Thoughts, links, and project updates

I was watching “Poor Kids” a Frontline documentary yesterday and was thinking what a little girl said. She said that she sees people walking into houses and they seem so happy. She wishes that she had a house to walk into. It broke my heart, I had to stop watching it. I’ll pick it back up when I’m not in such a sad mood.

I found out that Betty White died in her sleep. I watched “CBS Sunday Morning ” where a couple of people she worked with were interviewed. She always had a positive attitude and tried to see the good in everything. Her husband died in 1981, she never remarried.

I just got through Watching “Melissa Gilbert: Little House on the Prairie” on YouTube. She made $75k per episode on Little House on the Prairie then went to NYC and made $500 a week I guess on Broadway…. Her second marriage was to someone 14 years older than her… They were still married when this premiered in 2001…. He was 50 years old when interviewed. They divorced in 2011…

View of downtown Huntington WV from Hampton Inn in Kenetic Park. They have excellent views and a large patio out back.. very nice hotel.

I’m watching “THE KILLING OF AMERICA (1981 DOCUMENTARY)”. I didn’t realize there was so much violence in the US prior to maybe the past 20 years. This is showing some very graphic shots of people who were killed and even while they were getting killed. We live in a very scary world and it’s been that way for a very long time, at least in the US. I’m not sure if I can finish watching this, it’s very upsetting, but I need to see it… So I can be more careful and more aware of my surroundings.

I just watched Albert Einstein: Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century | Full Documentary | Biography” on YouTube…

I learned a couple new things I didn’t know about him… He basically had an open relationship with his last wife before she died. He didn’t know and never saw his first born child. They gave it up for adoption, because he didn’t want it to interfere with his life and projects. That bothered me. The child didn’t know… but it would be an awful feeling to know as a child, you didn’t Trump your parent’s careers.

The end of the documentary explained that he went to the doctor with chest pains.. The doctor said it was a relive easy procedure but Einstein declined, saying he wanted to die naturally and not have any life saving procedures done.

Sunset over Huntington, WV

I just watched “Quentin Crisp interview | Good Afternoon  | 1975” I watched this earlier today. I made a YouTube playlist with quentin crisp interviews… This video was in 1975 and he was already 67 years old. He was about 4 years older than great grandpa pierce.

Anyway, Quentin Crisp is a very interesting guy…. I watched two of his interviews today.. I chuckled to myself after he said a few things I found funny. It’s crazy to think he’s still influencing people’s lives decades later.

The woman who interviewed Quentin, Mavis Nicholson, died in 2022.. She was 91 years old. She was 45 when this interview was done.

My dad always said how much he loved the pnw when we lived there, and he always talked about wanting to go back. I was so young that I don’t remember much of our time there, but I’ve often wondered what might have happened if he had followed through and we’d somehow ended up staying. I’ve often wondered how different our lives might have been and where that path would have taken us

I was researching if Quentin Crisp ever talked about crime in the East Village, which was very bad when he lived there…

I found out that Crisp actually was robbed in New York, including an incident right after he first moved into the Hotel Chelsea. Rather than being traumatized, he treated the burglars like unexpected guests. He recounted that when a thief broke into his room and demanded cash, Crisp simply handed over his wallet and politely asked the thief if he would mind leaving him enough money for cab fare to his morning appointment. The robber was so bewildered by Crisp’s elegance and utter lack of fear that he actually obliged, left the cab fare, and ran off. [1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Crisp)UltimatelyUltimately),

Crisp argued that while London’s crime was fueled by deep-seated hatred and misery, New York’s crime was simply “business.” He found a certain comfort in that, famously stating that he would rather be mugged in New York for his money than beaten in London just for being himself.

I just watched a video on YouTube of Amy Lee playing a live concert… I followed her on Instagram… she’s such a neat person..I hope she’s pleasant and treats people with respect… unlike Jennifer Lopez who I hear won’t allow people she thinks is beneath her to look at her in her face. Why are some people such assholes???

I looked up Courtney Love online… She has always intrigued me. She lives in a hotel in London… or at least did… and she lived in a hotel in NYC for awhile as well in 2010.

I also saw where she went to Chicago to see Nirvana and stayed in a Days Inn there where she first had sex with Kurt Cobain…

I’m Watching “The Young & Homeless (Streetlife)” on YouTube

I hate seeing people suffer. Why must people suffer? This was filmed in England in Manchester City. Stacey Dooley was the presenter or host. I watched a documentary she did on the homeless in Chicago a few weeks ago. She’s really good. I like her energy, empathy and compassion.

