I was doing pretty well with the New York Times crossword puzzles this week—until this morning, that is. 🤯

📺 I watched Bears from Disneynature tonight with my kids. The photography is just incredible, and it is exactly the sort of thing I want to get my kids interested in. My daughter loved it so much she drew a picture of a bear. 🐻😀

One thing holding me back from ordering more Amazon Echo Show devices, for other rooms in my house, is the feeling that I don’t own them. I can’t fully control what is displayed on the screen (I just want the clock), which is frustrating.

I wish there was a social club for people who want to go to concerts that aren’t too loud for my ears to handle.

I can’t wait until the day that Google announces that Android is canceled. That has to be coming someday. Google will stop updating Android and start releasing Pixel phones based on some GoogleOS that is more locked down and more beneficial to Google.

Google is shutting down its Cloud Print feature in 2020. Never rely on Google to keep anything around that isn’t Search. 🙄

I’m doing some work out of order today because I just discovered something that will make putting my current tasks off even more difficult. 😱 It doesn’t help that it’s Friday, and I’m not working at 8:00 AM tomorrow.

Tonight was another night when the Apple two-factor authentication popup started alerting me over and over that someone was trying to sign in, in my area, with my account and password. I don’t see how that is even possible, but I changed my password yet again.

🎵 I love “Dream Boy” by Beach Bunny. It’s such a fun song, and everything about it is great, from the lyric to the vulnerable vocals to the production. I wish it had been around when I was younger and listened to a lot more power pop and emo—it would have fit right in.

My daughter is a little like the kids in this light article by Kevin Noble Maillard:

What’s the most accurate way to describe kids’ relationship to “Frozen”? Adoration is insufficient, and obsession is downright weak. It’s more like a cathexis, an acutely intense energy focused on a singular entity.

My daughter was borderline obsessed with Frozen for about five years. It lulled a bit for a while, but the existence of “Frozen II” on the horizon has revived her enthusiasm, especially with Elsa, quite a bit this year. After months of looking forward to it, my wife and I are taking her to see the sequel this weekend.

I am going to start trying to get my kids to watch the nature documentary-style movies on Disney+ later today. The new ones look gorgeous, and the old ones had fun narratives, invented from the wildlife footage, to follow. I loved the old True Life Adventures movies that used to be on the Disney channel all the time when I was a kid, and found one of them, The Living Desert on Disney+ last night. Disney+ also has National Geographic content, which I have to dive into more next. I am cautiously optimistic that my kids will enjoy them (or at least tolerate them sometimes and learn something).

I’m pushing a small bug fix update out for one of my apps, and re-thinking my git branching strategies a little, because I have been stuck in version control hell for a while now.

I got over my last cold-turned-sinus-infection late last week, and I am already coming down with the next one. Oh, the joys of having a toddler in preschool. 🤧😕

I am updating my FreeNAS box right now, not because I need to keep it current (it’s working fine), but because I can’t help myself. 🤞

My personal life today consisted of no news, then bad news, then good news, all on different fronts. I plan to unwind a bit, later on, and watch “His Dark Materials” on HBO.

I am happy that I have subscribed to the “Poem-a-Day” email series from Poets.org. Each new poem makes my world a tiny bit bigger. Poetry is something I have missed, without realizing it, since I studied and wrote it in college.

Jeanne Marie Laskas’s article in The New York Times is absolutely wonderful:

“If you make him out to be a saint, people might not know how hard he worked,” Joanne said. Disciplined, focused, a perfectionist — an artist. That was the Fred she and the cast and crew knew. “I think people think of Fred as a child-development expert,” David Newell, the actor who played Mr. “Speedy Delivery” McFeely, told me recently. “As a moral example maybe. But as an artist? I don’t think they think of that.”

Go read it.

I started my day by putting “do something great" at the top of my task list. The greatest thing I did today was rather humble: I cooked delicious butternut squash soup for my family. I will count that as a win.

The credit card my wife and I use the most got compromised again yesterday. It happens about once every year or two. I don’t know how it happens, but the bank’s fraud detection always catches it somehow, so I guess we are ok. 🤷‍♂️

I have to do required ethics training today for one of my audit certifications. Unfortunately, having watched “The Good Place” does not excuse me from the CPE requirements.

I hope to start to get more meaningful programming work done this week. I have been sick or on antibiotics (which knock me out) for the past three weeks.

There’s nothing like an unscheduled play date in a few hours to get me to clean up the messy parts of the house I normally don’t want to bother with.

Democrats should not move to the left or the right to win in future elections. They should move to Wyoming.

The amount of family disruption that has started since our 2-year-old son discovered he can boss around Alexa is absolutely staggering.

So far, I have found Apple Arcade to be overwhelming, in terms of number of games available, and underwhelming, in terms of whether I want to spend more time playing games. One gem I found was “Shantae and the Seven Sirens” (a colorful Metroidvania-style game). I wanted to like the Oceanhorn sequel better than I did, but it just didn’t grab me. There are lots of irreverent, mobile-style games, too, which I tried, but can’t really justify putting more time into.

I think that I mainly don’t have time to play video games right now, and don’t want another monthly subscription to worry about (even though it is a low dollar one) either. My plan is to cancel my free trial just before it rolls over into a paid subscription. Perhaps I will try it again later.