Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Yesterday I wrote about a con Jimmy McGill and ride-or-die friend Kim Wexler pull against a prosecutor in Better Call Saul ep. 4.08 to get her to reduce the charges against Jimmy's associate, Huell Babineaux. At Kim's suggestion Jimmy wrote a bunch of letters as a fake letter-writing campaign from ordinary citizens of Huell's hometown, attesting to what a wonderful person Huell is and promising the judge to come protest his unjust prosecution at trial. The judge tells the prosecutor to offer a plea bargain to keep the case away from trial. The prosecutor, suspecting the syrupy sweet letters of being phony, takes them back to her office and sets her team to investigate them.

This is where Jimmy is three steps ahead of them.

First, those letters from people in Coushatta, Louisiana are all mailed from Coushatta— a real town. Jimmy traveled there by bus to post the letters from the tiny town's post office.

Next, many of the letter included phone numbers for the people who supposedly wrote them. Those phone numbers....?



Remember Jimmy— actually he did this as Saul— the phone salesman from a few episodes ago? Yeah, those phone numbers are all real. They go to a bank of phones Jimmy purchased and set up in his office. And he's hired his 3 member film crew of UNM students, including "Drama Girl", his script-writing and makeup consultant, to answer the phones. They put on laughably thick Cajun accents and downhome mannerisms as they impersonate eah of the letter writers the ADA and her staff check up on. Jimmy himself lays it on thick as the pastor of the Free Will Baptist Church, while "Sound Guy" plays a recording of church organ music in the background.

Oh, and Free Will Baptist Church? You know the prosecutor and her team are going to Google that. They're not idiots. But again, Jimmy is ahead of them. And the showrunners hid an Easter egg.



The prosecutor's team pulls up the church's webpage. It's got a photo carousel of Huell Babineux being thanked by various members of the community— including firefighters thanking him for rescuing senior citizens from a burning building. The prosecutor, at this point, gives up. She contacts Kim to offer a plea bargain.

When I saw this come up on a laptop screen in the show, following the crazy accents on the phones, I was practically crying with laughter. Then after watching the episode I discovered something even better— an Easter egg.

That pic from the website? It's not a a screen-cap from the TV series; it's a screenshot I made by visiting https://www.freewill-baptistchurch.com. Yes, the Free Will Baptist Church of Coushatta, Louisiana is fake... but it has a real website we fans can visit!

The main page has the aforementioned photo carousel of Huell Babineaux (Lavell Crawford) and his many charitable acts. The "Testimonials" page has 3 audio recordings of the Better Call Saul cast pretending to be small town parishioners. If you call the number on the website, you hear a recording of Bob Odenkirk's hilarious rendition of a Cajun preacher. And the "Donate" button really works— though it redirects to a real, legit charity, the Food Bank of Louisiana.

So many places on the web want you to sign up with a name and email address in exchange for access to content or services. As an end user I'm like, "I just want this one free thing you're offering, I don't want you to spam me with daily advertisements for the next umpteen years!" So I have an alter ego identity I use.

Here's how I signed in for free wifi at the airport recently:



Yup, Hugh Jass is my alter ego. I've been joining webinars, downloading free pdfs, and connecting to airport wifi as Hugh for years.

"Wait, why's this tagged as humor?" you may ask.

Read the name. Say the name. Hugh Jass. It sure sounds like "Huge Ass", doesn't it?

I'm hardly the first person to make this joke, of course. It's one the names Bart Simpson uses to prank bar owner Moe in The Simpsons, as far back as at least the early 1990s. There was even a 1991 episode in which a guy named Hugh Jass actually answered the phone at Moe's Tavern, foiling Bart's prank.

What about a real-life Hugh Jass? A quick web search finds a number of hits, though many of them are pages discussing pranks. LinkedIn claims there are 240 contacts matching "Hugh Jass"... though there, too, the top hit looked like it was an account created as a joke. But at least a few others at cursory glance seemed like they could be legit.

As far as hugh.jass@gmail.com... whoever owns that I'm address, I'm sorry for the extra spam I create for you. 🤣

Recently I've gone on my clothes shopping spree for 2023. Over the past 6 weeks I've bought 9 shirts and 1 pair of trousers. I call this my 2023 shopping spree because the last time I bought more than 1 item at a time was when I bought 8 shirts... in May 2021. (BTW, this recent set of 9 shirts are long sleeve while the 2021 set was short sleeve. I'm replacing different wardrobes in different years!)

