Most in the know are critical of the current state of religion, and Christianity in particular. My opinion is the problem is that we are more religious than ever when you treat the definition of religion as simply re-ligamenting or re-binding. So called "organized" religions simply claim their sets of beliefs, loyalty tests, and rewards are better than other religions. Pick us, they say, over them. But what if the problem is religion itself? What if religion, like "the law" that Paul rights of, might be a good foundation is something we must move beyond in order to become more human, to be more Christ-like? Are we really called to believe in Christ or are we called to imitate Christ?#
Taillon gave up three home runs yesterday and the Cubs lost to the Marlins 1-3. On the one hand he has given up an alarming number of home runs over the last 10 innings that he has pitched, on the other hand most of those were solo home runs. It might be that Jameson is tipping pitchies, or it might be bad pitch selection or execution, but it is also the case that MLB is mostly all about home run hitting these days. By current baseball standards, the pitching staff holding the opponent to 3 runs or less puts the loss on the team's offense, the win on the opponents pitching. Shota also gives up a lot of home runs as did Kyle Hendricks in the past and my guess is the overall rate increase has more to do with changes in hitting and these style of pitchers. #
In think in this era what is most important is pitchers not walking batters and not giving up a high number of hits. You might even say that 3 home runs on only four hits is a very good pitching. The real measure is the number or hitters a pitcher allows on base, which is part of WHIP measures and Jameson's current WHIP of 1.11 is below is career mark of 1.20. Home runs alone is not necessarily the factor in wins and losses, it's home runes in comparison between the teams. The loss last night was not on the pitchers, it was on the Cubs hitting. #
In addition to the below, I also write drafts of posts for my primary blog here then copy that post from this Daynotes outline to my microBlog outline and run a script to publish it over there. In this manner Drummer really is my main writing tool/platform.#
- You may notice that the title of this site is Daynotes, but it probably should be Day Notes. The name is an homage to the first blogroll I participated in called the Daynotes Gang. People who participated in the blogroll were bloggers and fans of Jerry Pournelle. After his columns for Byte magazine wound down Jerry used his web site to publish his technology writing and his site included a daily journal written in a manner similar to what we now call blogging.#
- Speaking for myself, I imagined myself as an amateur technology pundit. During the early 2000s I even became a published author. My first blog was called Notes From The Cave. "The Cave" was a term for the room I lived in/studied in while in college that I transferred to mean the home office in our basement. What I wrote then were literally notes I wrote while in "the cave." #
- The first iteration of Notes From The Cave was written using EditThisPage, the first blogging platform developed by Dave Winer. By 2008 that platform was decommissioned and I moved to using WordPress, and that site continues on to this day. Today that Wordpress site is mostly an archive for posts I publish to other sites, but what I write here is not cross posted to it. #
- Daynotes is a daily outline written in Drummer and published by Dave's Old School blog CMS and hosted on Dave's server. I can save the source OPML files, but I do not have access to the web server that hosts this content. For that matter, Drummer is also hosted by Dave, and all this means that if Dave were to decide, he could stop hosting and I would be no longer able write these notes as I do today, and that would be a case for moving these Daynotes back over to Wordpress. #
- Lately I have been trying out Dave's latest app, Wordland, to write posts on Wordpress, but even if Dave were to take Wordland down the posts live on in Wordpress and can be edited using Wordpress's editors. Wordland is nice, but I really like writing in an outliner like Drummer, so I am included to keep doing what I am doing here until there is a real risk of it going away. #
Pete Rose and "Shoeless" Joe Jackson are now deemed no longer banned from baseball by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, which means they be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Whether they be elected is the real test of whether MLB accepts the hypocrisy that exists now that gambling has become a widely accepted across all sports. #
In an article in The Atlantic titled "The Missing Branch" writer Yuval Levin explains how the weakness of Congress has lead to expansion of the executive and judicial branches. We seem to have forgotten that the founder's solution to "no taxation without representation" was a two house Congress representing the people, the House of Representatives, and the states, the Senate. Congress is seat of the government, the President is there to execute the laws passed by Congress, and the Supreme Court is there to be sure the laws are within the bounds of the Constitution. Congress most important item of concern ought to be the preservation of its power to represent us, We The People, rather than making sure team Democrat or team Republican win.#
Missing from this article is any recognition by the Chief Justice that the U.S. Supreme Court has contributed the diminishing of the rule of law by decisions that make President above the law and turn money into speech. Every bad era of U.S. History has at its root Supreme Court decisions. #
