nosrednayduj

MA no better than TN

2026-04-07T15:41:03Z

Apparently Massachusetts is considering one of those age-based social media bans. I wrote a letter to the editor at the Boston Globe:

I think it is a shame that Massachusetts, a liberal bastion, is considering an age-based social media ban. Implementation of these things is always ensuring the identity of all users of a service. Then allowing the government to see all the users of the service (regardless of the ages of those people), following which those who have posted antigovernment messages can be targeted as domestic terrorists.

It is damaging to sexual minorities who are still in the closet. It is damaging to questioning youth because they are denied access to information about their sexual feelings. It does not protect the youth, it puts them in a cage.

Smaller services will have to shut down or exit Massachusetts because they won't comply on moral grounds, or they simply can't because they don't have the staff.

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Action #13

2026-04-04T14:50:18Z

I forgot to blog that on Thursday afternoon I stood on a bridge over a highway, with a bunch of other people, and a sign that said "hands off our votes" in single letters each 3 feet high.

(Maybe my readers don't really care, but this is how I keep track of it.)

Also, after the shop charged up the 12 V battery they couldn't find anything else, and they told us that because it was "testing fine" they couldn't just replace the battery on warranty. Bah.

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The Kia is sick

2026-03-30T21:49:19Z

It's been doing some slightly funky things, in particular not running the automatic liftgate mechanism at seemingly random times, but it did a very funky thing yesterday, and ended up completely draining its 12V battery. We're not sure what triggered this, but somehow it got into a strange mode when we attempted to shut it off, and apparently it did not shut off fully until it succumbed to battery drain. It was down to 4V, which made me think that the voltmeter was broken, so I tested it on the battery I knew to be mostly charged, and it read a normal 12.5 kind of number.

I had to watch a YouTube video in order to figure out how to get at the battery terminals. Anyway, we got it charged up, and it's now at the shop, where it is still under warranty, and we expect they will be replacing the battery. We think maybe the automatic liftgate thing might be refusing to run if the battery voltage is low, and sometimes being really cold can affect battery voltage (these failures were all in the winter).

The shop that's 8 miles away couldn't see us for two weeks, but the shop that's 20 miles away could see us today. So I had a 20 mile bike ride!

20.44 in 1:53:28 for an average of 10.8 and a current year-to-date total of 417.

In all fairness, I had a really stiff tail wind. I was surprised the average was that high, because there was a lot of stopping and checking the directions at the beginning.

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Board game event (#3) and action #12

2026-03-29T02:29:10Z

So there's this giant gaming convention called PAX, and PAX East is this weekend. I had heard of this before and been vaguely curious, and now that I have more time on my hands, I thought I would go. I decided to go for only one day, and to go for Friday to reduce the overcrowding that probably happens on Saturday. It was plenty crowded!

It was not exactly overwhelming, but close. The big money is in video games, and so a substantial amount of the convention is dedicated to video games, including videogame tournaments. There are enormous booths by computer manufacturers and game companies, which had lines for getting a demo of this and that. There were also some people who were selling boardgames, and a lot of Magic the Gathering stuff, and quite a lot of tabletop RPG kitsch like paintable miniatures and shiny dice. I didn't buy anything (except extremely overpriced food).

The open gaming area was more than four times the size of the room at Arisia. Interestingly, I only saw one person I knew, besides Perry who came with me. Maybe other people I knew were there and I just didn't see them in the 1000 other attendees.

Their game library is about 4-5 times the size of the NESFA library (which gets used at Arisia and Boskone) – but a lot of that was duplicates of popular games so that multiple groups could play the same thing. I did pretty well by just looking for the "looking for gamers" cones that people would put out when they wanted to play some game; I would walk up and ask if they were still looking for someone (sometimes they had forgotten to fold up the cone), and then inquire something about the game, and usually join them.

The first one Perry and I approached turned out to be a Magic the Gathering thing, which I had not realized because the box he was sitting next to said "Commander", and who knew that Commander was a type of MtG. (Well, not me anyway.) It was best for 4 players, and the two of us made 3, so we played for a little bit, with a lot of reminding me how the game worked. Then a couple of other people approached, and we decided that it would be better if we abandoned this game, and I bowed out, leaving Perry to play, since he has played MtG a bunch at Arisia. Of course he doesn't have his own deck and stuff, but usually at these things people have loaner decks.

I ended up playing about four other games, pretty much all of which I enjoyed. Too bad I don't remember the names of them :-)

I spent an hour just walking around in the booth area, and exploring the other floors where they had various big rooms and theaters with things going on. I didn't actually try to understand the things. There were board game tournaments, but I'm not really excited about a board game tournament. I want to play once, not multiple times. I suppose I could just lose!

After about 6-7 hours I was getting to be done. I had joined back up with Perry at some point and we had just finished playing a game with some people who had to go participate in an event, and I allowed as to how I was getting kind of tired. The noise was pretty oppressive, with hundreds of people all talking as they played or as they interacted with booth bunnies. There were later trains and we could have come home a couple of hours later, but after some discussion and poking at the game library we decided to hang it up for the day.

