⚾️ My hot take on the Red Sox vs. Diamondbacks game: 😢🤷‍♂️😤

Ulysses, I can’t quit you. If only I knew how to to publish from you to micro.blog.

🎵 The new Sara Bareilles album is really good.

My favorite warm weather alcoholic drink is the classic margarita—but not just any margarita. It has to be homemade and must have freshly squeezed lime juice and Cointreau. No mixes! Here’s how I make it:

Ingredients

1 part freshly squeezed lime juice 2 parts Cointreau 3 parts tequila

Technique

1. Mix the three ingredients together, with ice.
2. Serve on the rocks (after a good stir) in a highball glass, or, serve up (shake with ice and strain) in a martini glass.

My favorite non-alcoholic warm weather drink is iced tea—but not just any iced tea. It has to be homemade and cold brewed. Here’s how I make it:

Ingredients

4 PG Tips tea bags water

Technique

1. Put four PG Tips teabags into a 1.5 L glass pitcher.
2. Fill the pitcher with water.
3. Refigerate for 24 hours.
4. Serve over ice.

⚾️ Dennis Eckersley uses the word “cheese” an awful lot when he is calling a game. 🧀

I finally deleted my Facebook account today. I had deactivated it a long time ago, but I decided that we are never, ever getting back together.

I could have written this article from Ars Technica, because I don’t trust Google to stick with any of their products, except Search, in the long run. It is frustrating that the geekiest and of the big tech companies does not stand behind any of their products, except the one (Search, obviously) that is actually good and makes them money. Due to my frustration with Gmail’s web UI and their lackluster iOS and Android apps, I have concluded that Google is not good at application development or design, despite its obvious skill at developing, and running at massive scale, hardware, software infrastructure, and platforms.

⚾️ It is very early in the season, but it has been difficult watching the Red Sox lose so many games. I don’t expect them to finish last in their division, which is where they are now, but it has not been fun to watch so far.

Why do my children love Daniel Tiger so much, and why does it cause so many problems?

Thanks to it being April Fool’s Day, I can save some time by not reading the news today. That used to be frustrating, but now it feels freeing.

There is a forest fire in New Jersey, very far away from where I live, but it has been smoky and hazy all over my region of the state since lunchtime yesterday. It is kind of awful, to be honest, though it is barely bad at all compared to what happens in Southern California.

I submitted Simple Call Blocker to App Review tonight. The update is practically nothing, but it does feel good to be shipping software again. My rewrite of SwiftoDo Desktop, for the Mac, has been taking me a while.

My wife and I watched another (very old) episode of the Great British Bake-off tonight. It’s a fun show. So far, the first season is still my favorite, despite not being in HD.

One of my minor projects of the week was, essentially, moving terabytes worth of media files around my home network. Having a home media server is like that, sometimes.

I started updating my apps to Swift 5.0 today. It has been a pretty easy migration for me, so far, but it has reminded me how much I dislike dependencies and CocoaPods. I think I’m going to ditch all CocoaPods eventually and just take over, for myself, whatever open source code I use.

I will be submitting the new build of Simple Call Blocker, my free anti-neighbor spam app, soon. I don’t plan to release the update to my other iOS app, SwiftoDo, for another week or so.

My thoughts on Apple Card, written in the Apple style of trying not to say “the" before the product name.

Apple announced Apple Card at its event on Monday. Details are incomplete, but its announcement excited me more than the media-related services Apple announced at the same event. Perhaps that is because I pay for things every day, but don’t watch much TV, and my wife and I are happy with our New Yorker subscription (she reads the physical magazine; I read it online) and our New York Times subscription (which we both read via its iOS app).

Apple Card interests me because I use Apple Pay all the time, and Apple Card’s Apple Pay-specific cash back rewards are a 33% better than what I get from either of my two current credit cards on the things I purchase most. From a pure spending and getting rewards perspective, Apple Card seems like a winner to me.

