Thoughts @ Large: 95
Posted on September 18, 2025 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

𓃑  On a recent CBS Sunday Morning, we watched 7-year-old Xuanyi Geng solve the 3×3 Rubik’s Cube puzzle in 3.05 seconds, a world-record.  I was duly impressed, because this is almost 100 times faster than I can mix a second martini.

🛟  Of my handful of phobias and triggers, the one that bothers me the most viscerally is the “stranded at sea” film premise, especially if treading water is involved.  I’ve endured too many films in that genre (Adrift, Open Water, The Reef) and refuse to view any more.  I was never a confident swimmer; but having my tow-rope break while water-tubing in Lake Erie decades ago, and only then finding out that my life-jacket was more-or-less an anti-flotation device…

It was all I could do to bob up and down in the chilly lake water and catch quick gasps for what felt like forever until the boat could circle around and pick me up.  Not to mention the feeling, as the boat oh-so-slowly turned around, of the live end of the broken tow-rope slithering through my ankles as I worked to keep my head above water.

The two noteworthy parts of this story: there were no sharks in Lake Erie that afternoon; and I lived to write about it.

🐻  I’ve been pondering how best to scare away treat-seeking black bears that visit our deck and/or climb our dogwood trees.  Whistles aren’t that effective and clanging pot lids only mildly startles them.  Now if bears would only growl insults about Trump, I could count on his MAGA troops taking care of them for me.

🐧 Here’s what I’ll say about animals.  Animals may crap in the woods all their lives but animals don’t churn out millions of big-screen TVs and laptops and electronic devices and appliances that last a few years and then wind up in landfills, buried next to the boxes they were shipped in.  If Amazon even remotely resembled a responsible organization, it would buy landfill space equal to the volume of crap it ships to its customers every year.

🍔  Let’s talk about sloppy joes.  [Vegetarians, you may be excused from this item.  I’ll let you know when it’s safe for you to return by displaying a cucumber emoji.]  Now, regards sloppy joes — you are either the kind of person who heaps the sloppy joe mix onto the bun and tackles the mound with knife and fork, or the kind of person who eats sloppy joes in a more refined way, with a dry top, like a hamburger, but secretly thinks the other way looks way more delicious.

Me, I used to be in the latter category but age has allowed me to the embrace the truth and the mess of the former.

🥩 Fake out!  Not a cucumber!  Can’t come back yet!

🥒 George Harrison’s song “What is Life,” from his 1970 solo album All Things Must Pass, disappointed me when I first listened to it, in that its title promised far more than the song delivered.  I was just 17 and looking for answers — while Harrison was 27 and presumably had the answers, because he was a Beatle!

Is it better to be young and not know what you don’t know, or to be old and know too late what you should have known?  If only we could choose — but that is life.

🤠  Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem, seen below in her official X photo, has been U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security in the reign of Donald II since January 25, 2025.  Kristi was born to the Arnold family in 1971.  At age 18, she claimed the title of South Dakota Snow Queen.  Kristi appended the N to her KLAN initials at age 21 upon marrying Bryon Noem.

“We were a rodeo family,” she said. “So I always competed in the rodeo queen contests that they had. I think I won one of them one time.  My mom believed in doing those kind of things because they taught you basic horsemanship and also the interview skills she knew were very important and public speaking and interaction with other people.”

Yay for interactions with like-minded people, the one and perhaps only thing she’s good at as a shill for Trump.

🥨 I’ve had a lot going on this year, healthwise, that I haven’t shared here.  Not that I’m hiding things but it wouldn’t educate or encourage discourse.  Once my issues are settled, hopefully soon, I am anxious to resume posting my usual dumb comics, marginal poetry, obtuse science and math problems and other commentary that I hope makes people wince or smile with me.  Preferably the latter, but the times often dictate otherwise.

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Photo Inflation
Posted on September 15, 2025 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

Well, Adobe Photoshop, it has been “nice knowing you.” In less carefully-couched words, our relationship is over.  (You were always a mixed blessing).  This year, Adobe raised the price of their Photoshop-only subscription from $9.99 to $14.99 (for existing subscribers) and $19.99 for new subscribers. 

