Some Blog Site

For a recent trip, I reserved the hotel online a few months ahead of time, as is usual.

What was unusual was that they emailed me 3 days before the trip and asked me to check-in online.

This has been a thing with airlines for many years now, but they limit it to 24 hours. And it still doesn’t make sense as it is; I wish they would rename it to “obtain your boarding pass” rather than “check-in”, because “check-in” means that you are there.

Back to the hotel email: I thought I would humor them though, and see what the process was for checking into a hotel 3 days before I get there. It’s not like they’ve been waiting to see what gate assignment the terminal gave them, and I don’t need a boarding pass to get into the hotel.

I answered a few general questions, and then the next screen they wanted me to upload photos of my ID. It was at that point that I decided I did not want to waste any more of my time doing the job of the hotel clerk. Not that the job of a hotel clerk is bad, but they’re getting paid to do that paperwork, I am not.

So I just closed that browser tab and did not finish checking in online. It’s not like it saves me any steps – I still have to go to the front desk to get my key.

When I got to the hotel, 3 days later as planned, I just walked up to the front desk and checked-in like usual and no one asked or cared if I checked-in online before I got there.

More and more things are getting “self-service” options, and in some cases it makes sense. I like having the option at the grocery store to do the self-checkout. In that case I know the benefits versus responsibilities. For the airlines, if I’m not checking any bags I know the benefit of getting my boarding pass online is that I can skip the counter.

In the case of the hotel, they did not present any benefits to me – it’s just extra work for me for no reason. So unless they can convince me why I should check-in early, I won’t be bothered to do it.

In the last week or so, we had the announcement of the 2026 NFL schedule. Now that we know who will play whom and when, we can start predicting wins and losses.

I keep my predictions over at Some Fun Site. View results of previous football seasons.

2025 Summary

Last year, I predicted that

• Los Angeles Chargers = 14-3

Only one team made the list of consensus picks, and how they actually did was

• Los Angeles Chargers = 11-6

Not quite on, but not way off either.

(more…)

Subtitle: in which I improve the government’s records

Allow me to introduce to you the 2025 SFS List of Baby Names that Combine Similar Pronunciations. That baby name list is the place to go in case you are wondering what are the most popular baby names in 2025 regardless of how they are spelled. The Social Security baby name list does not adjust the rankings based on alternate spellings (like Catherine/Katherine), but SFS does.

It was just Mother’s Day, so the SSA released the name rankings for 2025. Last year’s champion, Liam has repeated as the most popular boy’s name in the US, for the third year, so the trend is official. Liam and Noah and Oliver repeated as the top 3, but Liam’s lead is dwindling.
No controversy for the girls – it’s Sophia again, and by a similar margin as last year, and no signs of slowing down.

Some Stats

• In the top 11 names for the boys, names 1-4 are the same, and then 5-11 have a bunch of shakeup since last year.
• The top 5 names for the girls are the same as 2024, with the only order change being Charlotte overtaking Emma for spot 4. Then 6-10 get all mixed up.
• Again, Liam has the title of the highest-ranked boy’s name that has no spelling variations, at number 1.
• New this year, Charlotte is the highest-ranked girl’s name that has no spelling variations, at number 4.
• Girl names still have more spelling variations than boy names (247/1000 vs. 170/1000 alternates)
• Kayson once again took the prize for the most spelling variations for the boys at 10, well above Kayden with only 6.
• Kehlani once again took the top honor for the girls with 6 ways to spell it, just barely above several names with 5 variations each.

2025 Improved Baby Name List

Click on the link above and peruse to your heart’s content!

Charcuterie boards were all the rage, and I think they might be most of the rage these days still. I was thinking about charcuteries boards. Not the arrangement of food on a surface, but the board itself – the piece of wood that holds the food.

Like this:

That caused a little problem because I was trying to look up a picture of the wooden board, but how do you look up a board used for charcuterie board without using the term “charcuterie board”? I looked up “charcuterie board empty” and other things, but the search engines saw the term “charcuterie board” and they thought to themselves “oh yeah, we know what a charcuterie board is, we’ll get you plenty of pictures of charcuterie boards” and they never thought to themselves to use the whole phrase I typed and what it actually meant.

I was able to find one eventually, I forget what term I used, maybe “wooden board for serving food” or something.

But all that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is to show you my idea for how I would make a charcuterie board, if I were to get into making charcuterie boards.

Behold, the

Sharkuterie Board