🎵 I have been enjoying the Breaking Singer/Songwriter playlist on Apple Music quite a bit today.

Axios reports:

Contact tracing data from around the globe suggests that while there are instances of asymptomatic coronavirus patients transmitting the virus to others, they are not “a main driver” of new infections, World Health Organization officials said at a press conference Monday.

How can this be true, based on all of what we have observed so far? At least Axios adds some context to the statement and concludes: “The bottom line: These statements are a reminder of just how little we understand about this virus.”

I code in C# at work and in Swift in my home life. Each language has a default indentation style, different mostly on whether opening curly braces ("{") are placed at the end of a line or at the beginning of a line of their own. The former style is called the “K&R” style, though I know it only as “the one true brace style.” The other style is called the “Allman style,” though I have never heard it called any name in particular, and think of it, myself, as “C# style.”

I leave my IDE code formatting defaults alone, so I have coded using the “one true style” in Xcode for Swift, and have coded using the C# style in Visual Studio. Both styles seem to work equally as well, but overall I prefer the way that the C# style helps ensure that all the opening and closing braces will line up.

I have been thinking this week to try to change my Swift coding style to match my C# coding style, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I can’t imagine using the C# style for Swift coding, or the “one true style” for C# coding; it just wouldn’t look or feel right. I found out that a lot of this stylistic distinction is based, as so much is, on historical precedent: influential textbooks or famous programmers set the way, and the rest of us follow. Maybe I will break with convention on my next Swift project, but probably not.

Tonight I’m taking a trip down memory lane with 10,000 Maniacs.

“MTV Unplugged” was a huge hit from 1993, when I was a sophomore in high school. Back then, I listened to ”In My Tribe” and “Our Time In Eden” (my favorite 10,000 Maniacs record) back-to-back all the time.

Another live performance, from 1998, was just released a couple days ago, too.

I’m grilling and enjoy the day, which is a nice respite for me, because the last few days were kind of rough.

Wondering tonight…

What is an effective way to counter a bad-faith argument? Do you call out the other person for arguing in bad faith, or does that always backfire?

I can’t think of a NYC mayor more hapless than Bill DeBlasio. I don’t know enough about him or about NYC politics to understand why everything goes wrong for him, but I do think that people just don’t like him, which may even be unfair to him, like the stupid “controversy” in 2014 about how he ate his pizza with a fork.

The credit card companies have trained me very well to be really, really concerned about my credit score at all times. I check my credit score about once per week, even though it has always been in the “excellent” range and I have no real reason to check it. I have no reason to care about my credit score (I guess I am fortunate in that way) but I obsess about it nonetheless. It has been drilled into me that it is what responsible, ethical people do. I have internalized that logic as “it’s what people like me do.”

I think about China’s “social credit score” being implemented here in the United States somehow, what with the rise of authoritarianism and all, and marvel at how easy it would be to implement, and how much of it is already in place.

It’s day two of me learning new keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Excel (on Windows). There are so, so many. It’s almost embarrassing that I didn’t know them; I have been using Excel almost daily for about 20 years! 🤯

Cop Shows

This article by Constance Grady on Vox argues something I have been thinking a lot about this week: Our opinion of the police is heavily influenced by cop shows.

One of my favorite shows right now is Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s characters, while being funny, eccentric, and often immature, are all portrayed as valorous and extremely dedicated to their jobs and to justice in general. That is part of its appeal to me. I don’t see it as pro-cop propaganda, but it does work that way just a little bit, by presenting the world we wish was true, and allowing us to live in it for a while, as if it were true.

Maybe—and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here—but maybe Mark Zuckerberg isn’t nearly as smart as people give him credit for. 🤷🏼

I enjoyed episode 300 of Upgrade, which was part victory lap and part looking forward to the future. Upgrade is one of my personal top three tech podcasts (the others being Accidental Tech Podcast and This Week in Tech). My favorite part of Upgrade is the camaraderie between hosts Jason Snell and Myke Hurley. I enjoy the enthusiasm and energy they bring to the well-worn topic of Apple news every week.

Oh, so Microsoft Office does have a command palette! It’s accessible via Alt-Q. I knew that “Tell me what you want to do…” option was in the command ribbon for years, but I thought it was just a useless online help lookup tool. All of a sudden I feel like much more of a power user.

One of my personal projects this week is to train myself to use the Alt key-based keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Excel and Word a lot more often. I had forgotten that the entire command ribbon is keyboard accessible, and the implementation is actually pretty clever. I would prefer a command palette, though.

Wegmans was twice as crowded as usual tonight because everyone brought their spouse to the store. It was date night, I guess. At least everyone wore masks.

I wrote an AutoHotKey function today to paste decoded URL-encoded strings, which I have to do quite a lot because I’m emailing people about files stored on SharePoint quite often now. It is useful to be able to paste a folder name or a file name without “%20” in the place of every space, and other URL-encoding garbage.

I like AutoHotKey well enough, but I wish it didn’t have its own programming language. I’d rather just use AutoHotKey to set hotkeys, and call out to something else (C#, Python, Swift, JavaScript, even VB Script) for the functionality. I suppose that is also possible with AutoHotKey. Or, I could write my own Windows app to do that, somehow. But if I did that, I might have to implement my own programming language to support its scripting. 😅

My wife and I watched Jerry Seinfeld’s “23 Hours to Kill" Netflix special tonight and really enjoyed it. I especially liked his opening bits.

I found a Visual Studio Code extension for todo.txt today. I am happy. I don’t think any todo.txt extensions existed the last time I looked, in the early fall last year.

I’m not 100% sure about this, but I am finding that I prefer tabs over spaces for code indentation all of the sudden. 🤯 I have preferred spaces since 1992!

I have spent many hours over the past week trying to do something that can’t really be done: replace the default iOS software keyboard with a custom picker view that also can become the first responder and respond to hardware keyboard shortcuts. I thought, earlier this evening, that I had given up my fancy implementation and was returning to something simple that I got working very quickly. Somehow, though, I went down another rabbit hole tonight and wasted the last hour.

Programming is fun, but so much of my time is wasted this way. Some of my best code get cut out of my app because, as elegant as it is, it just doesn’t work with the frameworks I’m building on.

I have been self-editing an awful, awful lot lately. I think it’s due to the mixed up combination of stress and existential dread this global pandemic has brought to me and my family. I want to share more online again. Hopefully I will get back into the habit.

All work weeks should begin on Tuesday. 😎

I finished reading all the Kenzie-Gennaro books by Dennis Lehane last night. I’m going to try starting True Grit by Charles Portis. I love the movie versions, especially the Coen Brothers one, and hope that the book is even better.

This is a test post from iA Writer on iOS. It is cool that iA added MicroPub support. 😀 I had some issues with the authentication, and had to generate and enter an app token manually. The app creates a new draft and opens it up the web browser; it does not publish immediately—which is a good thing and a bad thing, I guess.

My state (New Jersey) announced today that school is closed for the remainder of the school year. This is exactly what I expected, but it is still going to be hard to explain this to my daughter, who misses school desperately. It’s for the best, though.