Category: Tech

Its a Covid Easter pt2

Hello and welcome to the second annual Covid-19 pandemic lock down quarantine Easter. I feel like I should be writing something profound but I can’t come up with anything. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

I plan to spend my day doing chores and stuff. I’m going to make some chicken and quinoa for Jen for dinner. I don’t have any Easter bunnies to cook for her so we’re just going to have to make do.

Apple tells me that they are sending me a replacement AppleWatch. It should arrive tomorrow. Jen had a battery problem with a series five once too. I guess it’s a thing? I’m getting a new watch out of the deal though. Let’s just hope my backups from last week install correctly because I don’t want to start from scratch again.

I watched Birds of Prey yesterday. It was okay. Better than Suicide Squad. Better than Wonder Woman ’84 too, probably. Could it be that it’s the third best DCEU flick behind Wonder Woman and The Snyder Cut? That plus the trailer for The Suicide Squad made me want to watch the first Suicide Squad again. It’s running right now. I’m 75% through. It’s like most of the DCEU movies. It’s okay. Nothing special. Waaay too much slow motion. I think the only recent live action DC movie I haven’t seen is Joker. I’ll get to that soon enough.

I started my nightly fast really early last night. 7:00 instead of 9:00. I wasn’t planning on it, I just got wrapped up in stuff and didn’t eat after dinner. That means I was clear to eat at 11:00am instead of 1:00pm. It’s 11:30 right now. I think I’ll throw in a load of laundry and then have something to eat. What do you think?

The Watch Situation Continues

I am 100% sure that no one else on Earth or anywhere else gives even the slightest shit about my AppleWatch struggles, but here I am writing about it again because this is my page and what I say goes, dig?

Pardon my paraphrasing Fonzie.

I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, but my heroic Series 5 has been becoming more and more difficult to charge over the last few weeks. It was only over the last few days that jiggling the charger cable stopped being the fix for the issue. The real problem became when I would see it start to charge, stop looking at it, go back to it an hour later and see that it didn’t charge at all. Looking more closely at it on Saturday it became clear that it was just screwing with me. It said it was charging but it would then stop charging within seconds of connecting. Well that sucks.

Yesterday before work I was unable to get it to connect at all. The battery was below 20% and I gave up. My plan was to wait for my vaccine shots and then take it to the Apple store. 0.68 seconds later I was opening a chat window with Apple Tech Support. I unpaired it from my iPhone during that chat so that they could open up a ticket and send me a box to ship it back to them. That was about 8:30AM or so yesterday. FedEx just dropped off the box. Thanks!

It was during the unpairing process, while pondering an indefinite amount of time without my watch, that I started thinking of alternatives. I actually took a cheap pocket watch that I bought at the souvenir shop at Kennedy Space Center out of my desk but the battery was dead and I can’t figure out how to pop it open to replace it. Then I thought to myself… where did my old AppleWatch go? It went into my bureau, that’s where. It was stone dead, of course, so I threw it on the charger. After a while my phone started asking to pair with it. Done! Well, eventually. The pairing process takes a while. When that was done I checked for OS updates and started the loooong process of installing over a year’s worth of updates. That was further delayed by having to wait until the battery was over 50% before it would load. I think the whole process took more than three hours.

It’s all done now, and my Series 3 is on my wrist as I type this. Some things that I noticed… The text is a lot smaller. The watch face template I’ve been using for a year or so isn’t an option. Weirdest of all, the Covid-19 inspired hand washing sensor isn’t available either. Oh! I just realized the DB meter isn’t there either.

Tonight, after work, I have to go to my parent’s house to pick up a load of laundry. While I’m out I will drop my Series 5 into a FedEx drop box and get that process rolling along. How long will I be living in the past with my Series 3? Unknown. Will I get my watch back or will they replace it? Unknown.

Does it matter?

No, don’t be stupid. It’s just a watch!

