March 2023
Need You Now.
One of my favorite songs of the 21st century is “Need You Now” by Lady A. I can’t believe this track has been around since 2009. It seems like it just came out just yesterday.
Me.
This blog is a pretty accurate representation of who I am in real life. I don’t worry about the number of hits I get here (though WordPress really wants me to bump up my SEO!) and I write for myself just as much as I write for anyone that may stumble across this blog. I hope I make readers smile once in a while.
When I started my radio gig in the early 1990s I was told that I need to “look a little more modern” for my publicity shots. I grew out my flattop, wore clothes from places like Filene’s and Jordan Marsh, and wore a Swatch watch on my wrist. It wasn’t really me but I suppose you have to have a certain look when you’re on radio (he writes ironically). There’s a certain style one must have when you’re giving away the grand prize of a Mother’s Day Promotion – a vacuum cleaner at a local dealer’s shop. Draw the number and listen for the squeals of delight.
I didn’t maintain my “radio look” for very long and I went back to flattop and my own look after a year or so. It was much more comfortable. I didn’t really feel comfortable in my own skin until I was in my very early 50s. I’m more me than I’ve ever been and that’s good.
One of the things I like about Mastodon as a social media platform (versus Twitter, Facebook, and all the other corporately algorithmic doom scrolling machines) is it feels like more people are much more genuine. I feel comfortable engaging with the folks I meet in that space. It’s all nice to see so many familiar faces moving over from Twitter. There’s no algorithm to game so there’s not as many people engaging in tricks to game the stream. Many folks dependent on the monetary gain, dopamine hits, etc. dependent on these games are declaring Mastodon, and the Fediverse in general, a lost cause. Probably because they don’t know who they need to be to get the recognition they’re craving.
I’m fine with that. If this was that Black Mirror episode “Nose Dive”, I’d definitely be the Cherry Jones truck driver character.
And that’s awesome.
Huzzah.
I’ve mentioned many times that one of my rules about choosing programs and services to use in my “computing stack” is that the data has to be available across the board. I refuse to be locked into one ecosystem. If I type a document on my Mac, it has to be easily accessible from my iPad, my Linux machines, and any Windows computer I may have fired up at any given time.
There are two programs/services/needs I have struggled with for years when it comes to this interoperability: task management and my daily journaling habit.
I have maintained a daily journal (outside of this blog) for over a decade. Back in the days when I was all in on Apple I used Day One, which does exactly what it’s suppose to do. It lets me attach photos, I can write an entry in a freeform style or I can build templates and share my thoughts in an organized fashion at the end of the day. I love Day One but it was mostly confined to the Apple ecosystem. If I carried my Linux computer while traveling, I had to journal through the iOS app on my iPhone, which is OK but not a great experience.
I tried moving my journaling habits to Obsidian, but it required a little too much in the way of care and feeding to keep things working the way I like them to work. I kept going back to Day One.
Today I learned Day One is beta testing a web interface. And because I am a premium subscriber (which backs up all of my journal entries in an end-to-end encrypted space), I have access to this beta test. And so far it is wonderful.
Some folks may question using the proprietary Day One format instead of plain-text based Obsidian, but one of the things I like about Day One is that I can easily export my journal entries to plain text. And that’s a beautiful thing.
The other struggle has been around task management. I have kept an electronic to-do list for many years and recently have relied on the todo.txt plain text task management system. I used Dropbox to keep these text files synchronized across my devices. The issue I constantly run into is “version collisions”, for example, is the online version or the version on my iPhone the most up to date? I’ve run into situations where I’ve overwritten important tasks when trying to reconcile versions. This makes me not trust my todo management and then I start worrying that I’m going to forget something important.
OmniFocus is an amazing task management system that I enjoyed for years. The problem with OmniFocus is that it’s traditionally been an Apple based experience. Work requires that I use their standard issue Windows 10 computer. And I’ve been using my Linux machines as my daily drivers for a while now. Luckily, the OmniGroup offers a web interface to OmniFocus and the version currently in testing is pretty much on parity with what their applications offer. Like Day One, it’s easy to export to plain text files, and I can automate that practice so I always have an text-based backup.
Both of these web based solutions meet my “the data can’t be locked into one ecosystem” criteria.
I’m going to give these web based solutions a try for the month of March as part of my on-going “30 day personal growth” challenge I try to embark on every month.
On the plus side, using these subscription based web interfaces also will save me money, as both are cheaper per year than the former counterparts I was using. So, while I’m saving money with software subscription costs, I’m also able to use older Linux-based computers that can be repaired and upgraded to keep up with the times instead of forced obsolescence that we often see with Apple products.
Win win is always a great thing.
Caturday.
Truman occasionally gives me a look when we’re getting settled in to watch TV for the evening. Here we had just finished a couple of episodes of “The Good Wife” and he felt it was now time for treats.
Hockey.
Hockey season seems very long to me. Tonight they announced there are 18 more games in the season for the Tucson Roadrunners. We won’t be going to every game, as every game is not at home and we don’t have a full season package.
Tonight’s game was fun but we lost 15 seconds into overtime. Sometimes that’s the way the puck goes.
Dear Apple, Part 4.
Dear Apple,
I really don’t know what’s going on with you lately. Your road show Sybil, Siri, is doing wonders with messing up my HomeKit experience on a daily basis, but now we have a new game.
It’s called “let’s change the clock”.
You see, I like my time display on my iPhone to be shown on a 24-hour clock. As I type this shortly before bed, the clock says 21:52. I’m smart enough to know that means 9:52 PM. But I prefer to have my time displayed in military time. It’s just how my brain is wired.
When some new bug resulted in the blurred out mess you see in the screenshot above, I had no choice but to hard power cycle my iPhone. Yes, that’s my home screen, after I tried swiping and moving and turning the screen on and off for five minutes but no, you wanted everything to be just a big blur. Because, after all, It Just Works. Except, you took that reset to move my time display choice back to a 12-hour clock. This morning my temperature displays were in Celsius, even though they’re set for Fahrenheit, and my time display was showing a 12-hour clock even though it was set for a 24-hour clock. And all my HomePods were suddenly reporting the weather report in Celsius. Which I specifically have turned off because it confuses the rest of the house.
I really don’t know what’s going on.
I tried getting rid of that big blurred out mess you see above and I was able to get to this before I had to do that whole hard power reset thing.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I just expect to much, like fairly expensive technology to work properly. I know that my next laptop will probably not be an Apple product because I just can’t trust your quality control anymore. And if I’m going to have a mediocre experience I’m not going to pay a premium price for that experience.
Snow.
Forecasters had predicted snow would generally stay about an elevation of 4000 feet, with maybe a dusting down to the desert floor. I guess we can say 3 1/2 inches of snow is a dusting.
Winds were gusting up to 50 MPH when we went to bed last night and it was raining. I guess Mother Nature had other plans. She’s not happy with what humans are doing to her planet.
Selfie.
I was playing around with the webcam in my resurrected Lenovo ThinkPad T460s the other day. Here’s a selfie taken with this computer running Pop!_OS. I used the Cheese application.
The result has a slight “Lucille Ball in ‘Mame’” Vaseline on the camera lens haze to it.
Test.
It looks like WordPress is moving away from their WordPress app and wanting users to use their JetPack app instead. Of course, JetPack involves a yearly subscription, but it wouldn’t be 2023 if a software company wasn’t trying to coax a constant revenue stream out of users.
Eventually I will move to something open source and free (as in likenfree beer) software to power this anxious blog. In the meanwhile I shall play the game.
