Busy Days, Pucks, and Why Twitter Sucks
Nov. 17th, 2024 09:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogAnother weeklong recap, with three of the past five nights ending for me much later than they usually do.
Tuesday was my first Dressup in weeks, for a 9:30 Rochester trial with a client I'd never met before. We'd exchanged documents- "exchanged" meaning "embedded them in a dozen different emails to me the day before the hearing that I had to go in to the office on a holiday to save and print"- and I was there in plenty of time to even get a downtown charging station- that wouldn't work because a car next to me was using the other plug and it couldn't charge both at the same time:P- and met the client for full preparation....
for a case that never got heard. Soon as the judge came in, she saw the other party, told us she knew him from outside the case and couldn't hear it that morning. Neither could anybody else. Thanks for coming, guys.
I'd ordinarily have been happy to get out early, but I'd also booked a 5:30 appointment with another client there, so I wound up stuck for the whole day. Some of it, I just caught up on things, but it also gave me a chance to work off some of that frustration. A week earlier, after coming home early on Election Day, I knew I would either have to get out for some exercise or go to an urgent care and get put into a medically induced coma so I wouldn't obsess over the incoming election results.
I chose the latter and got the bike outside for the first time in weeks:
Wound up obsessing about the results all night anyway, but at least it helped me get a little sleep. A week later, the exercise was inside: our gym has a Rochester location a few minutes from my office, and it was another of their company wide "benchmark days." The app tracks your past records for these, and I knew the "12 minute run for distance" meant keeping a pace of at least 5.5 miles an hour for the whole time (a 10:54 mile pace) and then picking it up in the final minute or so to break my old personal record of 1.13 miles. I didn't, but at least I tied it:
(Those are the coaches' names. No, unlike certain felonious President-elects on their SATs, I didn't pay them to run them for me.)
Even odder? There's a different "benchmark" for your best time running a mile on the treadmill, and when you're at about my speed, they come very close to each other. My PR for that one, set almost two years ago, was 10:54.That's what you get if you set the thing to 5.5 mph and never stop, and since that's exactly what I did this past Tuesday, I wound up tying that one, too.
----
No major accomplishments Wednesday, other than finding out about the one I'll mention at the end. It was, however, when I learned that longtime LJ-now-Dreamwidth friendgreenquotebook was in town with her husband for a couple of days. Steve has recently retired, giving them more time for trips like this one, to see the Buffalo stop of the Shoresy Fall Classic. Shoresy is a slice of Canadian culture spun off from the long-running series Letterkenny that we've watched on Hulu, following a semi-proish bunch of hockey hosers from Oop North. The show's creators run a multi-city tournament in bigger NHL barns for charities in those cities against alumni of the host teams, and Andrea and Steve got to see the show's stars take on Sabres alumni from some very good 100-level seats that night.
Steve grew up near here and remains a Sabres fan through the recent years of suffering, while Andrea roots for them as well at least when they're not playing the Islanders; so when I got in touch about them about maybe doubling down on pucks and seeing the Sabres play St. Louis the next night, her response was, Hell yes! We couldn't get into the lower bowl without a mortgage application, but cheap seats were plentiful on StubHub, and after a successful transfer of them into Ticketmonster, we had our three places in the 300s for faceoff, slightly later than usual at 7:30 because the network stooges at ESPN had claimed this game for national telecast.
Good thing, that. After I picked them up from their near-airport hotel, they kindly took me to dinner at the Dino before the game. I suggested we walk over to Fountain Plaza and take the train to the arena. Nice walk; no train. The above-ground section of Metro Rail is having track maintenance until Thanksgiving, so I walked back to the car and picked them up for the drive to the Seneca One garage. Hey- it helped me get over 10,000 steps for the day 🏃
(That wasn't even the biggest count of the day; Eleanor's been coming-with on our morning dog walks and we now often go longer than I used to with just Pepper:)
Back to the evening: we made it in plenty of time for the anthems-
- for the Sabres first goal-
- for some hearty chants of Ref You Suck! after the zebras waved off a late goal by Buffalo that would have tied the game, making a third goal minutes later only a tying one rather than a winning one, but that led to a power play in the extra stanza and a beautiful shot from the Sabres captain-
- so we left happy, quoting the late longtime broadcaster RJ's pronouncement that the Sabres win it in OOOOOverTIMMMMME!
We arrived home safely- me that night, them the next day by plane- and for me, it was one more night of unusual activity.
----
So many friends are active in the local music community. I got to see two of them across Allen Street from each other after work.
