Today I learned (from the Bing bot, and thanks to my kids’ curiosity) that there are approximately one septillion stars in the universe. A septillion is ten to the 24th power. It’s a number so large it is unfathomable to me.

🎵 Today’s listen: Boston by Boston. I’m trying something retro for a rare weekend gym day.

Currently reading: The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt 📚

I decided to finally go all in on using my Planck EZ keyboard at work. I am still trying to get faster at typing on it and sometimes forget where I mapped certain symbol keys, but I am finally loving it. Now I want another one for my Mac, which wouldn’t be a big deal if they weren’t so pricey. ⌨️

My friends from high school would never believe that I attended religious services twice this week. There was a lot of music and merriment each time.

 🎵 Today seems like a good day to listen to a ton of Lana Del Rey.

I followed a bunch of (semi-famous, mostly tech) podcasters I listen to in Mastodon and it totally became Twitter again for me, in good ways (there is content) and in bad (it’s a lot of outrage and virtue signaling). I don’t really know people on the platform, so I think it might just not be for me.

Finished reading: Constance by Matthew Fitzsimmons 📚 It was an OK sci-fi thriller. The writing was competent but it was never exciting. It was obvious from the start who the big bad was, and the characters seemed to lack inner lives. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of 5.

I have been enjoying playing chess puzzles and correspondence chess at lichess lately. It is free and is really, really good.

I joined Club TWiT this evening. Leo’s pleas finally wore me down. I look forward to seeing how ad-free podcasts affect my listening preferences.

Is Dilbert over now? It seems so weird. I remember 20 years ago when Dilbert comic store part of every internal IT presentation. I wonder what will happen to it. Will it get picked up by NewsMax or Truth Social or Fox News?

I had begun to think that my tolerance for hot, spicy food was very high, but the Peruvian chicken place I tried today is making me question that. 🌶️🔥😅

On the most recent Accidental Tech Podcast, I’m pretty sure Marco Arment mentioned that he uses one of my iOS apps, Simple Call Blocker, to block whole town’s worth of potential spam phone numbers.

I have gone from excited about AI to unnerved by it. At this point, I am limiting my exposure to the news articles and blog posts about it. Overall, I am worried about AI now. It seems unbelievably disruptive. Reading endless think-pieces about it is not going to resolve anything for me, though, so I will tune most of them out for now.…

Currently reading: Constance by Matthew Fitzsimmons 📚 It’s a thriller with a sci-fi premise. I hope I like it. I hated the last book I started!

🎵 I’m just playing the hits today.

Finished reading: American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales 📚 I abandoned this book pretty early on. There’s nothing new in it if you follow tech and social media issues. No rating, because I did not complete it.

I’m really enjoying the Super Bowl. It’s a great game! I don’t really care who wins.

Finished reading: Fairy Tale by Stephen King 📚 I enjoyed it but wished it was 100 pages (or more) shorter. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of 5.

I love how people are interested in Bing again. I don’t think I know anyone who uses it other than myself, and that’s only at work. (I like keeping all my tools Microsoft-only, if possible, at work, where I am mostly searching for Microsoft-owned things.) I hope the AI integration Microsoft announced today will help it be a credible competitor to Google.…

🎵 Today’s listen: Dog Problems by The Format. It’s a classic combination of feel-good music and “I feel bad” breakup lyrics. Nate Ruess, who fronted this band before he sang with fun., has a distinctive voice. Standout tracks include “Time Bomb,” “The Compromise,” and “Snails.”

I still have a Google Voice number and at this point I don’t know why.

Public service announcement: If you cut your finger in the kitchen, like I did last night, those silly-looking finger cots (or finger condoms) are awesome for protecting the wound.

Ice Cubes, the Mastodon client, has been getting better at a rapid rate. There are updates every day, it seems. Impressive.

🎵 Today’s listen: In The Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. It’s an indie rock masterpiece. That’s all I can say.

This “track changes” article by Ben Shpigel of The New York Times is wonderfully snarky: Tom Brady’s football career traced an arc that bordered on mythical, ascending from sixth-round N.F.L. draft pick to seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback and global celebrity. And, after more than two decades of unparalleled brilliance in his sport, plus another season, it has ended. …

🎵 Today’s listen, Groundhog Day The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording), composed by Tim Minchin. It is wonderful and timely.

I find the Magic Trackpad (which is connected to my Mac mini) to be very janky compared to my wired trackball (or to the built-in trackpads on MacBooks). The pointer skips around a lot. I wonder if everyone has that but no one complains.

🎵 Today’s listen: Come Get Your Wife by Elle King. Much of it is fun, “angry woman” country music. Whether you enjoy it or not probably hinges on how much you like its hit single, “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home),” which is a duet with Miranda Lambert.

A couple new, paid (or optionally paid) search engines have caught my attention recently: Kagi and Neeva. I am trying to figure out if switching to either of them, and paying for a search engine for the first time, makes sense for me. The main problem with search engines—and Google is the prime example of this right now—is that search results are often worse in quality than they were five or ten years ago.…

🎵 Today’s listen: John Coltrane and John Hartman I just learned about this album this week. As far as I know, it is the only vocal jazz/standards album John Coltrane ever made. John Hartman has a deep, silky voice that’s so good I am surprised I never heard of him before.

📺 I’m watching The Last of Us. Love it.

🎵 Today’s listen: Heaven or Las Vegas by Cocteau Twins. This is purported to be one of the greatest albums of the 1990s, and a foundation for the dream pop and shoegaze subgenres. I never listened to it before today. I liked it but didn’t love it enough to keep it in my library. I think its genre may not be for me.…

Ian Bogost’s essay comparing the TV adaptation of The Last Of Us to its video game forbear was a good read. I especially enjoyed his thoughts about what content makes sense in a video game vs. a television series. I don’t fully buy his argument that video game storytelling is inherently inferior to other media. It works differently, which I don’t think the author fully realizes. At one point, when descriving his experience playing The Last of Us (the video game), he states:…

My daughter performed in front of a couple hundred people in her elementary school talent show tonight. I am so proud of her. I was not brave enough to do such a thing at her age.

Want to read: You Are a Badass® by Jen Sincero 📚 Thanks, @greghiggins.

🎵 Today’s listen: To Venus and Back by Tori Amos. I haven’t listened to this album in many years, but I remember liking it in 1999 and 2000. I remember Tori Amos being very divisive when I was in high school (in the mid 1990s); I can’t remember why.

📺 I finished watching His Dark Materials season 3 last night. I found the last season to be a letdown in many ways, especially the last few episodes. I think an adaptation of The Amber Spyglass that I would like would be twice as long and cost a hundred times as much.

If you stop doing something, you get worse at it. Last fall, I stopped writing for myself every day. I’m tring to get back to it now. I’m finding it harder to stich together thoughts and sentences. Typing—outside the context of my day job—feels weird. My writing has lost its voice—at least for now.

One thing that has been making me happy lately is Radio Paradise, which is an Internet radio station. Several things about it make it special: It is completely ad-free. It runs on the public radio model, in that it is listener-supported. A DJ breaks in between songs a couple times an hour to say hello and remind listeners that they can donate. These breaks never annoy me. Its “Main Mix” is the best eclectic rock radio station I have ever listened to.…

I have been playing more chess lately, and I have never played worse, I think. It is a humbling game sometimes, especially if you are not a visual thinker.

Currently reading: American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales 📚

Currently reading: Fairy Tale by Stephen King 📚

I’m happy Tapbots’s Ivory Mastodon client is out. My love for its predecessor, Tweetbot, far exceeded any feelings I had for Twitter. I installed it and am trying it out. At present, however, I’m not that interested in Mastodon, and I don’t think Ivory will change that. It was hard to kick my addiction to Twitter and I don’t think I need to replace it with something that is almost exactly the same.

I have been happy to sit out the whole Twitter implosion, though I am beyond tired of hearing about it all the time on the podcasts I listen to. I still have an account over there, mostly to be able to read tweetstorms (that really should be blog posts) that other people link to. I haven’t posted anywhere in a while. I’ve been busy reading and working and haven’t had much to say.

📺 I have been watching Obi-Wan while at the gym because it is relatively mindless. And wow is it mindless! Seeing more Darth Vader and Obi-Wan is fun, but boy does everybody suck at their jobs on that show. 😀

HBOmax keeps canceling shows and, in unprecedented fashion, wiping them from its catalog. It’s unbelievable and petty. From the outside, it just seems stupid. How can the company that made them lose money by streaming them? Im glad I’m not a subscriber right now.

Hades II is in development! This is unexpectedly good news. (It feels wrong to use a Roman numeral after a Greek god’s name.)

The New York Times iPad app got a dark mode recently (I noticed it yesterday), after a million years of not having one. The iPhone app, however, still does not have a dark mode. What is the big deal with the Times about reversing black and white in their app?

We plan to visit my mom for Christmas again this year. It has been several years since we could, due to the pandemic or us being sick. We are all feeling happy about it. I just hope we can stay healthy that week, because it has been a very rough autumn for us, illness-wise.

Today I’m taking my family to Boston for a short trip. We are excited. My wife and I went to college near Boston and have fond memories of the city.

My son and I are sick for the second time since school started. No one liked wearing a facemask last year but I didn’t catch a cold or COVID until my son stopped wearing his.

For the first time in about 15 years I am no long a customer of Verizon Wireless. My family is living the MVNO life. I hope it works out, but I get the impression that, because eSims make switching quick and easy, we can always switch carriers again if we need to.

Upgrade+ from Best Buy sounds incredible. It is tempting me to buy a MacBook that I really can’t afford right now—but could easily afford if paid for over the next three years. 😅 That’s dangerous.

I have been looking forward to the Python 3.11 release all month and it is finally here. It wasn’t released early enough for me to install it at work this morning, though. I’m eager to see how much performance has improved. I’m also looking forward to better error messages and the Self type hint for class factory methods.…

Tonight I signed up for wireless service through Tello. I will test it alongside Verizon Wireless (via my iPhone’s eSim) for a short time and see how well it goes. I wanted to try Mint, but I need monthly billing for expense reimbursement through work. I almost signed up for Visible but their poor customer service scares me.

🎵 Taylor Swift Releases 7 New Songs Just Hours After New Album Midnights: Listen. Taylor Swift is crazy, y’all.

Here’s a game for a Big Data nerd like me: Is it Pokemon or Big Data?. Very (ok, somewhat) funny and informative.

I received a small windfall today in the form of a prepaid virtual prepaid card, which is quite difficult to spend vs., say, money in my bank account. My office offers the same thing for spot rewards, and even the U.S. government used this scheme for one of the COVID payments last year.

I wasted an hour trying to get it added to my Apple Wallet so I could actually spend it, before I gave up (because it would not work) and requested a plastic card, for a small fee, to be mailed to me weeks from now. The whole thing seems like a scam. How hard is it to send people checks?

I hate it how I can no longer call a doctor’s office and get ahold of a person. The online MyChart sites that all my doctors have are not a good enough replacement for a person who answers the phone.

🎵 Who else is looking forward to Taylor Swift’s new album? My daughter and I are anxiously awaiting its release tomorrow.

It amuses me that the tech pundits seem to hate Apple’s latest iPad and iPad Pro updates.

The Excel gods have not been smiling on me this evening. I can’t get two different worksheets merged the way I want to, which is without requiring my users having to do anything other than click “Refresh all Queries.” It isn’t working. Poor data quality seems to be the culprit.

Did you know you that, in Windows 10’s File Explorer, you can easily copy a file’s full path to the clipboard? You right-click it while the Shift key is down, and select the “Copy as path” item from the context menu, which otherwise isn’t there. 🤯

I think that widescreen 16:9 presentation slides look worse than 3:2 ones. Text gets too wide to read comfortably. Some people divide their slides into two areas side-by-side, like they are two slides in one, which also isn’t good. Those are too busy, I think.

My monthly “don’t have a lawn that embarrasses me” budget has increased dramatically over the past few years. It has gone from a good buy (about $30/week) to eye-wateringly expensive (a little over $100/week). Part of the increase is that we changed lawn services from a company that did a poor job to one that did a good job. I have tried to shop around for a cheaper, but still good, service, but haven’t found one yet.…

It is stupefying to me that Apple’s new low-end iPad supports the first-generation Apple Pencil and requires a special adapter to pair and charge it. Who thought that would be a good idea?

I read Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey last night. I picked it because it was the first nonfiction book I found in Libby that I thought would be fun to read on a quiet night. I first heard about the book from an interview McConaughey did with Bill Maher where I initially thought Maher didn’t like him. I am a fan of McConaughey’s acting and his positive attitude, though i am not always sure if he really has a coherent philosophy.…

I started using https://hckrnews.com to browse Hacker News in a less redundant way. It collects the stories that reach the front page of Hacker News and groups them by day. Each story shows up once and doesn’t move around, so it takes a lot less time to browse.

I finally changed over my personal email address to use iCloud. That will save me $20/year on my Hover.com bill and give me an excuse to use my iCloud email account, which has been checked fruitlessly by Apple Mail for many years.

I stopped writing blog posts a couple months ago for no reason whatsoever. It has been very hard to get back into the habit of posting something regularly. I have not lost interest in blogging. Something stranger has happened: I have lost interest in myself. I don’t completely know why. I am not overly depressed or anything—just maxed out. My general feeling about the past couple months has been that I have put in more effort, and reaped fewer rewards for that effort, than I have in years.…

I have some light reading tonight: Polars User Guide. I basically hate Pandas’s API and hope to use something more nicely designed, and a heck of a lot faster, instead.

📺 I finished watching Slow Horses Season 1 tonight. I loved it and can’t wait for Season 2. I’m wondering if I would like the books that the show is based on. I also wonder if it will get more than two seasons.

I’m uninstalling Visual Studio from my work computer. It feels weird to do it, but I haven’t used it in years. Visual Studio Code killed it for me.

I love using PETL to read, transform, and validate datasets. Its API is simple and straightforward to use, and its documentation, while not perfect, is really good. Unfortunately, PETL’s data processing—especially loading data into SQL Server—is very slow—to the point of being completely unusable for anything but the smallest datasets. Odo promises to be much faster at data loads, and seems dead-simple to use, but I cannot get it to work.…

The chess cheating scandal du jour is puzzling and fascinating. Matteo Wong’s article in The Atlantic does not really unpack the issue, but instead provide some depth into how computers have changed the game over the past 25 years: What once seemed magical became calculable; where one could rely on intuition came to require rigorous memorization and training with a machine. Chess, once poetic and philosophical, was acquiring elements of a spelling bee: a battle of preparation, a measure of hours invested.…

Over the weekend I wrote a SQL Server stored procedure and some user-defined functions it relies on that cleaned up data and inserted it into a new table. It was the sort of thing that took a short time to write, but an awfully long time to execute and to troubleshoot. It gave me an opportunity to learn more about using SQL Server’s “Include Actual Execution Plan” and “Include Live Query Statistics” features, which helped point me in the direction of creating an index that supposedly sped the whole process up by 30%.…

🎵 Today’s listen: Autofiction by (The London) Suede. It’s really good! They went “punk” after 30 years. 😀

I wrote a SQL script that queried, cleaned, and loaded data into a table. It failed after 9 hours of runtime because of a NULL value in the source data that I had forgotten about. 🤦‍♂️

I am still learning new T-SQL operators. Today I discovered CROSS APPLY, which is for joining to a table-valued function (with parameters pulled from the other tables).

🎵 Today’s listen: Asphalt Meadows by Death Cab for Cutie. I’m excited to hear new music from one of my favorite bands from the aughts.

Tableau is a very powerful data visualization tool. The more I use it, though, the weirder it is to me from a UI standpoint.  I find it both easier and harder to use that it’s nearest competitor, Microsoft Power BI.

I coded and tested an update to one of my iOS apps tonight. It has been too long since I touched Xcode. I have been working more evening hours this year than ever before—mainly because I am on dad duty during daytime hours—and don’t get to work on my hobbies as much as I used to.

My son lost his first tooth today! It happened while he was at school, eating an apple. His teacher wrapped it up for us and sent it home with a note.

iOS 16 is very nice! I am enjoying the new Lock Screens and how they tie to the system Focus feature.

My idea to eat healthier on my vacation was poorly conceived. 😅

Whitefield, New Hampshire, band concert. My father-in-law is playing a song he arranged and my kids are dancing and running around the town green.

It is my family’s annual drive off to vacation day. We are all excited. I will be driving pretty much all day.

I am supposed to be packing my tech gear for my vacation, so of course I am updating all my Linux boxes and freeing up space on my file server instead.

Yesterday I wiped my old iPad, which was running iPadOS 16 developer beta 3, and reinstalled iOS 15.6. Of course, an hour after I did so, a new developer beta was released that may have fixed the Music app crashing bugs that were vexing me.

🎵 Today’s listen: Gold by Sister Sparrow. Apple Music labels it an “Alternative” album, but it is blue-eyed soul all the way. My favorite track is “Can’t Get You Out of My Mind”; it’s fierce and fun.

My writing as a child:

Why use a small word when a big word will do?

My writing as an adult:

Why use a big word when a small word will do?

🎵 Today’s listen: firstborn by Nicolle Gaylon. It is a veteran country songwriter’s first album. It is full of autobiographical songs which are, interestingly, chronologically ordered from birth to death.

The Music app on the most recent iPadOS 16 developer’s beta crashes a lot. I regret installing the beta for this reason, but it was on a device I could live without, and I did need to test one of my apps.

I don’t need a better notes app. I need to take better notes.

I want to install Linux on an old PC that I have. After looking at all sorts of reviews and videos showing the various desktops and distros I could try, I came to the conclusion that boring old standard Ubuntu would probably suit me best.

🎵 Today’s listen: Emotional Creature by Beach Bunny. I loved this emo-pop band’s debut LP, Honeymoon, a couple years ago. I didn’t know this album was out, so I’m excited to listen to it. The lead single, Oxygen, is good.

In my quest to fill my new Kobo with some good things to read, I quickly found Project Gutenberg, which has tons of public domain books to download in various ebook formats. Unfortunately, most of its books are basically plaintext files. That is great for longevity and flexibility, but is not great for readability on an e-reader. Many (most?) of its books don’t look great on your Kindle or Kobo (or what have you).…

I bought the Kobo Clara HD thinking that I could side-load ePubs on it without converting them. While that is true, when you read a normal ePub—with at least some of them I have tried—you cannot change the font, margins, or line spacing. That is very frustrating. I learned that Kobo has its own format, kepub, which is basically ePub with some extra stuff added to it. Kepub files work exactly how you would expect e-books to work.…

I don’t always like Google’s products or business practices, but some of its offerings are great. Google Fonts is a case in point. From its (hard-to-reach) footer: Google Fonts is a library of 1,429 open source font families and APIs for convenient use via CSS and Android. The library also has delightful and beautifully crafted icons for common actions and items. Download them for use in your digital products for Android, iOS, and web.…

When installing fonts on my new Kobo e-reader, I came across a font that I had never heard of before: Lexend. It is a free, sans-serif font with a bold mission and a rather audacious website. Here is some of its most informative copy: In 1999, as an educational therapist, Dr. Bonnie Shaver-Troup, working with clients, began observing that reading issues masked the individual’s true capability and intelligence. In 2000, Bonnie theorized that reading performance would improve through use of:…

I got my Kobo this afternoon, set it up, and started noodling with it. My library card needs to be renewed, so I was locked out of logging into Overdrive to worry library books. Side-loading books was very easy, and I don’t need to convert my ePubs beforehand either, which I had to on my Kindle1. I wish the Kobo had a USB-C port instead of micro-USB, but I won’t be plugging it in too often, so that’s not a big deal.…

Today I learned about ChromeOS Flex, which is an easy way to install Chrome OS on any computer: Try the cloud-first, fast, easy-to-manage, and secure operating system for PCs and Macs. ChromeOS Flex is a sustainable way to modernize devices you already own. It’s easy to deploy across your fleet or simply try it to see what a cloud-first OS has to offer. I don’t really have a use for it, but I wish I did.…

I taught my daughter how to visualize and calculate volume using one of my Rubrik’s Cubes tonight. Since school ended I June, she and I have covered most of the fifth grade math curriculum and some of the sixth grade math curriculum, too. We are just starting volume calculations, and still need to cover measurement unit conversions and graphing on a coordinate plane. Geometry is where things get tricky. She told me tonight she wants to get 100 on all her test so she could move up to the highest math level at the end of the year.…

To my surprise, my son1 asked me to teach him how to use JSON in Python today. His grandfather showed him JSON files from his website earlier today, and now my son is mad for reading and writing JSON himself. We graduated from Turtle graphics to data structures and file I/O. I introduced to him Python dictionary and the list, showed him how to converted both to JSON, and then showed him how to write the JSON to a file.…

I just impulse-purchased a Kobo Clara HD. I hope it wasn’t a bad decision. I need an e-book reader only for a few weeks each year, during my summer vacation, which is coming up soon. I have an old Kindle, which I trot out annually to read outside with during my vacation, but its lack of a backlight and its low resolution make it hard to read in way too many places—not just indoors, but outside in the shade as well.…

A little while ago, I bemoaned that the Sony WH-1000M4 headphones were disappointing to me. I’m happy to report they have been working pretty well as my gym headphones. The fit is pretty good (they don’t fall off unless I’m practically upside down) and the sound plus noise cancellation are more than adequate. The creakiness I observed when they were brand new seems to have gone away. My only complaint is that, when I bring my iPad with me to watch TV shows while doing cardio, it can be a pain to get the headphones to connect to it.…

🎵 Today’s listen, Stop the Clocks by Oasis. It is a greatest hits album that is supposedly curated by the band to resemble on of their live show setlists. It is all the Oasis I need, and maybe a bit more.

I am excited to teach my daughter division by unit fractions this evening. I have been telling her that multiplication and division, much like addition and subtraction, are inverse functions. Now I get to show it in action, and it may blow her mind.

📺 I very much enjoyed Stranger Things season 4. After I finished it, I re-watched seasons 1 and 2 (so far), which I have not seen since they debuted. I think they hold up well and I liked them even better than the first time I watched them.

I don’t use Drafts anymore even though it used to be my all-time favorite iOS app. It became way more than I need it to be. Ulysses and Apple Notes have completely overtaken it for writing, and I don’t bother using it any more to create calendar events or execute searches.

My son needs a Chromebook for school and a computer to run Visual Studio Code in. I kind of want to get him a MacBook Air (which can run Chrome), but one is too expensive. I kind of want to get him a Linux laptop (which can also run Chrome), but that is likely not going to work 100% right. Why not get him a Chromebook and install Visual Studio Code on it?…

🎮 Today’s listen: The London Suede and Similar Artists Station on Apple Music. This is probably a personalized BritPop playlist. I’m discovering a lot of album cuts I didn’t know about or bother listening to in the 1990s. Also, I now think Blur holds up far better than Oasis.

I have been writing and editing documentation all week—so much so that I have been dreaming about applying styles to text in Microsoft Word. Today I really got deep into the minutiae of Microsoft Word and legal citations. I was delighted to find an online guide called Typography for Lawyers, which not only has lots of useful tips about typography, but also tells you how to do it in Word, Mac OS Word, and WordPerfect.…

At work, I rely on compression to keep my hard drive from filling up with huge data files that I need to work with and keep for the duration of a project. Because I mainly care about saving storage space, when it comes to file compression, I care mostly about compression ratio and only secondarily about compression and decompression speed. Over the years I have become somewhat of a file compression nerd.…

🎵 Today’s listen: I Miss Britpop. Because I do.

A miser knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I feel that way sometimes about the people tracking my time at work. The thing is, they don’t bother me about how long it takes me to do my work. I bother me about it.1 A constant source of frustration for me is that everything I do takes longer than I expect it to. This is true whether I am doing something for the first time or the hundredth.…

The first public image from the James Webb telescope was made public today, and it is amazing. From the article: Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.…

Early in my career, I ended up working on Microsoft SQL Server projects as a software developer and a business analyst. Over several years, I became an expert1 in data modeling, performance tuning, ETL, numerous database connection options, numerous database programming libraries. Even after I left my software development job behind, I wrote queries and developed metadata layers for analytical reporting. Over that time, I wrote a ton of SQL queries, and I had a very opinionated way of structuring them, which was essentially clean ANSI SQL.…

One thing I learned today is that Microsoft essentially made a fork of Visual Studio Code and customized it for database work. The app is called Azure Data Studio. Out of the box it supports Microsoft SQL Server, including non-Azure-hosted versions, despite its name. With an extension, it supports Postgres, too.…

My Schiit Magni 3 amplifier is acting up again. Tonight it is ground loop hum. Before tonight, it has been annoyingly sensitive (that is, it pops loudly) to the tiny amount of static electricity generated by my feet scuffing the low-pile carpet when I rise from my chair. When I stand up while wearing my headphones, it pops very loudly, which is painful to my ears, and then it will hum angrily the rest of the day.…

I was delighted to learn this evening that I could install the excellent, open-source database Postgres on my Mac by downloading a simple app bundle—Postgres.app—and copying it to my Applications folder. In contrast, installing SQL Server on my Windows machine at work was a big deal.

Over this past week I played through Ori and the Will of the Wisps on the Nintendo Switch. It is a challenging Metroidvania with beautiful graphics and a moving story. I highly recommend it—especially if you enjoy platforming challenges. The way that Ori moves, jumps, bashes off enemies, and launches into the air is pure delight. I had purchased the game almost two years ago when it first came out, and abandoned my save file because the game kept crashing.…

I have been experimenting with writing ETL (extract, transform, load) scripts in Python for work. The scripts were mostly fun and easy to write, but the outcomes have been disappointing: unacceptably slow load times. I usually work with an instance of SQL Server that runs locally on my computer. I use it for data collection, analysis, and reporting, and have never needed a shared server. In the local environment, I have always loaded .…

On Independence Day, we Americans celebrate throwing off the yoke of tyranny of the British Crown and declaring that we, and all people, have certain inalienable rights under natural law. The Supreme Court has made a mockery of this idea in its recent decision Dobbs v. Jackson. Now we are being led to believe that our natural rights are not natural at all. Instead, they depend on national tradition—specifically what the Supreme Court majority deems to be national tradition.…

📺 Stranger Things season 4 really clicked for me. Sure, it has some clumsy bits and didn’t serve half its characters with a real story, but overall I was hooked from the start and loved every minute of it.

