Good morning good morning hello hi howdy what it is, what it is. Thursday, very exciting. The day I check the covid dashboard and measles dashboard. What the heck, let’s do that right now. Covid trending up in Raleigh, down in Durham, Cary and Chapel Hill/Carrboro. All low by historic standards. The One Regional Covid Super Pooper™ seems to have moved from Cary sewage district to Cary sewage district 1 this week. No change in Measles.

Not too bad, not too bad.

Important embarrassing correction. While making my bonkers prediction about Trump turning democrat and voting for DC/Puerto Rico statehood yesterday, I said “Rhode Island” instead of “Puerto Rico.” What a humiliating error. I blame the GMHHAY editors. They have been suitably flogged.

MS and AK senate have both not been called yet. I am now optimistic about Alaska — most of the remaining vote is from the villages, who are traditionally blue even when there isn’t a native on the ballot. God, we said “native” my whole childhood, they are the “native corporations’ it is the “Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act” but “Native” sounds so iffy now but that is the word we used. Do we still? I don’t know, my Alaskaness is fading I guess. Well, it’s not, but my WOKE-Alaskaness is. I will ask Julia. ANYWAY, that one is looking good.

Misssissippi is a crazy journey of it’s own, they have literally NO recount laws whatsoever when it comes to Senate races. It will be a county-by-county legal free-for-all, and then may well go to the actual Senate to decide. Might be a real civics lesson coming. But this also explains all those texts and emails we are all getting from Scott Colum. Of course, given how much he fucked things, Chuck Schumer should be paying for it all.

I am super bummed he and Jeffries will probably be re-appointed. It sucks. I have written my congressional delegation appropriately concerned emails in the style of Susan Collins. Feels not enough. Wish we could convey to those idiots how done with them their entire electorate is.

Been using this new app for my personal financial tracking. It’s called Monarch Money (dumb name). Longtime GMHHAY readers know I’ve been using Quicken for years. I check all my transactions on every account every day. Makes it a lot less stressful to lose a credit card or something, helps me keep an eye on spending, etc. etc.

However, Quicken is… well, I wouldn’t call it abandonware, but it’s not far off. I originally used it because I hate a bajillion tabs and prefer native MacOS software to another browser window. And that is still true, but:

1) I have learned the trick that in Safari you can share a webpage to the Dock, and what it actually does is make a sweet solo app instance of that website. It is pretty awesome. You gotta use Safari, and Safari has a few flaws, but mostly (if you haven’t used Safari in a long time heads up) those have been resolved due to the common core of Safari on MacOS and iOS and Safari being the largest mobile browser. So now you can make a website like an app. Shows up in the doc, in your apps folder, in the app-switcher, everything. It is swell.

2) Quicken is now in Private Equity hell, Intuit sold it a while back its changed hands since then again, and no one cares anymore. It doesn’t integrate with Apple Card. It doesn’t integrate with Venmo. It doesn’t integrate with my 401k provider. It’s getting absurd. Half my finances don’t show up. And I want to switch to the Apple Card as my primary credit card as another step in my decades-long journey to untangle myself from Amazon. But I can’t if I can’t freakin’ monitor my spending.

SO. Monarch. They SAY they don’t sell your data. I have not evaluated that. I have also not checked who their investors are. Shit I should do that. I have one more day of my free trial. Hold please. Oh this is fun: Accel, Menlo Ventures, FPV Ventures. Ugh. What a bummer. I will assume, eventually, that this will get enshittified but it’ll work for now. They let you turn off all AI and they let you delete all your data in different categories, so that is promising.

BUT it lets you connect Venmo, Paypal, your crypto shit if you have it, all weird-ass, old-school financial providers, Apple Card, the works. It handled every single thing I threw at it in terms of connections.

AND if you own a home, you can put your address in, it grabs the value from Zillow, and live-updates your home value, so your net work is actually close to accurate.

It has credit score integration too but I have not tried that yet.

OH and if you use a chromium-based browser, which, sadly, I do not, it will actually download your transaction data from Amazon and Target and auto-split the expenses into categories and add the descriptions to the comments, which is the single-most time-consuming thing I do in this whole situation every day. I have set all that up in a Chromium browser (Brave) and I hope it does it automatically if I just leave that browser open, but I am not optimistic. We shall see.

AND – I can’t believe I’m saying this — but they have a referral situation so if you wanna try it let me know and I can save some bucks.

Fun sidequest just now: Had to log into my paid Crunchbase account to check out Monarch’s funding, and I originally used a LinkedIn login when I made my Crunchbase login eons ago so they could see I was legit when I edited stuff. But I recently changed my LinkedIn email as part of my Great Email Reorganizing, and so now LinkedIn and Crunchbase have different emails. I can Log in with LinkedIn, but I cannot update my email or change my password on Crunchbase anymore. Awesome. $600 a year.

