Tag: technology

Blet Money

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last two months, whenever I’ve had any downtime, I’ve been doing online surveys for mostly pocket change.  Jokingly, I declared that all of the piddly change I’d make would eventually feed into a larger pot, and that the goal would be to get enough money to where I could get myself a new replica wrestling belt for my collection, and hopefully by then, the WWE Shop will get their heads out of their asses and release an NXT UK Tag Team Championship replica.

Well, as you can see above, I’ve done quite a lot of surveys, and the pot has filled up way faster than I would have ever imagined, and I’ve more or less got enough money socked away to where I could be ready to pull the trigger most any available belt out there.  Shocking nobody, the WWE has still yet to release the one belt that I really want, but I’m hoping that perhaps the re-launching of NXT UK in mid-September might jog someone’s memory that there’s still an active belt out there that still has no replica available.

The funny thing is that a long time ago, I used to do random surveys on pen and paper, when companies would send them to me, with pre-paid postage envelopes, which made it easier.  I remember the first time I got actual currency in an envelope, which inspired me to keep going with it for a little bit longer.  Jen on the other hand, got a free pack of toilet paper to sample and judge, which was always funny since I was getting cash for doing surveys.

Ironically, it was mythical wife who introduced me to 1Q (yes that is my referral link), as an app that provided digital surveys, and the payouts were immediate and through PayPal.  Sure, they were only quarters, but still, a bunch of quarters turns into a bunch of dollars over time, and every little bit helps, when there’s one pot all this change is getting dumped into.

I say ironically, because this clearly re-ignited this compulsion to do surveys for pocket change, because it lets me at least be making something, in my downtime, as opposed to making nothing when I’m bored and doing nothing, although that’s hardly the case this day and age, seeing as how there’s a baby in the equation.

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There is no software Adobe doesn’t know how to make less efficient

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Since the onset of coronavirus, I’d been working remotely since basically, my daughter was born.  I kind of got the jump on remote working, on account of being available for my wife and newborn daughter, but then when coronavirus started shutting everything down, I had a head start on working remotely.

Needless to say, my internet at home isn’t quite the fiber-optic connection at work, so it goes without saying that I deal with a little bit more slowdown at home than I do when I’m in the office.

Regardless, I still have to do my share of work, no matter the circumstances, and these days a large part of what I do is a whole lot of reviewing documents, namely PDFs.  So I’m in Acrobat a large portion of my days, whether I’m reviewing PDFs, marking them up, collating them for higher-ups, or whatever.  I’m in Acrobat a lot.

A long time ago, when Adobe products were all offline, I always took a mental note of how much space every program took.  Photoshop would always be a beast, but often times Illustrator would be larger.  Once InDesign came into the picture, it too was rather large, and then with the assimilation of Macromedia, Dreamweaver and Flash were large chunks of disk space necessary to have to install.  All the while, always in the background was Adobe Acrobat, which was but blips on the radar, and took minimal space in comparison, and also ran as smoothly as a well-maintained Audi, all the time.

No matter how much I had my feuds with PageMaker 6.0, Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 8.0, InDesign CS3, InDesign CS6, Acrobat was one of those programs that was always steady as a metronome, and stable to boot.  I remember the first time I managed to get Acrobat to crash, but it was primarily because I was running it off of my old netbook, and I was trying to open a shoddily-made PDF that had a kabillion vector points in it, and frankly nothing short of a NASA computer could open it without issue.

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If only I could’ve held out for another year

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t really paid much attention to cars in a while, especially since I’d just gotten a new one less than a year ago, and that whole having-a-baby thing kind of tends to take mental capacity away from just about everything else in the galaxy for the vast majority of our waking lives.  But my Apple News feed randomly spit out this article about a Nissan electric car with an attractive looking thumbnail so I clicked it, and then I’m staring at my screen with a not bad look on my face at the Nissan Ariya, that’s supposedly going to hit the United States in 2021, and there’s a piece of me thinking damn, if I could’ve only held out for one more year.

And it’s not like I couldn’t have; my old Kia Forte was still running fine, and at “just” 150,000 miles, I probably could’ve easily gone longer, especially with the sheer lack of driving that’s been done during this fucking coronavirus pandemic keeping smart people like me sheltered in place more often than not.  I just simply wanted a new car, and I wanted a bigger car, because a baby was on the way, and it would’ve behooved me to be ready with a larger and more comfortable vehicle for my pregnant wife and then-eventual kid.

But if I were able to hold out for another year, then most definitely the Nissan Ariya would’ve been in the conversation, when I would be looking for a new car.  I used to always be dubious about electric cars, because of their supposed mileage range per charge, but considering my new car now and most Tesla Model 3’s typically range 280-300 miles per charge, and there’s really not a tremendous difference.  The real angst lies in the scenario of taking an electric car out on a road trip, and running out of juice with no idea of where to get more, in the middle of the night.

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Revisionist history culture is concerning

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it

-Winston Churchill

[2020 note: I basically made this exact same post three years ago, starting in a similar manner]

Not long ago, I saw that Community was available on Netflix, which was pleasing to me.  Community was one of those shows in which I’d only seen sporadic episodes in no particular order, depending on whichever group of friends I’d hang out with and happen to catch an episode or two at their point of watching through the series.  However, crushing on Alison Brie withstanding, I liked the show, and I always thought it would be a good idea to binge the series in order if the opportunity ever presented itself.