I started teaching my son Python turtle graphics this week. He’s only 5, but he is absolutely mad for computers and is thrilled to get to use them to do something. I first learned to program using turtle graphics in Logo when I was in third grade. It was back in the 1980s, when computers were too expensive for my family to own, so it was also the first time I ever used a computer.…

It took a few days of cajoling, but I somehow convinced my daughter to study math with me over the summer—at least until we go on vacation in about a month. We are going through a “step up to fifth grade” packet that her math teacher gave us. I am making up my own problems based on the material and challenging her to think mathematically, too. She is an A+ student in the middle level of math in her grade, but she has been unable to pass the school’s rigorous, though largely arbitrary, criteria to gain entry into the highest level.…

I have been resting and collecting thoughts long enough. I plan to start writing blog posts again! I just need to make some time to do it.

I have not felt like I have anything to say lately. It has been a weird, intellectually empty feeling—probably born of overwork and my new, thrice-weekly exercise habit. My mind is scattered and I cannot complete a thought.

I am afraid I am becoming a workaholic. I keep returning to work or work-related stuff in the evenings now, almost every day. I feel like I can’t get enough done during the day anymore.

Today was my son’s preschool graduation. The whole family went to his very cute graduation ceremony this morning. We had a pizza party in his honor this evening, and my wife made a delicious cake to his specifications (chocolate cake, vanilla buttercream). He is very proud of himself and I am very proud of him.

I watched Apple’s WWDC keynote this afternoon. I am most excited about the new MacBooks because I have been hoping for that kind design since 2020. I really want one, but the closest I will ever get is buying one for my daughter next year to use for middle school.

Ask Micro.blog: Can anyone recommend a good PC game controller for young children? I think my kids' hands are too small for my Xbox controller. There are many choices on Amazon but many seem low quality. I’m planning to set up a retro gaming machine.

Today I showed my son how to do a couple things in Python for the first time. We only spent about half an hour on it, but it was a lot of fun. First, I showed him how to to use a Jupyter notebook in Visual Studio Code. We made Markdown and Python cells. For the Python cells, I walked him through a Hello World example. I then had him print out whatever he wanted many times in a for loop.…

I have been burning the midnight oil over the past week writing a data validator program—basically a front-end to the PETL validate function—in Python. This would be my third such program, and it is going to be the sort where it can be configured entirely, and flexibly, with configuration files. Theoretically, it should not require coding, or at least not that much coding, to set up validation rules. It has been a fun project thus far, and it is nearing the point where all the pieces will come together.…

Today was my son’s first playdate, which has been long delayed due to COVID. We met our son’s friend’s parents, who were very nice, and had a fun cookout this afternoon. I even made coffee ice cream in my new ice cream machine.

My favorite tech discovery of the week was this one: an old TechNet post titled “Enable Recycle Bin on mapped network drives.” This article helped me figure out how to get the Windows Recycle Bin working on my primary documents folder, which is a mapped drive that isn’t really a mapped drive. For historical reasons, I store my documents on a mapped drive that is actually a deeply nested folder on my hard drive.…

I did my first workout at my new gym tonight. I am happy I did, and am proud to say that it was not as hard as I thought to get back into cardio and weights again after many years away from them.

Much to my surprise, I have been relying heavily on a very old Windows app, Robocopy, at work the past few days. Part of the work I need to do this week involves moving very large files to and from a network share over a very slow VPN connection. Those file transfers were hosing my file manager, DoubleCommander, so I started doing them from Windows Terminal via Robocopy. It’s a tool I haven’t really used in about 20 years, when I wrote batch jobs to deploy my software or move data files around, but it still works.…

I joined a gym today. It has been 12 years since I last had a gym membership. Getting to the gym has seemed impossible to me due to work and kids—and then the pandemic. Last weekend, my wife said I should try, and I jumped at the chance. I hope I like it, and can find time to go—probably after my kids are asleep (or, at least, sopposed to be asleep.…

I’m setting up a web server for my five-year-old son to play with on an old Raspberry Pi that fell into disuse a long time ago. I was delighted to discover the Raspberry Pi imager exists now to make OS installs a breeze.

I set up an old MacBook Pro for my son a little while ago, which I finally gave to him today. I set up an old—but, compared to the Mac, far newer and far more powerful—Windows machine today for my daughter. Setting up my son’s Mac was a breeze. Nearly everything was downloaded via the Mac App Store, and I needed one reboot for a system update. Setting up the Windows 11 machine took a lot more work.…

Today was the first 90º+ day of the year for us in Central New Jersey. I took my family out for ice cream, and later to the beach, to beat the heat. I think everyone had a great day.

Listening to the AirPods Max for five minutes in an Apple Store ruined me for other noise-canceling headphones. Not because they sounded good. In fact, I listened to them only long enough to learn that they are bass heavy and exciting. What wowed me about them was the active noise cancellation. It was far better than anything I had ever experienced. It made the din of the Apple Store—all those human voices, which are difficult for ANC to cancel out—go away completely.…

I spent nearly all of my writing time this evening drafting a job description for the Senior Data Analytics Manager job I hope to be promoted to, sooner or later, at my firm. I feel good about what I wrote, which describes the specialist position that I have carved out for myself at my company, but I’m running it by a couple mentors for feedback anyway. I had a great year at work this past year, but promotion is by no means guaranteed.…

I am trying the no-case lifestyle again with my iPhone 12 mini. I am pretty sure my case is the reason why wireless charging is so flakey. Let’s see how long I can go before I drop the slippery thing.

Today I learned a good way to generate dummy data for use in the data analysis training I am going to perform next month. While there are services like dumbdata.com that can produce dummy datasets without requiring any programming at all, those tend not to work for me. My data needs are domain-specific. I don’t just need random names and addresses and things like that; I also need specific columns, including some inter-related financial data columns, for a dummy dataset to make sense to my audience.…

I am starting to write a job description for what will be (I hope) my next job—or at least my next job title. As a start, I am researching all the other similar job descriptions from open job postings. I hope I can cobble together something good by the end of the week.

My blogging interlude this month has been brought to you by COVID-19. For a long time I didn’t know I had it. It entered my house just as peak tree pollen season started, and its symptoms mimicked my springtime allergy attacks. At present, I am still getting over it. I hope to feel 100% by the end of the month.…

My seasonal allergies have been worse this week than they have been in years. I can’t think straight. I’m hoping pollen season ends early this sprint. 🙁

Because I seem to get far less done in the daytime hours than I think I should, I found myself working late tonight. I created a short presentation on data validation using Python. I dared to include a tiny bit of source code in this one. It will be fun to see how that goes over.…

I did bit enjoy being in an allergy-induced brain fog all day. My son’s allergies are much worse than mine. He is too little to willingly take his allergy medication, which makes helping him difficult. My wife identified a bush near our front door that flowered for the first time I years, and seems to be a major source of our allergies. She is wants to get rid of it, which is understandable, but it hard for us to do quickly enough for it to matter.…

I’m writing my self-evaluation tonight for work. I’ve blown past the suggested length, but hope it will be OK. I’m that good, after all. 😀

Of course, on the weekend I have to write my annual self-evaluation essay for work, I read this article in the Wall Street Journal by Marcus Buckhingham. He spells out the problems with the annual review process: The failings of the annual performance review fall into three broad buckets: They are too infrequent. They are dehumanizing. They are irrelevant to real-world performance. For years I have complained to my “performance advisors” about the absurdity of the annual review process.…

Elizabeth Lopatto’s account of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami Beach is a rollicking and chilling account of a conference that is supposedly centered on the granddaddy of all cryptocurrencies, but is actually centered on the number one right-wing hobbyhorse: grievance. I’m at Miami Beach, in weather so hot and humid it feels like being inside a mouth, to try to get a sense of the vibes. I’m uncomfortable because of the heat and also the flashes of antisemitism.…

Today I found out about a new game by Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger, who created one of my favorite iOS games, Good Sudoku. It is a word game called Knotwords. Playing it is a little like playing crossword constructor. You fit letters into an empty crossword grid so that they make words. The tutorial and first few levels are very easy, but the game gets more challenging—and more fun—once you pass them.…

Yesterday, The New York Times published a very well-written profile of actor Henry Winkler written by Matthew Klam: When the producers of the HBO series “Barry” asked Henry Winkler to audition for the role of Gene Cousineau, they assured him that he was on a short list. Winkler said he was willing, as long as the list didn’t include Dustin Hoffman. “Because he’s a movie star. He’d get it. If Dustin was on the list, I wasn’t going in.…

Leo Laporte, on this week’s MacBreak Weekly podcast, said that he is going to start calling Elon Musk an oligarch rather than a billionaire. I found that very interesting. For some reason, we reserve the word “oligarch” for very rich, powerful men in Russia, but I think it may be an apt term for any billionaire. Having that much money certainly grants a person outsized authority and autonomy. Each company Elon Musk owns controlling stake in must feel to him like a fiefdom in which he can do whatever he wants.…

Seeing Mac OS 8 emulated in a web browser today brings back some pleasant memories of my years as a Mac tech in college. Most of the machines I worked on for that job ran OS 8 or OS 8.5, which to my Windows-centric mind were beautiful and fun to work on.1 For two years, I worked in the theatre building with one of my best friends. We were in charge of keeping the theatre professors’ computers—and almost all of the computers in student areas, working.…

📺 I rewatched all of Barry over the past week, and watched the first episode of season 3 tonight. So far, season 3 appears to be off to a fine start.

Douglas MacMillan, Faiz Siddiqu, Rachel Lerman, and Taylor Telford reported today in The Washington Post: Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion on Monday, the company announced, giving the world’s richest person command of a highly influential social media site that serves as a platform for political leaders, a sounding board for experts across industries and an information hub for millions of everyday users. The acquisition followed weeks of evangelizing on the necessity of “free speech,” as the Tesla CEO seized on Twitter’s role as the “de facto town square” and took umbrage with content moderation efforts he views as an escalation toward censorship.…

Playing basketball with my kids this weekend and moving a bunch of unwieldy deck planks around my property today made me feel old in ways that I was not expecting. I am not sure how to get back into shape at this point, because I have been away from strenuous exercise for so long, but know that I have to start out slowly.…

I realize now that I’m writing my blog for my children. A body of work—even a body of an unimportant, inconsequential work—is a better thing to leave behind than nothing at all.

To my amazement, my kids seem to like jazz. By “like”, I mean don’t seem to mind, which I will consider a win. They don’t mind when I play John Coltrane (who is one of my favorite jazz musicians) on the kitchen smart speaker. They don’t blink an eye when albums like Jazz at the Pawnshop or Kind of Blue are playing. Today, I put on a Louis Armstrong playlist during breakfast, told my kids about him while I was playing, and my daughter expressed actually excitement about it.…

My five-year-old son is really into coding. He doesn’t know how to do anything yet, but he wants to learn. Currently he plays around with Swift Playgrounds a lot on his iPad (which is a little too old and slow to run it properly). He also orders his grandfather to program a collection of JavaScript games, utilities, and other doodads for him on a personal website. I’m going to start him on Scratch and Swift Playgrounds on the Mac.…

This morning, my presentation group and I presented our InsurTech webinar for a third time. This time, our audience was a group of insurance regulators attending an in-person training seminar. We presented remotely to a large room that none of us ever saw. From our side, it was the same as presenting a webinar, except we got even less feedback from the audience until the Q&A period at the very end.…

📺 Netflix canceled my daughter’s favorite show, The Baby-Sitters Club. I haven’t broken the news to her yet, because it would crush her. Consequently, I don’t feel too bad that Netflix has been beaten up by Wall Street this week.

Last year I told myself that if I have the opportunity to present to somebody, I will always create some visual aids to complement what I say. It’s an easy way to differentiate myself from my peers, who rarely make slide decks unless they are training clients. It also shows that I’m well-organized and a structured thinker. I found out today that I can build a good-enough slide deck in about ten minutes and present it right afterward.…

📺 I started rewatching Barry in preparation for the season 3 premiere. It seems impossible that the last episode of season 2 to air was almost three years ago. 🤯

I have spent practically all day coding, coding, coding. I am adding features to, and (more than anything) refactoring, the Python data validation program that I have been working on for my day job. The result isn’t perfect, but it is far better than where it was this morning. First, I broke up my 600-line script into numerous module files. I was happy to learn how easy this is, but I am still a novice at what I can do with the Python package I have created.…

When I was a kid, I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. One thing that I remember is that Captain Picard—in some future timeline, at least—retires to his family’s vineyard in France. It was a place that looked pleasant but terribly boring. It was far afield from the exotic, exciting locales that his starship captain career brought him to. I always wondered why someone with such an exciting life would end up someplace so boring.…

Tonight I had deep conversations with my wife and (later on) with my half-sister. They were rewarding, but they have exhausted the part of my brain that likes to write meaningful, or at least useful, blog posts. I guess my message to the world today is: be excellent to each other, even when it’s hard.…

When I was in college at Brandeis University, a friend of a friend1 was in a band. A cool band. He played cello in Betwixt, which was, at the time, a critically-acclaimed Boston-based noise/art-rock band. They played a few shows on campus, and I’m pretty sure I saw them play in Boston at least once, too. It was always a blast to see them perform. Their onstage vibe was cool and sexy.…

I am giving Microsoft OneNote a try again at work. This is surprising to me. I’m a plaintext lover who has taken notes in Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code for years. It seems crazy to move from simple-to-understand text files to a clunky, proprietary format stored in a monolithic database in a weird location on my system. Furthermore, OneNote is the one corner of Microsoft Office that I have never liked.…

The best podcast episode I listened to today was the April 5th episode of The Ezra Klein Show: Dan Olson is the creator of a two-hour-YouTube video, “Line Goes Up,” that has now been viewed nearly seven million times. “Line Goes Up” is the single most comprehensive critique of crypto that I’ve ever heard. And that’s because Olson isn’t just focused on cryptocurrencies as a technology or an asset class, but on the crypto universe as a distinct culture underpinned by a powerful ideology.…

I watched about an hour of Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball last night. The picture quality was fantastic, both in terms of sharpness and color. I think that the MLB service also has great picture quality, too, but Apple’s streams looked better to me than Thursday’s streams from MLB.tv. I liked the near lack of graphics and other nonsense on the screen. The announcers were sporadically good, but sometimes they were so far off topic that they didn’t bother to call the game.…

My daughter is turning 10 next month, and we are finally getting her some “older-kid” gifts. I just ordered her a pair of HomePod minis to use as a stereo pair in her room. I think she is going to love them. Someday she will play something other than Taylor Swift on them, too.

I am wondering if a wireless CarPlay adapter would be worth it. It seems intriguing, but maybe dealing with BlueTooth is more trouble than it’s worth.

My wife and I just ran lines with my daughter for a skit she is working on for her acting class. It was kind of hilarious to act with her. I am either a terrific actor or a terrible ham. I can’t tell which, but I think my wife thinks it is the latter. 😅

📺 Why does the premiere of Apple’s Friday Night Baseball have to coincide with the season finale of Severance?

I completed my Python program this morning, but could not resist refactoring it this evening. I cut my main method’s size in half, compartmentalized my code better in classes, and made the program structure more data-driven rather than process-driven. The work should pay off for me, because I will have to make copies of my program and customize each copy for a different type of data valuation. I probably over-engineered it, though; it went from 525 lines to 625 in the process.…

I spent a good chunk of time today creating a data validation program using Python. Python is a language I know (to some extent) but I barely use. Instead, I write scripts in PowerShell, create more complex programs in C#, and analyze data with SQL queries, Galvanize Analytics, or Power Query in Excel. My goal today was to find a way to validate a large number of .csv files, which have a great many columns and will be of questionable quality.…

At the start of my career I learned an important lesson: The reward for doing good work is always more work. That often works in your favor. As you advance in your career, you move from doing many simple, repetitive tasks to solving fewer, more complex, and more interesting problems. In general, my experience bears this out—but not always. In my first real job, I was a software developer in a small group within a large company.…

Over the past week, I played through Children of Morta on my Nintendo Switch. It is a Roguelike game built around combat and dungeon crawling, with several gimmicks to keep it interesting. There is a strong story element and a very enthusiastic narrator; unfortunately, I didn’t think the story amounted to much in the end. Overall, I enjoyed it. It reminded me a little bit of the Diablo games, though my memory of those games is quite hazy.…

My wife and I hired a cleaning service for the first time since the COVID pandemic started. Of course we spent most of today frantically cleaning the house to prepare for them. 😅

I can’t seem to read books lately. It’s hard for me to even watch TV shows. I wonder if my attention span is shot.

Rebecca Keegan wrote an entertaining and informative profile of Barry star and co-creator Bill Hader in The Hollywood Reporter: In Barry, which returns to HBO for its third season April 24, Hader plays a reluctant hitman who wants to be an actor. Barry is just really great at killing. This is not so different, Berg points out, from Hader, who became a star on SNL in his 20s almost in spite of himself, fought crippling anxiety on the live broadcasts, and really just wanted to write and direct.…

I have watched enough episodes of Hot Ones on YouTube to pique my interest in hot sauces. So far I have a bottle of a chipotle-inspired sauce and a bottle of sriracha. I am trying to enjoy them. So far they taste more acidic than hot to me. Perhaps I need to learn to cook with hot peppers instead of dabbing sauce on things.…

My five-year-old son just realized that he, and everyone he knows, will die someday. It has lead to unexpected, devastating dinner conversations the past two evenings. I don’t know why he started thinking about it. Out of nowhere, he started asking questions about death at dinner last night. At the time, my daughter and I had just started talking about Beethoven. I had looked up the composer’s Wikipedia entry and was reciting when he was born and when he died.…

The best podcast episode I listened to today was the 400th episode of Upgrade: It’s episode 400! We evaluate the forward-looking predictions we made back in episode 300, and then draft stories we’ll be talking about over the next hundred episodes! Also, an Apple TV+ movie won Best Picture and we round up an awful lot of Apple rumors. Upgrade is one of my favorite tech podcasts. Hosts Make Hurley and Jason Snell have a great rapport, and mostly talk about Apple and streaming TV services, which are beats that I enjoy learning and speculating about.…

One thing I have gotten into lately is watching videos on YouTube in which musicians talk about music. One channel/host I like is Rick Beato. He does everything from break down the music theory behind certain pop songs, to live interviews, to simply gushing about great performances and great audio production. What makes his videos enjoyable is his infectious enthusiasm for all kinds of music, and his deep respect for artists, engineers, and producers.…

I’m super glad my wife and I didn’t bother to watch this nonsense last night. 🙄…

Watch this video: “Hurt” by Johnny Cash. I dare you. Everything about Cash’s performance is powerful. Honestly, though, the music video’s imagery is perfectly attuned to the music and to the singer. Director Mark Romanek and his small team who made the video were working at the top of the game. (I didn’t just learn about this song or video. On Friday, I watched a short documentary about music producer Rick Rubin that reminded me of it.…

One of my favorite artists from the last few years, Frank Turner, has a new album out: FTHC.1 It—at least parts of it—represents a swing back from his acoustic guitar-led singer-songwriter fare to his roots as a hardcore artist. Yes, that means it’s peppered with screaming and righteous anger. That usually isn’t my cup of tea, but I’m down with it. Frank Turner is cool and makes good records; you should listen to them.…

The best podcast episode I listened to today was the unexpected return of an old favorite: Tim Goodman’s TV Talk Machine. The show ended in 2020. I never unsubscribed, and was surprised this week to find new episodes waiting for me. I would not have noticed them if there hadn’t been a redesign of Overcast, my podcast player, for me to look at this week. It’s been 612 pandemic-fueled days.…

I learned today that one of my cousins died. Before this I didn’t even know he existed. I am not entirely sure how I should feel. Vaguely sad is all I can muster right now.

The best podcast episode I listened to today is this interview of Matt Mullenweg on Decoder with Nilay Patel: Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, which he co-founded, and Tumblr, the irrepressible social network it acquired from the wreckage of AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon. Matt’s point of view is that the world is better off when the web is open and fun, and Automattic builds and acquires products that help that goal along.…

One thing that I learned about this year in chess that I never thought about is this:

For grandmasters, sportsmanship is resigning when your opponent will clearly win. For novices, sportsmanship is playing out the game and allowing your opponent to checkmate you even if it is inevitable.

I have not been doing much writing lately. I looked over a white paper I started writing in the fall, and realized I haven’t worked on it since December. I do not wish to abandon it; I’m just not that interested in it right now. I have been busy—and have wasted time—elsewhere.

📺 I love Severence on Apple TV+. It is a strange, darkly comic, slow burn of a suspense story. I thought it was a miniseries, but I learned from Wikipedia that season 2 has already begun shooting—and not too far from where I live. My mind is spinning. Where could they take this weird story?

During my freshman year in college, my friend Saul and I played a Pong-inspired game on his Mac called Mortal Pongbat. It is basically Pong with lasers and bombs you can use to destroy your opponent’s paddle. As a two-player game, it was a ton of fun. We also would play a one-player Centipede clone called Apeiron. It was frenetic and had some humorous sound effects. While these games look very dated today, they were a lot of fun in 1995.…

I think about productivity a lot. I wrote up my productivity system about nine years ago. I created todo.txt apps for iOS and macOS. I have strong feelings about how to stay productive. Because of all this, when I don’t feel especially productive, I stress myself out about it more than I think I should. I even stress out when I feel like I have had a productive day but think that it took me too long to do that work.…

🎮 I played through through Celeste this week. I really enjoyed the challenge until the last couple levels, when I had to turn Assist Mode on to get through them. I am glad I made it up to the top of the mountain, no matter how I got there.

I found out about plaintextsports.com from a Daring Fireball post. The site’s Twitter account describes it thusly: Live sports scores, play-by-play and boxscores, in plain text. No ads, no tracking, no loading. I love it. It is fast and no-nonsense. Clicking on the box scores loads a page full of stats for each game. There is even a “hidden” page that lets you follow all the teams in certain cities or regions.…

One of my old websites is #2 on Hacker News right now.

Luke Broadwater and Amelia Nierenberg report in The New York Times: After losing an hour of sleep over the weekend, members of the United States Senate returned to the Capitol this week a bit groggy and in a mood to put an end to all this frustrating clock-changing. So on Tuesday, with almost no warning and no debate, the Senate unanimously passed legislation to do away with the biannual springing forward and falling back that most Americans have come to despise, in favor of making daylight saving time permanent.…

⚾️ I’m watching the Red Sox/Twins opening Spring Training game. I’m happy that baseball is back! Instead of following the Sox, I may watch the MLB free game of the day and jump around the league this year. It will be interesting to see how the new universal designated hitter rule plays out.

🍀 We are having a St. Patrick’s Day dinner tonight. I put the corned beef in the slow cooker and got the potatoes ready for roasting later. I’m even going to cook cabbage for the first time. I plan to sauté it, and hope it turns out well.

I want to help my daughter do a science fair project and create a fancy 3-fold poster for her elementary school’s science fair next month. I like the idea of making oobleck (a.k.a. “slime”) with cornstarch and water and doing some simple experiments with it. I think it would be a lot of fun. I wonder if it is too basic for fourth grade, but I expect it would be OK.…

Kevin Draper reports for The New York Times that Tom Brady is rescinding his retirement announcement from only eight weeks ago: Brady, the 44-year-old quarterback who has won the Super Bowl seven times, wrote on his social media accounts Sunday evening that he would return to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to play his 23rd N.F.L. season. I can only admire Tom Brady’s gumption here. His numbers last season were so good that his retirement seemed unnecessary, despite his age.…

My daughter had a book fair at school today. She was so thrilled about it that she told me about it many times over the weekend before it happened, and several times today after it happened. She proudly showed my wife and me the books and the fancy pencils and erasers she bought there today. It is wonderful how much she loves to read and to write. I always loved book fairs in elementary school, too.…

My son is starting to get interested in ScratchJr on his iPad. It is a visual programming environment for kids. It seems like a good way for kids to learn programming. I set him up with it on Saturday and tried to help him get started yesterday. So far his favorite part is the image editor, which of course is the non-programming part. He has been drawing and coloring with it most of the time.…

I got a chance to try Universal Control tonight. It is pretty cool! I think it will come in handy sometimes, when I want to type on my iPad without having to get my BlueTooth keyboard.

I have not had much interesting to say lately. I have been doing boring things like preparing my taxes and watching way more TV than usual. I hope to get out of my creative slump soon.

Judging by the weather—wind, cold, snow, sleet, hail, and rain—it is the last gasp of winter here in New Jersey. All I have wanted to do is sit under a blanket and watch TV.

I play chess on Chess.com, thanks to a challenge request from Andrew Canion a while back. We play “1 Day” games, which are essentially correspondence chess. It is great fun playing against Andrew, but I don’t get to play with him in real time because we live on different sides of the planet. To see if I can beat an opponent—who is not one of my kids—in real time, I have played a number of blitz games, which are 10-minute games.…

Jason Snell, on Six Colors, shared some interesting information about Apple’s Major League Baseball announcement on Tuesday : Though NBCUniversal’s Peacock is rumored to be picking up ESPN’s old package for Monday and Wednesday night games, what Apple is doing is an entirely new license from Major League Baseball, containing three separate products… He goes on to provide details about MLB Big Inning, linear and on-demand archival content, and Friday Night Baseball, which run the gamut from normal televised baseball to something akin to the NFL Red Zone.…

🎮 I bought 992 games today from Itch.io: the Bundle for Ukraine. Now my backlog is over 1,000. 😅 I (selfishly) wanted to pick up cross-platform, DRM-free versions of Celeste and Baba Is You for cheap. The rest is gravy.

