Earlier today I spent some time looking at Fender guitars. Specifically, I was looking at the American Ultra Stratocaster that is made in California. Under normal circumstances, I could visit a few pawn shops and the local guitar store (we still have a Guitar Center) to try out some guitars. That simple act seemed like a normal part of the way guitar buying worked. A couple of times a year I go and try out a few guitars.

https://shop.fender.com/en-US/electric-guitars/stratocaster/american-ultra-stratocaster/0118010781.html

Early this morning a cup of coffee and a view out the window were enough to get the day started. 

I have started to find live news feeds on YouTube. A wide variety of traditional news networks provide streams now on YouTube. Sometimes in the past I have watched the Yahoo! Finance live show online. It generally provides a good background soundtrack to what the economy is doing on a daily basis. Part of giving up cable is being a little more willing to hunt down new sources of content. For the most part, switching over to reading economic news vs. watching it happen live is not a big inconvenience.

Earlier today I started to figure out how to cast Disney Plus to my Google Next Hub Max. Telling the Hub how to play something from YouTube TV was really easy. Trying to get it to display content via voice command for other things was difficult. Strangely it has gotten harder in the last year. Maybe the introduction of the ability to do more things created conflict in getting to the pathing that I wanted to execute. Obviously, clicking the cast button is much more accurate given that it is a 1:1 pathing selection to execution. Sometimes using the new voice technology makes life easier and sometimes it creates a ton of frustration. On the brighter side of things the Disney Plus subscription that we have for the next few years (I prepaid for 3 years) supports casting to screens with very little effort. 

During the start of the day open a new word processing document. Progress through the day while taking some notes and recording thoughts.

Right now my favorite guitar string has to be the Ernie Ball Paradigm “Skinny Top Heavy Bottom” electric guitar strings. They have proven to be a really solid string option. I tried both the regular and the Paradigm versions of the strings. After testing both string options, I ordered 3 packages of the Paradigm version to use going forward. That should clearly tell you where I stand on the Paradigm vs. regular Ernie Ball string debate.

My second cup of coffee was resplendent. Today I started to think about technology and where my focus should be. Google released a bunch of location and movement data this week. It pretty much shows how patterns of movement have changed. It might be a good idea to dig into that data or maybe my time would be better spent on working on some certifications. Earlier this year I had committed to working on my basic coding skills and brush-up on building things in Python.

Today my subscription to YouTube TV ended. Given that March Madness ended early this year my subscription to cable had to go early as well. We generally only pay for television access when the Kansas Jayhawks are playing basketball. Today instead of watching the daily White House press briefing on a television channel I watched it via streaming live on YouTube thanks to the Washington Post with about 58,268 people. I tuned in a little early and wondered if the Washington Post knew the people in the room were being broadcast live a couple hours early. You could hear people talking in the room and it was interesting.