The administration's rationalization of an obvious emolument is just the latest example of their contempt for the Constitution. The unwillingness to be bound by the Constitution and the brazen circumvention is to me an impeachable violation of Trump's oath of office. The Constitution does not give power, it' purpose is to restrain power. The Constitution does not give rights to citizens (see the ninth amendment), it prevents the government for taking away rights. To me, the Constitution is clear, the administration cannot accept an emolument without an act of Congress no matter whether or not the giver is getting something in return. #
The bullpen problems the Cubs had in their loss to the Mets yesterday is more of the same of the Hoyer era. Every season the Cubs rebuild their bullpen mostly from pitchers who were let go from other teams. When they do sign a free-agent reliever it is not when that person is at their prime but rather after their prime when they don't command as high a salary. Hoyer's plan for building a championship team is predicated largely on luck, but luck is not a strategy. No matter whether the Cubs win the division at the end of the season, Ricketts has only one question to answer and that is, based on his body of work, can Jed Hoyer build a consistently championship level competitive team? I think the evidence since 2017 is clear, he cannot and it is time for a change in direction. #
I am subscribed to the basic plan of micro.blog and that has served me well, but Manton might have just added a feature to premium that could cause me to consider upgrading.#
Just updated the firmware on the Note Air 3C and hope that doesn't cause problems.#
All the actions of the Trump administration results in impacts to the majority of citizens to the benefit of practically none of the citizens. In a practical sense, how does redirecting money from cancer research to homeland security and defense helps the average American? Consider that 1 in 3 men will get cancer during their life time. It would be one thing if Trump were cutting this spending and giving money back to citizens, but instead they just moving more money to the military industrial complex. #
My translation of this article about the Cubs closer role woes is that it is that it describes the obvious result of Hoyer constantly trying to build a bullpen by dumpster diving through other team's castoffs. #
Of course, the Obvious Guys have already got their shirts designed for Chicago's claim on the new pope. #
An American Pope? Never expected to see the day. One of my best friends is excited that he is from Chicago and apparently a Cubs fan and they both got their Masters of Divinity from Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. I even spent a few nights at CTU the first time I ever traveled to Chicago on my own while my friend was still in school. The real important question though is the new Pope a fan of deep dish or thin crust pizza? #
We have had technical difficulties with this blog today. Looks like the OPML file somehow became mal-formed by a square bracket added to the end of the file. I downloaded my files, opened blog.opml and removed the extra character. I had to delete blog.opml from Drummer, recreate it and then import an OPML from a local file. #
When you import a local file it appears that the OPML headers are not included in the import, so I manually added each header individually and then tested to confirm the blog builds.#
The moral of the story is that it is really important to regularly download your files from Drummer. Fortunately I could download the current blog.opml file and correct it. #
I watched an interview today with economist Yanis Varoufakis about Trump's tariffs. He thinks that the actions and purpose are equivalent to the Nixon shock of 1971 that eliminated the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold resulting in the U.S. dollar becoming a fiat currency. In short, the dollar changed from representing something tangible to representing the good faith of the United States, but that also enables the Federal Reserve to print as much currency as it wishes. #
The action created a floating exchange between the dollar and other currencies and it made the U.S. dollar the global reserve currency. As the global reserve currency the dollar is what is used by most countries in the world when buying goods and services with other countries, and it is what provides the U.S. with economic power over other countries in the world. Shutting off the flow of U.S. dollars to a country impacts that country's ability to trade with other countries.#
The action also decreased the value of the dollar and that resulted in an increase in the flow of capital in to the United States from other countries, but that increased flow also increased inflation and did not result in more jobs. Varoufakis says that Trumps actions have increased the flow of capital in to the United States but that is translated to rent-seeking rather than job growth.#
In other words, it is a scheme created by bankers for the wealthy to become wealthier and address a risk of United States losing economic power over other countries in the world under the claims increasing jobs for the middle-class. Nixon's actions and subsequent actions take by every President since has destroyed the middle-class in the United States. #
