The world is a busy place and the internet is part of the world, so it’s also a busy place. I’m here to help.
Instead of having to click on a clickbait link and then read an actual article and junk to glean the valuable pearls of wisdom within, just read below for the actual clickbait content*. Save time, save money!
Clickbait title: Self-Made Billionaires Like Warren Buffett and Elon Musk Prove If You Don’t Make Time for These 6 Little Things Every Day, You’ll Never Be Successful
MacRumors has a large and active forum and each news post on the main site also gets automagically turned into a forum thread in the news discussion subforum. Certain people will use some of these threads—well, really, nearly all of them—to dunk on Apple and the various things the company is or isn’t doing (or is perceived to be doing or not doing). The actual topic of the thread is often irrelevant.
Here’s a fun (?) drinking game. Take a drink any time someone mentions the following in a MacRumors news post discussion thread. NOTE: I am not responsible for any blood alcohol poisoning that may result.
Refers to Tim Cook as:
Timmy
Tim Crook
Tim Cooked
Tim Coked
Tim Apple
Tim Hollywood
A bean counter
Fire Tim Cook
iSheep
iToy
Crapple
Emojis
Animojis
Memojis
Watch bands
iWatch
Touch bar/Emoji bar
Butterfly keyboard
Headphone jack
Form over function
Too thin
Bending
“You’re holding it/using it/[something] it wrong”
“Courage”
“Can’t innovate, my ass”
Apple is now just a fashion brand
Overpriced
Steve Jobs
Where is the new Mac Pro? (Update: Released December 2019!–See next item)
I have a decent beginner’s guide to meditation and the only reason I haven’t read through it is because the book strongly encourages you to read and then immediately do each exercise on consecutive days (for maximum effect), and I wanted to wait until I had a block of time where I could commit to doing that without the possibility of interruption.
Which naturally turned into an excuse to keep putting it off because I never have time when secretly I do and I am either lazy, afraid or some combination of both. Lazfraid. Afraizy.
So tomorrow I start with the first exercise. I successfully trained myself to be a long distance runner after not running for 20+ years. Hopefully I can manage sitting still and not thinking.
This is the date that The Weather Network is promising Vancouver will reach double digits for the daily high for the first time in 100 years. The temperature is alleged to reach 10ºC. I will lay out my shorts and t-shirt that morning in anticipation. They are also forecasting showers, so I will also include an umbrella next to my shorts and t-shirt.
With spring approaching this month and the promise of un-cold weather in the near future, let’s review Winter 2018/19:
December: This month was a bit of a throwback to winters of yore, which is to say it was relatively mild and not-so-relatively wet. It rained a lot and I spent many-a-minute eyeing the traffic roaring at highway speed along Brunette Avenue, hoping to avoid being sprayed by a giant wave kicked up by an 18 wheeler. I was mostly successful. No snow. Yay.
January: Mild with some cold days and pretty dry. This is similar to a lot of the winter weather we’ve had in recent years. I like it. Only a few traces of snow. Yay.
February. The entire month was pretty much 3-6 degrees below seasonal temperatures. And it snowed. Not once, not twice, but more than that. Some snow was wet and gone the same day, but the last snowfall has become semi-permanent as daytime temperatures have been too low to melt it much and nighttime lows have been consistently below freezing. We had an actual snow day at work. I am kind of over the cold and snow now, so no yay.
Early March has been more of the same, with cold temperatures, though it seemingly got up to 9ºC today. While it has been getting slightly warmer, this has been offset by sharp winds that end up making it feel even colder than when it’s cold. No yay.
If I was actually running outside right now…well, I wouldn’t be, because there is too much compact snow on the trails, as was the case two years ago during The Great Snow of 2017. At current rates of melting, the trails might be comfortably run-worthy in two or three weeks–assuming we don’t get more snow or another polar vortex or a frost giant heavy-breathing over the region for a week.
The final question is: Why are people so fascinated by the weather? I can only assume it’s because there’s no way to avoid it. And getting soaked by an 18 wheeler hellbent on hydroplaning is an experience you are not likely to forget.
This is a fast-moving and witty romp that starts with a cancer-riddled old man completing the proverbial deal with the devil shortly after being brought into Northcote Hospital. He summons Terrible Things, gets his just reward (not so good), then leaves the hospital staff to deal with the cosmic horrors he’s invited to our dimension.
Complete with a literal shout out to Lovecraft, Dead Shift is full of gruesomely gory scenes and characters both smart and sarcastic. They take the whole “world transforming into some unspeakable place” thing well, considering.
The story zips by quickly and though the climax is predictable, the journey getting to it is entertaining as the three central characters–a doctor, a pathologist and a staff nurse–team together to undo what the old man has done, showing resolve, ingenuity and that ineffably dry British wit along the way.
The only reason I rate the novel three starts instead of four (come on, Goodreads, add half stars already) is I felt there was an unnecessary tonal shift in the final scene. It is rather humorlessly grim, unlike all that came before it, and feels designed more to show off a shock/twist ending. As such, it left me disappointed, because the twist is trite and doesn’t earn the abrupt shift in tone.
Everything before is a spiffy take on the ever-growing library of Lovecraftian fiction. If you like yours with a dash of sarcasm and a handful of sensible characters that don’t behave stupidly to advance the plot, Dead Shift is recommended.
