The drain is clogged again

The drain is clogged again

So, I successfully managed to wake up at 5 am for the first time.
I decided that I would get my new camera, if I was able to wake up at 5 am, x-amount of times. I never actually decided on a numerical value for x, though... I just started waking up earlier.
Yesterday was day 1, and I woke up at 6 am. It wasn't quite 5 am, but it's better than the 9am I'd gotten used to.

I'm still trying to figure out what number to replace x with. I had the number '3' in mind since the beginning, so maybe 3.

The drain is clogged again.
It's kinda happening on and off. I feel like it clogs up more, when I take showers at weird hours when no one else is showering or when no one else has showered for a while. Like 5am or 3pm. I think it has to do with the drain. The more people that are showering at the same time, the more flow there is in the drain. But I don't know how that works.

When I'm in the shower and it gets clogged, I'm scared of using the plunger. I'm worried that I'll pump it a few times causing one of several things to potentially happen; 1) black water gushing up from the drain with such a force that I'm unable to stop it, causing it to flood everything... or at least mix in with the discarded shower-water and touch my feet (perhaps the more reasonable variant of the two)... 2) something coming up - like hair. Now, a bit of hair coming up from the drain has definitely happened before, but I always just assumed it was my own hair which had fallen out while showering.

My irrational mind is scared of pulling on the hair and having it be stuck to something... and then I keep pulling until a skull or something like Sadako from The Ring pops out... or perhaps something less humanoid like a dead rat that died because it got tangled up in a bunch of hair and drowned.. or perhaps a rat-king or maybe a nest of roaches. ...and all the while I'm just standing there in my birthday suit, watching a literal horror-movie unfold before my very eyes... all because I wanted to improve my life by waking up at 5am.

Anyway, the water has now drained.

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Technology Musings

I thought about trying to write this blog in Japanese but actually ..... I'm still debating.... my written Japanese sucks so bad though, it would be agony for both reader and writer alike. And I think 2020 has brought enough grievance onto mankind, so for now I'm saving my poor grammar for another time.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that I've been wanting to start a blog for a long time, but I couldn't find a platform that I found suitable. All of the ones that I know of, that are available in English or to a global audience are convoluted and have a difficult interface that I can't figure out, and I'm not interested in trying to figure out something that should essentially just work as a basic word-processor. It's not worth the time that I'd have to invest into it. --and people might say: "oh, but you can use the skills gained from mastering the convoluted interface for other things blahblahblah" -but no, no I can't. So stop defending the companies' decisions to create convoluted and cumbersome interfaces in order to subtly trick unknowing customers into paying for something just because they can't figure out how to get to the free option easily. And in this day and age, that's what I think is happening.... the platform In particular that I'm talking about here, is the free version of Wordpress. It was always very simple. Easy to sign up, very quick, easy to get the API key required for Akismet on the self-hosted version of Wordpress. But I tried signing up a few days ago, on the same day that I created this blog, I think, and it was just such a mess to sign up. There were so many options to choose from, and now they have all these fancy layouts and all of this STUFF... and while that's all fine and good, it has also made the process a lot more bothersome and time-consuming... and in the end, I found myself not liking the end result, and feeling that I was too far removed from what was actually being published on the web. Just too much clutter.

I think the problem with a lot of these services is that the base code is a remnant from when these platforms were first introduced. Back when they actually WERE simple and straight-forward to use. But in order to keep up with the times, in multiple ways, the developers just added stuff on top of this code, all the while keeping an outdated foundation. I don't know if this is how it works, but it's certainly what it feels like.

I don't understand why it has to be a convoluted process for a user to get to a text field where you can enter some text and then publish it onto the internet.

Also, why do they give you so many options for formatting, all of which are bad?

Back in the day, blogs would be simple and then the users would modify the themes themselves using HTML and CSS. But it seems that this is no longer as easy.

Sometimes I reminisce about the early era of modern computing and the internet. The Windows 95, 98 and XP days. Geocities. Freewebs. Altavista...

Obviously the internet is much greater now. Much more grand. Operating systems are much less prone to crashing (I presume. I haven't used Windows since 2006). So of course innovation has improved things. But it has also added a lot of superfluous layers of unnecessary code and unneeded graphics onto foundations that are 15+ year old. And that's very old in computer-time.

A lot of the time, things don't actually improve with these changes. Things are just changed for the sake of being changed. Busywork and motion without direction. Aimless flailing about to satisfy an onlookers desire for newness, without any actual novelty or innovation.

I think this becomes particularly obvious when we look at the increasing computing demands. We need faster processors, more ram, bigger hard drives in order to be able to smoothly run resource-heavy programs.... But if the software wasn't this bloated or resource intensive, then the need for more computing power wouldn't be as high. What I'm getting at here is that a lot of computing power is needed in order for things to just RUN. You think that spending 100s or 1000s of dollars in order to upgrade certain things will speed up things proportional to the amount spent. You invest an additional $1000 into your $2000 machine and you get a 50% increase in performance. But that's not how it works. You think that buying the newest iPhone will give you a much improved performance when put side-by-side with your 3-year old model, but to your disappointment the difference isn't as stark as the age-difference and acquisition cost lead you to believe. Perhaps it's because we've somewhat plateaued? Upgrades and updates have stopped being improvements - now they're just changes. And these changes aren't always for the better.

Anyway, that's enough reminiscing about the past for now. The sun has risen and a new day has begun. 

P.s. 
I didn't proofread this entry. I'll do it later, unless I don't.