notoriously bad customer service was just begging for a competitor to come in and do things right. However, that was before the corrosive effects of private equity were well understood. Any real threat to the current market would just be purchased and killed. See the tech industry for literally dozens of examples.
Anyway, I rode the city bus for the first time yesterday, and I did a college like date (in spirit, if not in price) with my wife. We will be home all day, because you know, we don't have wheels.
Note: We live at the very end of the bus line. Getting to the airport is easy via bus. Getting downtown or anywhere else we might want to go in RVA via bus is 90 minutes each way.
2025-07-12 12:00:00
I was out in the yard before 8 AM mowing to beat the heat. I did not beat the heat. (I mow with a human powered reel mower, so no noise to disturb the neighbors.) Last weekend was Independence Day in the US. But given that the government and about 1/3 of the citizens have abandoned the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, I certainly did not feel like celebrating. We were camping, but otherwise did nothing specific to celebrate.
While at the campground, the airbag light in the truck came on warning us that the passenger airbag was not arming. I figured it was the sensor that detects if a full sized human is in the seat, which is a cheap part. When I dropped the truck at my mechanic Tuesday he told me it is the airbag control module, and that I should absolutely not drive the vehicle until it is fixed. There is a chance that the airbags will just all blow while I am driving, or not blow at all in an accident. Unfortunately, it's not a cheap fix (are there any cheap car fixes these days?) and the part is in short supply. So as I type this on Saturday morning the truck (our only vehicle) is still at the mechanic. I'm hopping on the city bus this afternoon to go to the airport and rent a car, as we have shit to do this weekend, and we both have appointments on Monday morning.
BTW, after this repair I'll be at $6100 on car repairs this calendar year. I bought the Edge in 2020 with 92,000 miles on it, and it's been fine until this year. But that is a big bill to deal with in a year when I'm had job issues and now I am starting a business. I was supposed to head to Asheville this weekend for DrupalCamp, but as I have no wheels that got nixed. 2025 just refuses to give me a break. I was curious, so I went and looked at what I could buy for $10K. (The $4K the Edge might sell for, plus the $6K I've spent on it this year, assuming they can get the airbag module.) I can not get a better vehicle for $10K, so in hindsight the decision to keep fixing the Edge is a good one.
Onto the links.
Kerri wrote about not getting the the current trend of people tracking every detail of their life. That struck a chord with me as I too have zero desire to track much of anything in my life. My wife bought me a smart watch for my birthday a few years ago, and after two weeks I returned it and replaced it with an analog watch. She also has the most adorable dachshund.
This article takes a more realistic look at the digital nomad life. It's not all hanging out at the beach working on your laptop. That really shouldn't be a surprise. That said, I am looking at a 4-6 week trip next summer where I work from the camper as we visit every National Park east of the Mississippi river that we have not yet visited.
Martha Wells, author of the MurderBot books, is not expecting true AI anytime soon. BTW, if you have not watched the MurderBot series on Apple TV, it is well worth a one month subscription to binge. It's ten 30-minute episodes, so you can easily knock it out over a weekend, or even a rainy day.
Ryan (who I met when he sent me an email via my blog over 20 years ago, and it turned out we lived in the same neighborhood) has added a blogroll to his site. I need to do that.
This post was composed while listening to Jukebox the Ghost.
And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.
2025-07-08 12:00:00
Trip: 51
Nights: 175-177
After losing my job at the end of May I canceled both June camping trips out of some Calvinistic ethic that I should not be in the woods having fun while unemployed. I fixed that for July by starting my own company, so now I am never employed or unemployed. I'm Schrodinger's Sales Consultant. So we went camping for the July 4th weekend.
We went to Douthat State Park. We were there in peak COVID in summer 2020. We met friends who got an AirBnB nearby. It poured rain the entire weekend. Our BBQ dinner with friends ended up happening in an unused picnic shelter at the State Park, after we spent the day hanging out in the camper due to the weather. The weather was much, much better this time. It was 90+ and humid in RVA and by the time we got to Douthat 2.5 hours later, it was low 80s with comfortable humidity.