Our friend Maria was first to go on at 8. A smaller house in this newer Allentown venue, but I got to gift her the CD from the duo she opened for two weekends prior and share some stories about the songs she was singing. Then, over to the legendary Nietzsche's where our (and her) friend Annie was kicking off a new series of piano nights on the vintage keyboard across from their bar:
She did a few singalongs of Elton John and Billy Joel, a few of her own compositions, but most touching was a cover of a song by a Buffalo Music Hall of Famer we're all friends with named John Brady. We first heard him opening for Antje Duvekot a few months ago in the village, but he's recorded and performed with just about everyone in this community and with many beyond. Annie told us before the song that if she hadn’t wandered into this very bar, ages ago, on a Tuesday night in a blizzard with just one other listener to his set, she wouldn’t be singing there, or probably anywhere in public. She already had her degree in music and was at UB for her masters, but was still very shy about performing, and she and her friend, John's only audience that night, got to talk a lot about how he did what he still does. That helped her overcome that shyness, and the result has been decades of public performances, inspirations of generations that she's taught, and an upcoming CD of her own tunes:)
----
I'll end with an announcement of sorts about leaving a platform I never really joined.
When Twitter began as a Thing, it wasn't appealing. That original 140-character limit, later doubled, just seemed too confining, When I did "join," it was after Elon Muskrat took over and he started requiring you to be logged in to read beyond a single linked post. So I never used it for anything other than lurking, but picked the most offensive-to-him things I could come up with. In addition to my posted name, I also put "cis male" in my profile as soon as he threatened to kick out anyone using such wokeness.
Last week, I began seeing a mass exodus of friends and sites from his sewer site. Part is his complicity in the election, but also part is his announcement of new X (as he calls it and everything) Terms of Service that, among other things, require users to consent to their content being used to train his evil army of A.I. bots. I clicked to read said terms, and saw that, sometime recently, I had been banhammered:
Perfect. I've been kicked out of a club that once had me as a member.
The migration appears to be something called Bluesky. It's run as a Twittersite-in-exile by many of its pre-Elno developers, and has much more of the old site's look and feel than the current crop of Nazis and miscogynists are running now. I acquired an account over there ages ago when it was invite-only, but I think now anyone can get one. This is me, if you care to follow.
Maybe they'll kick me out there, too, eventually. I just hope they don't do it at the last minute after I prepared all weekend to post something:P
Tuesday was my first Dressup in weeks, for a 9:30 Rochester trial with a client I'd never met before. We'd exchanged documents- "exchanged" meaning "embedded them in a dozen different emails to me the day before the hearing that I had to go in to the office on a holiday to save and print"- and I was there in plenty of time to even get a downtown charging station- that wouldn't work because a car next to me was using the other plug and it couldn't charge both at the same time:P- and met the client for full preparation....
for a case that never got heard. Soon as the judge came in, she saw the other party, told us she knew him from outside the case and couldn't hear it that morning. Neither could anybody else. Thanks for coming, guys.
I'd ordinarily have been happy to get out early, but I'd also booked a 5:30 appointment with another client there, so I wound up stuck for the whole day. Some of it, I just caught up on things, but it also gave me a chance to work off some of that frustration. A week earlier, after coming home early on Election Day, I knew I would either have to get out for some exercise or go to an urgent care and get put into a medically induced coma so I wouldn't obsess over the incoming election results.
I chose the latter and got the bike outside for the first time in weeks:
Wound up obsessing about the results all night anyway, but at least it helped me get a little sleep. A week later, the exercise was inside: our gym has a Rochester location a few minutes from my office, and it was another of their company wide "benchmark days." The app tracks your past records for these, and I knew the "12 minute run for distance" meant keeping a pace of at least 5.5 miles an hour for the whole time (a 10:54 mile pace) and then picking it up in the final minute or so to break my old personal record of 1.13 miles. I didn't, but at least I tied it:
(Those are the coaches' names. No, unlike certain felonious President-elects on their SATs, I didn't pay them to run them for me.)
Even odder? There's a different "benchmark" for your best time running a mile on the treadmill, and when you're at about my speed, they come very close to each other. My PR for that one, set almost two years ago, was 10:54.That's what you get if you set the thing to 5.5 mph and never stop, and since that's exactly what I did this past Tuesday, I wound up tying that one, too.
