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). At $349 each, that was too expensive.

The smaller, cheaper HomePod mini holds little appeal to me, and seems to be a far less interesting product for the audio engineers at Apple to work on. For all I know, though, it sells in huge numbers, which makes it interesting in and of itself. Maybe a HomePod mini max (ha!) will be released someday, at around $150, which will hit the price/performance sweet spot I am looking for.

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. For almost three months my mental state caromed between what I think of now as irrational fear and rational fear. I could see the whole year of 2020 play out in my imagination, way before my friends and family could see what was coming, but I could do nothing to stop it, and I could do almost nothing to protect my family from it. All those feelings felt very real and very debilitating, even when almost no one else around me was feeling them.

I had about two months of angst about COVID before it actually hit around here. The last time I went out with friends and family was, I think, on March 14, 2020. We went to see a musical and when out to eat at a crowded restaurant afterward. It was really hard for me to feel comfortable the entire time, but I didn’t want to let everybody down because I was concerned about a pandemic that hadn’t hit our area yet. Less than a week later, my entire family was on lockdown.

Back in January, February, and early March 2020, it didn’t help me at all to have known about the scope and length and shape of prior pandemics, like the Spanish Flu, which I know, from reading family letters, killed a bunch of people in my extended family about a hundred years ago. It didn’t help me at all to know what I should do and buy to prepare for it. It didn’t help me at all that I am smart enough to think for myself and to scrutinize, with a pretty good understanding of the relevant science and statistics, the information and advice experts were providing to us. All of these things just made me feel more uncertain and more cynical about what was going on.

A year later, I am feeling more hopeful. I have the vaccine after all, and am probably (but not definitely) immune to COVID 18. But my county is still at extremely high risk level. The numbers are still higher than they were last year when all of us were in a panic. Despite that, all the states, even blue states like mine, are reopening rapidly and throwing caution to the wind, when it would be more prudent to do so more gradually. It makes me nervous that we are giving the virus a chance to circulate long enough to adapt resistance to our vaccines.

I was early in being scared of COVID, and I may be late in getting over that fear. I just hope that, when I look forward from today, whatever fear I feel is merely anxiety over things that will not play out, rather than the accurate foresight into the future that I had late last winter.

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. Platforming and combat are fast and fluid, it nails the difficulty curve, it doesn’t require grinding (unlike the Castlevania games), it allows for slow or fast play, and so on. I could go on and on about it.

🎬 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. Then I thought, she should have a bodyguard or an entourage with her at all times for protection. Then I thought, she should not need to! That could ruin her life.

Amanda Gorman is a strong and bold speaker, and deserves the last word on the matter:

“In a sense, he was right,” the former National Youth Poet Laureate added. “I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.”

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 don’t care that much how it looks, as long as it is simple and makes sense.

Mermaid’s plaintext premise is really cool, and the syntax is flexible enough to not be awful. It is way more flexible than the examples on The Mermaid website originally led me to believe. You can name each shape whatever you like (not just single letter identifiers) and you can define the content (shapes) and relationships (arrows) separately if you want to. The only thing that stinks is that you have to manually insert html break tags (<br/>) for line breaks, because there is no word wrap.

I still need to figure out what the best renderer is for me. The Mermaid Live Editor does not produce usable charts on my work machine’s web browser (the new Edge) for some reason. Typora seems like it will do for now.

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.

The problem is, we learn three things in the final two episodes of season 1 that make the pilots unnecessary:

1. A person’s mind can uploaded to, and downloaded from, a digital brain
2. A digital brain can be copied an indefinite number of times.
3. A digital brain is all that is needed to drive a mech

If one pilot’s mind can be copied, without harming her, and then bound to any number of mechs, then why do we need the pilots at all, once you’ve got the first one’s mind copied? If the pilots aren’t really necessary, why haven’t the characters in charge of the gen:lock program figured that out yet?

I’m not sure I will pick it up again when season 2 comes out. Maybe this kind of anime isn’t for me.

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. He will cash out cash out with a tidy profit for his also-ran music service. I was surprised to learn that Tidal’s value appreciated so much since he bought it.

It sure seems like a bad deal for Square, though, who accepts a ton of business risk without much benefit. I probably don’t know what Tidal’s cultural cache is—I had assumed that most people had never heard of it—so I can’t appreciate its value. Still, even if the acquisition sounds like a bad idea, $300 million is play money to the Jay-Zs and Jack Dorseys of the world, so who cares?

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. People keep getting in trouble for what they post to Twitter. (“Social media” in these cases always is Twitter, too. That is probably just because it is public facing, though it is also a popular place for broadcasting, calling out, and grandstanding.)

It will soon be the conventional wisdom that those who seek high offices—in public service or in private industry—should have no public social media presence, no blog—certainly no Twitter account—maybe no public online presence at all. That bothers me because I think there is value in publishing one’s thoughts to the world, in a blog, vlog, podcast, or whatever other medium I can’t even conceive of yet. People have an urge to share and should not feel that they will be punished for it, especially years after they tap the “post” button.

I understand that some people are deliberately awful on social media, and that is a problem, but isn’t it also a problem that “the Internet never forgets?” The right to be forgotten is at both ridiculous to ask for and essential for people to get along with each other after a certain point. How should we evaluate a person based on what she posted online? Does it matter how long ago a thought was posted? What is fair? I think we are at a cultural crossroads regarding these questions, and may be stuck at that crossroads for a long, long time.

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.