I might go again next year (is it every year? I don't even know that.) I don't think I would go for more than one day.

And then, on Saturday, there was No Kings. I went to two of them – one in my town where there were 300 attendees, and one on Boston Common, where there were tens of thousands. It was big. Probably bigger than the no Kings in October. I think it might've been the same MC as last time. Different speakers. One of the speakers had also spoken at one of the others I went to earlier in March, an Iranian woman from some peace organization.

The main floor as seen from above. In the foreground is some area for eating the overpriced food, and some trucks, and behind is a section of the booths.

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21 hour travel ordeal

2026-03-17T21:08:29Z

The schedule: leave the hotel at 9 AM PDT, return car, get on flight, get off flight in time to take a train which gets me home at 9 PM EDT.

The actuality: leave the hotel at 8:30, because I decided that maybe I should be a little more conservative about LA traffic – this was a good choice – return car, wait too long for a bus back to the airport from the rental car center, get on flight, have it taxi around the airport a few times, get off flight, wait around, get on flight, sit at gate for two hours, get off flight, panic for a while, get on flight, get off flight in time to take a train which gets me home at 9 AM EDT the following day. Maybe this was just the karma but followed me from my previous traffic adventure.

( Gory Details )

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Adventures in LA traffic

2026-03-16T04:22:55Z

The dance was great. One of the callers was kind of too hard for my little pea brain, and apparently also for a number of other people's little pea brains, but there was a lot of stuff that I did understand in real time and able to execute, and there were a lot of good moments of teamwork, getting the whole square to do all the parts, and not just one person pushing, but really working together where some people understood some parts and were able to explain them well enough in tiny soundbites to get other people to understand other parts and really make the whole thing work.

I wanted to put my feet in the ocean this trip, since two years ago I had failed due to weather. Somebody said there was a nice restaurant on the beach that had its own parking lot (parking is always an issue) and we could go there. 6 people wanted to go, so we split into 2 cars, with one other person was assigned to my car to help navigate. The other car got going a few minutes before the two of us got going. The other person didn't really know where she was going, and was just using Google, which was fine, until it ran us into a traffic jam that seems to be being solved by the cars ahead of us making three-point turns and coming back the way from which they had come. When we got to the head of the line, we discovered that there were barricades across the road, so we made a three-pointer etc.

We called the other car, they had successfully arrived at the restaurant, and were giving us various advice about which roads to try, and we tried one and then we tried another and then we discovered there was another thing that was blocked off and then we went really far east so that we could get around it, and then we were on the south side and that should work, but it didn't, and there were cops everywhere and it was just a mess. Turned out it was a St. Patrick's Day parade. Nevermind that it was really pi day. Anyway, at some point the two of us realized that we weren't getting there in time to have lunch and get back to the dance, so we bailed and went somewhere else that was quick. Bummer. Sunday, there was not a St. Patrick's Day parade, and the two of us and one of the people in the rest of the group who actually liked this place a lot so happy to go again did succeed in going, so I got the beach view experience at this restaurant. And I got my feet wet.

But, since I didn't know that that was going to work out, on Saturday evening I said to some people "I want to go to the beach this evening after dinner" and a couple of them said "sure that sounds like fun let's do that". So we had dinner and we headed towards LAX because there's a giant parking lot on the beach very close to the airport. We dodged some airport traffic successfully and were heading towards the beach when we discovered a road closure with a lot of police activity. Didn't seem like a time for a parade. So we tried to dodge the closed road, and we discovered a giant amount of traffic. There's a lot of hills right near the ocean in some places, so we were able to see down to the actual beach from the road we were on, and there was this enormous crowd and a lot of lights and more police cars which seemed more like security as they didn't have their lights going, and a ton of traffic where we were, apparently trying to find parking and/or get down to the beach area with the crowd, and we were like "we don't really want to be here; we don't know what this crowd is all about, but we just want to walk on the beach", so another three-pointer. After about 15 minutes we got away from the horribleness and found a place where there was a beach, with less parking but we were able to park legally, and I got to get my feet wet on Saturday evening as well as Sunday afternoon. It was extremely foggy, so that contributed to the delay, because you couldn't really go fast even if it wasn't heavy traffic. Fortunately it's not like I had anything else to do that evening.

Here's hoping that traffic is not insane tomorrow morning when I am driving to LAX. There could be some excitement returning the rental car, because they have just opened, and I mean just, it was the first day when I rented my car on Friday, a new consolidated rental car center for the airport. I hope there are signs. I did see some signs when we were returning from the beach, though I'm not planning to go that route, so hopefully it will in fact work out.

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I went to Chico/Paradise for probably the last time

2026-03-12T23:50:40Z

I started by visiting my mom's old assisted living place, where I had a nice chat with some of the staff and one of the residents who still remembered me. Everybody was sympathetic to my plight with Claudia in having been denied access to Clyde for the last year of his life and also denied the ability to go to the funeral.

Then I picked up a salad and took it to Bidwell Park, which is a nice park with the Little Chico River running through it where I sometimes took my mom on an excursion. We would either walk slowly with the walker or I would trundle her in the wheelchair around the paths. So I sat on a bench by the river, ate my salad, and then walked on some of the paths.