I’ve been watching a show called ” Inside NatWest”. It’s a British documentary about life at a bank in Huddersfield, England. It’s very interesting. It was recorded in 2015…. The people that were going into the bank asking for money were very interesting. I also found it interesting some of their incomes and the amounts of money they were borrowing for houses…. Most of them were right over 100k…. with many of the customers making less than 1k (pounds) a month… I would love to know what the real estate market looks like there now… Was very interesting….

I watched “Life In A Crack House | US Gang Exposed (Crime Documentary) | Real Stories” This really bothered me. I hate seeing people suffer and struggle. A lot of them said they didn’t expect to live long so they wanted to be happy the short time they were here. I also heard people say the same thing in a 1960’s documentary about poverty in Chicago. it really depressed me to watch both. They put cameras in a drug house and watched them for six weeks… 24/7.

I just found out about a movie called “Titanic II” Mom was watching it downstairs… It had just started. She wanted to watch it together, but there is nowhere to sit. I wish she had her old bedroom then we could have.. She always watches good movies. This movie is 11 years old and I never heard of it until now. crazy when you think about it.

It doesn’t have good reviews at all. Someone said in the movie’s YouTube comments that he had a bigger monthly grocery budget than this film had to produce the movie.

You can watch it for free on Youtube… It’s also on Amazon Prime but it’s a separate subscription… which is very aggravating.

I added it to the watch list.

I just watched a really neat show titled “The Dark Side of the 90s” I watched an episode about the Viper Room and River Phoenix…and learned some stuff i didn’t know about…. I looked up.the title of the series on Google and saw where it is a series on Vice TV… there are several episodes available.

Since it came up as a suggestion on Youtube…. I probably would never have looked into it any further if the title on Youtube didn’t say Part 2….. Because of that I went looking for Part 1…

Surprisingly, quite a few of the episodes are still on YouTube.. But you can watch them on the vice TV website as well.. On demand.. But you have to have the channel on your cable package.. Which in my case is Xfinity.. Apparently, I do not have that channel available. I am not clear yet on how much it would cost to get it. Vice TV does not offer the option to buy it separately outside of your cable provider unfortunately.

If you have Amazon Prime, you can buy season 1 for less than $22 if you choose high definition or aprox $16 for standard definition. Amazon Prime also gives you the option to buy each episode at $2.99… But several of them are still available on YouTube to watch for free…. I’m not sure how long thar will last.

I’ve added this docu-series to my watch list. I’m looking forward to getting through all of them and learning a bunch of stuff I did not know.

I watched “Princess Margaret: Rebel Without a Crown – British Royal Documentary” on YouTube.. It took me a few hours to watch it, because I was doing other things… so I rewound a lot….

This is the first documentary on the Royals that featured Princess Margaret… I did not know much about her. When she was younger, it was hard for me to tell the difference between her and her sister Queen Elizabeth.. It appeared as though the queen took care of her little sister and looked after her.. So that made me feel good.. We should always be there for our family… so many people turn their back and abandon the people who love them.. I always wondered how people who do such things sleep at night.

The people who were interviewed, did not speak very highly of her really.. They spoke of how snobbish and difficult she was.

I’ve watched a lot of documentaries on the British royal family.. It’s sad to see family members that you know have passed on.. When you watch enough of these, you also notice how people’s physical appearance changes. I believe Queen Elizabeth is the last person or one of the last people of her generation who is still living. I don’t even want to think about still being around if all of the people that were in my life the longest we’re gone.. when my time has expired here.

Life is indeed fleeting, we are here one day and gone the next..

Today I started building a new Airtable Stats dashboard for my Windows 95-style WordPress back office.

The goal was to create one place where I could see how quickly my Airtable databases are growing and how much activity is happening in each table. I wanted to track how many records were added today, yesterday, this week, and this month, along with the cumulative total for each table.

The idea expanded into a full database activity dashboard with headline totals, per-table statistics, cumulative growth charts, daily activity charts, busiest day, average daily additions, fastest-growing table, and manual refresh controls.

I also created a visual mockup of the dashboard first, which helped establish exactly how I wanted it to look inside the Windows 95 environment. I really liked the result and decided to move forward with development.

I initially uploaded the wrong version of the Windows 95 theme, so I stopped before making changes. Once I found and uploaded the latest theme, development continued using the correct version.

The updated theme became version 1.5.5 and now includes an Airtable Stats desktop icon, a Windows 95-style stats window, mobile-friendly scrolling, caching, and a new Appearance → Airtable Stats settings area where I can choose which Airtable tables to monitor.

The system can use Airtable’s record creation timestamps to determine when records were added, which means I don’t necessarily have to manually add a Created Time field to every table.

I also decided that WordPress should maintain historical daily snapshots locally. This will reduce unnecessary Airtable API calls while allowing the dashboard to build a long-term history of database growth.

What started as a simple way to count new Airtable records has turned into something much more useful: an analytics layer for my entire back-office database system.

