Geek

The 1930s school clock in my office was starting to struggle a little bit. It’s been in many rooms, survived many moves, and has made its way across the country from it’s manufacturing home of Springfield, Mass. The clock was just shy of 100 years old and it is stored safely in a carton in the back of my office closet.

I decided to upgrade to a 2000 vintage digital clock. It’s kept in sync with the wireless controller located elsewhere in the house. We have a couple of clocks on this wireless system and this is the only digital clock. The other clocks are solar powered and analog and they work very well.

It’s weird not hearing the minute-by-minute click-click of the early 20th century school clock, but I can still watch time march by in military precision with the counting of the seconds. It gives my office a high tech vibe, which is probably good for a geek like me.

My new glasses arrived in the mail today. I am wearing bifocals for the first time in my life and these glasses from Zenni Optical are wonderful. And more importantly, very affordable. With my prescription from late last year in hand, I ordered these glasses on the Zenni Optical website last Tuesday and had them by today. They fit will, they’re comfortable, and I’m getting used to the progressive nature of these bifocals.

I can see around me and read my phone at the same time without holding the phone out to the far reaches of the room. It’s a wonderful feeling. And it wasn’t expensive!

I stumbled across this photo of a Kmart with adjoining “Kmart Food” while browsing through cash register photos the other day. The Kmart side looks exactly like the Kmart we would go to in Mattydale Plaza outside of Syracuse but I don’t remember ever seeing a Kmart Food. However, in the late 1970s there was a grocery store next to the Kmart in Mattydale, so I’m wondering if it originally was a Kmart Food.

I know the Kmart in Mattydale burned in the early 1970s and was rebuilt. Perhaps the Kmart Food was removed at that time.

I still think Kmart was best when they stuck with the big, red K and the turquoise ‘mart’.

Our web host is still restoring servers across their platform, but our service (on server #1!) has been stable for the past 24 hours. Fingers crossed.

Our web hosting company has been struggling with service for the past 48 hours. This is the fallout of a server migration that was suppose to take place in an eight-hour window on Saturday, Oct. 9. There has been little communication on the subject from the web hosting company, which is quite disappointing. If you’ve been stopping by and finding no traces of this site, my apologies, but fret not, I have no plans on discontinuing anything.

Thank you for your continued interest.

With my new iPhone 13 Pro I’ve been excited to try out 5G from our cellular provider, who happens to be AT&T.

The 5G service from AT&T in Tucson is not good.

For a while I’ve been contemplating moving away from AT&T. The only reason we’re on AT&T is because it was bundled with our fiber connection at home when we lived in Chicago. Cellular service in the Windy City was decent but not great, and we’ve had the same experience here in Tucson. I’m convinced there are better options.

Mike suggested T-Mobile. He uses the T-Mobile network through Mint Mobile, but Mint doesn’t provide the option to tether a cellular-wired Apple Watch to your account, which is something I rely on a bit. So while looking around on the Internet I discovered that T-Mobile offers free 30 days of data service if you have a compatible device, which I do in the iPhone 13 Pro. So I have both my normal AT&T service and the T-Mobile free plan running on my phone.

The T-Mobile of 5G, thus far, has proven to be much more reliable that’s AT&T in the greater Tucson area. I did a speed check in the downtown area and was impressed with the results. Unfortunately, according to the coverage map, T-Mobile gets a little spotty outside of the Tucson and Phoenix metro areas. And with all the exploring we do out in the desert, this could prove to be an issue with us in the future.

I’m going to test the service on our drive to Las Vegas next weekend and see how it does.

Here’s one of my favorite clips from “I Dream of Jeannie”. A geek aside, the second season (as heard here) had the best of the magical sound effects.

As I type this blog entry, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have all been down for several hours. There is no word as to when the services will be restored. A part of me wonders if this a distraction tactic from last night’s Facebook whistleblower story on CBS’ 60 Minutes, but we shall see. The bright side is, Facebook is down and my friend’s Internet connection in North Carolina hasn’t been this fast in years.

I have a Facebook account even though I wretch about the service all the time. Too many interest groups have a presence only on Facebook, which is a terrible shame. I have relatives that only communicate via Facebook, which is a terrible shame. I wouldn’t mind in the least if Facebook never returned to service, save that it would break my Oculus VR goggles forever. I could deal with the $250 loss.