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is one of the disappointments in my Nintendo Switch collection. I had hoped it would bring me the same joy that Super Mario World and New Super Mario Bros. did in the past. Instead, I found it punishingly difficult, due to devilishly positioned enemies and a physics engine tailored to make the characters slip off platforms all the time. (Don’t even get me started about the Ghost Houses.…

Since watching the Apple announcement today and learning about the Mac Studio, I have never been happier that I did not wait for a more powerful Mac mini before I bought mine. The Mac Studio is more computer than I need and is out of my price range (for a desktop at least). I am thrilled that it exists for other people to use, and will happily listen to the pundits talk about for the rest of the month.…

I am excited to see what new Macs Apple announces tomorrow. I would love for there to be a new MacBook that follows the design language of the iPad Air, with flat sides, rounded corners, and anodized aluminum shells in several different colors. Ever since I got the generation 4 iPad Air I have wanted a MacBook that looks a little like two of them sandwiched together. For a little while longer I can dream that one will be unveiled tomorrow or later this year.…

I am thankful for sun, warm weather, and my home office loudspeakers this morning. It’s going to be a good day.

🍴 My wife and I ordered Indian food tonight. That may be a non-event to most people, but for us it was a revolution. My wife never tried it before. I hadn’t had any since before she and I got married. We absolutely loved it and are still excited about it.

My wife was in a car collision this morning. She was uninjured but was understandably shaken up. I cancelled my morning meetings to go help her. Most of my help consisted of coordinating the tow truck and the body shop. While this was happening, my son fell out of his chair at preschool, hurt his back, and was given an ice pack, and my daughter was sent to the school nurse on account of her chapped hands, which were bleeding.…

I gave a coworker some advice for giving effective presentations today. I told her some things worth remembering: You are the star of your presentation, not your slide deck. Structure the presentation around ideas rather than facts. Make the presentation structure seem simple and obvious to the audience. One thing should always lead to the next. It is better to present fewer concepts well than it is to present more concepts poorly.…

My little corner of Micro.blog has not had much to say about the invasion of Ukraine. This is probably a good thing, because it provides me a respite from grim news and unsubstantiated reports from the front lines. If I still had a Twitter timeline to scroll through, I’m certain that it would be full of performative, meaningless platitudes1, and strident back-and-forth arguments from people who (like me) have no bearing on the outcome of the conflict about what should be done about it.…

Recently, I converted all of my (very old) academic writing from outdated document formats (WordStar and Microsoft Word 6) to more future-proof formats: either Markdown or OpenDocument format (.odt). While I did not re-read every essay I ever wrote for school during this process, I did notice something in my files that surprised me: From my junior year of high school to my final semester of grad school, I created outlines—full sentence outlines1—for all of my papers that were over a few pages in length.…

James Wagner reports for The New York Times: Major League Baseball canceled the first two series of the 2022 regular season on Tuesday after the league and the players’ union failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement. After nearly a year of negotiating, including nine straight days of talks between the league and the union in Florida starting Feb. 21, the sides could not come to a new pact by M.…

I have been doing fairly well at work this month, but I feel kind of terrible about it. I feel like I am falling short in terms of productivity every day. Part of it is that I have been spending a lot more time managing than doing. I am keeping abreast of what my team needs, at the expense of getting my own tasks completed. I probably won’t be able to prioritize my tasks as well as I would like to for the next two of three months.…

The poet often sits upon the edge of reason, testing the waters of both sides with both his hyperactive poet-senses and his nightmarishly sluggish normal-senses. Treading both sides for a time, he realizes both of these seas are just as cold and just as briny, but the one just beyond reason is far deeper. With this, he dives in, drinking deep, closing his eyes beneath the surface, coughing up the salt when he bobs up for air.…

I have been taking a brief, unplanned blogging break. I overloaded my brain last week with too much work, too much programming which led to the same dead end I always end up in, and too little sleep. I also had an important doctor appointment yesterday that I was very uncertain about. Fortunately I am past that and can start to think more clearly again. Overall I am well and am looking forward to the future.…

I wasted a ton of time tonight trying to convert some old Apple sample code from an obsolete version of Swift to the current one that compiles. If only I had checked the Swift Package Index first! Of course, someone else had already done it and created a package based on it.

A big success is made up of many smaller ones. A coworker reminded me of that today, and I really needed to hear it.

Modernity is a thin veneer over thousands of years of baser and humbler human history. Almost everything we take for granted today—like electricity, telecommunications, antibiotics, vaccines, knowledge of the internals of the atom, an understanding of DNA, the discovery of plate tectonics, limited space travel, microchips, complex computer modeling, the internet, and so on—was invented or discovered within the span of two or three lifetimes. When I was a little kid, some of the things I was taught in science class had only been discovered or agreed upon within the past twenty years.…

When I first started work as a systems analyst I knew nothing about business and nothing specific about systems, but I knew a lot about language. I realized early on in my career that technical and non-technical people approach problems so differently that they are, in many cases, not even speaking the same language. In meetings between the business team and the IT team, I would always either start the meeting, or steer the meeting toward, defining common terms for both sides to use to talk about the problem.…

Today was my son’s fifth birthday. We had two family parties for him this weekend and all had a great time. He got presents. We ate cake. We spent a lot of time together. The important thing to me is that he knows he is loved.

My son turns five tomorrow. As part of our celebration for him, we all took a trip to Grounds for Sculpture. It is a huge sculpture garden that my kids love to visit. Part of their fun, which my wife and I can’t fully understand, is that they both bring their nearly-identical stuffed penguin toys there to stomp on some of the sculptures. They have also named a bunch of the sculptures and enjoy visiting them and pretending to have a chat with them.…

🎵 I love the album All Mirrors by Angel Olsen. Everything about it is stunning.

🎵 A new album from an old favorite of mine dropped today: Lucifer on the Sofa by Spoon. A straight-ahead rock album is a great excuse to turn up my speakers today.

Tonight I performed some surgery on my color laser printer’s empty toner cartridges and installed knock-off ones in their place. I feel a little dirty, but I saved about $400. I resent that toner cartridges now have microchips in them that are required for the printer to print. The chips help the printer report its toner levels, but otherwise are there to make a rather generic toner cartridge into into something proprietary and overpriced.…

My soon-to-be-five-year-old son is typing…something…into Swift Playgrounds and thinking he is programming. It’s not that different from what I do most days. 😂 At least he is very excited about it.

I am sitting down to watch the final episode in the weakest Disney+ series I have watched so far: The Book of Boba Fett1. The show is flawed in many ways, but some of it is fun, some of it looks good, and it is, in all but name, a continuation of a show I do like, The Mandalorian. Not a book, by the way. ↩︎ …

Last month I started a new, private ritual. Every morning, before I start work or before cleaning up the family breakfast table, I say to myself, “This is going to be a good day.” Sometimes I say it to myself again in the middle of the day when I have a break from work, or when I see the moon or stars in the evening at the start of an errand.…

At my job, we use Webex and Jabber and Microsoft Office 365 for messaging and collaboration, but email is still king. Over the years I have organized my emails by year, project, and client using the various tools that Microsoft Outlook provides: folders (sometimes nested), categories (which are tags with names and color coding), and flags. Recently, I have simplified my filing system to use no categories, no flags, and only four essential folders:…

At some point, everyone wishes to be seen and heard. Giving people the attention and consideration they deserve takes focus, patience, and a commitment to preserving their dignity. Sometimes the person wanting to be seen and heard is a victim; other times that person is a bully. It can be very difficult to see and hear them both.…

I tend to minimize good things that happen to me, but am trying to change that. To that end, here is a list of small wins for me this week. I got a complimentary email about my productivity guide, PlainText Productivity. I got a complimentary email about my free call blocking app for iOS, Simple Call Blocker. I responded to a bug report in my todo.txt app, SwiftoDo for iOS, fixed the bug, and published the update.…

The worst part of memory is its selectiveness. I can remember, in excruciating detail, every embarrassing moment, every incidence of social awkwardness, every chance I should have taken but didn’t, every blunder or pratfall, every mistake on an important exam, every poorly written paper, every taunt hurled at me, and every dressing down I ever received. I wish I could say that I remember all the successes and great things in my life just as vividly, but it simply is not true.…

One thing I never planned for in adulthood is developing a strong preference for trailing punctuation to remain outside of quotation marks1 unless the period, comma, or other punctuation mark itself is being quoted. I wonder if the people I work with, who read my emails and technical writing every day, think I don’t know how quotations marks are supposed to work in American English2. No one has ever called me out on it.…

One of the bad parts of moonlighting as a programmer1 is that, at the time of day I can code, I am often a terrible inefficient coder. The time I have available for coding is very late at night, typically 11 PM to 1 AM. For the most part this is fine. I can’t get to sleep until 1 AM or later most nights, no matter what I do, and going to bed before I feel tired is counterproductive.…

Tom Brady finally retired today. For most of my adult life, I was a football fan. The whole time, my love of the game sat uncomfortably beside my real concerns about how dangerous it is. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was some false controversy about whether the NFL was dangerous to the athletes who played in it. I never got caught up in it: I was always certain football was a dangerous sport.…

You aren’t the best. You’re not even close. And that’s OK. I love chess now, but I am not very good at it. When I first got into it again, however, I thought I was hot stuff. I beat a bunch of bots with higher and higher ratings until I reached what I thought my level was (Elo 1,000). I thought that was a pretty good rating for me, considering I hadn’t played in 20 years.…

I have been converting my high school essays from their borked Word .doc format to Markdown, to preserve them for future readability. So far, I have converted my ninth grade work and half of my tenth grade work. As I go, I don’t read each essay in depth, but I have read some of them and found them to be incredibly, unmistakably me. I could have written them yesterday—even my very first high school paper.…

Take your time I have played most of my chess games against the bots found on Chess.com. When playing against a bot, it will make its moves instantly. It is tempting to keep pace with it. You shouldn’t. Unlike bots, humans—especially those of us who are not chess masters—need time to look at all the pieces on the board, weigh different moves against each other, and consider both the good and the bad outcomes that would come from each move.…

The last two days I have been busy doing work for people and myself, busy achieving things, and have gotten positive feedback from my coworkers, my family, and the world. Things are going pretty well. I have been so active doing things that I have not been reading the news, engaging with politics, or thinking deep thoughts all this time. Maybe that’s why things are going well.…

Last week I started using FancyZones, one of Microsoft’s PowerToys for Windows, on my work computer. I think I love it. FancyZones lets you create a tiled window layout and snap windows into pre-defined zones (or areas on your screen) via drag-and-drop. It makes it easy to divide your monitor into halves or thirds and arrange multiple windows neatly. Compared to manually sizing and placing multiple windows, it is much faster to snap them all into place by dragging them anywhere onto a zone or by typing a keyboard shortcut.…

Last night I started converting the essays I wrote in high school from the old Microsoft Word .doc format to Markdown, so they will be readable as long as plain text files are readable. My process is simple: Open the Word .doc in LibreOffice. Copy the text and paste it into Ulysses Replace double-spaces after periods with single spaces. Fix all the paragraph breaks, using the version opened in LibreOffice as a guide.…

Last night when I fished a high school essay out of my archives, I was dismayed to find that all my old word processor documents related to school are still saved in the antiquated Microsoft Word .doc format. The file format is now so old that none of the word processors I had installed—not even the online version of Microsoft Word—could open them. I was pretty sure for a moment that all my old work, which I have retained in my document folder for decades, had been lost.…

When I find myself struggling to be creative or productive, I always think of a story I read in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. It was about a rower who was pulled out to sea one evening by the ocean tide. He rowed and rowed all night and kept being pulled farther and father from land by the ebbing tide. In the morning, however, the direction of the tide reversed, and he was pushed back to the shore to safety.…

I have been having trouble lately coming up with something to say each day on my blog. I am feeling somewhat uninspired. This lack of spark probably stems from spending many hours this past week (far more than usual) writing software. The many hours spent programming have taxed my brain so much that the acts of writing, doing chores, or doing my other day-job work have felt exhausting and unrewarding for the past few days.…

My son can play a reasonable game of chess for a four-year-old. I have to explain to him how to get out of check sometimes, but he is getting a knack for the game. I am proud of him and more than a bit amazed.

I got a raise today. It’s off-schedule—a total surprise. I feel it is uncouth to take a victory lap, but I did promise myself last year to celebrate my wins. Right now I feel happy, and think my hard work and change of attitude last year paid off.

Earlier this week I played through Steamworld Dig on the Nintendo Switch. I bought it for a song during Nintendo’s New Years sale, and I found it well worth it. It is a high-quality game with a fun—and brief—game loop. First you explore the mine and collect treasure, then you return to town to sell the treasure and purchase upgrades. There isn’t any more to it, unfortunately, but the gameplay is fun nonetheless.…

Back in 2006, I bought a Nintendo DS and was fanatical about the game Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day. It was a game that promised to make you mentally sharper, as long as you did solved simple cognitive training puzzles every day. For several months I played it daily, for five minutes or so, before I watched TV or played a more conventional video game. I told everybody about it.…

I taught my four-year-old son how to play chess a couple days ago. It was his idea. He was curious about it because I have been talking about chess with my wife, and because our chess board is on the underside of the Chinese checkers set we have been playing with as a family. He and I played a few games over the holiday weekend. This afternoon, he played with his grandmother and grandfather, which was his idea.…

I am grateful that I have meaningful work to do today. I hope I can get it all done.

I spent all day coding in VBA for work. I’m creating Excel templates for data submissions. These templates need (at least I think they need) data validation routines that the people filling them out can run. Those routines will help prevent some data quality problems down the line. The only tool for the job to code those routines is VBA, which is bar far the oldest language I code in on a regular basis.…

Correspondence chess Several days ago, @canion challenged me to a game of chess—basically correspondence chess—on chess.com. I’m pretty sure he is beating me right now, but we are just in the middle of the game, so we will have to play it out to be sure. Simultaneous online play Tonight I played a real-time game against someone else on chess.com for the first time. I won! Except for the one, slow game with @canion, I haven’t played against a real person in chess for about 20 years.…

I’m pretty sure I re-learned long division tonight as I helped my daughter through her homework assignment. That was a skill that bedeviled me when I took the GMAT twenty years ago. The GMAT, at that time at least, did not allow for the use of a calculator. To make it worse, none of the figures on the math problems divided evenly. Many of the math problems were painful to get through, not because I didn’t know the math, but because I could not remember how to calculate the final answers with long division.…

I have been thinking that my goal to replace my work keyboard with the Planck EZ Glow—a 40-key ortholinear keyboard—has been a bust. I tried to learn the Colemak-DH layout and customize the heck out of the board. I was fairly successful at both of those things, but not successful enough to feel comfortable typing in Colemak-DH all day long. I stumble on some of the letters, like B and K, and otherwise make a lot of mistakes.…

We lost power for the second night in a week. I’m not sure what’s going on. My kids do not think it is as fun as I did when I was young.

Late tonight I reconfigured my desk setup for the umpteenth time. The main reason is that my last setup revision, which moved my monitor forward and my keyboard and mouse to a pull-out drawer under the desk, left my headphone and stereo amps in a no-mans-land behind my monitor, completely out of reach. My desk is strange, and I wish I had one or two normal, five-foot-wide rectangular desks in its place.…

I am grateful to the Micro.blog team and community for the (relatively) new plugins system. The stats and search plugins are blowing my mind right now. They are exactly what I have wanted from “day 1” and did not know how to create myself. Thanks @amit and @manton and to others who contributed.

Digital media is a miracle. It is infinitely reproducible with no loss of quality. The internet and all the devices we have make sharing digital media less expensive, on a marginal basis, than was possible via any other technology that came before it. We have invented a way to make some resources—like art and entertainment—effectively unlimited and nearly free. We take it for granted now, and moneyed interests are busy trying to dismantle it with blockchains as I write this, but I think we should all step back sometime and consider how incredible and wonderful it is.…

Thanks to all the checkers games I have been playing with my kids, my mind has turned to the other, better game you can play with the same board: chess. I have been enjoying playing lots of games on Chess.com’s iPhone and iPad app, which is part of Apple Arcade. The chess app has an assortment of bots with various skill levels to play against. I quickly plowed through the beginner bots and the first three intermediates.…

I advised a colleague today to research web3, because I think it may be the most interesting InsurTech technology of the year. I don’t think that glomming cryptocurrency and smart contracts onto the web is a good use of technology at all. The idea is especially dubious, and that is the reason it is interesting to me. I honestly think that web3, along with the cryptocurrencies that make it possible, are based on a long con.…

I am on a mission to replace Far Manager, which is a Windows file manager that I really love, and have used for over a year. Far Manager is a text mode file manager that has been in development since the 1990s. It is a lot like Norton Commander, which I used briefly in my DOS days. I like how fast the UI is, how easy it is to navigate the filesystem, and also how easy it is to read the file and folder names in text mode.…

Since I started intermittent fasting a few days ago, hunger feels less like a had headache and more like disappointment. So far I am doing pretty well with no breakfast, a cheese omelet and coffee for lunch, and a low-carb (but certainly not no-carb) dinner.

Nobody is a surprisingly good action movie. It nails everything there is to nail about the action genre. Specifically, the writing and editing are top notch. The story is set up with great efficiency, and every set-up is paired with a call-back later in the film, which is very satisfying to see. Also, Bob Odenkirk’s acting in it is fantastic. I will admit that it does play a little like a mashup of The Accountant and John Wick, but I liked it better than either of those two movies that share its genre.…

My kids are really into playing checkers since winter break. I have played a lot of games with my son and daughter in the past week or so. To get a better handle on the rules and strategies, I also played some games alone on my iPhone (there is an Apple Arcade Checkers game). Checkers is a game that, until last week, I had not played more than once or twice since I was five.…

I never imagined she would use it as a camera and fill it with photos and videos. iCloud Photo Library has been enabled from the start, and we have plenty of cloud storage space. Unfortunately, Photos will not free up space no matter what I do. If you delete a photo or video from Photos, it is deleted everywhere, so that is not an option. Tonight, as I update iOS via tethering the iPad to my Mac, I am weighing my next move.…

I have a big, scary pile of “important” papers in my office that I have started scanning and shredding this week. It’s something I don’t do often enough. I am finding papers from 2019 at the bottom of the pile. 😳

Last night I started reading Plato’s Republic again. I have been unsuccessful finding a good book to read start-to-finish, and have had a desire to read something intelligent for a change. Naturally, I decided to return to first principles and go back to the dawn of modern Western thought. I read through Book 1 last night and enjoyed it very much. I had read it—or at least large portions of it—when I was a freshman in college, in a very eye-opening seminar course on justice.…

Work day two of my 16:8 (or no breakfast) fasting regimen has been a greater success than yesterday. I have been more alert and more productive at work, and have not been hungry since before lunch yesterday.

Still no snow where I live.

I started 16:8 intermittent fasting a couple days ago. It basically means I skip breakfast, then eat a normal lunch, dinner, and maybe snacks, between noon and 8 PM. So far, during the tail end of my winter vacation, it has worked out all right. But today is my first day of work in almost two weeks, and I feel very rusty. I don’t know if I am hungry, or if being away from work for so long has slowed down my mental processes.…

The Omicron wave has been a source of concern for my family and my town. School systems north of us have pre-emptively closed schools and have gone remote for the week. The school superintendents where I live are adamant that they cannot (or, really, will not) close schools unless (or until) there is a breakout in a particular school building. Because schools have been closed since December 24, there can be no outbreaks inside particular schools.…

🎉 Happy fifth anniversary to the Micro.blog community! I am very grateful that it exists.

“That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” —Christopher Hitchens

I saw my best friend for the first time since the pandemic started (since February 2020 really). It was great fun and I wish we had gotten together sooner.

If it weren’t for the SwitchUp YouTube channel, I would have played little more than Breath of the Wild and Hollow Knight on my Switch. Now I watch their videos to monitor Nintendo eShop sales weekly, and have developed quite a backlog of games. In the past few months—mostly after Black Friday—I acquired (all on sale and usually for $5-10 per game, with the exception of Metroid Dread), the following games:…

🎬 After days of trying, we finally got the whole family together to watch a movie today. We picked Encanto and really enjoyed it.

I don’t get nervous speaking in front of people. I never have. The main reason is that I firmly believe that the audience wants you to succeed. And, if you don’t succeed, the audience will generally forgive you. Just show them respect at every step, and things will go fine.…

My feelings about Christmas are complicated. There are numerous legitimate reasons why, which I won’t go into. But they are there, and they have left me feeling and seeming like a villain in a Christmas movie. I don’t love Christmas (any more). I have heard enough carols. I have seen too many Santa Clauses. I don’t care much for Christmas trees, or elves, or angels. The lights and decorations overwhelm, rather than delight me.…

Now that my vacation has started, my mind has turned off. I am sinking into a few days of family time, TV, and video games.

My employer has always been generous with holiday time at the end of the year. We always get extra time off. This year, for some reason, it is being especially generous. Today was my last day of work for the year. The rest of the year is paid vacation or holiday time, and none of it comes out of my bank of “self-managed time off” hours. I also got a gift card from my employer in the mail, and used it to buy an Apple Magic Trackpad, which is something I have always wanted but could not justify spending the money on.…

I am working on one of my iOS apps for the first time in about half a year. For many different reasons, I couldn’t bring myself to work on it for a long time. The problems I was facing with it seemed insurmountable. In truth, some of those problems still seem insurmountable, but I feel ready to move forward again with it. Last night I stayed up late (which happens to me a lot when I am coding) and fixed a build that had been broken since the last time I touched it.…

My article on Big Data and data call projects was published in my company’s newsletter today. I am happy another one my goals for the year is complete.

⌨️ I got my warranty replacement Planck EZ today. Everything on it works, and it came with clicks Box White key switches rather than the Cherry MX Browns my original one came with. I am very happy with it, and hope to get back on track with the Colemak-DH layout soon.

I watched the most recent Bond film, No Time to Die, last night. I have seen every Bond film at this point, largely inspired by John Gruber, who famously (in tech circles at least) is a Bond fan. Despite having seen dozens of Bond movies over the years, I don’t consider myself a Bond fan. Most of them are ridiculous and their sexism has obviously not aged well. I like to think of James Bond as a terrible spy.…

I brought the family to a drive-through holdiday lights extravaganza this evening. It was a little underwhelming, but we are all glad we went. I will never forget the animated “prehistoric Christmas” Santa sleigh being pulled by pterodactyls, though, even if I try to.

First, my wife decided to keep our oldest child home from school, out of extreme caution related to the TikTok school shooting challenge, which I immediately dismissed as a hoax. My wife stayed home as well. At breakfast, my four-year-old son sneezed and coughed once or twice, so I suggested we give him a rapid COVID test before sending him into preschool. He did not seem sick, but I thought we should do the responsible thing.…

Last night I misplaced my AirPods. I didn’t realize it until this morning, when I always take them off of my dresser and put them in my pocket. At 7:15 AM, they were gone. I didn’t mind at first. I knew they were at home, because I wore them while I was unpacking the groceries, but I had no idea what became of them. I looked for them at breakfast time, and couldn’t find them.…

Today my group and I presented on InsurTech to for an industry group’s free training day webinar. It went really well, which I expected because it was our second time making the same presentation. Still, I think that we all improved as speakers. We made our points more clearly and more cogently than we did the first time, and did so with greater focus and energy. We did some ad-libbing, answered some questions from the audience, and covered all of our material with only a minimal amount of rushing at the end.…

Over the past week I played through Shantae and the Seven Sirens, which is one of the many games I bought on sale after Thanksgiving. Once I started it, I realized that I already played part of it. In 2019, it (well, a small part of it) was a launch title on Apple Arcade. At the time, I, like most Apple nerds, got the Apple Arcade free trial. I did not click with Apple Arcade.…

Today I spent the majority of my work day creating a massive Excel template. Tomorrow I will code the data analysis bot that will fill that template with data tables and command logs that document the analytical procedures. Over time, these two days worth of work are going to save me many, many hours. I have always automated the data analysis part of my job, but never enough of it for my tastes.…

I am presenting my InsurTech slides to a new audience on Wednesday after about a month away from the material. I have to start rehearsing soon. Hopefully it will all come back to me quickly once I look at the slides again.

It puzzles me why the optimal settings for HDR and framerate are not selected by default. I always have to go to the audio/video settings and set the frame rate to “match content”. If I don’t, I get audio drift (lip sync problems). I also learned tonight that I have to set the default video output to non-HDR because the Apple TV menus look terrible in HDR, but then set the HDR setting to “match content.…

The top of the new Apple TV 4K remote looks just like the iPod click wheel. Unfortunately, it does not work anything like one; you can’t slide your thumb around the perimeter to scrub. I don’t get it. It seems like a big missed opportunity to me.

Now that my media- and backup server appears to be running stably, I’m turning my attention to setting up my new Apple TV 4K. Somehow it has remained in its box since I received it on Wednesday. I…don’t watch much TV these days. 😀

Over the past year, my TrueNAS Core server has been bugging me every few months about one of my boot failing. In this case, the boot drives are simply two USB sticks, run in a mirrored configuration. If one fails, the other one handles the load. (The reason I use a USB stick for a boot drive is that my server has an internal USB port for that very purpose, and no other place for the boot drive to go.…

I shared the article I wrote to one of my mentors today. He said he loved it and that he would help me get it published in an industry journal. Things are looking up!

I love how Matt Birchler compares crypto to BitTorrent in his latest blog post, “Maybe It’s Just a Product Nobody Wants”: I don’t think crypto is going to disappear, by the way. I think it will always have a place in the world, but much like bittorrent before it, it was new & exciting, people tried to use it for basically everything, and then it settled into being used for, well, nothing for most people.…

I received a motorized sit/stand desk today for my kids to use in the family room. I assembled the whole thing this afternoon, which was not too hard but took about an hour. Once it was done, I discovered that the left side would not lift. It was a frustrating way to end up. I emailed product support and hope to get some kind of answer. I’m afraid that, no matter what, I’m going to have to disassemble the whole thing to fix it.…

Some days I feel like a hero just because I got dinner on the table and my kids’ homework completed.