Finally I drove up to Paradise where Clyde is buried. I had been given instructions on how to find his grave by the cemetery people, who I had called earlier. Instructions didn't quite work, but I wandered around for a while and found him, before I resorted to visiting the office in person.

Most of the headstones in the cemetery are the flat kind. It's odd that be hole that they dug for it is 2 inches larger on each side, so it looks unfinished. I suppose a few years of rain and lawn growth will fix that. It's also very white, and stands out from the others. Again, time will fix that. The engraving looks to me like the standard picture of Multnomah Falls up in Oregon. Not particularly a place I associate with Clyde. Maybe Claudia just picked it out of a catalog because she liked it. Waterfalls are good.

It was still a little early for me to check into my next hotel, so I sat on a bench in the shade and read my book for half an hour. Clyde was in the sun or I might have sat on him. And now I'm writing emails and posting.

In theory I'm supposed to get together with Clyde Jr. this afternoon, but he's in San Francisco for some medical procedures, and he says it's taking forever. So I might not actually get to have dinner with him. Hope he's okay; he didn't tell me what the nature of the issue was.

I had a little adventure trying to charge the electric car I rented, because somehow it failed to charge my credit card, so it stopped charging in the middle. Trying again made it work, so perhaps it's just that I had added a new payment option and somehow the credit card company decided it would decline it the first time and then allow it the second time. Sometimes they do that. But it was annoying because it stopped while I was off buying the salad, and when I returned I was surprised at the fact that it thought it was done.

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Blog-worthy bike ride

2026-03-09T23:05:18Z

We needed to get a hitch installed on our new Kia, and rather than ordering it and having our local shop do it, because they made a hash of installing the hitch on the Tesla, we decided to go to a place that does all hitches all the time (actually they do roof racks as well). But they were in Framingham, which is 23 miles away. I had the idea I'd bike home today and bike back to get it tomorrow, but then Valerie needed the Kia for a trip tomorrow morning, so I only went one way, and we just went and got it with two people and a car in the afternoon.

22.59 miles in 2:18. Average 9.7, because I'm slow, but also the roads were sometimes covered in puddles from melting snow, and you can't hit a puddle fast if you can't see for certain what's under the water, because it could be a 3 foot pothole. There were a couple of downhills I got to go fast because it was dry and clear, but there was a lot of being cautious. Also there was a bunch of icky traffic in Framingham.

Don't know when the last time I went more than 20 miles was. I suppose I could scroll back through my bicycle tags. Perhaps there will be many more now that there's less demands on my time, and it's warmer. Even if I have time, it's hard to bring myself to go more than about 10 miles when it's 30°.

(edit: It was June 12: https://nosrednayduj.dreamwidth.org/159443.html)

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Action #10 and 11

2026-03-09T01:29:15Z

Today was International Women's Day. There was a thing in Boston Common. Yesterday there was a thing for "stand up for science", which they had a year ago, also in Boston Common. I went to both of these things. One of the speakers at the science thing said "are you pissed that we have to do this again this year?" (Audience yells "yes")

Both of them were only moderately attended; 300-400? I noticed some of the same people at both. Of course I was there also; perhaps people noticed me.

Ken wonders if having all these little protests is actually worth anything. I don't know. It's my retirement activity, so far at least. Anyway, there will be a big deal on March 28 for No Kings and I will go to that also.

I discovered a website called protest.boston, which doesn't have everything, but that's how I discovered these two things. I don't know if there's some better way for me to find things (other than being on Twitter or Facebook or some other thing I don't want to be). Just searching for "protest Boston" doesn't work very well, because it gets news articles about protests six months ago. Even saying "protest Boston March 8" doesn't work.

I rode my bike to the train station on Saturday, but on Sunday I did not get my act together early enough and had to take a car. I blame daylight savings time.

Meanwhile I'm getting ready for a trip to California, where I will go visit my stepfather's grave and walk around Chico for one last time, and then fly down to LA for a square dance.

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Dance and action #9

2026-03-03T03:05:45Z

I spent the weekend at the Tech Squares annual square dance weekend, where I had a blast. There was dancing on ice skates, dancing to pre-recorded stuff from the 1950s, dancing to silly hacks that people invented, just regular plus dancing, higher level dancing, board gaming, jigsaw puzzles, chatting with people I only see once a year, chatting with people I see more often than that, decent food, and not enough sleep.

Somebody had brought a Rubik's 4x4 cube, and I learned that I have forgotten everything I knew about what to do with the centers. At some point I had edges and corners solved and was making progress on the centers, but slowly, because the thing I was doing did more than I wanted it to, so I tried to figure out what I needed to do to be more restrictive in what changes my moves made, and of course ended up messing it up completely. Then I repeated that situation, and then I got into a mess where I couldn't solve the edges, and the centers were still a mess. Then I gave the cube back. Maybe I will get mine out and spend some of my retirement re-deriving how to do this.

The new car went 220 miles and returned with 24% left in the batteries. It's "guess-o-meter" is moderately accurate.