I was somehow blind to Adobe’s price hike until I saw a $14.99 charge on my credit card and said “whaa?”  (Truth be told, I probably said nothing and just scrunched my eyebrows, but “whaa” was exactly what my eyebrows would have said if they could talk.)

For some reason, I thought I could restore my $9.99/month rate, and so I cancelled my existing subscription and signed up again.  Nope!  It’s now $19.99/month!  Aren’t you sorry you cancelled us now, said Adobe with a sneer.

The bottom line is, my Adobe Photoshop experience is over.  I have a 15-year-old copy of Photoshop CS5 (one of the last software packages one could own rather than subscribe to) which I can use to open my PSD files if all else fails.  Meanwhile, I’m eyeing a one-time purchase of Affinity Photo to sustain me, and this blog, for the duration.

For your enjoyment, here’s a non-Adobe-processed image — a chart of Adobe’s stock price over the past year, which reflects the December 2024 announcement of their price hike.

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Pet-Free Hotels: The Inside Scoop
Posted on August 16, 2025 by CHC   ᐃ ᐁ

A Note from Self

I was surprised to notice that it has been three years since I launched my hobby website, PetFreeHotels.com — it feels like half that time.  I thought I might take a moment, with your indulgence, to share various morsels and tidbits from the endeavor.

To recap, PetFreeHotels.com grew out of my searches for hotels in the cities where our families live which, for my spouse’s sake, do not allow pets.  One of us (I won’t say who) thought we could make money producing a pet-free hotel listing website.  The other of us saw that more as a programming challenge than a productive economic venture.

The other of us was right, but I went ahead with it anyway.

I will say at the outset that the idea would have been moot if (a) my spouse did not have pet allergies or (b) if even one hotel booking site offered a pet-free checkbox next to the ubiquitous pet-friendly checkbox.  The latter is only a matter of time, and it will be the signal for me to close the shutters on PetFreeHotels.com.

• • • 

Websites are pretty much the last arena where 20th-century software hobbyists like me can still dabble, thanks mainly to the WordPress platform.  The 100 Billionth Person (the blog that you and 34 others are now reading), ART @ CHC (my rarely-visited photo site) and Pet-Free Hotels (consulted by 450-500 people a week) each have very different looks and functionality, but I built all of them with WordPress.

More accurately, I built them with WordPress plus countless “how do I do x” look-ups on Stack Overflow.  That was the go-to tool for amateurs like me in the Pre-AI Era.  Now, AI just hands you the code needed for the task at hand, whether you’re a grey-whisker coder or work for Microsoft, Meta or Google.

While I have yet to use AI-generated code in my sites, I do admit to copying code posted by contributors to Stack Overflow, code I haven’t taken time to fully understand but will use if it’s easy to incorporate and it works.  Notably, such borrowed code forms the basis for the search-a-city feature on PetFreeHotels.com.  Although I put lots of my own time into that feature, its core code came from someone else, and who knows where he/she copied that from, not that I’m asking.

So a software purist I am not… but I digress, one of only a host of my usual digressions.

• • • 

Out of a sense of duty to my visitors, I held off promoting PetFreeHotels.com until I had amassed 1000 pet-free listings — but even that figure averages to only 20 hotels per state, scattershot coverage by any measure.  To make early user visits worthwhile, I first focused on the most popular U.S. destinations: New York City, San Fransisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Las Vegas, Disneyland, and Orlando.  I also searched for pet-free hotel listings near hallowed American icons: Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Smoky Mountains, The Alamo.

This served to get PetFreeHotels.com off the ground, but my gut-feel told me that the site wouldn’t be legit until it had 2000 listings, and not all that useful until I hit 3000.  And so I went to work.

• • • 

How does one find a pet-free hotel?  It depends, because the exact wording of pet policies varies from brand to brand.  Marriott makes it easy — my search phrase for Marriott hotels (Courtyard, Fairfield, Sheraton, SpringHill, and others) is site:marriott.com “pets not” location, where you replace location with the desired destination.  Best Western also has a reliable search phrase: site:bestwestern.com “not accepted” location. 