I am a somewhat baffled, however, at the Apple commentators’ many takes on how Apple Card’s rewards are mediocre. I suppose that may be the case for people who want travel rewards, but if you want cash back and can use Apple Pay at your local supermarkets and restaurants, Apple Card is a winner.

I base my opinion on lots of research into the best cash back cards. For the past twenty years, I have been a cash-back-rewards seeker who researches credit cards on NerdWallet and BankRate at least once a year, and occasionally jumps from one card to another. Based on my research, I already have the best credit cards for me, from a rewards perspective. Apple’s credit card’s cash back rewards system is better than all of them, again, for me. Two percent cash back on all Apple Pay purchases would increase the cash back I get from my largest non-mortgage monthly expense category, supermarket spending, from 1.5% to 2%.

I heard on TWIT this week that Apple Card does not have certain protections most credit cards come from, like purchase price protection and extended warranties. That doesn’t matter to me, though, as I have not used those benefits in the 20+ years I have had a credit card.

Apple Card’s announced interest rates fall within what I think is a normal range. Each customer’s interest rate will depend on their credit rating, so it is technically unknown until each person applies for it. Apple has not made it clear whether there is a monthly billing cycle with an interest-free grace period, which is common. This leads to more uncertainty about it, as better cash back rewards are not helpful if you have to pay interest on every purchase. I almost never carry a credit card balance, though, so whatever Apple’s interest rate is for me, and provided there is a normal grace period for purchases, it does not matter.

All in all, Apple Card sounds like a good deal for a lot of Apple’s customers.

Today I learned that you can delete files older than 30 days from the Recycle Bin in Windows 10.

I am a little baffled that the most exciting announcement from Apple’s event today is a credit card.

Unlike most iPad users, I can write apps for the platform, and know an awful lot about iOS APIs. Like most iPad users (I imagine), I had to search online for instructions on how to restore it from an iCloud backup.

I brought my iPad Pro with the LCD backlight bleeding problem to the Genius Bar tonight, and they kindly swapped it (out of warranty) with a brand new one for only $100. Not bad for a $1,000 iPad!

📺 I am super late to it, but I may just like “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” even more than “The Good Place”. (I don’t even know myself any more!)

Journal 2019-03-20

I have been working pretty steadily on finishing version 4.0 of SwiftoDo Desktop. I feel pretty good about the app, in general. It is coded in Swift now, as opposed to Objective C, and has a much more mature, and hopefully easy to support, architecture.

It will be a massive upgrade from version 3. While I would like to charge for it, even for my current customers, I feel bad enough about drastically changing an app I sold, even if it is for the better, that I am strongly considering just releasing it as a free upgrade. That’s basically my plan for the next version of SwiftoDo on iOS, which will be based on this codebase as much as possible.

My day job has been super interesting lately. I have hundreds of data analysis work papers to write, and I coded some pretty sophisticated scripts to generate all the data analytics I need to run, review, and report on. If only the software I was using made it easier to generate my work papers. I still have days and days of work ahead of me writing all the work papers that document the process. I also re-learned today about VBA’s superannuated support for interfaces, polymorphism, and delegation, for another project I am working on.

My wife has been baking cookies for Purim this week, which is a lot of fun, but incredibly tempting to me, as I have been on a low-carb diet the past few weeks. I have to loose all the weight I gained over the past 14 months, due to stress- and grief-related overeating. I am using MyFitnessPal, once again, to track my eating. I have also been doing low-paced treadmill workouts in the evenings, though not every night. So far, my diet and exercise regime has gone really well, but sweets can still be tempting.

One new wrinkle in parenting that my family is dealing with is that my two-year-old son has recently developed separation anxiety, which is normal at his age. It has lead to a good deal of interrupted sleep late at night, when he wakes up and screams “Mommy!” My wife bears the brunt of it, though. He cries for her, but not for me. I am definitely second banana during these intermittent nighttime terrors.