I found out about the whole bombing Iran thing while I was away, but mostly was not looking at any news sources and stuck my head in the sand about it til I got home. Today I clicked around for protests, and I found one, this evening in Boston. I would say there were 200-300 people there. This one was also put on by the socialists, like a previous one. Some decent speakers. The MC was pretty good at getting everybody to cheer at the right times and he led us in a number of chants. After an hour of rallying we started marching. I don't know what the destination was, because after 40 minutes of walking, it seemed we were getting further away from the train station, and when it was 15 minutes away and there was a train in 20 minutes, I got my phone to give me walking directions and, like a dork, I just stuck it in my pocket and had it announce things like "your next turn is in 1000 feet". Walking is often faster than taking public transit, and more reliable (assuming your feet work, which surprisingly, after dancing them off all weekend, mine did). I'm sure I would've missed the train if I'd taken transit, even though I walked past a couple of T stations.

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Action #8

2026-02-17T19:00:03Z

There was a 50501 push to have lobbying of all 435 congresspeople at their offices on the same day. (A 50501 theme. One day, everywhere.) I got an email from a friend who's in the organization saying that my congressional district had very few volunteers and did I want to come. So I signed up. Turned out there were only 8 of us, even though this is an extremely progressive district. It was somewhat "preaching to the choir", but the staffer who met with us was glad we came and took some notes.

There was a half hour chat among the eight of us before the half-hour appointment with the staffer so that we could be either on the same page, or at least know what pages we were on so nobody was surprised with what we might say. The organized theme was "impeach Trump; defund ICE". I'm more on the "defund ICE" side; impeaching Trump now will obviously fail, and they admitted that would be the case. My theory is that as impeachment fails, Trump will say how obviously exonerated he is by this failure to impeach, and it will push headlines in his direction and people will believe him. Their theory is that during the investigation and the arguing about the articles of impeachment in Congress, the headlines will be pushed towards "Trump is a lawbreaker", and people might be pushed in the direction away from Trump. Also, right now there are so many laws being broken by the administration, and there is no recourse other than impeachment, so if we are not impeaching, that implies we are okay with the laws being broken.

Sadly, all of these points are true. We should impeach because otherwise we are complicit; we should not impeach because it will fail and the media will spin that failure the wrong way.

Turned out the organizer for our little delegation had been a speaker at a rally I had been at. So that was sort of cool. In one of the things I said I tried to quote him, and then I realized that might've been him and I said "was that you?" And it was. What I was trying to say was "don't embrace centrism; make sure that you ride the Zohran Mamdani progressive energy." And I was quoting was this guy saying that we need to embrace both the socialists (who had organized the rally) and the more corporate people (like 50501, who organized today's item), because the Democrats aren't going to make it if we stay fractured.

One of the other people brought up the problems that the Democrats are all just saying "no", and not giving something positive to go to. Mamdani was giving people something positive to go to, even if he's not going to succeed in his free childcare etc. plans, he got people thinking more than just "the other side is bad".

Anyway, it was an interesting experience, and very different from the previous things I've been doing.

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It's official; jab; action #7; SF con #2

2026-02-13T01:32:41Z

After meeting with my fidelity representative a couple of times, we have concluded that I have enough money in retirement + Social Security to retire (assuming that they fix the SS problem by 2033). So I am stepping back from the brink of the job market cesspool. I have toned down my LinkedIn profile, and written various announcements (like this one, not that any of you are going to offer me a job), and started replying "nevermind" to recruiters (none of them really had a job I wanted anyway).

I realized that it's been five months since my last Covid vaccine, and I'm about to go to two separate square dance weekends, the first in two weeks, so I went and got jabbed this afternoon.

Then I took the train into Boston for an action which was billed as a "Valentine's Day Vigil for Dignity and Freedom" (never mind that it's actually Abe Lincoln's birthday). They were having a vigil in support of incarcerated women, and protesting against a proposed a new women's prison. They say, correctly, that the money could be better spent on community support, in particular support so that people don't do crimes just to survive. Stop the pipeline. And a couple of "fuck ICE"s thrown in for good measure. They had some good speakers, many of them were young people. They had a chorus leading us in songs (starting with "this little light of mine"). At the end when it got dark they handed out little electric candles for the vigil part.

This weekend I am going to Boskone just for Saturday. I haven't been to Boskone in many years, but it seemed to have interesting things on the schedule. Decided to go just for the day rather than spending on a hotel room. Also not plugged into the volunteers and I probably would get bored if I were there all 3 days without filling time with volunteering. Next winter when there's no Arisia, we'll see if I go to more of Boskone.

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Job or no job, that is the question

2026-02-04T03:01:50Z

I have done two job search related activities this week so far; need to do three to qualify for unemployment. Will I do another? I don't know. Last week one of my activities was joining monster.com and letting it rewrite my resume. Maybe it's actually better. Mostly it was reformatting; I did not let its AI do anything significant. I've also been having discussions with my representative at fidelity, who wants to help me invest my 401(k) (now IRA) for my retirement, and had me do a bunch of budgeting things to figure out whether retirement is appropriate. Seems so. (This, however, is not a qualifying job search activity.)

