Category: Tech

Missed a Chance

I feel like I missed a chance tonight. I didn’t play guitar even though I had plenty of time to. I just popped an episode of The Walking Dead on Netflix and flaked. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have been productive. I still haven’t even finished my exercise for the day. I am at 17 minutes. 13 minutes to go. Why am I sitting here talking to all of you when I should be walking?

It’s gonna be a late night, but at least I get to watch the scene where Dale argues to save Randal’s life*.

*The Walking Dead, season two episode 11 Judge Jury and Executioner. Season two isn’t the best season**, but Jeffrey DeMunn kicked this episode’s ass.

**Get back in the damn house, Carl!

They are Fighting Back Again

Oh, facebook. How you fight me.

Last night a friend tagged me in a post. If there was FoMO before… damn. There was no comment, just three names tagged in a reply to a post. I got the notification email and based on the title I read it. I wish I hadn’t.

Want more? Okay. Here’s one more. I’m listening to my favorite Walking Dead podcast. They solicit feedback from listeners, like all good TV show podcasts do, and most of the feedback they get comes via a facebook group. I’ve contributed a few times in the past, but I won’t be commenting on facebook anymore. The episode just started and they were talking about the general mood of the comments on facebook. Damn it. FoMO!

Is this what an alcoholic feels like when all of their friends are still going to bars? No. No it isn’t. It might be 0.1% of what they feel though. Okay, 0.01% maybe. You get what I’m getting at though, right?

Example

I wrote about struggling to leave the facebook this morning. Here’s an example of why leaving is annoying.

That Pedal Show, the guitar gear centered weekly show on youtube that I really enjoy watching, does a live show on Mondays at 5:00pm UK time, which translates to noon for me. I try to tune in during work but sometimes I miss out. Today being a holiday, I was looking forward to watching without any distractions. I was going to put my feet up, listen to the discussion, and maybe noodle on my guitar a little to kinda get into the spirit of the thing, you know.

Noon comes along and there is no notification on youtube. There’s nothing on their youtube landing page. There’s nothing on their web page. That last one isn’t unusual, they generally don’t put news there. They put it on facebook. There is a really active facebook group and that’s where I go when I want to find out if they had to cancel a live show. At least… it used to be. All I wanted to do was look at posts around noon time and see if they mentioned anything. I couldn’t though… because I made myself boycott the whole bookfaycey experience.

Shit.

Okay, so I’ll try again next Monday.

Unrelated note: The Apple Watch Activity app dangles these monthly challenge out to users. This month’s challenge, for me, is to burn a specific number of calories. The goal they set is higher than what I would have if I just hit my normal goal every day. In fact, I would miss the challenge by quite a bit.

Usually I don’t pay much attention to things like this. I just keep my head down and do my thing and yippee, right? For some reason though, I really want to hit this one. It told me how much I would have to average each day in order to hit it and I changed my calorie goal to match that number.

I’ve already closed my exercise ring (I’m actually two whole minutes over the 30 minute goal). I’m still only at 80% of the move goal (they call the calorie burning ring the Move ring). I’m going to have to exercise more today, aren’t I. Crud.

Unrelated note again: Kyle Schwarber played first base for the Red Sox last night. Early in the game he made a pretty terrible error. He fielded a ground ball and tried to throw it to the pitcher, who was covering first base, and he underhand tossed it to somewhere near the orbit of Neptune. I didn’t see it because I was listening on the radio, but it sounded really bad.

Later in the game he was faced with an almost identical play and this is what he did (roll the video, please):

Two Weeks Down

It’s Monday again. You know what that means? At 2:00pm the time runs out on the second week of my facebook boycott. I said I’d stay away for a week, then when that week was up I extended it a second week. That second week is up today.

I would like to say it’s been getting easier. I’m not sure that’s true. It’s my nephew’s birthday today and Facebook has become the traditional birthday wishes extension mechanism. They also tried fighting back again. When I joined Lizardfish Kevin made me a co-admin of the band’s facebook page. I got a notifications email for the page the other day. I didn’t open it. I have only gotten the one for my personal account which leads me to hope that I don’t have any new notifications which means maybe they’ll leave me alone now? I don’t know.

While I definitely do not miss the nazi bullshit, which is the reason I left, I am starting to miss some of the other connections. I haven’t seen any pictures of any of my brother and sister’s kids, including the birthday boy, I’m out of touch with friends, and I haven’t had the opportunity to check out any fellow guitar nerds’ rigs on the various groups I belong to. I guess my point here is that I am in full blown FoMO mode right now. The fear of missing out is catching up to me.

