The iPhone dock that I bought when Apple first took our headphone jack away died on Friday. (It was the Apple model with the 1/8″ headphone jack in it) It was sad. I was sad. I was even sadder when I found that Apple doesn’t sell that dock anymore even though they use them to display all of the iPhones in the Apple stores.
I found a super cheap replacement. It doesn’t have a headphone jack, but it does have space for a watch charger.
Yesterday I used the Distance function on the Indoor Walk setting on the Apple Watch Workout app for the first time. It said my longest indoor walk was 3.20 miles so I set my distance at 3.20 miles and off I went.
Today I went to do it again. This time, however, the default distance it gave me was 3.21 miles. Well honk my hooter, it wants me to set a new record? Off I went. I did it. 3.21 miles of walking in place. It took 45:07 seconds. My legs feel battered and weak, but I will be okay after I rest up a bit. I haven’t had any protein yet today so I think I’ll need some breakfast soon, yeah?
I expected to get an award from the iPhone activity app for setting a new distance record. I did not. I am sad.
So I reblogged a couple of pictures from the new film-only-photos page I started last night. I don’t know how long that page will last. I’ll probably either get tired of maintaining two pages or I’ll just forget that it’s there and post everything here like I’ve been doing for almost 14 years. You know, habits and all.
What I didn’t mention is that I did the same thing with Instagram. I started a new account there too. I already forget the user name so I’ll cross post something later on so I’ll have a record of it. Forgive me for being lazy, I just faux walked five kilometers.
Anyway, I was sitting in the car last night, waiting for Jen and Bellana to come out of the airport. The attendant at the parking lot told us not to leave our car unattended. Otherwise I would have gone inside too. So I figured, what the hell, I’ll make that new Instagram right now. It was amazing how idiotic the process was. For example: I did all of the setup for the new account and then clicked the final “create” button and… I got an error message saying I could not create a new account at this time. What? I started over and went through it all again and when I hit create again it told me there was already an account for that email address. Why the fuck didn’t you tell me that before? Also, who hacked my email and started an account with it?* So I made a new email address and did the whole process again and it errored again! This time instead of clicking the create a new account link I just logged in with the email that had just failed and… It said I was locked out due to a violation of the terms of service, or some shit like that. What the hell? How could I have violated the TOS when I haven’t even logged in yet! Ugh. I disputed the accusation and all it asked me to do was do a captcha and a two-factor authentication and then I was in.
I mean… really? Assholes? I know you’re facebook and I know that facebook is the root of all evil, but give me a friggin’ break.
Whatever. Yet another social media account to lose the password to and never log into again. Probably.
*After the second failed account creation I realized that I wasn’t hacked and I didn’t already have an account for that email address. Instagram is just fucking stupid.
Here’s the new Instagram account:
I am in the office today. It’s the first time since before the surgery. The traffic was really bad. Another sign that the pandemic is over, even though people are still getting sick in droves. Hooray.
I was 10 miles down route 93 before I realized that I forgot my headphones. Damn it! Fortunately I had an old set of ear pods in my desk, so we’re good to go for today but… dumb ass.
It’s my first attempt at monitoring liquid and protein intake from outside of the house for a full work day. I will also be taking my meds (just vitamins, actually) at work today too. What could go wrong?
Jen came up with a project today, and like all times when Jen comes up with a project she kicked it’s ass back to the stone age like the Boss Queen that she is.
She decided her office and the living room had too many power strips and extension chords. They don’t any more. She rearranged all of the wiring everywhere and when she was done we have the same number of things plugged in but with one power strip and two big extension chords left over. It was pretty amazing to watch. She’s pretty amazing in general, but this was really cool.
You should be in awe of my wife, just like I am.
Changing the subject, did the Flickr iOS app go screwy for anyone else today? The auto upload stopped working. I think it was because I took a slow mo video this morning. The same video file made YouTube act weird too. I cleared out my phone’s photo album (everything is backed up), logged out of Flickr, took a new picture, logged back in, and everything was okay again. Weird.