Today I spent "being retired": I went skiing at the local bump, which took up all of the afternoon. It was really great, because there's been all this natural snow, and I waited until it was 35°. I got there right at opening (1 PM) and the main run was beautifully groomed, and there weren't many people yet, so it was "four minutes up, two minutes down" for quite a while. At some point ski clubs and so forth started coming in so it got more populated, but never any significant line. I decided that I was tired around 3:20. Really it was "tired of there only really being one run".

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Car woes and action #6

2026-01-31T18:48:59Z

Our new car discriminates against the polyamorous.

You can't have three key fobs. You can only have two. They are connected to the car because of course it's the modern keys with an entire computer inside them. And evidently they just have two slots in the car side of the computer to hold the paired key information. I think we would not have bought this car if we had known. But it's not something we ever thought to check. It's like, we didn't check if it actually had headlights, either. After all, we had multiple key fobs for our Prius, our Leaf, and our Tesla. We just thought it would cost $300 at the locksmith to get the third fob purchased and paired. But then we discovered that no, we cannot at all! The car also only has two driver profiles (where it remembers what you're seating is), but it has a guest profile. Which suggests that you should be able to have a guest key. But apparently not!

Even without supporting polyamory, you would think that people might have adult children who were living at home and needed their own key to a car, or caregivers whom they wanted to have drive children or elders to various places, or just to have an extra key because they are flakes.

It's too late, because we've already paid and done all the paperwork, so we will just have to leave our keys hanging on a hook so that we can take one when needed, and we will have to be careful about "can't just leave the car at the train station have somebody else pick it up without a lot of planning". We also learned this restriction is common with many models of Kia, so buyer beware.

Then, on the way home from action #6, where I stood in my town center with 90 other people holding various signs, the Leaf decided that it didn't need to provide braking normally anymore. So I had to really push hard on the pedal and it was making horrible noises. I guess we need to call the shop on Monday. And hope that it drives (stops) well enough to get to the shop. There is a shop in the center of town that we often use. We thought about going there and just leaving it but in the end decided to bring the car home instead.

Our town is more liberal, so there was more positivity towards our action than in neighboring towns, but we did have a few fingers and long beeps which usually mean "no" whereas a series of short beeps means "yes".

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Action#5

2026-01-26T14:33:43Z

I forgot to report on Saturday standing on the street corner holding signs. We went to another neighboring town. This is a more conservative place than our town, and apparently than some of the other places we've been recently. There was a lot of negativity. Balanced by a lot of positivity, but more negativity percentagewise than typical. One guy stopped in front of our group, rolled down his window, and screamed and screamed and screamed. He was really angry, called us child molesters. I think he's confused about who the child molesters are. Our group's policy is "no interaction" and one of the leaders was walking back and forth in front of us saying "don't react, don't react".

There were about 50 protesters. Originally this had been planned for an hour, and then it had changed to half an hour with the wind chill prediction, but in actual fact there wasn't a lot of wind and it was bright and sunny, so despite the 15° we stayed for the whole hour. Naturally I had my heated boots, and I borrowed Ken's heated gloves as well. I think I need to buy a pair for myself.

Ostensibly this was to protest Citizens Bank being a funder of ICE, but people had general "Ice Out" signs. I have begun the process of divesting myself from citizens Bank. It turns out to be quite a lengthy process to get yourself moved from one bank to another, with all the automatic payments, and I feel like I need to make sure that it actually happens to the new bank before I'm willing to shut down the old bank. One of my financial institutions failed to automatically change it, so I have to call them. And recently I noticed an outstanding check, and I need to go email the person to get them to actually cash it. It's for a square dance, and maybe she thinks she should hold on to them until closer to the time. When I'm running a square dance, I just cash checks right away, so I don't lose them. It's not like anybody's getting interest on the money these days. There are some interest-bearing accounts available, but not regular checking and even savings at regular banks. What's up with that?

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New car, and action #4

2026-01-23T22:33:56Z

We bought a car! It is a Kia EV 6. I spent about 20 minutes sitting in the driver seat playing with my new toy. I have added myself as a driver profile. Unlike the Tesla you can't have an infinite number of them, it looks like there are only 2 plus a guest. Haven't tried out the guest setting yet. Valerie and I will be 90% of the drivers, so it makes sense for us to have the profiles. We will just rename "Jeff", who is apparently the former owner. We also need to acquire a third key, because when Ken does drive, he wants to have the key. Unfortunately the fob is enormous, and he may be sad because he has some special key carrying case that he constructed himself and I don't think this will fit.

It seems to have a navigation mode built in. I don't know if we need to pay extra for this, and therefore if it's going to become disabled sometime. I failed to find car play, but maybe I don't need it if built-in navigation exists. Anyway, we used it because we went to another stand on the overpass thing with sign made out of individual three-foot-high letters that said "WE STAND W/ MN ICE OUT". Lots of happy tooting. A few long honks which we assume are unhappy tooting, but we are far enough away we can't see thumbs up or down or middle fingers. We had some American flags that we were waving (it's our flag too!), but my hands get very cold, so even though I had good gloves, I needed to also put them in my pockets and let other people wave the flags.

