ICE raids Hyundai plant in Georgia

Trump is doing his damnedest to destroy our economy.

South Korea says ‘many’ of its nationals were detained in immigration raid on Hyundai facility in Georgia

The South Korean government said Friday it had expressed “regret” to the U.S. Embassy over the raid at a battery plant under construction at one of the state’s largest manufacturing facilities.

South Korea said Friday that it had expressed “concern and regret” to the U.S. Embassy over an immigration raid on a Hyundai facility in Georgia during which it said “many” South Korean nationals had been detained.

“The economic activities of our companies investing in the U.S. and the rights and interests of our nationals must not be unfairly violated,” said Lee Jae-woong, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry of the key U.S. ally, according to the Yonhap news agency.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-hyundai-plant-georgia-enforcement-action-rcna229148

I am a drummer

The winter before last, I bought an electronic drum kit from Facebook Marketplace. Seemed like a deal and I’d always wanted to learn, so why not? I drove a few hours to the seller’s home somewhere south of Charlotte and hauled it back home.

It sat in our playroom for a little while until I got over my intimidation. Then, like with everything else I want to learn nowadays, I fired up YouTube and watched my first drum tutorial video. After a day or two of practicing, I was able to do a basic pattern!

Once I had that down, I was constantly feeding myself new material to master. I would fire up Spotify in my headphones and drum along with whatever song struck my fancy. Soon I was doing more complicated music. Eventually, I progressed to watching videos that included drum tablature, getting to the point where I could read music and nearly play at full speed. Suddenly I was somewhat useful behind the kit.

Fast forward to today. My band DNR’s drummer, John Palmer, sometimes can’t make practice due to prior commitments. The rest of the band could either waste time, noodle around, play to a drum track, or bag the practice altogether. I have been stepping up in practice to take over drumming with the aim to keep a steady beat. I’m still new and not nearly as fancy as I want to be, but often I can get the job done. It does drive me to want to get better, especially since I know the caliber of musicians my bandmates are and that they deserve an equally talented drummer. I’m not quite there yet but I definitely get charged up about playing with a real band. John’s position is secure, let me just say!

While I still get self-conscious about missing a beat or not adding the right fill, I can appreciate how far I’ve come in the short time I’ve been a drummer. Drums to me are a welcome break from work. I will leave my home office for the playroom, sit down, and play to a song.

A little bit here and there can get you far, before you know it.

Umstead hike

The weather this past week has been phenomenal; a real taste of fall with highs in the low 80s, lows in the mid-50s, and very low humidity. Kelly and I had been itching to get outside and enjoy it, so today we packed up the dogs and spent a few hours hiking around Umstead Park. We didn’t have real plans once we got there and just began hiking one of the loops, which turned out to be Sycamore Loop and took us almost 7.5 miles. It was just as pleasant in the woods as we’d hoped, so our hike was mostly enjoyed by all.

One of our hounds, though, seemed to run out of steam after about five miles, so the last bit of our hike became more of a drag. It did go to show us that we really need to do more hikes like this.

RSS update update

So far the RSS reader reboot is working well. I feel like I have more control over the media I get and the stories I read. I especially like rediscovering the blogs of friends whom I haven’t interacted with in a while. On Facebook, I long ago noticed that the service simply didn’t share updates from certain friends in my feed, even though those friends were posting regularly. It became obvious that my “friendships” there were being manipulated. This for me was the downfall of Facebook’s usefulness: when it began to heavily throttle the user to user interaction in favor of stuffing my feeds with unwanted “follow” posts and of course ads. I can still get a taste of that user-to-user by switching to looking at the Friends feed directly but any trust I once had in Facebook is long, long gone.

Hope you’re enjoying the updates here.

A grind

Gotta be up front with y’all. What’s going on is a grind. Yep, a real grind. A flood of colossally bad moves, blatant racial profiling, skirting and breaking the law. It is maddening. It is infuriating. It is depressing. Every morning I pop open my phone to learn about the latest disaster.

But you know what? This chaos is not going to last. It will end, these crooks will be reigned in and brought to court, and our country will begin the long and substantial work to rebuild our nation, alliances, and reputation. I try to focus on this future rather than the mess we are currently in.

The headlines, blogs, and social media posts are right to tell us what’s happening, and it’s important to know what’s happening but it’s often not the whole story. What gets our attention now is the stories that are flashy or angering or infuriating but the stuff that doesn’t make headlines is the fact that the current regime is striking out almost universally in court.

Judges are holding officials’ feet to the fire. Grand juries are refusing to play along with the administration’s bullshit charges. The idiots are getting called out and quietly retreating on many fronts.

As long as this administration keeps being frustrated in its quest for legitimacy there is hope. We just gotta keep grinding.

Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Junior to Ban Covid-19 Vaccine ‘Within Months’

My local VA can’t find the COVID vaccine. To my surprise, neither can CVS. Or at least it doesn’t currently have any.

Now the rumor is that RFK, Jr. plans to ban the COVID vaccine within months.

