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I really enjoyed this video. I stayed in the Circus Circus with my two brothers in January of 1998. I love how she gave a tour of the room and of the hotel itself. It looks a lot older now, I remember it smelling really good there and it seemed so much newer then. I still get a whiff sometimes of what it smelled like over 20 years later.. I wish you could capture smells in a bottle, wouldnt nice? Kinda like Shazam but for smells.

The view she showed in the video looked just like the view we had.. The bungee jumping platform was still there. We did not have a lot of money when we went. We even rented a car from with the hotel and drove around Las Vegas. It really made me miss my youth and my two brothers. I had worries then too. But I don’t have near as much anxiety as I do now about life. It’s mentally crippling for me sometimes how much I worry.

Anyway, I thought it was neat that she stays and hotels a night or two at different ones.. kind of gets The full Experience. I enjoy staying in hotels as well, I would love to document my experience like she’s does.

I was just thinking, this time last year I was making a lot of content that I wasn’t getting paid properly for. I didn’t do it for money, I just enjoyed the creation process.

Fast forward to this year and I’ve been building software like crazy. I enjoy the creation process with this as well, but this tine I’m building tools I can actually use myself.. The difference now and then is that the potential to make money off this is much greater…. I won’t have to depend as much on the whims of an algorithm and hope I get a couple of dollars…

There are also a lot more places to sell software than there are to get paid for producing written or video content. I should have taken this route a long time ago…

I just listened to a song by the Foo Fighters titled “Everlong”. It came out in 1997, it made me real emotional. I don’t know what makes me that way. Reading some of the comments on the YouTube video made it worse.

People were saying sad things about their lives related to the song. I hate that I’m like that sometimes. It consumes me and makes it harder to keep moving and do what I need to do so mom and I can have a better life.

I found a documentary about when Charles Dickens visited America in the 1800s… It is actually a series with 10 episodes. I can’t find it anywhere to stream online but it’s on Amazon in DVD format. I can watch it with a USB DVD player on my laptop. Id really like to see this, will be my Christmas present to myself.

I was checking on mom and a movie was playing that had Bea Arthur in it. I don’t think Mom was watching it, she was asleep. I looked it up, and it was “My First Love” and came out in 1988. It was a TV movie on ABC. I did not realize be off there was doing movies in the ’80s.. I thought she was focused on the Golden Girls.

She was in her 60s in this movie, born in 1922. I didn’t realize she was that much older than my grandparents. She was almost closer in age to my great grandparents. Her co-star was a good looking man, Richard Kiley, who was born the same year as Bea Arthur, in 1922. He died in 1999 and she died in 2009. It’s neat and comforting to think they still live through their movies. It’s the closest we could ever get to being immortal I suppose.

Watching the short clip and then looking it up reminded me how fleeting life really is. We are here one minute, then gone the next. It also made me think of my first love from so long ago. I reached out to them a few weeks ago but never heard back.

We have spoken off and on through the years and I think about them a lot, depending on what’s going on in my life. I sent a message saying that I would love to see them before our time on this planet expired, and got ignored. This is coming from a person (me) that rarely reaches out to meet people. But with them, I always felt we had unresolved business, for a lack of a better word.i don’t know, I think of them often and hope they are OK and doing well.

Seeing the clip of this movie really touched me for some reason. I’m going to put it on my watch list… I just hope it’s not a sad movie, I have to gear up for those kinds of movies.

I’m watching “jasper mall” on Amazon Prime. I just got through watching all five episodes of “just like that” on HBO Max. They were good, but all the shows so far seem dark and sad. There apartments are dark… a lot of sad scenes… and even sad music..

For some reason I’ve always been fascinated with dead malls, buildings and even houses. I like thinking about how people lived their lives in the places they spent so much time living or working in… and what happened to make them want (or have) to leave.

Several weeks ago I set my phone to sleep from 6pm to 1pm the next day, so I don’t get any notifications…. Only important ones, that I select get through.

It was wearing me out thinking I have to be available during every waking minute.. I don’t start or stop working at those hours necessarily… But 6pm is a good time to stop I believe… and 1pm is when I start my bigger projects and work on them for five or six hours.. I don’t like to get an endless stream of alerts. It gives me a proper ending time, which I think is very important.

I’m now getting more traffic on some of my blogs from Chatgpt than I’m getting from Google…. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

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…