Living Out Loud
Living Out Loud
Lou Plummer
A blog focused on kindness, community and life experience written by one of the world's oldest Gen-Xers.
Latest Posts
My recipe for not hating myself consists of three elements: 1. Keep changing -- and by changing, I mean improving, and by improving, I don't mean "be more productive." I mean be a better person today than I was yesterday. Better means...
Age: 61 Number of Years driving: 45 Approximate number of cars owned: 13 New Cars purchased: 1 In a twist of fate so cruel it was almost unbelievable, the universe broke my beloved 2005 Camry last Saturday, the same day I wrote about a...
The first world problems have been coming at us hard the past couple of weeks. Amidst the excitement of moving into our new house we started to experience a streak of serial disappointments so consistent that it seems scripted. It...
My phone will ring some time in the next hour. It will be my Dad. He will be having a problem with his television. He will probably be pretty cross about it. He won't ask me to fix the problem. He will just blurt out "It's not doing...
I'm BackA former colleague once told me, "When you see a swimming pool, you don't dip your toe in. You do a cannonball." When I rediscovered blogging a few years ago, I started accumulating domains like bad habits. I went five hundred...
The power structure in America has a deep investment in keeping people afraid and begging for protection. We accept that roughly half our federal budget disappears into military-related spending or the interest on debts from previous...
I’m a technology enthusiast, not a business analyst, so I’m not the right person to predict what all the money pouring into AI is going to do to the economy. I consider myself an environmentalist, but I’m also skeptical that every scary...
iPhone Tracking Requests Did you have a moment when the Internet seemed like a magical creation? Was there ever a time when you sat at a keyboard or held a phone and discovered you could use it to do something you’d once only read about...
I recently went on vacation to Costa Rica. It was an experience that was not without technical difficulties. The very first time I attempted to take a picture with my iPhone, I received a message that my storage was completely used up...
So there I was, pedaling my bicycle as fast as I could down a long, straight stretch of road, feeling great. I'd just discovered the pleasures of riding a road bike, and I loved every minute that I could get away. Always a data geek, I...
I am not snobbish about the television shows I watch. I don't declare a new series to be a failure if it isn't the second coming of The Wire. Sure, some shows are just watchable, while others make me count down the days until the next...
I've mentioned this in passing a few times and sparked some curiosity, so I'm going to tell the story of the time I ended up on an FBI watchlist, which was creepy AF but still a badge of honor for getting under the skin of the man. I...
I've never read Marie Kondo's book on organizing, the one where she talks about only keeping those things that "spark joy" in you. Furthermore, I've never been to the container store. When it comes to tasks like finding cleaning supplies...
Those of us whose online life began with 2400 bps modems or slower remember what life was like when viewing an image online meant downloading it line by line over a 10- or 15-minute period. One image. The early editions of CompuServe,...
You are surrounded by courageous people. The chances are you probably display and exemplify courage more than you can imagine. Some people associate the word with Marines charging a pillbox at Iwo Jima, but of course that's not always...