Monthly Archives: June 2024

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Debate night. It’s once again debate night in America. Our two geriatric asshole candidates will go head-to-head for 90 minutes on CNN. Honestly, I’d rather gouge out my own eyes than watch Biden and Trump debate… again. I weep that these are the two paragons my country of 300 million souls has turned to in its hour of need. If, in fact, these two are the best and brightest we have available to captain the ship of state, maybe we should just accept that America’s long experiment in self-government is well and truly over.

2. Julian Assange. The guy is responsible for publishing metric tons of classified documents. He pled guilty to a single count and will serve no time in an America cell. I’m honestly in disbelief that the private jet carrying this shitbird home to Australia didn’t find itself the victim of a tragic midair accident while he was in transit. I can only hope that one quiet night in the not distant future, he will be visited by rough men prepared to do violence on behalf of their nation. His worthless hide should never have been allowed to enjoy a single day of liberty.

3. Time off. I’m about to start the second and last ultra-long summer weekend. That feels great. It also feels terrible in that the next long stretch of time off on the books for me won’t roll around until the end of the year. Oh sure, there will be plenty of one-off days scattered between here and there, but it still feels like a whole lot of time on the job stretching out between now and Christmas and that’s just a little depressing no matter how you shade it. 

It’s been a very strange year…

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It’s just a few days shy of the one-year anniversary of experiencing the still unexplained tachycardia that started me down what feels like a very long and often unfulfilling series of medical appointments and major life changes. As June 28th looms larger on the horizon, I’m still not sure what to make of the experience. Maybe it’s not surprising to anyone else but learning that I am not actually indestructible came as something of an unwelcome surprise. 

I won’t say that I ever considered myself particularly healthy, but I always felt robust and strong as a bull moose. I rarely gave much thought to my physical limits. This experience has forced me to confront both human fragility and the illusion of invincibility I once held. Every medical appointment since has been a reminder of my body’s unpredictability, and despite numerous tests and consultations, the cause of my tachycardia remains elusive. This uncertainty has become a constant background noise in my life.

Each day carries a mix of hope and frustration, as I swing between optimism that the next appointment might bring answers and the annoyance of another inconclusive result. It’s a challenge to remain patient and positive when the path to wellness feels never-ending. Often, the struggle between my own ears is as or more problematic than the physical one.

As June 28th approaches, marking a year since this parade of fuckery, I find myself reflecting on the life changes that have accompanied it. Adjusting my lifestyle to accommodate both the knowns and the unknows has meant altering routines that felt as natural as breathing. From dietary changes and new exercise regimes to prioritizing rest and stress management, the shifts have been both major and minor but always impactful. The experience has reshaped my understanding of health and well-being and the surprisingly delicate balance required to maintain it. 

A year later I wish I had better answers than, “well, as long as the incidents aren’t recurring, keep doing what you’re doing.” Patience in the face of uncertainty has never been one of my strengths. This experience hasn’t improved that at all. As I gain some distance from the events that launched this ridiculousness, pondering on what it all means and what’s going to happen has receded to manageable proportions rather than filling a dominate place in my daily thoughts. That has gone a long way to letting me make the mental leap to getting back to what now passes for normal.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Antwerpen Chrysler Jeep Dodge. Antwerpen is apparently the outfit that bought my Jeep after the nice people at Land Rover sent it to auction. They, in turn, sold it to someone named Kok Loeng. But somehow as far as the dealership and the MVA are concerned it’s still my email and physical mail address associated with the Jeep. I regularly get letters both electronic and physical. I guess it’s only a little absurd that they can’t sort it out. I advised them once but now they’re on their own. I’d like to say I’m surprised, but it feels pretty much in character for both a car dealership and the state government.

2. Smell. I was walking the halls at the office on Tuesday and was struck by a distinct smell that I always identify with hotel rooms at the beach. I think it’s some combination of a space being overly air conditioned, high humidity, and cleaning products. If I hadn’t known better, I could have said I was walking the halls at the Carousel thirty odd years ago. It’s a damned dirty trick for your mind to play when you’re standing in the dumb office being a trusted professional. 