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Action #3

2026-01-21T15:57:47Z

Yesterday was supposed to be some "work stoppage walkout between 2 and 3" protest. That was easy; my work was stopped already.

Separately, there was a rally in Boston at 5 PM. So I decided to go to the square dance on Tuesday (which I rarely attend) and go to the rally beforehand. It was pretty well attended for being 20° and dropping; I would guess 500-1000? They had a bunch of speakers, two of whom were high school students who had participated in the walkout. Apparently hundreds of high school students walked out. The school administration was not supportive, and they were irritated about that fact. One of them spoke quite well. At 6 PM we marched from Copley Place to Boston Common shouting various slogans as usual. Then I took the T to MIT for the dance and had a good time.

Best sign: "the wrong ice is melting; the wrong Amazon is burning"

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Arisia

2026-01-19T20:40:11Z

I went to what might be the last Arisia. They are taking a gap year due to personnel issues at the top that I don't understand. It was pretty chaotic organizationally; everything was very very late in getting scheduled. I'm just a peon so I don't know anything. I did try to volunteer to help early on but nobody asked me to do anything, probably because it was more complicated to explain how or what than to just do it. Maybe they will get it together and actually have a 2028 Arisia, or maybe it will just fade into the distance. Last year when we had the same hotel it was too small. This year there were fewer attendees, and so the hotel was a good fit. Probably there was loss of money as a result though.

I volunteered in gaming and coat check again. I ended up playing more games than I usually do. I particularly liked a game called "Magicians Challenge". I went to a couple of sing-alongs and did the "summit Mount Arisia" challenge. Climbing 15 flights three times in a row (with descent in between times) is a good workout and makes your thighs very sore the next day.

They had two new events this year which were pretty popular.

In gaming, somebody had the idea to have a Yankee swap where you were supposed to bring a gift wrapped game (not new) and do the Yankee swap thing. (Google it if you haven't heard of it.) There were about 50 participants. I didn't participate, because I looked at all of our games and said "well these are good and I don't want to give them away, and those are crap and I don't want to inflict them on someone". I actually had one I could give away, because I've been trying to sell my friends copy of McMulti, which I believed was worth something, but I think that was only 30 years ago when I paid $100 for mine. Probably that would have been somewhat popular. A couple of games were stolen several times. So I didn't enter, but I was staffing the table at the time, so I got to watch. Someone had brought like 15 extra games "in case people came who wanted to participate but didn't have a game to give". So I could have participated, but I decided to just watch. At the end, there were a bunch of games that had not been opened yet because not as many as 15 extra people came, and people opened them and then took some, and there was also some informal trading among the participants who had a game that they didn't care about. And then at the very end there were like three games sitting on the table and somebody said "someone come take these games", so I grabbed one.

The other interesting new event was "night market" where crafters were supposed to bring small things and barter them with other crafters. Well I'm not a crafter, so I brought homemade cookies. I got a few random little kitsch things that I traded my cookies for. It was kind of entertaining to wander around. Unfortunately, the dealer's room, where people sell stuff, was primarily little kitsch things, and I wasn't interested enough to part with money for them. There were only two booksellers and there were no T-shirt sellers. I bought a few used books. I also got an old Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine at the night market where a bunch of things were being given away for free. We'll see if some short stories from 1994 are any good.

In an unusual step for me, I actually bought some art. I bought a print of this piece: http://www.clemensart.com/images/tunacookie.jpg . I've been enjoying the artwork by this artist about this cat and dragon for years, and decided that I like this one a lot and it needs to hang in my kitchen. You can see more here: http://www.clemensart.com/mlindex.htm

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First day of retirement was pretty busy

2026-01-15T15:13:43Z

It was my regularly scheduled square dance night, so I made cookies to bring for celebrating. People offered me my choice of congratulations and condolences, and I wasn't really sure which what I wanted.

I started the day by reading the separation agreement. Because I'm over 40, I am required to receive a list of the job titles and ages of people who were and were not affected by the layoff in my division (no names). Unfortunately, docusign does not let me cut and paste, so if I want to do data processing on this, I will have to take screenshots and OCR. I found myself, "senior software engineer, 65". I found a couple of other people who I knew to have been laid off.

There were about 300 in the division and 34 were laid off. Most of them were over 40, but most of the employees are over 40. There were a number of 20s and 30s laid off, interestingly no 40s, lots of 50s and 60s. Somebody who was laid off was 83! I didn't know we had anybody who was that old working for us. But there's a lot of different projects in the division that I don't know anything about. I also don't know if it's only US employees in the list, and I don't have any idea if people from other countries were laid off. Other countries have stronger employee protections, and so often it's the US who gets hit. At least that was the case when I worked for Harlequin. It's very hard to make somebody redundant in England, while US is "at will".

After lunch I had a bicycle adventure, where I rode 9 miles each way to another used car dealership, where I measured five cars for cargo space and end to end wingspan of the mirrors, folded and unfolded (or noted that there was no power fold). The entry to our garage is narrow, and the Tesla was difficult to get in. Folding mirrors was very helpful.

