I often wear my AirPods Pros when I’m out for a walk. I don’t wear them when hiking, but if I’m walking the neighborhood or on a nearby trail I’ll listen to a podcast or some music. I’m also a fan of Apple’s “It’s Time For A Walk” series with their Apple Fitness+ service.
For the past several weeks I’ve been hearing intermittent static and white noise-like sound when I’m firing up these first gen AirPods Pros; Mike suggested it sounded like a manufacturing defect he had read about a while back and suggested I take them to the Apple Store.
I did that today.
After a few minutes with the kind man behind the Genius Bar, he took my pods into the secret room for some tests. A few minutes more and he came out, informing me I now had two new AirPods Pros in my existing case and he gave me instructions on how to charge them and get them paired to my iPhone.
My walk this later this afternoon was a delight and there was absolutely no issues with my AirPods Pros. They were covered under a quality program of Apple’s and they replaced them without request and without hesitation.
This is Truman relaxing on our bed yesterday afternoon. I’ve noticed that when he’s in this particular pose he can be a little aggressive. He likes to bite my hand once, and then he doesn’t do it again for a while. It’s not a damaging bite, he just puts his teeth on my skin but doesn’t break the skin. Then he retreats and holds his mouth open like he’s breathing through his mouth for a few moment. I suspect this activity is because he was neutered around two years old and he might have a few hormones dancing around in his system and he really wants to grab a lady cat by the scruff of the neck and do more things, but what do I know.
At least in this photo he was in a calm pose. As I type this entry he’s sitting on the window sill apparently trying to push the sides of the window wider and making screeching noises. He’s only loud when the rest of the family is trying to sleep.
The mood at tonight’s hockey game was quite festive. We went a little earlier than usual to enjoy the drinks and food in the area in front of the arena before the game. Being St. Patrick’s Day I thought the area would be a little more populated, but it was comfortable. They didn’t have Guinness, though. They were serving corned beef and cabbage for $15 a bowl, but we didn’t buy it. The line was too long.
There were quite a few folks dressed for the St. Paddy’s holiday. They were also dyeing beer green. I had a Dos Equis Amber which didn’t look very green, though they tried. There was a lot of green in the stands though.
The folks in front of us were fun and dressed festively.
Last night I joined a flying club with a very similar structure to the club I belong to back when we lived in Upstate New York. I’ve been looking for this opportunity for a long while and have been on the waiting list for a couple of months.
It was pouring rain when we met at KTUS Tucson International Airport, but we made our way to the hangar where I got to take a look at the three airplanes I am now co-owing with 49 other folks. The airplanes are all Cessnas and all types I have flown before. I’m anxious to get checked out in these airplanes, meet the other members of the club, and start talking general aviation with folks again.
Lucky and Jinx enjoy playing hide and seek in the great room. When they’re not playing hide and seek they’re running around at full speed with occasional stops to sniff the rear of the little ginger animal (Truman) that occasionally makes an appearance.
The dogs recently celebrated one year of living with us and it has been a year of delight. I enjoy their energy.
I’ve mentioned before that my favorite food is popcorn. I can’t get enough of the stuff and honestly, it’s probably my favorite element of the cinematic experience.
Earl and I went out to dinner the other night. I noticed they had a popcorn dish as an appetizer. Popped in bacon grease, the popped corn was topped with bacon, some other seasonings, and the sprig of green that I fail to identify at this time. I enjoyed the popcorn so much that at the end of the meal, when we decided to splurge for dessert, I stepped away from the traditional dessert menu and ordered another of the popcorn appetizer.
It was delicious.
Maintaining my popcorn mood, I popped myself a bowl of corn for supper last night. Every once in a while we have a “every man for himself” dinner experience and while the others made sandwiches and the like, I opted to eat a bowl of popcorn.
My husband and I went for a mini road-trip yesterday. As we were setting out from Tucson around 10:00 a.m., I commented, “it sure looks like it wants to thunderstorm, but it’s the wrong season for that”.
A few hours later, as we roamed around parts north of Phoenix, the sky turned very dark. And before we knew it, we were storm chasing in the Sonoran desert in March. Because when it comes to weather these days, anything goes.
There was some impressive lightning but I was unable to get any shots because I was not planning on chasing storms in the Sonoran Desert in March.
I mentioned last week that I had found a solution for my cross-platform app management, specifically around my personal journaling habits (Day One) and task management (OmniFocus). With both of these traditionally Apple-only applications having web interfaces, it was now easy to keep using them because I could still get to the data from my Linux computers.
Day One continues to be brilliant for me and it’s helped me sort out thoughts, reminisce about things that have happened in the past, and in general continues to bring me delight.
OmniFocus is another matter. While I’ve used OmniFocus on and off over the years, I always end up feeling like the application and/or processes are just too complex for my needs.
I’m a simple guy. I maintain a todo list so I don’t forget to do things. I’ll have a brilliant thought while out for a walk or falling asleep and I have to write it down or else I’ll forget it in five minutes. I can remember every room and associated schedule from high school but I can’t remember what I recalled five minutes ago to tell my team at work. So todo lists are important to me.
So, I’m back to “Plain Text Productivity” using todo.txt. I maintain two todo lists, one for my personal tasks and one for work. Every morning, when I sit down at my computer to work for the day, I type a buildtasks at the command line on my work-issued Windows computer and the automation builds routine things I need to accomplish for the day and copies anything from my personal list, which is sitting on our home server, marked with +work. It then deletes anything for work from my personal list.
It’s a little clunky but typing that command every day tells my brain, “OK, it’s time to work”.
Because I’m a GenXer that knows life before point and click and because I LOVE retro computing, I love tinkering around on the command line. And because I’m an applications developer, I can write simple scripts to automate the creation of checklists and integrate them into my personal todo list. As a pilot, I like checklists. A lot. My team at work has learned the value of checklists under my leadership.
In this screenshot I’m logged into my home server, looking for anything I’ve tagged with “blog” due today, finishing that task, and then creating a checklist for my next flight.
My “today” command is pretty simple, it’s a shortcut to a longer command that grabs anything in my todo.txt with the current date. Because I have my next flight checklist staggering dates, whenever I look at anything due that day, I’ll see the tasks to prepare for my next flight.
I’ll dive a little more into the scripts I use to augment todo.txt as outlined on the website in a future blog entry. It’s not as robust as point and click or touch and swipe, but it works well for the way I think, and that’s what keeps me on track.
Truman typically engages in contact with the humans by going up to them and turning his back. It’s his way of saying “I’m here, now give me some attention so you’re worthy of my gaze”. I love it when he’s so cat like.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