Earlier this week I played (twice!) through Gris. It is a beautiful platformer that represents a metaphorical journey of a girl overcoming grief or depression. It is the kind of game that is meant to be an emotional experience rather than a challenge. In fact, it is impossible to lose. What struck me about it is how beautiful it is. The graphics are painterly and the music perfectly fits with the game’s themes and action.…

📺 I watched the first few episodes of Hawkeye on Disney+, and that was only because I was on my iPad half the time. I think it is the weakest Marvel or Star Wars series that Disney+ has produced. The plotting is lazy and makes no sense, and at every turn it goes out of its way to undercut and ignore its title character, which is frustrating.

My wife and I had parent-teacher conferences with my daughter’s teachers. My daughter is doing great (which we already knew) and her teachers love her. I am very proud of her.

🎵 I’m enjoying “The Weeknd Essentials” playlist while I work this morning. I have learned to appreciate his music over the past two years. I was familiar with his biggest hits, but I wasn’t sold on his sound until Due Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia” came out and reminded me how cool and sexy modern 80s-inspired R&B can be.

I wonder what specifically happened this week to make “web3” a topic on every tech news site and every tech podcast I listen to.

⌨️ My expensive Planck EZ keyboard with the broken LEDs is being replaced with a new one. The customer service rep is even seeing if I can get it with different keyswitches than it originally came with, to match the set I switched to.

My main (or only) contribution to gift-giving for my kids this holiday season was a biggie: I bought them a multi-function color laser printer. (Don’t worry, my wife bought them a ton of other presents that are a lot more fun.) I got the idea to buy a color printer because my son’s preschool prints everything in color, and the administrators there said that color printing is phenomenal for kids’ worksheets.…

I had a couple dispiriting meetings toward the end of the week that killed the enthusiasm I had for what I have been working on over the past few months. First, one of my co-presenters said he thought that the lack of audience questions during our webinar indicated that everyone in the audience was just playing on their phones while we talked, waiting to collect their CPE credits. Then, later in the week, one of the partners I report to on technology initiatives seemed unenthusiastic about the automation bot I created, which took basically all year to figure out how to do.…

In the middle of our Hanukkah celebration tonight my wife got a text that informed us that our son had been exposed to a classmate with COVID a couple days ago. My brother-in-law’s family left immediately because my son and his kids are unvaccinated. (They are all too young.) I’m not concerned that my son is sick (pre-symptomatic) because the rest of us as vaccinated. My son’s entire preschool class must stay home all next week, due to the exposure rules.…

The elliptical machine and the treadmill stand proudly in my basement like dusty monuments from a forgotten age.

Tonight I fell asleep in my chair in front of my whole family. I have officially become my dad. 😅

Today, after almost two months of not having any usable time work on it, I finished coding the automation project that has been bedeviling me for half the year. I got over the technical hurdles months ago; all I needed was eight hours uninterrupted, so I could rewrite my code and test it. It took me a long, long time to find that time, but I found it today. It felt great to finally get it working, and even better to remove about half of the code as I optimized it.…

Today I made my final revision to the article I wrote for my company newsletter. It is an article about Big Data, which is a term that is both readily understandable and has no agreed-upon definition, which I intentionally did not bother to define in the opening paragraph. I was asked to define it anyway, right up front, and to cite it from a source. I did so and ended up with a real head-scratcher of a second sentence.…

⌨️ I have been walking through the troubleshooting steps that ZSA customer support sent me, but nothing is turning the LEDs back on again. I hope that the warranty will cover it.

I am starting to miss coding in Swift every day. I must get back to it.

🎮 I bought myself a ton of Nintendo Switch games that were on sale for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. My backlog is embarrassingly extensive now. I must have a year’s worth of games to play. Perhaps I can stop buying them for a while.

Hanukkah is a great holiday, but does it have to be eight nights in a row? It’s night three and I am exhausted. 😀

I swapped the keyswitches on my Planck EZ and now the per-key LED lighting does not work at all. I am bummed. This thing was very expensive and I didn’t do anything with it that it isn’t designed to do. 😕

I will be driving most of the day. Thanksgiving is over and now I am looking forward to Hanukkah, which begins tomorrow night.

Stephen Sondheim died today. The world has lost a titan. My wife and I were lucky enough to see him sit for a long interview at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers a few years ago. He was sharp and witty and gracious, and we learned a lot. It is no surprise when an old man dies, but our minds are spinning nonetheless. At least he was able to live a long, productive life.…

I finished the article I was writing last night just in time for Thanksgiving. I am relieved and hope I don’t have to revise it hastily next week after I turn it in.

Right now I am trying to finish the article I am writing for my company newsletter. At turns I love it and I hate it. I don’t think it is my best work. I don’t even think I can give my best work right. The article resembles an introduction to the (huge) white paper I am working on far more than a standalone article. This was my intent, but because of that, it lacks a proper ending.…

My day was actually really good. My mom and I had a nice time together on the long car ride from her house to mine. We did not hit much traffic, either. We all had a big family dinner this evening, too, and it was great. I’m surprised and grateful at how chill everything has been.

I am driving to Connecticut tonight to pick up my mom and bring her back tomorrow for Thanksgiving. I am hoping that I left late enough to avoid a lot of the nasty rush hour traffic.

The oddest thing happened to me today. My neighbor texted me this morning saying that she heard a cat crying and thought it was stuck in my car, which was parked in my driveway. I went out to look—and looked pretty thoroughly—but saw and heard nothing of a cat. I thought my neighbor must have been mistaken. An hour later my neighbor texted me again saying the cat was still in there, but stopped crying when I went outside to look.…

My wife and I went grocery shopping together (without the kids), for the first time since my daughter was born 9 years ago. We went to a huge Italian market we had never been to before, bought a bunch of stuff we didn’t plan to, and had a really great time together. It’s funny that these little things can be so wonderful.

This is my handiwork for the night. Most of the kids’ Hanukkah presents are wrapped. 😮‍💨

After a week away from it, I finally sat down and wrote a little bit more of my article for my company’s newsletter. I still have about a week and half to complete it, and I am most of the way there. My topic has drifted a bit from what I intended to write. I started with the intention of writing about how to execute a data call project. (A data call project is when a government organization asks private companies to send it data, which it then uses for analysis and reporting.…

A real “rebuilding year” is when a sports team is broken down and reassembled, basically from scratch, after—and as a response to—a dreadful season. 2020 was a dreadful season for, well, everyone on earth due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It certainly was for me. I experienced some deep trauma back in 2018 when my father died, which I thought went away after a few months, but never really did. Watching my father die (of Alzheimers and old age) completely messed me up.…

🎵 I have listened to Adele’s new album, 30, about five times today. I’m into it!

My wife teaches a public speaking course, and from time to time we talk about what examples of public speaking would be good for her students to watch. While we go through the usual speeches by luminaries such as President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and also pick apart the speeches of politicians of our day, I always argue that, if you want to learn public speaking, you could do a lot worse than viewing and analyzing Steve Jobs’s many famous product launches.…

I don’t journal anymore, and I think…”what am I hiding from myself?”

🎵 I can’t wait to listen to Adele’s upcoming album, 30, which is coming out on the 19th. I have been looking forward to it for weeks.

My wife and I brought her car into the dealer tonight because its passenger-side-mirror lane-checking camera stopped working. I wonder if the global chip shortage is going to make a repair pretty much impossible.

I started playing Shantae on the Game Boy Color last night, and was blown away by its ambition and the technical prowess it exhibits. Although its resolution is indeed very low, it still offers every bit of the charm of the recent Shantae games, along with satisfying gameplay, great music, and fun character designs. It is hard to believe it was written for an 8-bit system, because it exhibits tricks like parallax scrolling backgrounds that I know were possible until the 16-bit era began.…

I gave my presentation today. It went very well. It was all I achieved today, though. As soon as it was over, I couldn’t do anything for the rest of the day.

My next presentation for work is tomorrow morning. I am really looking forward to it. I think I created a solid concept and structure for my team’s talk. I hope good things come of it.

🎮 I beat Metroid Zero Mission tonight. It is a fun game, and much better than the original game (Metroid) that is is a remake of.

When I cut somebody off in an online meeting, I now apologize to the person I spoke over and say “I’m just excited” about whatever it is we are talking about. It may be a lie (because how exciting is my job, anyway?) but I think it is usually appreciated. After I do this, I shut up and listen. I almost never mean to cut people off in meetings, by the way.…

Two reasons: Culture. The Puritan work ethic is one of the foundations of our culture, and has been since colonial times. Work is righteous and cleansing to the soul. Of course this is nonsensical, but it is baked into the culture. People are brought up hearing that our ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps (itself a nonsensical idea if you think about it), and that when times get tough we should do the same rather than reach out to others for assistance.…

My Instant Pot beef stew came out very well. I didn’t use a recipe; otherwise I would share it. I simply dumped all the ingredients in raw, cooked it under high pressure for 40 minutes, let the pressure naturally, and let it sit on the warm setting for 40 more minutes. It was nearly perfect.…

I’m attempting to cook a beef stew in the Instant Pot right now. I’m not sure if it will come out right. I don’t make stew that often, and when I do I usually use a slow cooker or (gasp!) my stove and oven. If it works, though, it could be a game changer for me. I both need to use the Instant Pot more often, to justify its place on my counter, and I need more convenience in my approach to cooking big meals.…

One thing I didn’t expect when listening to Taylor Swift’s honest-to-goodness money-grab re-recording of her album Red is how good it is, and how many songs she added to it. Hell, Red (Taylor’s Version), even sounds better. The engineering and production are amazing, and I very much enjoy listening to it on my best speakers and headphones. Now I am very much looking forward to Swift’s re-recordings of 1989 and Speak Now, which are my daughter’s favorite records.…

🎮 I am enjoying my retro handheld very much. Yesterday I played through Super Mario Land for the first time since the 1990s. I also got through about 50% of Metroid Zero Mission, which I don’t think I ever played before. Some of my enjoyment is nostalgic, but most of it is because I have been playing some fantastic games.

I don’t know what I want for Hanukkah or Christmas. I feel like I’m letting down the people in my family who want to buy me a gift. It makes me sad to think about it.

I have a corner desk that is connected to a second, straight desk, which looks really cool, but is a pain (literally) to use. While it offers me enough space for two desktop computer setups: a necessarily sloppy-looking windows laptop-and-monitor setup for work, and a more streamlined Mac mini-and-monitor setup for home, it causes a lot of problems. The desktop is so high that it puts pressure on my forearms when I use the keyboard, which leads to wrist pain.…

In college, one of my humanities professors, Prof. Klein, told me that genius is being able to look at the same things everybody else does but see something different. She told me a story to illustrate: One time she had company at her house—a friend and her kids—and they needed to find a place for three little kids to sleep for the night. There was only one bed, but it was a queen-sized bed, which she thought would only suit up to two people.…

One fun thing I did with my daughter tonight is to compare the slide decks we are developing. I’m working on an InsurTech presentation for work, and she created a Civil Rights & Women’s Suffrage presentation for school. I think it’s fun for her to see that we are doing a similar thing. Tonight I walked her through the concept of a build slide using one I created for my talk next week.…

I have been writing for an hour and forty five minutes tonight and have come up with, maybe, one paragraph of useful text for the Big Data/Data Calls article I am writing for work. I am not blocked. I am not distracted. I am pushing sentences around like a kid pushing peas around on a plate. The right way to connect my ideas and my sentences together is just not coming.…

One of my coworkers called me today and, before talking about business, he praised me for my presentation skills, based on presentations I gave weeks ago. 😊

This is my music find of the week. I asked my Amazon Echo speaker to play “cool music” while I was making dinner and had no idea what I wanted to listen to. (I was hungry and tired, and couldn’t even name an artist of a genre at that point.) Alexa starting playing a “Cool Jazz” radio station on Apple Music, and it was actually perfect background music for making and eating dinner.…

Writing for three hours at night sure makes me hungry. It’s nearly 11 PM. Do I risk eating a snack so late? How could I even avoid it?

One of the disheartening but more interesting things you learn in business school is that most of the growth in the stock market can be attributed to inflation. That’s why I’m not that excited that my retirement portfolio has been growing quickly lately as the stock markets keep reaching new highs. I know that there’s a catch. Those dollars aren’t worth as much, and that’s part of the reason that markets are rising.…

My wife and I started watching The Americans this weekend. We stumbled upon it when browsing Amazon Prime Video. It’s good to have something to watch on Prime Video, because it is criminally underutilized in my house. The last thing I watched on it was Invincible and I don’t even remember how long ago that was.…

Looking back on last week, I played a lot of video games. A lot more than usual actually. It’s a sort of thing I do when my brain is so tired I can’t do anything else, not even focus on a TV show. I have been working really hard writing system walkthroughs or performing data analysis during the day, and working on a presentation and an article for publication in my company’s newsletter during the evenings.…

🎮 I finally beat Metroid Dread! I thought it would be impossible, but I persevered. What a cool game!

My daughter got her first COVID-19 vaccine today. I am grateful that she will be fully vaccinated relatively soon. I think my 4-year-old son will have to wait until his fifth birthday to get the jab.

Do I like Foo Fighters now? Today I’m loving when their tracks come up on my randomized Apple Music post-album ∞ (“infinity”) playlist. I have had a grudge against that band since I saw them in concert almost 20 years ago and hated their set. Maybe Dave Grohl was having a bad day that day. I thought he hated the crowd, of which a small majority, including me, were there to see the co-headliner, Weezer, who performed before him.…

My retro handheld, perhaps understandably but not by design, has become a dedicated Pokémon machine. I never played a Pokémon game before last week, and honestly never understood their appeal. Last night, when my brain was too tired for anything else, I had fun grinding away at Pokémon Yellow for hours. I am missing out on the game’s social features like trading and battling. It must have been amazing to have been a little kid with a Game Boy, a link cable, and like-minded friends.…

I may never beat Metroid Dread’s final boss, Raven Beak. I’m just not fast enough on the controller, and I don’t have the time or patience to “git gud”. That’s OK with me. I could never beat the true final boss of Hollow Knight, The Radiance, either, and have played through that game, start-to-nearly-the-finish many times. Playing through the game is fun; finishing it is optional for me.…

The New Jersey governor’s election is certainly a nail-biter! Maybe Phil Murphy will pull out a win after all. I can’t help thinking, though, that there is no good reason any statewide election should be this close.

If, after enjoying double-digit leads in Monmouth University and Fairleigh Dickinson polls last week, Murphy loses the New Jersey gubernatorial race (which seems pretty likely right now), the pollsters deserve to be roundly criticized, once again, for relying on unrepresentative sampling or making incorrect assumptions in their production modeling. Campaigns rely on these polls to gauge the impact of their efforts, and voters see large leads in the polls as an excuse to stay home, as their votes are not needed for their candidate to win.…

I’m working on an article for my company newsletter right now, and it feels like I am just pushing words back and forth and nothing is gelling together. I write, I delete, I move things around, and my word count stays the same, and each section remains unpublishable.

It is Election Day today in New Jersey. Everyone in my family voted early, by mail (as it should be), so there’s nothing to do but wait until evening when the results start rolling in. I’m hoping that Phil Murphy wins re-election, and that we don’t have a repeat of the 2009 gubernatorial race. The year after Obama won the White House, Republican Chris Christie was voted in as our governor.…

Barbara Sprunt reports for NPR today: Sen. Joe Manchin has announced he cannot yet support the $1.75 trillion framework for President Biden’s social spending package that congressional Democrats were hoping to push through this week. “I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact that it will have on our national debt, our economy and, most importantly, all of our American people," the West Virginia Democrat said in a statement Monday afternoon.…

I carved a happy jack o’lantern this Halloween.

Double chocolate cupcakes for Halloween.

🎃 Lots to do today for Halloween! We’re making cupcakes (my kids can’t eat much candy due to allergies), chili, and cornbread for a family party, and we’re trick-or-treating, too.

In America, we could all unite politically, but only if we all decided to be Republicans. That is what happened, briefly, after 9/11. It could never have gone the other way; there is no way we could all put down our differences and become Democrats for a while. That is by design. For as long as I have been alive, Republicans have defined what Democrats are. To them, Democrats are many horrible things, but they are primarily unpatriotic, ineffectual, and toxic.…

A vaccination, blood test, and an MRI all in one 24-hour period was too much for me. 😮‍💨

Today I watched some videos from Great Art Explained on YouTube. The videos on Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights are fascinating. Watching them have me some serious flashbacks to my art history class in college.

I just got my Moderna booster shot. They are in such demand that CVS called me and asked me to come in three hours early to get it.

I have completed the New York Times crossword puzzle every day for years, but for some reason I stopped about a month ago. I have been having trouble getting back into it, too. Too many lousy puzzles turned me off.

🎵 I listened to Lana Del Ray’s new album, Blue Banisters today, plus a new single by Beach Bunny, and enjoyed them very much. Adele’s new album is coming out soon, and I am really looking forward to it, too.

One thing I certainly do not believe in is the divine right of kings. When considering why this is, I originally thought it was because I am American, and come from a country whose founders rejected the monarchy. But that can’t be it. Americans love monarchies, especially the British one. I realized that my feelings about it go deeper, and distract from my enjoyment of the fairy tale movies and stories my kids consume, which very frequently include princes and princesses whose right to wealth and power is never questioned.…

The latest controversy in my area is another type of fight between conservative parent activist groups and school boards. This time it is not about mask requirements, but about sex education. Two things specifically rile the shouting class this time: (1) Masturbation exists, and (2) so do LGBTQ+ people. Apparently, there are enough prudes out there to give the school superintendents hell about teaching about masturbation in schools (grade 3-5 specifically, in my case).…

I have been working all evening on my InsurTech presentation and totally blew through my self-imposed blogging deadline. No worries. My mind was engaged and my time was well spent.

I mailed in my request for a mail-in ballot for all future elections. (My state has an off-year election cycle for state-wide offices, so this is timely.) I did not do so before because I had thought it would be better to take my kids to the polls to show how voting works. I realized that I can also do that from home. Really, we should all be voting by mail.…

My daughter’s iPad wont take system updates because over a third of its storage space is taken up by “Other”, which I cannot delete. Hooking it up to my Mac and doing the update from the Finder is working a treat. Who knew?

🎮 I have been loving the new Metroid game and it has been kicking my ass. 😂 It is the toughest and most fun game I’ve played since Hades and Hollow Knight.

I was so tired this afternoon that i couldn’t talk good (er…) and stuff at my last meeting today. Thankfully it was not a meeting with a client. 😅

💉💪 I scheduled my COVID-19 booster shot appointment. I hope to be able to vaccinate my kids soon, too.

I have thought so many Big Thoughts about the InsurTech presentation I am working on that I have come full circle. I realized today that what I have built thus far contains pretty much the same information and ideas as my prior presentations on the topic, going back four or five years. I think my current presentations slides and speaker notes are much better, and that the talk will be have better focus and clarity, but I am surprised at how much I want to say seems to be recycled from what I already had thought about the topic.…

I spent some time today trying to set up my new Retro handheld gaming system. I flashed ArkOS on it and copied some games over. I had to find YouTube videos to help me configure it correctly. I hope to figure it out well enough to give the cool, inexpensive handhelds to my kids someday.…

This video from University of California Television hit close to home (literally) for me: Follow a team of UCLA anthropologists as they venture into the stuffed-to-capacity homes of dual income, middle-class American families in order to truly understand the food, toys, and clutter… Watching this video was like watching a newsmagazine segment about my own house. My house is a mess, my kids won’t pick up their toys and have taken over the entire house, and I spend so much tome tidying the same few messes every day that I can’t seem to move forward on any projects that would actually make my home better.…

Today’s new MacBook Pro models are the first in a very long time that seem too “pro” for me. Their processor specs make my M1 Mac mini—which is fantastic—seem pretty pathetic by comparison. I’m not in the market for a new machine, but I look forward to reading the reviews. After a long time it feels great to be a Mac user again, because there are really good products up and down the line.…

I was very excited early this month for the release of Metroid Dread so I watched a bunch of videos on YouTube of gamers playing through classic Metroid games. Eventually the YouTube algorithm led me to learn about retro handheld devices. These are emulators that can play games from many older systems. I quickly got obsessed with them and ordered one, an Anbernic RG351MP, despite my history of not really liking many of the classic games available on my Nintendo Switch.…

I have been diligently working on my InsurTech webinar slide deck this evening. I was so locked in the zone that I forgot about everything else for the last four hours. I completed 20 slides, which is probably about half of the slides I will end up creating entirely. My presentation team partners will be creating the rest. I don’t have enough time to make my slides look perfect, which is unfortunate.…

I learned about something new today from three separate podcasts I listened to, and a New York Times article I stumbled upon: popularism. It’s an idea that David Shor wrote about that apparently boils down to this: To win voters, Democrats should talk about what is popular rather than focus on racial tensions, identity politics, and calls to dramatically alter government and social systems (“defund the police,” for example, would be out).…

I have tons of different “extra-curricular” projects right now, mostly for my job, but also to satisfy my own desire to build, develop, and share. I have systems projects, programming projects, presentations, and a white paper to write. This is on top of my normal job and home life, and my desire to read a book or play Metroid Dread sometimes, too. I have started to break down each project into discrete tasks, and plan for only the next couple.…

Tonight I started preparing a slide deck for a presentation on the topic of InsurTech that I, and a couple coworkers, will present online next month. I presented on InsurTech several times before, dating all the way back to 2017. This time is different, however, because I have leveled up my presentation skills. I am excited to get the chance to present again, and am embracing the opportunity to find something new to say about technology, insurance, and investments.…

It’s my birthday today. My in-laws bought me dinner and my wife baked and decorated a delicious birthday cake for me (her best one yet, I think). I am now in a post-cake coma, and will be taking the rest of the night off.…

A few weeks ago, prompted by a flare-up or RSI pain in my wrists and forearms, I moved my keyboard and trackball from my desk (which is a corner desk that is apparently too high for me) to a siding drawer beneath my desktop. Now I have to sit almost a foot further away from where the monitor was, which necessitated moving my monitor forward almost to the edge of my desk.…

My wife and I have been watching Sex Education season three. True to its title, the show actually does weave sex education into its stories and strives to impart sensible information to its audience. In one of the episodes, a trans student acts completely confused about which of the two sex–specific (boys and girls) sex education classes that the school’s new, conservative principal set up that they should attend. Because the trans character is new to the show, this scene seemed like a zeitgeisty political statement that the show’s writers crammed in, rather than a story beat that grew organically out of the characters and themes of the show.…

One of the more memorable books I read in college was assigned to me in comparative literature class: Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly. It is an exploration of human folly, written during the Renaissance by Erasmus, who was a philosopher and theologian, as an elaborate inside joke for his friend, Sir Thomas More. Folly is personified as a particularly vain goddess who praises herself (which is itself folly) for all of the great joys and accidental discoveries that folly brings to our lives.…

I have been practicing typing on Colemak-DH on my Planck keyboard regularly all week, after a two week hiatus. Keybr still has not enabled more than the initial six letters in its typing practice. It assesses my confidence on each key, and it still is not high enough for me to move on to the next letter. It is slow going, even though I have memorized the layout 95% at this point.…

I never knew there was an ISO standard for numbering document sections. I kind of love it and kind of hate it. I am the sort of person who developed a deep preference for the ISO 8601 date format, so it may be inevitable that I end up adopting it.…

🎮 Metroid Dread is really fun. I spent a couple hours on it last night. It is really fun. It is weird not having the morph ball right from the start, though, and you pretty much have to figure out wall jumping is possible on your own.

My copy of Metroid Dread was just delivered. I am so excited to play it, but I’m not sure when I’ll get to start. I’ve got to help out the kids to bed and plan to watch the season finale of Ted Lasso tonight as well. In anticipation for the new game, over the past few weeks, I played through about most of Metroid and Super Metroid to get back into playing shape for it.…

One of my favorite subreddit names is “a boring dystopia”. It is certainly not one of my favorite subreddits to browse—it is too depressing for that honor—but its name perfectly catches the zeitgeist. So many bad things happening right now are so dreadfully mundane that we don’t even want to think about them. One aspect of our boring dystopia lately has been the failure of global supply chains to keep up with demand.…

After hours of struggle last night on an automation project I am doing for work, I had a breakthrough today. I feel good about the project for the first tome in months. In my experience, robotic process automation (RPA) cannot be coded in the same way as, say, VBA to manipulate data. I am very good at coding in VBA, even though it is my least favorite programming language. VBA was built for traditional programmers like me.…

This morning, I just had to click on a news story about somebody’s kid who tragically died of COVID. This evening I just had to listen to a podcast about the Supreme Court’s capricious behavior and what lies ahead in its term. These things didn’t teach me anything, or give me any insights I didn’t already had. Instead they leached me of energy. Now, when I read an article or listen to a podcast that I know, going in will make me upset, or sad, or depressed, and inevitably does make me upset, or sad, or depressed, I find myself asking myself, automatically, “Why did I let that in?…

My daughter learned about slavery and the Civil War today in school. We talked about both—mostly slavery—over dinner. Needless to say, it was a heavy conversation—the first of many about race, racism, and the cracks in the foundation of our country. My daughter was, rightly, very shaken up about what we told her. It made me think of when I first learned about slavery in detail, when I was in high school.…

Don’t mistake domain-specific knowledge for intellect.

While you’re at it, don’t compare yourself to other people.

