Friday State of the Bill

Facebook

Less and less useful with every passing day. Lots of drum-beating, outrage, and self-promotion, less and less personal content. It's like a giant dinner party of acquaintances, rather than a conversation among friends. I know the world is fucked up. I know there's a dog half a continent away that needs a home. I know you sell Amway products. How was your day? No, thanks, I don't want to buy non-stick cookware. How was your day?? Yes, Missouri is on the fast track to Worst State in America, how was your day???

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Three positives: Day four

1. Movie night with the family. There wasn't any way I could meet any deadline tonight, or indeed even finish any project with or without a deadline, so I didn't try. I plated dinner and the family and I sat down to watch a movie, "The Goonies", as it happens. I hate the movie, but I love sitting with my boy, and then it doesn't matter what the movie is.

2. Prozac. Odd thing for a list like this, perhaps, but it's made a difference. I've been having heart attack symptoms for a year now, though there is nothing wrong with my heart: it's all stress, and it's all manifesting as chest pain*. Imagine getting punched in the sternum with a red-hot baseball bat. The small end. Yeah, it's like that. Anyway, my doctor prescribed prozac and while it's not a cure it has certainly taken the edge off.

3. Sleeping with the window open. Cooler temps make for good sleeping weather.

* So, on the subject of chest pain: first symptoms were last July. ER twice, found nothing, no evidence of any cardiac event at all. Chemical stress test + CT scan: nothing remarkable except for the condition of my arteries, exceptionally good for a white male in his mid-40s. No calcification, heart muscle strong, etc. Not cardiac but skeleto-muscular, related to stress.

Friday Five

1. What crowd-funding projects have you supported? If you haven’t supported any, were there some that really intrigued you?

I've never supported one; never had the money. The one that truly got my attention (where I didn't actuallyknow the person) was ZPM Espresso. Coffee. I mean, c'mon. Had I had the money at the time, I would have gladly forked over the maximum donation just to have a good espresso machine with parts I could replace off-the-shelf.

2. How much of your montly bill-paying is done online?

Most of it. I think there are one or two checks that we still have to write. Trash service, life insurance, stuff like that.

3. What are some of the more memorable things you’ve bought or sold in online auctions?

Purchased two sets of lasts, wooden shoe forms, one set for men's shoes, one for women's. Never did anything with them, ended up selling them back on Ebay.

4. What experience do you have with purchasing digital entertainment (music, movies, TV shows, or live web shows, for example) online?

Music: I buy from CDBaby, occasionally Amazon, but always physical media to avoid DRM restrictions. Most of the time, any music is simply downloaded from ... ahem ... non-commercial sources, shall we say? I can get pretty much any song I want by recording audio off YouTube, or downloading from sites like MediaMonkey. There's also torrents: I download movies all the damn time.

5. What kind of stuff have you bought or sold from personal online craft stores, such as are found on Etsy?

Purchased several hundred silver-colored buttons for the yeoman uniforms from an Etsy vendor in England. They were much smaller than I expected, but turned out to be perfect in context.