The burning of Notre Dame shook me to my core yesterday.

The images and videos made me so upset that I thought I was going crazy. After all, it is just a building, and presumably no one died, so what is the big deal? Still, the cathedral is a symbol of beauty and hope—literally of reaching to the sky to a higher power—and, to me at least, of human achievement, collective action, and indomitable spirit. To see it, a world monument, burning up (and potentially collapsing altogether, though thankfully that did not happen) deeply troubled me.

I have thought about it a little more now, and have realized something: When upsetting things occur, it makes sense to be upset, even if what is happening isn’t the most upsetting thing that could occur. Feeling so bad wasn’t really a bad thing for my me, and it wasn’t an outsized emotion to something that wasn’t really affecting me. I’m not crazy; I’m sensitive, and that’s OK.

I have been in a weird state lately in which I am not excited about any company’s recently released, or recently announced, products or services. I feel grateful that I didn’t drop everything in 2007 and start covering the smartphone and gadget market for a living. (I wanted to!)

Thanks to the couple of warm-weather days we had this week, I discovered that I need to replace not one, but two air conditioners shortly, before I really have to turn them on again. Sigh. 💸

🎵 Temporary, by Feathermerchants

I was poking around my iTunes library, found an old album I loved from senior year of high school, by a local Connecticut band called Mr. Right. After some Google searches, I found a copy of a song that was one of my all-time, lost, never-had-it-on-a-proper-CD, never-could-get-it-anywhere songs: “Temporary”. It wasn’t what I expected, however. It was a different arrangement, which was entirely unexpected.

When I first heard “Temporary”, it was a power pop song, recorded by Mr. Right (or maybe just Jim Chapdelaine). Apparently, he dusted the song off almost ten years later to record with his new band, Feathermerchants, and reimagined it as a folk-rock (dare I say, Americana?) ballad, sung by a feather-light soprano.

When I was seventeen, I recorded, with my high school band, an EP weeks before we all left for college. Due to dumb luck (one of our friends grew up next door to a bonafide music producer—and the knew each other), two of our four-song EP was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jim Chapdelaine, who went on to become a 13-time Emmy winner, among other amazing things. We first met up with him because his band at the time (in 1995), Mr. Right, played a gig at my hometown's annual fall festival on the green. My friends and I pretty much idolized him for a little while after high school graduation.

Jim played a recording of the original song through his board as we were waiting for something to happen—probably while we were waiting for our gold master CD to be written, at 1/2X speed, in Jim’s basement music studio. The chorus is an ear worm, and I really enjoy the lyric. I remembered it to this day, and hearing it made me feel nostalgic.

I just purchased my ticket to “Avengers: Endgame”. I got a Monday night showing, because I have a wife and kids to spend the weekend with. I’ll have to stay off the internet, I guess, between the movie’s premiere and my showtime.

Journal 2019-04-07

This weekend was great.

On Saturday, my wife and I took the kids to the Staten Island Zoo. One of my wife’s best friends is the director of education there, and she gave us (my 6-year-old daughter, mostly) a private tour. We all had a great time, and my daughter had an absolute blast. She loved everything about it, and got to touch a bunch of animals (sheet, goats, birds, snakes, lizards, an armadillo, a rabbit, and a chinchilla) that we never through she would touch. (You can’t touch most of these animals unless you’re on a field trip or you know someone who works there.)

On Sunday, my wife and I took the kids to one park in the morning and let them play a long time. My 2-year-old son, of course, only wanted to be pushed on the swing, but my daughter wanted to climb and jump and slide and dig in the same, and so on. We had a blast. I took her to another park in the afternoon, where she played for hours, blew bubbles, and made some little friends.

It was great to be able to watch my kids learn and play all weekend. We didn’t go too far from home, or spend that much money, but we all had a great time together.

My (Former) Hobby: Home Media Streaming

For someone who is, now, only marginally interested in television and movies, I have spent a lot of time and money over the years to make my television watching experience awesome. I used to be really into it, and—unless you had a lot of money to burn—it used to be hard to get it working correctly, which fed into my engineering mindset and led me to tinker with hardware and software frequently, for almost a decade.

I started in 2008 by connecting my 13” white MacBook to my (non-HD) TV via a $30 video adapter. Even though my TV was primitive, picture quality was way better when playing video this way, and I could watch streaming videos directly from the networks’ web sites, like “Lost”, on my real TV for the first time. I loved it. After about a year of this, I got a mini-PC as a Christmas gift, which I started using, with an external hard drive, as a home media server.

For the front end, I bought a set-top box that Western Digital used to sell. The system worked…mostly. Streaming over WiFi was reliable for non-HD (480p) and 720p HD encoded TV shows, but anything with higher resolutions, higher bit rates, or DTS audio would usually be impossible to play.

