O-Dark-Thirty

Ever thought this? When we make a decision based on our inherent goodness and reason, it must be correct. Yeah, that's not Biblical at all, and it certainly doesn't align with my personal experiences over the last six decades. We're immersed in a society that teaches us our INTELLECT will guide us correctly, especially when it is paired with our EMOTIONS. The news services and the government seem to concur with the thought that repetition makes something true - so our WILL can govern our actions. In Grad school classes I interacted with a lot of smart people - and I liked them. Still, one of the basic arguments we had in every class was whether morality was absolute or relative. Most of the others argued for a relative morality. I always took (and still take) the stance that morality is, and should be, absolute. I will never forget the one comment after I said "For instance, we can all agree that murder is wrong." Another student said "Well, I t...

September swept in, surprising me in how quickly it displaced the months of summer. (I do miss the fall leaves the the sweet smell of the earth as it falls into winter slumber.) I retired in January. People ask me if I'm bored. No, not yet. In fact, I still have so many things on my list of to-dos and I keep adding to the list. What, for example? Story ideas, game ideas, reading books, taking classes on Udemy ... I wake up some mornings with story ideas. I write them down in my notebook. It's a standard spiral notebook with a hundred pages or so. I usually write on both sides of the page. Since January, the notebook is almost full of ideas and thoughts. I'll need a new notebook in a few weeks. That's okay. If you don't keep a personal notebook of your ideas and thoughts, you should. Jim Rohn , one of my favorite speakers, recommends it as well. He was the mentor of Tony Robbins . You can catch recordings from both of them on YouTube, and I recommend them....

I have a lot of data on my iPhone 4S. There are - literally - hundreds of solutions in the internet to capture and transfer the data. Some are more useful than others, but I didn't manage to successfully finish any of them. I made a complete backup of my iPhone on the Mac and traversed the directory to find the files. Without some sort of database schema, I'm lost at that point. Some sites said backing it up to the cloud from one machine and bringing it into the other machine via the cloud would work. I can see that working for the pictures, but I backed my pictures up manually. Just plugged the iPhone into my computer, opened the disk and copied each of the picture folders. In my opinion, it should be that easy for all the data on a phone. My picture history spanned a few years. I hope the pictures are captured elsewhere, but I don't know for certain. That's a future project (I'll put it on my list). The tricky part seemed to be the SMS text da...

I don't know if this is a mental shift away from Apple or not, but I even set up Darling's iMac to boot directly into her Windows partition. (See my Back From Mac post) I am probably more driven by cost. My iPhone 4S was getting old and I had an almost new Galaxy S4 sitting on my desk. I jumped ship from my iPhone to my Droid two weeks ago (and a day, but who's counting?). For over a year I tried to make a good, comprehensive plan for switching over, but my analysis paralysis became to obsessive. So I simply leaped from one to the other. The initial shock is detailed in Part One , with some follow-up in Part Two .  I have a few more observations... I installed Pandora, Chromecast (for my Google Chromecast ) and Netflix. With the latter two I can use the phone to stream movies to my television. How nice is that? Wow, the Galaxy S4 drained power fast! I didn't even do much with it, but I knew something was going on because it sat in my pock...

So it's been two days. I expected I'd miss my iPhone 4S more, but I don't. The Galaxy S4 seems to be fine. (I just realized this is a 4S to S4 transition…it's the little things that make me happy). The first night with the new Droid was hard. I felt I was cheating on the iPhone. I like the Do Not Disturb feature on the iPhone, but the S4 has one, too. Blocking Mode on the Galaxy seems to work in a similar fashion, though not exactly so. I don't have it figured out yet, which might explain the lack of incoming phone calls. Then again - there isn't anyone to call me. Unlike the commercials, Siri didn't come after me. I did hear a strange noise in the study during the night, but attribute that to the cats, not the sad little iPhone 4S still sitting on my desk. The iPhone still has 52% of its battery charge as of this morning. The Droid sucks up juice like a toddler at the zoo. What's with all the updates? Probably because the phone is a ye...

Over a year ago I decided it was time to ditch my aging iPhone 4S and switch to a Galaxy S4. I own both phones - due to one of our sweet daughters giving their mother a Galaxy S5 phone (leaving me staring at the S4 with a look of mixed terror and fascination). As of this morning I was still using my iPhone 4S (a nice phone, darn it!). I like it. I'm used to it. I don't need to think about how to do anything on it. I've used iPhones for a while (and programmed some apps, too, but that's another story and I let my development license expire). So I had a plan. It went something like this: Make a list of current apps. Duplicate them on the Galaxy. Move my addresses (how?). Move my messages (how?). Take care of all the pictures on the phone. Switch over my service. Simple, right? Except I have dozens of apps on my iPhone - I made a list that took over a page. Don't judge me. You're the same way. Some of my apps are iPhone only. I don't use th...