The most important parts of a laptop, from my perspective:
Keyboard. I use laptops primarily for writing, so the keyboard is paramount
Display. This is #2 because I am going to be looking at the screen intently, riveted by my deathless prose, and I need a sharp, high-resolution display. It doesn’t need to be 4K and probably shouldn’t be, given how it affects battery life. Speaking of…
Battery. I need enough battery to allow me to use the laptop multiple times throughout the day without needing to plug it in. The ideal is 10 hours, as this provides plenty of breathing room based on my typical usage.
Trackpad. A mediocre trackpad can make editing infuriating. I shouldn’t need to add a mouse to make the laptop feel usable. On the other hand, I can use a mouse if I really need to.
Light and compact. I don’t want something that I feel I’m lugging around. At the same time I don’t mind a bit of extra heft if it means not sacrificing anything else on this list.
SSD. This is pretty standard these days. It insures that loading programs and saving files happens fast, to minimize disruption.
CPU. A Core i5 of some sort is usually good enough. Faster is always better but here it’s more nice than essential.
Ports. I don’t really plug a lot of things in, so a wide port selection isn’t necessary. At least a couple of USB-C ports is nice, though lacking those I’d want at least a USB Type A and maybe something to connect to an external monitor, like mini-DP or HDMI.
Everything else would come after this. For a Windows laptop a touch screen is nice to have but not essential, as is the 2-in-1 form factor. I don’t really watch any media on a laptop so have little need for a tent mode. Being able to draw in a tablet mode can be handy at times, but again is merely nice to have.
There is no positive way to spin these (fat) figures, but I will offer a few caveats:
I was sick for the last week of the month and did no exercise, ate about the same and was generally slothful during this time
um, that’s about it. I was going to say I had fewer days this month to lose weight, but I also had fewer days to gain weight, but I managed the latter handily
On the bright side, I did manage to remain donut-free and reduced my general snack intake. I obviously did not eliminate it, as the numbers below attest. I did slow the rate of weight gain, which will be a nice precursor to actual weight loss…this month. Yes, this month. March is Weight Loss Month. Slim is in. Svelte is the new black.
February 1: 164.9 pounds February 28: 167.5 pounds (+2.2 pounds for the month)
Year to date: From 162.3 to 167.5 pounds (up 5.2 pounds)
And the body fat:
January 1: 18.5% (30.2 pounds of fat)
February 28: 19% (32 pounds of fat–up 1.8 pounds)
This one bugs me because it just seems so random and out of the blue. Friday I was fine, Friday night I was sick.
This same sequence happened where I felt fine all day Friday and in the evening my throat had that telltale scratchiness. Unlike then, this one doesn’t seem random at all because I have been surrounded by other sick people lately, including several at work. I powered through a two-day workshop on Monday and Tuesday as it was too late to reschedule, but to my dismay actually felt worse instead of better on Tuesday. Today, upon waking early in the morning I could feel the cold nestled deep in my chest like the chest burster from Alien and opted to stay home. I like to think this is me being generous and saving fellow co-workers, among others, from experiencing the same mild agony of sneezing, running nose, sore throat and so on, but it’s really me just wanting to curl up and nap and imagine how wonderful it is to feel healthy and how can I possibly take it for granted again after being so sick? Which I will inevitably do, because that’s just the way our brains work.
My hope is that I will feel peppy enough to return to work tomorrow. My fear is that I will rank a smidgen too low on the peppy scale and be faced with choosing between a) feeling like poop but going in anyway and risk spreading my illness around or b) staying home, feeling guilty about how I feel like poop but knowing I could probably shuffle, zombie-like, through the work day somehow, especially if I loaded up on handy cold remedies first.
Today, though, the level of guilt I felt in staying home was a big fat zero. I also had very strange dreams in the morning when I’d normally be up that included:
some strange medieval setting that was a quasi-musical with a knight lamenting in song about always having to fight
another person lamenting about something where he repeated the same word three times but I can’t recall the word now, dang it
the scenery was this weird pastoral plain that felt like it was at the top of a mountain, with giant redwood-like trees that didn’t render properly until you got right next to them. Yes, it was like being in a video game with poor drawing distance.