One episode in particular that made me think “whoa, this show is really clever” was the episode that most widely seems to be known as “the D&D episode.”  Not giving anything away, but the Community gang plays a game of Dungeons & Dragons for a particular motive.  However, if there’s one scene in the episode that really sticks with most viewers, it’s of Ken Jeong’s character, Chang, completely painted black and wearing a white wig, because he wants in on the game, and assumes LARPing as a dark elf would get the job done (spoiler: it doesn’t).

But it’s a little bit of a jaw-dropping scene because in all technicality, it’s still Ken Jeong in complete black face (and hands and presumably all other flesh).  But the thing is, he’s not trying to imitate or ridicule black people, he’s just trying to get in character as a dark elf.

Well, I just learned that that episode of Community won’t be available on Netflix anymore.  In fact, any episode of any show, and presumably any movie, that features any non-black character painting their skin tone as to appear darker, has been scrubbed from Netflix’s library, in light of the rampant racism problem, running roughshod in America currently.

Blackface, has suddenly shot up the charts as a hot button, and all throughout the world of media, there’s a whole lot of retroactive scrubbing being done, to eradicate all proof of any show, person, entity or whatever, partaking in blackface at any point in history.

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New Father Brogging, #012

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is a portable apnea monitor.  As my daughter was premature, we were not given a choice on that she was required to have one in order to be discharged from the NICU.  Understandable initially, as she, like many premature babies had shown the tendency to have episodes of bradycardia (low heart rate), and it was nice to have a safety net at home to know if something were going wrong at any point.

How it worked was that our baby had two nodes strapped to her chest, that fed into an eight-foot cord, which was hooked into the monitor itself, which gave real time pulsing green lights indicative of her heart rate.  At any point if the baby registered more than 20 seconds of a slow heart rate, elevated heart rate, or shallow breathing, a piercing beep would emit from the monitor, along with the illumination of a red light next to whatever icon indicated the event.

The beep was soul-piercing to hear, and the red light was looking at the eye of Sauron.

At first, we’d experience events a few times a day, as we learned as parents on how to be parents and how to hold our child, feed our child and generally handle our kid in the optimum manner to avoid putting her in situations where she’d be at higher risk of triggers.  But as babies tend to do, she began growing rapidly, as mythical wife and I started to gain experience with handling her, and eventually the number of events began reducing to nearly nothing.

As time passed, the necessity of carrying around a box the size and weight of a school textbook and the long, tangly cable that ran with it began to grow increasingly frustrating, especially to me, as we as new parents, wished to expose our child to more of the world, and not just keep her in bassinets or the Mamaroo, but it began to feel like a literal ball and chain.  The number of events were next to nothing, and I was eager to find out when we could be without it.

During a visit to the pediatrician, we were told that two months no events, and then we’re good to go. 

Two months??  I was pretty livid.

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New Father Brogging, #011

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Throughout this week, mythical wife and I have introduced a baby monitor, so that we can put her down at a scheduled time, and still be able to keep eyes and ears on her from elsewhere in the house, while we try to reclaim a little bit of time for ourselves.  At first, it felt almost alien, having some free time back, and initially I used them only to do chores and tasks that tend to fall to the backburner on most days, but then when I’d finish those, I realized that it wasn’t yet 11 pm, and I actually had some free time back on my hands.  It was kind of nice.

Today, my daughter let out the most high-pitched shrieks I’ve ever heard come from her.  Worse off, we heard them first through the baby monitor, so they occurred with neither parent in sight.  I tore up the stairs and into the bedroom to get to my child as fast as possible, and hearing them in person was the most soul-piercing sounds I’d heard in my entire life.  I picked her up out of the bassinet and held her to my chest immediately.  Moments later I was in the most tears I’d been in since her birth, because no parent should want to hear such horrific sounds emanating from their baby.

Fortunately, everything seemed to be fine; maybe she was having a bad dream, or maybe it was the fear of awakening without the use of her arms, since we have her sleep swaddled.  Maybe a combination of both, or maybe she was overheated, since the bedroom tends to warm up throughout the day.  But either way, because nobody can speak baby, we’ll never truly know to why she was in such a frenzied panic, but all I do know is that it was one of the most frightening experiences for me in recent memory, and I’m still admittedly a little shaken up by it, regardless of if everything is fine.

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Oversaturation shouldn’t result in shortchanging everything

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

More often than I’d like to admit, I run into the scenario where I sit down with the intent to watch television, but then burn 30 minutes solely looking for something to watch, before deciding that what I do want to watch will exceed the time of day in which I want to be getting ready for bed.

Primarily, I use a Piss4 or XBONE to watch television, and between two consoles, I typically am skimming through Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, WWE Network, HBO Go, ESPN, TLC Go, or whatever network app the sports game I want to watch is airing on.  And then there’s PLEX where I’m connected to two different servers chock full of content that may or may not overlap with the shit available on all other mentioned media options.

The wife and I haven’t even plunked down for Disney+ yet.  That’s another trillion hours of content available if and when we do.

Needless to say, it’s easy to burn all my time searching for something to watch instead of actually watching something, because when the day is over, and I know that I’m far from the only person who feels this way, but there’s just too much god damn content out there, and not enough god damn hours in any day to watch all of it and actually stay on top of things.

Whether shows are being churned out, or acquired from overseas and distributed in America, it seems like every single time I turn on the television, there’s always a whole bunch of new shit that’s available to watch, and all I can really do is [add to list] everything and then continue browsing titles and watching previews in hopes of finding things that are so compelling, they’re capable of breaking the browsing cycle and be watched immediately.

But most of the time, things are just [added to lists] and then never get watched, not without a tremendous amount of effort and determination.

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