Month: December 2022

I tried to eat fancy fries

I tried to eat some French fries fancy-style, with a fork. I won’t get greasy fingers, I thought. I’ll be civilized.

It lasted for two fries. Then I began pawing them into my mouth like a caveman.

They were good.

The Culling 2022, Twitter edition

Tonight I deactivated my Twitter account. I have 30 days to change my mind, and then it goes away forever.

Good.

Casey Newton, in today’s edition of his Platformer newsletter, wrote the following:

…observing Elon Musk’s escalated attacks on a former employee and continued promotion of far-right ideas and personalities, over the weekend I found myself thinking: I just don’t want to be on Twitter anymore. 

It has all been bad, of course. From the moment Musk dragged that sink into Twitter headquarters, assured the assembled employees there that he wasn’t about to eliminate 75 percent of them, and soon did exactly that, Musk’s hostile takeover of the company has been ugly to behold.

Any acquisition is bound to cause turmoil in the lives of its employees, but Musk seemed to revel in it: laying off employees so indiscriminately that he was forced to beg many to return a day after terminating them; forcing a mostly remote workforce back into the office on a day’s notice; imposing impossible deadlines on those that remained; requiring workers to sign a digital loyalty oath promising to be “extremely hardcore”; putting workers through regular “code reviews” that have often served as a pretext for firing them; purging workers who were found to have been critical of him in Slack or on Twitter; installing beds in the office to encourage workers to sleep there.

And:

More recently, he falsely stated that the company had “refused to take action on child exploitation for years” — an especially egregious statement given that he had just purged 80 percent of the company’s contract workforce, which included the majority of its content moderators. (We’ve reported that Twitter’s efforts here were indeed understaffed, but it’s not true that the company took no action.)

In recent days, Musk has increasingly advanced the narrative that Twitter was a den of corruption before he bought it. And over the weekend, he made his most disgusting smear to date. 

Here’s Dana Hull at Bloomberg:

Elon Musk posted tweets including an excerpt of Yoel Roth’s doctoral dissertation Saturday that suggested the former Twitter executive is an advocate for child sexualization — a baseless trope that leaves Roth susceptible to online abuse. […]

“Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” tweeted Musk, with an excerpt from the 300-page dissertation. “Gay Data,” the title of Roth’s 2016 dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, is about Grindr, the geosocial networking service popular with the LGBTQ+ community.

To be clear, the dissertation is about how to keep predators away from children. But in an interview with Kara Swisher, Roth had dared to criticize Musk after resigning. And so this was his punishment: a smear pushed out to 121 million people, which led immediately to Roth being overwhelmed with death threats.

As if all of that weren’t terrible enough, Musk followed up by tweeting “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” — a smooth-brained, Tucker Carlson-ass Mad Lib of a post that served to bolster the kind of anti-trans and anti-vaxx culture warriors that most people have absolutely no desire to hear from, ever. (Culture warriors who, I assume, made up a good number of the 60,000-plus accounts Musk recently returned to the platform after falsely saying he would first consult with a council of experts before doing so.) 

There’s more, but you get the point (Platformer is great if you enjoy reading about how social media is affecting our world. It can feel a bit like doomscrolling at times, but Newton writes good stuff).

It’s reached the point where Twitter–which I rarely used before, anyway–has gone from being worth watching in a “flaming train wreck” kind of way to where having an active account starts to make you feel at least a bit complicit in what Musk is doing. I’ll still see and hear about Twitter news, of course. It’s nearly inescapable if you read any sites, blogs or newsletters that cover social media, but I’ll be doing it as someone on the outside, looking in, not as someone participating directly in the hellscape Musk is making.

Run 737: Jet joke here

After two weeks, the snow has finally retreated enough that I can run on the trails again. Yay.

I could definitely feel the two weeks of not-running, though. Not as yay.

But I made it without any issues, so here’s a list of conditions and observations:

  • It was foggy. Ack. Unlike the November fog run, it was lighter this time, so my glasses didn’t become coated. It just lent a somewhat spooky ambience to the run.
  • I started out slow and never really got faster, but stayed fairly steady. I only had one km under the 6:00/km mark (the fourth, on the Cottonwood Trail)
  • The trail was mostly clear, though some snow persisted on parts that get less sun. I was able to navigate these without issue.
  • I started to feel a bit tired between the 6’7 km mark, but maintained pace and a steady BPM of 151 overall, which is good considering the cold.
  • Speaking of cold, I wore two layers up top and that was fine. My hands never really warmed up, though. I blame the fog, somehow.