I think there may have been fighting, but it was bloodless from what I can remember
there were other dreams that were sufficiently weird that I can only remember them being sufficiently weird
All that and I did not take NyQuil first, as I’d run out a day earlier. I’m getting more tonight and look forward to what my subconscious will present to me.
And I hope I feel at least better tomorrow. Seeing the activity rings on my watch go unfilled makes me sad.
I just completed a two-day Coaching and Mentoring workshop, which I don’t recommend doing with a bad cold. If I could have made the cold optional I would have opted out.
But between the congestion, aches, and general tiredness, I got to see the results of my Life Skills Indicator (LSI), which was the compiled results of a 240 question survey that I and four co-workers had to fill out (those poor co-workers). All of the questions were about me.
On the plus side I found out I’m not a megalomaniac bent on taking over the world (or the office). On the negative, I’m allegedly too passive, conventional and satisfied with the status quo. All of which are kind of odd (I’ll cop a bit to passive, because if no one is rustling my jimmies, I tend to be content).
I will have more on this once this head cold has vacated my head and other parts of my body. For now it’s a little too aggressive (unlike me) to allow me to concentrate on expanding on the LSI results. But there is entertainment to be had here, so stay tuned, as they say.
In which I once again dive into the weird yet strangely fascinating world of Whitley Strieber.
Strieber was originally known as a horror author known for books like The Hunger and The Wolfen. He branched out with a pair of novels in the mid-80s that posed “What if?” scenarios regarding a limited nuclear war and the destruction of the environment. Both are still compelling reads today, and Warday especially presents a chillingly authentic take on how devastating a “small” nuclear exchange would be.
Then came 1985’s Communion, in which Strieber relates experiences with what he calls “visitors” (not aliens) to his cabin in upstate New York, the now infamous grays. Unlike the pseudo-documentary style of Warday and Nature’s End, Communion is presented as fact, events that actually happened to Strieber, his family and others around him.
Some people dismiss this as a con, but it strikes me as too detailed and comprehensive to be the book equivalent of a snake oil salesman. I’ve seen people recount experiences with aliens and there is a strong sense of delusion in the way they present their stories, with obvious gaps and little evidence to suggest anything happened other than in the alleged victims’ minds. And one could claim the same here, that Strieber is similarly deluded, that he is simply not well. But if you’ve read the narrative he’s formed over the last 30 years it is impossible to dismiss everything without assuming a level of paranoia about all the others going in with him on the scam.
All of this is a long way of saying Strieber reports a lot of weird shit happening to him, and who am I to tell him it didn’t? I think what we know of the world and the universe is a tiny slice of a very thick wedge, and as advanced as we think we are with our internet-connected refrigerators and smart cars that almost never crash, the stuff we don’t know towers over what we do.
And that is a slightly-less longer way of saying I’m willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt when it comes to weird shit, especially if they can present their case with humility, at least some circumstantial evidence, and make it interesting, too.
The Afterlife Revolution posits one thing: that when we die, the physical body ends, but the soul–or whatever you want to call it–persists, leaving the body and returning to a non-physical realm where it exists both as a separate thing and also as part of a giant consciousness that encompasses the entire universe. Anne Strieber describes it as “universal love” during her many chats with her husband Whitley.
Anne Strieber died in August of 2015.
Since then Whitley Strieber claims he has been contacted by her and the book is in large part a dialogue between himself and his late wife, as she tries to answer his questions about what lies beyond the end of life. Mixed in with this is a somewhat urgent need to create a “bridge” to better facilitate communication between the living and the not-so-living because the world is on the brink of catastrophic change. For those who have read Strieber’s other books, this will be familiar, as he has long been warning of cataclysmic climate change and the immense toll it will take on humanity–usually estimating billions dead and humanity possibly extinguished altogether.