Read this Op-ed in the New York Times that I think correctly describes the reasons behind Project 2025 and what the Trump administration is doing. I think it can be summarized is that a group of people who think they are smart have deemed the republican democracy instituted by the U.S. Constitution is inefficient and that the only efficient form of government is a dictatorship. Democracy is inefficient by design to prevent tyranny. The problem the smart people don't seem to address is, what happens when they no longer like the person they elevate to the supreme presidency? Or worse, what happens to you when that supreme president no longer likes you? #
What ties together these thinkers? A conviction that executive governance combines maximal leeway to act with maximal power to execute decisions without second-guessing from civil servants or lawyers or deference to judges.#
The great danger of such a breathtakingly expansive view of executive power is that it threatens to transform the American presidency into a dictatorial office that disregards the separation of powers and seeks unchallenged primacy in its place.#
The problem is, the genie is already out of the bottle. How does Congress or the U.S. Supreme Court able to reign in President Trump and his handlers? Congress can start by passing a joint resolution that ends the states of emergency as per the 1976 National Emergencies Act and override the president's veto. #
I really like my Boox Note Air 3C but I also find it a bit large, which is why I am interested in a new e-Ink tablet announced by Boox, the Go 7 that has a 7-inch screen. The problem is that the Go 7 uses a different stylus that they are charging an extra $47 for it, but what I am most concerned about is whether it feels like a the "glass on glass" of the Apple Pencil and iPad as opposed to the paper like feel of using the EMR pencil on my Note Air. Besides the Go 7 being much smaller and thus could be more handy to carry around, it only costs $249.#
I think that one thing that can explain much about the United States right now is unresolved corporate trauma that has built up over years and manifests in fear, distrust, and anger with the government. The trauma started with the assignations of John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr, spread significantly by the war in Vietnam, the war on drugs in the United States and to date culminated on 9/11 it's on follow wars. Gen X and subsequent generations grew up in the stew of these traumas while the Baby Boomers were the first affected and the first to react. You could say there is a line between those taking advantage of the trauma and those trapped by the trauma. #
Looks like Real ID is not proof of citizenship nor is a drivers license. Do you carry a passport with you everywhere? #
Read this report saying that Comcast is losing TV and broadband customers and I am not surprised. I am both a TV and broadband customer but don't think Comcast is doing much to keep my business. One way they could do that is by dropping their broadband data cap or at the very least increase it by 2x. We learned during Covid that there really is not a cost impact to Comcast from increased consumer downloads.#
I need to improve my ability to monitor network traffic on my home network, particularly traffic going out/coming in from the Internet because I seem be bumping up against Xfinity's bandwidth cap. We went over this month and I think that was due to some sync with Onedrive that went wrong with a couple of my virtual machines. #
By most reports the Chicago Cubs wrapped up their toughest two weeks of the schedule last night and enter the first series against divisional opponent Pittsburgh with a 17-12 overall record and a 1.5 game lead in the N.L. Central. In short, they exceeded expectations. However, for me, the upcoming month against lesser opponents will be more telling. Will the Cubs play down to their competition, which has been a problem in the past, and end May with just a few games above .500 or will they extend their overall record to well above .500 by dominating the lesser opponents? Good teams beat the teams they are supposed to beat, and they are supposed to beat Pittsburgh so I am looking for a sweep or at least win the first two for a chance to sweep.#Polls of public opinion matter to people who hold office if they believe that the public can and will remove them from office. Trump and the people directing his administration are not acting as though the fear they can lose their office. Given they are obvious in their disregard for the Constitution I expect some justification will come to delay or cancel elections, or the rules will be such that only their supporters can vote.#
I have done more experimentation with Wordland today. The template that I am using on my Wordpress site requires titles for posts because it uses the title as the link to the post. The top page is only an index to posts and doesn't display of the post content. One can make the template use the date as a link to the post. I am surprised that Wordland requires publshing posts to Wordpress before adding to the RSS feed, it would seem to me that publishing to Wordpress would be optional but that by default everything that one saves is added to the RSS feed. I would expect Wordland to first and foremost be a simple way to build and maintain a RSS feed apart from publishing to any destination because that would provide for the ultimate flexibility. It could even be used apart from Wordpress. In short, unless I change the template writing posts without titles in Wordland is pointless to me.#