We had an added complication of having to bring our 13-15 year old dog camping. He was camping with us once 5 years ago, and he was fine. But he is essentially allergic to planet earth, and we had free weekend pet sitting, so we just didn't ever bring him along. Our pet sitter has a new job that has him out of town most weekends, and Teddy's medications are complicated and the consequences of screwing them up are extreme, so we don't trust anybody else to deal with him. So Teddy gets to go camping.
Our fears about Teddy and camping turned out to be unfounded. He was great. He's old and not very mobile these days, so we can't take him hiking or even for much of a walk. Maybe we need a baby stroller to push him around. At one point a Park Ranger stopped by the site due to complaints of an unleashed dog chasing kids. He looked at Teddy and said, "I don't think he's the dog we are looking for." The Ranger also warned us to be careful on the bridge into the campground, as someone ran off it the previous night. (see photo below.) The bridge is sketchy and I get nervous pulling my little 14 ft. camper across it. I don't know how the guys driving a Dually with a 40 foot Airstream do it. Also, Teddy doesn't seem to understand that if he's already outside, he doesn't need to wait for us to take him out to pee. Not once all weekend did he walk to the grass and lift his leg. He waited for us to take him to the grass every single time.
We got into camp Thursday evening and after dinner got a fire going and we hung out at the campfire until it burned out, then headed into the camper for cards and board games. On Friday we went birding in the AM in the campground, which was also an experiment in leaving Teddy in the camper. I assume he was just sleeping in the camper, but whatever he was doing, he was quiet, which is what we were hoping for. So we can leave him for short periods of time without him causing a disturbance. After lunch I went out for a 5 mile RT hike to a waterfall that was more of a water trickle. Friday night was a repeat of the previous night, campfire/cards/bed. Douthat is fairly remote, there is no cell service in the park. However, I did not expect it to be so remote that we didn't hear a single firework on July 4th. I'm sure the many dogs in the campground appreciated that. Teddy's hearing is mostly gone so he would not have noticed them anyway.
On Saturday I did another hike to a waterfall that had little water. Blue Suck Falls kind of sucked. It's a big exposed piece of rock, so I bet it is quite spectacular during Spring runoff season. On July 5th 2025, there was maybe a few gallons a minute flowing, so not so spectacular. It was a very pretty hike though. I birded along the hike and picked up a few warblers and watched a crow harassing a Broad Wing Hawk, so it was a good hike overall. After that I just lounged at the campsite. It was a very mellow camping weekend. Saturday night was a repeat of the previous two nights.
The drive home on Sunday was uneventful.
Douthat is a wonderful state park. The trails were very well maintained. I only had to deal with a single blow down in two days of hiking. It's one of the original Virginia state parks, so the campsites are nice sized, if not particularly level. The beach area looked very nice, although we did not do any beach time due to having Teddy with us. The camp store and grill had the essentials and you can rent canoes, kayaks, and paddle boats a a very reasonable hourly rate. We didn't leave the park the entire weekend.
Next camping trip is to the Snowshoe ski resort in WV for a blues and brews event. We are mainly going because the Saturday night headlining act is Robert Jon and the Wreck, one of my favorite bands. I will leave you with a couple of sample tunes.
2025-06-29 12:00:00
It was a productive week on the starting my own company front. I signed my first two clients, and I'm expecting another contract this week. It's not paying all, or even most of the bills yet, but it is paying some of them. More importantly, the incoming cash lengthens my runway for when I run out of money to sometime next year. My nervousness at going solo is starting to turn to excitement as my plans come to fruition and I start to consider what my life will look like next year when this is working fully. I have an MBA and I actually built a pro-forma income statement and tested various scenarios to gauge my odds of making a living on my own. It was fun to work those financial analysis muscles, and seeing the plan actually work is cool too. I've proved the idea is valid and the strategy is solid. Now is the hard part, executing.