A few dog owners had their dogs off-leash, but fortunately no problems arose because of this. The fog began to lift slowly over the course of the run, but it wasn’t until the walk back that the sun actually broke through. This probably worked to my advantage, since it kept the sun from “strobing” through the naked trees on the run.

Overall, it was nice to get back out, but I definitely felt missing those five runs that got called due to snow. Here’s hoping no more snow this year (or next year, while I’m at it).

The view from the bridge at Deer Lake Brook. There’s a lake in there, trust me!

Stats:

Run 737
Average pace: 6:05/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Start: 9:57 a.m.
Distance: 10.04 km
Time: 61:06
Weather: Foggy
Temp: 2-4ºC
Humidity: 91%
Wind: nil
BPM: 151
Weight: 162.8
Total distance to date: 5455 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: Saucony Peregrine 12 (127 km)

A haiku to getting fat

Today, I weighed in at a high-for-the-month weight of 163.2 pounds. This is bad and I feel bad. I vow to do better, even though it’s December and it may seem like a hopeless battle.

I asked ChatGPT to write a haiku about gaining weight. It still managed to put a positive spin on it.

Gaining Weight: A haiku by ChatGPT

Winter has come,
Gone are the days of summer sun.
Now I must eat more.

ChatGPT also seems to have a liberal interpretation of what a haiku is, because that ain’t 5/7/5!

One more time, a haiku about getting fat:

Getting Fat: A haiku by ChatGPT

Layers of fat grow,
Once sleek form now soft and slow.
Winter indulgence.

That’s more like it! It’s also an actual haiku.

Now I’m off to eat nothing. NOTHING. Well, maybe breakfast. But then NOTHING.

Treadmill workout: Stepping up

I did a 30-minute workout today and bumped the speed back up to 6.5, leaving the incline at 0. I had to put in a wee bit more effort, but that was good. Even better, I made sure not to touch the metal on the handgrips, so I did the entire workout without getting zapped. Woo. Upping the speed resulted in an average pace that was a whopping 43 seconds faster (from 9:49/km to 9:06/km). Despite that, I actually only burned 23 more calories. But 23 very intense calories.

Stats:

Speed: 6.5
Incline: 0

Pace: 9.06/km
Time: 30:31
Distance: 3.35 km
Calories burned: 194
BPM: 119

Clowning around (with appropriately terrifying results)

Using DiffusionBee on my Mac, I entered a photo of myself using the Image to Image feature, then entered the prompt Dressed as clown.

It produced this nightmare-inducing result:

Available to traumatize guests at your next birthday party

Original photo as reference:

I got a fancy cap in the process, along with a dress shirt (?), and it made the background more overgrown.

I will experiment more, but maybe with fewer clown prompts. Or more. I haven’t decided yet.

Mac vs. PC, 2022 edition

I have an Obsidian document that I’ve been working on for some time that chronicles my current take on the whole Mac vs. PC debate. I’ve added to it, tinkered with it, but it’s occurred to me that I may never actually finish it in a way that I’ll be satisfied with.

So today I’m presenting a more off the cuff take on this decades-old debate.

Short answer: They both suck! And they are both pretty good!

Longer answer:

First, a tiny bit of background:

My first PC was acquired in 1994. It came with a floppy drive and no CD-ROM drive. I added the former later, at a cost of $200, so I could play Myst.

My first Mac nearly came four years earlier, when I considered a Macintosh Plus for around $1,000 while attending university. I dropped out of school and abandoned the plan to get a Macintosh. My first actual Mac was a MacBook Air I got in 2013, with stock specs. I ended up not really taking a shine to what was then OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and sold the Air a year later, getting a Surface Pro 3 at a now-defunct Microsoft Store. It would be seven more years before I’d get my next Mac.

Currently, I have:

  • A custom-built PC I put together in April 2019, with 32 GB of ram, a pair of 1 TB SSDs and a GeForce 2070 video card
  • A base Mac Studio with the M1 Max: 32 GB of ram and a 512 GB SSD, with a 2 TB external SSD attached
  • A 2020 MacBook Air with M1, upgraded at purchase to 16 GB of ram and a 512 GB SSD

The Air is kind of vestigial at this point, since I currently have no need for a laptop. I will either sell or trade it in eventually.

