General

Circle beats the squircle: A Birchtree dream

Last night I had a dream featuring Matt Birchler. I have never met Matt. He is a celebrity of sorts in the Apple tech scene, who has a YouTube channel (A Better Computer), a blog (Birchtree), a podcast (Comfort Zone) and probably half a dozen other projects. He writes articles for various tech sites. He also has an unrelated full-time job in UI/UX.

He is a busy guy.

I came across him via his blog and follow him on Mastodon, where much of the former Mac community from Twitter has migrated to.

One of his passions is UX and design (which works out well for him, because it’s also his job). In the dream, we are hanging out in a living room (?) somewhere and discussing design, as one does. Specifically, we are nodding in agreement over how circles provide more space for information over squircles (the rounded-off square icons you see everywhere on Apple devices these days). This is, of course, nonsense. Literally the opposite is true, but in the dream we were right, and the world was wrong.

Then I suggested we play something on “Game Center” on an Apple TV nearby and the dream ended, or at least my recollection of it did.

I’m not a big squircle fan, so I think the dream was just trying to accommodate that. Thanks, subconscious!

That whole WordPress drama, again

An update from my perspective, having blogged on WordPress for just under 20 years:

  • I turned off the WordPress news widget in my WordPress dashboard, because it is now filled with unhinged posts from the co-founder of WordPress.
  • I am still actively looking for a place to move to, away from WordPress. It’s now a question of where I’ll land, not if.
  • To that end, I realized I had been consistently mistaking the name of a possible new platform as Blogtastic, when it is, in fact, Blogstatic. I am smart.
  • I have backed up everything on this blog, including all one billion images, of which 990 million are cats.
  • When you have an entire website (not hosted by WordPress) devoted to every time you have “lied, misrepresented or behaved in a questionable manner”, you may not be charting the best course forward possible.

I expect to make a decision on a platform soon™.

While I’m wishing for ponies

I have a bike and enjoy riding it. I don’t ride it much because I live in a vast urban area that requires me to ride the bike (I have no vehicle to load it into/onto) along busy streets not designed for bikes before I can get to the nicer areas with bike lanes, dedicated bike paths and further out, trails and other places where riding a bike is actually calming and relaxing.

I wish there was some master plan for the Lower Mainland (Metro Vancouver) to add proper, separated bike lanes on basically every major route. Instead, we get weird piecemeal projects like New Westminster’s upgrading of Columbia Street (two blocks adjacent to the Royal Columbian Hospital, which is why it’s happening) and Sherbrooke Street (same reason). It’s nice and so far it looks great (work is expected to be complete in February 2025), but it’s just a few blocks, like a tease of what could be before you’re just dumped back onto the regular street with nothing but a white line separating you and your bike from every vehicle.

But without some central plan that de-prioritizes cars and prioritizes bikes, this is probably the best we’re going to get.

Maybe we should learn French and move to Paris, where they seem to have figured this out.

What does this mean?

Also, I am really leaning into “posting whatever pops into my head (or social media feed)” lately. I’ll have more substantive posts, too. I’m pretty sure, anyway.

I present cat on shark:

I would give credit, but none was attached. I like the ambiguity of “Is the cat attacking the shark or is it just using the shark as a couch?”

September shleptember

September was not a great month.

It started with something like three new temperature records being set as we got multiple days of 30C+ weather, but not long after that the reverse happened, with periods of rain and cooler-than-average weather. That trend has continued right to the end of the month, where today the high is supposed to be 16C, two degrees below the usual 18C. And yes, I can feel the difference!

My birthday was a bit of a dud, but it got better a few days later, weirdly.

Strata stuff is basically all bad and weighs me down. I wish people could just be better, but that world is clearly a fantasy. Maybe we’ll evolve to be more enlightened in a few million years. Haha, sure.

On more positive notes, I am doing more stuff and being more productive, both creatively and otherwise. I have resumed regular runs and my legs have not betrayed me–yet!

Also, as per the previous blog entry, I am down very slightly in weight, which is better than being up.

In all, a hearty meh, with a side of “could be worse!”

Time sequences

Every time sequence that consists of incremental numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.):

12:34
1:23
2:34
3:45
4:56
2:10
3:21
4:32
5:43
6:54

Why do I find this bit of trivia interesting? I don’t even like math, which means I should also slightly dislike numbers on principle.

But I made a vow to post anything that pops into my head1Don’t worry, there are some limits., so here we are.