So We we’re trying to put a Nest sensor into Harry’s room and we were waiting for it to connect. My iPhone was standing on a charger in my room. In a moment of boredom I opened the camera app on my Apple Watch and took some pics. One with the front lens and one with the back.
Two things. One, if you’ve ever wondered what my phone charger’s view looks like, here you go. Two, if ever thought I wasn’t the biggest nerd in the universe, now you know better.
Daylight Savings is over for another year. Back to standard time for our sorry asses. Did everyone remember to turn their clocks back at 2:00am this morning?
I had a moment early today where I realized how spoiled being an Apple user has made me. I woke up to go to the bathroom, like ya do. I looked at my watch, but without my glasses it was kind of a lost cause. It looked like it was 4:00am or so, but I really couldn’t tell. The little clock I bought for Harry’s room next to my bed and it said 5:00am. Okay, that works. The alarm clock next to Jen said 5:00am too, and my CPAP said I’d been using it for five hours. So it’s 5:00am, right?
Dumbass.
As I was getting back to bed again after doing me biz (TMI, right?) I remembered about the whole turning back the clock thing and for a minute or two there I was a confused, 90% asleep red head. How could the CPAP machine say five hours if we turned the clocks back. If the clock said 5:00am, shouldn’t the CPAP have said six hours? I know 100% that I turned it on at about midnight. Weird. That’s when I remembered I’m an idiot and clocks that aren’t connected to the internet the way my Apple Watch and my iPhone are don’t magically turn themselves back.
I said it before, I’ll say it again. Dumbass.
Dumb. Ass.
Jen and I just went through the house and fixed all the non-internet connected clocks. Is this the first time in memory that on daylight savings day all of the clocks are showing the correct time? I mean, all except for the cars. It’ll take years go get those suckers right.
Happy Back to Standard Time, everyone. Enjoy the sunset at 4:29pm today.
Wait, what?
Way to go, Apple Fan Boy. Way to miss out on the simplest, yet ridiculously useful function available on your Mac.
There I was, thinking that I could only use the Messenger Application with fellow Apple folks.
Imagine my surprise when I was a single check box click away from having all of my SMS messages show up on my computer.
Ugh… dumb ass.
What was it Brody said? Here is your finger, far from the pulse, shoved straight up your ass? Something like that.*
*That’s a Kevin Smith reference. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Would you like a chocolate covered pretzel?
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.
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.
I was able to sneak into the cellar and play the guitar twice today.
I got a lot done for 50/90, which was nice, but I reached the point on the second go-round where my hands just wouldn’t do it anymore. That’s actually not a bad thing. I really need to build up more stamina, but I’ll get there.
On a gear note, I have my little recording nook in the master bedroom that has my current recording pedal board and my little 15 watt Fender amp. My big use-with-the-band pedal board and my Vox 15 watt amp (and my 30 watt Fender amp) are all in the cellar because Covid was slowing down and I thought they would be traveling to Mike the Bass Player’s house soon… and of course that hasn’t happened because the universe has intervened. The upside is I could set all of that stuff up in the cellar to keep working on 50/90 while I’m locked out of my bedroom. I bring my new Les Paul and my MacBook Pro up and down with me, as there is no way in hell those puppies are staying down there in the humidity. I set everything up far away from the flood zone, but you may note from the previous pictures that none of the electrical stuff is actually on the floor. The pedal board is, but the pedals themselves are not. That’s for flood damage prevention reasons.
So that is what I am doing to keep 50/90 going this week.
I also wanted to start with the exercising again. I started a couple of weeks ago and then fell off the wagon. I wanted to start up again today, what with it being a Monday and the iPhone Activity app starting its week on Monday. Jen wanted to do the same thing and she totally kicked ass all day today. Me? I was at two minutes of exercise as of 7:00pm tonight. Looked like I was going to fail for the day. Well, screw that folks. I’m up to 17 minutes now with 3.5 hours left in the day. I’ll get to 30 minutes, you betcha.
Okay. I need to go get a bottle of water and do another few minutes of exercise.
Looking for the bright side of self isolation. It’s tough to find, but it might be out there. Probably not, but maybe I might be able to pretend.
Inside the Red Head's Head 