So! What is my take on Mac vs. PC in 2022?

It depends, but it’s mostly down to preference for very specific things.

If you are doing most of your work in a web browser, and at a desk, there is almost no functional difference between the two. I use Firefox on both and the experience is so similar they could be the same machine. The only difference I’ve noticed is that Google Maps seems to load faster and scroll more smoothly on the Mac, for reasons unclear to me. Firefox is happy to crash in either OS, though thankfully this is fairly rare.

The one exception to the browser experience is if you use Safari, as it’s only available on Apple devices.

Obsidian is pretty much the same.

Discord and Signal are the same.

These similarities are less surprising when you consider that the above are Electron apps, so they’re basically web apps in a wrapper, modified just enough to run on specific platforms. None of these feel especially Mac or Windows-like.

If you use Apple for your music, the Mac experience is better because Windows is still saddled with the decrepit iTunes. But Apple has already confirmed their Apple Music app is coming in 2023, so that won’t be an issue much longer.

The choices come down to a few things and again, this is specific to desktop-only.

Where Macs win out:

  • Interoperability between Apple devices. If you have an iPhone and/or an iPad, Apple makes it easy to share data, messages and photos among all three. You can still do this to some degree on a Windows PC, but it’s not as seamless or effortless. But this is where the Mac has a clear (and obvious) advantage. It’s probably the best reason to get a Mac desktop, so if you also have a Pixel 7 and a Samsung Galaxy 8 tablet, this may not be so compelling.
  • Mac-only apps. A lot of smaller companies and developers make apps that are only available on Mac. A few examples are Ulysses (a writing app) and Pixelmator Pro (photo editing). If you rely on these apps, you can find approximate equivalents on Windows, but nothing quite the same.
  • The menu bar. Apple has had a menu bar along the top of the screen since the first Macintosh in 1984. It’s home to tons of little utilities that some Mac users absolutely love having. The closest equivalent on Windows is the System Tray, which is not as accessible or flexible.
  • Font rendering. While Macs have issues with resolution scaling, the approach to font rendering looks nicer to my eyes than Windows. It’s easy to see (ho ho) why so many writers use Macs.

Where Windows wins out:

  • Gaming. The Windows gaming scene is decades-old and is both deep and wide. Many people will buy PCs exclusively for gaming. Apple has improved the state of gaming on Macs with its own silicon, but it trails far, far behind the PC.
  • Windows-only apps. Macs usually get a version of most popular software out there, but not always. The situation here is probably better for Mac users overall (which is to say, there are more Mac-only apps than there are Windows-only).
  • Cost. Do you have a small budget? Windows PCs run the gamut from dirt cheap to ultra high-end. The same variety simply doesn’t exist on the Mac, which start with “premium” pricing and go up from there.
  • Variety of form factors. Do you desire a particular form factor? Speaking of variety, on the desktop, Apple gives you the Mac Mini, the Studio (which is basically a tall, souped-up Mini) or the pretty much obsolete and outrageously overpriced Mac Pro. And that’s it. Meanwhile, on the PC side, you can get everything from adorably tiny NUCs to monster gaming rigs and everything in-between.
  • Window management. The ability to easily and flexibly snap windows is built-in and can be easily expanded further with the officially supported PowerToys app. Apple’s options are crude and insufficient by comparison, forcing you to go the third party route.
  • Multi-monitor support. Both systems can work with multiple monitors, but on Windows it’s effortless and largely glitch-free. On the Mac, it’s more fiddly if you use third-party monitors, and there are bizarre decisions like only having the dock show on the active monitor (and needing a weird mouse gesture to get it to appear on another monitor).

Where neither wins out:

  • GUI and overall user experience. While some may prefer the aesthetic of macOS over Windows 11 or vice-versa, the reality is they are much more alike than they have ever been. They both have light and dark modes, they both have rounded corners on the windows, they both have a bar/dock at the bottom of the screen (though only Apple now lets you move theirs). For me, neither OS really looks better than the other, it’s just a matter of personal preference.
  • File management. Both have notable flaws or quirks. Windows has File Explorer, which is actually pretty good (and even better now that they added tabs) but it often seems slow, as if it’s indexing a folder every time you open it. On Macs, Finder is solid but has weird design choices, like not showing all folders in certain views, requiring an extra click to “Show All.” Maddening busywork for no benefit!
  • Bugs. Apple and Microsoft have both proven equally capable of shipping bug-riddled software. Enjoy!