I read this post about the desktop computing metaphor and when I read the description of an itemized operating system my experience with the NewtonOS immediately came to mind. What I remember is that everything in NewtonOS was an object and data was separate from objects so that you didn't need duplicate data. I am probably not doing the topic justice, but I do believe NewtonOS was the only "object oriented" operating system that I have ever personally used. Regardless, I really would like what is being described in the post because I agree that the desktop and window metaphor is no longer the best way for us to do personal computing.#
Today Dave Farquhar wrote about the first computer I personally ever owned, the Timex Sinclair 1000. Dave includes a link to this post written by a guy who is reviving and upgrading a TS 1000. For a glimpse of what it was like to use this computer, look at the second to last picture on this page that shows the display of a game called Dungeon Crawling. One of the"official" games that one could buy was Frogger, which my buddy Ray renamed Wood Tick once he saw how huge the flattened frog became when "hit' by an object. This post triggered the selection of my Crucial Track for today.#
Jason has released his app, Crucial Tracks, which is a web app for journaling about music. The app is an add-on to his Crucial Tracks blog. I have signed up to create my own profile and RSS feed that you can subscribe to, or see my entries on my micro.blog or Bluesky profiles.#
If citizens endorse the idea that people named by authorities as "criminals" or "terrorists" have no right to due process, then they are accepting that they themselves have no right to due process. It is due process, and due process alone, that allows you to demonstrate that you are a citizen. Without it, the masked men in the black vans can simply claim that you are a foreign terrorist and disappear you. -- Tim Snyder#
Another way to say the above is, innocent until proven guilty. It is the obligation of the state to prove a person's guilt, not the obligation of a person to prove their innocence, and this applies to citizens and non-citizens.#
- Dave elaborates on what he means by inbound RSS. In my experience micro.blog is the only site that enables this in a couple of different ways. You can either have items from inbound RSS feeds appear in your timeline or to import posts from a feed to your blog. The import is intended to be a one time activity and not something that happens in an ongoing manner, so it doesn't meet Dave's use case.#
- In a roundabout way I have been using inbound RSS for some time by using If This Then That. Posts that I publish to my main blog get cross-posted to a Wordpress site, which I created back in 2008 as a replacement to the blog I first created using EditThisPage. The IFTTT applet monitors the RSS feed of my blog and when it finds a new entry it posts that to my Wordpress site. #
- Here is an example. At the bottom of the post you see the source citation, "from Routine Revelations" along with the link to the source. A problem I had when I set this up is that Wordpress requires titles for all blog posts whereas my main blog doesn't require titles, such as was the case with the source post to above example. The work around is to automatically create a title using the date and time as a unique identifier.#
- When I first started using IFTTT I had applets monitoring my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts and also cross posting this to the Wordpress site. My idea is that the site would be an archive of all of my posts across all these sites. Here is an example from Facebook. and here is an example from Twitter. If you look at the archive page from September 2020 you see a mix of blog posts and tweets and you even see some articles I favorited and shared from Pocket. Over time the social media accounts disabled the API that IFTTT to block this functionality and thus I lost this functionality. Now that Bluesky provides outbound RSS I could set up IFTTT monitoring of it but in practice I only cross post to Bluesky from my main blog, so monitoring Bluesky would be redundant. #
- My point is that a practical use case for inbound and outbound RSS is the consolidation and archival of one's Internet posts across multiple source locations.#
When we are left to having to scrape up a few micro controllers to cobble together a computer, there will be Collapse OS. #
Today is Pixel 9a day, I see a number of reviews that have been posted and I received an email from Google telling me I can go purchase my own. #
- A MLB team cannot win their division in April, but they can lose it. Going in to the middle of April we are seeing positive results from the Chicago Cubs, although they suffered the first set back of the season when Justin Steele was put on the 15 day IL. Right now they are at the top of the NL Central with a half game lead but that doesn't matter as much as the +28 run differential that is the best in the league. The runs they scored during this last home stand in cold April weather is a very positive sign.#
- On Friday the Cubs start a 6 game road trip in Los Angeles and then San Diego, and I think these games are a good early test for the Cubs. I want to see them win at least two games in LA and win one in San Diego. The Dodgers have actually fallen back to earth going 6-4 over the last ten while the Padres has jumped up to the top of the NL West over the Dodgers and Giants. I will feel good about a split on this road trip. #