We will have to take Ken's bicycle to check out some of these cars, but I was able to eliminate a couple by measurements. We also learned that it's possible we don't want to buy from this dealership, because one of their electric cars was at 3% charge, and another one of them was so badly charged that it let us roll down the power windows but then wouldn't roll them up. Which means that these people don't know how to take care of their electric cars, and they are damaging the batteries by not keeping them in the sweet spot of about 60% charged. Also, if I had wanted to test drive either of these vehicles, it would've been trouble. I didn't actually drive any; I just sat in the driver's seat and looked at the controls (and adjusted the seat so that the cargo length measurement would mean something).

The Ford Mustang Mach E is very much competing with Tesla. They have a huge touchscreen and pretty much nothing else for controls. They don't have door handles at all. There is a button that you push and it pops the door out. Happily, the cargo was also too small and so we could eliminate it right off the bat without having to agonize about "I am going to hate driving this car".

Today I'm going to do some rearrangement where I take the monitor from my work computer and put it on my home computer and pack up my work computer and try to figure out what I'm going to do with desk space. I have too much of it if I'm just going to have one workstation. I don't really want to get rid of either of the desks permanently, but we could try to use the space for some storage instead. This house is very weird, because it is very large and has insufficient storage.

And it's going to be a nice day again (thank you climate change), so I will have another bicycle adventure somewhere.

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Joining the ranks of the retired

2026-01-13T20:51:20Z

Unexpected, fast-track route.

Yesterday my great grandboss sent me a meeting request to "discuss some important business updates".

This is not my first rodeo. So I was not at all surprised when they laid me off in that meeting. I guess the "important business updates" are that they are trashing our entire product. Although they were a little cagey about exactly who was being laid off, giving the excuse that some people hadn't been told yet. I got some text messages from some of my coworkers so I at least know about some of them. I'll wait until tomorrow to ping the others for whom I have phone numbers.

I was also not terribly upset, because I'm pretty close to retirement age, and I'm reasonably well set up financially. They are giving me 18 weeks severance and paying out the full bonus from this past year. So I'd be okay for half a year anyway even if I hadn't been shoveling the max contribution into my 401(k) for the past 15 years.

They started the conversation with "these are difficult conversations to have" and I said "I've been laid off five times before, it's okay." I mean, I'm kind of emotional about it and I'm telling everybody, but generally I'm fine. I mean, in the computer industry, you have to have in the back of your mind, "I could be laid off today". It just fades into the back of your mind like "I could get hit by a truck today". Both things are true; being laid off is a little more likely.

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Action #2

2026-01-12T02:31:59Z

I've decided to start my count over this year, and have edited my year wrapup for 2025 to include political actions. Not really happy that this is a new thing.

Today's action was similar to yesterday's, only in a different nearby town. There were about 200 people present. Lots of signs, none really awesome. I rather liked someone's "they told me it would be bad. Holy sh*t!" where the * was done with a large Christmas bow. Another one said

malice
cowardice
injustice
and maybe some other words ending in "ice", where the "ice" was in a different color, and then the last line was "stop ice"

In car news, we've pretty much decided that we are going to junk the Tesla and buy something different. Not sure if we're going to actually go look at other cars or just stick with the Solterra. It turns out to have a possibly fatal flaw which is that, apparently for battery management, it restricts the frequency with which it will allow fast charging. This would not matter to us except if we tried to go more than 500 miles in a day. This has not happened in the past 40 years to me personally. So maybe it would never happen. When I was young and my parents were doing the driving for vacations, it happened almost every vacation, so it seems like a "thing I might do". We don't have a lot of detail on this; we just heard it from somebody. You would think that this kind of thing would be part of the specifications of the car, but apparently it's not. Now I'm going to Google for a while and see if I can learn anything.

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Busy day

2026-01-11T01:38:28Z

Today we started out with the aforementioned nearby protest. There were about 75 people, and the usual mix of happy tooting, nothing, and thumbs down/middle fingers (more of the former and less of the latter). In fact, there was more happy tooting and less nothing; I think people are primed to be upset about the whole situation. Best sign: "we all saw the video".

Then Ken and I rode our bicycles to a car shop 7 miles away which had a used (2023) Subaru Solterra. It's a lovely car, it fits Ken's bike, it has adaptive cruise and heated steering wheel. It has cool AI-ish feature where it has a camera in the front and a camera in the back and probably the sides also so that it can show you all the surrounding stuff, not just a backup camera, and it does some integration of what it has seen with those cameras and where you currently are and shows you what is underneath the car. When you turn in some way as you're backing up, you may cause the car to go over a place that has not yet been seen, and then it shows that as black in that area and corrects itself as it sees more and more. It shows you this surrounding stuff when going slowly even forward, and I think that's going to be great for me because I often do a bad job of parking between the lines.

It's a little bit wide for getting into the garage, but we think it's narrower than the Tesla. We measured the car and then we measured the garage opening and then we thought about how much clearance we normally have with the Tesla. And the surround vision thing will enable us to be much better about aim. I might paint some access lines on the driveway.