The reality in the US is that working for a company is not job security. Almost all white collar professional work in the US is "at-will." For those of you not in the US, that means you can fired at any time for any reason, or no reason at all, excepting specific protected cases like race, sex, national origin, etc. Not that the current administration would actually enforce those laws. In late stage capitalism doing a good job does not provide job security in corporate America. If you are going to live the uncertainty, you might as well do it on your own where you keep all the profits instead of making some rich asshole richer.
We saw the Indigo Girls in concert this week. It was brutally hot, but 100% worth it. I also published my top 5 books list for the first half of the year. This afternoon, I'm attending a lecture on the historical impact of the Declaration of Independence at my favorite local brewery. Yes, I'm paying to listen to a history lecture at a brewery. I'll probably have a post about that in July.
Harper is an open source grammar checker that works 100% locally. I use Language Tool because it seemed less icky than Grammarly, but I need to install this and give it a test run.
The moment you stop eating what everyone else eats, stop buying what everyone else buys, stop believing what everyone else believes — not because you're rebelling but because you're paying attention — you discover something unsettling: most people are sleepwalking. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
-What if Everything You Were Told About Happiness is Wrong?
This queer online zine can only be read via Telnet.
This mashup of 80s metal songs with "hell" in the title is an absolute work of art. Make sure you stick with it to the end, or at least through the extended guitar solo cuts.
Substack sucks, but you already knew that.
I found this new to me band this week, Massive Wagons. It's blues based bar room rock and roll done incredibly well. Check out this tune from their latest record, which takes on the British government.
Next week's edition may be delayed due to the Independence Day holiday in the US. We are no longer a functioning representative democracy, but we'll still take the day off. I expect it to renamed in honor of the orange shit gibbon in the near future.
And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.
2025-06-28 12:00:00
I've completed 23 books so far this year, with another 5 or 6 started and abandoned. These are the top 5 so far. At least a couple of these are destined to end up on my annual top 5 list. I have hundreds of other book reviews on this site.
The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings
Normally, you don't judge a book by its cover, but in this case, go ahead and do it. It's a stunning book cover and a perfect harbinger of what to expect in this book. If your reaction to the book cover is, “cool,” you can add this to your to-read list.
This is a stunning debut novel. It's fantasy, set in a post-Katrina New Orleans around 2015, IIRC. This New Orleans is soaked in magic, with a series of songs powering the magic and keeping everything in balance. Except that somebody is stealing the songs, throwing everything out of whack and opening a rift that allows spirits and humans to cross a usually forbidden passage between New Orleans and its mirror in the spirit world, Nola. Nola is a city of zombie cab drivers and a magical sky car system to get around. Our heroes are a trio of three young kids, aided by some magical artifacts obtained on a quest set up by Grandma. There is also a parallel story line involving a 20-something trans ex-pat who has returned to New Orleans. He ends up on his own magical quest to find his cousin, who is presumed dead in a magical accident, but no body has been found.
There are many players in this story, and keeping up with them as the POV shifts, and following where you are (New Orleans or Nola) can be a bit of a challenge at some points in the book. But stick with it. Ultimately, this is a love letter to New Orleans, both the place, the spirit, and the music.
Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario
The author won a Pulitzer for her newspaper reporting in The LA Times about Central American immigration to the US. Consider this book the extended version of that reporting. The journey is harrowing, with kids as young as 8 or 10 leaving Honduras headed North to the US, often in search of their mother's, who had gone North years earlier to earn enough money to support their kids from afar. The journey involves extended stretches riding on top of trains, with young kids dying or losing limbs from a fall just about every day. They also have to dodge gangs, corrupt police, the Mexican immigration police, and legit cops. Along they way they get help from churches and locals who sympathize with their plight. Even if they make it to the US and find their family, they live in fear of being deported daily. That fear is probably much more real these days versus when the book was written 20 years ago.
