Flute Player

Well, it’s been an interesting year. Now as I approach the last year of my fifties, I’m confronted by a number of changes and life choices. “When one door closes, another opens” and all that.

One change I honestly don’t care about all that much, I’ve quit it before — didn’t miss having it in my life then, won’t miss it now. Funny how that is. Perhaps if I felt more strongly about how it ended I’d be upset, but surprisingly, I’m not. There simply was no real future in it anyway and I knew it.

The other thing for me to do now is to get back on track with my health. Lose the weight, watch what I eat and drink, maybe exercise. Then there’s music. Much to do.

Income disparity is very real for most people. Once in awhile, somebody gets lucky and comes into more money than they ever dreamed. In an instant, their circumstances changed. No longer were they consumed with paying bills or other mundane chores. Now they had money. They could to do the things they always wanted to do, but never did, simply because they now had money. That’s reality. If you have the means, then you can do.

Chess is a game of skill. It’s logical. That’s why no human can beat the computer anymore. The computer always knows the best move. Playing people is different, sometimes they make mistakes. Make the wrong move, you could be toast.

There she was.
I don’t know where they met, or how.
There she stood.
On stage! For all to see.
Showing off like the greedy songbird she was.

— Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham, Amadeus)

Thumb drives must be formatted MS-DOS (FAT), or you can’t copy to them from a Chromebook. If they’re formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled), you’ll get “insufficient permissions” notices.

Nick Wells (Robert De Niro, The Score): If you want me to do this, you gotta pay me what’s right. It’s gotta be that way.

Max (Marlon Brando): I always pay you what’s right.

Nick: You always think you do. I always know what you pay me. It’s not always right.

Disappointed, but not surprised. Such is the nature of business.

It’s an old saying. When can’t confronted with a threat, we instinctively look to protect what is most vital to us. Sometimes that is ourselves.

In spite of those that contend otherwise, the eBook is the way print publishing is going. The advantages of eBooks far outweigh their printed predecessors in a number of ways. For example, cost. Printing books is already expensive and is only going to go up and up. Such are the costs to print a book on paper and then ship it. No such costs for eBooks.

Search. You can’t search a printed book, but you can an eBook. From a scholar’s point of view, the eBook is the obvious choice.

Group participation. Again, the eBook has it all over print. The ability to engage an infinite amount of participants in dialog over a particular passage or sentence is already being used by teachers.

Harry, never say anything unless you have to.
— Chili Palmer (John Travolta, Get Shorty)