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. If only Microsoft implemented the “shake that mouse and the cursor gets bigger” feature from macOS.

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. I have heard of such things happening in the South, but never where I have lived (New Jersey now, New England before that).

• People (including my family) don’t have our kids play outside that much because is too hot, and the air quality too bad, to do so.

• I saw more people exercising after dark (after 9 PM) yesterday than I did out during the daytime.

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. It is frivolous and adds no value. Didn’t Bill Belichick expose the futility of the sports press conference twenty years ago or more?

🎮 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. Lockdowns, too, are features of war, as if each one of us, amid not only the pandemic but also acts of terrorism and mass shootings and armed insurrections, were now engaged in a Hobbesian battle for existence, civil life having become a war zone.

Lepore argues for cultural and economic origins for burnout, which make for a useful lens through which to study the phenomenon. Personally, I think the burnout really is a manifestation of depression, specifically of high-functioning depression coupled with exhaustion. Lepore touches on this, too.

Burnout still feels like its own thing to me, because I experience the feeling at my desk during the work day. Fortunately, I have learned (or am still learning) to slow down and demand less of myself, and of those around me, when I am feeling burnt out.

🎮 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. 😀