Good morning good morning hello hi howdy it is Friday wooooo! Checked the COVID stats yesterday (still doing that) we have a big ‘ole COVID POOPER in Raleigh right now. Seriously, a one-week burst of the highest COVID levels in 2+ years in Raleigh last week. That dude is shitting everywhere.

Just back from McDonald’s, where I was chatting with a human rights friend of mine on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay. Well deserved, an excellent choice. Wikipedia sorta leaves an important point out of her biography, but the NYT morning newsletter doesn’t bury the lede:

(not to diminish the rest of her esteemed career, fighting Apartheid, prosecuting genocide in Rwanda and all).

(I have three half-finished cans of Zevia ginger ale in front of me and I’m going to recycling right after this — can I drink 18 oz of ginger ale while writing GoMoHHAY? We shall see!)

GoMoHHAY (gonna try and make it a thing) I have a confession it has been 24 hours since my last confession. I got distracted by a cute baby on the side of the road while driving through the neighborhood this morning and when I looked at my speedometer I was going 32mpg in a 25 while driving a 7,000 lb truck within 20 feet of a baby and that was wrong.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: It says a lot about our society that we have still not invented a method to express regrew while in an automobile. We need a sorry horn.

But then this is the country that is apparently going to fucking livestream an execution of a handicapped person for fun? Gleefully? What the fucking fuck. How utterly depraved and disgusting. Never a bottom, every day a new low.

I am against the humane, dignified application of the death penalty. I am very, very against this utterly soulless, malevolent, evil application of the death penalty. Guess I’ll just say that out loud. Again.

Republicans are doing a gas holiday here in NC. We should see gas prices go down about 30-ish cents in the next week or two. Trump has said he’s not gonna bomb Iran again until after the mid-terms, so, you know, average person is gonna think things are okay. I don’t think these stupid-ass shenanigans like this and the illegal checks Trump is sending out will do the trick and keep the house for them, but I do think they will mitigate the damage a bit. Cheaters cheaters cheating gonna cheat woooooooooo.

Okay enough politics we all have lives we have to choose health and happiness in order to give all our money to charity you’re doing that right? Are you donating more than is comfortable? Shit does anyone even have money any more? Weird coincidence. It’s almost like they’re trying to keep us from pooling and organizing oh I am not feeling conspiratorial today nope nope nope.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

I am listening to a weird-ass band called Ak'Chamel that I learned about from the hallowed institution KEXP, the album is called Spiritually Unemployed, which I can really bond with. They have great costumes, they are a kinda droney psych thing, I bet they are fun to go see live and take some sort of illicit substance to, not that I do that anymore, because the world of illicit substances is kinda poisoned by bad people these days, alas. But i don’t think I really would anyway I am not much of a psychonaut, or at least I might be but I prefer to endeavor to travel those journeys with the significant handicap of being drug-free. Scratch that. Being illicit-drug free. Amlodopine what what? Can I get a shout out for Atorvastatin? Anyone?

Just about done with the lost wallet misery. Finally sucked it up and cancelled the main card yesterday, new one is en route. New bank card en route, new backup card en route, new work card has arrived, driver’s license ordered, going to order my replacement passport this afternoon. AirTag and wallet-finding-FindMy card have not yet arrived but I expect them imminently.

Coincidentally, we did our annual security training the other day at work, and I always take that time to think of a thing I can do to improve my infosec. The AirTags on the new wallet passport folio will help, as will the forced resect of every credit card number stored online.

But I decided to take it a step further after this whole Amazon meme. Have you seen this? Amazon has a new (is it new?) page about you that is, like, well, about you. Here is mine, or part of it:

I do not play cornhole, I do not prefer Dewalt, but I do buy them, but Amazon wouldn’t know my preferences, because Milwaukee doesn’t sell on Amazon, god bless them. But by and large, across the 100 or so items, it was pretty accurate.

I do not especially like this.

I do not especially like companies building giant data profiles on me.

The best way to avoid this is to have multiple email addresses. And I have done this to some extent, through the years, (thus thwarting Google) but all my ecommerce, banking, etc., all goes through one address.

So I decided to fix this yesterday. I made a bunch of new email addresses: one for Apple, one for the Amazon/Chase ecosystem (they have to be the same because I use the Amazon/Chase card), one for doomscrolling one for apps, one for news, one for financial and one for rock and roll. As new emails come in to my main email, I am taking the time to change the address on every single one of them.

I already, of course, have separate emails for day job and pool/storage company. Use separate browsers for those, too.

In one day I made pretty good progress! Aside from the fact that I tried to use a whole sentence as my new AppleID password (changing some old passwords as well), and it accepted it on my Mac but then failed on iOS and TvOS which sucked. But that is fixed now.

More or less shocked how easy it was to change my email address at Meta and Apple. They do a good job. Some stores have zero way of doing it. I just deleted those accounts. I seem to have two Bloomberg accounts. Lotta newsletters don’t let you change your email, so I am just unsubscribing, then re-subscribing to the ones I care about with the new email.

I am also unsubscribing to every single record label and concert venue email here, which hurts but is, I bet, going to save me a ton of money. I will slowly rebuild that up as I ill-advisedly buy more records and well-advisedly go to more shows.

Also as I am doing this I am slowly migrating out of 1Password. Done with them. I’ve been on a version like 4 versions back – the last version they let you use where you can keep your vault to yourself and not put it in their cloud. But this of course means I have four versions of unaddressed security vulnerabilities, so it is not sustainable. My current use of Android has made this all a mess for the last year, and, as much as it sucks, it’s one of the reasons I’m going back to iOS: so I can use Apple’s decently secure, unified password manager. I am not happy about this but it is the best move.

Anyway, very ambitious. And a thing that is unaddressed is all of these new emails are all under a single Gsuite account, all under my same domain. I would love to get the entire domain off of Gsuite, but I am too addicted to Google Sheets for that to be realistic, alas. It’s a paid GSuite account, not free Gmail, so in theory they do not harvest your data but you know they do.

So now in Apple Mail.app on my Mac, I have seventeen email addresses. Also already have one for Jane stuff, one for my online selling, and one for my old record label. Seventeen!

But it all seems to work pretty seamlessly and I am pretty well-chuffed.

No tantrum from Jane yesterday! A whole day! Woo! refused to brush her teeth last night, but was fine this morning. Starred a track by Laika this morning and another one by… Well, actually, I don’t know because I can’t look at Apple Music on Android at the moment.

Gotta go re-log in. Ha.

Music music. Ummmm… Ooo it’s Friday I get to add new music to the To Investigate playlist what fun. But that does not solve our problem here. Oh here’s one did you know there’s a new Mogwai? With Iggy Pop? Well, there is. Here you go:

Until Monday, friends, with tales of chores! CHORE WEEK IS COMING SOON.

And in case you’re wondering I finished two of the half-full Zevias.