-
We are now at the one year mark of when COVID-19 started being real for most Americans. Little did we know then just how awful it would truly be, with hundreds of thousands dead. But even worse, is that there is a significant number of people who don’t seem to care that 500,000+ Americans have died.
-
Fateful words I wrote last year…
How we will know this is really serious is when sporting events, say MLB Opening Day, get’s cancelled/re-scheduled.
Needless to say, it was really serious and still is, even with some semblance of normalcy returning.
-
My increased usage of Microsoft Teams is causing me think I could be more productive with a larger monitor, probably at least 32-inches, an upgrade from the 24-inch monitor I currently use. One of the two I am looking at is curved, which is intriguing but I am uncertain about whether I would like looking at a curved monitor every day. Does anyone have pros/cons about curved monitors?
-
It doesn’t mean much, but the Cubs won their first spring training game today, 1-0 against the Padres.
-
The Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 3 GPS, and it’s LTE equivalent, are the only Wear OS watch currently on the market that uses Qualcomm’s 4100 watch processor.
-
Currently reading: The Myth of a Christian Religion: Losing Your Religion for the Beauty of a Revolution by Gregory A. Boyd 📚
-
Currently reading: A Rhythm of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal by Sarah Bessey, Amena Brown, Barbara Brown Taylor, Lisa Sharon Harper 📚
-
Spring has come. Today is the first day of MLB spring training.
-
I’ve been wondering about the future of Wear OS in light of Google closing the acquisition of Fitbit and that there are so few watches with the new Qualcomm 4100 processor. I suspect Google has drastically slowed development on Wear OS and that has forced companies to hold back launching watches with the 4100 because it may be the only new thing about them in the next year. If I am right that may mean we won’t see many watches with the latest processor until the fall.
Personally, the Fossil Sport that I currently wear has all the “features” I need but performance is not exactly reliable. I’ve begun to think one of the latest Fitbits might be good. I really wish Apple would do with Apple Watch what they did with the iPod and make it work with Android, which I think would decisively the end Wear OS, but Apple appears committed to the halo Watch gives to iPhone.
-
Really disappointed with Google. I ordered a Barely Blue Pixel 4a from their store and at the time of the order was told it would ship between February 24-26. Now it says the shipment was delayed and there is no eta. Probably should have stuck with black and Amazon.
-
In this essay,The Death of a Retailer, Om Malik writes fondly about Fry’s and its inevitable passing. I agree strongly with the following:
In retrospect, as is often the case, Fry’s death was inevitable. In Fry’s heyday, many of us built our own computers (or at least tinkered with them). We bought software and installed it. The struggle of being a lover of computers was what made it so special. Every year, however, computers became less cumbersome.
Come to think about it, “the struggle” is what captured my imagination about computers and why I still tinker.
-
I am interested in Lunatask because it claims to have end–to-end encryption, which I find most task apps do not have. However, there is no web app and only currently available for MacOS and Windows 10 and therefore not really usable for me at this time.
-
Niklaus Wirth wrote of the 50 Years of Pascal, the programming language he developed. Pascal was the third programming language I learned and the one we used for nearly all of my computer science classes in the early 80s. I remember well how it became popular due to Borland’s Turbo Pascal.
-
I am sad to learn that Fry’s Electronics has gone out of business. I first learned about Fry’s by reading Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor and it’s frequent cameo in Jerry’s stories of his computing adventures. A business trip many years later provided me the opportunity to go to a Fry’s and found it truly geek heaven, there was simply no electronics store like it that I had ever seen.
-
We do not have the sunshine nor are the Cubs playing today as they did last year and we have much more snow on the ground. However, full training camp starts today and the first game is within weeks!
-
MLB camps have opened. Despite the weather, Spring is coming!
-
James Madison and his colleagues believed that by deviating from theoretical majority-rules principles, the American republic would benefit from more stability, a better protection of rights, and generally a higher quality of person in positions of authority. But ironically, it is precisely where minority rule bites deepest that this promise is revealed to be most false. – David Frum, Democracy Is the Only Solution
Madison could not have imagined how the Constitution they wrote creates the structure that allows the combination of technology and wealth to create autocratic minority rule. People who believe the U.S. Constitution is without flaw need to address for whom does it really provide liberty?
-
Joe Biden will tackle global chip shortage with executive order
There’s a chip shortage? Like dude, what am I going to do when I have the munchies?
-
Looking at the case counts and deaths per day for the county in which I live and wonder what will become the accepted “normal” number? I don’t think these numbers will ever get to zero. I imagine they get to many days of zero so we only track monthly numbers, then eventually seasonal numbers, and we probably won’t get there until several years have passed.
-
“Many Republicans do not accept Democratic governance as a legitimate outcome” of elections, said Thomas Zimmer, a history professor at Georgetown University who is writing a book about political divides in America. “America is nearing a crisis of democratic legitimacy because one side is trying to erect one-party minority rule.” Source: FiveThirtyEight
This article lays waste the claim that both parties are equally bad.
-
The article, Why Generation X will save the web, makes an important point for those concerned about new laws written regarding the Internet:
Government and policy – the mechanics and grunt work, not the media showmanship – are powered by an army of hard-working, very young people who have all of the academic knowledge and very little of the practical experience. Those young folks, now, in 2021, who were in nappies when I was on the Hill, now run whatever corridors of power they (virtually) travel through, in professional support of those older politicians.
And it’s these young professionals – not the boomer career politicians – who are setting the tone of internet policy.
As the article suggests, we tend to think it’s gray haired Senators, who don’t understand the Internet, who are going to write new laws against encryption and other parts of what we call the open Internet, and that is wrong. The laws will be written by millenials who have never known the open Internet. The only Internet millenials know is the bad, closed corporate Internet of Facebook and Twitter and Medium.
We shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t protect that which they have never known nor experienced.
-
Celebrating day 2,190
-
A year ago we spent a few days in Detroit, not knowing then that it would be our last social outing of the year. A year later and we have no idea when we will do something like it again.
-
We are making super bowl chili. That is all.
-
I am using Things to manage my personal lists on my iPads. Things is a really nice app but one frustration I have is that when I tap a lost item to expand it tapping it a second time does not collapse the item. It seems the only way to collapse is to tap on another list or try to find a blank space, which is inconsistent and not intuitive.
subscribe via RSS