This time, as with the last few times around, I did all my shopping online. That still seems a bit new to me as I resisted online clothes shopping for a few years. Oh, it's not because I'm afraid of technology or online identity theft or anything like that. I've been buying things online, including major purchases, regularly since 1997. It's just that buying clothes online took me a while to warm up to because details of color and especially sizing are so crucial, and you can't be sure of those online.

"Oh, but you can buy stuff online and return what doesn't fit," people assured me. Yes, I always knew that was possible. But it seemed like abusing the returns policy to me to order lots of stuff, 2, 3 or even 4 different sizes and colors, planning to return more than half of it.

What tipped me over was seeing that even traditional brick-and-mortar store chains were embracing online clothes shopping. As part of that they were implicitly endorsing the practice of plan-to-return-most-of-it necessary to make buying clothes online an actual, reasonable thing.

Speaking of returns, I did make a few this time. Those 9 shirts and 1 pair of trousers I mentioned are only the items I kept. I returned 2 other shirts because their colors didn't look as good in person as in the photos, and 2 other clothes items because they were inches shy of fitting properly even relative to the sizing chart the manufacturer provided. Overall 10/14 seems like a good hit rate. It's better than the 2/8 keeper rate I had on a buying spree earlier in 2021.

First off, yes, I'm still writing about our trip to West Virginia and North Carolina from last month. Yes, it's over 3 weeks since we returned home and I still haven't cleared the backlog of journal entries from it. But now I'm almost done. One of these last few I'm going to switch into the present tense instead of tying it to a particular day or location. Partly that's because it's about a question we discussing numerous times on the trip: "There are so many amazing waterfalls in North Carolina, why didn't we hike them when we lived here?"

Like I said, the thought occurred to us not just once but multiple times over the course of a few days. I blogged once about it already; see Why didn't we do this when we LIVED here? That blog reflects our first discussion on the matter. We came up with a few answers, partial answers, to the question. They still left us wondering. As we thought about it more we found better clarity. Ultimately the conundrum of "Why didn't we do this years ago?" comes down to three big things: Information, Money, and Time.

1) Information was arguably the biggest obstacle to us visiting all these waterfalls, or even a few of them, when we lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, many years ago. For this trip we found so much information online in website and blogs and via apps like AllTrails. When we were in NC in the mid 90s none of that existed. We had to find info in books. And yes, there were books back then. We saw plenty of books about waterfall hikes in gift shops on this trip, in 2023. But in the 1990s those books were fewer and not as widely distributed. ...And, no, it's not for lack of looking. Back in the 1990s "Let's stop in this bookstore and look around" was a regular thing. And I did find books on hiking in the state... but only a few, and most of them weren't very lucid. It's nothing like the wealth of information a person can find online with a minute or two of searching today.

2) Money. Money was another big obstacle. As "poor starving grad students" the idea of spending a weekend going somewhere and staying at a hotel for a few nights was pretty much outside the realm of possibility for us. We were happy doing day-trips... and indeed we did several memorable day-trips the summer we lived together in Chapel Hill. But getting over to the part of the state we visited on this 2023 trip would've taken most of a day just for the round-trip drive, leaving not that much time for actually hiking. It would've worked better as a weekend getaway— which we could ill afford.

3) Time. "Time is our most precious resource," I've said many times. Alas when I was a poor, starving grad student I wasn't just poor and starving. ...Actually I wasn't starving; I always had enough to eat. What I didn't have was free time. As a grad student you internalize that there is always, always, something else you should be doing to advance your studies. The mindset is not 9-to-5, it's 24/7. Everything that's not actively getting you closer to your doctorate, or to a publication, is a poor choice you should reconsider. Thus the number of trips I took in my 3 years in North Carolina was very few. Yes, it's ironic that now, many years later, I find it easier to carve out the time to travel to North Carolina from across the country than to visit it more widely when I lived there. But that's life.... Or rather, grad student life.

Ahead of our new dining table arriving a few days ago we listed the old one for sale. "We'll put it on Craigslist and if we get no bites there after several days, we'll try Freecycle or donate it to Goodwill," we agreed. But then I paused for a moment to ask, do kids these days still use Craigslist?

Craigslist is kind of a Gen X thing. It's familiar to us because we're both Gen Xers. But what about younger generations? I figure a target demographic for selling decent quality used furniture online is people in their early to mid 20s, those looking to furnish an apartment for the first time. That's Gen Z.