I hate this timeline.

The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months,” one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed in the face of scientific consensus that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, told the Daily Beast that Kennedy’s stance is shared by “influential” members of President Donald Trump’s family. Like Kennedy himself, no Trumps hold any scientific qualifications.Malhotra is a leading adviser to the controversial lobby group Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, which is seen as an external arm of Kennedy’s agenda as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary.

He told the Beast that many of those closest to RFK Jr. have told him they “cannot understand” why the vaccine continues to be prescribed, and that a decision to remove the vaccine from the U.S. market pending further research will come “within months,” even if it is likely to cause “fear of chaos” and bring with it major legal ramifications.

Source: Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Junior to Ban Covid-19 Vaccine ‘Within Months’

Thirty years with a web presence

My blogging mentor, Wil Wheaton, noted his 24 years of blogging today so naturally I had to check where I stand on these metrics.

It’s been 23 years since I began actual blogging (or as I called it back then “web logging”), using a dynamic, database-backed site rather than static pages. Here’s my first post. I looked for the prior software I’d been using, “bpblog,” but it seems it has completely vanished from the Internet. Which might be a good thing, actually.

More interestingly, last month marked THIRTY YEARS of a web presence! That would be the “Flea Forum” hosted on the servers of a long-gone local Triangle web hosting and internet company, Cybernetics. Check out this mirror in all of its 1995 glorious, hand-crafted HTML glory.

I kept a digital journal even before this though as far as I know I never posted it online. I recall posting an excerpt or two here on MT.Net. But private journaling doesn’t count.

I’m still committed to growing my blog reading and writing as nearly every commercial online media company does more pissing me off than entertaining me lately. Either its incessant ads, shadowbanning, patently stupid fake AI photos and videos or the million other ways they annoy me. It’s time to get back to real, y’all.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to be a keyboard warrior from now on. I dabbled with video posts earlier and I would like to bring this back. I will probably write what I want to say, read it on camera, and post both. If you have the ability to post video why not do it, right?

Thanks for sticking around. I hope our conversation can continue.

Trying to find a COVID booster shot

Kelly and I are traveling in a few weeks so we both decided it made sense to get a COVID booster shot. COVID cases are ramping up again, with some cities reporting infections are reaching levels they usually do in February, which is concerning for late summer.

Kelly got a shot on Sunday and it absolutely leveled her for Monday. She slept until 5 PM, with fatigue, chills, fever, nausea, joint pain: all the typical COVID symptoms which apparently can sometimes manifest from the vaccine.

I am not looking forward to being similarly knocked out, though my previous COVID shots affected me very little. So I reached out to the Durham VA and asked if I could get a walk-in shot.

The nurse responded a few days ago and suggested I make an appointment to be sure that the vaccine brand I wanted was in stock. She later reached back out and said that neither the Moderna nor the Pfizer version are in stock and she would have to figure out when they might come in.

This is … concerning … as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is doing his damnedest to destroy our healthcare system and get us all killed. If we’re at February levels of COVID right now, imagine where we will be in the winter when more interactions take place indoors?

I am really glad I work from home right now.

I still remember the efficient operation the VA undertook to vaccinate veterans and their caregivers in 2021. It is a stunning contrast.

Back to East CAC duty for me

Since it seems 2010 is making a comeback in my life, it’s only fair that I am in charge of the East Citizens Advisory Council again. This happened today when the current Chair, my neighbor Jean, abruptly stepped down. As Vice-Chair, I’m now in charge for the first time in a decade.

I’d been working to mentor Jean in how to make things happen and made it a point to let her lead. As a fifty-six year old who’s had his turn already in leading this group, I feel strongly that it’s time the younger generation had a chance to try running things. My role was to be a coach and help get things running smoothly as we were starting essentially from scratch after the City of Raleigh abruptly disbanded CACs in February 2020.

Now I must spend time recruiting a new leader and reviving this organization on my own if need be. I have put in too much work in CACs over the years to let them wither, so I feel it’s worth a good push right now. Further, civic engagement is what this country so desperately needs at the moment.

I guess everything old is new again, eh?

Chasing hallieandtravis.com again

When the kids became young adults and I tapered off my regular blogging about them (and me – their blog was as much about my journey as a parent as it was about them), I opted to let the hallieandtravis.com domain expire. I’d always had far too many domains to juggle and I took a gamble that it might sit idle until I was one day ready to set it up again.

About two years ago, I saw that the domain was active again, serving as the wedding guest registry of a Nebraska couple.

Good on them, I thought. I hope they have a wonderful wedding. But I also thought that maybe when the wedding was done the domain might be made available again. When the renewal date came this spring and then got extended, my heart sank.

After rediscovering that post about the magic day in 2010 today, I decided I would try to reach out to the current domain owners and ask if they would be willing to let me buy the domain again. I sent an email to an address I had guessed about and it didn’t bounce, but I also didn’t receive a response.

I am hopeful I can reclaim the domain someday and perhaps share those writings with the world again.