Today, to thank my in-laws for all the help they give to my family (which is a lot), I cooked them a nice dinner—chili and cornbread, which they love—and my daughter wrote them a thank-you note for the various nice things they do for her. I am trying to teach my children to express gratitude. I’m not sure that part was completely successful, but we all had a great time.…

I have two seemingly conflicting ideas in my mind right now: You are what you do. You are not your job. You are what you do. Annie Dillard wrote, “how you spend your days is how you spend your lives.” That thought has guided me since I read that, in an A.P. English class my senior year of high school. Action defines who you really are, but I have learned that it does not always inform who you think you are.…

Today I listened to a lecture that Stephen Fry gave to Nokia Bell Labs a few years ago. He told stories about Pandora’s Box, about the invention of chess, about how doubling grains of rice on each square of a chessboard will eventually lead to counts of rice grains larger than the number of atoms in the known universe, about the founding of Intel, and so on. Stephen Fry’s stories were old, familiar, and, many of them, not literally true—but he connected them together to his ideas about technology and its effect on humanity in ways that were central to his thesis.…

One reason I decided to publish something (even something short, as long as it is creative) to a blog every day was to help me get over the perfectionism that has limited my creative output so much over the years. I don’t publish because my writing or even my thoughts are “done”. I publish because it is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. That’s what I do. I do this every day.…

Every year, when the air starts to get chilly, I flash back to this sense memory: I am four years old, sitting atop a hay bale in front of a farm stand with my kindergarten class, drinking apple cider and eating a white powdered donut. I can still taste the apple cider—sharp, sweet, with a distinctive bite because, as I would later figure out, it was turning hard. I can still see the bright white of the sugar on the donut and smell the hay that scratched my skin when I kicked my legs over the side of the bale.…

I have two collections that I love but cannot justify: high-end headphones (each is sub-$500, but still really expensive and good) and mechanical keyboards (each is $240 or less). It took ten years to build up these collections, so the embarrassing amount of money I have spent is spread out over a long, long period. I was wondering today if people who spend a lot more than I do on vacations do so because they forego (and don’t care about) material objects like pricy headphones and keyboards.…

⌨️ I got back to practicing Colemak-DH typing this evening. I am still not great at it, but I didn’t lose a step during my break from it, either.

I have worked from home for more than half of my career. I’m no stranger to working in an office, but I find myself wondering what people actually do at work all day. I always imagine that my coworkers are more focused on their tasks than I am, or more driven to earn a promotion, or more highly structured in their approach to managing their work than I am. I’m pretty sure, though, that that can’t be, because no one I have ever worked with in person was much more focused that I was, with the exception of one or two workaholic bosses I’ve had.…

I am nearing 2,000 posts on my micro.blog, which is about 1,950 more posts than I have made on any other blog I started in the past. Do any micro.bloggers know how I could generate any stats, like word count, about my blog?

I have been fascinated by this anonymously published paper/series of articles about the obesity epidemic. Part I, covering mysteries about obesity that I did and did not know about, drew me in. The authors’ thesis, which isn’t presented until Part III, is that chemical contaminants are the primary cause of the epidemic (not why individuals gain weight, but why obesity in entire populations increased dramatically since 1980). I’m not sure I buy that, but it is an interesting argument to consider that I had not previously given any weight to.…

Today I did too many chores, then did way too little of anything, and ended up eating too much ice cream this evening. I should give myself a break because our plans for today were canceled at the last minute. Still, I wish I could wake up on the weekend and just have fun, or at the very least take up the unstructured time I sometimes have on a Saturday or Sunday and do something productive with it.…

I have temporarily stopped practicing on, or changing to, the ColeMak-DH keyboard layout. I haven’t been using my new Planck-EZ keyboard at all. I am still too slow with that layout to use it for “real” writing, and I have been writing and writing and writing for the past couple weeks. I think I am still very excited about moving to the Planck and to a non-QWERTY layout. But I am more excited about my writing projects right now.…

Yesterday at work I was asked to give a status update on my team’s status call, which is a Webex. I decided to create a slideshow and make a good presentation out of it. I have decided to take every opportunity, even the little ones, to improve my presentation skills.

I played too much Scott Pilgrim vs. the World this week, and have been rewarded with wrist pain in my left hand. I should have known I was overdoing it because my typing became more and more inaccurate as the week progressed.

The tree service my wife and I hired accidentally severed the internet connection cable outside my house. Did I mention that I work from home and my kid has Google Classroom-based homework?

On a whim this weekend I purchased the beat ‘em up game Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World for the Nintendo Switch. It was an impulse purchase of a game I had not heard of and didn’t know was any good. I have been wanting to play a brawler for a while, but it is a genre I have not played since I was a kid, so I was not sure I would still enjoy it.…

I have been busily writing a bunch of stuff for other people this week. First there were work papers for my day job. Yesterday and today I wrote three long product reviews for Amazon. Since late last week (and for hours last night) I have drafting a white paper that covers a topic at work that I am an expert in—that’s going to be a rather long project. I was just drafted into a presentation team on Friday, and I spent last evening brainstorming and I spent this evening writing an 800-word outline for it.…

Two of my wife’s students went home today because they came to school with COVID. We’re doing great. 😅

“He who buys what he does not need steals from himself."—Swedish proverb.

I characterize the mindset of American conservatives—specifically the ones who are blasé or antipathetic toward anti-COVID measures such as vaccines and face-masks—thusly: Bad things happen to other people. That is, until they happen to me. Oddly enough, that is also my progressive-but-not-lunatic-fringe-liberal mindset. I figure that it is more healthy to assume I will probably be all right, given the precautions I take, rather than to expect the worst and be anxious about it all the time.…

I have been emotionally exhausted from all the deep conversations I’ve been having with my daughter this weekend—mostly on account of dealing with bad behavior rather than with her wanting to sit and learn at her father’s knee. I am not upset about these talks—I think I am good at this stuff, and firmly believe that it is my responsibility as a parent to shape my children into good, well-adjusted people—but it does take a lot of energy out of me by the end of the day.…

On Thursday I embarked on an ambitious project related to my job. I am writing a white paper based on the presentation I wrote earlier this year, with the goal to publish it—or articles based on it—in an industry journal. It’s about how to do a certain type of project that I specialize in at work. That’s a topic I know a lot about, but have lacked the confidence to understand that it really is something valuable.…

📺 I, for one, thought that yesterday’s divisive Coach Beard dark-night-of-the-soul episode of Ted Lasso was great. It wasn’t perfect, but I admired its ambition and loved every minute of it.

Viewing this wonderful lecture on the importance of a classical education made me wonder if I had, or did not have, a classical education. I read a lot of great works, struggled a lot with deep reading, philosophy, and trying to understand the human condition, but I have many, many gaps in my reading and education, too. Reading Ulysses for the first time lately has truly impressed these shortcomings on me.…

Move slow and fix things.

Grace is accepting others’ limitations. Humility is accepting your own.

I think all the products Apple announced this week are great. I am tired of hearing that some people are disappointed that they are only incremental improvements on the previous models, or that Apple isn’t exciting anymore. That’s true of every product that isn’t a new invention. And how exciting could the umpteenth smartphone be? The steady ratchet of incremental improvement is one of humankind’s greatest achievements. The entire modern world is built on it.…

I have been working at a more measured pace to increase accuracy at work. Hope no one notices in a bad way that I am spending more time on some tasks, because I am double-checking more thoroughly than before.

Wisdom is neither quickness nor intellect. It is seeing the world how it really is.

According to the superintendent of schools, some parents in my town are sending their children to school wearing “fake” masks that superficially satisfy mask wearing requirements while being completely ineffectual. These masks do not protect the wearer or anybody else from COVID or any other type of disease. They are specifically designed to be as flimsy as possible; some are even see-through. It’s a product for people who want to be assholes, pretend that COVID is not real, and thumb their noses at responsible people.…

My daughter has been in school three days so far this school year. Every school day, our entire community has received an email from the superintendent of schools stating that there are new COVID cases affecting students and staff at all, or almost all, of the schools in the district. This is from today’s email: As stated previously, I realize that our school community has varying viewpoints on COVID-19 and specifically on mask protocols.…

I can’t clean my office because I’m too busy to do anything with it all day, even though I am working in there, and at the end of the day I don’t want to be in there anymore. I have been thinking that I should break up the mess into chunks, box part of it each day, and organize the box while I watch TV. The problem is, I don’t really watch TV much anymore.…

On Saturday, my nine-year-old daughter hosted a pasta party for the family that she had been planning for weeks. She created invitations that listed a schedule full of activities. She also created a menu of four different types of pasta (spaghetti, ziti, farfalle, and elbows), homemade meatballs, homemade bread, and for dessert, chocolate pudding and homemade shortbread. My wife, my mother-in-law, and I cooked. During the party, my daughter led us through telescope painting and decorating (the telescopes were paper towel rolls) and a pasta parade (we walked around the block while my kids held toy pots).…

I got my first job when I was sixteen. I was a dishwasher at a restaurant for about half of summer. Soon after I started, my mom wanted me to tell my grandfather about my new job. She was proud of me for getting a job, even though it was a job with low status and poor pay. My grandfather had worked as a short order cook and a baker for most of his life, so he was well-versed in working in a kitchen.…

I have just started to use my new Planck keyboard for work for a short, short time each day. It has been rough going so far. I expected to have trouble typing in Colemak-DH because I just started learning that layout. I did not expect to have as much trouble with chording keyboard shortcuts. The problems I am facing are making me doubt whether I really can use a 40% keyboard for work, where it would give me the most benefit.…

One challenge with the Planck that I did not anticipate is that I have trouble hitting the (little) left shift key, and I miss having a right shift key (the Planck has none). It is especially surprising to me because I rarely used the right shift key before I made it a goal last year to use right-shift all the time, rather than stretch my left pinky crazy distances. I think one reason left-shift is more difficult to hit is that the Colemak-DH layout keeps my fingers on the home row all the time.…

I have been typing more and more each day with the Colemak-DH layout on my new Planck keyboard. I basically know where all the keys are, but my typing is laborious and slow. I have to think very hard to type every word. At my best right now, I make a plan for the word I will type next, then try to execute that plan without making too many errors. At worst, I look down at the keyboard and hunt and peck.…

Tomorrow is my daughter’s first day of school—in-person school—since March 2020. Thinking about the sleep schedule changes this will require for all of us has been nerve-wracking all day. Remote learning and remote work have, for the last year and a half, given all of us in my family an extra hour of sleep every night. Because my daughter and I are all night owls, it will be impossible for us to make up the lost sleep.…

We are all replaceable. That is written into our biology. Our social and economic structures reflect it, too. We are all unique. A human life is irreplaceable. But a human is replaceable.…

You don’t have to be smart to be right. Just because you are smart doesn’t mean you’re right.…

L’Shana tova for all those who celebrate. Let’s hope for a better year ahead.…

When I was in business school, back in the early aughts, I did a team presentation project on the topic of the male/female wage gap. To this day, I am embarrassed at my work on this project. I was young, hard-working, and idealistic, but I was unknowingly naive to the world and think I got it all wrong. At the time, I worked at an insurance company, and there was a huge number of women in the departments I worked with at manager and director levels.…

In the 1990s, the old guard of educators—mainly white men like Harold Bloom—decried the decline and of the Western canon. In general, the Harold Blooms of the world lost that argument. High school reading lists today are far more diverse and are—as my high school English teachers feared—diluted in quality. The classics have been pared back, to make way for new ideas and more diverse voices. Case in point: my wife is teaching The Hunger Games to high school juniors this school year.…

After getting very upset at our daughter’s elementary school’s plan for lax COVID safety protocols announced during a webinar last night, she woke up at 4 AM this morning and wrote impassioned emails to the superintendent of schools, the school board, and the principal. She emailed and talked to other teachers at the school, our rabbi, our pediatrician, and her doctor friend to ask for advice. She and I seriously talked about disenrolling our daughter and home schooling her.…

I didn’t get everything I wanted to do done this week. I’m OK with that. Life intervened. Stressful things came and went. I did right by my family each day. That has to be the most important thing. It’s time for a holiday weekend and then Rosh Hashanah. Onward.

I am trying a new keyboard layout, Colemak DH, and have switched around keys and reprogrammed the Planck EZ to enable it. Colemak is proving easier now that I can look at the key legends for the correct letter.

My daughter’s elementary school will not require masks if the outside temperature is 75°F or over. They said that means masks will effectively not be worn on classrooms for the entire month of September, and probably through October as well. In general, the COVID measures are based on outdated conjectures about how the disease is spread, and will be ineffective against an airborne pathogen. My wife wants to pull our daughter out of school.…

Vulnerability is a new ideal masculine trait. Being open, honest about, and comfortable with your flaws is nontraditional, unexpected, and disarming. But that isn’t vulnerability. It’s invulnerability. You need to be tremendously self-assured to take social risks and not be flummoxed if things do not go your way.…

When I was in college, I longed not to be learned but to be wise. I was learning rapidly, and soaking up new ideas all the time. I was making connections between all sorts of different systems of thought and culture. I thought I had human nature all figured out. I was, however, wise enough at the time to know that I would be foolish to consider myself wise. That paradox never really resolves itself.…

I can write. I always could. In high school, I wrote cogently and forcefully, like someone who read the up-Ed pages of two newspapers every day. Unlike most of my peers I had figured out how to revise and shape text—how to edit out hedging and weasel words and unfinished thoughts. Essay structure and organization fascinated me. In college I wrote passionately with explosive figurative language. I wrote and put on a play: a farce poking fun a dorm life at my school.…

My caffeine experiment is almost at its end. For the past week, I have only drunk decaffeinated coffee. One funny thing I noticed is that decaf coffee is not nearly as disappointing when you are no longer addicted to caffeine. My caffeine free (or almost free) lifestyle thus far has left me with no downsides: my energy level is just fine all day. I am not tired at all during work hours, and I no longer desperately crave an afternoon coffee each day.…

Today I started flashing custom layouts to my new Planck EZ keyboard. It runs QMK firmware, but the manufacturer has tools call Oryx and Wally that make customizing and flashing simple. On a software level, it is the best keyboard I have ever used. On a hardware level, it is solid, too, but I am not used to the ortholinear layout yet or the layers system. Typing with my left hand, especially the letters C and X, is a little problematic for me, because the Planck requires the use of different fingers than what I use for those keys on staggered layouts.…

I always used to dread meeting new people. They always asked “what do you do?” And what I do (for work, naturally) has mostly been nebulous and boring and unglamorous. When I worked in corporate systems, I was too young to be an interesting (read: rich) tech nerd. When I worked in management consulting, no one really knew what that meant, and neither did I. When I worked in internal audit, no one wanted to hear about it.…

📺 Ted Lasso Season 2 Isn’t In A Slump, It’s Headed For A Breakdown: This is a great analysis of what’s going on with the tonal shift in Ted Lasso season 2.

We stayed at the beach until it got dark tonight, which was a first for us. We like to go at dinner time and stay until dusk. It is quieter and cooler then. Sunset was pretty, if a bit subdued compared to the last couple times we have gone. This time, I brought my camera, though.

Work has become stressful again. I don’t have enough time to do everything I have to do—not just work, but taking care of my family and house, too. I’m taking my wife and kids to the beach tonight to just hang out, which is wildly irresponsible, but may be the thing I need to clear my head.

I have started to learn the Colemak keyboard layout on my new ortholinear keyboard. Colemak is a modern keyboard layout designed to reduce finger travel (and overall hand movement around the keyboard), while preserving the position of some keys that are vital for chording with the Command or Control keys: C, V, X, and Z. It has been brutally slow going. I have been a touch typer on normal, staggered QWERTY keyboards for over 30 years.…

A COVID vaccine for under-12 kids cannot come soon enough. It looks like Pfizer is a few months ahead of Moderna on this front, but it has been a frustratingly long wait. The Delta variant, which seems to be more virulent in children than o.g. COVID, has made me quite anxious.

My birthday present arrived a couple months early: a Planck EZ 40% ortholinear keyboard. Please excuse me for a while: I need to relearn how to type. 😅

In college, I studied literature. What I learned about literature is that history, religion, and general knowledge are all wrapped up in narrative. So are our memories. We are the story we tell ourselves, as individuals, as nations, as peoples. Narrative is memory, and sometimes the narrator is an untrustworthy one. I learned a lot about literature there, but I missed the important lesson: Why do we study literature? To learn empathy.…

When I was in high school, I was a guitar teacher. I was probably a terrible guitar teacher, but it wasn’t a job I wanted, it was a job I kind of couldn’t get out of. I had only one student, the son of a very nice teacher at my high school. After school in the drafting classroom, my student and I would listen to music he liked and try to transcribe it and learn how to play it.…

To err is human. To forgive, divine. But to have a good chance to detect and correct mistakes, you need controls. That’s what I have learned in my audit career. A control helps you understand if a transaction or business process completed completely, correctly, and timely. It is designed to answer the auditor’s most probing question: “How do you know?” The term itself is jargon, and isn’t widely understood outside of accounting, finance, audit, and compliance circles—unless you are pulled into an audit of some kind as a subject matter expert.…

After over twenty years as a coffee drinker, I am now the owner of a drip coffee maker for the first time. Its make and model are nothing special, and it doesn’t actually brew better coffee than my AeroPress or French Press or Chemex ever did. In fact, the coffee it produces (with far less manual effort) is actually a little worse. Strangely enough, that is the whole point. I want coffee to be less enticing to me, because I am trying to wean myself off caffeine and maybe even cut coffee out of my diet entirely.…

Last night I told my wife I was going to go entirely to decaffeinated coffee starting today. After one look from her, I chickened out, and revised my goal to “quarter decaf”: half decaf in the morning, and full decaf in the afternoon. I still plan to eliminate (almost all) caffeine from my diet, but I am not sure if I will just drink decaf coffee twice a day, to preserve my warm beverage habit, or if I will forego coffee altogether.…

Today I, along with a small team, gave the biggest presentation I’ve done in years: a webinar for my company’s clients. We did an outstanding job. Now that it is over, I feel relieved and exhausted. I spent several months earlier this year gearing up for this day. I decided early on to level up my presentation skills, which I thought were already very good. I took the learning process very seriously.…

I read James Joyce’s classic short story collection, Dubliners, while I was on my vacation. I read it as part of my presswork for tackling Ulysses, which I am slowly navigating now. I don’t normally enjoy short stories because they usually seem incomplete—cut off just before they got interesting. Short story collections are usually disjointed; I prefer collections that have common characters or plot threads that run through all the stories.…

Sometimes when I’m working, I want music playing, but I don’t really know what I want to listen to, and I don’t have the patience to think about it. In these situations, I have tried listening to classical music, jazz, and lo-fi (hip-hop/trip-hop, etc.). Over the past week, I gave Endel an honest try, too. While I enjoy classical music in a live setting, I don’t like listening to it in my headphones.…

Today is my first day back at work after my vacation. I have found that, now that I consume less caffeine, I am finding all of the catching up, surprises, and unexpected requests to be less stressful than in prior years. Let’s see how I feel (maybe tired?) later this afternoon and evening.

After thinking about it quite a bit (too much really) I ordered a 4-pack of Apple AirTags. I think it will be useful for my wife and I to have them on our keychains and in our go-bags, especially because we are spending more time away from home now. I look forward to kicking the Tile app off my phone.

My wife and I are unpacking and cleaning house after our time away from home. I always need this buffer day after a vacation to reset the house and, most importantly, the kitchen before I return to work. (I wouldn’t need a buffer day if we ever got back home before midnight. 😀)

My day will be all about packing and driving, and a visiting my mom for a little while, too.

I have been lowering my caffeine intake over the past month or so. While I don’t drink that much coffee, but I think that my two (strong) cups per day allotment is causing me some minor health problems. I am at the point where trying to quit (or at least drastically lower) caffeine consumption seems like a reasonable approach to try to improve things. In retrospect, it is embarrassing how long it has taken me to even consider lower caffeine intake as a possibility.…

I am at the point I my vacation where I am contemplating how I can be a better person after I return home.

I am not able to attend Micro.camp due to vacation travel-related reasons. I wish everyone the best. 😀

This afternoon at Burns Lake in Whitefield, New Hampshire.

Lake Winnipesaukee is a fun, low-key place. We spent an afternoon there with some old friends yesterday.

I’m driving to Lake Winnipesaukee today. We are going to see one of my wife’s college friends who we haven’t seen in years.

One of the lies I told myself when I packed for vacation is that I would spend more time writing and coding (for fun) each day. My MacBook has sat in a box in the closet, unused for all but one evening. I did not expect: My kids going to bed at 10:00 or 11:00 PM My RSI to make typing in the MacBook quite painful (at home I use an external keyboard exclusively these days) Me taking up reading through the prose of James Joyce (I recently started Ulysses, after reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners) and all sorts of related background material I am OK with this.…

Today’s activity was blueberry picking at a nearby farm. My kids really loved it. We have a ton of blueberries now, and plan to bake something yummy with them: a blueberry buckle, perhaps.

We found a new lunch spot today at Moore Resevoir, and had a conversation about the Connecticut River (the river I lived near my entire childhood) while we were there.

We spent the afternoon at Echo Lake in Franconia State Park. It is a great place for the kids to swim and play. They made sand castles, lakes, and swimming pools for their toys on the beach.

Here is a view of “our lake” in New Hampshire. We spent the afternoon there a couple days ago. The kids played in the sand and water, the adults chatted, and I took pictures. More recently we went on a couple short hikes and spent an afternoon at Santa’s Village, a theme park.

One frequent and inescapable sight on the rural roads of New Hampshire is the Trump campaign sign. In every town, there are Trump campaign signs flanking the ends of driveways. Huge Trump/Pence billboards are proudly hoisted over the signs for legitimate businesses, presumably by the owners themselves. Trump flags—and the occasional anti-Biden flag—hang limply from the front of houses; some of them are accompanied by the MAGA battle flag: the black-and-blue parody of the Stars and Stripes.…

My family’s plans for a picnic lunch and an afternoon of swimming at Echo Lake, in Franconia State Park, were cut short because tickets for the lake were sold out. Echo Lake is one of my family’s favorite spots in the White Mountains. The mountain views are beautiful and there is a large (artificial) sandy beach to sunbathe and play on. We went to the nearby Profile Lake instead, and ate our lunch at the Old Man of the Mountain viewing area.…

Today I drove the family to a tiny park in northern New Hampshire that consisted of a picnic area, a waterfall, and a couple of short trails. We ate a picnic lunch when we got there and then explored the place. We enjoyed experiencing the roar and spray of the falls and had multiple great vantage points to view it from. It was a great time.…

It’s day three of my vacation and my sleep schedule is already completely messed up. 😬

After a sunny, exciting day at the fair, today was overcast, cool, and low-key. We took the kids to a playground (with a view of a mountain) and to the bookstore/toy store in nearby Littleton, New Hampshire. The kids had great fun, but we had to cut our visit to down short due to rain. Ironically, for the warmest year on record, this has been the coldest stretch of days that I have ever been in the mountains.…

My family and I very much enjoyed the North Haverhill fair today. We had perfect weather, and I lucked out with the fair food (my wife and I shared the best fried Oreos I have had in years). My kids loved seeing the animals (one thing we saw was a goat obstacle course contest) and enjoyed the rides. I find that I enjoy fairs—especially the agricultural aspects—a lot more as an adult than I ever did as a kid.…

⌨️ Somebody please tell me I don’t need a $245 ortholinear 40% keyboard! 😱

My vacation starts today. My family is going to the North Haverhill fair in New Hampshire. We always have a fun time there. My daughter is mad for rides and I am looking forward to fried Oreos. The rest of the family gets ice cream (maple soft serve) there.

I read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man this week. I approached it in nearly the same way I approached books that I studied in college when I was an English major: I read some background about the book and where it fit into the literary cannon. I read it closely, and re-read parts that didn’t quite make sense at first. Lastly, after I finished the book, I read essays about it to make sure I didn’t miss too much of its meaning.…

Procrastination is just a fancy word for avoidance. Socially, it is acceptable to procrastinate. After all, everyone does it sometimes. This makes it easy to not even think about why you are procrastinating. Conversely, it is not normally acceptable to avoid something or someone. It smacks of cowardice, and almost no one wants to be considered a coward. Think about that when you know you are procrastinating on certain tasks. Ask yourself: What am I avoiding?…

Who here wouldn’t want to buy a “I’m really big on Micro.blog” T-shirt? 😀

My wife took this picture while I was working today. I missed a beautiful day at the lake. Fortunately I had a good day, too.

An exchange between myself and my wife, about someone else we know: Her: It’s hard to say no to her. Me: No it’s not. It’s two letters. One syllable. Simple. Done.…

I have given up on Reeder 5’s native RSS feed handling with sync via iCloud. I had expected my devices to keep in sync, and for Reeder to sync in the background rather than whenever I started it. I think I asked too much from it. I use three iOS devices each day, and Reeder was showing me stale content on all of them at various points each day. I suppose local device syncing of 75 feeds was a bit too much for it to handle quickly and smoothly.…

It’s a uniquely American thing, I have read, to work while on vacation. I have had to, as recently as last year. Some of my coworkers were reading, reviewing, and revising work papers and memos while on vacation last week. My vacation this year hasn’t technically started yet, but I am now in my family’s summer-vacation spot, my in-law’s lake house, primed to report in for remote work in the morning.…

I missed David Rothkopf’s article, “We Still Won’t Admit Why So Many People Believe the Big Lie” on The Daily Beast, when it was published a couple weeks ago. He asks why some people believe the “Big Lie” that Donald Trump really won the 2020 presidential election. His answer is an obvious but largely unspoken truth: …even the most modest amount of analysis and introspection will reveal that buying into the nonsense peddled by the former president and his clown college of cronies is not an aberration, not due to some momentary lapse on the part of the American electorate.…

I am neither surprised or disappointed by Apple’s impending pull of “iDOS 2” from the App Store. The whole point of buying Apple hardware has always been to buy into a unique ecosystem: the “walled garden.” While the Mac has never been locked down to Apple’s Mac App Store, the iPhone has always been locked down to its App Store. It’s easy to forget now, but the iPhone grew out of Apple’s prior consumer electronics smash hit, the iPod, which was was completely locked down.…

I like the new name of Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team. I think the team’s old name, the “Indians,” and especially its already retired Chief Wahoo logo, were problematic and absolutely needed to go. If you find the term “Indians” as applied to a ball club to be inoffensive, know that that merely means you are not among the ones who are offended by it. I am sure that, at best, a lot of negative stereotyping went into the choosing of that appellation.…

Tonight I learned my son has a LinkedIn profile. What’s more, he works for Microsoft.

