General

In which Chance Miller showcases the world’s largest couch

How else do you explain this line in his review of the Zag Slim Book keyboard for the 10.5″ iPad Pro?

I’ve spent far too many hours searching in couch cushions for my Apple Pencil

Does Chance Miller really spend hours looking for his Apple Pencil in his couch? Is his couch as big as a city block? Perhaps. I’ve seen some pretty big couches. Or maybe he is perpetually losing it in every couch he encounters, as he goes through life dangerously nurturing his couch obsession, risking permanent loss of his Apple Pencil.

More curiously, he states that “I’m hard-pressed to find a reason to choose the Slim Book over the Smart Keyboard” then lists the Slim Book’s superior features:

  • a holder for the Apple Pencil (take that, couches!)
  • backlit keys
  • lasts for up to two years on battery
  • costs less
  • a full set of function keys (wait, he doesn’t even mention this, though they are plainly visible in the review’s screenshots)
  • a decent amount of travel in the keys
  • is easier to use on your lap
  • is more versatile, with multiple viewing angles
  • includes a palm rest
  • has a much sturdier stand

It’s clear why one would be hard-pressed to find a reason to choose the Slim Book when its list of superior features is as big as a couch.

But wait, let me provide the full quote from above:

I’m hard-pressed to find a reason to choose the Slim Book over the Smart Keyboard, but I’ve grown very accustomed to the typing experience the Smart Keyboard provides

Thus proving himself utterly mad for preferring the terrible, joyless, noisy MacBook Pro keyboard. Okay, to be fair, I actually find the Smart Keyboard for the iPad Pro to be superior in feel to that of the new MacBook Pro, but he still professes “to love” Apple’s keyboard design and specifically calls out the MacBook Pro. Insanity!

Mostly, I wished he had written “I’ve spent far too many years searching in couch cushions for my Apple Pencil” just to see if the editor was paying attention.

Pencilled in

This post was lovingly hand-written using my iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and the Nebo note-taking app.

Nebo converts the handwritten text to type on the fly and the accuracy seems pretty good considering l’m writing this in bed while the neighbors make strange thumping sounds upstairs.

All in all, I give the technology ten thumbs up and this post’s excitement level half a thumb up.

My Top 10 Albums of 2017

Or “Why I don’t know anything about the current state of pop music.”

I apparently only bought seven albums this year. That may actually be higher than average compared to most album buyers, since the album format is either dead or dying (or just on a temporary downward trend if you’re feeling less doom and gloom about it).

The albums I bought fall into these categories:

  • Albums previously owned but purchased for the sake of having them in digital format: 1
  • Albums bought because a friend had them and I liked them and they were on sale: 2
  • Albums that were cheap and had at least one song I liked so I figured why not: 4
  • Albums I bought that were released in 2017: 0
  • Albums I bought that were released in the 21st century: 0
  • The year each of the seven albums were released:
    • 1976
    • 1978
    • 1982
    • 1983
    • 1984
    • 1986
    • 1992

So really, this was an exercise in 1980s nostalgia. Not surprising since that was the formative decade for my taste (or lack thereof) in music. The seven albums are:

  • Hotel California, The Eagles. I’ve heard the title track a billion times and somehow I am still not tired of it. The rest of the album holds up well given its age and Don Henley’s cynicism is just as appropriate–or moreso–in 2017.
  • The Cars, The Cars. The Cars! This album got played endlessly in Drawing and Painting class in junior high but I didn’t mind because it’s a crazy good pop confection.
  • Vacation, The Go-Go’s. Worth it for the title track, “He’s So Strange” and “Worlds Away.” Not quite as catchy as their first album but pretty close.
  • Eliminator, ZZ Top. For some reason I can never bring myself to listen to the whole album, just the singles that I’m familiar with like “Sharp-Dressed Man” and “Legs.” I have no buyer’s regret.
  • Welcome to the Pleasuredome, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. What an improbable success. A friend had this on that newfangled CD format and it’s a bizarre mix of covers, ersatz prog rock, dance music and ballads. Somehow it works, in no small part due to Holly Johnson’s commanding presence.
  • Crowded House, Crowded House. A lovely pop album with one of the most essential songs of the 80s, “Don’t Dream It’s Over.”
  • Harvest Moon, Neil Young. The title track is a sweet ballad and the rest of the album is similarly soothing as Young gets quiet instead of weird or angry.