By bridging the gap between the living and the dead, it is suggested we would be able to at least mitigate the worst of the effects and humanity would survive, albeit probably not with internet-connected refrigerators. At least not for awhile. There is talk of how hard it is for the dead to appear before the living due to being so much lighter and faster and existing in a different space, which accounts for why they prefer making loud noises and being spooky. Apparently taking any sort of “physical” form is very demanding. Anne also talks about how some of the post-living are denser that others and that their souls sink instead of rising (to where is never really specified, though it’s suggested that “bad” people get reincarnated and keep getting sent back until they straighten out).
Strieber provides the circumstantial evidence, some of it in the form of coincidences (asking for a sign of Anne’s presence, then seeing something shortly after that seems “planted” by her, mixed in with a few out of body experiences, strange sightings and yes, loud noises. He freely admits there is no way to prove any of it, but the scenarios involving other people suggest that if this were a fraud, it’s one in which he has conscripted quite a few others.
In the end I was–being the logical, rational, but open-minded guy I like to think I am–intrigued by the ideas presented. There is a strong spiritual element throughout the book, but it’s not tied to a specific religion, it’s offered up more as an explanation of why these religions came into being, along with stories that persist across cultures, like a great flood. I admit I like the idea that there may be something beyond the physical, if only because a non-physical version of me would probably have nicer teeth. Or wouldn’t need them. I begin thinking in practical terms before long–how would an eternal non-physical entity keep itself entertained or interested? What would it do? How would it have fun? But that’s just me sitting here with a head cold not being able to fully comprehend questions of the universe.
I still like the idea, though. And if nothing else, The Afterlife Revolution is a sweet, and touching encapsulation of the life of a loving couple.
If you are absolutely sure that once we are dead, that’s it, this book will not convince you otherwise. You may even shout out, “Bah!” and toss it aside. But if you’re willing to at least entertain the notion that there is some other realm we lowly humans can inhabit after we expire, The Afterlife Revolution presents some interesting ideas on what it might be like, and frames it as a kind of thriller in which the dead and the living better learn how to talk to each other–and soon.
Friday during lunch the college closed early due to snow and everyone got to start the weekend early. I was home by 2:30 p/m/ and safely tucked inside from all the snow. Yay.
Friday evening I felt that telltale tickle in my throat that said “Yep, you’re getting sick–probably that thing that knocked out a co-worker for a few days.”
Late Friday the tickle becomes more of a barb and I seek solace in a bottle of NyQuil. It mostly works.
I think about going to the Canada Games Pool on Saturday. It’s not that bad, I think. I can do it. I go to the store and earn about half my exercise goal (30 minutes) on the watch Activity app. That wasn’t so bad, I think, though the urge to nab has arisen suddenly.
I have a nice bubble bath. I nap. I do not go to the pool.
Today I wake up and the barb is gone or at least sufficiently buried to no longer feel like a bar. My sinuses are stuffed but it’s hard to tell if it’s from my ongoing sinus issues or due to this cold or whatever it is. I again muse over going for a workout. As a bonus, most of the snow has already melted away and the sun is out.
I have another bubble bath. I nap once more.
I do not work out. I give up on meeting my activity goals. Whatever streak I have is ended and I hear a little imaginary sad trombone play.
And now just past 7 p.m. I fight the urge to go to bed early, my strength ebbing away as I type. It’s too early, I think. I need to write. Or read. Or explore my vast Steam backlog. I can’t go to bed, not just because of a little cold.
The not so sneaky snow returned today, starting to fall just after 9 a.m. By 11 it was looking like this outside the college library:
At 12:45 p.m. an announcement was made that the college was closed and GO HOME.
Which I did.
The SkyTrain was unsurprisingly crowded and despite being a bit slower than usual, I got downtown without issue. The Expo Line was unaffected by the snow and most places were still open, so I didn’t face any big pre-rush hour crowds. It was nice getting home hours before daylight ended.
The snow continued on and off (but mostly on) for the rest of the day and most of the night. This morning it is a veritable winter wonderland out there, though most sidewalks have been thoughtfully shoveled. The ones around the condo have not been shoveled and I have no doubt the Facebook page for Copperstone condo owners is rife with strife over the snowy sidewalks. I wore my boots.
