Your Friday Thing for November 7, 2025

(Sigh) I'm gonna delay the BIG PUBLIC LAUNCH one more week.

I always knew I'd make the announcement on an episode of MacBreak Weekly. For many reasons, and only some of them are weaselly! And November 11 was truly the day I'd been working towards.

Ah, but I didn't realize that November 11 is Veterans Day. This means:

• Federal holiday
• My local library is closed
• My other local library will be closed as well
• Ergo, no access to bi-symmetric gigabit Ethernet for my livestream
• And I'll be doing the show from my office, which will be
  • Not nearly as nice, because I work there every day, and Genius must not be interrupted by such earthbound irrelevancies as clearing away a dozen half-drunk glasses of Diet Dr Pepper, many of which have turned green
  • Reliant upon my home Internet connection, which is kind of on the cheap side nowadays. I only needed "the really good stuff" for the MacBreak livestreams. After several months, when library-streaming proved to be not just reliable, but actually optimal, paying for top-tier Internet began to seem like an extravagance.

I just feel like I want everything to be nice and bright and cheery when I finally announce that Ihnatko Dot Com has stopped slouching towards the finish line and has finally arrived in Bethlehem.

(Where it shall surely be turned away at the Inn. Not because there's no room, but because they don't cater to riff-raff.)

Also? November 18 is my birthday. I can say that here because it's just you folks.

It's a good, future-looking decision. I hope this site will be running forever. At some point, it might be operating as a sentient AI. So I'm not likely to forget our anniversary or its birthday if the date is already hard-wired into my firmware.

But don't worry about future delays. My mind is at peace with the inevitability of mistakes happening after the thing launches.

I don't know why I'm suddenly remembering the story about the One Thing about the Apollo 11 mission that Neil Armstrong had literal nightmares about:

To summarize (manually, not via Grok): it was the ignition system for the lunar module ascent engine. If it didn't work, he and Buzz Aldrin would be stuck on the Moon without any possible means of escape or rescue. Because it was such a critical component, it was mechanically simple: a valve opens, which allows two chemicals to come in contact with each other. Ignition followed by Thrust is the unavoidable consequence. He worried about the valve being controlled by an electronic solenoid instead of a lever with a big red handle on it.

We all know it all worked out OK. Space nerds also know the predicate to that sentence, which usually gets left off: "…even though they broke the switch off of the control panel by accident, and Armstrong was forced to arm the ignition system by jabbing a felt-tip pen into the hole."

Yikes. When Buzz Aldrin recorded this scene for The Simpsons, I bet it gave him some uncomfortable flashbacks:

Overall, I'm feeling good about this. Let's hope that this Good Feeling persists past November 18.

What'll I do with the extra week? Just rearrange some of these deck chairs, probably.

Now that I have my OmniOutliner Status And Scheduling Board Thingy built and optimized, I've been moving a few things around. I think people will enjoy the feature about everything I learned when I found an Apple Watch in the ocean (#4: "Some people in my town Facebook group are real jerks"). I always thought of it as a good fit for opening week. I've moved it out of that slot. I hope the launch will bring lots of people in to check the site out. The Apple Watch feature is pure Tabasco. Were I to pitch it to The New Yorker, they'd almost certainly buy it as a feature, and before its publication, it would almost certainly be optioned for a feature film. It's occurred to me that if I post it a week or two later, it could help bring a second wave of Curious Onlookers.

(I won't be doing too much of that kind of thinking. I'm just a dabbler. It makes my puzzlin'-pot hurt.)

I will leave you with this valuable piece of information: a new reality-competition show has premiered, in which British people knit sweaters for twelve hours at a shot.

I have seen the first episode. They knit. They drink a lot of tea. They engage in a bit of a natter. The only way this show could become any more British is if, during Episode Two, a young and healthy production assistant drops dead, the coroner is suspiciously quick to rule it "natural causes," and the twee-est knitter in the competition decides to begin her own investigation…starting with the benefice's new vicar, whose Vauxhall Corsa seems just a bit flashy for a young man of otherwise humble circumstances. ⓘ