Tag: tech

It is Wednesday

Today is Wednesday. Know what that means? It means two days until the kids come home for their Thanksgiving break. We only have them for a few days, and one of those days is actually Thanksgiving. Somehow we have to cram all of the Christmas decorating into the rest of the time. That includes a Christmas tree. Home Depot is already selling them, so they are there if we need it. Harry wants to get one at a tree farm. I am 100% out of my element there. Personally, I want to put up the fake one we had last year. We had so many lights on that tree (including the ones that came with it) that you could LITERALLY* see it from space.

What else… I don’t know. I want Santa to bring me a new cellar. Fat chance of that. Maybe a new MacBook Pro instead? hehehe

Okay, going to work. Talk later.

*No, you could not literally see the tree from space. There were a shit load of lights though, and it was super, super bright.

Charge, Please

I really wanted to be asleep about an hour ago. What’s the hold up? My Apple Watch. The battery got pretty low today and I wanted it fully charged before I fell asleep.

Then while I was working on music I accidentally bumped it off of the charger without noticing. Oops.

It’s not 100% yet but I think it’s close enough. G’night, cruel world. Talk to you all tomorrow.

Steam Fail?

I’m a Mac user, babie. None of that Windows crap for me. Well… except for work… and except for when I want to use something that doesn’t run on a Mac.

Jen has inspired me to try my hand at gaming so I installed World of Warcraft on my Mac. It works fine. Cool. Then there was the game I tried to play the last time I tried to get into gaming… which was something like 2012 or so? Star Wars: The Old Republic. That puppy doesn’t run on Mac.

So what’s a red headed Mac douche to do? Emulate, bitches! I installed Parallels and Windows 11. That works fantastically. Groovy like you’ve read about. Next, I installed Steam. That seems okay except that I always always always lose my password and had to jump through 2000000 hoops to actually get in. Once that mess was clean I downloaded and installed Star Wars. Success! Then I had to go through another 100000 password hoops before finally getting into the game and finding out that it doesn’t work with a track pad. I’m sure it works fine if I had an actual mouse with two buttons, but for the moment?

Fail, apparently. Bummer… for now.

Daylight Savings Had Me for a Minute There

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?

Ouch, babie… Ouch

I was sitting at my desk at 8:30am, 30 minutes before I start work, and I thought: Robert, you are going to do 15 minutes of exercise by walking very briskly in place. Hells yeah, you are.

Five minutes later I stopped because my back was hurting like crazy. Hells yeah, it was.

The same thing happened yesterday while I Was trying to do a second round of 15 minutes to close the 30 minute exercise ring on my Apple Watch. I powered through that time, but I couldn’t today.

In the immortal words of Austin Danger Powers, ouch babie… ouch.

I need to keep an eye on this today. I don’t want to hurt myself, but there’s a bag of Hershey’s Kisses off to my left and karmically speaking I need to do the 30 minutes so I can eat those suckers. I do understand that this arrangement makes no actual physiological sense, but shut up and leave me alone.

Here’s to a back pain free day… as if.

Doofus Moment

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?

Detailed Spam

I have received a bunch of spam text messages today. They’ve been pretty good. One in particular was very good. Almost good enough for me to consider thinking about maybe possibly considering to think about responding. If I did respond it would have been with something along the lines of, “who the fuck are you?” but it wasn’t actually good enough to get me to respond. It was close, but not that close.

It seemed to be coming from something that may have been a property management person or company or whatever, and it asked me if I needed help managing the property at my parents address. Except it didn’t say “parents address.” It gave their address. Just the street, not the town. It had to have dug that up somewhere. I can’t quite figure out where.

The phishing attacks are definitely getting better and better with time, but this one was much more detailed than I’m used to seeing. It was pretty annoying.

Don’t fall for the spam, folks. In the immortal words of Mad Eye Moody, constant vigilance!

Attenuation

Usually when we go up to Vermont we leave as early as humanly possible so that we can spend as much time there as we can and still get home at a non-ridiculous hour. Today is a little different. I have to time my arrival to match up with his class schedule. That means I have another hour or so before I have to leave.

I was thinking about playing some guitar before I go, but Jen is working and a few minutes from now she’ll be in a meeting. Better for me to keep quiet. It got me thinking about gear though. The amplifier I am going to use for November is a Vox MV50 Clean. There are a ton of MV50 models, but the Clean is the only one that comes with an attenuator. The others have a master volume. Blah.

It’s supposed to be a 50 watt amp and the attenuator has three settings; Off, 1/10th power, and 1/100th power. So it can be 50 watts, five watts, or 0.5 watts. At 50 watts it is loud. Great googlymoogly it is loud. At 0.5 watts it’s not. It’s a nice, useable at home volume. Well… still maybe a smidge loud, but not bad. I keep it at 0.5 all the time.

But should I? I was complaining the other day about it caving in when I bomb it with signal out of one of my overdrive pedals. Maybe I should set it to 1/10th power and just keep the volume control really low. Hell, maybe I should turn the attenuator off and see if I can use the volume control to keep things manageable. It’s doubtful, but maybe worth a try?

Huh… we’ll see.

Change of subject: Last night I don’t know what I was thinking. Two nights ago I had a memory lapse and got into bed without putting my CPAP mask on. Dumb ass. I realized the mistake before my head was on the pillow and all was right with the world again. Last night I missed two things. I forgot to top off the CPAP machine’s humidifier tank. Oops. It didn’t run out, but it’s close to empty.

I also forgot to charge my friggin’ watch. I finished my 30 minutes of exercise and just forgot to put it on the charger. Next thing I know I’m dozing off and my battery is at 30 something percent. Crap. Well, if it dies it dies. What’s a red head to do? I went to sleep. When I woke up today it was at 12%. It’s good to know that I can go 24 hours without a charge. The downside of course is that it’s been on the charger for about 90 minutes and it’s only back up to 52%. It’s probably not going to be fully charged by the time I have to leave. That’s okay. It’ll be charged enough.

I still need to top off the gas tank (it’s about 190 miles each way. In my hybrid Kia, if I start with a full tank I can get there and back and still have about a quarter of a tank left. I friggin’ love science) and pick up some caffeinated beverages for the ride. After that the only question is music or podcasts? If it’s music I might go with the new live record from The Pineapple Thief. I first stumbled across them a couple of years ago and it’s all good stuff, just nothing that sets the world on fire for me. Their new live record (they couldn’t tour last year so they did one show in an empty room and webcast it everywhere. The new record is that show) does it. It sets the red head’s head right on fire. Great album. I was seeing all this potential and waiting for a record that lived up to it. The last one was close. This new one nails it. Having said that though… I’ll still probably go with podcasts. That’s just kinda where I’m at this morning.

Happy travels, folks!