How I See It: Reflections on spirituality, technology, and the art of everyday life

  Weekly Update 01/31/26 – 02/06/26 Things continue to go well at work. I received my second paycheck on Friday, and it was my first full paycheck. Outside of work, this was very much a medical week. It began on Saturday with new prescriptions for eyeglasses. I hadn’t gotten new glasses since 2022, and my eyes have changed quite a bit since then. When I got home, I went online to 39dollarglasses.com. I’ve been using them since 2004 and have always been very satisfied. I was pleased to see the improvements they’ve made to their site. These include a new method for measuring pupillary distance, which should improve the performance of my bifocals, and a feature that lets me upload a photo of myself to see how the glasses will look on me. That’s far better than trying on frames in a store. Being extremely near-sighted, I’ve never really been able to see what glasses look like on me without them, and the online selection is vastly better than anything available in person. I now have fou...

  Weekly Update 01/24/2026 – 01/30/2026 Things at work are going well. I’m learning a lot about integrating APIs with PxPlus using the Cordedll system.   Apart from work, this has been my annual week of remembrance, with January 27 marking the anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 and the 28th marking the anniversary of the Challenger disaster. Next week we have February 1 st and the Columbia Disaster.  Remembering these events made me think about memory, especially visual memory and visual memory deficit: “a functional limitation in visual recall or recognition that interferes with daily tasks such as reading comprehension, spatial navigation, or visual learning.” It seems that you, Muggles, have a much greater ability to recall visual memories than I do. That made me think about what visual memories I do have. I remember being in a car, turning left from Riverside Drive onto Van Nuys Boulevard, when I heard the announcement about the Apollo 1 fire. I reme...

 01/17/2026 – 01/23/2026 This has been a good week. Things at work are going well, and I am learning a lot while making solid progress. I am relearning and remembering a great deal about FACTS software. It has been a very long time since I last worked on that platform, but it is all coming back to me. I have even found myself hitting “P” after loading a program. That is a habit I picked up in the 1990s when working with FACTS. The “P” command was used to enter the program’s password so I could access it. I stopped using “P” when I moved from FACTS to MAS 90, where it was not needed, but the habit has resurfaced now that I am back in FACTS. Even though the “P” command is no longer required and locking is handled differently, I still find myself doing it. The biggest event of the week was PAYDAY. This was my first payday since October 2022, so it was a big deal. It felt good to have money coming in again. Between October 2022 and January 2026, I spent some time on unemployment unti...

  01/10/26 – 01/17/26 My week has been dedicated to my new job. I have finally reached the point where I am doing real programmer-type work. I have been reviewing the FACTS code to understand how their credit card processing software works and how we can use that code to integrate our own credit card system. I have found this to be educational work, and it has taken up most of my time this week. This was also the end of the first pay period of the new year, so I turned in my timecard and am looking forward to getting paid next week. I also spent some time redeveloping my budget. I like budgets, but somehow I lost my old template and had to rebuild it. I now have a solid template in place, including the ability to set up payments based on a percentage of net pay, fixed dollar amounts per month, and amounts set aside each month for recurring expenses such as bills that are paid every other month, every three months, every six months, and annually. Part of my new financial plan inc...

Hello, and welcome to my weekly update for the week of January 3, 2026 through January 9, 2026. It’s been quite a week. I was finally back to work for the first time since October 2022. The week is a bit of a blur to me. I’d like to tell you all sorts of interesting things about what I did, but I just can’t recall events in that level of detail. Much of my time was spent on onboarding: a lot of meetings, a lot of documentation, and a lot of discussion about company policies and how things work at EBizCharge. I met many of the people I’ll be working with and enjoyed getting to know them. One familiar name from the past came up as well: Tim Plotner. Tim is one of the main architects who developed the FACTS software back when it was still owned by Software Solutions. I spent part of the week getting a copy of the system up and running and reacquainting myself with how FACTS works. It has its own screen editor that relies on its own metadata rather than Providex’s NOMADS system. Fortunatel...

  Happy New Year Since it’s a new year, I’ve been thinking back on New Years past. I remember those early ones as a kid at my parents’ house, especially the New Year’s Eve parties they threw for their friends who also had kids. There was always food, and lots of it. At least one six-foot sub from Vitello’s, sometimes a six-foot meatball sandwich as well, along with plenty of other things to eat. The house would be broken into several sections. In the garage, we showed movies, but not the way people do today with TV projectors. We had a pair of cinema-quality 35mm film projectors, and my father borrowed movies from friends at the studios. In the front room, we showed films on 16mm, not as professional as the setup in the garage, but still impressive. Other parts of the house were set up for games, some using early home systems and others using arcade machines like Ms. Pac-Man . It was a fun evening for everyone. As an adult, I also find myself thinking back to those mornin...