The forecast for the week ahead promises low temperatures just below freezing, which will make the snow crisp ‘n icy, but daytime highs will be above–it’s 4ºC as I type this–so the big snow will still steadily melt until an early spring magically starts.
There’s probably several hundred million reviews out there for Apple’s true wireless earbuds known as AirPods, so I’m not going to go on at length about them. But here are a few thoughts after having them for several months.
Setup on my iPhone 6 was effortless. Bluetooth devices often have trouble pairing and Apple aimed to fix this with a custom W1 chip that makes pairing with an Apple device painless. And it works.
I got my AirPods after a critical software update that expanded the actions you could take by tapping the pods, as well as allowing separate actions for left and right. For me I chose Pause and Next Track for left/right as they are the most common options I use, other than volume control (which is not an option). I skipped the “Hey Siri” integration because if I want to talk to Siri, I’ve always got my watch with me. While having controls on the AirPods themselves is nice, the reality leaves something to be desired. More on this later.
The fit is nearly identical to the existing EarPods and really, apart from the long “stem” these could easily be mistaken for the same. It’s a bit disappointing that Apple didn’t try to push forward more on the design. Luckily, the EarPods fit well in my ears, so the AirPods stay in securely, too.
This is important because one of my regular uses of the AirPods is when jogging. Because they aren’t sealed, they allow other sounds to be heard (traffic, marauding bears, my wretched gasping breath, etc.) In the times I’ve used them on runs I’ve never felt them budge and the freedom of going true wireless is great. I’ve also done workouts on elliptical trainers and treadmills with the music on my watch playing through the AirPods, no phone needed, and again it’s great to have music for workouts without any wires.
The sound quality is not great but it’s perfectly decent. I have lousy ears but to these lousy ears the sound quality seems a little better than the EarPods. They won’t replace a pair of good quality headphones but for their size they do a good job of pumping out music without noticeable distortion, even if the overall presentation is slightly flat.
The battery life is perfectly fine for my usage. Apple promises five hours and I generally don’t use the AirPods for more than an hour at a time before they go back into their handy and compact charging case. The case is small enough to easily carry in a pocket and does a good job of boosting the battery life by proxy. It’s rare that I put the AirPods on with them charged below 100%. Being able to see the charge by flipping open the case near my iPhone is nice, too (it pops up an animated card similar to the one you see when pairing the AirPods).
I’ve worn them a few times when the weather has been a bit misty and while others report no issue wearing them in the rain, I’m hesitant to do so, simply because they cost $200+ rather than the $35 of the EarPods. I’ll probably get braver as they get older because going wireless is so much better when running.
On the downside, the controls are fussy. You double-tap to invoke an action and I find, especially when jogging, that the AirPods happily ignore the taps. I can be rapping on them like an insane woodpecker and they do nothing in response. I discovered you can tap the back of your ears to activate the controls, but sadly, this is also somewhat inconsistent. The inconsistency means that if I want to skip a track I usually just hold up my watch and tell Siri to skip to the next song. The lack of volume control is also a major omission. While I can use the watch for this, it’s not as easy to do while running as an actual physical control on the earbuds would be.
They have dropped connection a couple of times, but only briefly. Otherwise the connectivity has been very solid, something I really never expect with a Bluetooth device. It’s been a pleasant surprise here.
Recent rumors suggest Apple is developing new AirPods that can work with hands-free Siri (no interest) or offer actual water resistance (very interested). The latter is rumored for 2019, though, to which I say boo.
Overall, I’m surprised at how much I like the AirPods. I have come to terms with the weird look of them, which is mitigated partly by their increasing proliferation, but wouldn’t object to a tweak to the stems to make them shorter or…something.
On a scale of 1 to 10 Steve Jobs Cooing Over the iPhone 4 On Stage, I rate the AirPods 8 Steve Jobs Cooing. There is room for improvement here but they are a very solid version 1.0 product.
