Foto

In an attempt to replace any apps owned by billionaire fascists like musk and zuckerberg I created an account on Foto today. Hopefully it will help cut the instagram chord. It just came out of beta and there are bugs and server issues and the search function appears to be garbage. Still, it’s not a meta app.

My user name is the same as my Flickr account, robj_1971.

iPhone 16 Pro Max

As much as I love upgrading to a shiny new phone, the process of restoring a new iPhone from a backup, including repairing and restoring an Apple Watch, is SO FRUSTRATING.

I think everything is set now, except for maybe one of my credit cards in Apple Pay. It is all crazy like, but the phone is really cool. Just wait folks… the new camera is going to start taking mountains of new cat pictures any minute now. Just hang in there. It’s coming.

Back Up

Is today the day?

I just backed up my iPhone…

I have an iPhone 14 Pro Max. I skipped the 15’s entirely. The 16’s have been out for a while now but I’ve been holding off.

Is today the day that I stop holding off and finally upgrade?

We’ll see.

Is this photo of a sleeping cat the last photo I will ever take with my trusty iPhone 14 Pro Max?

Again… we’ll see.

Nothing

I have nothing to write about. Nothing.

It’s Tuesday morning. I did my exercise but I haven’t done anything else on the morning schedule. I took the trash to the street, but that’s it. I’m sitting at my desk in the cellar watching some film photography youtube posts and getting jealous of people who live in places where the weather in January isn’t ass and they can go outside and take pictures of stuff. I should be setting up my desk for the work day, but no. I’m sitting here typing this even though I have nothing to write about. Dumbass.

How am I supposed to feel about the near future? We’re going on vacation. Me and my wife and my mother in law and my step daughter. It’s going to be awesome. About a week before we leave though, the usa swears in a fascist as president even though he’s a convicted criminal who publicly stated he wanted to be a dictator. What the fuck? I say again, I don’t live in the united states anymore. I live in Massachusetts. Starting Monday there is a clear difference. I am trying very hard to focus on the upcoming trip and not the upcoming end of our society but the closer we get to January 20th the harder it gets to do that.

In news related to the upcoming end of the world as we know it, I am done with meta. Zuckerberg has dropped to his knees and taken the tiny little donald’s tiny little donald into his mouth and I am done with him and everything he touches. I was just starting to feel okay about using facebook again, and I have been using instagram pretty regularly for a while, and of late I was using the shit out of threads, but now? Now that zuckerberg has shown his true colors (which we all knew about already, let’s be honest with ourselves) I am done with everything he touches. Fuck him and fuck his company. Done. I am done with all of them. Unfortunately, I use a couple of his messenger functions to communicate with some of my friends and with my band and if I stop using them 100% I lose those connections. Fuck. Fuck meta. Fuck zuckerberg. Fuck trump. Fuck musk. Fuck fascism.

This is so depressing.

I am trying to revive my last music re-recording project. Quarantine tunes volume eight. I don’t think I can finish it before the RPM Challenge starts in February, but maybe I can pick off a couple of songs and finish them up. I ordered a couple of small cables and a headstock tuner in order to finish putting together the pedal board i want to use for February. QTunes Vol 8 will be the test bed for that board. The verdict after one test so far is that it sounds really good but it’s noisy. I am choosing to blame the cheap daisy chain power supply for the noise, but who knows.

Note: The music talk is another attempt to distract myself from Monday’s upcoming doom.

So… back to a previous topic. If threads is on the no fly list thanks to zuckerberg being a fucking slime, then I guess Bluesky wins the twitter replacement race by default. Everything I post here cross posts there. That’s nice. Images that I add here do not display. What about links? Does this show? Let’s click publish and find out. Safe money is no.

Until later, my fellow depressed friends. For the moment though, let’s start thinking about what song Massachusetts should use as its national anthem, m’kay? Think about it. We’ll talk later.