The most honest explanation for Trump’s actions are: He is insane. He suffers from a number of pathologies. That is fairly clear. The more important question is: How has this insane man managed to gain control of the government of the world’s richest and most powerful nation? That, my friends, is the unfortunate outcome of an economic system that has so profoundly failed to enforce economic equality, and a political system that so profoundly failed to protect its democracy from the influence of capital that it allowed itself to be totally captured by extreme lunatics backed by extreme wealth. And here we are. The whole thing is most notable for its absurdity. If it’s any consolation, all the capitalists who led us down this road are going to lose a shitload of money. Ha ha, fuckers.#
- Without due process, a claim of guilt is simply one man's word over another. Without due process we are simply being asked to believe the claims that the humans they labeled as terrorists and thus deserving of deportation and imprisonment are in fact deserving of that label and loss of liberty. Due process is how governments insure that the right to liberty endowed by our creator is preserved. #
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. -- Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
#- The Declaration Of Independence is important because it defines the values of the United States of America. It says the rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is not only secured for citizens but for all people because we all have the same creator. Due process for everyone is how we live out our values in the United States and denying that to anyone makes us hypocrites at best.#
One of the reasons why I bought the Macbook Pro last fall is that I anticipated prices will increase with Trump entering office. I sold some of stock to make the purchase, and I now realize that was a second good reason for the timing as that pool of stock has less value today. Thanks Trump!#
I am wondering today about the price of things that I eat every day, blueberries, yogurt, bread, and my fondness for guacamole. I've seen was the tariffs are doing to my retirement savings, but I have yet to see it impact my daily life, but that will happen soon! Thanks Trump!#
- I am using a Boox Note Air 3C as my primary notetaking tablet and I am using a daily organizer PDF. For the past year I have been using an app called NeoReader to open the PDF that I then annotate with my handwriting, and that has worked very well. However, a shortcoming of annotating a PDF on this device is that I cannot search for that handwriting, to find something I basically have to recall the date on which I wrote something and go to that page. The cool thing about the PDF is that it's a very robust template and includes hyperlinks to move throughout the file, which makes it function more like an app than a document.#
- The latest version of the Boox firmware for the Note Air 3C adds the ability to create notebooks using a PDF as a template. After upgrading my Note Air 3C to this version of the firmware I created a new notebook using the daily organizer PDF and I found that the linking function exists in the notebook. The benefit of using a notebook is that I can search for handwriting, which makes it much easier to find something. Prior to using the Note Air 3C I had been using OneNote on an iPad that also supports search of handwriting, so I have missed this feature.#
- Boox notebooks are backed up to PDF files that I have configured to sync with my OneDrive account and I also use SyncThing to sync copies to file shares on computers on my home network. The problem is, the links are not preserved in the backup files, which are an export of the notebook, so navigation through the backup files is not as easy as with the annotated versions of the PDF that I had been using. I also cannot search for handwriting in the backup files.#
- If I had a way to perform a type of OCR indexing of the annotated PDFs so that I could do searches on a PC I probably would stick with that approach, using NeoReader, rather than using the original PDF as a template for a notebook. #
It is a cold and damp day here in southeast Michigan, which has me wishing to be back in Phoenix watching the Cubs during spring training.#While the header graphic is not what I normally think of as spring, I did take it in spring while in Phoenix, and I might keep that one there all summer!#
Happy April 2! I need to get the top graphic on this page changed over to something not winter. #
America started developing tunnel vision during the 90s and I think our current state in which the ends is only the destruction of the now is the logical conclusion. Really what we are living through is the beginning of the fall of the American Empire that rose in place starting on August 6, 1945. Washington D.C. is being sacked while most of the nation cheers because the empire has been only serving a minority of citizens. Unfortunately, our tunnel vision prevents us from even considering what might come next.#
Clearly, we did not learn the right lessons from Trump 1.0. The establishment convinced itself it only lost due to Hilary's failure rather than face the message that nearly half the country find the U.S. government beyond redemption, that it needs to be complete destroyed. #
Really enjoyed this post by Dave Rogers: Our Tools Shape Us. I've been using Roam but I am in the process of transitioning fully to Obsidian, although if I am honest what I use most is Drummer, which makes me think that if I ever had used Think Tank I would have loved it. #
I have updated and completed the outline of the books that I read in 2024 and updated its inclusion in the larger total books read since 2020.#
I am not sure that it's really useful, but gone ahead and enabled the Linux Terminal in Android. I created and edited a text file using nano and pinged my home gateway. It's going to be interesting to see uses people come up with for this. #