We then called Ken's electric car nerd friend and he's not a fan of the Solterra and suggested a bunch of different cars that might suit our needs. Unfortunately it is very difficult to find out the actual dimensions of the cargo space. They all say things like "83 cubic ft." I care about the shape more than the total volume! Which is why we had to actually go there with the bicycles. His nerd friend also says he knows about a place to get batteries that might be cheaper, but it's not clear that it's enough cheaper to warrant actually fixing our car. So anyway, we now have to decide if we want to spend many hours trying to get Ken's bicycle into different cars or if we just want to buy this one, regardless of nerds not liking it. It's possible that he doesn't like it because it's just an SUV and while it seemed to have pretty good pickup on the test drive, it's not a Tesla performance model S and this guy is all about speed.

Going home, I got ANOTHER FLAT. This was in the rear tire, which is not the one that I replaced in November. It appears I didn't blog about all my flats. Looking at order histories, it seems that I replaced the most recent one this past spring so it has less than 2000 miles on it. You'd think it should last longer than that? But anyway, I do have a spare! So I replaced it this evening. I was lazy at the side of the road and I called home for Valerie to come get me in the borrowed Prius rather than trying to fix the flat in situ.

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Our Tesla is sick

2026-01-10T01:34:25Z

It's possibly fatal. The battery compartment sprang a leak and water got in and corroded everything and it stopped running. It had an alarming message, when I turned it on it said "vehicle may not restart, service required". Fortunately I was on my way home, because in fact it did not restart.

Separately, and strangely coincidentally, it also had a coolant leak into the rear drive unit. Thinking that we should have been having regular maintenance on this car, but I didn't even know it had coolant. You kind of have to take the car apart in the front to even get at the coolant reservoir. With gas cars there is a standard schedule, but we didn't know about any schedule with this thing and we got it when it had 90,000 miles on it so any initial service would have been long past. It was pretty strange that both of these problems happened on the same day. There was a coolant low message, and I called Ken while I was driving saying "do I need to turn back home and take the train and be very late" (since it was a place that the leaf could not go) and he looked stuff up on the Tesla motors club website, and the considered opinion was that one should have it checked but it wasn't a fatal problem, and then on the way home there was this may not restart stuff.

So we currently have it at a non-Tesla third-party shop that does electric cars; the same place that did the heart transplant for our leaf three years ago. Unfortunately, they think the battery is not savable, and it will cost $15,000 to replace. If Tesla hadn't tanked, then the car would probably be worth enough to warrant making that repair. But it did, and the car is not worth that much anymore. And that's before we add the drivetrain repair which will also be thousands.

We might do it anyway if we can't find a replacement non-Tesla car that we like. We're going to look at a Subaru Solterra tomorrow.

Looking at the Solterra is going to cut into my protesting. So I'm just going to a thing in the morning at a nearby town rather than trucking into Boston, because the place that has the Solterra is only open 10-2. It's close enough to bicycle, and since the point is to find out if our bicycles go in the back of it, that's our plan. The Solterra costs $25,000 and is 8 years newer. We saw some for as little as $21,000.

Meanwhile we are driving a friend's Prius when we need to go somewhere the leaf can't do.

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Certified safe boater!

2026-01-03T18:25:20Z

Massachusetts passed a boater safety law last year which requires operators of a power boat to have a safety certificate. If you're old, this doesn't actually take effect until 2028, but if you are young, it takes effect now. There are a bunch of young people whom I have taught to drive the boat so that when they are visiting, we can go waterskiing with just me and a couple of young people. So now I have to get them to take the class and get their safety certificate. I will pay for the class. But it takes time! Something that most young people are short on.

Even though I'm not required to do it yet, I took the class and have earned my safety certificate so that I would know what it was like. Strangely, you can do in-person classes offered by the state for free (at inconvenient times in inconvenient locations), or you can do self-paced online classes for money. Even though the online class does not involve a real instructor but is just videos and reading text and little game-like things showing things like right-of-way rules. Then you have to take a multiple-choice test and pass with 80%. 60 questions; I only missed one, though I did guess on a few of them. It's the typical situation where two of the answers are obviously completely bogus, one of the answers is right, and the other answer is plausible.

It's not a lot of money, $45 for the one I took. There's a different one that's more expensive and in theory takes less time; maybe one of my young people will take that one and they can tell me how it differs.

The class didn't actually suck. The videos were okay, and you can run them at double speed. They had a set of actors who were going around in boats showing different things like parts of boats and navigation buoys and potential hazards and docking techniques and different kinds of lifejackets, and it was the same people in all the videos so you kind of got to know them. I did it in several different sessions; I didn't really keep track of the amount of time, but it was probably 10 hours.

It's a little annoying because there's only one type of boat license and so the class covers things about boating in the ocean that you'll never need if you are only dorking around on a small lake. I had a leg up because I have boated in the ocean and I did learn those things before we headed off to Bermuda, by reading parts of the Annapolis book of Seamanship. Though that was now 30 years ago.

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Holiday letter

2026-01-02T15:59:45Z

One of my three followers pointed out that I neglected to post my holiday letter. I almost didn't write one because I was kind of disappointed in this year.

http://www.olum.org/yduj/holiday-letters/Happy_holidays2025.rtf

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