Where does Gen Z go to buy & sell stuff like used furniture? Facebook Marketplace was the only other thing I could come up with. Both Hawk and I are FB objectors, though, and we weren't going to let Mark Zuckerberg scrape our entrails just so we could get a couple hundred bucks for a table and 6 chairs. So we listed the dining room set on Craigslist.

We listed the table and chairs on Craigslist. And after 3 days we'd gotten... nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a single ping.

I suggested we ask someone literally in the target demographic we're trying to reach: our niece, Tessa. She's in her early 20s and coincidentally just moved into her first apartment. (If she weren't 2,500 miles away we probably would've just given her the table and chairs.) We texted her and had this conversation:





Tessa went on to explain that one of her friends had just found an apartment on Craigslist. She confirmed that Facebook Marketplace is popular among friends her age, too, though that for buying furniture she and her boyfriend bought most of theirs from local thrift shops.

We'll try one more time with Craigslist then probably donate if it we can't sell it. But dang, it would've been nice to get a few hundred back to defray the cost of the new furniture we bought.

Update: We sold the table a few days later— to a good home!

Yesterday I wrote about going bald. To be clear, I don't mean "going" as in, "I'm shaving my head tomorrow." I'm talking about the normal, natural condition of gradual hair loss that's been playing out for, at this point, a few decades.

Anyway, after posting that blog entry yesterday I saw a feature about going bald in my newsfeed this morning. It's "The art of growing bald gracefully", posted on CNN.com. My guy response was, "Oh, great, I post a blog about baldness and now all the advertising spyware that's on major websites chooses to show me articles like this." But a quick click through to the article shows it was published today. So, yes, it's genuinely in CNN.com's feed, it's not something they dug up and fed to me because they (or their advertising platform) are able spy on my web browsing.

The author of this article, Oscar Holland, has gone through a situation similar to mine, though he's farther along it than I am. He proposed that there are "three important dates" in every balding man's life:

There are three important days in every bald(ing) man's life: The day you realize you're losing your hair, the day you realize you should shave off what remains, and the day you finally do. Growing bald gracefully is about reducing the gap between these milestones as far as possible.

I agree. I actually came to the same conclusion back in my mid 20s when I first noticed the creeping hairline and the strands of hair left in my hairbrush every morning. I resolved even then that I would age gracefully, not vainly. As I asserted in yesterday's blog, I would not comb my last three strands of hair sideways over the top of my head. I'd shave it all off first.

Thankfully it's not yet time to shave. Per the 3 days Holland describes, I'm still between #1 and #2. I've had a much longer run from #1 to #2 than I expected. My hair still looks good from the front. But at the same time I know that day #2 is closer than ever before. Day #3, when I choose to be completely bald, will not follow far behind.

Colorado Travelog #21
Ouray, CO - Tuesday, 5 Jul 2022, 5:50pm

As we wrapped up our hike at Box Canyon Falls a few minutes ago I asked Hawk to remind me how we planned this trip. "A few years ago we were looking up waterfall hikes in Colorado, saw a cluster of them in Telluride, and decided to go," she said. Indeed, we built a trip around the kernel of spending a few days in Telluride. But visiting Telluride isn't the only thing in Colorado that's been on our list. There's a place that's been on my list for more than 30 years. 😨

I got on the Internet for the first time in 1990. Yeah, I know, a long time ago! One of the fun things to do back then was scour public ftp sites for cool digital pictures to display. There was no Google back then; Google wasn't founded until 1998. Even Yahoo didn't start until 1994. Early internauts exchanged lists of site addresses in text mediums like Usenet News groups and then visited them one-by-one, browsing through their file subdirectories, to see what they had.

This is where a lot of wise-asses would say, "I bet it was porn!" And they would be wrong. Porn online wasn't a big thing back then. (Why? Frankly, because it was several years before a scalable e-commerce mechanism was constructed to profit from it.)

Here was one of the first pictures I downloaded online in 1990:



I was entranced by the beautiful mountain scenery. I made it my desktop background image for a while. At the time I'd only ever been on the east coast of the US (and an evening in Canada) so I'd never seen a sight like that in person. I knew I wanted to visit such places some day. But where was it?

The photo was identifiable only by its filename, lkmarron.gif. "Lake Marron", I thought. I searched various times over the years for Lake Marron but could never find it.

