Tonight the coyotes are howling in response to nearby sirens.

One sounds like it’s about 50 feet from the back door. Since wolves and mountain lions are gone in these parts – and most parts – they have taken over as the top predator.

Well, kind of. Alligators here in Florida are the top predator, but those mostly stick near water. Everywhere else, it’s the coyotes.

I just don’t think human relationships can be made as sterile and antiseptic as many people seem to wish they could be.

Using one’s authority in improper ways is obviously bad, but lately it seems that any showing of human emotion in even intimate relationships (and if you think a mentor/mentee relationship isn’t intimate, well, you’re wrong) is absolutely verboten.

If I notice this, being fairly emotionless about most things, then it must be really bad out there. I understand, though, that it is a reaction to past and present very real abuses.

Yes, it is bad for male or female professors to harass their students. Etc.

I think where I differ or at least where I lack fear is I don’t much care about my so-called “career.”

I would burn it to the fucking ground for someone I truly cared about in an instant. If I loved someone, or even to help them if they needed it, I would not give a single shit about what anyone else thought or any rules in place.

The difference is, I wouldn’t do it to get my jollies as some vile scumbags seem to do, but denying that human emotions exist (gasp!) even at work is fucking daft, in my opinion.

That’s why I am dangerous, I guess. My principles are non-negotiable, irrational, and I’m not easily cajoled, threatened or bought out. That is a privilege I have for various reasons, but even when I didn’t have jack shit it was still true.

It’s why I got in so very many fights when I was a kid.

In other words, I will go along to get along, but I’d rather die than violate my core principles

Looks like for the project we’re about to do that I keep cryptically alluding to on the site, we’re about to get fucked over by Obamacare.

No surprise – it was always designed to fork more money over to insurance companies. That’s the only reason it became law; it was a bug, not a feature, that it helped anyone at all. That was absolutely incidental, no matter what Obama intended. That my fellow liberals act all rapturous about the ACA disgusts me since it’s such a corporate handout.

For us, given the amount of money we have vs. the yearly fine vs. the risk of of a bankrupting injury at this point it’d make sense to just pay the fine and pay any doctor’s expenses out of pocket since we can afford everything but, say, a kidney transplant and the like.

That’s a risk/reward scenario a lot of people our age are making now, and that’s how it’s going to come out for many of them.

Why are so many Americans so worried that someone might be smarter than they are, or as it usually is put, “acting smart?”

There are millions and millions of people smarter than me. So what? Why do Americans have such a problem with that? It seems some sort of weird pathology that is peculiarly American in my experience.

People said what they liked about George W. Bush is that he seemed like a regular guy they could have a beer with. That’s not who I want to be president. I want the smartest and most clever damn person we can dig up.

I guess I am just not smart enough to understand this oddity.

I’ve been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix, and it was at version 0.3 back in 2002.

Over a decade now. Sad to see it going down the toilet, catering only to users who can’t find their start menu with both hands, the assistance of two IT people and a laser pointer directed right at it.

But that’s what’s happening. I do most of my personal projects using Firefox or working in it in some way – those that don’t make some use of Firefox involve photography, mostly.

There really isn’t an alternative, either, as Chrome is a privacy-thieving, slow*, uncustomizable piece of gutter crud.

I just downloaded Phoenix 0.3 and fired it up in an XP VM. Most pages, unsurprisingly, don’t work very well, or at all. Here’s my blog for instance:

Still, it was so much better than anything else at the time. Is a bit disappointing and sad to see Mozilla catering to the LCD for no reason, as there already is Chrome.

*Slow with add-ons that actually do anything useful, like block ads, etc.

I was an adult since I was about 10. Maybe 12 at the latest. I was certainly wiser, smarter and more able to reflect on my own situation and life than the adults around me even when I was that young.

Perhaps that is because I grew up in rural North Florida (very much a part of the Old South, and all that entails), or perhaps it was something inherent in me and it would’ve been true anywhere; I don’t know. What I do know is that I was an adult, wiser than almost all of those around me, from around 10 years old.

So it bothers me when I see statements like, “Oh, she/he is only 22 – still a baby.” Or asserting that college students are still children.

Completely idiotic I find that sort of thinking.