Maybe one of my resolutions for next year will be to buy an album released next year. Hey, it’s happened before! (Last time in 2014.)

In their pocket

I got an email yesterday from Pocket, the service that lets you save stories on the web to read later (various browsers and other apps do the same thing but I glommed onto Pocket, in part because it was bought by Mozilla and integrated directly into Firefox).

Email from Pocket is not unusual–I get several per week with recommended and sponsored stories. This one was different, though (and yes, it included the little rocket because that’s become a strange and slightly annoying trend in email subject lines over the past few years):

? Stan, you made the Top 5% of readers in Pocket this year!

It goes on to elaborate a little:

You’re a top reader in Pocket for 2017, and you should be proud! Not only did you make it into the top 5%, you’ve also exercised your brain and undoubtedly learned a ton in the process.

I just find this weird. There are about five hundred billion people on the internet, so how did I manage to get in the top 5% of Pocket users? My first thought is that Pocket is drastically unpopular and any moderate use by anyone would put them in the top 5%. This is also my second and third thought because all other possibilities seem so much less likely. But perhaps most people only use Pocket occasionally because they read a story right when they find it, rather than holding off until later. Maybe we live in a culture of instant rather than delayed gratification and I’m an outlier.

Maybe this would all change if Pocket featured Facebook integration (I would then hate it forever and plunge into the bottom 5%).

Anyway, I suppose it’s nice but mostly still weird that I’m in the top 5% of anything on the internet. Go me!

The ongoing death of brick & mortar: NCIX edition

The personal computer market has changed a lot since I moved to Vancouver in 1986, and the retail market has changed along with it.

In 1986 the Macintosh was only two years old, the IBM PC was all of five. Walking into a decent computer store, whether a hardware-focused place like Future Shop, or a software-focused one like Super Software, you could buy titles for the following systems:

  • Apple II
  • IBM PC
  • Atari 8-bit
  • Commodore VIC-20
  • Commodore 64
  • Macintosh
  • Amiga
  • Atari ST (520/1040)

Ten years later the market every system was dead or dying, save for two. The Macintosh had carved out a niche, primarily for those using it in desktop publishing, but it was the PC that came to dominate, both with businesses and home users, with the advent of VGA graphics and decent sound cards making them viable for gaming. The growth of the PC led to the number of stores selling PCs, PC parts and software exploding.

I did a lot of my early shopping back then at a few local stores such as ATIC Computers and Frontier PC before settling on NCIX for their combination of good stock, retail locations and solid pricing. Just this summer I was still buying from them, picking up a mouse and some USB stick, not realizing they were on the verge of shutting down all of their retail stores and declaring bankruptcy. It makes me sad to see another long-time local business go under, even as I admit to a bad taste in my mouth over the way customers are predictably getting the short end of the stick as the company goes under.

Also, how does a company selling tech in the shadow of places like Amazon and Newegg not realize the future is online? I liked shopping at NCIX because I live in a condo and it’s a pain to get larger items delivered, because they end up at some depot and it’s just easier to get them at a store. But if I lived in a house? I’d order everything online–it hardly makes sense to do otherwise, with either free or cheap shipping. But the owners of NCIX apparently thought otherwise, and even as the competition got swallowed up (Best Buy devouring Future Shop), shifted to corporate/online sales Frontier PC) or just vanished altogether (to my surprise, ATIC is still around, though they have moved to a new location next to MEC), they kept their focus on retail stores that never generated enough traffic to justify the expense of operating them.

And in this case, we’re looking at stuff that doesn’t translate easily into digital format like books, magazines and music. But it doesn’t matter–people are shifting their purchases for a lot of electronics online and NCIX lost out.

I guess I’ll get a chance to see how well delivery works from Amazon and Newegg now.

Angry on glass: A SkyTrain station message by Author Unknown

A few days ago during The Rains I trod to the Sapperton SkyTrain station to begin my morning commute and I discovered this message finger-painted onto the glass near where I usually stand on the platform.