+ Things I Like:
– good fit (for my ears, anyway)
– comfortable (for the lengths of time I wear them)
– perfectly decent sound quality
– quick, painless Bluetooth pairing
– almost never lose connectivity
– very good battery life for true wireless earbuds
– charging case is compact and insures the AirPods always have some charge in them (assuming you periodically top up the charging case itself)
– automatically stops playing music when you remove one from your ear
– Things I Don’t Like:
– controls are flaky and unreliable
– no volume control
– you can get them in white, white or white
– they still look kind of funny
– no water resistance limits their use for outdoor activities (unless you’re willing to risk it)
– reasonably priced for the product category but expensive in Canadian dollars (currently $219)
Right now at 1 p.m. it is snowing. Did I bring this on by talking about “sneaky snow” falling overnight in my previous post?
I’m going to think positive and say yes. Yes, I have mastered unknown powers of the universe.
As it turns out, the lottery ticket I bought for tonight also contains all of the winning numbers. I’ll update this post later as a multi-millionaire to confirm.
UPDATE: Somehow I am not super rich today. An oversight, obviously. I’ll keep working until it’s addressed.
It also stopped snowing and is sunny today. Hooray for sun.
UPDATE #2: The jackpot for the 6/49 draw is now up to $9 million. Nine is my favorite number (well, it was when I was a kid and it seemed important to have a favorite everything), so this obviously means I am meant to win tonight. As always, I promise to use the money wisely and carefully and not on 10,000 Klondike bars.
Saturday it snowed overnight, just as it had earlier in the week. I call this sneaky snow, coming in quietly after you’ve gone to bed, waiting to surprise and possibly delight you the next morning. Except the sun and warming temperatures usually make short work of this ninja-like snow. the next day (it’s just above freezing now, so the sun is slowly doing its thing)
I’m okay with this.
Also, in the interest of not being all complaint-like I’m going to rename the damn snow tag to that darned snow, which makes it sound kind of cute. I’m not opining on whether I think this is accurate because that could possibly violate the no-complaint thing.
Technology always marches forward, except for things like the Dark Ages and I guess World War III. But generally, it marches forward. The pace of change can sometimes be startling, while in other cases it feels like it’s taking a lot longer to progress for unspecified reasons (example: car technology has improved but not substantially changed at a mass production level in over a hundred years. The majority of vehicles are still fueled by gasoline that powers an internal combustion engine. Sure, whizzy electric cars and hybrids have gained, but they’ve yet to take over on a mass scale).
I was born in 1964, the same year a bunch of stuff happened. The Beatles were pretty popular. The American space program was in full swing and only five years away from a moon landing. And cars ran on gasoline that powered internal combustion engines.
But what technology over the past 50+ years has become obsolete or so little-used that it’s effectively obsolete? Most of it is stuff I grew up with. Do I yearn for any of this bygone technology? Let’s have a look at The Obsolete List and find out!
Rotary dial telephones. People often still refer to “dialing a number” but no one actually does it anymore. I remember back in Duncan you only had to dial the last five numbers instead of all seven and at the time it made dialing bearable, though you still hoped people had numbers like 222-1111. By the time the proliferation of phone numbers required you to enter all seven digits, plus the area code, we had moved on to push button phones and it was inconvenient but not the utter madness that it would have been on a rotary phone. Do I miss these devices? No. There is no nostalgia value in having to wait for a rotary dial to finish turning before you can enter the next number.
8-track tapes. I’ve discussed these before and the short answer is no: digital music does everything an 8-track tape did, without all the weirdness of putting songs out of order, duplicating tracks, splitting them in two and not to mention the inevitable tape-eating that happened. These had one minor convenience over cassette tape, in that you didn’t have to flip the tape over (if you were one of those poor sods that didn’t have a tape deck that could play both sides automatically). Speaking of…
Side A and Side B. Okay, this isn’t technology, strictly speaking, it’s more about how albums were always split into two halves before the Compact Disc (see below) took over. While this allowed some bands to experiment by doing different things on each side, I think the benefit of having a single cohesive whole makes for better albums overall.
