Blathr Wayne Lorentz

News anchor on WGN-TV: ”Thank you, Terry Savage.”

The HomePod across my living room: “*bing* Hi there!”

I guess my HomePodʼs name is Terry Savage.

New from Scholastic! Itʼs Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Hidden Cat!

Look for it in a bookmobile near you!

This guy looks in my bedroom window.

Not the one with the camera. The one with the bicycle.

Mr: “Hey, Siri, add pretzels to my groceries list.”

Siri: “Who is speaking?”

Me: “Wayne”

Siri: “Sure. Here's home music picked just for you.”

You know your software is flaky when the command menu includes an option to restart the program when it starts misbehaving.

You know your software is really flaky when you build an entirely different program to fix whatever it is that happens that prevents the main program from restarting itself.

It's called a “tech stack” because of how easily it falls over.

Netflix is one of the largest media companies on the planet. If it canʼt keep its web site from eating itself, what chance do I have?

I just received a notice from Constellation Apartments that my service request has been completed.

It's worth noting that I haven't lived at Constellation for 16 months.

I wonder what took them so long to fix.

“No Access to Delivery location” is Postal Service for “There was a big Astros World Series parade in the way, so the mailman went home.”

The Billy Joel song Pressure is on the radio right now. It reminds me of when this song was in the top 40 on the radio. My friends and I used to love this song because it spoke to us, how we felt and thought, and the pressure we felt in everyday life. Screaming the chorus together was a means of venting our anger and anxiety.

We were eleven.

I canʼt remember what pressure we thought we were under at that age, but how awful is it that at age 11 we even had a concept of pressure and sought coping mechanisms.

Today I got a good look at Tina, the lizard who lives in my garden.

She has blue eyes, like my wife.

While I appreciate the Potter Country Store being creative with its web site, I donʼt think a laundry basket is quite the right icon for a virtual shopping cart.

Unless they use laundry baskets to do their shopping in Schulenburg, Texas. You never know. People in Pennsylvania call shopping carts “buggies.”

Guy looking at vines at the nursery: *Grunt*

Me: That one is nice and clingy if you want something that will climb brick.

Guy: You know about ivy?

Me: Just from my days at Harvard.

Guy: You went to Harvard?

Me: Lots. I used to deliver pizzas all over New Haven.

Guy: Walks away

This is one of those jobs I could never do.

These guys are only about ten stories off the ground, but in Chicago, I used to see guys 40, 50, even 60 floors up with nothing to support them but a couple of ropes and a plank of wood.

I hope theyʼre well-paid.

In Hong Kong, Iʼve seen children doing this 20 stories up with just a single rope, balancing against the glass with their bare feet.

I doubt theyʼre well-paid.

November 4^th, and the Christmas lights are up on Main Street.

Iʼm O.K. with that.

I got a new Atari cartridge today. Itʼs the Sears version of Warlords.

Iʼve never played this game, and have no connection to it. But I bought it for three reasons.

1. I think Iʼm going to try to collect as many of the Sears text versions of Atari carts as I can.
2. Itʼs the only Sears cart that has a full Atari trademark notice on the end label. No one on the internet seems to know why.
3. The top label has a misspelling. The third game is listed as “Lightening Ball.” My guess is that this is supposed to read “Lightning Ball.” According to my computer, lightening means

   A drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy as the head of the fetus engages in the pelvis.

That doesnʼt sound like a very fun video game.

Thing nobody asks at a store anymore:

“Paper or plastic?”

…Until today. Today I noticed that the check-out people at H.E.B. ask shoppers if they want paper or plastic bags. Itʼs like Iʼm in the 1980ʼs!

Itʼs nice that H.E.B. gives you a choice. If you have a pet and need poop bags, you can choose plastic, and re-use a plastic bag instead of buying new bags. Or, if you donʼt want to kill sea turtles, you can choose paper, since theyʼre made from trees, which we can make more of.

Itʼs possible to make moisture-resistant paper bags. Perhaps that should be the default so we can both bag pet nuggets and save the planet.

Upgrading macOS on a headless Mac is an iffy proposition. The last time I did this, I ended up nuking the whole machine and restoring from a backup.

If it works, Iʼll go across the street and buy a lottery ticket.

30 minutes later…

Itʼs O.K., Annie. I have a button to do that.