My son is four years old.

🤯😁😅

My family is at the county fair this evening. It is a little hot but we are having a fun time. The kids love the rides.

I’m going to be driving most of the day tomorrow, so, via Ulysses, I’m scheduling tomorrow’s blog post to be published tomorrow. I am not sure if the post hits the Micro.blog timeline, though. If it did, I would probably use that feature more often.

Panic’s bright yellow pocket game system, the Playdate, looks cheerful and cute. I want one, plus the blocky stereo dock, just to put on my desk like other people place toys and figurines. Ars Technica published a review of the hardware and a preview of some of the games yesterday, which whet my interest. I don’t know if it is worth the money for me to have a geeky object d’art for my workspace, though.…

Elizabeth Nelson wrote the best, most accurate take on Ted Lasso (the character) that I have ever read: Unceasing optimism defines Ted Lasso. But roller-coaster mood storms, manic reveries, and seemingly deliberate head games also define Ted Lasso, the players’ coach, and make him one of the best and most-layered characters of the peak TV era. He’s a man who presents himself as two-dimensional, but who might actually be playing three-dimensional chess.…

If there is one thing I would like my kids to learn from me, it is that one of the greatest, most impactful human inventions of all time is the double-entry bookkeeping system for accounting. If my son or daughter ever throws that term out in class when a teacher is writing a list of inventions on the board, there may be some “ums” and blank stares in the classroom, but I would be very proud.…

When I was a kid writing essays for school, I always peppered my writing with big, fancy words in places that small, simple words would do. In part, I was showing off my big vocabulary to my teachers. For the most part, though, I was afraid to use the small, simple words because I thought of them as childish. I figured that small, simple words would make my writing seem small (as in insignificant) and simple (as in simplistic) as well.…

My new grill was delivered today, but it arrived damaged and I had to refuse it. No grilled hamburgers for me today, I guess. At least I noticed the dent and scuffs before the installers got far along with its setup. Hopefully a replacement will come before the end of the week.

I read this quote years ago in a novel called The Gargoyle that fundamentally changed my life: Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly. —Andrew Davidson Love is an emotion that does not meaningfully exist unless it is expressed through action. Actions are governed by choice. Thus, to act with love is a choice you have to make every day, many times a day. It doesn’t matter how you feel: love is what you do.…

You are the story you tell to yourself. Make it a good one.

Today we are going to a family birthday party, then restocking the fridge for a week’s worth of camp- and work lunches.

It is popular now to lionize failure. Both fictional stories (thematically) and nonfictional accounts (explicitly) praise failure as a stepladder to greatness. It makes sense. Failure is a great teacher. It teaches us what does not work. It teaches us what we need to do better, and what we need to work harder on. It teaches us what our limitations are, and prods us into further developing our strengths. While this is, in some way, timeless wisdom, the overt emphasis on it in the business book, personal productivity, and self-help space is relatively new.…

I think about education a lot, not only because I have kids, but also because my wife is a high school teacher, and I like to help her think up lessons. If I were a teacher, I would challenge my students to think really hard, to question what they have been told, and to go beyond the material and create new thoughts of their own based on what we discuss in class.…

The Steam Deck looks fantastic. It’s like a Nintendo Switch for Steam games. Considering I wrestled with a Windows laptop for 8 hours to get it ready to play Steam games just days ago— and had the whole thing fail, the very next day, to understand how to work with the very Xbox 360 controller I was using the day prior—I never want to bother with PC gaming again. It’s too fiddly and too expensive.…

I have been having a lot of trouble finding books that excite me lately. Over the past month, I read through the first Grishaverse novels trilogy (staring with Shadow and Bone) and found it only OK. (It could have been a single, much faster-moving novel, I think.) I started Leviathan Wakes, the first novel in The Expanse series, and couldn’t get into it. Most recently, I started Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse and, after reading a few chapters, concluded that it is not for me.…

I decided to upgrade my Windows laptop to Windows 11 yesterday. It was an awful slog, replete with many failed Windows Update attempts, permissions issues that prevented me from changing the necessary diagnostic data sharing settings, and even a hardware firmware update. I ended up having to “reset” Windows—which deleted all my apps, data, and settings—to move forward. However, hours later, once Windows had finally gotten all of its updates in, I had the opportunity to use Winget for the first time.…

I enjoyed reading Morgan Housel’s blog post on the Collaborate Fund blog. The ideas in the post are some that I want to explore in my blog, too. All these items are direct quotations from the post: The ability to create complex stories makes it easy to fool people, including yourself. What’s boring is often important and the smartest people are the least interested in what’s boring. Intelligence can make it difficult to communicate with ordinary people, who may have the missing insight you’re looking for.…

I have been an Apple Music subscriber from the service’s very first day. I was an iTunes Match subscriber before that. I have been pulling an enormous electronic library of albums and songs forward with me since I was a teenager. We’re talking about thousands of albums, dozens of playlists, and a lot of complications that have stuck around in my library since the CD days. Apple Music gobbled up all that music info and turned it into a frustrating mess for me.…

You Really Need to Quit Twitter

I saw this article by Caitlin Flanagan on Om Malik’s blog. It’s a fun read if, like me, you’ve been through the quitting Twitter part she goes through.

What you would prefer to do isn’t the same as what you would be willing to do. I think that distinction gets lost a lot if times in interpersonal relationships. If you ask for one and then ask for the other, don’t be surprised if the answer changes.…

The cake I made for my wife today came out tasty but a little messy. I am wildly inconsistent when it comes to frosting layer cakes. This one ended up with crumbs mixed in, and I didn’t have any frosting left over to put flowers on the top. The ganache and raspberry filling was great, though.

After ten years of service, my gas grill rusted out to such an extent that it is unusable. I thought I could get another couple months out of it, but, alas, part of it fell apart today. I ordered a new grill online right away. Fortunately, I won’t have to assemble or lift it.

Maggie Fox of CNN reports: Hours after Pfizer issued its statement, the FDA and Centers for Disease and Control issued a joint statement saying Americans do not need booster shots yet. “Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time,” they said. In a statement to CNN on Friday, the World Health Organization said, “We don’t know whether booster vaccines will be needed to maintain protection against COVID-19 until additional data is collected,” adding, “limited data available on how long the protection from current doses lasts and whether an additional booster dose would be beneficial and for whom.…

I learned about the app Transloader thanks to a MacStories article that popped up in my RSS feed today. Transloader lets you send a URL from any Mac or iOS device you have to your Mac, and the Mac will download it, send it to an app, or pass it or the downloaded file to an Automator workflow. Saving downloads to my NAS is something I have longed to do for ages.…

I have a bunch of half-finished blog posts lying around, but not enough time to spruce any of them up into something presentable.

When I was in fourth grade, my family moved to the town across the river. The move was not traumatic, but it was socially isolating. We had to move out of our old house three months before our new house was finished being built. We ended up as the only tenants in an apartment complex across town from where we used to live. For the fall, I went to my old elementary school and saw my old neighborhood friends and familiar classmates during the day, but I saw no one my age outside of school during the week or on weekends.…

Life experience has a definite shape to it. Time isn’t a straight line. It’s a funnel. Well, really, it’s an hourglass. The future is infinite. The past is infinite. The present, however, is really, really small. Right now is the ultimate pinch point. You can only do so much. You have a tiny amount of time. You have a finite amount of attention. Now is the time. Now is your time.…

I find myself thinking this, on the fifth of July, after enduring with fusillade after fusillade of illegal fireworks, and thrum of dance music blaring from several neighbors’ backyard parties, and the thump, thump, thump of basslines permeating every barrier between them and my family until almost midnight last night. (Let’s just say my kids don’t sleep on July 4th.) What does America mean to me? It is a promise to do better, to try harder, to fight for justice and freedom, and to stand up again after being knocked down.…

When the Micro.blog client apps were open-sourced, I reviewed the Github repos for the two I use most (the iOS app and the macOS app). I wondered if I could contribute something to the projects—probably something small, like more hardware keyboard shortcuts or an enhancement to how the post editor works. I wasn’t sure if that would be welcome, based on the brief “About the open source project…” verbiage in the REAMDE, and based on (1) the very old, but open, issues in the iOS repo, and (2) seeing no issues in the macOS repo.…

On Thursday I configured NextDNS to block (for my personal devices only) news.google.com. Google News has been my Internet obsession since it debuted in 2002. It is not a healthy one. Whenever my mind gets lost for a second, I find myself opening a browser tab and checking Google News to see…what’s new, I guess. Sometimes I close Google News out of disgust or boredom and then, almost immediately, open it up again.…

Some of my neighbors appear to have town-sized budgets for their Independence Day fireworks displays.

This week @manton open-sourced the iOS and macOS Micro.blog apps. I think that is a great move in general, but it is not one of the things I require in the software I use. I never felt that comfortable when, a while ago now, I read users’ blog posts expressing anger or dismay that the client apps were not open-sourced. (Let’s put aside, for now, that what makes Micro.blog work is the server-side code.…

My carpal tunnel flared up so much today that I won’t be writing a proper blog post. 😕

I often joke with people that I am not as nice as my wife is. It’s a self-deprecating remark, but I do mean it. I am a nice person, just not as nice as my wife is. I’m not as nice because I was bullied for most of my childhood. I never got beaten up (though I did get into fights), and I was never afraid to go to school (though it was a gauntlet and a crucible), but I was picked on mercilessly, incessantly, and for everything—my name, my weight, my glasses, and most of all for being smart.…

I have recently finished crafting a slideshow, and writing a talk to go with it, that is the best one I have ever done, probably by a mile. I spent hundreds of hours this year watching talks on YouTube (both good and bad ones), watching instructional videos on speaking and on creating effective visual presentations, and trying new slide design techniques (and throwing out all the things I tried that didn’t work).…

One of the difficulties my family has had due to the pandemic is finding a suitable summer camp experience for my nine-year-old daughter. She loves camp, and there was no camp last year. This summer, we opted for what we thought was the safest camp option: a drama camp that promised to be outside only (under tents and such) or virtual if the weather was bad (presumably, if it rained).…

I keep eyeing the AirPods Max listing on Amazon. The price is dropping below $500 now. They don’t seem perfect and I only tried them for a second but the noise cancellation puts the NC in my Beoplay H9 to shame.

I cleaned out my closet today, which is both exhilarating and depressing. So many clothes to get rid of! So many things held onto for too long. Now I have empty shelves and drawers and nothing to refill them with. May it stay that way, at least until I get an office job again.

We visited the beach tonight and really enjoyed it. Sunset is my favorite time there.

My work week has overflowed with head-desk moments, turnarounds, and setbacks. It has been frustrating beyond belief. It’s not often that I experience big parts of my work projects blowing up in my face, especially for unexpected reasons. Fortunately, all the problems I am facing are technology-related, not interpersonal, and can, I think, be solved by doing something I, by nature, kind of hate doing: asking for help. I am trying to change my mindset from “I can’t do this anymore” to “I can do this.…

My wife teaches speech, debate, and dramatic arts to high school students. I love it when she asks me to help her with her lesson plans, because it gives me the chance to take a subject that she has to teach, however uninteresting it may seem (especially if you’ve taught it for 10+ years in a row), and blow it up into something that is the foundation of everything. Here’s an exchange we had this spring:…

“Real artists ship.” Steve Jobs said that to motivate the Macintosh team in 1983. It’s a statement that reverberates in my mind and absolutely drives me crazy sometimes. Why? Because I have tons of code that I haven’t shipped. Hell, some of my best code hasn’t shipped. At some point, I lost my nerve. I couldn’t finish the projects I started. I couldn’t make a small change to a UI because it would inevitably spiral out into something that would require a rewrite of the entire app.…

I just had to reboot my iPad due to some wonkiness. I wonder when iOS/iPadOS 15 developer beta 2 will drop. I think we just passed over the historical median age of an iOS beta 1.

📺 My wife and I watched the first episode of Hacks tonight and thought it was a hoot. The writing is outrageous, the characters have no filter, and Jean Smart is a treasure.

🎧 I turned on the crazy hi-res audio settings on my Mac tonight. I want to justify why I have an expensive DAC. 😀

I write a lot of email at work. Almost every one I write starts with “Hi, <name>.” It seems perfectly normal, until you realize that every email client already includes that in the “To” field above the body of the message. The reader knows her own name, and it is written on the screen in the “To” field next to her email address. Why do I write it again in the body of the email?…

I picked up a Product (RED) Apple Watch 6 at Best Buy for my wife for a great price. Her Apple Watch 3 broke a couple weeks ago, and I ordered her an Apple Watch SE with a red band from Apple. It wasn’t supposed to be delivered until late July, which meant I was able to cancel it and pick up the Apple Watch 6 for her, tonight, for the same price as the Apple Watch SE, thanks to the insane Prime Days sale that other companies glom onto, too.…

Ted Lasso season 2 has unexpectedly huge shoes to fill. I have not been heartened by either of the two previews, which I think are veering too far into the cute end of the show’s tone. I loved the first season, and hope they can keep what make season 1 so engaging keep going. It wasn’t the cuteness of Ted’s cheery attitude. It was the overcoming of cynicism in everybody else that made it interesting.…

One of the best lessons that literature has taught me is that the bad guy thinks he’s the good guy. In more abstract terms, the villain thinks she is the hero of her own story. That is what drives villains, and that is what makes them dangerous. Sometimes, as in real life, the villain may in fact be the hero of his own story, because the story as we know it isn’t over, and it isn’t about what we thought it was about.…

I think this is the best Father’s Day I have ever had. I think the work I put into being a better dad has been paying off. I’m a little misty-eyed right now. 😀

As of right now, I am very glad that, twelve months ago, I bought the extra temples for my daughter’s eyeglasses. 😮‍💨

I don’t think my Father’s Day post made it to the M.B. timeline for some reason. Here it is.

I am teaching my daughter how to solve problems. Math problems. I find or think up challenging math problems for her (she is a third grader), and, to make them more fun, I rewrite them to include mention of her friends and family, favorite characters, and favorite things. We work through them together before bedtime. It’s fun, and we both get a lot out of it. I always close our math session by asking her a question.…

I already know that one of my Father’s Day presents is a nice warm L.L. Bean blanket. It’s not because I’m old and need a nap. It’s for watching TV at night in the summer. To keep our upstairs anywhere near comfortable for sleeping, our central air has to work very hard. This makes our TV room, which is one of the lowest rooms in the house, absolutely freezing. My house has central air but we also have room air conditioners in two of the upstairs bedrooms because the central air is not enough to cool them.…

It looks like someone stole my credit card info again. Fortunately, I was able to lock the account online to prevent more transactions. Unfortunately, the credit card company’s fraud center closed before the time stated on their website, and I couldn’t talk to anyone last night about what transactions I need to dispute. What kind of huge credit card company doesn’t have a call center running 24/7?

Seth Godin says that everyone should have a blog. Moreover, everyone who has a blog should blog daily, primarily because it reinforces the idea that the important thing about it is to show up, every day, day after day, and actually do it. Well, this is showing up. I’m here. I’m thinking about how I can be better at everything I do. I’m trying to build myself up, brick by brick, after whatever the heck happened to me during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

I hit a technical snag at work that is absolutely killing me right now. The first step in fixing it, I think, is to uninstall Microsoft Office 365. If only that were the last step, too!

Last night I became unreasonably upset that UIKit does not let me use an inline date picker (the date picker control that looks like a calendar) as an input view (i.e., in place of the software keyboard on the iPhone). There is some kind of maximum height of the input view/keyboard area, and the top of the date picker gets truncated. I tried a lot of ways to make it work, but I guess I’ll have to wrap it in a popover and have some “special cases” code paths in my view controller to make it work.…

One of my heart’s dull aches is my memory of driving up the Maine coastline with my parents every year in my childhood. I did not always appreciate those trips back then, but they are etched into my mind indelibly. I just have to think about it and I can feel the cool breeze in my face, smell the salt air, and see the black rocks at the edge of the water and the glint of sun off the waves. I long to go back someday.

Nicole Perlroth, Erin Griffith and Katie Benner report, in The New York Times, on how the Justice Department traced and recouped a huge ransomware payment: Bitcoin is also traceable. While the digital currency can be created, moved and stored outside the purview of any government or financial institution, each payment is recorded in a permanent fixed ledger, called the blockchain. That means all Bitcoin transactions are out in the open.…

I wish I could be more methodical at work, but my stupid, whimsical mood is hard to overcome. I get things done, but not always in the orderly way I had hoped.

We are going (in person) to a (real) birthday party today, for the first time in…oh, never mind. Anyway, my daughter is jumping up and down in excitement, and that’s what is important. 😀🎂

I’m installing the Xcode 13 beta on my new Mac mini and I’m installing iOS 15 developer beta 1 on my old iPad Pro. I will probably install iOS 15 on my old iPhone 7 Plus later this weekend. Because I upgraded hardware this year, I actually have old devices kicking around for pretty much the first time ever. All it took was spending a ton of money!

🎬 My wife and I had only time enough to watch the opening number in In the Heights so far. We absolutely loved it and can’t wait to watch more tonight.

This is turning out to be a terrible year for Apple device spending for my family. I had to buy my wife a replacement Apple Watch yesterday because the screen stopped working on her Series 3 and it is out of warranty. It is the fifth Apple device I have purchased this year. 💸

I had forgotten that Apple said Siri will operate on-device starting in iOS 15. Tom’s Guide says it is a killer feature. My biggest problem with Siri is the “Siri is not available” messages I get a lot of the time. Maybe that problem will go away for me.

🎬 I can’t get enough articles about the In the Heights movie. Vulture has a fascinating one about how the “96,000” pool scene was filmed.

I have been following stories about aphantasia with interest because I am 99% sure I have it. Carl Zimmer reports in The New York Times: Dr. Adam Zeman didn’t give much thought to the mind’s eye until he met someone who didn’t have one. In 2005, the British neurologist saw a patient who said that a minor surgical procedure had taken away his ability to conjure images. Over the 16 years since that first patient, Dr.…

📺 I am looking forward to watching Loki tonight or later this week. Truth be told, it is the Disney+ Marvel series I have been least looking forward to, but I am bored with TV right now, and think it will be fun.

I have been listening to Apple Music’s “Made for Spatial Audio” tracks all morning with my external DAC and my closed-back planar magnetic headphones. So far, I have decided that I prefer the lossless stereo mixes to the Dolby Atmos mixes. I guess I prefer a narrower soundstage.

I am appreciating the lossless tracks on Apple Music. I probably don’t have the ears to actually hear the difference anymore. But my equipment is good enough to make use of the extra bits, I am listening more closely than usual, and I am enjoying it.

I discovered today that Windows 10 lets you change your mouse cursor’s color as well as its size. You have been able to change the mouse cursor set to a different one since Windows 3, I think, which would allow you to switch the color in a different, less flexible way. This feature is different. I now have a slightly larger, bright-yellow-with-black-outline mouse cursor on my huge 4K monitor. It is much easier to spot when I am returning to my desk after a break.…

My region’s climate has changed significantly in my lifetime, and, seemingly to me, more quickly than before in the past ten years. It is dismaying. Here are some of my observations of it from this week: It has been over 90ºF every day since late last week, and it is only early June. Ninety degrees is not just hot for June here: it is hot for summer. My daughter’s elementary school has two early release days in a row this week, due to excessive heat.…

Oh, cool: Apple Music’s lossless audio quality tier is now live. Check out iOS Settings > Music to turn it on.

Huh. No new hardware was announced at WWDC. I can’t wait to hear hot takes about that all this week and next on my nerd podcasts.

I’m looking forward to watching WWDC while thinking about the last virtual conference I attended, last week.

🎬 My daughter and I watched Raya and the Last Dragon this afternoon, partly because it is too hot to play outside. We really liked it.

🎬 I rewatched Wall-E today with my daughter and enjoyed it even more than the first time I saw it.

I have one hour to work on important stuff right now, and here I am, looking at my Micro.blog timeline instead. 🤦‍♂️

It’s my third day of attending a virtual conference. I have seen too many presentations in a row, and consequently my mind is now a blur. My biggest takeaway is that presenters often lack focus, which causes them to run out of time before they get to the most critical points.

I am feeling much better about the slide deck I am creating for a data calls talk that I and my team will present this summer. I soaked up presentation after presentation for the past month, and put a lot of it into practice today without even having to think about it.

We had a one-second power outage in my neighborhood two nights in a row, after 11:00 PM. I can’t figure out why.

I have been attending a virtual conference most of the day today. Technically, today is the pre-conference training workshop/training day. So far, it is pretty good and I am learning something.

I am sympathetic to Naomi Osaka’s mental health-based arguments for skipping press events during the French Open. I am also sympathetic to the French Open’s argument that participation in these press events is a mandatory part of her contract. While I am more sympathetic to Osaka’s position, I think we should all end the charade of bringing up an athlete in front of a media panel to answer for her poor performance or to gloat about her good performance in a match.…

🎮 I started another run at Hollow Knight after quite a while away from it. I have missed a step or two… 😅

‘60s pop like The Four Seasons sounds great from the tiny, terrible, mono Amazon Echo speaker in my kitchen. The music must have been mixed with transistor radios in mind.

I’m spending this rainy morning listening to jazz and reading The New Yorker.

I enjoyed Jill Lepore’s recent article on burnout in The New Yorker: Burnout is a combat metaphor. In the conditions of late capitalism, from the Reagan era forward, work, for many people, has come to feel like a battlefield, and daily life, including politics and life online, like yet more slaughter. People across all walks of life—rich and poor, young and old, caretakers and the cared for, the faithful and the faithless—really are worn down, wiped out, threadbare, on edge, battered, and battle-scarred.…

🎮 I have been very much into playing Good Sudoku again lately. I am trying to master its Pro level, where the puzzles start to get very tricky. I am trying to learn how to spot the Y-wing pattern, but still need to resort to hints quite a lot to find them in the grid.

Today was a good day because I got to spend all morning outside with my kids, and because the family all shared a nice meal together in the evening.

Republicans Block Independent Commission on Jan. 6 Riot. It’s shameful. I don’t think we need an independent commission to know and understand what happened, though. It is no secret what happened. It is no secret what went wrong. Everybody knows who is responsible.

Micro Camp sounds like it will be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I’ll be traveling during it, so I won’t be able to attend.

I am on Zyrtec, so I don’t get many allergy symptoms anymore, but I think this is the longest and the worst allergy season in many years. I read somewhere, years ago, that climate change leads to increased pollen levels, and I believe it.

I have the day off to spend with the kids today. 😀

The washing machine is installed and running an empty load as a test. After that, it will be deluged with all the laundry that has piled up since our old machine broke. I feel sorry for it.

I am waiting for a new washing machine to be delivered to my house. Let’s just say that my family really needs it ASAP. 😂

I don’t drink that much coffee each day, but I missed my afternoon caffeine dose yesterday and felt completely awful until I had a coffee at dinner time. It was scary! Now I’m looking into strategies to reduce my dependence on caffeine.

🎵 I love the new Bleachers single “Stop Making this Hurt.”

I just learned that I get Friday off as a “bonus holiday” before Memorial Day. Now my schedule is in sync with the rest of my family’s, which is fantastic. I look forward to letting them know at dinner tonight. 😀

I actually achieved all my objectives at work this week. I am still floored by that! 😅

It is starting to get hot outside and it is not even June yet.

Apple support came through for me again this evening. I brought in my iPad Air 4, which appeared to have a faulty region in the screen (it was really minor, but I thought it would get worse over time), and came home with a brand new iPad.

This week, I programmed for many, many hours. Often when I do this, while I wait for builds to complete or unit tests to execute, I pick up my Rubik’s Cube and solve it (or scramble it, if it is already solved). For the past three days, I could not solve my Rubik’s Cube anymore. I couldn’t remember how to do it, and I kept making mistakes even in the earlier portions of my solve.…

The latest episode of Accidental Tech Podcast has a great discussion about lossless music, which is coming to Apple Music next month.…

I am a little too excited to be getting Office 365 installed on my work laptop tomorrow. I have been on Office 2016 for so long it is absurd.

I am going to try to not do any programming today. It has been a huge part of my job lately, and I enjoy getting in the zone when I do it, but it has taken a toll on my body. I have spent way too much time typing, and I feel it in my wrists, forearms, and even my shoulders.

This morning I decided to add one more feature to the app I’m developing for work. Twelve hours of coding later, I have rewritten the entire app, and am just now getting to test if that one new feature is working right. 😅

Google wants to build a useful quantum computer by 2029. If it does, I’m sure it will cancel the project by 2030.

I look forward to reading the 2021 M1 iMac reviews later, even though I will likely never buy that computer. It’s the sort of thing I would want if my family were structured more around, say, a central computing location in the family room or something. We all have iPads instead.

A software update at work pushed out the virtual backgrounds feature for WebEx. Since my home office—at least the part of it that is behind me and not under my control— is a mess, I enabled it. Sadly, it looks pretty awful. The background mostly leaves a halo around me un-obscured; sometimes it clips portions of my face or shoulder off. I have a very high-end laptop and a “very good” Logitech webcam (all webcams are terrible, I think), so I have concluded that WebEx’s technology is way behind Zoom’s, which does the virtual backgrounds flawlessly.…

I’m up late coding. I have been up late coding many nights in a row now. I’m trying to get some of my projects completed (as much as software can be completed). I feel like I am inching uphill day after day. It’s not a bad feeling, though. I feel peculiarly tenacious lately.

I did not have to wait long for the Apple Music announcement to drop.

Apple Music can release its rumored lossless tier any minute now. I’m waiting with my best headphones. I don’t care at all about spatial audio or Dolby Atmos, though, so I hope that isn’t the only kind of thing coming.