Apparently Vancouver set a record for low temperatures in February and I can vouch that it was pretty chilly for this particular patch of the planet. What better way to celebrate (?) than a bunch of questionable cold weather writing prompts.
It’s said there are 500 ways to say “snow.” Come up with another 500.
Write an action adventure about a snowman caught in a hothouse. Throw in some vampires, too.
Imagine you were caught up in the mountains during a raging blizzard. That would really suck. You’d probably die or lose all your hands and feet or something. So write a romantic comedy featuring anthropomorphized raccoons instead.
List 10 things to do with snow and hard liquor
Write a story where one night a magical frost gnome appears and grants you anything you want, as long as it rhymes with frost
The first time Betty went ice skating she fell and fell and fell. She just couldn’t skate. Everyone laughed! But Betty wouldn’t let others get her down. She practised and practised and got better and better. Then she got got run over by a Zamboni on the night of her Olympics competition. Write the story as a safety brochure on Zamboni driving.
Well, poop. Or fat, to be more precise. If February ended yesterday I would have been down for the month. Alas, it did not and my slight overindulgence yesterday resulted in SWI (Sudden Weight Increase). I was up a little less than a pound for the month, but in my defense, 0.8 pounds is a modest increase. My weight regularly shifts up and down by that amount on a nearly daily basis.
But it still means I was essentially treading water (or retaining it) for the shortened month, and the small increase of body fat was not encouraging.
I am starting to exercise more, something I intend to ramp up starting next week, assuming we are free of blizzards for the last few weeks of winter. And I’m getting better at enforcing my “no snacks after dinner” rule by drinking tea and subsequently running to the bathroom a lot.
I also remain donut-free.
For the year so far I am only up 0.4 pounds and there’s an excellent chance that could be wiped out when I step on the scale tomorrow. So while things are not moving as quickly as they could be, I still feel I am headed in the same less-fat direction.
As always, the stats:
February 1: 167.1 pounds February 28: 167.9 pounds (up 0.8 pounds)
Year to date: From 167.5 to 167.9 pounds (up 0.4 pounds)
And the body fat:
February 1: 19.6% (32.8 pounds of fat) February 28: 19.7% (33.1 pounds of fat) (up 0.3 pounds)
Since I started writing with Ulysses again, I’ve been forced to reacquaint myself with my 2016 MacBook Pro sans Touch Bar. This is the one that an Apple executive (maybe Phil Schiller?) claimed would make a nice alternative to the MacBook Air when it debured, neatly ignoring that it cost $700 Canadian more than the Air (ironically, the updated 2018 MacBook Air, combined with a 128GB version of the MBP, has resulted in the price difference now being only $230).
There were no great revelations in going back to the MBP. I still liked the things I liked before, and still disliked the rest. So let’s recap:
The Great:
The haptic trackpad is still the best I’ve ever used. It’s a tad bigger than it needs to be, but that isn’t a real issue, and being able to click anywhere on it is great. And the clicks are smooth, not, uh, clicky.
The display is terrific. High resolution, bright, and without using the “skinny” 16:9 ratio. It’s not as tall as a 3:2 display, but it gives more headroom than 16:9, something I find important in a laptop.
The Good:
Speedy SSD.
Versatile Thunderbolt 3 ports.
macOS is still pretty solid.
Backlighting is spiffy.
Save about $670 over the next tier of MacBook Pro, and get bonus real function keys in the process.
The Meh:
Only two Thunderbolt ports. One for charging, the other for…everything else. And both on the same side.
Actual performance varies. It’s never bad, but sometimes it doesn’t feel as tight as what you’d expect for a “pro” machine.
Headphone jack (ya) is on thee right side, which, given the design of nearly every wired set of headphones in existence, makes no sense.
macOS is still pretty solid, but the Finder still kind of sucks.
Styling is getting dated.
All-aluminum design is slippery as all get-out. Every time I pull it out of my knapsack it feels like it’s going to squip out of my hand. And it doesn’t even feel that nice. It’s metal and cold. Meh!
Even though it only weighs about three pounds, it somehow feels heavier.
Battery life is only average vs. other Ultrabooks.
Display bezels are pretty big in 2019.
The Bad:
You can’t upgrade anything post-purchase.
Any repairs are difficult and costly.
The keyboard still sucks.
I can tolerate the keyboard, but I still don’t really like it. It’s just too shallow and clicky, like a scissor switch keyboard imitating a mechanical keyboard. It just doesn’t feel right. And I have less than two years before a potential repair bill of $600+ awaits, should even a single key fail. Given Apple’s flailing in trying to make the keyboard more reliable, I’m very interested in seeing what the next MacBook Pros look like. I doubt they’ll retreat to what they had before, but I think there’s a decent chance they will do something different, instead of continuing to tinker with the current design. Hopefully they won’t present something even worse still, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
Overall, this is a laptop that doesn’t stand up to the best Windows laptops anymore. The only thing that really separates it from the competition is the trackpad, but the deficiencies like the keyboard, battery life and repairability, lag behind many other notebooks. Still, it’s a competent machine and I can muddle along with it for writing. Every other Mac laptop now comes with the same butterfly switch keyboard (even if current models feature a newer, quieter version of it), so it’s not like switching to another model of MacBook will make much difference.
On a scale of 1 to 10 Think Differents, the 2016 MacBook Pro without Touch Bar rates 6 Think Differents.