Random Saturday Thoughts

The Bruins are finally back home after a tough road trip. They have a 1-0 lead over Buffalo late in the first period but the Sabers are going on the power play. We’ll see how it goes. I’m listening to the game on the radio. I am using the NHL app on my iPhone and I am running the app using the iPhone Mirroring app on my MacBook. Ain’t technology cool?

I was going to write something else… what was that… I don’t recall…

Oh yeah, xmas is four days away and I am starting to feel sick.

Figures. HoHoFuckingHo.

Lunch Break

It’s Wednesday afternoon. My lunch break is coming to an end. If I were to sneak a post in before getting back to work, what would I write about?

I have no idea. My mind is a blank! So I guess we stream of consciousness this sucker? Ready… Go!

The Bruins beat the Red Wings last night. They play the Blackhawks tonight. Two teams that aren’t very good. Theoretically we should beat them both pretty easily. Last night they needed overtime to squeak out a win. Tonight? I’m almost afraid to watch.

If I could watch, that is. The NESN app is being a jerk. Well, I don’t know if it’s NESN or FiOS. I think it’s FiOS. It tells me I’m signed in, but when I try to watch something it tells me I’m not signed in and then won’t let me sign in. Maybe during tonight’s game I’ll pop in a single air pod and listen to the radio broadcast. I’m following each game but I am not listening to the goings on and I am starting to feel very much out of touch. I feel like I am too old and easily distracted to really give my full energy to a team that isn’t very good… lately they have been better but… yeah. They are currently in third place in the division so they are higher than a wild card seed for the playoffs. That’s good. Let’s keep it up, folks.


Current television binge watching projects:

  • Star Wars Skeleton Crew season 1
  • Silo season 2
  • What We Do in the Shadows season… 6? I think it’s 6. Only a couple more episodes before the series ends for good. All I can say is, BAT!
  • Better Call Saul season five. Two seasons left.
  • Gotham season 1. I hear it gets easier once you get past the first season. Here’s hoping that rumor is accurate. I want to watch this show but some of the episodes have been tough. Some of the acting is really bad. I don’t want to give any names because I am afraid Will Smith might slap me at the Oscars. Sorry. Just calling them as I see them.
  • Dark season 3. This one is a slog. I am having a really hard time getting through it, but I am determined to finish it.
  • Black Mirror. I don’t remember what season I am on, but I am having a hard time sticking with it.
  • Doctor Who, rewatching the last season to prep for this year’s xmas special.
  • The Walking Dead season 3. Rewatching along with the The ‘Cast of Us podcast. I fell behind by one week but I am caught up on both the show and the podcast now.

Seriously, does anyone really believe that Juan Soto is going to sign with the Red Sox? Seriously?


We are going to Vermont this weekend. I want to bring my new/ancient film camera but I can’t really see a time or place where I could use it. Maybe. We’ll see. I did order my first roll of 120 color film yesterday. It won’t be delivered until after we get back though. Oh well.


I have to buy a gift for our work yankee swap. It’s Tuesday. Holy crap that came up fast. Yikes.


Okay. Back to work, Robert.

Handcuffed

We just had a really frustrating issue come up at work. The customer had access to their system locked down hard, for perfectly valid and acceptable reasons. They had issues with applications crashing and we couldn’t get in to see what happened. There were a slew of people from my company, the hardware vendor, and the customer on a conference call and we were all totally stumped. Then one of our tech guys and one of the tech guys from the hardware vendor started hammering away at it and they figured it out.

Sometimes this software support stuff can be incredibly frustrating, but when those frustrating moments get resolved… oh man is that satisfying. Even in a case like this where the folks who support my application ended up being innocent bystanders (the issue and the fix ended up having zero to do with us) it is still immensely satisfying.

Huge tip of the hat to the two guys who eventually worked it all out. As the commercials used to say, it’s Miller time*.


*It’s not Miller time for me. I don’t drink. The sentiment still works though.