On a recent business trip, I got into the hotel shuttle, with the same driver who'd dropped me off about 9 hours before. I asked him how big Charlotte was. He said about 3 (million). We turned and got a look at downtown, which I pointed out as very far away from us. He noted that there had been homeless encampments over there, but that they'd "gotten them out" and that they'd "been protesting" or something. I took this as an elegant invitation to two different conversations: "damned homeless" and "those poor people". I naturally picked up the second fork, and we had a nice conversation about the cruelty and senselessness of the inequality, how un-Christian it is. I used my twenty-minute ride to plant seeds of socialism; I even told him that was what I was doing. We left on good terms, "you really gave me something to think about." You too, man. <hr> On the same trip, at the security-check, I saw a guy take his glasses back out of the security bin. It was then that I realized that they must have been Meta Glasses. <hr> Why are airlines such zealots about keeping the window shades down during the flight? It's 9:00 in the destination timezone. Can't we have some natural light to encourage our circadian rhythms in the right direction? Instead, everyone sits in the dark, inhaling one movie after another. <hr> My aggressively non-cloud based workflow allows me to work efficiently without an Internet connection. I opened all of the tabs I needed before the flight and now I can read them in peace. The browser doesn’t auto-reload them; it doesn’t do anything I don’t ask it to. I use Opera, which is very non-intrusive in this way. It’s managed the cache perfectly for decades, for which I’m ever-appreciative. I'm reading and writing so much that my neighbor finally asks, near the end of the flight, whether I'm a writer. Yeah, sure, but not professionally. <hr> Finally, in Newark, I saw a sign that summed up the neighborhood perfectly: <bq>Divorce $399. Spouse’s signature not required.</bq> <img src="{att_link}divorce_399._spouse_s_signature_not_required.webp" href="{att_link}divorce_399._spouse_s_signature_not_required.webp" align="none" caption="Divorce $399. Spouse’s signature not required" scale="60%">