Some corporate hotels hide their pet policies on pop-up windows (Choice, Wyndham) or drop-down text (IHG), silly obstacles in the way of assessing a hotel’s pet-friendliness.*  My take is that this is done for a reason, because corporations do everything for a reason.  I learned that I just have to bite the bullet and put “no pets” in the search phrase for these chains and hope my time is not wasted sifting out pet-friendly sites.  It was a big help learning the pet-friendly brands I can ignore (this cat is giving you the cold shoulder, Sonesta, Red Roof Inn and La Quinta!)

I search for independent hotels using the phrase hotel location “pets not”  (or “no pets”) followed by a long string of “exclude this term” items such as rentals, condos, hotels.com, expedia.com, bringfido.com and the like.  The return on this investment is pretty low: independents tend to be pet-friendly and many don’t even bother posting a pet policy, but I feel like I owe it to users to offer some choices beyond the corporate brands.

• • • 

As of today, there are 3156 hotel listings on PetFreeHotels.com.  Although I ensure each and every entry is “pet-free” when I add it to my database, I find that the listings degrade over time.  Hotels close, change hands, change brands, and/or change their pet policies.  The down-range class of hotels seem especially volatile in that regard — I suspect owners become more permissive toward pets when they’re trying to balance their books.

Unfortunately, hotels don’t notify me when they change pet policies — which means that I have to periodically re-verify them all, state by state.  While this takes time away from my expanding the database, think of the visitor experience: what good is a pet-free hotel site if 10%–15% of the listings are pet-friendly, re-branded, or closed?  I would like my listings to be 98% accurate but, given the amount of churn I see, that will be hard to sustain.

I’m in the process of doing a full site review now — in the past four weeks, I’ve done about one-third of the states, starting with the most-visited.  These represent about three-fifths of the listings.  It’s a rather mindless task:  I treat it like knitting (not that I ever knitted), something I can do in odd moments while I’m pretending to be productive.

Hopefully I’ll finish the review next month and then wait a year to do it all over again.

• • • 

I’ll close this fascinating account with a few statistics for the insatiably curious:

• What are the most-visited (and least visited) states on Pet-Free Hotels?

Over the past 60 days, the most popular states (based on page views, not users) have been Tennessee (561), Florida (507), North Carolina (429), California (355), and Georgia (299).  These states, led by Florida, typically comprise the top five over any extended time frame.  Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York and South Carolina usually round out the top ten. (I didn’t expect Pennsylvania.)

The ten least-viewed states were Arkansas, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Vermont, North Dakota, Delaware, Wyoming, Connecticut, Mississippi and West Virginia; West Virigina had 43 views in the last 60 days and Arkansas a mere 12.  No surprise here: other than Hawaii, these states aren’t the first ones that come to my mind as big draws for pet-averse travelers.

I am only able to cite these figures because I had the foresight to dedicate a separate page to each state in my WordPress website.  This makes it easy for Google Analytics to report visitor totals on a statewise basis, which helps me focus on the most popular states.

• So, how much money am I making on this?

I have a two-part answer.  Regards the first part, I allow Google to place one AdSense ad (whose content I do not control) on each page that lists 8 or more results.  Oftentimes, Google misfires and inserts an ad for pet products or services — just what my visitors are looking for!

While I have never been impressed with Google’s ad choices, Google thinks my ad-views are worth $7–$9 a month, depending on clicks.  Over a year’s time, that would pay for a one-night stay at the Red Roof Inn in Washington, D.C. (two pets allowed, first one free).

As to the second part, I also display a “Buy Me A Coffee” appeal when the search yields 20 or more results.  (Because how dare I ask for money if you only see 2 EconoLodges and a Microtel!)  “Buy Me A Coffee” donations from kind supporters have totaled $84 in the last 6 months.  This had paid the cost of the petfreehotels.com domain name and hosting the website, with some money left over for more generous tips to restaurant servers and fast-food workers.

• How much time am I putting into this so-called hobby?

You don’t want to know — which really means I don’t want to know.  There’s obviously an opportunity cost here, in that activities like music, photography, reading, writing and my household to-do list have taken a back-seat, because I’m busy with PetFreeHotels.com.

But right now, given the events of the year, I’m happy just doing my knitting.

_________

* As comedian Mitch Hedberg observed about double-wrapped Pepperidge Farm bread: “I don’t need another step between me and toast.”

 

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