On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I started fiddling with that memory book project in Affinity Publisher today. More and more, I'm wishing that this machine I'm building it with had more RAM installed. I've been advised that I should have pulled out the hard drive, replaced it with an SSD, and put whatever files would not be actual programs onto an external hard drive instead. Well, if I had a steadier income, I'd have considered that.

On an unrelated note, where my left earlobe attaches to my skull...occasionally feels blocked or itchy, or whatever form of irritation seems guaranteed to keep me from thinking clearly about whatever else should be occupying my brain.

"Hi! This is the alert system with Visa-Mastercard, with news of important changes to your account before the next billing cycle!"

Twice in the last five minutes over my cellphone.

Some boiler room somewhere is getting desperate to find people to rip off with that script.

I suppose we should have expected this reaction from "Tsar" Vladimir?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/27/world-aviation-body-to-launch-inquiry-into-belarus-hijacking

Basically, it looks like Putin and Lukashenko have decided that it's time the rest of humanity was forced to rewrite the 1944 Chicago Convention on civil aviation on their terms. I think they're going to need a time-out session, don't you?

I've been trying to update the data sets I want to work with repeatedly over the last two days. eDR3 and the Gaia Nearby Stars Catalogue, specifically. Yes, the former file is 3 GB, and it takes a couple of hours to download and then the extraction process fails.

I'll have to take it to Github at some point this week to see if anyone's already resolved the issue before I ask any questions.

It's stuck in "Closing the Library" mode, and has been for over 2 hours as I write this. A quick web search tells me this has been a common problem for people using Photos as part of the High Sierra version of Mac OS X. Some people have had to put up with it for 12-18 hours.

I'm not sure of which solution idea of the several published so far to trust here.

My current cell phone is too old for that app.

This morning, I got a note in my GMail account with the sender flagged as "US Concealed Online".

It is the latest of several instances per day that I have been mistaken for other people sharing my personal name-family combination over the years since getting an e-mail account. There have been e-mails seeking assorted other published authors; some from a Home Depot location in Ohio seeking the renewed custom of a nearby, other Dwight Williams; a few seeking a "private military contractor" also sharing my name.

Plugging my name into say, Google or Duck Duck Go for example, gets me hundreds of other named-alike people. Doctors, actors, end-credits production staffers, writers, athletes, fugitives, convicts, and on the list goes. I'm nowhere near either the best- or least-known of my ilk. There is comfort in this at the moment. Some amusement, some consternation, but also comfort.

Your kilometrage will vary.

I saw it.

Two things coming to mind. One is a paraphrase of something Clint said to Natasha in Endgame: Don't give me hope unless you mean it. The other is that I'm bracing for this movie to be an eulogy and no more than that.

It burns me that those of us who care about such things had to wait until after Endgame to get this movie at all. And there are lots of more important things to be angry about, yes. I am angry about many of those other things, too, as you've read from earlier installments of this blog. But this is staying on my personal list of such things, anyway.

I agree with this complaint about "DSC: Battle of the Binary Stars" as published by Spacedock on Twitter. That system has to have a few thousand ID tags in star catalogues published across the Federation and beyond. Some of the "inhabited-by-indigenous-and-intelligent-species" worlds close to that system and known to the Federation probably even gave that system *actual names*. The system deserves more than "six light years from Gamma Hydrae" as an identifier.

https://twitter.com/SpacedockHQ/status/1095193479997804546

I had fun watching the above-named movie - even if the title characters were named in inverse order - and one small annoyance that still nags at me:

Luis, Dave and Kurt still don't have surnames.

Why?

Marvel people, could this be fixed in time for their next movie together, please?