“fuck you ya you fuck head” – a possibly aggrieved passenger or urban poet

One might quibble about the lack of proper punctuation but the message is nonetheless unambiguous. What I find most intriguing is what would prompt someone to:

  1. Feel this angry while standing on the platform of a commuter train very early in the morning (before 6:30 a.m.)
  2. Be moved to transfer the anger into a message written via finger on a rain-slicked sheet of glass

This leads to other questions, such as:

  1. What did the person feel later, when they were presumably on the train. Remorse? Regret? Catharsis? Ongoing anger?
  2. Would I be able to pick this person out if I suddenly found myself on the car on which the angry scribe was riding?
  3. Has this person written similar messages before?
  4. Is this act usually a one-off or just one in a series?
  5. Is the person–almost certainly a guy (sorry, guys, you know we’re mostly jerks) an otherwise nice fellow, entirely reasonable, and just found himself in a foul mood due perhaps to an unexpected and unpleasant event?

I am slightly sad I will never know the answers to these questions, though I’m not sure what I would do with the answers, anyway. Maybe one day I’ll make the answers up and turn it into a story called “The Messenger.”

(Probably not, though.)

Testing the axiom “An artist must suffer for his art”

My personal life has undergone a seismic shift as of last night. Since this is a blog and not Dear Diary I’ll say no more, but if an artist must suffer for his art and I keep writing or doodling or throwing pots or engaging in some sort of creative endeavor, I will soon be producing work that’ll look touched by genius.

Just sayin’.

Let’s start with a haiku.

I did a bad thing
The consequences are due
I am a dumb guy

The genius part may build slowly over time…

I bought a book about not complaining (this is not a complaint)

I picked up a book about not complaining. It was on sale, so I certainly will not complain about the price. We’ll see if it, along with my newly-infused Kaizen brain, can overcome the negativity and gloom that has descended over me during the past year.

I’ll admit, it would help if Trump got kidnapped by Bigfoot, too, but I can’t pin my hopes on such a happy thing occurring.

So here’s hoping A Complaint Free World helps.

I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro, so I’m going to get in one last complaint, again regarding its extremely low travel keyboard: Do not like.

There, done!

Who needs emojis? I do!

I admit it, I like emojis. But I use them in that hipster, post-ironic “I’m too cool for you” way, sort of the same way I use “lol.”

This probably makes me a horrible, petty person in some way, but it’s balanced out by how adorable I find kittens.

I installed the Super Emoji+ plugin for the blog. How is it? Let me sum it up:

If you look carefully, you can see the crying emoji above appears to be an actual severed head as the tears are pooling directly under it. No wonder it’s so sad. Poor body-less little guy.

EDIT: The plugin doesn’t seem to work with the current version of WordPress. Just pretend that giant question mark above is crying.

EDIT, The Sequel: I’ve removed giant question mark and added an image that captures the essence of the missing emoji. My work here is done.

Black Friday now starts on Wednesday

It should come as no surprise in a world where Christmas ads start showing up in October (or September) that Black Friday, officially the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday (this year that would be Friday, November 24) now starts on Wednesday or just whenever. Every sale right now (and ads for such are overflowing at the moment) is either a Black Friday Already Sale or a Pre-Black Friday Sale. It is now and shall continue to be Black Friday. Which actually sounds a little ominous when you think about it.

I mean, I like sales. I want to buy that new fry pan that promises to never ever let food stick to it for real, and I’m glad that I’ll have a chance to get it at a really good price. But is it worth the relentless barrage of ads and yet another lengthening of the time frame in which we need to endure the things? I even had an obnoxious banner ad show up in the WordPress dashboard of this blog for one of the plugins I had installed.

Had, because I’ve since uninstalled it and sent the company behind it a brief note explaining how I don’t care for obnoxious banner ads on my WordPress dashboard. Perhaps they didn’t know. Now they do!

Anyway, I should try to focus on the positive rather than just carp and be negative, so let me conclude by saying that I’m really looking forward to getting that magic fry pan. If they haven’t sold out of it before I can get to the store.