Facebook is awful, is designed to be awful, and provides the tools necessary to destroy society. This all goes on while Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg roll in the money. The money comes from advertisers who are buying all of your information for the lowest price possible. You know all this, I know all this, and yet I still have a Facebook account.

I hope the service remains down. For days, weeks, years, whatever it takes. I’m OK with social media completely falling apart.

It’d be good for the world.

My love of Apple has been rabid at times. I love the “fit and finish” of Apple’s hardware and their contributions to a user’s lifestyle. With Apple Fitness+, Apple Card, Apple TV+, and the like, Apple has definitely pushed itself as a “lifestyle company” more than a technology company.

I think this is why my interest is waning a bit (again).

I’m still happy with my Apple hardware. My M1 Mac mini, originally purchased as my work computer, but moved to my the role of my main computer when work wanted us back on Windows laptops, is amazing. This M1 Mac mini is hands down the fastest desktop computer I’ve ever owned. It doesn’t even get warm, even with Zoom calls and the like going on. I’m thoroughly impressed.

There are bugs in MacOS Big Sur that I’m sure will endure into MacOS Monterey coming out before the end of the year.

Then there’s my 2018 iPad Pro. I have the larger version and I’ve tried on numerous occasions to make it my “main computer” by using it for as many of my computing tasks as possible.

It doesn’t quite fit the bill.

I don’t like the idea of everything being accessed one app at a time. I know iPadOS has “multitasking” capabilities by putting half screens next to each other, but handling things in this manner just doesn’t gel with the way my brain works. It’s probably because I’m an old computer geek, but I feel very confined when working on my iPad. I’m typing this blog entry on my iPad. It’s the only thing I can see. If I were to float a mail window or something off to one side of the app I’d feel virtually claustrophobic with my computing experience. I don’t like that.

Then there’s the bugs. A week or two ago, Apple released iOS 15 for the iPhone and iPadOS 15 for the iPad. They’re suppose to be the greatest iterations of the popular operating system. But there’s bugs. So many bugs.

For example, iPadOS Mail gives me two separate iterations of “All Inboxes”.

There’s no need for this. The “fit and finish” I loved from Apple is rapidly disappearing from their software catalog. The second “all Inboxes” should say “iCloud” and there’s only one email my iCloud inbox. Don’t even get me started on iCloud. I tried to search for a photo in the iCloud web interface to Photos and apparently there’s no way to do that. I can only search for a photo on my device. Ugh.

Then, there’s Apple Maps. This mapping service insists on calling Houghton Road here in Tucson as State Route 983. There are absolutely no road signs that say anything about State Route 983. The road was once considered to be labeled as State Route 983 but it never happened. The same with State Route 910 and State Route 810 here in Tucson. They never happened. They’re not marked. But Apple Maps has state route trailblazers all over the place on their maps. I’ve reported this too many times.

I thought perhaps the maps incident was limited to pockets of misinformation, but apparently not. Interstate 4 in Florida, which runs through the center of Orlando and provides the main access to Walt Disney World, is not marked as Interstate 4 anywhere in Apple Maps. Scroll in, scroll out, doesn’t matter. It’s marked as Florida State Route 400, which is an internal designation used by the Florida Department of Transportation.

With the Interstate system pretty much the backbone of the prosperity of the 20th century, you’d think Apple Maps would put Interstate markers on their maps. But no, it’s SR 400.

This weekend I powered down my Mac mini and powered up my Windows based gaming computer as part of my typical 30 day challenge. Has Windows come along far enough, and is Microsoft’s Surface line of computers nice enough, to meet my computing needs? When Chris’ Apple Mac Pro (trash can version) could no longer handle his graphic design needs, he opted for a high powered Windows machine that was a third of the price of a modern Apple Mac Pro and he has been delighted with the experience. His biggest struggle with the move has been the different keystrokes in familiar applications (like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Premiere). He even put the release candidate of Windows 11 on his primary machine and it’s been rock solid. He has no complaints and he doesn’t have to juggle between a productivity computer and a gaming computer.

I’m curious to see what the next 30 days bring for my desktop computing experience.

I had to give a software demo at work today. It was software written by me and the rest of the team, and the audience was sizable. The demo went well, I heard back great feedback, and I’d had a great rest of the day.

It’s a good feeling.