We had folks drive from two hours away yesterday just to float our creek in tubes. A lot of them actually, my old body is sore but I'm getting back in shape.

Not one of them threw a brick.

Took this shot of my little place from the comfort of my easy chair after a day driving tubers along the creek in the little yellow bus. My life is simple and I like it that way.

Today was laundry day and when I strip my bed down, Piper swoops in. I give up trying to make it right away, she owns it.

My start time with the new job is 0945, bankers hours. From 1000 to 1400 today we handled 145 tubers, from grandmas to three year olds. I truly haven't worked this hard in years. Every time I made it back to base after dropping an over-capacity load of 14-15 people at the start point, another group were ready to go. After a couple of hours I had to start working pickups in to get everyone back. The company is only on it's second year but this was a record. Happy covid Memorial Day!

Part of the drill is to tell everyone to look for our flags in a tree by the disk golf course. That's where they stop, get out, and wait for me to pick them up. Only a few floated by today. Here's the spot:

We had a hundred floaters today. That's a lot of runs up and down Shoal Creek with tubes piled high in a trailer on the back of an old twelve passenger school bus. Everyone had fun and now we rock into Memorial Day tomorrow. Nobody wore a mask, nobody coughed and not one person let the word covid enter our space.

OldManJim is out having fun by the creek this summer, doing what I do well, driving people around. Ricky and I started the morning out cruising through the David Crocket Park campground, smiling and waving at the folks as they woke up and making sure everyone saw our old yellow bus towing a tube trailer with the company logo on the side. I felt like the ice cream truck just without the music.

The day went well, lots of happy tubers and our ability to arrive at the pickup spot within minutes of the end of their two hour float was spot on.

I'm also having great fun with my new phone and new Facebook page, reconnecting with old friends and making plans for some late summer visits out West.

My truck has been having electrical issues lately and I just figured that my old Interstate battery was on it's last legs. She wouldn't start this morning so my neighbor hooked his rig up for a jump start, and nothing happened, dead. We then jiggled the battery and she came back to life.

Then I drove to O'Reillys for a new battery. As the store guy Kenneth was installing it he went Oh shit, do you see that? Hmmm, not something you really want to hear about your old truck, but I'm really glad he spotted it. The ground wire was broken and hanging by a single wire at the chassis. Electrical issues solved! He snipped the wire, put a new clamp on and then ran a ground from the clamp to the old ground spot.

This guy went above and beyond the call of duty for a battery sale and I have myself a new parts store.

I connected my new Samsung S20+ to my Yamaha YAS-207BL Soundbar with Bluetooth and cast the phone's screen on to my 65" 4K TCL TV.

Pretty sick for a 73 year old great-grandfather living in Tennessee.

Ricky is my new boss at Crockett Shoals Tubing and I grabbed this shot today to put on the website. I hope he likes it as much as I love my new gig. It's a good physical job getting people in and out of the water, handling the heavy tailgate of the tube trailer, combined with the pleasure of driving fun people along the back roads of downtown Lawrenceburg, TN.

I started my new job today. It was a great opening day, at least fifty happy tubers throughout the day enjoyed a stress free two hour cruise down Shoal Creek with driving services from the top to the bottom provided by me. I've had a lot of different driving jobs over the many years and this one is sweet, and unique.

OMG, OldManJim bought a phone. Sheesh, what next, eat a steak? It all started when I casually searched online for the best Android phone and the Samsung S20+ kept hitting the top spot. I'm a Spectrum customer and they offer an unlimited plan for $45 so I called them and talked to a sweety from South Carolina named Jasmine. (hope I got her name right because I gave her my website link :-)

I was going to pick up an unlocked model from Amazon but she talked me into the Spectrum monthly bundle and my new S20+ 5G black should arrive in a few days. Why now after years without a phone? I'm starting a new job tomorrow that pretty much requires one and the extra money coming in will pay for the phone. Now excuse me while I run to the store and buy that steak. (ok, maybe not...)

I really like my new mobile template and it would be perfect for any web presence. It has a one page structure which means as you scroll to the end, you have viewed the site. The menu below the header image drops you right down to it's content and a scroll button appears on the lower right to take you right back to top.

It's responsive in that if viewed on a computer, laptop, or tablet it will make use of the space and float the aside content to the right as a second column, while a phone will simply present everything sequentially.

This is a holy grail for me as I've been lazy in the past and not supported mobile as I should. Alright, slap me upside the face and we can move on now.

Here's my New App. Drop by and check it out if you like.

What an interesting day. Very glad I'm alive and my brain is still working just fine, thank you. I decided to dive into a mobile template today and I needed a subject so I chose my upcoming employer.