3. Here we are on Thursday, trying to slip back into the week after a random holiday on Wednesday. I’m not a big fan of these floating holidays. Where they fall on most other points in the calendar, I fill in the blanks with some of my own vacation time to build out a nice long weekend. Since I’ve already done that in early June and will do it again in early July, burning off more vacation time between the two feels excessive. So, what we’re left with was basically a week that feels very much like it’s had two Mondays. If that’s not the sign of a having a bad time, I don’t know what would be. 

I’m not there yet…

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I want to like artificial intelligence. I was an early adopter of things like the Blackberry and iPhone, tablet computers, and Blu-ray disks. Getting my hands on new tech was thrilling. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t toned that down considerably. I still like having neat new hardware, but tech like Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) and the raft of other AI platforms feels somewhere between overwhelming and terrifying.

Technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace. Innovations are not only frequent but also increasingly complex. GPT, for example, is built on sophisticated machine learning models that can generate human-like text. This level of complexity can be daunting, even for those who have always embraced new technologies. The rapid pace means there’s less time to acclimate and understand each new development.

Earlier technologies, though innovative, were often more transparent and easier to understand. In contrast, many modern AI systems, including GPT, operate as “black boxes.” Their decision-making processes are opaque, making it difficult to comprehend how they work or predict their behavior. It’s a classic example of AI being asked a question, something magic happening, and the system spitting out an answer on the other side. 

Throw in a healthy dose of skepticism about how easy these systems will be to control or how well privacy is being protected and I feel like I’m increasingly in danger of turning into the old man standing in his front yard shaking his fist at a cloud. Maybe I’ve just finally gotten old enough that I’ll never be entirely comfortable again in a world so deeply different than the one I was born into. I want to like this stuff. It’s fascinating and I expect it’s fully going to run the world in the future… but every time I fiddle with it, I’m left feeling just a bit uneasy.

I really do want to like AI. I think it’s clearly the next stage of our technological development. I want to like it, but I’m just not there yet.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Portion size. For most of my life, I’ve ignored the “recommended serving size” listed on most products. All it ever told me is that I identify as a family of four for purposes of meal prep. The reality is the serving size listed for most things is honestly absurd. Have you ever really measured out a single ounce of peanuts? It’s way, way less than an adult male hand full. An ounce of cheese? That’s something like a 1×1 inch cube. A serving size apparently isn’t half a package of bacon. Want a sandwich? Yeah, that’s “one serving” for each slice of bread. Utter bullshit that in the year of our lord two thousand twenty four, we haven’t come up with a consequence free way to eat the tasty food.

2. Never being satisfied. Sitting in the office doing stuff that I plainly have the capability of doing while sitting in the comfort of my sunroom remains pretty much infuriating. Look, I know that being in the office once or twice a week – in comparison to the five days a week that was the norm in the olden days – is a huge step in the right direction. Yet on those days when I have to put on pants and drive the 40 minutes to sit in fluorescent splendor, it all feels completely ridiculous. I don’t expect to see another revolution in office affairs in my lifetime, but having seen what could have been – what should have been – how we’re forced to operate “just because” feels entirely absurd.

3. Trash Tech. At one time Trash Tech was a reasonably well-respected trash company. Their cans were thick in the neighborhood on trash day. When I sold the truck and opted to hire a service, they were the top of the list. It was a horrible mistake. In the one month I maintained service with them there wasn’t a single day when pickup happened on its scheduled day. For two out of four weeks there was no pickup at all. Our business relationship was terminated for cause pretty quickly and that’s where the drama really started. Because I was “under contract” for three months of service, they wouldn’t come retrieve their containers until the end of that period – which would have been the end of March. For the last two and a half months, their cans continued to sit here. Finally tired of calling their customer service number, I opted for the far more humorous option of invoicing them for two months of storage and advising of the administrative fee that would be imposed at the end of June if I had to arrange alternative removal and disposal of their equipment. Sometime this morning, their cans finally disappeared. Sadly, the invoice remains unpaid. 

Questionable indicators…

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The cool thing to do now is bitch and complain that inflation has made everything too expensive. Social media is full of discussions about the cost of everything. It’s one of the news media’s favorite topics when they have a few extra minutes or column inches to fill. I can’t remember the last time I went a day without seeing at least one passing reference to inflation and “out of control prices.”