Cassette tapes. These are still around, so like vinyl, technically not dead, but it’s very much a niche product. While more compact than vinyl, durability was always iffy, with tapes unceremoniously unspooling and getting eaten in the tape deck. You also ended up with the degraded tape exhibiting a lot of pops, cracks and other un-musical sounds. May casette tapes rest in pieces, I say.
Floppy disks. No one in their right mind would miss these. Everything now is better. I still have a box of them dating back to the mid 90s. I wonder if they would be readable today? (I checked and you can get a USB floppy disk drive for $30. I’m not sure it’s worth $30 to find out.)
Compact Disc (CD). Officially introduced to the world in 1983, they became the dominant music format by the end of the decade. Now, with digital music and especially with the rise of streaming music, the CD is not dead but is on life support. It had a few advantages over vinyl: better audio quality (provided the recording was managed properly–vinyl aficionados will always argue that records offer a “warmer” sound than CD), a more, ahem, compact format, the ability to hold more music (about 75 minutes, where vinyl was pushing it at 48-50 minutes) and because the disc was read by a laser, you no longer had to worry about a needle scratching across your record when you bumped the player. Instead you had to worry about the laser blinding you. Do I miss CDs? Really, no. They were better than vinyl and tape, but ultimately they now look like more of a stopgap on the way to digital music. And they could still get scratched and have playback suffer. Plus the album art was hard to make out.
Compact Disc-Recordable (CD-R). These were discs you could record to (multiple times in the case of CD-RW) and they allowed for early mass backup/storage. But they were slow, prone to errors and clunky to use. DVD-Rs were not much better, just higher capacity. I do not miss these. As with floppy disks, everything now is better.
Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) TVs and monitors. You know, the big, boxy things that you could warm your cat on and weighed between 50 and 1000 pounds. While the cats probably miss them–LCD monitors and TVs offer little room to accommodate sleeping felines–the only aspect I miss about CRT monitors is how blacks were much..blacker. This is offset today by OLED technology, but OLED hasn’t really percolated into widespread use, apart from some TVs, smartphones and laptops, because it’s still really expensive. I don’t miss the weight, energy cost, blurry text or industrial beige styling of most CRT monitors, though.
Digital watches. OK, these aren’t obsolete, but with watches now being more fashion statements than actual timepieces, who would still wear one? Anything a digital watch can do can be done better on a smartphone, or even a smartwatch. Still, I kind of miss that Casio I had back around 1978 or so. It could play 12 songs for no real reason and it was cool to set alarms. It felt like being in the future. As digital watches go, it wasn’t hideously ugly, either. At least that’s the way I remember it.
Mimeograph machines. I remember these from elementary school, circa 1971-1977. They produced weird purple text and the ink smelled strange and alien. Smudges abounded. It felt like 1850s technology that somehow lasted into the 1970s. I don’t miss them. I suspect teachers may have paid for the privilege of smashing these machines when photocopies and printers replaced them. Speaking of…
Dot matrix printers. These are still used in some places where multi-part forms are needed and the people there haven’t figured out how to load a tray with three different kinds of paper at once. They were noisy, slow, pretty bad at graphics, did I mention noisy, required ribbons you had to wind and worst of all, they would go haywire as soon as you turned your back to them. It was like they knew and waited to misfeed the paper. Again, I don’t miss these. Ink jet printers are better in all ways, save for ink drying out if not used for long periods of time, but that’s easily solved by getting a laser printer instead. Or just go paperless, like we were supposed to 40 years ago.
Microfiche. This was very cool in the early 80s. It’s been superseded by, well, computers, and the ability to digitize content. Back in the olden days you had to load a negative from, say, a newspaper, into a microfiche reader, then zoom in and pan around like you were using a microscope, except instead of bacteria, you were examining old news stories. I actually do kind of miss this. Looking back on the times I used them, it felt like I was doing real research and making real discoveries instead of just typing something into Google’s search box and getting 10 million results. The latter is still better, mind you.
