Well worth the money. For example the two day shipping on pretty much everything is REALLY nice.

I ordered a 10,000mAh external battery pack for charging the phone on the go. I ran my phone off it for five hours today and the battery gauge still hasn’t dropped below 100% on the external battery. Got to me in two days.

But what I really love is Amazon Music. Initially I had about 35 tracks in there, mostly Jodeci’s new disc and some Marcus Johnson tracks. But then I discovered I can go into the store, sort by genre and then check off the Prime box. All of it included with my Prime subscription and I’m now at 112 tracks and climbing.

Haven’t really watched much on the video side though.

I just get a little worried sometimes about the Amazon effect. It’s to the point that even personal care products are more easily obtained on Amazon than in the brick and mortars around me.

Second time in nine months. This is much easier than the first time – that one had me without a voice for a few days.

But this one seems to be confined to sinus and throat. No lung involvement which is typical for me. And it’s not enough to knock me down. So that’s good.

The symptoms are strange though – the itchy soft palate is more allergy than anything else. I’m taking the 180mg of Fexofenadine but maybe I’m becoming resistant to that.

The congestion does do one thing though. It deepens the hell out of my voice. I normally have a fairly deep voice but it enhances the effect. Dose me with a little Sulfur Hexafluoride and well – I’d just be knocking em’ dead in the streets with my voice.

Well – as far as I’m concerned he’s right about me. I dont’ want to take it away from the religious bigots, I just wish they’d just shut their fucking mouths. Really – I’m getting tired of the shit the Repugs are pushing lately.

And then there’s that bigot pizza parlor who says they’d serve gay customers but wouldn’t make pizzas for a gay wedding. Yeah right. First off what gay couple would serve pizza at their wedding? I mean seafood, the standard chicken and beef etc. but pizza? You must be joking.

Your religious liberty offends me. And i have the right to tell you to go get fucked.

So to kick it off my father died on Good Friday. No real grief on my part because I haven’t spoken to him in years. Not to mention he was firmly in that Italian thing called dead to me category. I’d just had enough of his shit over the years.

And then it was the usual Saturday go shopping day and I noticed it was super crazy.

And Sunday it was visit a friend in Newport.

Easter Dinner was a Kale and Beet salad. Oh you don’t know flavorful if you haven’t tried one. Working a lot more fish and vegetable into the diet. And trying against a tide of carbohydrates to limit them. It’s harder than you think.

I note that bubbling around the web are the reading lists for Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Some convergence – for example I have read the entirety of the Biblical text. It’s an eye opening experience let me tell you. It’s where you discover terms like translation error, copy error, editorial error etc.

But here’s my list:

Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”. Talks about what happens when you stratify a soceity.

John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me”. A white southerner decides to take drugs to darken his skin to have the black experience. Quite eye opening.

George Orwell’s “1984”. Scary shit there.

Ira Levin’s “A Kiss Before Dying”.

Lysistrata

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

A lot of that list above was inspired by the high school I attended. You could say that they were just a little subversive there.

If I sent flowers with the motto “Avis in infernum vetus mater miseri irrumator”. It translates to “Roast in hell you miserable old mother fucker”.  To my fathers funeral? I doubt many would be able to translate the Latin into English.

The better angel says not to do it. But the evil angel is saying do it, in fact bribe whoever is doing the gravestone to engrave it there. Not many people would get the Latin bit. Some archaeologist in the future might chuckle at it.

I won’t do it, but fantasizing about it has it’s humorous element.

I’ve noticed a trend in the deaths of Italian-Americans. They tend to die on significant holidays.

I’ll offer two bits of empirical evidence.

1) My paternal grandmother died on Christmas day of 2005.

2) My father dies on Good Friday of 2015.

Plus in the past I had an in-law die on wedding day or very close to it.

I’m trying to think, what would be a good day for me to kick the old bucket. I get to choose from Memorial Day, 4th of July, Columbus Day, Thanksgiving. I’m thinking Thanksgiving because having a birthday in later November means it sometimes falls on Thanksgiving day. So to die on Thanksgiving day – yeah that’s when I’ll go.

Oh well – he’s been dead to me for years. I broke off contact with him over some shit on facebook and just the generally shitty way he treated me over the years.

So I got the news tonight that he died today. No tears were shed. In fact I’d long wished it was my father that died and not my mother. She died way too young. But my father survived to go through two more wives and finally his number was up.

Can’t say there was much love lost between he and I. He was a criminal, I worked in the state’s top law enforcement office. Of course I always knew my maternal grandfather harbored some hard feelings toward my father. Found out when dear grandad died that grandad had been a Providence Police officer for 20+ years and knew my fathers criminal acts.

But it’s over. The one regret if you could  call it that is I wish I had gotten his genetic sequence done. If only to rub the fact that he was part Ashkenazi in his face. Ah well. I know I have some of that same ancestry and I’m almost certain it came from his side of the family.

So when I started working where I work I recommended a cart for keyboard, monitor etc.  Because servers are spread out through the room.

I was told and you’ll love this, that a cart would be too expensive and we couldn’t get one.  So I went over to Micro Center and got a 4 port KVM switch. That solved the swapping cables issue on one rack.

Well recently our 300TB storage array is in the low 90% utilization range. Which means we’re running out of space. It’s spread among two large disk cabinets. Well, the solution is to add one more disk cabinet.

So I got in the computer room today and the other two IT people are putting together a cart, or crash cart as we call it. So I asked how much did that cost? Well – couple hundred bucks.

The reason – because the keyboard and monitor are sitting in the server rack in the space where they want to put the new disk cabinet.

Ut si! I’ve completely stopped offering advice. Why bother when they won’t listen?