It turns out the file was misnamed. The scene pictured in it is Maroon Lake. Its name in 8.3 format should've been maroonlk.gif or lkmaroon.gif, not lkmarron.gif. That could've saved me years of wondering. But eventually search engines got good enough to show near matches, and I found the place I was looking for. Then I forgot about it.

I forgot about it until today, that is. And that's why I prompted Hawk to recall how we planned this trip. "Lake Maroon, which I've wanted to see for more than 30 years, is near Aspen," I explained. "What do you think about planning a trip to Aspen next year, or maybe later this year."

"Why don't we see if we can go this week?" Hawk responded.

[sound of needle scratch]

As I was literally driving on a city street at that moment I pulled over to a parking space, dug my computer out of a bag in the back seat (I'm glad I brought it with me today!), and started checking if we can still change our plans. We can!

Get ready, we're about to call a massive audible.

Update: It took a few hours of wrangling to line up all the reservations, but we did it. We're now rebooked to visit Maroon Lake on Saturday!

As I wrote about my youngest sister turning 40 recently I thought about how the 10 year age difference between us made a difference in how we grew up... and how it didn't. At age 40 my sister is technically a Millennial, while I'm squarely in the middle of Gen X. But she's at the cusp of the Millennial generation; people born just 1 year earlier are Gen X. I see in her (and her age peers) a blend of characteristics from both age cohorts.

That got me wondering, as an aside, what do you call people who are part Millennial and part Gen X?  "Xillennial", I figured. I tried searching on that term to see if anyone else is using it. I discovered that the shorter Xennial has already become somewhat common to describe this age group!

Xennials, people born in the late 70s to early 80s, really do straddle some of the cultural divides between generations. My sister matches most of the traits of this subgroup. For example:

— Xennials, like we Gen Xers, grew up using landline phones. They're familiar with hand-written lists of phone numbers on the wall and sharing a phone number with everyone in the household. They may never have "dialed" a phone, though, except at grandma's house. Mobile phones became common around the time they were in college.

— Xennials knew what life was like pre-Internet. Yet the home Internet revolution (which I peg at "later 1990s") happened while they were in high school, so it was also something they grew up with. By the time they were in college digital literacy was considered normal... at least among students. A few writers call Xennials "the AOL generation".

— Xennials, like Gen X, got through school before social media became a dominant force, along with the stresses it puts on adolescents. But social media emerged while they were still generally young enough to embrace it as new technology. One upshot is that Xennials parents, like Millennials, generally are not befuddled by their kids' devices, apps, social media, etc. Even though these things didn't exist when they were kids, Xennials started using social media for themselves before they had kids or while their kids were very young.

Are you a Xennial, or do you have close friends/relatives who are? What do you think about these comparisons?

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.

Just as the story of the Wheel of Time spans a long time so, too, does my involvement with it. I wrote recently how the release of the Wheel of Time series on Amazon Prime reminded me how it has now been 30 years since I started reading the books.

Early on I was an avid follower of the series. I devoured the books as soon as they came out. I was thrilled to find an online discussion group in 1993. I participated actively in that group and its successor for several years, and to this day I maintain friendships formed there. I literally met my wife there. We've been together 27 years now!

I even created a web page about Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time in 1994. Yes, 1994. Yes, that predates Wikipedia by more than 6 years! I don't have a screenshot of what it looked like back then, but the page is still online today... and honestly hasn't changed much since about 2001.


"Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again."


That line from the prologue of every volume of the series describes my own relationship with the series. As big a fan as I was of the story in the mid/late 1990s I lost interest not long after.

I always thought The Shadow Rising (1992), the 4th volume of the series, was the best book. Jordan broadened the canvas of the story considerably and tied together the actions of the present with the legends of the distant past in a compelling way. The 5th book, The Fires of Heaven (1993), wasn't as good, but after as much of a magnum opus as I felt Shadow Rising was I was still eager to continue the series.

The problem really started with the sixth book, The Lord of Chaos (1994). It moved slowly, and it seemed like nothing important or interesting happened. My disappointment grew with the seventh book, A Crown of Swords (1996), which was more of the same. Then, with a nearly 2 year wait until the next book, which had no promise of being any better, I gave up. I stopped caring about the story and the characters. I never read The Path of Daggers (1998) or any subsequent books, though I did remain active in the newsgroup despite that for a few more years for the friendships I had there.

Ah, but the Wheel turns 'round again. Here in 2021, 7 years after the series was completed— with a whopping 14 books— a streaming TV series launches. And with it my interest in the Wheel of Time is reborn. It is not the beginning, for there are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time, but it is a beginning.

