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Now that it’s raining and snowing (yes, at the same time), it is time to reminisce about the warmer days of this past year. Here are some things we did this past summer.

First up, we went on some hikes. This is from earlier in the spring, before the trees leafed out.

Another hike, this time with some tame cranes who liked the same path we were taking.

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After years of not having a dedicated internet connection, I finally found something that works.

T-Mobile Home Internet

We are too far back from the main road to get cable, unless we wanted to pay the cable company to install a repeater and a quarter mile of line.

Satellite wasn’t really an option, because that’s download only and you need a landline for uploads, and we don’t have a landline. We have a home phone, but it’s through cell service.

We checked about DSL, but that wasn’t available, nor is fiber optic.

We used to have a dedicated hotspot from AT&T, back when it was a family share plan. It worked fine, but it had a data cap with overage charges if we went past the cap. That wasn’t much of a problem until about two years ago.

So we switched from the family share plan to the unlimited plan, which gave us more data on our phones and was a cheaper plan (even without factoring in the overage charges) but we were not allowed to keep the dedicated hotspot.

We survived by using the hotspot capabilities of our phones. That was fine, but it hastened the demise of my iPhone 5’s battery. But that was easily replaced (the battery, not the phone), and then our local library helped out by doubling their number of free mobile hotspots. We could check out a hotspot for two weeks at a time, and that was especially helpful this last spring when the schools switched to remote learning, and this fall when they resumed classes remotely. And for my job being work-from-home too. The last couple months we’ve had up to 5 people in online meetings at the same time. The library hotspot is okay but it wasn’t that good to keep up with that many devices, and its range wasn’t that good. It’s that little hotspot thingy about the size of a deck of cards.

Then, after a visit back to the family farm a couple weeks ago, my brother encouraged me to try AT&T fixed wireless. It’s what they use in their rural area, but it requires the service provider to setup special equipment, both at the cell tower and at the home. So they only put the equipment at the cell tower if there are enough people in the area to warrant it.

I checked online and AT&T fixed wireless is not an option.

I then checked Verizon because I had seen their commercials. They have a wireless home internet option for people like me, but it’s not available in my area. But I clicked on the option that said I was interested, so they’d be encouraged to add the service here.

I had looked into mobile hotspots from Sprint last year, but they were not helpful because I didn’t have a cell phone plan with them.

Going down the list of cell services, I tried T-Mobile. They had a home internet service, which was invitation-only, but some things online said it was opened up to everyone. With nothing to lose, I went to the T-Mobile site and clicked the link to sign up. They said service was available in my area! But then they said I had a call them to setup the service.

That had me confused. A cell phone company with a website to be able to check for service in my area but not able to let me buy the thing didn’t quite make sense.

That was late that day though, so I left it until the next day. In the morning though, they called me and left me a voicemail. Yes, I was approved and they’d like to get me going with the home internet service. So I called them back and went through a lot of questions, mostly related to my credit worthiness. This lady also said I was lucky to have gotten an invitation, but she never asked for any invitation info – she just saw that I was approved and that was that.

A couple days later, the home internet box arrived on my front porch. I plugged it in, the lights turned green, and it worked.

At that point, there had been no charges on my credit card and no email from T-Mobile welcoming me or even acknowledging my existence.

Even now, a few days into the service, I got no communication from T-Mobile about my account.

The home internet box uses their cell signal but it’s a more powerful box, about half the size of a toaster. It has both 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals, and they’re both more powerful than the free library hotspot. The kids were pleasantly surprised by the extra speed of the 5GHz band. And if it ends up not being good enough everywhere, there are ethernet jacks on the box to which I could connect an extra router.

The only problem I’ve had so far with the home internet box is that it doesn’t like FTP. My FTP client just gives errors. As soon as I fire up my phone tether hotspot or the library hotspot and connect the laptop to that, the FTP client is happy. I have not checked Archie or Gopher yet.

Overall though, it’s much better than having to go to the library every two weeks for a new hotspot. They won’t let those be renewed, so we’d have to take it in and hope they had another one ready to go. Sometimes we’d have to wait a few days for someone else to turn one in. Apparently we aren’t the only people in the area with this problem.

For $50 a month, it’s worth it. At least I hope it’s $50, I’ll find out once I get a bill or something from T-Mobile.

I’ve written about life as a simulation before, but it came up in the news again recently so I want to add another thought to it.