You'll learn a lot about immigration, and you'll also understand why Trump's send them all back strategy can not work. Enrique failed 8 or 9 times before finally making it into the US. Conditions are so bad in many places in Central America that the risk of death pales against the misery of staying home. Most of these folks are not criminals, they are refugees. And they should be treated as such.
Everything Burns by S.A. Cosby
This is Cosby's 5th book, I think. By now, you know what you are getting in a S.A. Cosby book. It'll be set somewhere east of Richmond, VA, within a few of hours drive of the city. There will be crime. It will be violent. People will die, and those deaths will be graphic. Almost all the main characters will be black, and the plot is usually driven by systemic racism in some way. This time the story revolves around a family that owns the local crematorium. A brother is on the wrong side of the local drug gang, and his successful, rich, older brother home from Atlanta has to fix things. In this case, fixing things involves financial fraud, crypto scams, execution style murders, and people burned alive in the crematorium. At the end of the book I wasn't sure if there were any good guys in this story.
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
If the news reported, completely seriously, that the moon and all known moon rock samples instantaneously turned to cheese (or a cheese like organic matrix per the official NASA statement), how would you deal with it? How would the President deal with it? Your neighbors? Evangelical preachers? And then, what if the moon turning to cheese appeared to trigger a life ending event on earth?
Can an author really did into those meaty questions with this ridiculous premise? Scalzi can. Did I mention the cheese related puns? He bounces back and forth between chapters where he very seriously considers how an evangelical preachers would explain this to the flock, and then in another chapter we spend the day with a Hollywood producer sitting through pitch after pitch of bad cheese related TV and movie pitches. It's not a traditional follow two main characters through a story book. It's more like an anthology, which each chapter considering how one specific group or person is dealing. There is a light connection weaving through the story, but I'm not sure it was even necessary.
Somehow when you finish this book you'll find yourself thinking about the meaning of life and cheese puns at the same time.
The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
An early leader for my book of the year. It's an inventive story involving books that bestow various powers on whoever has possession. The book of doors allows you to time and place travel simply by walking holding the book, thinking of where or where and when you want to go, and walking through any door.Our heroine Cassie comes into possession of the Book of Doors and upon realizing its power, finds herself pursued across time and space by dark forces that would possess the books for evil. So time travel set in the modern day world with good and evil, all very well executed.
2025-06-27 12:00:00
This was a good month for concerts. Last week, a free ticket from a friend put me in the third row at The National for Aimme Mann, with Jonathan Coulton opening. Coulton came to fame back in Web 2.0 when he did a stunt where he wrote a song every week for a year, selling them all off his website. It lead to him walking away from his web developer job to be a full time musician. And here he is in 2025 opening for Aimee Mann. His music is very humor forward, which was an interesting contrast to Mann's more somber take on the world. Alas, Coulton did not play my favorite of his tunes, Code Monkey.
Aimee Mann played the entire Lost in Space album, in what was essentially a COVID delayed celebration of the 20 year anniversary of the record. She describes the record as her most depressing album. It definitely is not get up and dance music. Alas, she did not dip into her big breakthrough with Till Tuesday, so I did not get to hear Voices Carry live.
Two night ago the Indigo Girls sold out the stage at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens. The opening act was Katie Pruitt. Katie is an up and coming County / Americana singer-songwriter with a powerhouse voice. You can check out her new single on YouTube.
The Indigo Girls were sans band for this tour. It was just Amy, Emily, and their violin player. I last saw them in a tiny club in Atlanta 30+ years ago. The heat index when Katie hit the stage was 100F. It was down to 95F when The Indigo Girls started at 8 PM. It felt like their song choices leaned hard into their more issue focused tunes, which is not a surprise given the state of life in the US. They were fabulous, as you would expect. Alas, they did not play my favorite Indigo Girls tune, Southland in the Springtime.
0 for 3 on hearing my favorite tunes live, but still 4 fabulous performances.
