Townsend Park and Nearby Areas 1952
The 1952 aerial photograph is on the right.
Still choose not to have internet access at home 🖥
Probably the biggest time suck is the internet, just browsing social media and random websites. Not only is it time consuming – it’s expensive with the $50 plus a month for the cable or FIOS service, to say nothing of the electricity consumed and the constant supply of gadgets like modems and routers that you use for a few years and throw in the garbage when they fail or become obsolete.
For years, a resisted even having a smartphone until they finally became inexpensive and it seemed like a growing necessity to have access to email for work. But nowadays it seems like you can virtually do everything on your smartphone – no computer needed.
Bandwidth caps keep increasing and with more powerful smartphone apps you don’t really need computers for much except for the most processing intensive things like GIS work. And heck, it seems like most new phones are including Hotspot capabilities and providers are allowing you to use part of your monthly bandwidth for hot spot allowing you to get your desktop computer online for basic, occasional use.
I just like having my internet access limited at home and not using my laptop, which uses far more electricity than my smartphone. When I need an occasional dataset or to do something best done on the computer, I can use the hotspot mode to briefly connect. And I can get connected wherever.
For bigger files and downloads, I can always swing by a public Wi-Fi network at a local library or other location. My office has WI-FI and that’s where I normally grab software updates, podcasts, YouTube videos that I download and so forth. I like how my internet access is controlled and limited to set time periods at the library or similar other locations.
Even when I own my own land, I really doubt I’ll ever have home internet. It seems like a lot of equipment to buy, services to subscribe to, electricity to consume and equipment to discard. I get that smart homes are very trendy these days but I don’t want to live a life where everything I do offline is monitored and sold for marketing purposes. My smartphone is really just enough.
John E. Amos Power Plant
John E. Amos Power Plant is a three-unit coal-fired power plant owned and operated by Appalachian Power, a subsidiary of American Electric Power (AEP). With a nameplate rating of 2,933 MW, it is the largest generating plant in the AEP system. It was named after John E. Amos, a prominent state senator, Democratic National Committee member from West Virginia, and member of the AEP board of directors.
The IBM 029 Card Punch
Lines of code longer than 80 characters drive me crazy. I appreciate that this is pedantic. I’ve seen people on the internet make good arguments for why the 80-character limit ought to be respected even on our modern Retina-display screens, but those arguments hardly justify the visceral hatred I feel for even that one protruding 81st character.
There was once a golden era in which it was basically impossible to go over the 80-character limit. The 80-character limit was a physical reality, because there was no 81st column for an 81st character to fit in. Any programmers attempting to name a function something horrendously long and awful would discover, in a moment of delicious, slow-dawning horror, that there literally isn’t room for their whole declaration.
Almost Over