It’s supposed to be an explanation of how life on this earth got started and continues, but it is limited in its explanation to this earth and what we can observe from here.

I’m reminded of the story of the world being supported by a turtle, but what supports the turtle? Of course, it’s turtles all the way down.

If we’re in a simulation, then someone must have started (and be running) the simulation.
No, silly, that person is also a simulation.
Ok, then who started that simulation.
Obviously, it’s simulations all the way down.

It’s just an existential version of kicking the can down the road.

I have an update to an old post about the trichotomy of features. This one pertains to ambitions of a person.

This one could have been called hobbies, but I already have one for hobbies. So I chose “ambition” instead, but it pertains in general to things people want to do. This is not for the ambitions themselves but rather for what the person needs in order to accomplish them.

Watching various Marvel movies and seeing who is in the credits, I am sometimes surprised. For example, I watched the first Thor movie thinking it was Ed O’Neill playing Dr. Erik Selvig and it wasn’t until the second movie that I matched the character with the actor. It turns out that it was not actually Al Bundy playing a scientist in the Thor movies. It was some guy named Stellan Skarsgard, who has been in some other movies too but I never saw those.

Ed O’Neill:

Stellan Skarsgard:

I had a slightly different problem with the Iron Man 2 movie. There I paid attention to the credits and was surprised to see the bad guy was played by Mickey Rourke. I said to myself “that is not the Mickey Rourke I remember.”

It turns out I was picturing Mickey Rooney

not Mickey Rourke.

And the other problem I had was early on in the Iron Man franchise because I had grown up hearing about Morton Downey Jr, so I had to stop and think about which Mr. Downey Jr. was playing Tony Stark so I didn’t accidentally say the wrong one.

For reference:

Robert Downey Jr.

Morton Downey Jr.

Certain words have a connotation of a level or degree of the idea. For example: worthless is worth-less, the quality is “worth” and the level or degree is low. Another example: eventful is event-full, the action is “event” and the level is high.

I like to take words at face value. And the same with suffixes. The suffix -less should mean less or lower, -some should be medium, and -ful (or -full) should mean more or higher.

And then, because English is so convoluted, a lot of words use those suffixes in the wrong way.

“Awesome” is the one I like for an example of how wrong it is. For this set of words, the quality of awe can have three modifiers to indicate little awe (unimpressive), much awe (impressive), or a moderate amount of awe (umm, pressive). In my world, these would be aweless, aweful, and awesome. But for some reason, “awesome” means full of awe, and “awful” does not mean full of awe, and no one uses “aweless”.

Other candidate: “ruthless” which means lacking ruth. If we take “ruth” to mean “pity”, then someone who is very compassionate should be called “ruthful”. And an average person could be ruthsome.

Another one: “winsome” which means a high level of attractive appearance. It should be “winful”, and someone ugly or mean could be called “winless”.

There are other words with the wrong suffix, but I’ll leave the rest of those as an exercise for the reader.

Except this last one, which doesn’t fix the category because it’s a prefix.

“Extraordinary” – technically, “extra” means outside of, like extraterrestrial. But my first thought is usually that it should mean “more ordinary”, like an extra helping of ordinariness. What I’d like to see is the use of its opposite “intraordinary”. And while we’re at it, how about some extramural sports in college?

I was inspired to write this after reading a column in World magazine. That column had referenced the quote “It takes a village to raise a child.” and what stuck with me from the column is what it takes to make a village.

What does it take to make a village? It takes families.

For a healthy village – one that would do a good job in helping to raise a child – you need healthy families. “Healthy” as in emotional and social health, not physical health. What happens if your village is full of dysfunctional families? You wouldn’t want your child raised by that village.

I connect this to the concept of herd immunity. “Herd immunity” in the realm of diseases and vaccinations has to do with if a large enough percentage of a population is immune to a disease then the disease won’t spread throughout the population.

If you replace “disease” with “dysfunction” and “physical health” with “societal health” then that’s the picture I was getting in my mind of what I wanted to convey. If most of the families in the village are traditional families then the children will be “immune” to a lot of problems that befall society (plenty of citations out there, here’s one).

People want to live in a good neighborhood, but if they’re not trying to be a good family and also good neighbors, then it’s not going to stay a good neighborhood. It’s like the saying about traffic: you’re not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.

You could keep going with this concept: what does it take to make a good family? and then what does it take to make a good whatever that answer was? Etc.