2020-02-27
I’m a sucker for kitchen hacks.
Untethered
As I’ve written previously, these days, I work from my phone and iPad more than ever. But, at heart, I’m still ‘mobile second.’ For long or demanding tasks, I’m orders of magnitude faster and more comfortable using a PC.
So, last week, I was dismayed to find the space bar of my trusty MacBook Air acting up, ignoring every few clicks, occasionally double-spacing after a single press. By this weekend, things had worsened, and nearly none of my space-barring yielded single spaces, alternating entirely between nothing and doubles.
Monday, I headed to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue for a Genius Bar appointment. Where, despite this being a known issue with Apple’s newer butterfly key switches, they didn’t have any replacement keyboards in stock.
Hopefully, the part will be in today or tomorrow, and I’ll have a repaired computer back by the end of the week. But, in the meantime, I’m doing my best to slog along with just my mobile devices, using two side-by-side for ghetto-fabulous multi-tasking, coding in patently unsuitable editor environments.
And all I can say is: Joni was right. You don’t know what you got till it’s gone, indeed.
2020-02-26
2020-02-25
Always useful, but especially prudential now: research on where people miss when they wash their hands.
2020-02-20
I feel seen by pretty much all the installments of Catana Comics.
First Law
I was in the gym with clients from early this morning, but came back at lunchtime to work the balance of the day at home. Or, at least, that was the plan. Instead, I seem to be an object at rest, unable to overcome the inertia of our couch.
I’m trying; I really am. Even this blog post is an attempt to kick-start things, to get rolling by knocking out some quick, easy to-do list wins.
And, perhaps, that will work, and I can pick up momentum as I go. From past experience I’ve learned that sometimes days like this, despite their slow starts, turn out on balance to be highly productive in the end.
But other times, I just stay stuck, don’t really accomplish much at all. And though, earlier in life, those sort of no-progress, do-nothing days stressed me out, I now increasingly think: sometimes that’s just the kind of day it is. And that’s okay, too.
2020-02-19
How Google got its employees to eat their vegetables.
Ambient Flora
Me: This music is nice! Who is it?
Jess: I’m not sure. It’s a playlist for plants.
Me:
Jess: Well, it’s been cloudy for days, and I was worried our window plants were feeling sad.
2020-02-18
Sticking it to copyright law by recording (and releasing in public domain) all the melodies.
Story Time
As I recently wrote, I’m not a big poster on social media. Outside of Twitter, I don’t even look at most social networks with any regularity. But Jess is a big Instagram reader (watcher / looker?), and my colleagues, who are mostly about half my age, seem to mediate their entire lives through the app. So, out of a vague sense of FOMO, or possibly a fear that I’ve become even more of an old, cantankerous Luddite than I’d realized, I recently decided to give Insta-life a whirl.
This weekend, I posted to my ‘story’ for the first time: a captioned photo of the Valentine’s Day tableau Jess left for me on our bed – a pile of cards, surrounded by a giant heart made from a dozen bags of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups (a guilty pleasure I usually finish off before I’ve carried the rest of our groceries home).
In the days since, whether cooking pasta at home, visiting the MoMA with Jess and my parents, eating dinner with them all at The Loyal, or working at the gym this morning, I’ve snapped a dozen or so further photos, with the intention – if not yet the follow-through – of similarly story-posting. Even if, at this point, I’m still not entirely clear about what kind of stuff goes in stories versus regular posts.
Similarly, though I’ve added a bunch of new accounts to my stream, I’m also unsure what kind of picture and video content I actually care enough about to make me reflexively pop open the app. Especially as compared to Twitter, where I already satisfy my voyeuristic political / journalistic hobbyism while also nerding out on fitness science and relishing really terrible dad jokes.
Plus, I still feel incredibly self-conscious (and, really, self-appearance-judgy) about the idea of selfies and first-person videos and recorded workouts. At a deeper level, I’m not even sure what kind of stuff I think I should be posting in the first place. Is it random bullshit à la this site? Personal branding content in the fitness or fitness-tech space? A revival of my long-dormant street and landscape photographing interest?
So, in short, lots still to learn and puzzle through. But, in the meantime, I’m going to do my best to muddle ahead. Feel free to follow along. Even if, I suspect, it won’t be pretty.