At the trade show I attended last week one of the keynote speakers was Steve Wozniak. "Woz", as he's known for short in the computer industry, co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs in 1976 after inventing the prototype of what became their first personal computer, the Apple I. The topics outlined for Woz's appearance seemed only tangentially related at best to devops, the purpose of the conference, but I made sure to attend as I really wanted to hear what this legendary technologist has to say.

It turns out a lot of he said was, in so many words, "I'm a naive man-child oblivious to the astonishing privilege I have." Yes, I'm going to rip into an industry icon. Buckle up.

Woz's appearance was formatted as an interview. He reframed the first question asked of him to be, "What do you do for money?" He talked about how isn't it great that he gets paid to speak. Then he talked about opportunities he's turned down from a few cryptocurrency companies, explaining that they didn't want him to help build the product, they just wanted him to attach his name for advertising.

Um, okay, but what do you think this get-paid-to-talk thing is? You're not helping us build a product, you're not even helping us understand how to build a product, you're only being paid to appear in front of this audience because of your accomplishments in the 1970s and 1980s. Like, literally, what's the difference? And BTW, according to the speakers' bureau Speakers.com, Woz's fee for this appearance would be anything from $50,000 up to $100,000 or possibly more.

I only looked up his speaking fees as I was composing this blog, not as I was listening to his presentation paint an increasing picture of his naïveté. Let me come back around to that later, after I touch on the part of his keynote speak where he really jumped the shark.

Woz spoke for a brief minute about his involvement with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. That was actually my main interest in attending his keynote as I've been a fan of the EFF since watching with dismay when The Communications Decency Act of 1996 imposed draconian restrictions against free speech online, passed by a Congress that collectively had no f'ing clue what the Internet was other than what they saw in a scary movie somewhere, and signed by President Bill Clinton who had a tiny clue but was too timid to take a stand against it other than muttering something like, "This probably isn't even legal" as he signed it into law anyway.

So, what did Woz have to say about the EFF? In a nutshell, "It's too political." He explained when he found out they had lobbyists, people paid to lobby government lawmakers— yes, he spelled this out, with a sneer in his voice, like adults in America don't know what lobbyists are— he quit.

"I don't like politics," he reemphasized. "I don't vote. Well, except for last election."

He. Doesn't. Even. Vote.

That's where I had to speak up. Mindful of the fact that my comments in the virtual trade show platform had my name and my company affiliation on them, I fired off "Championing not voting 👎".

A colleague of mine, who coincidentally will no longer be employed at my employer after this Friday, posted at the same time, "Ahhh... must be nice to be able to ignore politics."

What does he think organizations like the EFF do? Does he think they just write blogs about digital privacy and free speech, which companies and governments choose to enact policy on because their better saints say they should? No! Politics is how we make social policy through government. Political change takes lobbying. And voting.

Moreover, think about what it means when a person gives a list of socio-legal-political causes he supposedly cares about (digital rights was just one of three causes he discussed in this interview) but then says he doesn't vote. If you don't vote you don't care— or you don't understand. To put it harshly, it means he's stupid or a liar.

I don't think Woz is a liar. I do think he's naive though. Through his whole 15-20 minute interview he came across as having a child's understanding of the world. He's a brilliant engineer and loves to tinker. But he's basically a technical genius 10 year old.

As an addendum, as I was researching background information for this blog entry I stumbled across a few interesting things that further paint the picture of startling privilege and naivete when put together. Woz has been widely quoted as claiming he doesn't care about money. "I didn’t want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values," is one famous quote. Yet his net worth in 2020 was estimated at $120 million, and the fees he earns for speaking/appearances earn him probably north of $1 million per year. Sure, it's easy to say you don't care about money— and to see voting as irrelevant— when you've got the privilege that wealth affords!

Another bit I found is that Woz is dishonest, perhaps even intentionally so, in downplaying how much he earns. When asked about jobs and income he mentions that he still gets a salary from Apple. He routinely describes it variously as "$5 a week", "$50 to maybe $100 a month", etc., "After taxes and savings are taken out." But here's the thing: that Apple salary is $120,000 a year (published record). Obviously he's trying to paint himself as a down-to-earth person doing what he does for the pure love of it. That one gig alone— which is only a tiny of his income and capital gains— is by itself more than the average American earns, yet to Woz it's such a pittance that he routinely passes it off as if it's just a few bucks.