While we’re on techy subjects: questions for the hard-core IT/Networking people out there. Any idea why Cloudflare is constantly evaluating me as a human on every single website these days? It’s not my IP, because it doesn’t happen to Emma. Might by my NIC? Is there somewhere/somehow to get resolved? It’s not the end of the world, I pass every time, but I mean, it adds like 10 seconds to every single website and it is driving me bonkers.

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!

Listening to Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend this morning because I listen to every album people mention to me if I have not listened to it before. And while I’ve owned the “Girlfriend” CD single since it came out (man what a killer tune) I had never listened to the whole album. And my old friend Corin recently posted a Threat-or-Skeet about ten perfect albums and I’m gonna listen to all the ones I hadn’t, and I started with this. It is pretty great. Corin likes power pop more than I do, but yeah, solid record.

Corin was in a great Boston power pop band with my old roommate Dave. They were called the Pills. Jill and I helped em out with one of their album covers, I think Jill designed it? Memory is hazy. Dave and I used to work together at Prophet Sound (RIP). The Pills are reuniting in December for the first time in, like, 20 years or something and I am seriously considering going to the show. Very tempting.

Saint Etienne have announced their European farewell tour dates. Very tempted to find some city I have a friend in like Barcelona (hi Jenna!) and go see them. BUT they had this little nugget in the email. They said something like “no plans for US dates yet but never say never.” Left the door open for some US dates. Man I really would like to see Saint Etienne one more time before they hang up their hats.

I had one more tech thing today what was it. Figured I could just get ‘em all out of the way at once. But now I don’t remember. Crap. OH RIGHT. Getting off of Amazon. A company called Readwise has made an entirely new eBook store — did all the hard work, negotiated the deals with the publishers, everything. Works on phones and Android-based e-readers. I do not have an Android-based e-reader, I have an Amazon Scribe, and I do like it, but, alas, Amazon. I would prefer to go to Remarkable if I’m gonna leave Kindle, but they have a proprietary OS (well, Linux-based, but still) and no Readwise partnership, and mainly focused on note-taking. Which means I need to find a new e-reader. I want it big, I want it to handle PDFs, I want a stylus. If this is a world you inhabit, let me know your thoughts.

Another cool thing about it is that you can do go read.amazon.com — Amazon’s browser-based Kindle reader — within the Readwise app. So, assuming it worked well (big if) and Amazon doesn’t break it (ditto), in theory, you could still read your old Kindle books. I’d love to check this out. But I feel like I’d have to spend some coin on it to test it, and my days of spending hundreds of dollars and taking the plunge on some new untested tech thing are (mostly) behind me. Ok who am I kidding I have an iPhone Duo and a Clicks Communicator on order. Jesus, Rick. Get it together.

Jane had the back-to-back of Gymnastics and Girl Scouts last night. Handled it like a champ, no breakdowns. I did watch these two girl siblings in a fascinating exchange where the younger one came over to the older one and looked at her as if asking to play, the older one pushed her away, the younger one started to run away to mommy, the older one immediately knew she f’d up, screamed sorry a few times but gave up when the younger one got to mommy. She then proceeded to try and pretend the younger one did something wrong, but abandoned that immediately, and honestly could have ended it all right then if she said sorry again but she didn’t for some reason - presumably because now the mom was watching. So much psychology. Kids are so fascinating. Give em the vote.

This morning Jane starred “Sweetest Taboo” by Sade and man what is the sweetest taboo. Let me just verify myself with Cloudflare here dammit so I can look at the lyrics. Yeah I man, okay. They’re gonna bone. But there is no indication of any taboo? Neither seems to be taken by someone else, they do not seem to be related. Cmon man. Sex is not a taboo.

Jane and I did not talk about that.

But I did buy her a really cute Mojave 3 shirt for Christmas from the recent Mojave 3/Unified Goods partnership. I can’t wait it is going to be so freakin cute.

She seems to have decided she wants to learn French with me. I mean I already know French (or did) but she is coming at it new. She doesn’t want to use her own Duolingo, she’s using mine. So it kinda feels like I’m teaching her? Which is pretty awesome. Makes me wish there was a progressive economics version of DuoLingo I could use with her. Or indie rock. Or power tools or something.

If AI weren’t inherently immoral maybe Id vide code them. But nah.

Really thought I had a playlist ready today and many are close but alas none are quite ready. But luckily Keith sent me this great concert by Ex:Re, and you should watch it she is great the new album is great. It comes with a cute polaroid.

All right talk to you tomorrow chums.