They have a Facebook page and no website. I took it upon myself to grab a cool domain for them and construct the template within it. I used a few images from their Facebook page, extracted the relevant content and had a functional attractive website up in about ten hours.

So what now? I know they get most of their business from their Facebook page, so how would having a website and a cool domain like ( cstubing.com ) help them promote their product this year?

They actually don't even know it exists yet. I figure I better get on the payroll first, check out their cool little bus, and maybe then say: oh, by the way, I created you a website...

Sometimes signs come in the most unusual way. I've been busy all afternoon planning an upcoming epic road trip out west, sending texts, trying to feel out where the most interest in my company might reside.

All of a sudden, opportunity came knocking, in the form of a knock on my door. It was Ricky, the owner of the local tubing company that transports creek tubers down to my dead-end street, get's them in the water for a two hour cruise and then picks them up later. I met the girl bus driver last summer when I helped her turn the bus around down by the creek. Combine that with the fact that my landlord Steve told his friend Ricky that I was a good guy, and I now have a job for the summer driving the bus.

How about that. No road trip for me, and with everything going down out there, probably a good thing. I think in their magical mystery way, my people on the other side just gave me a sign.

Confusion wanders in, chaos and turmoil prevail, but strangely we settle down, resigned to the sinking ship on which we sail. (It's All Over, A Century Ends, David Gray, April 1993)

And if you think I just grabbed this profound thought off the internet and mindlessly reposted it, think not. I'm a huge David Gray fan and I culled this from the second phrase of the last song on that album. Please god, never let me post a non-original entity again...

Here's the video clip.

My new app allows me to take an area like New York, isolate the cities, randomize the colors, turn off the state outlines, make the actual underlying map go away, and create this:

Introducing my latest website: OMJst.com. Again, in keeping with the OMJ brand, another succinct five letter domain and in case you hadn't noticed, I'm having way too much fun with this.

Please try it out and make some cool art!

Seattle looks like a stuffed pig in my latest grab from the new app. The multi-colored things around it are Cities, drawn by their boundaries without regard to land or water. I lived and worked that area for twenty years...

I'm having a good time with my new prototype and thought I'd share it with my readers in it's current state. You can run it here: click on a State, and see what you get. You can also go straight to the Oregon map by clicking on it below. It's a work in progress but I can see the I-5 corridor and Portland pretty clearly, plus all the open space in red.

I've been working all day on a new concept: a way to overlay Counties, Zipcodes and Cities within a State all together on a map such that the result is attractive and meaningful. I first process the Counties giving them random hues of Red, then the Zipcodes with random hues of Green and finally the Cities with random hues of Blue.

The result is fascinating. Here's California and you can feel the unincorporated open County space in Red, the areas in the state where Zipcodes are relevant in Green and the dense population of the Cities in Blue.

It's coming together as an app where you can zoom in and everything is hoverable and clickable. I will certainly share it when ready. The other States are equally fascinating!

Our storm Saturday night packed a nice little 70+ mph punch and broke a few trees. It came out of the north and made me scramble to shut the house down and secure the cat and the garbage can. A popular fire-fighter was killed up in Spring Hill when a tree hit his house, but mine seem to be pretty strong.

Suicide is the worst way to go and I would never consider it because I strongly believe there's a really bad place on the other side for those that take their own life. Then I read this morning that a Hillary / Michelle O ticket is being considered to replace Joe, and it gives me pause...

On that bright note, I have a new app! It's called OMJcp, where cp stands for City Playground. It's just like my Zip Code app, without the Zip, which means there aren't multiple Cities, which means more fun. It's phone friendly and ready to explore. Open her up and click on the question mark for instructions, if you like. It even supports permalinks, for example, here's all the cities in the U.S. with the word summer in them.

One nice thing about road trips is you get to press "refresh" on everything in your head. I've had something bugging me for some time now, and that is the responsiveness of the code I'm creating. That's a phrase all web developers have known for a long time and most have developed their own standards for dealing with it. It simply means, make it look as good on a phone as it looks on your personal hi-res monitor in a freaking state-of-the-art browser.

I don't own a cellphone and as such I never run my code on one, but I do have tools to emulate how it looks on one. I try my best to support the phone but sometimes I get lazy and say screw it, let them run it on a real computer, and that's a cop out.

Today, back at my office after a disappointing road trip (nothings open but gas stations, fast food and sometimes a rest area), I tackled my most recent app: OMJzp and made it responsive. I think it turned out great and I urge my phone owning friends to try it out.

Melissa also gave me some great feedback on OMJim and I think I improved that also. Now I'll dive into some older stuff and see what I can do.