----
No major accomplishments Wednesday, other than finding out about the one I'll mention at the end. It was, however, when I learned that longtime LJ-now-Dreamwidth friend
greenquotebook was in town with her husband for a couple of days. Steve has recently retired, giving them more time for trips like this one, to see the Buffalo stop of the Shoresy Fall Classic. Shoresy is a slice of Canadian culture spun off from the long-running series Letterkenny that we've watched on Hulu, following a semi-proish bunch of hockey hosers from Oop North. The show's creators run a multi-city tournament in bigger NHL barns for charities in those cities against alumni of the host teams, and Andrea and Steve got to see the show's stars take on Sabres alumni from some very good 100-level seats that night.Steve grew up near here and remains a Sabres fan through the recent years of suffering, while Andrea roots for them as well at least when they're not playing the Islanders; so when I got in touch about them about maybe doubling down on pucks and seeing the Sabres play St. Louis the next night, her response was, Hell yes! We couldn't get into the lower bowl without a mortgage application, but cheap seats were plentiful on StubHub, and after a successful transfer of them into Ticketmonster, we had our three places in the 300s for faceoff, slightly later than usual at 7:30 because the network stooges at ESPN had claimed this game for national telecast.
Good thing, that. After I picked them up from their near-airport hotel, they kindly took me to dinner at the Dino before the game. I suggested we walk over to Fountain Plaza and take the train to the arena. Nice walk; no train. The above-ground section of Metro Rail is having track maintenance until Thanksgiving, so I walked back to the car and picked them up for the drive to the Seneca One garage. Hey- it helped me get over 10,000 steps for the day 🏃
(That wasn't even the biggest count of the day; Eleanor's been coming-with on our morning dog walks and we now often go longer than I used to with just Pepper:)
Back to the evening: we made it in plenty of time for the anthems-
- for the Sabres first goal-
- for some hearty chants of Ref You Suck! after the zebras waved off a late goal by Buffalo that would have tied the game, making a third goal minutes later only a tying one rather than a winning one, but that led to a power play in the extra stanza and a beautiful shot from the Sabres captain-
- so we left happy, quoting the late longtime broadcaster RJ's pronouncement that the Sabres win it in OOOOOverTIMMMMME!
We arrived home safely- me that night, them the next day by plane- and for me, it was one more night of unusual activity.
----
So many friends are active in the local music community. I got to see two of them across Allen Street from each other after work.
Our friend Maria was first to go on at 8. A smaller house in this newer Allentown venue, but I got to gift her the CD from the duo she opened for two weekends prior and share some stories about the songs she was singing. Then, over to the legendary Nietzsche's where our (and her) friend Annie was kicking off a new series of piano nights on the vintage keyboard across from their bar:
She did a few singalongs of Elton John and Billy Joel, a few of her own compositions, but most touching was a cover of a song by a Buffalo Music Hall of Famer we're all friends with named John Brady. We first heard him opening for Antje Duvekot a few months ago in the village, but he's recorded and performed with just about everyone in this community and with many beyond. Annie told us before the song that if she hadn’t wandered into this very bar, ages ago, on a Tuesday night in a blizzard with just one other listener to his set, she wouldn’t be singing there, or probably anywhere in public. She already had her degree in music and was at UB for her masters, but was still very shy about performing, and she and her friend, John's only audience that night, got to talk a lot about how he did what he still does. That helped her overcome that shyness, and the result has been decades of public performances, inspirations of generations that she's taught, and an upcoming CD of her own tunes:)
----
I'll end with an announcement of sorts about leaving a platform I never really joined.
When Twitter began as a Thing, it wasn't appealing. That original 140-character limit, later doubled, just seemed too confining, When I did "join," it was after Elon Muskrat took over and he started requiring you to be logged in to read beyond a single linked post. So I never used it for anything other than lurking, but picked the most offensive-to-him things I could come up with. In addition to my posted name, I also put "cis male" in my profile as soon as he threatened to kick out anyone using such wokeness.
Last week, I began seeing a mass exodus of friends and sites from his sewer site. Part is his complicity in the election, but also part is his announcement of new X (as he calls it and everything) Terms of Service that, among other things, require users to consent to their content being used to train his evil army of A.I. bots. I clicked to read said terms, and saw that, sometime recently, I had been banhammered:
Perfect. I've been kicked out of a club that once had me as a member.
The migration appears to be something called Bluesky. It's run as a Twittersite-in-exile by many of its pre-Elno developers, and has much more of the old site's look and feel than the current crop of Nazis and miscogynists are running now. I acquired an account over there ages ago when it was invite-only, but I think now anyone can get one. This is me, if you care to follow.
Maybe they'll kick me out there, too, eventually. I just hope they don't do it at the last minute after I prepared all weekend to post something:P