Thoughts on a VCR and on Travel

 

Ever since I started pulling wires to disconnect my old DVD player and connect a new one, I have not yet been able to get my old VCR to work.  The VCR is rarely used, but I want to be able to use it once in a while to play a tape of my late wife and I on a TV show.  As much as I'm starting to care for RQS, I will always miss my late wife and how she made my life better.

Although I think I have everything set up right, I know that I'm overlooking something.  I am very lucky to have had this poor quality recording, as it is all I have left of my wife, save for a few tiny pictures.  In the future, all there will be left of me will be a few pictures and the remnants of my thoughts on the blog entries I've posted.  This is normal in life.  From dust to dust, as they say....

Right now, I feel I have a few more good years left in my life.  Over the next two or three years, I plan to go on at least three to five more cruises, plus do some more land trips that I never have had the time or money to do in the past. For example, I will be doing another New England/Eastern Canada cruise soon.  And shortly afterwards, I'll be doing a Hawaii cruise on my own.  If all goes right, sometime next year, I will be doing a Panama Canal cruise with RQS.  Then I hope that we will be able to take some trips to South America (think: cruising by the Tierra del Fuego), Iceland, and Great Britain (with a Westbound crossing on the Queen Mary 2). At that point, I have to determine how much money we can spend on travel while we are both healthy enough to take bucket list trips.

When I went on my last cruise, the ship I was on had only 2 US type electric sockets.  In today's world, this is not enough.  By watching one vlog, I found out that the ship we're cruising on has USB ports on both sides of the bed.  If that's true, we will not need to play games with the extension core I use for my CPAP machine.  

It's nice to know that no matter what happens, that the world will keep moving forward when I'm long gone.  Let's hope that time does not come soon....

I don't know how I make it through the day.

 

Lately, I've been feeling very tired when I get up.  Most of the time, I can blame it on not getting enough sleep the night before.  Yet, I continue with the idea of going to work at a 9 to 5 job, as I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have to be somewhere on a regular basis.  This morning, I didn't feel like I had enough sleep the night before, and I felt lucky that I had some "extra caff" coffee available for me to start my day.

It's still nice being able to go to work presenting as female.  I wish I could have done this throughout my career.  However, it was many times more difficult being out and about as a trans person than it is now.  But I can't complain about my past.  My 40 year career in technology made it possible to effectively retire at 58, even though I've had several jobs in the past 7 years that allowed me to avoid draining savings too much.

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Today, I wished I could have stayed home and slept for a while.  RQS was out of town seeing a relative, and I didn't have much to do when I got home.  So I figured that I'd try to figure out why my VCR  wasn't working after I installed my new DVD player.  Somehow, I had to have unplugged the darned thing from its power supply, yet it appears to be plugged in.  If I can't figure this out, I may look for a used player at a thrift shop, just to be able to view a few tapes I can't get on DVD or Blu-Ray.

Once I gave up (for the night) on the VCR issue, I took a quick nap before calling RQS.  She'll be coming home soon, and it'll be nice to have her here again.  However, this will be an interesting weekend, as this will be the first time I'll pick her up as Mario in several weeks....

Standardization - Should it be imposed by government?

In America, our choice of data/power connector has been made for us by the manufacturers of our electronic products.  If one is an Apple customer, one uses the connector on the right.  If on Android, one uses the connector on the left.  Does this make sense?  Shouldn't all products play nice in the sandbox?

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I started off with the Apple vs. Android dispute, as it goes much deeper than one would think.  Most Android products can talk with each other.  My cell phone can be tethered to an Android tablet without problems.  The same can be said about Apple phones and tablets.  But Apple makes sure, at almost every point, that its products do not interface well with the other products' ecosystems.  There is no reason that I can't tether my iPad to a Samsung cell phone via Bluetooth or Wi_Fi connections.  Yet, this is so.

Several weeks ago, one of my friends asked me to figure out a problem.  She had a non-Apple laptop and an Apple phone, and couldn't get tethering to work, so that she could submit her final project.  So I allowed her to tether her laptop to my phone, and she was able to submit the project on time.  This is not a good thing.  Wi-Fil to Wi-Fi connections and Bluetooth to Bluetooth connections are simple.  Yet, Apple makes "security" excuses for why this can't be done.  This is bullshit to the average person.  And it is starting to be so for regulators as well.

Europeans are getting tired of the E-Waste being generated for its electronics.  They would like to have a simple wiring standard that can be used on all common electronic devices, and they want to standardize on USB-C.  Apple is strongly against, this, as this is the first step towards making Apple play nice in the sandbox and acting like all other electronics manufacturers.  Europe wants people to make "Oranges to Oranges" comparisons between products, and not force people to choose between one manufacturer's ecosystem vs. another manufacturer's (or group) ecosystem.

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About 160 years ago, the United States had no standards for simple things such as screw threads.  This caused us a lot of grief when we started mass production of manufactured foods.  We needed to standardize specifications for most of the basic products, such as screw threads.  How thick they had to be, what angle did they wrap around the screw, and how much distance between the threads had to be included in this standard.  Standardizing screws, nuts, bolts, was only one part of the problem.  Even the screw heads had to be standardized.  In America, we have the flat head and Phillips screwdrivers.  But in Canada, they have one more variety - the Richardson head.  (I think this to be a superior design to the Phillips head, but I won't go into it here.)  Standardization has forced American manufacturers to compete on both quality and price, and has allowed us a greater variety of product providers had standardization not been mandated.

Yet, there is value to competing standards - for a while.  Does anyone remember VHS vs. Beta?  Although Sony's product was technically the better product, it failed in the marketplace.  Video Tape Recorder manufacturers standardized on VHS before the product itself (the VCR) became obsolete. Competition doesn't always mean that the best product will survive.  It means that a product at a decent value/price point will survive.  But what happens when the market stabilizes with two standards.  Does this benefit the consumer?

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For me, the jury is out.  I own both Apple and Android products, and prefer my Android products.  Although I use an iPad, it is not my favorite device.  I would prefer to buy a new Samsung tablet if I could get one with connectivity to the 4g/5g cell phone networks.  Yes, there are drawbacks to this approach.  Most manufacturers of Android products do not maintain them for as long as Apple does for its products.  So in a way, it seems like we have a modern day equivalent of a Coke vs Pepsi Taste Challenge. As for me, I'll "Make Mine Moxie!"