Good morning. Hello. How are you? #849
Learning Spanish, teaching scenario planning and geopolitics, re-evaluating the B-52s, using seven different browsers daily.
Good morning! Hello there! Ca va? Ca va bien? Did Trump get indicted yet? No? I want my money back. Quelle dommage. It really is something how this whole learning Spanish thing is making me remember my French better than I have in decades. DuoLingo’s pretty cool. I mean, I’m never ever going to be a native speaker at this rate, and I’ll barely even be able to understand the Spanish subtitles in a movie, but I think with a few more months of this I could at least get by in, like, an airport or something. What I really need is DuoLingo for contracting and landscaping, as well as maybe DuoLingo for the tech industry. Lotta specialized nouns I would like to learn. But it’s fun. Feels like it’s activating a different part of my brain, one that 50 year-olds don’t bother accessing very often. Gotta never stop learning.
Speaking of learning, Jane is in an “I know kung fu” mass uploading of information stage and it is pretty disturbing and amazing. Last two bedtimes have been prettyy crazy. Monday evening was crazy enough where I taught her about scenarios, scenario planning, best and worst case scenarios, planning for scenarios, mitigation of the worst possibilities and the like. And when I say I “taught” her, I generally mean I casually say one thing in a sentance while the family is talking, and she latches on to it, and then makes me explain it fully. So I casually used the phrase “worst case scenario” while talking to Emma, and Jane just wanted to know all about it. She gets so excited when she finds a new area of learning that she doesn’t know about.
And last night. Man. That was intense. We got upstairs for bedtime a little after six and she walked over to the globe and said “let’s do globe.” She plopped it down in front of us and started asking questions for two hours straight. She already knew roughly where the continents were and what they were, what America was, where we were in it, where Alaska was and that daddy was from there. We’d in the past played a game where she spun the globe, her finger landed somewhere, and I’d tell her the country (this dovetailed very nicely with my daily morning game of identifying all the countries on the six continents so I was always very proud of myself when I could enter). But last night went way beyond that. We started with some comically basic stuff like I finally remembered to explain to her that borders were not actually lines drawn on the ground they were only on maps, same with the equator.
But by the end of the two hours we had covered, god. The concept of empire, the English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish empries, along with the older Roman, Mongol and Incan empires — we didn’t get the Persians. We’d discussed the concept of colonization and decolonization (she really liked the idea of England saying “you can have your country back” and I had to repeatedly stress they weren’t so nice about it at first). We discussed the differences between Indian independence (the Indians were already there and they took their country back) and American independence (a bunch of English who had taken the land broke away from England). We discussed the unfinished journey of the rights of the first nations in North America and the rough mechanics of Nunavit. We discussed the Scottish and Welsh independence movements, we discussed the partition of Ireland. We discussed World War I, lightly, World War II in detail — Hitler, his hold over Germany, the Axis powers, Japan. We discussed at length the geopolitical history of Manchuria she is very interested in Manchuria, since that’s where she first grasped that countries fight over land and borders moved. We talked about the Russians fighthing over it in the 1600’s and again in the 1900’s and we talked about imperial Japan and the WWII Pacific theater, and what happened to the Chinese mainland after the end of WWII. We talked about WWII segued into the Korean war — which she found very interesting — and the Vietnam war, and its roots in the collapse of the French colonies in Indochina. We talked a lot about the colonization and decolonization of Africa.
She also kept making fun of me for using the name of a country’s language as the name of its people, so I had to explain demonyms to her and used England vs America as an example. We both spoke English, but they are “the English” and we are “the Americans.”
At one point she had us set up two chairs and do a panel discussion on Geopolitics for an audience consisting of two Cabbage Patch dolls, a kitty Beanie Babie, a witch Hello Kitty and a Sanrio Melody dressed in a halloween outfit.
That was surreal.
All the while I kept telling her we should stop, she was going to want to do something else tonight, she was using up her whole bedtime talking about Geopolitics. But she did not want to stop.