I was never serious enough to buy an expensive computer to connect to my TV, because I figured, correctly it turns out, that video streaming devices would become cheaper and more capable over time. Of course, during that time, I cycled through a ton of set-top boxes (most of which I got for free as review units): Roku boxes, a couple Roku knock-offs, the Boxee Box, the first Amazon Fire TV, an Amazon Fire TV Stick (which was quickly returned), a couple Raspberry Pis running XMBC (which worked great for TV but stumbled on DTS audio), and eventually a number of Apple TVs (fourth generation).

The reason I went through so many front-ends is that they all had two limitations. First, each one left out at least one of the top video sources: either iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, or Plex. (Nothing left out Netflix.) Second, all of them choked on certain sorts of videos, depending on their audio or video encodings.

Eventually, I began to watch video on my iPad while I work. This led me to discover Plex in the App Store. Plex is a server that you can install on a computer, coupled with client apps that run on many different devices. Plex looks great, has server side transcoding to make video formats less of an issue, and allows you to manage a centralized library of TV, movies, music, and more. I used Plex on an Amazon Fire TV for a year or two. I started out very happy with it, but the software stability of the Amazon Fire TV decreased over time, and Plex and Amazon did not release software updates timely enough to fix it. Eventually, I was very unhappy with the Fire TV + Plex combo, but still pretty happy running Plex on my iPad.

When the Apple TV, 4th generation, was released, with support for iTunes, Apple Music, Netflix, YouTube, and Plex, I bought one right away. I figured, at the time, that Apple was so big that only it had any chance to get all the major video providers on a single box, and get them to stay long term. (Amazon, of course, was conspicuously absent for several years, but that was not as important to me back then as it is now.) I didn’t expect to love it for to watch baseball on MLB At Bat, but it plays games at 1080p/60fps, which looks amazing, so I do.

Over time, home media streaming went from being a niche hobby, in which nerds like me tried to hook up computers to their TVs, to a very mainstream way to consume video and audio. Thanks to cheap and nearly ubiquitous modern hardware, my home media streaming “hobby”, has basically come to an end. I still maintain a Plex library, but I no longer have to upgrade or to fiddle with hardware connected to my TV, or worry about audio and video encodings and bit rates before I watch a movie with my wife. I also stream a lot more video from outside the home (not via Plex) than I ever did before—just like everybody else these days. It’s not special any more; it’s just another entertainment product, and it deserves very little thought, because it just works. Things are much better now, but sometimes I do miss tinkering with hardware.

⚾️ My hot take on the Red Sox vs. Diamondbacks game: 😢🤷‍♂️😤

Ulysses, I can’t quit you. If only I knew how to to publish from you to micro.blog.

🎵 The new Sara Bareilles album is really good.

My favorite warm weather alcoholic drink is the classic margarita—but not just any margarita. It has to be homemade and must have freshly squeezed lime juice and Cointreau. No mixes! Here’s how I make it:

Ingredients

1 part freshly squeezed lime juice 2 parts Cointreau 3 parts tequila

Technique

1. Mix the three ingredients together, with ice.
2. Serve on the rocks (after a good stir) in a highball glass, or, serve up (shake with ice and strain) in a martini glass.

My favorite non-alcoholic warm weather drink is iced tea—but not just any iced tea. It has to be homemade and cold brewed. Here’s how I make it:

Ingredients

4 PG Tips tea bags water

Technique

1. Put four PG Tips teabags into a 1.5 L glass pitcher.
2. Fill the pitcher with water.
3. Refigerate for 24 hours.
4. Serve over ice.

⚾️ Dennis Eckersley uses the word “cheese” an awful lot when he is calling a game. 🧀

I finally deleted my Facebook account today. I had deactivated it a long time ago, but I decided that we are never, ever getting back together.

I could have written this article from Ars Technica, because I don’t trust Google to stick with any of their products, except Search, in the long run. It is frustrating that the geekiest and of the big tech companies does not stand behind any of their products, except the one (Search, obviously) that is actually good and makes them money. Due to my frustration with Gmail’s web UI and their lackluster iOS and Android apps, I have concluded that Google is not good at application development or design, despite its obvious skill at developing, and running at massive scale, hardware, software infrastructure, and platforms.

⚾️ It is very early in the season, but it has been difficult watching the Red Sox lose so many games. I don’t expect them to finish last in their division, which is where they are now, but it has not been fun to watch so far.

Why do my children love Daniel Tiger so much, and why does it cause so many problems?

Thanks to it being April Fool’s Day, I can save some time by not reading the news today. That used to be frustrating, but now it feels freeing.

There is a forest fire in New Jersey, very far away from where I live, but it has been smoky and hazy all over my region of the state since lunchtime yesterday. It is kind of awful, to be honest, though it is barely bad at all compared to what happens in Southern California.

I submitted Simple Call Blocker to App Review tonight. The update is practically nothing, but it does feel good to be shipping software again. My rewrite of SwiftoDo Desktop, for the Mac, has been taking me a while.

My wife and I watched another (very old) episode of the Great British Bake-off tonight. It’s a fun show. So far, the first season is still my favorite, despite not being in HD.

One of my minor projects of the week was, essentially, moving terabytes worth of media files around my home network. Having a home media server is like that, sometimes.