I am reading a lot more lately, basically to try to tamp down the level of stress and existential dread. I just loaded the last of the six Kenzie-Gennaro novels on my iPad.

My son’s preschool announced today that it is closing for the remainder of the academic year. It isn’t a surprise, but it is upsetting to think of the learning and socialization opportunities he is missing. He’s a bright, bright kid, and we just can’t pay as close attention to him as we want to right now. It’s sad.

I just set up a “Windows" style keyboard (it’s a Razer BlackWidow Lite) with my Mac for a trial run. I mapped the Alt key to “Command”, and the Super/Windows key to “Alt” so that it is more Mac-like. I’m still getting used to the layout, but it is working out all right so far.

Well, my wife and I gave me a haircut this afternoon, and now I know exactly what I will look like when I, someday, lose all of my hair. 😀

I still haven’t attempted to cut my own hair during this “social isolation” period. I guess I could give myself a buzzcut with these instructions. My wife has, thus far, not been willing to help me cut my hair, especially after the cut she gave to our son.

Is the Virus on My Clothes? My Shoes? My Hair? My Newspaper? My wife and I area asking ourselves these questions every day, and we are at relatively low risk. I only go grocery shopping once a week, and we don’t order takeout anymore. But some essential supplies must be ordered and delivered every few days.

Right now, I’m thankful for my good BlueTooth headphones, a Radiohead playlist on Apple Music, and not being on the phone anymore for work.

The new iPhone SE looks like a great option for me if I break my current phone, which is a three-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 8 Plus. Mostly, though, thinks I can stay on my current phone for another year, or even more, if I can get another battery replacement.

Just wondering, does anyone use the “menu” key on the bottom right of their computer keyboards? I feel like I should start trying to, to see if I can rely on the mouse (well, in my case trackball) a little bit less in Word and Excel.

I find myself listening to fewer podcasts, but more podcast ads (I don’t skip them as often), now that I’ve been social-isolating for so long. I want to hear the soothing voices of my favorite podcast hosts talk about something other than Covid-19.

I learned this morning that lawn services are up and running my neighborhood. I guess they are “essential services”; who knew? It’s a good thing and a bad thing, really. I detest the noise, which never seems to stop in my neighborhood, but my kids do need the lawn mowed, especially now that their only playground is our back yard.

I spent more time tricking out my Visual Studio Code install today. I installed the Local History extension, which, after some configuration, will save a copy of every file I edit, every time I save them, to a folder tree on my machine. I had something like this on Sublime Text for years, but this is even better. It integrates the the editor, and shows diffs between versions.

I kind of wish I had COBOL skills to help out my state right now. Why can’t the state retirement systems run on Swift? (I kid!)

I created an even more useful Excel VBA module that lets you resize the currently selected chart to cover, exactly, a range of one or more cells. You specify the range after you run the macro.

I created an Excel VBA module for resizing the active chart to a (hard-coded) standard size. This sort of thing is useful at work when developing reports.

The March 2020 Visual Studio Code update just came out. Microsoft and the community are adding feature after feature to it at an astounding pace. As long as you have a fast computer, it is an amazing programmer’s editor and Git client now.

I don’t know what took me so long to think to do this, but today I coded a VBA module with macros that increase and decrease Excel row height by one row at a time. I call them via the “Quick Access” toolbar, which is easy to customize.

Arq Backup 6 was just released. It is really compelling software if you want to “roll your own” backup service, rather than use something tightly integrated with the back-end, like BackBlaze. I’m very glad, now, that I bought a lifetime license when Arq Backup 5 came out, four years ago. I got a free (as in, already paid for) upgrade! Arq Backup 6 is much simpler looking than prior versions were. It is set up almost like a web app. Unfortunately, it no longer looks and feels much like a Mac app, which is one of the things that brought me to it in the first place. I don’t use its main UI that much anyway, though, so that probably is not a big deal.

Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race. It is amazing that I didn’t get a New York Times news alert about this.

This story about Wisconsin’s primary election is very upsetting. It is yet another symptom of a larger problem: American democracy is in deep, deep trouble, now that Republicans, who need low voter turnout to win elections, have taken over the Judiciary.

Neutron stars are so strange. I was recently trying to explain them to my daughter, who just got really interested in black holes and cosmology. I wonder if she would be able to follow Randal Monroe’s explainer in the New York Times today.

Pixelmator Photo, my photo editing app of choice on iOS, dropped a new version with more great features. I love this app, because it is very easy to use, and it integrates very well with Apple Photos. I hope that, someday, it does not become subscription-only, because I don’t know if i use it quite enough to justify a monthly payment.

🎵 I am enjoying “Future Nostalga” by Dua Lipa.

📚 Most of my “social isolation” reading has been the Kenzie-Gennaro series of detective novels by Dennis Lehane. I had read the fourth, “Gone Baby Gone”, back in 2007, the year its movie adaptation came out, without realizing it was part of a series. In my opinion, the first one is pretty good, the second is a lot better, and the third is starting out even better than the second.

It looks like I’m not the only person who moved to Apple Books recently. Bradley Changers at 9to5Mac did, too. Now I kind of want an iPad Mini just for reading, though.