In the end I spend most of my time on Windows because I’ve used it longer and am just more comfortable with it, plus I game and as I said above, Macs are not great gaming rigs, though they are improving. I mainly use my Mac for writing and when I want a more distraction-free environment (ie. my vast Windows gaming library is unavailable).

Obligatory GIF:

3600 days of MyFitnessPal is kind of weird

As of today, I have logged into MyFitnessPal for 3,600 days:

That works out to 9.86 years. I’ve been logging in since I had hair.

When we were in Manning Park back in 2017 we had no cell reception. The place is, as they say, off the grid. But north of the campground we were staying at by Lightning Lake was a mountain called Blackwall Peak. We drove the long switchback-filled route to get to the top, and right at the apex was…a large Telus cell tower and building. I was able to get one bar on my cell phone and keep the MFP streak going.

I later found out that if you logged into the app during days you had no connectivity, they would comp you for them later through support. This was later still built-in to happen automagically once you had connectivity back. I think my streak was in the 800s back then.

The weird thing now is I don’t really care about the streak anymore. In fact, I’ve been on the lookout for a better tracking app but so far I’ve found none that are a worthy replacement, despite its flaws and niggles.

Anyway, just a random thing I noticed today.

Here’s a shot of me preparing to throw my mid-summer snowball, with the cell tower behind me.

Walk 91 and 92: A pair in the snow

There was definitely no running involved!

(Okay, a tiny bit as an experiment as I mentioned in the prior post).

Basically, I walked to the lake and back, as if I were doing a run, but without the running part. This was done to:

  • Assess how viable running would be on the trail (not very)
  • Get out for some fresh air
  • Burn a few calories instead of sitting on my butt eating crackers

The main thing here is that once I got onto the river trail (which is to say, once I was off nicely shovelled sidewalks), my pace slowed a fair bit over my usual walking pace. It wasn’t super slippery, but it was enough that I couldn’t walk at my usual breakneck (for walking) pace. The first walk, my left big toe got cold for some weird reason. It was fine on the way back.

Stats:

Walk 92
Average pace: 10:04/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 4.08 km
Time: 41:02
Weather: Overcast
Temp: 2 °C
Humidity: 93%
Wind: light to nil
BPM: 108
Weight: 161.8 pounds
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255
Total distance to date: 690.18 km
Walk 93
Average pace: 10:17/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 4.33 km
Time: 44:32
Weather: Overcast
Temp: 5 °C
Humidity: 91%
Wind: light to nil
BPM: 181
Weight: 161.8 pounds
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255
Total distance to date: 694.51 km

The view along the way (the debris is from a now ex-tree that fell over):

A very brief run in the snow

This morning, I donned my running clothes and headed out to Burnaby Lake, though I didn’t actually intend to run. I did want to see how much snow was still on the trail, to get a sense of how long I might need to wait until running becomes viable again.

Technically, I did run a little, as a test, about 20 meters or so. The trail is certainly walkable, but for running, the compact snow is that yucky combination of uneven and slippery. I could run, but only very slowly, in order to maintain my footing.

Conveniently, I got a newsletter from Running Room today with tips for running in the winter, which included wearing something like these to keep from landing on your face:

On the one hand, if I was faced with a a long layoff from running due to snow, this might be tempting, though I can’t imagine it makes for a very pleasurable running experience. On the other hand, based on my assessment today and assuming we don’t get a pile of new snow, I am assuming I’ll be able to run possibly by this Monday (five days from now). That means I will miss one more run and a total of five runs (two last week, three this week). This makes me sad, but at least it won’t be the multiple months of the 2016-17 snowpocalypse.

This is what the trail looked like near the Avalon parking lot. The snow looks shallow, but that’s mainly due to it being compacted. The darker bits are slippery.

There’s a tiny chance that if we get a lot of rain tomorrow (Thursday) a run could be viable on Friday, but I am not expecting this. What I might do in lieu of a run is walk to Piper Spit (weather permitting–the last time I tried this, it started snowing hard) and shoot birbs with my camera. I saw a heron at the lake today, but with my stinky phone camera, the best I could do was this cropped image (which isn’t too bad, I suppose; it definitely captures the overall gray/blue quality of the day):