Yesterday I went for a very enjoyable hike along the highest elevations of the Santa Catalina Mountains. The Aspen Draw Trails afforded me some peaceful times surrounded by evergreens and some impressive views. Here’s a video my adventure.
June 2024
Tech!
I’ve decided to start playing around with the next step in video production. Green screens! Not bad for my first attempt.
Caturday.
Truman can occasionally be impatient when it comes to his dads getting out of bed, but he is always looking refined.
Lost.
I’m still making my way through photos and video footage from my storm chasing trip in May. While I’m going through all these picturesque bits and bytes I sometimes feel a moment of disbelief realizing it’s been nearly a month since I trekked out onto the Great Plains. That is usually followed by a pang of boredom, because the weather in the month of June in Sonoran Desert is generally very boring, especially for a guy that loves wild weather.
We have been experiencing near record heat for the past couple of weeks and it looks like the trend is going to continue for the foreseeable future. This should come as a surprise to no one; the climate is changing and too many people don’t care about the climate enough to do anything about it.
I’m tired of selfish people.
I think I have isolated myself too much from storm chasers that are still out on the Great Plains chasing storms well into June.
When I came back from the trip and realized the car needed a few thousand dollars of repairs I began to wonder if chasing storms was worth it. Blazing thunderstorms, high winds, and impressive tornadoes a mile or two away? Sign me up. Dancing in ping-pong ball sized hail? I can probably pass on that opportunity.
But gosh, how I love visiting The Great Plains.
Sunrise to Sunset.
Lucky is the man that sees both the sunrise and the sunset of the same day.
And speaking of lucky, Lucky and Jinx certainly enjoy their sunset walks. Usually they go out with Mike and Chris, but once in a while Uncle J.P. and Uncle Earl will take them for a walk. They still follow their usual routine, once we’ve determined the asphalt is within everyone’s tolerance levels.
Avoiding Fiddly.
All my life I have been one that wants to press buttons. I’m not talking about pushing buttons to get people going, but rather buttons on equipment, i.e. computers and the like. I always want to know what the button does. There’s a part of me that’s surprised I never pulled a fire alarm in school, especially in elementary school, where a little hammer on a swing broke a piece of glass that then pushed a button behind the glass.
My amusement at pressing buttons led me to technology and to this day I love fiddling with buttons, physical and virtual, in the technology space. At times this can lead to a decrease in productivity. Instead of using an application to get things done, I spend the vast majority of my bandwidth playing with all the bells and whistles in an application to try to get things to a point of where I can get things done. This approach is not overly productive and as I get older, my desire to be ‘fiddly’ remains, but my recognition of this trait is accepted and I modify my workflows to avoid ‘fiddly’ situations.
Narrowing my focus to a specific set of applications and earnestly fighting the urge to try other applications keeps my employer happy.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is constantly releasing upgrades and updates to their products and the work desktop services team dutifully pushes these changes to our company laptops. Hardly a few days go by when I’m not being prompted with pop-up ads to “try this new things in Teams!” or “you can collaborate with friends in the web version of PowerPoint!”. These pop-up ads, coupled with the constant barrage of Teams messages from folks ignoring my “Busy” status tends to make my to-do list longer than it needs to be.
For a couple of years I’ve been using an application called Obsidian to manage my notes, lists, and other general writing adventures. Productivity gurus far and wide have been touting the virtues of Obsidian for years but I have never been completely happy with the experience. The interface resembles nothing on any platform it’s available on. The syncing service is great, albeit a separate subscription. But my downfall with the application is that it is so customizable that I end up customizing the experience more than actually writing or making lists or taking notes.
While theming an application to my liking is pleasing, it’s not productive for a fiddly guy like me.
So I’m trying out new applications that aren’t as fiddly for this purpose. Before Evernote went completely catawampus a decade or so ago, I was content with Evernote. OneNote at work is alright for work stuff and that’s probably where I’ll land at work.