I’m building a CRM widget for my Win95 Style WordPress theme that will pull data out of an Airtable base I keep, and display it in a Unix style terminal… (I’m basically just wrapping it, it’s not an actual terminal) which I’ve always preferred, at least as far as retrieval goes…

My goal is to have a vintage GUI for a dashboard displaying every aspect of my projects, interests, etc. I love details and I want to be able to see them all in one place… broken down by project.

I love the modern tech of course, I just prefer the old way of retrieving info… I’ve never found anything that quite suited me in that regard… So I’m building it myself with WordPress and Airtable API’s..

The theme is already finished… As I get into it though, I’ll decide whether it should be a widget or a plugin… the transition from one to the other is usually pretty easy. Of course, I won’t be selling it, at least in its current form, don’t wanna tick MS off.. ☺️

I’m watching “The Final Years Of Queen Victoria’s Reign | A Monarch UNveiled | Real Royalty” on YouTube. I learned some things I never knew about her. She wrote over 50 million words in her journal. She was also of German heritage (3/4) and spoke fluent German. When her husband and mother died the same year… She was devastated and spent a lot of time in Germany, where her husband Albert and her mother were born.. Of course, it wasn’t technically Germany at that point….

She also disregarded social constraints and lacked a sense of snobbery. I enjoyed hearing the stories of how she treated her staff…. She never called them servants and went out of her way to correct anyone who did… I could see queen Elizabeth being that way as well… I think Queen Elizabeth also journaled, but I don’t know if it was to the extent that Queen Victoria did…

I have been wanting to watch (again) “Christmas thru the Decades” on YouTube but couldn’t find it. I did find it on Amazon Prime for Free though… It goes from the 60’s to the 90’s but stops… It premiered in 2015…. I wonder why they didn’t include the early 2000’s? I would also like to see all decades of the 20th century…

I’m watching a documentary on YouTube about Hart Island in NYC. It’s an island where over a million people are buried in mass Graves. They talked about a book titled “How the Other Half Lived” It’s a book written over 100 years ago by Jacob Riis… I noticed that there are a few people who have republished the book on Amazon. I’ve heard of publishing books that are in the public domain, I need to revisit the idea..

I just got through watching the short story “The Berlin Wall Revisited” on HBO max…. they discussed a guy who did a lot of filming of the berlin wall in the 80’s… both sides of it… I couldn’t find much out about him.. But found a video on youtube that’s in Spanish with some of his work… It looks very interesting.

I watched “Concorde A Supersonic Story (BBC 2017). Iconic Airplanes In History” Joan Collins was interviewed for this… along with several flight attendants, pilots, people who worked on building it and even passengers… They only had one profitable route, New York to London… so they started chartering the plane out….There were people who profited from selling day excursions to exotic places. When the Concorde crashed in 2000, it was a chartered flight headed for a cruise.

The last flight was in 2003. One of the flight attendants said it was like aviation took a step backwards…. It’s interesting how there really is not much interest in super sonic travel… It was mentioned that a lot of investment bankers and hedge fund managers used the Concorde to commute. Could you imagine?

While watching an episode (episode 3 season 1) “History of the Home” they were discussing how Virginia Wolf liked to have a room outside of the house where she could write in peace. I did a little reading about her…. She had an open marriage with her husband, had romantic relationships with woman and suffered from bipolar disorder, which ultimately took her life at the age of 59. Her husband, who was only two years older than Virginia, lived another 28 years.

Many of her statements and essays would be offensive today…

I just got through watching “Michael Jackson: Searching for Neverland” It showed the final months of his life. I didn’t realize he was so broke the last few years of his life. One of his guards said that Michael Jackson was essentially homeless. He rented homes and never stayed in one location long.

At one point in the film, Michael was shopping at the Schwarz toy store and ran up s $39k bill. His card would not go through.. His security also had not been paid in five months.. They must have felt awful while he was out spending money and they did without. I just can’t imagine someone of his status wouldn’t be able to pay the people who helped them. I don’t believe it was to dodge them, I honestly think he wanted to. At one point he gave them a check for half of what he owed them.

He had a lot of problems at the end of his life. After watching this, I don’t see how he even functioned after having to worry about everything… It gave me a better understanding of how difficult his life was…. Having to worry about every step you take or every word that comes out of your mouth.

It was very touching. It came out in June of 2017 on Lifetime…. I had not heard of it until today..

The worries of this world are no longer his to bare. I find peace in that for some reason..

I’ve been watching a documentary about John Belushi… It’s very interesting. The doctor interviewed pretty much gave a gloomy picture of Addiction – that you’re always going to relapse… He’d do well at times, but according to his wife at the time, something would trigger him and he would start using again. It’s an interesting story but very depressing.