When 2:00pm rolls around today I will extend the facebook ban by another seven days. I’m not sure I am going to make it through this one, and if I somehow manage to, I am not sure I’ll be able to stop myself from putting an end to it. It is starting to feel like failure is inevitable.

Bush League Radio

WEEI… ugh.

I was about to write a post about some bush league coding, but now I know the code is fine. I’m trying to listen to the Red Sox game’s radio feed via the MLB app on iOS. It’s been really crappy for the last couple of innings. Just drop outs and break up and terrible. I assumed it was the app. I was wrong. My sincere apologies to those who work on the app for my cursing you up and down and saying bad things about your mothers as I was getting more and more frustrated. I was wrong. I am sorry.

No, the bush league shit is actually WEEI itself. It was the actual radio feed that was failing. They are currently broadcasting a major league baseball playoff game via a cell phone. I shit you not. Now, I have a teeny tiny mini spec of radio experience and I am willing to accept that this is actually Tropicana Field’s fault. If that is the case then it’s just another in a long line of garbage coming from that stadium. The team is epic. The facility is the shittiest of shit. I will not, however, let WEEI off the hook because they should expect crap like this and have some sort of backup in place for when the shitty stadium goes to shit. Nope. They have a cell phone. Bush. League. Crap.

Anyway, it’s the top of the fourth inning. The Red Sox are down 5-4. The Sox opened the game with two runs in the top of the first and then Sale sucked up a storm and gave up five in the bottom of the first, including a grand fucking slam. Remember when David Price was a post season dog who was guaranteed to choke in the big game? He overcame that eventually and has a ring to show for it. Sale was supposed to be different, and I know he’s coming off a gigantic injury, but he choked in a must win in his last regular season start, and he was god awful tonight. The fuck, dude? Are you a new pre-redemption David Price?

The Sox did manage back to back home runs in the third inning to close the gap, but I didn’t hear it because WEEI was falling apart at the time.

Come on, Red Sox. Let’s get that lead back and let Mr Sale off the hook.

Lawn Pause

Front yard: Done.

Side yard: Done, from the street all the way back to the woods.

Health check: OUCH! My back hurts, my leg hurts, my arms hurt, my shoulders hurt. Yup, it’s lawn day. I’m taking a break for a few. Usually my lawn breaks are on the patio in the back yard, but everything out there is soaking wet and the sun hasn’t had any luck drying it off, so I am inside.

Okay, break time is over. Get back out there and cut some more grass, fat boy! You can do it! Through all of this mowing the lawn your Apple Watch activity app has given you credit for 16 minutes of exercise! Go cut that grass and close that ring!

Face ID

I just figured out why my iPhone’s Face ID wasn’t working last night.

It’s my glasses.

I have two pairs of glasses. All through the work day today I was wearing my computer use glasses and Face ID worked every time. After work I switched to my regular use glasses and it failed. Huh. I took the glasses off and it worked. I put the glasses back on and it failed.

SONOFABITCH!!!!

ADDENDUM: I cleaned the lenses on my general use glasses and Face ID works again. Whatdayaknow.

Early Start

I was up early this morning and had some chores to do. Between taking the trash barrels to the street and going up and down the stairs to do laundry (the avalanche of Bellana clothes are finally folded and put away) I somehow managed to register 10 minutes of exercise without even having done any actual exercise. The activity app is off to a good start today.

I’m not sure what was going on, but the FaceID on my iPhone stopped working last night. It was working before I started cooking dinner but I noticed it wasn’t working just after we finished eating. Weird. It didn’t work once for the rest of the day. Right now? Working fine. I’m not sure what happened.

Today is my sister’s birthday. Being facebook free, I sent her a text instead of a post on facebook. I hope that is acceptable. I’m not sure what the protocol is anymore.

Speaking of facebook (giggles), that was kinda fun yesterday. Sure, it pulled the nazis over to Twitter for a while, but I managed to avoid all of that and just have fun reading the faux panic. Sounds like Zuckerberg lost about six billion dollars in stock value. I assume most of that was due to the 60 Minutes story Sunday night, but whatever. It’s all connected to his wallet one way or another. Granted it was just stock value, right? He’ll probably make it back today. It’s not like it’s real money or anything. It’s not like he’s going to need to take a second mortgage to pay his bills.

Okay, time to go to work. We need to get through the day so that we can focus all of our attention on the Red Sox beating the Yankees tonight. It’s a moral imperative. 8:00pm tonight, or thereabouts, we finally get payback for that friggin one game playoff back in ’78. Sure we beat them in 2004 and handed them the most humiliating playoff loss in major league baseball history (giggles), but still… I want one game playoff revenge. Suck it, Bucky Dent.