I did not “Let Loose”

From the Apple Canada website. Missing: Tim Cook saying, “Good mooorning!”

Apple had an “event” today, and I put that in quotes because the event is just another pre-recorded video showing off new hardware. Apple also decided to air it at 7 a.m. Pacific, so I assume they are past getting live views and just want the video out early so tech sites, “influencers” and the like can spend the rest of the day posting stories about what got unveiled. Unless the EC beings down new restrictions on Apple today, then all the various media will pivot to that story, because it’ll be a lot juicier.

I doubt I’ll go back and watch the video now, because what was revealed had all been leaked days, weeks and in some cases, many months earlier. The highlights:

  • iPad Pro but with OLED and M4. Thinner, just the way Apple likes it! Otherwise, it’s an iPad.
  • 13″ iPad Air (new) and 11″ (same) with M2 (new, but -2 from the M4). Gotta differentiate Pro from Not Pro. Otherwise, it’s an iPad.
  • A fourth Apple Pencil, but now it’s Pro1Next year Apple will change its name to Apple Pro Inc.. But it also works with the new Air. But it also only works with the new Air and new Pros, meaning Apple now has four pencils in its line-up that all work with different models and generations of iPad. This Pro one includes a squeeze gesture and “barrel roll” feature. It’s otherwise an Apple Pencil.
  • Apple killed the $329 ninth-generation iPad and brought the price of the 10th generation model down to $349, from $399. This means an overall price increase for the base of $20, which is not bad considering the features of the 10th generation.
  • All front-facing cameras are now on the long side of the iPad. It only took them 14 years to fix this.
  • The base model of the iPad Pro 13″ model, equivalent to the one I got in 2020, now comes with 256GB of storage instead of 128GB. That’s good. It starts at $1800. That’s bad. In fact, it’s ludicrous. Add an Apple Pencil Pro®? It’s now $1968. Fancy a “magic” keyboard, too? $2417. Now, add your taxes and…$2,707.04! Also, note that unless you go for the 1 or 2TB storage options ($830 and $1380 more, respectively), you actually get a binned M4 with fewer cores. Watch the Luke Miani video below for more on this.
  • Fun Fact: That 2020 iPad Pro I bought cost $1169. If you add about $150 to match the 256GB of storage for the new model, it comes to $1319, which is still almost $500 less than the new one. I mean, I understand Apple charging so much more. OLED is a brand-new screen technology Apple just invented, and the company is desperately in need of revenue, as it is down to its last few pennies.
The video is better than the thumbnail.

And that’s about it. Just refinements, some (rather large) price increases, more product confusion, more gating (the Apple Pencil Pro works on the new iPad Air, which has no new hardware, but won’t work on the older M2 iPad Pros, which run the same SoC) and a bunch of iPads. I don’t think these will move sales much, other than the 10th gen now being sensibly priced.

Walk 107: Now with more running

View from Cariboo Dam, at the halfway point of the walk.

Today, I had to decide1Technically, I didn’t have to decide anything. I could have stayed in bed and eaten nacho chips all day. The thought did cross my mind.: Walk or run?

I figured I’d start a walk and once I got to the lake, I’d make the decision there. Easy peasy.

And the walk there was quite pleasant compared to yesterday: A bit warmer, with increasing sun and no rain. None! Yay!

Once I got to the lake, I opted not to run, because it was getting late in the afternoon and I still felt I wasn’t quite ready. But I did do a lot of running on the 4 km back and got a sense for how a longer run might go. I did one solid km of running for the 6th km and my pace was surprising–5:27/km! Much faster than I might have expected.

Curiously, my right knee/leg actually felt better when running. The tendons behind the knee felt a bit tight when walking, but felt fine when stretching for the running bits. My shins suddenly made themselves known, but that’s normal after a layoff from running. Overall, I feel it went well.

My training status also finally ticked over from Recovery to Maintaining. That’s what shaving 42 seconds off your pace will do, I guess.

I’ll walk again tomorrow, then see if I’m finally ready to run on Wednesday. It will have been 26 days since I last run by then (about the same as last year, when I went 25 days between runs with a similar injury), but I think these walks have done a good job of getting me ready.

Blue sky over the Brunette River.