Phew! I finally fixed a bug that bedeviled me for days. (Well, nights, because it is in my hobby project.) The fix was adding two lines of very basic code to a function that hasn’t been touched in years. I think the Swift compiler changed something about implicit protocol compliance, and it caused the function to stop processing the intended read/write logic for one of my protocol data types. I’m rewriting that library to not need that function anymore, and must code some better tests for it than I did before.…

My daughter and I made some flower cookies to celebrate the lovely spring day.

I hope so. I am a sucker for lossless codecs, even though I probably can’t hear the difference between them and AAC-256.…

I think that Apple is going to lose whatever antitrust cases are eventually brought against it in the EU and in the US. I don’t actually think Apple should lose, because I don’t think it is correct to call Apple a monopoly. The general antitrust argument against Apple is that its App Store platform is too locked down, and that is unfair because Apple is a monopoly (insert eye roll here) of its own platform.…

I have been using SQL for 25 years and I just learned today that SELECT [...] FROM Table1, Table2 is called a “cross join” an can also be expressed as SELECT [...] FROM Table1 CROSS JOIN Table2. 🤦 In my defense, I must say that I have only had to use a cross join a few times in my entire career.

I unblocked Reddit.com earlier this week because the domain keeps coming up in tech question-related search results. After only a few days, I’m back looking at mechanical keyboards and expensive headphones on Reddit like an addict. I just blocked the domain again.

To my complete surprise, I discovered today that Durgod released an update to their keyboard configuration: Durgod Zeus Engine. The interface looks a lot better, and it is a little easier to use. They didn’t change the keyboard hardware driver to support function layers, which is unfortunately. I really want that. (Honestly, what I want is the ObinsKit software that powers the Anne Pro 2 to apply work on it.)…

Napier Lopez reports in The Next Web: Apple only just released its new iMacs featuring the acclaimed M1 ARM-based processor, but according to a report from Nikkei, the company plans to launch M2 as soon as July. I don’t know anything in particular about Apple’s plans, but it seems crazy to me to expect a faster chip at this time. What I would expect is more I/O, driven by more cores and supported by more RAM.…

I am very conservative about cities re-opening too soon, considering the pandemic has not ended. But NYC reopening on July 1 almost seems reasonable to me. Time will tell.

🎵 I’m going to lean into my New Jersey-ness today and listen to a ton of Bruce Springsteen. First album up: The Wild, The Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle. This is one of Springsteen’s records that I never think to listen to, but, of course, it’s great. It was made back when Springsteen still wrote songs with a torrent of stream-of-consciousness-style lyrics like a verbose street poet.

I did really well at my presentation today. Practicing over and over definitely paid off. The talk I ended up with was almost completely different than the one I started with, even though my slideshow stayed the same.

Per Tom Warren In The Verge: Microsoft is changing its default Office font next year and wants everyone to help pick the new default. While there are more than 700 font options in Word, Microsoft has commissioned five new custom fonts for Office, in a move away from the Calibri font that has been the default in Microsoft Office for nearly 15 years. I am unusually attached to Calibri so I am not looking forward to this change.…

I’m rehearsing for an online presentation to my entire company later this morning. I feel good about this one.

🎵 I think it is cool that Counting Crows is releasing a new album next month. It has been seven years since their last one, and I honestly thought they had given up writing new material.

I’ve been coding a lot over the past week. I’m coding right now. I’m taking the core of my iOS and macOS apps and putting into a cross-platform Swift package. It’s been a fun excursion from doing UI work, but it has a purpose. I am dismayed, however, at how buggy Xcode 12.4 is. I can’t create a new file and rename it in the sidebar without trying to rename another file first. Also, automatic protocol compliance only sometimes works. Does anybody at Apple actually use Xcode, because little bugs like these should not be in there anymore.

Laughably, for no good reason, seeing a bunch of bad takes on new Apple products last week sapped my will to share, well, anything on my blog for many days. 😅 I’m trying to get back to normal now.

Yesterday I decided to re-play a game I loved a few years ago called [The Sequence]. It is a puzzle game where you, essentially, build a machine with various component parts to move a ball (well, the game calls it a “binary cell”) from one part of the screen to another. It sounds simple, and it starts out fairly simple, but it becomes very challenging as you progress. It’s the sort of game a programmer, or anyone who enjoyed Human Resource Machine would enjoy.…

I am delighted that I discovered a video game that is new to the Nintendo Switch, but not at all new to the world, called Fez. This is the game’s official blurb: Gomez is a 2D creature living in a 2D world. Or is he? When the existence of a mysterious 3rd dimension is revealed to him, Gomez is sent out on a journey that will take him to the very end of time and space.…

I am unsettled today by yet another mass shooting in my country. It seems like not a day goes by without a New York Times news alert about it. (I plan to turn those alerts off after I finish writing this.) This time, a gunman killed seven people, then himself. This detail about the story jumped out at me: “The shooting likely lasted one or two minutes.” I think the news media covers mass shootings like they are exciting, like some kind of action movie where bad outcomes only happen to the extras, and the rest of us get to watch.…

Stephen Warwick reports in iMore: Kuo says that next year Apple will drop the 5.4-inch model and run with two 6.1-inch models instead, one Pro, one regular. This rumor is a prime reason I upgraded to the iPhone 12 mini early this year. I absolutely love the size and weight of it. It fits better in my hands and in my pockets than my iPhone 7 Plus ever did.…

Last night, I published my first NuGet package: TodoTxt.Library. It is a code library meant to help develop todo.txt applications in .NET. I wrote the code back in 2015, open-sourced it on GitHub, but otherwise left it alone because I had moved on to more macOS and iOS development by that time. This week, I upgraded the code base work on .NET 5, so that it is cross platform (rather than Windows-only, as was my original version), and figured out how to package it and upload it to NuGet, where it may have a shot at actually being used.…

I filed my taxes and now I can spend my after-work time on more productive things again.

Tom Warren’s article on The Verge caught my eye: Microsoft is refreshing its Surface lineup with the Surface Laptop 4 today, which now offers the choice between AMD or Intel processors across both the 13.5- and 15-inch models. Both sizes will ship with Intel’s latest 11th Gen processors or AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series processors. Microsoft is shipping its Surface Laptop 4 on April 15th in the US, Canada, and Japan, starting at $999 for the AMD model and $1,299 for the Intel version — a $300 price gap between the pair.…

I’m assuming that somebody’s job, every day, is to wake up in the morning and ask Siri “When is the next Apple Event?” I’m glad I didn’t try to change careers back in 2009 or 2011 (when I thought of it) and get into tech journalism.…

I spent some time tonight working on my tax filing, and some time learning how to create and publish NuGet packages. I want to package up one of my .NET libraries soon. I think it will be a fun, short project—unlike filing my taxes!

I never would have predicted that in 2021 I would be using a text-mode file manager from the 1990s, a command-line based to-do list program, and, at least sometimes (by choice!), the Vim text editor.

Tonight I published a huge update to the website for my first iOS app: SwiftoDo. What was once a one page site with a very outdated template is now a Hugo-based site full of information. There is a lot more that I could add, it is now so much better than my old site I had to publish it.

I have been up way too late for the past three nights, because I am working on a website. I bet a lot of micro-bloggers can relate. 😀

Last year when I was looking for something soothing to watch on YouTube, I came across James Hoffmann’s many videos about coffee, coffee machines, coffee products, and so on. I have watched a ton of them, mostly because I like his voice and demeanor. His latest video is about the AeroPress, which I have used for many, many years. I actually learned something new from it: People use the funnel, which is meant to help put your coffee grounds into the press without making a mess, to brew coffee into cups with mouths too small for the bottom of the AeroPress.…

The Linux kernel is gaining Apple M1 support. I have been wondering if, years from now, I can move my M1 Mac Mini to a home app-server role, running Linux, when it gets too old for Xcode and stops getting macOS updates. I have a Celeron based PC doing that for me now, but it runs hot and can be noisy, too. If a machine can run Linux, it extends its lifespan considerably for me.…

Yesterday I turned off the tap layer on my Anne Pro 2 keyboard which is basically only for using Fn, Fn2. right-Ctrl, and right Swift keys as arrow keys. (The keyboard does not have dedicated arrow keys.) I did this because I think the tap layer causes me a lot of problems, like the cursor moving up a line when I just meant to press the Shift key for its normal function.…

I both wish that I could give up coffee and that I could drink twelve cups of it a day. 🤷‍♂️

I wasted an hour last night trying to install QMK firmware on my work computer’s mechanical keyboard, a Durgod Taurus K320. I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love that it has the best build quality, rigidity, stabilization, keycaps, and typing feel and sound of any of the many (many!) keyboards I have owned over the years. I hate that its software is buggy: so buggy that sometimes the keyboard hangs and I have to unplug it to fix it; so buggy that I have to plug it in directly to my laptop rather than through a USB hub; so buggy that that I cannot program its layers the way I want to.…

🎵 I’m listening to Gaslighter by The Chicks again today. It is one of my favorite albums of 2020. Everything is great about it, from the catchy choruses to the close harmonies to the clean production. My favorite part of it is the songwriting, which is fueled with righteous anger and makes for compelling country-pop music.

Today I discovered that there is an open-source community creating a modern GUI file manager for Windows. It’s called Files and it is OK and seems to be heading in the right direction. It is a shame that Microsoft essentially abandoned feature development for their file explorer many years ago.

We are getting ready to go to the zoo today. It will be our first post-pandemic outing as a family that isn’t to a local park. I’m looking forward to it, and think it will be safe for us because we will be outside pretty much the entire time.

Today I made the mistake to look up someone I knew while I was in high school. I was reading an article about illegal drugs, and thought about a high school friend’s younger brother who ran into some drug problems about 20 years ago. Sadly, I discovered that he died last year. I can only conjecture, but it seems, based on what else happened to him over the past few years, that drug problems led to his premature death. Learning about what happened to him made me very sad.

As reported by Andrew Webster in The Verge: Apple’s gaming subscription service just got a massive influx of new titles. The headliner is Fantasian — the latest release from the creator of Final Fantasy — which is joined by other titles like new versions of NBA 2K and The Oregon Trail, and World of Demons from PlatinumGames. As part of the update, the service is getting two new categories of games: Apple calls them “Timeless Classics” and “App Store Greats.…

As reported by Lena H. Sun and Lori Aratani in The Washington Post: Federal health officials gave the green light Friday for fully vaccinated people to resume travel as an estimated 100 million Americans have had at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, and evidence mounts of the shots’ effectiveness. That’s good news, but it doesn’t make me want to go out and travel by plane or train anytime soon.…

⚾️ For the first time in over a year I have a baseball game on in the background as I work. I hope to get by the with MLB “free game of the day” offering this year, rather than paying to subscribe to the season package. There was no free game for the season opener yesterday, though, so I’m watching a spring training game.

Today I was very happy to find a command line todo.txt app that works on Windows.

My wife and I started watching The Sopranos a few days ago, and we are hooked. Both of us watched the show sporadically while it first aired, but didn’t catch much of it. Back then, I subscribed to HBO only during free trials I received from switching cable providers after I moved, so you could imagine I didn’t catch that many episodes. Now we subscribed to HBO Max to watch something else, and are likely sticking with it for a long time now.…

After a few evenings of work, I completed an update of my Simple Call Blocker app and submitted it to the App Store tonight. It feels good. Now I plan to start the revision of my other apps' website.

🎵 I’m enjoying the new album, Obviously, by Lake Street Dive. I think, though, that if I heard this album when I was a kid I would have hated it. My music tastes have broadened considerably since then.

After a few days of work, I just published my new, Hugo-based website for one of my iOS apps: Simple Call Blocker. The site is not as beautiful as I would have liked, but it is way better than it was, and now I have a framework I can use to add more content to it if I need to.

James Vincent reports in The Verge: The best-known AI text-generator is OpenAI’s GPT-3, which the company recently announced is now being used in more than 300 different apps, by “tens of thousands” of developers, and producing 4.5 billion words per day. That’s a lot of robot verbiage. This may be an arbitrary milestone for OpenAI to celebrate, but it’s also a useful indicator of the growing scale, impact, and commercial potential of AI text generation.…

One inexplicable thing I discovered today was that the git repo for one of my iOS apps did not have a working remote defined. It was pointing to a repo on BitBucket that doesn’t even exist any more. What the heck I have I been doing with it over the past couple of years?

I am putting the finishing touches on the website I am rebuilding with Hugo. I hope to go live with it sometime next week. I forgot how much work there is in building a website—even when you are not coding its theme.

Today was mostly about family time and the Passover Seder. It was a great day.

I stayed up late last night drafting a new, Hugo-driven version of one of my websites. I went from having nothing at all built to having about one third of the site done in a couple hours. The result, I think, will be more plain (and maybe more ugly) than the existing site, but it will be less janky on mobile devices. I sank a lot of time over the past week looking for a Hugo theme that is perfect for my needs, but I couldn’t find one.…

This is a short, short version of what happened to me over the past week when I decided to get organized. Form a desire to organize my project files differently. Discover the Johnny Decimal system. Create a taxonomy for my files in a text file. Start writing PowerShell script to switch folders based on the Johnny Decimal number Start writing a PowerShell script to index all the Johnny Decimal numbers in my folder tree Think about working with files from the command line more often Install Midnight Commander for a command line file manager Learn a lot of Midnight Commander shortcuts and customizations Learn about Far Manager, which is a lot like Midnight Commander but works much better on Windows Run into keyboard shortcut conflicts with Windows Terminal Learn about assigning and removing keyboard shortcuts in Windows Terminal Start thinking about using todo.…

I watched episode one of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier this week. It’s a show about two MCU characters I don’t particularly care that much about, so it wasn’t something I was really looking forward to, but I pay for Disney+ anyway and thought I may as well check it out. Reader, I liked it! My first impression is that it looks like it cost a zillion dollars. Special-effects-wise, it looks on par with the Marvel movies.…

I was thinking about creating a training presentation to help my coworkers with keyboards shortcuts, but was dismayed to see that our Lenovo laptop keyboards (which I never use, because I work from home and use external peripherals) don’t even have a menu key. Someone decided that Print Screen was more important, which may even be true, but it doesn’t help me make a good presentation for my coworkers. The menu key alternative, Shift+F10 is going to be a very hard sell, especially because F10 on the laptop requires the Fn key to be pressed, too.…

🎵 “Canada’s Country”: I’ve been enjoying this laid-back playlist while I work. Honestly, I didn’t know Canada made country music. Unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly Canadian about it. It would be cool if there were.

People on LinkedIn still use a lot of #hashtags non-ironically. Who are they tagging content for?

Does anybody know if scheduled posts, posted from Ulysses, show up in the timeline? I think my 1:00 PM Eastern blog post did not show up in the timeline, but made it to my blog on time.

I was not I initially interested at all in the Snyder Cut of Justice League but I ended up watching it anyway, over two nights. I’m glad I did. I thought the theatrical release of Justice League was pretty bad, but not quite as bad as the professional movie review consensus was. I figured that the Snyder cut must be better, but I was surprised at how much better it is.…

I have been using AutoHotKey for many years, and I never thought until today to map Windows+Q to quit the active app and close the active window. That creates something very similar to Mac’s Command+Q shortcut to Windows. The default Windows keyboard shortcut for quitting an app is Alt+F4, which is a two hand operation for me. Note that in AutoHotKey, you don’t even need to send that key command; you can use the WinClose function instead:…

Chiam Gartenberg reports in The Verge: At the company’s “Engineering the Future” announcement today, Gelsinger announced plans to outsource more of Intel’s chip production to third-party foundries; a $20 billion investment into two new fabs in Arizona; and a new branch of the company called Intel Foundry Services, which will see Intel’s foundries produce chips for other companies. Intel has had an awful decade, having missed out on smartphone chips and having stalled out at their 14nm process for years.…

Josh Berlinger of CNN reports today that the Colorado attack is the 7th mass shooting in 7 days in the US. It seemed like there were periods in recent years in which we had a deadly mass shooting in the national news at least every week, if not several times each week. There has been something of a pause due to COVID, for understandable reasons. Unfortunately, we seem to be un-pausing now.…

🎧 on, and getting into the ⌨️ zone now. Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed up till 1:30 last night, but that’s what ☕️ is for, isn’t it? 😅

It is amazing that Ulysses supports posting to Micro.blog now. I love the functionality, and its inclusion definitely cements Ulysses as my only writing app on iOS and macOS at this point. Now let’s bug the Ulysses team to do some other cool things: Implement publishing workflows, by which publishing a sheet can automatically trigger the sheet to be tagged with a keyword, be moved to a particular folder (such as “published”), or call an iOS Shortcut.…

I have been feeling behind at work, even though I am probably no more behind in my work than anyone else I work with. It’s been a struggle the past few days. I think I am pulling out of it now, but I’ve had to work overtime to get here.

I was bummed to find out that my favorite regular expressions editor for the Mac, Oyster, completely disappeared from the App Store (and it seems, the Internet). I wish I hadn’t deleted it from my old MacBook Pro, because RegEx is hard, even if you have used them off and on for decades. After failing to find something helpful for free, I had to buy another app (Patterns) which did the trick.…

I deleted my LastPass account today. I have switched over to Bitwarden and love it.

As Anya Kamenetz, Cory Turner, and Allison Aubrey report on the NPR website today: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its guidance for schools. On Friday, the agency announced it “now recommends that, with universal masking, students should maintain a distance of at least 3 feet in classroom settings.” Previously the guidance stated, “Physical distancing (at least 6 feet) should be maximized to the greatest extent possible.…

🎵 I’m currently listening to Chemtrails over the Country Club by Lana Del Ray for the first time. I have been waiting for this one. Lana Del Ray is one of my favorite artists. It’s too soon for me to tell how much I like it.

I have been an Inbox Zero guy since the early 2000s. Now I can’t keep up with my email; it comes in too fast, and I actually have work to do that demands my attention. Consequently, my Inbox is almost never empty. Now, mostly on Fridays, I just select all my Inbox emails (Ctrl-A) and move them to my Archive folder (Ctrl-Shift-1 thanks to an Outlook Quick Step I created), whether I have processed them or not.…

I am investing some time trying to see if I could implement a Johnny Decimal system for my files at work. Some of the constraints are tricky to deal with, but the general idea of it dovetails into what I have been doing for organization, and takes it one or two steps further.

Corinne Reichert and Stephen Shankland report in CNET: Apple will launch a series of new iPads in April, a report Wednesday said. The new iPad Pros will come with Apple’s homemade M1 chips, a Thunderbolt port, and better cameras and screens, according to Bloomberg. They will reportedly come in 11- and 12.9-inch display sizes. That’s cool. Maybe I’m not a “Pro” but the iPad Air 4 is just about perfect for me.…

When it comes to creating effective PowerPoint presentations for work, my reach still exceeds my grasp. I know a lot of important concepts, including the following: The slide deck is a visual aid, not the presentation Focus on one idea per slide Focus on very few visual elements/focus points per slide (e.g., five or six, maximum) Light text on a dark background is easier on the eye Unfortunately, when I try to apply those ideas, I feel like I’m not getting anywhere.…

🎵 The Hold Steady’s latest album, Open Door Policy, is growing on me. I know reviewers love it, because it is a return to form, but I was hoping for something different. It’s hard to say, what, though. Something that’s a mix of fun and depressing, like my favorite Hold Steady lyrics, I guess.

Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch reports: Apple has discontinued its original HomePod after four years. It says that it will continue to produce and focus on the HomePod mini, introduced last year. I, like many audiophiles, passed on the original HomePod due to its high price and lack of connectivity. I’m sure I would have enjoyed how it sounded, and its size is just right for me, but I would likely have had to buy two of them to be fully satisfied (stereo separation is important to me).…

I guess, based on the occurrence of a President Biden speech, that this week marks the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 in the United States. To me, the baleful presence of COVID-19 has been around for what feels like much, much longer—so long that I can’t even remember it clearly. My COVID panic started in early January, when we thought the disease was only in Wuhan. In America, for a couple weeks at least, it still seemed likely that the disease would never leave China, much like H1N1 and SARS never made a big impact here.…

There was a brush fire yesterday not too far from where I live. Brush fires are incredibly rare where I live, so this is a curiosity to me. We have had dry, windy weather for about two weeks now, which makes wildfire conditions rife. My family was outside yesterday but fortunately we didn’t notice it; we must have been upwind.

I’m probably being a climate-change alarmist right now, but I think we have never had such frequent windstorms in New Jersey as we have had this winter.

I have been well this week, but not in the blogging mood. I am working on gaining momentum now on all my work projects and hope to get back to my personal projects—like programming—soon. I have been so into coding for work the past couple months that I haven’t even turned on my Mac mini (which I almost exclusively use for coding) in two weeks. (Shameful!!😅)

I am at a place where I am feeling more positive about the future (and specifically my future) than I have in quite a long time. I am not euphoric or anything—just hopeful. And I am trying to be more grateful, too, for my family, and for the opportunities I have now to do good things.

I am grateful that the weather has changed from snowy and blustery to warm and calm. I have been able to take a walk after my lunch break for two days in a row. It feels nice.

🎵 I loved all of the “Playlists from Visionary Women” that were front-and-center on Apple Music for International Women’s Day today. I’m glad they are still there today on the “Browse” page.

This game looks 100% like a Hollow Knight rip-off, but maybe it will be the best Hollow Knight rip-off there is. It seems to marry Hollow Knight environments, character movement, and platforming challenges to Castlevania character- and background design. As long as it doesn’t take in the Castlevania-style grinding, it could be very fun. The more Metroidvania games I play, the more I think that Hollow Knight is the best one ever.…

🎬 I watched Frozen 2 again with my family today. We still could not really understand some of the workings of the plot. I do admire the music and the visual appearance of the movie even more than on my first viewing.

I really wanted an iMac Pro at one point. I was most excited about its cooling system, of all things, because promised to be inaudible. I’m sorry to see the product go, and am hopeful that it means M1-based iMacs are coming soon.

Matthew S. Schwartz reports for NPR: To millions of people around the world, the young poet Amanda Gorman represents hope, change and the promise of a better America. But to a security guard on Friday night, the young African American woman represented a potential threat to public safety. This is a sad story. My first thought was that Amanda Gorman could legitimately have been harmed in a situation like this.…

Tonight I learned about Mermaid, which is a plaintext markup language and renderer for creating flowcharts and other kinds of diagrams. I want to make flowcharts quickly for my technical projects at work, but i don’t have Visio, and I hate fiddling with a GUI to line up shapes and worry about arrow lengths and so on. The way my mind works, I just want to type out what I want and have software figure out how to lay it out for me.…

I realized today that part of my job is writing a short, really boring book about how I do my job. That, indeed, is the life of an auditor.

Ulysses invited me back into their beta testing program, and now I can test direct publishing to Micro.blog!

I’m setting up a new Celeron based mini PC. It came with Windows 10 Professional on it, which surprised me for such a low-end PC. Microsoft must be giving those licenses away now. Its fan spins up and for a second or two each time I do anything, which reminds me of the frequent hard disk chatter from my 90s and 00s PCs.

I watched Gen:lock over the past week. I was disappointed that it introduced a premise-breaking plot development in the penultimate episode. My beef is 100% spoiler-y. The shows is a mecha anime. Its premise is that, in some future war in which big robots piloted by people fight each other, a new type of mech is developed that is remotely controlled by very rare, very special kind of person. That person must bind her mind to the mech through a lot of hand-wavey technology called gen:lock.…

Per Mark Sweeney in The Guardian: “Why would a music streaming company and a financial services company join forces?!,” Dorsey posted on Twitter, posing the obvious question as he announced the news. “It comes down to a simple idea: finding new ways for artists to support their work. New ideas are found at intersections, and we believe there is a compelling one between music and the economy.” This is great news if you’re Jay-Z.…

The first time I heard the term “NFT” was yesterday, and I’m already sick of it.

I am grateful I received my COVID vaccine, but yesterday’s second dose has really knocked me for a loop today. 🤒

Sam Schechner and Keach Hagey report in The Wall Street Journal: Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry. I don’t even know what to make of this, unless it is a flex of Google’s monopoly power in search, maps, and video (YouTube). Who needs to track users across websites when every browser tab starts at or ends at a Google-owned website?…

Ella Nilson at vox.com reports: But much of Tanden’s résumé was overshadowed by her proliferous online posting — at least 1,000 tweets raking both Republicans and leftist Democrats over the coals — that Tanden quietly started deleting in November 2020. I haven’t been following this story, but my interest was piqued when I learned that Neera Tanden’s nomination chances were in jeopardy because of her tweets from the past.…

Today i will receive my second COVID-19 vaccine. I am excited to be so close to finished with the process.

I just looked at the latest release notes (see picture). So that’s why I couldn’t save my files to OneDrive this week. 🤦‍♂️ I figured out a workaround, but was bamboozled for days why something that once worked now did not. OneDrive’s iOS Files integration was always pretty unreliable. Maybe after this feature pull Microsoft will finally fix it.…

Having tons of meetings all the time is kind of killing my impulse to micro-blog. Perhaps it is because of all the social interaction I am getting at work, that I usually don’t.

Programming has got me pulling my hair out today. There seems to be no good way to do the simple things I want to do. I’ll have to pick a bad way and just deal with it.

Spotify’s new lossless tier isn’t enough to make me switch, but I would pay Apple more for lossless tracks on Apple Music. That makes me sound like a fanboy, but I was a Spotify subscriber before and like Apple Music more.

I have come to the conclusion that the best way to automate moving data around in Excel and formatting it, via Automation Anywhere, is by simulating keyboard shortcuts and putting delays in between them. I wish there was a slicker way, because it sure is fiddly.

The “projects” listed on my Hugo-based website are hyperlinks when I run it via hugo server but are not when I publish the site. Sadly, I have no idea how to fix it. Perhaps I have to try another theme.