Everyone is bitching that everything is too expensive, but every time I leave the house, I find that the shops are packed. The restaurants are packed. The roads are packed. There are scads of people crawling all over everything from morning til night. It doesn’t feel like the kind of behavior you’d see if everyone was trying to watch their pennies.

I’m left to wonder if it’s just the “very online” people who are broke (or at least keeping the narrative alive), because the sentiment isn’t matching my lived experience and personal observations. Given that Cecil County isn’t exactly an economically well-off region you’d think it’s something that should be noticeable. Maybe it’s just me being unreasonable, but it seems to me if there’s no money and everything is too damned expensive, more people would stay home.

It feels like consumer sentiment might just be a shit economic indicator. Chalk it up to another reason why I just don’t trust people as a group. I’ll be a lot more worried about the economy when people stop buying $1000 cell phones and I don’t have to wait in a line ten people deep at the local fast food spot.  

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Questionable aesthetic decisions. I drive past the house I rented when I first got back to Maryland every couple of weeks. I was dumbfounded to find that the current owner ripped off the large deck and planted a prefab garage in its place. It’s not just something simple that compliments the size of the house. Oh no. It’s a massive thing that overshadows the house completely. It doesn’t just look out of proportion with the property. but completely out of character for the neighborhood. It’s the kind of thing I’d lose my mind over if I had to look at it from next door. HOAs aren’t always ideal, but there’s absolutely a reason I’m ok with my local committee having to chop on any project that would alter the front facing profile of the houses here in my current hood. They may be the devil, but they’re the devil that will keep a neighbor from plunking down a massive steel building in their front yard. Sometimes that just has to be good enough.

2. Being old people. I unexpectedly found myself in attendance at a concert last Thursday. I couldn’t help but notice, when looking around the venue, that I was surrounded by “old people.” Old people who also knew that Chris Barron was the lead singer for Spin Doctors, a band who cut a swath through the early 1990s, and who remember his biggest two or three songs playing nonstop on radio and MTV. As it turns out it’s me. I’m “old people.” It was an unsettling moment of realization, even if sharing a very small venue with a guy whose music marked a pretty significant period in your life was a decidedly cool experience.

3. Self-denial. I’ve learned, over the last year, to go about the day in some varied state of hunger. Some days, I barely think about eating and don’t notice it. Other days, though, all I want to do is gorge on anything I can possibly get my hands on. Those days are the absolute worst, because falling off my particular wagon is no more than a quick walk to the refrigerator or pantry away. Self-denial has never been one of my unique gifts, so on days when hunger really sets in, it’s an all-day fist fight. They don’t hit as often as the used to, but when they show up, damned if they’re not brutal. 

A roll of the dice…

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You’d think that after nine days off, I’d have been rested, relaxed, and at least nominally prepared to go back to work. All those things might have been true on Sunday night, but on Monday morning exactly none of them are true. Wading in to the week deep backlog of email pretty much put an end to any opportunity for good feeling that could have bled over into the work week. Funny how that works.

One of the skills I’ve mostly mastered over the years is leaving the “work stuff” safely at work. I’ve been doing it so long now that I can even do it when the work stuff resides, for more days than not, in my home office. Once the lid on the laptop closes at the end of the day, it might as well cease to exist. It’s honestly a helpful mental trick if you can manage it. 

Unfortunately, because I like getting paid and would absolutely suck at living under a bridge or in a refrigerator box, eventually I have to start paying attention again – or at least I do for the next 11 years or so. Even so, it’s getting increasingly difficult to keep up the appearance that everything is a Big Serious Issue just because someone at echelons higher than reality says it is. 

Look, I get it that most everyone wants to believe whatever they spend their time doing is the changing the world or saving the universe. It’s comforting, but objectively it’s almost never the case.  On an average day, the average person working themselves into a lather doesn’t do much besides raise their own blood pressure.

In any case, I’m back at work for the next few weeks… and keeping my mouth from calling out every bit of fuckery I see seems like it’s going to be the project of the summer. How well that will work really is a roll of the dice at this point.