Stats:

Walk 107
Average pace: 7:58/km
Location: Brunette River trail/Burnaby Lake
Distance: 8.03 km
Time: 1:03:55
Weather: Sun and cloud
Temp: 13-14°C
Humidity: 60%
Wind: light
BPM: 132
Weight: 169.6 pounds
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255
Total distance to date: 803.59 km

My watch is stalking me

My Garmin Forerunner 255 on my weirdly skinny wrist

One of the features of my Garmin Forerunner 255 is a daily summary that pops up just after 9 p.m. to tell me what kind of day I’ve had and to pass on a little sage advice on health/sleep/exercise before I bed down for the night. It always starts with a summary, like:

  • Active Day: This seems to be the best. It means I wasn’t a sloth and got some good exercise and generally stayed out of trouble.
  • Easy Day: As expected, this pops up when I don’t meet my step goal and am generally slothful and sitting on my butt. The blurb is never too judgy, but it will suggest I get some “light exercise” or something because it knows I’ve done nothing.
  • Demanding Day: This is likely to pop up when I do a lot of walking (20-30,000+ steps), exercise and have not gotten a good sleep from the night before, which means my body battery will be quite low (I think it bottoms out at 5/100, which has happened a few times). It basically tells me GO TO BED AND SLEEP WELL.
  • Stressful Day: Even if I otherwise have a well-balanced day, with a good mix of activity and exercise, this will still pop up if the watch feels my stress level has been too high. I suspect it is doing a simple correlation between heart rate and activity, so if my heart rate jumps up, but I’m not doing exercise, it’s probably stress. Maybe it’s more nuanced than that. I could probably look this up, but for the moment I’m pretending the rest of the internet doesn’t exist.

Stressful Day is when I most feel the watch is stalking me, because it has been uncannily accurate in this particular assessment. In fact, it’s been so accurate that at the start of a SE1Stressful Event, I will stop and think, “My watch is going to chide me for this later” and start thinking about kittens instead, to reduce the stress/anxiety/existential despair.

So even though my watch is stalking me, it’s helping me be more relaxed, fit and shinier. And that can’t be stressing me out.

May 2, 2024 birb gallery is up!

I both indulged (30 photos!) and culled somewhat ruthlessly, as there were a lot of decent shots that I just skipped because 30 is enough to wrangle. Hopefully I picked the right thirty. I mean, yes, I did. Totally. You can’t prove otherwise!

Walk 106: Here comes the rain again

View from Cariboo Dam, midway through walk

Sunday and I’m walking again! I didn’t exercise-walk yesterday, but I did go for a walk. Today it was exercise-walk again, with some bonus running.

First, the weather. It kinds of sucked. It was cooler than normal, though 12C isn’t that cold, but I wore my long-sleeved shirt anyway. And it rained steadily the entire time. It was one of those, “Just get started and get it over with” kind of exercises, though the bonus lack of wind meant it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I listened to music, I ran on and off repeatedly, without issue.

Well, one issue: Right after I finished the 8K (I was running at the time), I stopped tracking, began walking again, and my right knee felt really creaky. It’s fine now, but the timing and suddenness seemed weird.

Other than that, it went well. I never try to fall into the “must go faster” mindset, but I kind of did, a little, today. I lopped 19 seconds off my previous pace and my BPM went from 118 to 131, reflecting how much time I spent running.

I’m still undecided on running tomorrow, but I will at least do an exercise-walk, regardless.

Hopefully with less rain, mud and generally slippery conditions.

Water falls. On the pond, on the rocks, on me.

Stats:

Walk 106
Average pace: 8:40/km
Location: Brunette River trail/Burnaby Lake
Distance: 8.03 km
Time: 1:09:36
Weather: Rain
Temp: 12°C
Humidity: 91%
Wind: light
BPM: 131
Weight: 169.0 pounds
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255
Total distance to date: 795.56 km

Some random photos from May 4, 2024

And no Star Wars references.

Various pictures taken around the neighbourhood with my iPhone 12.

The best Star Wars games (I played)

For this May 4th1May the Fourth be with you, see? lol etc., I was originally going to do a list ranking the Star Wars games I’ve played, then I realized, despite there being about a million Star Wars games, I’ve only played a few, so ranking them would be kind of silly.

I played Jedi Knight (Dark Forces II) in 1997, and it was awesome. As an early 3D shooter, its graphics are incredibly dated now, but it still retains its best features: an engaging story that moves you across the galaxy, a slow accumulation of nifty force powers, the eventual acquisition of a light saber. And the level design had a sense of scale that few shooters I’ve played since have really captured. Some games (like it’s not-quite 3D predecessor) have gotten remakes, but this one remains unloved, which is a shame.

The sequel, Jedi Outcast, looks better (it uses the Quake engine) and while it’s fine, I feel it falls short of Jedi Knight–though the light saber action is improved. I bought that sequel to that game, Jedi Academy, but strangely never played it.