At the moment I’m looking at Craft. Right now it looks promising, especially when it comes to the user interface. Plus, there’s a web version which makes it accessible across platforms, something very important to me.
If I’m not fiddling around with it too much by month’s end I’ll probably write a blog post about the experience.
Hacks.
We finished up season three of “Hacks” on HBO Max. I definitely enjoyed this season of the show. I don’t know if I enjoyed it more than season two, because this new trend of releasing these short bursts of series with no rhyme or reason to timing kind of messes with my memory and I don’t really remember season two. But I liked the way season three went along. The screen time afforded to the supporting players seemed a bit more proportional to their importance to the story.
I was a little surprised at the amount of “very progressive awareness” with some of the storyline choices. Sometimes I feel like the writers were checking off boxes on a checklist, but for me it worked 99% of the time and I didn’t roll my eyes once. Maybe I’m just getting old. That being said, it was interesting to see two main characters of different generations having their take on key topics of that nature.
I’m purposely writing in a vague way and without any spoilers in case you want to watch the show. I absolutely think you should give it a go. And Max comes from with your AT&T cellular subscription! I don’t know why AT&T has buddied up with HBO Max but we live in a crazy country like that.
WWDC.
I don’t have a lot to write about today’s announcements during WWDC24 from Apple Park. Is that what we call the spaceship? Apple Park? I should go there and get the full Apple Park Spaceship Experience. I hear it’s a real “E” ticket ride.
As a daily constant user of Apple products, I was interested in what the latest iterations of all the operating systems was going to bring the to the masses. I even blocked time off in my work calendar so I didn’t miss a beat. I walked away feeling kind of “meh+” about the whole thing.
A.I. doesn’t really get me worked up with excitement. I mean, it’s kind of neat, but it’s just a computer program cleverly grabbing whatever it can and regurgitating it back to the user based on some sort of input. It sounds intelligent, but A.I. isn’t really intelligent. It’s the new hype thing though and all the companies think they’re going to make money by mentioning “A.I.” in their products. But in too many cases it’s like saying Tide Pods are Gluten Free.
Anything to beef up Siri’s capabilities with a dose of sanity and basic functionality is a welcomed addition to the experience, so there’s that.
I definitely don’t need to make cartoons out of images of my friends to let them know they should have a happy birthday, and in that way I feel like Apple REALLY dumbed down and/or cheapened their line of products with gimmicks like this. I usually feel a warm and fuzzy from Apple; this doesn’t give me a warm nor fuzzy. But integrations with calendars and relating my schedule to things I have to do and the like… that’s something I can get on board with.
I was really surprised at how little time, comparatively, was spent with the Vision Pro enhancements. I feel like Apple has lost a bit of their enthusiasm for their Spatial Computing platform, even though it was just released in February. I don’t feel bad for the folks that spent $3500+ on these new devices, as I feel like it was sold long before it was ready to be useful, but I was surprised there wasn’t a little more movement forward with the platform.
The other thing that surprised me was the on-board A.I. processing is limited to the latest and greatest “Pro” edition of the iPhone, and that’s it. Obviously it’ll work with new phones coming out this fall. But if I had the latest “consumer” edition of the iPhone and I was left out of the loop I’d be a little perturbed. I still have an iPhone 13 Pro that works quite well, so I knew I wouldn’t be in that mix.
Being Positive.
I find society’s general focus on the negativity around us, and we all know there’s a great abundance of it, to be overwhelming more often than it’s not. The only way I’m personally going to get through this Election Cycle, and whatever comes from it, is by seeking and focusing on the positivity around me. It’s occasionally a struggle but it’s very much worth it.
I’ve decided to keep pushing forward with my YouTube channel. I finally went ahead and built a “trailer video” so folks would know what’s in my content and what my intentions are for the channel. I hope you enjoy this video as much as I enjoyed putting it together.
Hiking Mount Lemmon: Incinerator Ridge Trail.
Not only is hiking a much needed escape for my mental well-being, making videos about the experience is equally as mentally grounding for me. Here’s a video of yesterday’s hike.
