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.

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.