I updated my home page/landing page using Hugo: mjdescy.me. I definitely don’t have the hang of using Hugo yet, but I’m learning. One thing that made me feel stupid is that I don’t know how to get rid of the “Blog” section that the template I’m using wants to include. In the interest of getting something that is not bare HTML published, I created some meaningless blog posts. The last time I used a static website publisher, I had to create my own themes from scratch.…

📺 My wife and i accidentally found the Mo Willems special, “Mo Willems and The Storytime All-Stars Present: Don’t Let The Pigeon Do Storytime!”, on HBO Max earlier this week. We watched it with our kids this afternoon, and we all loved it. It is so joyous and nutty and fun that we got sucked into it right away. Mo Willems is a treasure.…

🎬 I enjoyed Pixar’s Soul quite a bit.

I installed Hugo a fifth time tonight. (Is this a record?) My network is being stupidly slow, and having all these little website files bouncing between three computers is causing latency problems in my text editor. Hugo is running on my mac Mini, and I found a way to do it that does not require homebrew to be installed.

It’s amazing how little I paid attention to the lyrics of OK Computer in the 1990s. It is way more depressing—and poetically expressive about it—than I knew back then. I will blame not having decent enough speakers or headphones to make them out clearly.

Apple reportedly plans March 16 event with new iPad Pro, iPad mini and AirTags. This is just a rumor at this point. The only Apple thing left for me to buy this year is AirTags—if they ever get released. I actually have been waiting for them eagerly. I want to get rid of my Tiles, mostly because their app got annoying, and partly because I bet Apple’s version would work better.

As if I didn’t already have enough to worry about, my county—which administered my first COVID-19 vaccine about two weeks ago—ran out of COVID vaccines due to delivery delays, and canceled almost a week’s worth of appointments. I hope my appointment early next month does not get canceled. I guess a lot depends on the weather.

This week, I have been watching educational videos on YouTube about Excel Power Query. My wife thinks it is insanely boring, but I am learning things that are going to be very useful at work. Power Query is a feature of Excel I have used sporadically for the last five years to pull data in from SQL Server. I recently discovered that I barely scratched the surface of what it can do.…

I think we got a foot of snow today! It’s not as fun for us, though, now that school is virtual. The local schools used up all their planned snow days, so they just do online learning (and teaching) when it snows.

I’m a lapsed fan of RPGs in general. I wish I had time to play them. The demo of Bravely Default II is waiting for me on my Switch, and may be waiting for me forever.…

I migrated from LastPass to Bitwarden’s $10/year plan last night. Bitwarden is equally unpolished as LastPass on the Mac, and seems on par with it, in the good way, on iOS. The switch gave me a good excuse to update my master password and to organize my mess of passwords into folders.

I don’t want this, but it does resemble my first (or maybe second) PC keyboard. I didn’t know how good I had it back then. Clicky mechanical keyboards are the best.…

I have been writing good meeting agendas for work lately so I don’t have to think so hard at meetings anymore. I hope it is appreciated.

Sennheiser says it’s open to selling its consumer audio business. This could be bad news for headphone audiophiles like me. Sennheiser sets the standard in many ways.

Seth Godin: …many people are working from home–which is very stressful, because what it really means is: you’re living at the office… I love this quote. I have worked from home for many many years, and never expressed the situation so perfectly.…

Do any micro.bloggers trust Bitwarden as their password vault? I’m a longtime LastPass user looking to jump ship. I am not sure about 1Password, but maybe I am being silly.

Trust relies on three things: Competence—can you do something well? Benevolence—are you doing good? Integrity—will you do the right thing, even when things are bad for you? I heard this breakdown on a podcast episode earlier this week, and loved the idea so much that I hastily dictated a note to Siri about it (I was in my car at the time), but I can’t recall which podcast I heard it on or who said it.…

I have been slowly teaching myself Hugo tonight. I haven’t gotten to the fun part yet, I guess. Due to incompatibilities with themes and, in the case of my first install, with the location where I want to store my site files, I had to install Hugo (on my Linux server) four different times now: via snap, apt, the “hugo” .deb package, and finally the “hugo extended” .dev package. I am finally at the point where I may have found a theme that is suitable for my personal site landing page.…

I wonder about when my kids can get Covid vaccines every day. What the New York Times reports today tracks with what I thought: late summer, at the very earliest.…

Much to my surprise, Marco Arment is in the exact same quandary I am in regarding dealing with a web development environment and a package manager on macOS.

📺 After a long work day, I finally caught up on “WandaVision.” It is weirdly delightful. I like to think that cast was having fun with its nutty premise.

For some reason, I really do not want to install homebrew, npm, or Hugo on my new Mac mini. I have bad, but completely unrelated, memories of completely borking (that’s a technical term) my prior Mac’s Python environment, homebrew install, command-line git install, and so on. Plus, I had planned on using the machine only for Xcode, Fork, Mail, Safari, and PDFScanner. So much for that, now that I want to refresh my websites.

I transferred all my websites, other than my hosted micro.blog of course, to a single Linode instance. I set up nginx, fail2ban, and certbot from a bare Debian 10 install. I set up DNS to point 5 domain names to it, and got my email MX record set up properly on the firs try. I feel pretty good about it, mostly because I didn’t have trouble with the typical things: permissions, users, groups, etc.…

My webhost got hacked and is going out of business. I can migrate my blog here, but I will need some cheap webhost for my four other low-traffic websites. Anyone know a good, cheap web host? I wish I knew of a good tutorial to get all of my sites with different URLs to be hosted on the same server.

I have been building tiny bots in Automation Anywhere this morning. It has taken me a little bit of time to figure out how to do what I want to do without resorting to writing a Python script—which I can do, but don’t want to do—but I am getting there. 😀💪

Joon Lee of ESPN reports: Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia, who hasn’t played since 2019 because of a knee injury suffered two seasons earlier, announced his retirement Monday. “Could it have ended better and I finished my career the right way? Yeah of course,” Pedroia said on a Zoom call with the media. “But there was a reason I was the first one dressed at 5:30 for a 7 o’clock game.…

I found myself reading the Wikipedia entry for Groundhog Day this morning. I doubt I have time to watch it again anytime soon, but I may listen to the different-but-also-excellent Tim Minchin musical adaptation later.

Kim Lyons reports in The Verge: “The contention that social media as an industry censors conservatives is now, as we speak, becoming part of an even broader disinformation campaign from the right, that conservatives are being silenced all across American society,” the report’s lead researcher Paul Barrett said in an interview with The Verge. “This is the obvious post-Trump theme, we’re seeing it on Fox News, hearing it from Trump lieutenants, and I think it will continue indefinitely.…

The winter storm in New Jersey today is more likely than not to delay my COVID vaccine appointment. It is snowing more than I ever expected to see again here, after the past 4-5 years.

I really like the simplicity of the Keysmith app, but I can’t find any use for it.

While I have been working a ton lately, I can’t work every second of the day. I have been watching the “Fullmetal Alchemist” anime series (there are two), mostly late at night, to unwind. I watched the entirety of “Fullmetal Alchemist”—which is the first anime adaptation of the manga—first. Because it veers widely off of the plot of the manga (which, since I am not a manga reader, I don’t care about), it seems to be widely considered the lesser of the two adaptations.…

My wife and I recently discovered the Apple TV+ show “Little Voice” and very much enjoy it. It is different in pace and tone from other shows (like “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) that we have been watching lately. While there is a lot going on in each episode, the pace feels slow and thoughtful, as if the show is focused mainly on the growth of its characters and on illustrating (a version of) the New York City music scene.…

I have been super, super, super busy today, and it just won’t stop. It looks like I’ll be working a lot of overtime…like right now. At least, once the kids go to bed, I can put my headphones back on and enjoy some music while I work.

I found this fairly long interview on The Verge with Marques Brownlee (MKBHD on YouTube) to be very interesting: But what looks effortless and fun to the viewer is often the result of careful planning and investment. YouTubers are entrepreneurs, and Brownlee — my guest on today’s episode of Decoder — talks that talk with the best of them. Marques Brownlee could be described as “tech reviewer” or a “social media influencer” or a “YouTuber.…

My name got mentioned three times on the all-team call at work today, which is three times more than usual. 😎

I don’t really want to criticize TapBots for making TweetBot version 6 a subscription app. I would like to highlight that $6.99/yr is a reasonable price to pay every year if you use an app every day. I wish more annual app subscriptions were below the $9.99 level.

Jason Kottke’s blog post offers some great advice that we all should heed: So what can you do about this right now? 1. Stop worrying about the variants until the experts let us know we have something to worry about. 2. If you are eligible for the vaccine, get it! 3. Spread the word about vaccine availability in your area. Yesterday Vermont opened signups for vaccination appointments for all Vermonters 75 and older, and I texted/emailed everyone I could think of who was over 75 or who had parents/relatives/friends who are over 75 to urge them to sign up or spread the word.…

I wrote a support email to Ulysses last week inquiring about micro.blog support. I got a response that said that it was on their “immediate roadmap” which is pretty exciting and still slightly mysterious.🤞

I can’t believe that Tom Brady is going back to the Super Bowl. Then again, it seems like the most normal thing.

After dithering on it for several weeks, I finally ordered a blue iPhone 12 mini late Friday night. I plan to keep it for the next four years, and also plan to keep using my iPhone 7 Plus as an occasional video player/video game player around the house. It was supposed to be delivered here on Tuesday, but it came late this morning—a couple days early. Strangely, I find myself not ready for it!…

The following children’s books are on the docket for me to read aloud to my daughter: A Wrinkle in Time The Secret Garden Little Lord Fountleroy Pollyanna The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe That should keep me busy for the next few months or so. I wonder if the sequels to A Wrinkle in Time will be demanded immediately.…

I have never watched an inauguration before, and don’t plan to today, though the rest of my family is very interested. My wife’s school has disallowed live-streaming it over Zoom due to its political nature. My employer sent an email warning people in the NYC office of potential demonstrations and unrest over it. What a messed up country and time to be alive.

This is old news, but I just discovered it this week. If you use Arq for backup on the Mac, you can email their support team for access to the next version, Arq 7, which (among other things) ditches the non-native interface in favor of a much simpler and much quicker native UI.

Note to self: just use rsync to sync files. Stop avoiding the terminal!

I’m doing the usual Monday morning brain boot-up sequence right now. I hear the hard drive platters grinding in my head. 😅

Today, I read the second-to-last chapter of A Little Princess to my daughter, and chose the next book I will read to her: A Wrinkle in Time. She is very excited.

2021 MacBook Pro will ditch the Touch Bar and bring back MagSafe, say reports. I don’t know about the Touch Bar disappearing, but I expect it to look a lot more like the iPad Pro, have 4 USB-C ports, and thinner bezels than the current models do.

COVID vaccine rollout in New Jersey is disorganized and haphazard. After a few days of nail-biting stress and uncertainty about it, I, and the other adults in my family, finally got appointments for our first dose, for about three weeks from now.

My cheap plastic iPhone 7 Plus case broke and now I want a new phone. 😠😳😢😅

I spent about two hours last night trying to figure out if I can move my FreeNAS server, which constantly generates about 40 dB of fan noise white noise in my home office, to the basement, so that I can escape the noise. The problem I have is that there is nowhere else in my house where I can get a wired connection. I tried a wireless-to-ethernet bridging solution, and was super disappointed with how slow it was (40 mbps up/down).…

Impeached twice. Not a good look. Let’s hope for the sake of the country that this is a one-time thing.

I haven’t had my M1 Mac mini for very long, and have only done a little Xcode work on it thus far, but I already love having a silent desktop that has tons of power. Since yesterday, I have mostly used that power merely to move tons and tons of gigabytes of data around my home network and to cloud storage, and everything has been rock solid and unnoticeable.

I have been very busy automating processes at work. I just got access to Automation Anywhere, which is a cool platform to build bots with. My practice with iOS Shortcuts in the past couple weeks is serving me well with its click, drag, and customize programming steps interface.

The House of Representatives is voting for impeachment along party lines so far, which is disappointing but not unexpected. Republicans don’t get it. It’s shameful.

On my M1 Mac mini, KensingtonWorks software somehow disables double-clicking on my Kensington Slimblade trackball. I can assign another button to perform a double-click, but it is hard not to double-click anyway, after doing so since the late 1980s. I found a third party mouse utility called SteerMouse that does a much better job than KensingtonWorks, and offers a lot more options. I’m not sure I want to spend $20 on it, but I do like all my mouse buttons to do something.…

This article in USA Today confirms my suspicions that all the anti-COVID measures would drastically reduce the prevalence of seasonal flu in the U.S.: During the 2019 flu season from Sept. 29 to Dec. 28, the CDC reported more than 65,000 cases of influenza nationwide. During the same period last year, the agency reported 1,016 cases. I get a vaccine every year for the flu—and luckily have not caught it since I was in elementary school—but other than that, I never think about it.…

🎵 I’m trying out PlexAmp again, and am listening to Herbie Hancock’s “Gershwin’s World” (in ALAC) which has been in my library for over twenty years and probably hasn’t been listened to since 2000.

My thought of the day, as I do my house tidying: Systems of human behavior break down when people stop putting energy into them.

I have been writing Amazon product reviews thousands of words long this evening, on products as mundane but important as insulated coffee mugs. Ten years ago I was pretty close to being ranked in top 1,000 Amazon reviewers, and was very close, but couldn’t quite crack it.

Per Ethan Anderton on SlashFilm, quoting Bill Hader: “Right when the lockdown happened in March, we were a week away from shooting. So the last time I was in a room with a lot of people was the table read episodes one and two of season three, and we were ready to go. Then it all got shut down. Season three is completely written, ready to go, and then during this time we actually went and wrote season four.…

I made the mistake today of turning off my home media server (HP N54L) for a few minutes to see how quiet my office is without its fan running. Now I can’t help but be annoyed by it. 😀

Music for Programming is definitely not for me, but I love the all-text site design.

I just got a Logitech C920 webcam to use for video calls at work. Testing it out has shown me that (1) my office looks awful, and (2) I look awful. 😅 I thought the default webcam settings made me look like Emperor Palpatine, but an image search soon revealed that Emperor Palpatine looks much, much better than I do. 😂 I did find out how to adjust the white balance to make me look less cadaverous.…

Pelosi, Schumer Join Chorus Of Calls For Invocation Of 25th Amendment Against Trump. I cosign. Swear in President Pence and swear him out in about two weeks when Biden is inaugurated.

I was having a pretty good day yesterday, full of minor but meaningful personal and professional accomplishments, and then all hell broke loose in Washington, DC. I pushed the news of it away as best I could, so I am less informed than I otherwise would be, but I am sad, angry, and ashamed nonetheless. Per Philip Rucker in The Washington Post: The “American carnage” that Donald Trump vowed to end at the dawn of his presidency was revived in terrifying, treacherous form at its sunset Wednesday, as Trump made a fiery last stand and incited his supporters to storm and sack the U.…

I realized today that in, ACL, a scripting language I use at work, I have been using a mixture of PascalCase and snake_case (like this: Table_Name) that is the worst of both worlds in terms of typing difficulty. Fortunately, ACL is not case-sensitive.

It appears that the M1 Mac Mini I ordered is going to spend 8 hours today riding around on a delivery truck in an area only a couple miles from my house before it is delivered to me. That’s OK. I’m just excited to finally get it. My current Mac is almost 8 years old.

Neil Young and Jimmy Iovine sold part or all of their music catalog publishing rights to Hipgnosis. This closely follows Bob Dylan’s catalog sale to Universal Music Group. Strange things may be afoot in the music industry.

I posted my “Publish to Micro.blog” Scriptable script on the Automators forum to help share it with the people who are most interested in iOS automation.

I published a Scriptable script that lets you publish text posts to Micro.blog from any iOS text editor using the standard share sheet. I am excited to share it with the community. Maybe @jean or @manton would be kind enough to share it more widely than I can.

I have been using the Magnet app on my Mac for years now, and I still can’t remember any of the keyboard shortcuts for it.

I am working on a Scriptable script to publish to Micro.blog via iOS share sheets, so I don’t have to rely on Drafts for that purpose forever. I am preparing it for publication on GitHub, and am making too many changes to its variable names right now in the process. 😅

I submitted a small but vital bugfix to one of my iOS apps this evening. It feels good. 😀

I created a Siri Shortcut to send my daughter a “Word of the Day” email (which is based on a template I created) to help her build her vocabulary. It’s the first Shortcut I created that does something that’s actually useful!

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposes national lockdown on England to combat new Covid variant. Yes, we have vaccines now, but COVID-19 has mutated into a much more contagious strain. It feels as if the whole world is in a macabre race right now.

Microsoft planning ‘sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows. I use Windows for work at least 8 hours each weekday. The last thing I need is a “sweeping visual rejuvenation” of it.

Google workers announce plans to unionize. This is, potentially, a great development. I am curious to see how many computer engineers unionize. I know, if it were me, it would be a tough sell to pay 1% of my salary to a group without collective bargaining power, even though I strongly believe in unions.

Chipotle launches cauliflower rice nationwide as consumers cut grains from their diets. This is a good idea. Cauliflower rice can be very good, at least when it is not overcooked. Still, it probably won’t get me to go back to Chipotle ever again. 😅

Making pound cake in a bread machine does not result in the softest, most perfectly baked cake. Next time I will use the oven like I normally would. It was a fun experiment, though.

If Sen. Josh Hawley follows through with his objection to the electoral college results, he deserves expulsion from the Senate.

I am making poundcake in my new bread machine today just to see if it will work. 👨‍🍳

I’m back to late-night debugging: a nasty bug has gotten worse, not better, since I started compiling my app on the iOS 14 SDK. It’s not the best idea to wait until late at night to think really hard about a mind-bending problem, but that’s the only time I have to myself.

I’ve gotten to the point with my cooking that I always think that I have no idea what I am doing, but end up rejecting most recipes I find, and my dinners come out really good anyway.

My pinboard.in subscription is lapsing in two weeks. I think I will let it expire. I have been a member for five years, and in that time have used Pinboard, and bookmarks in general, less and less. I wish I had joined it back when it offered lifetime subscriptions.

🎬 Wonder Woman: 1984 was all kinds of just OK. I mostly enjoyed the set pieces but through the whole thing didn’t fit together that well. I would love a better-written, more cohesive adventure, if there is another sequel. Maybe team up Gal Godot and Linda Carter.

I got a chance to play a few hours of Ori and the Will of the Wisps over the past couple days, and think it is absolutely amazing. While it definitely rehashes some of the same scenarios and story beats from the first game, the gameplay is actually significantly more complex and rewarding. I think I’m benefiting from my experience with the first game, which I played through twice, but I have found the sequel to be a little more forgiving in its difficulty.…

I have been busy with family most of the time the past few days, mostly doing Christmas-y things. I barely celebrate Christmas any more, mostly because my wife and kids are Jewish and I have a complicated relationship with Christmas. (Couldn’t we just celebrate Saturnalia or something instead?) This year, I found some Christmas music I actually like (the “Jazz Christmas” playlist on Apple Music, plus “Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas” and Nat King Cole’s “Christmas Music.…

“His Dark Materials” is another “limited” series that has been reviewed for its third and final season. It is based on a three-book series, so three seasons of TV adaption makes perfect sense. I hope that more book-to-one-season-of-television adaptations are made going forward, because it offers more time to tell the story than a 2-hour movie, but not too much time, like an open-ended TV series adaptation would. While it is not my favorite show on TV right now, it is up there.…

How can there be no emoji for “idiot?" 🤯

Per Russ Burlingame on ComicBook.com: “Ted Lasso is a three-season show. After the third season, I will desperately try to get Mr. Sudeikis to do a…” Lawrence started, and then he stopped to rephrase. “The only way I think a fourth season of Ted Lasso exists would be if TL went and coached a soccer team that played about a block from Jason’s house in real life, you know what I mean?…

Last night I started playing Ori and the Will of the Wisps on the Switch. I only had about 15 minutes, so I barely got into gameplay, but I was floored by how beautiful the game is. The beginning is like watching an animated movie.

I like Reeder 5, but I have been dissatisfied with feed syncing over iCloud for the past few days. The feed lists and unread posts have not been keeping in sync between my iPhone and iPad. I can’t be the only one experiencing this. Hopefully the developer will sort it out.

From Adi Robertson in The Verge: The Enola Holmes case hinged on Sherlock Holmes’ complicated copyright status. Most Holmes stories sit in the public domain, and stories like Enola Holmes — which reimagines Holmes (played by Henry Cavill) having a younger sister — can freely repurpose their elements. But 10 of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are still protected by copyright, and the Doyle estate argued that they depict a meaningfully different version of the character.…

I am taking a Robotic Process Automation online course for work today. Maybe, after I complete it, I will create a bot to take the rest of the courses for me.

I took advantage of the Nintendo eShop sales this week to buy a bunch of games, at varying discounts, to play in the new year: Ori and the Will of the Wisps Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Horace Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom This strategy has worked out pretty well for me the past couple years, though it does mean that some games remain unplayed for months.…

I started getting emails that frontline medical workers in my area have already received the COVID-19 vaccine. That is reassuring. Based on how the year has been going, I expected controversy and uproar already.

From Julia Alexander in The Verge: The show, The Book of Boba Fett, was not included as an announcement during Disney’s big investor day last week. Several other Star Wars projects, including two Mandalorian spinoffs — an Ahsoka Tano show and Rangers of the New Republic — a Lando Calrissian show, and a Star Wars anime, were announced last week. I can’t help but think that Disney may be planning to give fans too much of a good thing.…

I was right to be concerned about snow removal, because our snow plow guy just quit and passed us off to someone else who hasn’t called me yet. It will be dark out in about half an hour, too.

Eric Lander, who is a genius brimming with charisma, is probably the best Armchair Expert podcast guest ever. Listen if you have any interest in the Human Genome Project, which he helped lead.

🎮 I am happy to see that Hades is getting some “game of the year” nods, from Polygon and from Chiam Gartenberg of The Verge. It is easily my favorite game since Hollow Knight.

I woke up to a decent amount of snowfall, which totally surprised me. I am unsure how we are going to clear it off our driveway and sidewalks, though.

I finally got an Apple TV+ free trial. 😎

The snowstorm started and my kids are excited.

Chris Welch’s AirPods Max review asks the question “Apple still doesn’t offer a lossless tier, and I have to ask, if not now, when?” I don’t think Apple is ever going to offer lossless audio, mostly because 256-kbps AAC really is good enough for most listeners.

The local news is predicting 6-8 inches of snow today in my area. Dark Sky is predicting about an inch, plus some rain. 🤷‍♂️ We’ll see, I guess.

Got the new iPad 4 and bought Reeder 5 to use on it!

A robotic kitchen for rich people is kind of a cool idea, I guess, but the setup looks pretty scary. If robots can cook, where will that leave restaurant cooks in 20 years or so, when the technology gets cheaper?

I am eagerly awaiting for the shipment of a new iPad Air 4 today.

Live: Here Are the Electoral College Results, By State. Why on earth would I want to track this live?

I took a required course in ethics this morning, and wish I could have just watched a few episodes of “The Good Place” instead.

Taylor Swift to Release New Album, ‘Evermore,’ Tonight. 👀 I guess if there’s no new Bleachers album this year I can be happy about this, which sounds like it’s “Folklore” part 2.

First impressions of the Apple AirPods Max are starting to trickle in. I am looking forward to reviews that speak more to the sound quality and less about the impractical case.

Per Susan Davis on NPR: When earmarks were a regular feature of congressional business, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., said Democrats and Republicans were able to cut more deals and pass more bills with bipartisan support. This sounds like a bad idea at first, but it probably is actually a good one. Congress can’t pass meaningful legislation anymore, in part because there is almost no bipartisan agreement on important bills.…

Wow. Apple’s “December surprise” actually happened: By moving into the premium headphones space, Apple will directly compete with brands like Bose, Sony, Sennheiser, AKG, Bowers and Wilkins, and others that have years of experience and a long list of products between them. Apple is going higher than just about all of them on price, but the company is riding the momentum of the AirPods and AirPods Pro, which have dominated the true wireless earbuds market.…

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by Chuck Yeager and by test pilots in general. I did not know he lived to see 2020. Rest in peace.

🎵 Today’s listen: “Everything Will Change” by The Postal Service. It’s the remastered audio part of a filmed concert from 2013. Sadly, it isn’t new music, but it’s fun to hear the band play live.

It could just be end-of-the-year malaise, but I have given up on Inbox Zero. I will probably just declare email bankruptcy on January 1 and archive or delete everything in one fell swoop.

I would have thought that Bob Dylan’s entire song catalog, which he sold to Universal Music Group, would be worth more than $300 million. After all, that was the going rate for Taylor Swift’s much smaller one.

I’ve become so accustomed to global warming that I now expect December temperatures to be 40-50ºF and a sub-freezing day like today feels unusual.

🎵 Today’s listen: “My Woman” by Angel Olsen. I am a huge fan of her newer album, “All Mirrors”, so I decided to listen to her prior album. It’s pretty good, and has a strong finish, but it is not as compelling to me as “All Mirrors” is.

After about eight years of service, the right-click button on my trackball just stopped registering clicks. I guess the switch is broken. Luckily, there are two other buttons I can use, so I remapped right-click to one of the buttons on the top. I hope I can get used to it.

I enrolled in the Apple Small Business program today. I am grateful for it, even though I am among the smallest of the small developers on the platform.

Puerto Rico: Iconic Arecibo Observatory telescope collapses. I’m sad to see this observatory damaged so badly. It loomed large in my imagination as a child, mostly from magazine articles and SETI, and then the movie “Contact.”

Trump Has Discussed With Advisers Pardons for His 3 Eldest Children and Giuliani. Yep, nothing to see here. Swamp: drained! 🙄

The podcast landscape is changing apace. Spotify seems to be doing well with its exclusive podcasts and its various podcast network acquisitions. I’m of the opinion that their exclusive podcasts are, essentially, _not _podcasts, because I can’t listen to them in my preferred app, Overcast.

Apple Names App of the Year Winners. I guess this is important. I haven’t bought an app for myself all year (on iOS at least), though I am still paying for my Ulysses and Overcast subscriptions.