(insert Robert in a fetal position, shivering, longing for the safe return of his dumb watch here. Friggin Apple fanboy)

Addendum: I keep saying that I’ve had the Series 5 for over a year, but I think it might have only been 10 months. I’m not sure. I could look it up but… lazy.

The Good Old Days of AOL Instant Messenger

Remember the early days of internet fun? That magical stretch of time when online life graduated from bulletin boards to 14.4k modems and personal interactions? Before the World Wide Web and the information superhighway and Al Gore and all that?

Remember AOL instant messenger? Ah, the good old days.

I just relived that experience with Apple Tech Support.

They are sending me a box.
I will send them my AppleWatch in the box.
They will fix my AppleWatch (I think, or replace it?).
They will send my AppleWatch back in another box.

This Could Be It

This could be the end for my AppleWatch. I got it up to 100% charged last night and in the process took the new WatchOS update. Today though… At best it stays connected for a few seconds. At worst, it was connected for almost an hour and the charge actually went down 30%.

I’m hoping I can get enough of a charge to get me one more night of sleep data, but after that I’m thinking I’ll just let it die. Once we’re all vaccinated I’ll be paying a visit to La tienda de Apple, or L’Apple Store, or Et Apple…

The Apple Store.

AppleWatch Charging Blues

For the last few days I’ve been noticing that sometimes when I put my AppleWatch onto a charger it won’t charge. It takes a few tries to get it connected right and then it disconnects on its own before it finishes charging.

Tonight it mostly won’t connect at all and in the rare instances that it does, it disconnects itself after a few seconds.

Wonderful.

Fans in the Stands

The Boston Bruins are coming out of their week or so long Covid-19 shut down tonight. They are playing the Islanders at the Garden and for the first time since last March there will be fans in the stands. Not a lot of them, in terms of the building’s capacity, but some.

This was actually supposed to be the second game with fans in the stands but the first one was postponed when the team was shut down due to their little Covid-19 outbreak. I’m just going to leave this sentence right there and give you a second to allow the irony to sink in.

All set? Okay, ignoring the irony for a moment, I was thinking about this earlier today and I started to wonder how the team would handle possible outbreaks in the stands. I envisioned a message displaying on the jumbotron at regular intervals saying something like:

If within the next week or so you should develop Covid-19 symptoms and receive a positive result on a Covid-19 test, please call the Bruins at 617-555-IRONY and let us know so that we can commence with contact tracing for your fellow ticketholders.

You know, something simple like that.

On a completely unrelated note, we had a meeting today with all of the groups under our Senior Manager. We did a little team building exercise that required everyone to log into the same website. Sort of like a Jackbox thing without the possibility of NSFW content cropping up. The site gave each participant a randomly generated user name. What was my randomly generated user name, you ask?

EpicGiraffe

I’m pretty sure that when I someday punch my ticket and see my whole life flash before my eyes, being referred to anonymously as EpicGiraffe is probably going to end up being the high water mark for all things.

Better

Sleep was better last night. I went to bed ridiculously early. I was out cold by 9:30 or so. My AppleWatch says I woke up a couple of times but I only remember one. I was awake a bit before the Roomba kicked off its ride. I was sitting up and the cat jumped up and sat with me. As soon as Roomba made a noise though, she practically dove under the bed.

I managed a little more than eight hours of sleep. The heart rate dip wasn’t very high but it was okay. The restful sleep was also a bit less than I’d hoped but it too was okay. Much better than the hour and a half from two nights ago.

Here’s hoping my brain works a little better today than it did the last couple of days.

On a mostly unrelated note, I hung my AppleWatch on the charger next to my bed when I woke up this morning. It lit up green to show it was charging. It stayed there while I did my morning routine. When I was done I put it on again and the battery was at 48%. Huh. I put it on the charger on my desk and once again it lit up green. Then a minute later it prompted me for my passcode. Huh… not charging again. I tried again and it stayed connected. It’s up to about 75% now. My iPhone had a charger hiccup the other day too. Is this a trend? I can’t go to the Apple Store without a vaccine. This had best not become a thing.