She is five and she is taxing my brain on history but I would like to say that I correctly guessed the duration of the Korean war within one month, and I nailed within a couple years the year of Australian independence, which is, weirdly, a thing you don’t hear about much. Also I learned that they speak Turkmens in Turkmenistan which I did not know. But yeah, it was a lot.
I have an important update for everyone: After 33 years or so, I am no longer sick of the B-52s. You know who are awesome? The B-52s. You know who were always awesome? The B-52s. Did America realize this and then play the hell out of the B-52s, way too much, for a couple years there in the late 80’s and early 90’s? Yes indeed. Was it perhaps too much of the B-52s for a while there? Maybe. Did the B-52s deserve all that attention? Hell yes. Good for them. The B-52s were singular and amazing and unlike every other band and I still don’t want to ever dance to Rock Lobster again but actually I can feel it coming because it really is quite a site to see like 300 people going “down down down” all at once in a goth club or high school dance. The B-52s, man. They had it going on. Jane and I danced to “Love Shack” the other day and man what a great song and great video even if it was wildly overplayed. And still is, on First Wave. But still. Great band.
I finally got the invite to the Browser Company of New York’s browser, Arc. It is… a lot. A bit overwhelming for me. But I am going to persevere because my god, I love using lots of browsers at once. Right at this second I have seven browsers open. I know I have done this before, mentioning all my browsers, but it’s funny because I am running out of good Mac browsers to try. When I took on this whole Quickbooks-for-my-neighbors-landscaping-company job I needed another browser, because we use Quickbooks for work and I didn’t want to comingle the two or always be logging in or out (even though Quickbooks is one of those annoying apps that always logs you out) so I needed a new browser. I tried a few Mac browsers that people say are okay, but they had problems with either rendering Quickbooks’ complex AJAX, or with their password management and memory and/or their integration with 1Password, so that it was too cumbersome logging into apps. This ruled out Opera and one other one that I can’t remember. I wanted to try Arc, but they hadn’t let me into the beta yet. So in the end, I went with Microsoft Edge, which is actually a shockingly good browser! I give it an 8 out of 10. I read in Garbage Day the other day that no one uses Microsoft Edge. Then he defensively said don’t email me if you do I don’t want to hear it. So I am not emailing him. But I will say, Microsoft Edge. Not a terrible browser. Who knew.
So the current browser lineup is:
Safari - generic personal
Chrome - generic work
Firefox - dashboards for work on the third monitor
Brave - crypto cuz it works great with Metamask
Orion - Gmail search on my old Stodgy email that is mostly orders and mailing lists but specifically Amazon because threy only way you can see what a specific credit card charge is on Amazon is by searching Gmail for that dollar amount. And my Safari browser is logged into my main Gmail and switching Google accounts still sucks I know they made it easier don’t @ me but it’s still slower than switching browsers
Shift - Monday.com, our task management system at work. This way I can pretend its a Mac app. They have a Mac app, but it’s just a web page in a Chromium instance and it’s actually somehow, amazingly, worse than just using it in a browser.
Microsoft Edge - Quickbooks, the bank and a few wholesaler logins for the landscaping company
I don’t know what my next need for a browser is, but I am ready now that I have Arc. It is going to go into the mix sometime soon.
Anyway if you only use one browser, I strongly recommend mixing it up. The more browsers the better. Oh and if you do, you’ll definitely want to use Choosy, the greatest little app for telling your computer to open which links in what browser.
I know I’ve said all this before but, you know, new info about Microsoft Edge, who knew, and I guess I am just a Browser Enthusiast™.
Ambient mix for you today. Let’s all just calm down, okay? Relax. It’s going to be okay. How is Brian Eno so prolific at this age? It really is amazing. Guy doesn’t stop.
Oh hey my five-day restore of the Cold Storage drive is all done. How exciting. I can mail all these hard drives back to Backblaze and get my deposit back. Thank you, Backblaze, you really are a great company even if your stock performance is fairly unimpressive.
how does your daughter even KNOW about panel discussions?! not even a concept i paid attention to until my work made me as a grown-ass adult!