I also played Star Wars: The Old Republic, creating a bunch of characters, getting them into the 20s, then repeating the process until I’d filled every character slot. I got to see several planets and engage in sufficient pew-pew. It was fine as MMOs go, but I never stuck to it, though I’m not sure if it was the game specifically, or just that I was burning out on all MMOs at that point. I did create maybe the creepiest Jedi ever:

“Of course I’m a good guy. Why do you ask? Heh heh.”

Oh, and I remember playing the Star Wars arcade game that came out in 1983. It had colour vector graphics, which was very spiffy back then, and used sound and voice samples from the movies. That was a good time and a trusty quarter-eater.

I played tiny bits of:

  • Knights of the Old Republic (I dimly recall I did not like the controls)
  • Pod Racer (it was on loop in the store I worked at back in 1999)
  • The Empire Strikes Back (the Parker Brothers game for the Atari 2600, through emulation, since I never had the cartridge)

And this concludes my Star Wars game adventures. May you live long and prosper with the force.

Walk 105: So much walking

Brunette River about 2 km into the walk: So much green!

Today I walked to the lake and back and at first I started slower and my thought process was “This is fine” (non-ironic version) because I walked over 27,000 steps yesterday and my tendons and muscles and things were a little tired.

But I found my pace picking up, so I suppose I wasn’t that tired. I also experimented a few times with some short bursts of jogging (no more than 30 seconds or so at a stretch) and it was…okay. Not painful or anything. Creaky, I suppose. But it has been almost three weeks since I last ran. My BPM hit a max of 152, so I was achieving a regular run pace, though interestingly, my overall BPM stayed exactly the same as Wednesday, at 118. The weather may have helped a bit, too. It was less breezy and warmer in a pleasant sort of way.

Also, there was a meeting on the trail near the dam consisting of adult geese, their two goslings, plus two pairs of wood ducks…and their ducklings. It was like they were all just hanging out together. A bit odd. Maybe a coincidence? Perhaps this is how gooseducks happen.

Anyway, in all it went well. I will continue these walks and possibly try a run on Monday, when the weather promises to be a bit damp and when running would seem better than walking (in the rain).

I count 10 wood ducklings. The two goslings are just out of view. All are adorable.

Stats:

Walk 105
Average pace: 8:59/km
Location: Brunette River trail/Burnaby Lake
Distance: 8.03 km
Time: 1:12:07
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 20°C
Humidity: 38%
Wind: light
BPM: 118
Weight: 169.1 pounds
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255
Total distance to date: 787.53 km

Birding, May 2, 2024: A wren in the works

Where: Reifel Bird Sanctuary, Centennial Beach (Delta), Blackie Spit (Surrey), Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake (Burnaby)
Weather: Sunny, 8-17°C

The Outing

It was forecast to be sunny and mild, so we wore shorts! It was a bit brisk at Reifel in the morning, with a strong breeze blowing off the strait. An older man intoned to us, “It isn’t summer yet” but did not actually call the fashion police on us. I didn’t wear sunblock, so got some more mid-spring burning around my ears and neck. Next time I’ll wear sunblock, I swear.

Apart from being brisk in the morning, it was more like Reifel Bird Scarcity, ho ho. The overall bird population was down due to migrants heading off and the locals being busy in the bushes making babies (or so I assume). We didn’t see any American wigeons, though, oddly, there was a single Eurasian wigeon present. There were no coots at all, though we did see a single coot at Piper Spit. Likewise, there were no scaups, buffleheads or ring-necked ducks to be seen. We saw what appeared to be one snoozing merganser sleeping on a small island next to some geese, though they apparently don’t migrate, they just hide or something.

And speaking of geese, we finally saw goslings and plenty of them. More on them in a bit.

While many bird species were absent at Reifel, the ever-elusive marsh wren was actually seemingly ever-present. We saw and shot at least four of them, with varying degrees of success. A volunteer teased us with an alleged sighting of a pair of cedar waxwings in the area, but we did not see any. Boo. We did, however, see a few shorebirds on the inner ponds, the tiny and adorable least sandpiper, so that was neat.

The geese were taking notes from the blackbirds with regard to their table manners, proudly wearing their food all over their faces.

The wood ducks near the entrance were displaying their iridescent mullets along the railing. I swear they actually pose for people because they know how pretty they are. We did not see any ducklings, though.

After Reifel, we went to Centennial Beach. Here, I doffed my hoodie, opting for sunburn. The pond was largely empty, but we did spot a few Savannah sparrows on logs, and raptors above, the latter both in the sky and in trees. We then forged on to Blackie Spit because of reports of shorebirds. The tide here, as elsewhere, was extremely low. There were no shorebirds, unless you stretch to count seagulls. Which we do not. We did see some green-winged teals and various birbs, including more Savannah sparrows, a distant goldfinch and a train, which is not a bird at all. We also saw a bunny, also not a bird. It was hungry, so we watched it eat various wildflowers and things. Rabbits have an automatic “so damn cute” mode when eating.

We ended at Piper Spit, which, perhaps due to it being after 6 p.m., was quite busy. The number of waterfowl here is also down, through all the regulars were accounted for. The geese were out with their babbies, some of which are already showing their first growth spurt. There were many goslings, most of them huddled together in one mega-group. Amazingly, none of the small children present were unwise enough to try to go after them, so goose drama/murder did not occur. Or at least I didn’t directly witness any.

The Shots

The Birds (and other critters). Rare or rarely-seen birds highlighted in bold.

Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:

  • American goldfinch
  • American robin
  • Anna’s hummingbird
  • Barn swallow
  • Black-capped chickadee
  • Brown-headed cowbird
  • Golden-crowned sparrow
  • Marsh wren
  • Red-winged blackbird
  • Rufous hummingbird
  • Song sparrow
  • Spotted towhee
  • Tree swallow
  • White-crowned sparrow
  • Yellow-rumped warbler

Waterfowl and shorebirds:

  • American coot (one!)
  • Canada goose
  • Cormorant
  • Eurasian wigeon
  • Green-winged teal
  • Great blue heron
  • Least sandpiper
  • Mallard
  • Northern pintail
  • Northern shoveller
  • Sandhill crane
  • Wood duck

Common:

  • American crow
  • European starling
  • Rock pigeon
  • Seagull

Raptors:

  • Bald eagle
  • Northern harrier

Non-birds:

  • Bunnies!
  • Several squirrels
  • A sweat bee

The first ludicrous forecast of 2024 has arrived!

UPDATE, May 12, 2024:

The actual predicted high today is...22°C. I was right. I win! I don't win anything in particular, but I win!

The weather app as of the actual date, May 12th shows this:

—

Original post below:

From the Windows weather app:

The average high on May 12 is 19°C, so this would be a full ten degrees higher–and set a new record. I am predicting the actual temperature on this day to be:

22°C

We’ll find out in nine days!

(I am undecided on whether I’d actually want it to be 29°C. That is pretty dang hot for May, but if it’s not too humid, it really wouldn’t be that bad. Also, not like I have a weather machine to control this stuff, so I’m mainly trying to rationalize something out of my control here.)

Walk 104: Unexpectedly brisk

View of Brunette River from North Road bridge.

The walking speed, not the temperature.

I headed out a bit earlier and conditions were pretty much the same, though I’d say it felt a wee bit warmer. The biggest difference was my pace and BPM. Compared to yesterday, my BPM went from 126 to 118, while my pace dropped from 9:13 to 8:58/km. Yes, I averaged under 9 minutes per km for 9 km. I was not expecting this. But maybe I just felt good getting out, and the weather was pleasant and there were baby geese and all.

My plan is to do an hour-ish walk every day when I’m not running, save for Sunday and birding days (usually Saturday). This should help keep me fit, while having less impact on knees and other sensitive parts of my body. It also lets me pause and take photos, and touch trees. As a side bonus, maybe it will also help me lose some weight if I don’t gorge myself upon arriving back home.

View from Cariboo Dam, midway point of the walk.

Stats:

Walk 104
Average pace: 8:58/km
Location: Brunette River trail/Burnaby Lake
Distance: 9.02 km
Time: 1:20:56
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 14°C
Humidity: 50%
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 118
Weight: 168.6 pounds
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255
Total distance to date: 779.5 km

It’s May! An April 2024 summary

I did not care much for April. Among the lowlights:

  • I gained weight (though not much)
  • I hurt my right knee again (though not as badly as last year)
  • A valve in our dishwasher broke, meaning I had to wash dishes by hand for weeks like a barbarian1Admittedly, I came to enjoy this in a Zen kind of way
  • The replacement valve from Amazon was delivered to a full locker six times before Amazon (without emailing me) just gave up on the delivery, forcing me to “contact Amazon”, which meant cancelling the order, waiting for the refund, then getting the part locally for a few dollars more. But actually getting the part! Amazon is now an official last resort for me.
  • General strata nonsense. Just mentally tiring.
  • The weather was a real mixed bag, which is still better than a month of solid rain. I feel like March was probably better, which is weird.

On the plus side:

  • The climate still hasn’t collapsed
  • No nuclear wars that I know of
  • No new pandemics (yet)
  • I did some drawing!
  • I noodled very slightly on my game

On to May. It better be better, or there will be serious grumbling ahead.