Apple Watch

I didn’t care for the first iPod. If memory serves, my primary beef was that it cost too much for what it did (5GB for $400?). I did buy the second generation model, though, which was still in the same class (10GB for $400), and it did make my time sorting papers at work much more bearable.

The iPhone was obviously a game-changer; I don’t think anyone who saw that launch would disagree. (That said, I’ve never owned an iPhone; the associated cell contract is just too expensive for how little I use a cell phone.)

I was excited for the iPad, and knew that it would sell well… though I had no idea what the heck I would use it for. That’s still mostly true to this day: I use my iPad for reading PDFs of books and comics (tasks where it easily beats the pants off of any other device), but I feel like it’s a product that barely fits into my life.

And this Apple Watch? It does nothing for me. I stopped wearing a watch when I graduated from college—keep in mind that there was no iPhone/iPod touch back then, otherwise I might not have even worn one during college—and this gives me absolutely no reason to start up again. (And this is overlooking the fact that it needs an iPhone to work.)

I’m definitely not very good at predicting marketplace success, and I am admittedly not a typical person, but it’s rather strange to me that the most important technological things in my life are a five-and-a-half-year-old Mac Pro and a two-year-old iPod touch. (Both are getting closer to the end of their useful lives, but neither are there yet.)

Perhaps I’m taking the first (next?) steps down the road to being an old curmudgeon, but it seems like Apple’s gotten worse at answering the question “why?”… and the actual utility of their products, to me, has suffered accordingly.

The Best Juror

So I’m a grand juror.

I am among the most elite of the elite, having both had my number randomly selected for the jury pool and then randomly selected again to join the actual jury. My term is two months, meeting twice a week.

This has been hell on everything. Since jury duty began, I haven’t been working terribly reliably; I’ve failed to standardize my sleep cycle to a morning routine, so two times a week I wake up early and the rest of the time I wake up late (and I perpetually wonder why I’m exhausted); I haven’t seriously looked at my to-do list even once.

On the other hand, the experience has been very educational (sometimes in ways that I wish it were not). There is, however, the threat of perjury if I say too much, so I’ll hold off on general observations until after my term has concluded.

(Unsurprisingly, I am the pedant of the jury.)

CommercialCuts: Some of these are just dumb, but the Subaru, Cheerios, and Vodafone ads had me sniggering. Yes, I am twelve.

This thumbdrive hacks computers: Holy Fuck.

Or, if you prefer more words (quoting ElectricBlue in the article’s comments): This is a terrible security flaw but it’s also kinda awesome from the perspective of a “cyberpunk dystopia is now” point of view.

The American Room: I read this as part of my procrastination routine, and was surprised to be reading about myself. (*exaggeration)

The way of the future

I upgraded my server from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 this weekend. It took forfricking ever, thanks to one little file that got added to my Apache configuration files. I never found anything about it online, either; the only way out was through prolonged cussing.

So (search engines!), if you had a working Ubuntu 12.04 server that you upgraded to 14.04, only to discover that your PHP files are no longer processed by PHP (i.e. your server just spits out the PHP code as the page): check if /etc/apache2/conf-available/php5-cgi.conf exists. If so, try disabling it in the commandline (a2dissite php5-cgi.conf) and restarting Apache.

Otherwise there were a mess of issues, but they were pretty easy to address: find a service that’s broken, check the error log, fix the error, repeat until the service works. It’s pretty much the sysadmin equivalent of Shinji’s “Target in the center; pull the switch. Target in the center; pull the switch.” training in Evangelion.

I know I’m getting old when I am well-aware that the Yosemite public beta is now out, but have absolutely no interest in testing it out. In my younger days I would have been all over this sort of thing. (And I was, once—improbably—when Avery and Josh gave me a copy of Mac OS 8’s beta release.)

What *I* did on my summer vacation

Been a while, eh?

First, in the grand tradition that Siracusa started, follow-up. Despite setting a calendar reminder, I forgot about .moe domain registration day and lost the one domain I would have been tempted to buy: moemoe.moe. (There’s nothing there, yet, but maybe someday.)

After TextDrive sank into the abyss, I set up my email and web hosting on a $5/month VPS from DigitalOcean. I still have no complaints; my little server has served (ehehe) me well. [I have to write this now, because I’ll probably try—and blow—upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 sometime soon.]

I’m surprised by how privacy-conscious I’ve become, in the wake of both the NSA and the more general realization of just how much data companies can collect these days. I’m using far less Dropbox and far more Bittorrent Sync… and I’ll probably switch from that to SyncThing, once that hits 1.0. (That said, I’m not under any illusions that my data is secure or private—but maybe people will have to work a little bit, and their reward will only be my data.)

As far as where I’ve spent my time so far, this year: I’m pretty good at wasting my life. My job continues as ever, despite some truly dark days around the turn of the year. I’ve begun exercising again, after some random pain encouraged me to stop, and Marin and I are slowly working through our backlog of recorded TV shows. (We’re now halfway through Person of Interest season 2. Season 3 ended this June.)

I just finished reading a book—my first of the year […]—and am working on my second. (Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): a great read, and highly recommended.) I don’t know why I don’t read more; I have a ton of really interesting books on my shelf.

I recently bought a TV mount, and so over the weekend Marin and I had the pleasure of manhandling a heavy, expensive, holy-crap-how-does-this-have-that-much-dust television. Once I get a couple longer cables, I think the thing will look downright snappy. (As an added bonus and/or primary motivator, my frickin’ heavy center speaker is no longer balanced on top of some spacer bricks, themselves balanced on top of a bookcase, behind the TV.)

At WWDC in June, Apple announced that they’re creating a new programming language called Swift. That’s thrilling news to me; I’ve never liked the look of Objective-C, and have always wanted to learn how to write programs for my Mac (and, more recently, iOS devices). (The closest I ever got was back in the days of Mac OS 8: I had code that would create a window, had a menubar, and employed an actual event loop… not especially impressive, but you have to consider that there wasn’t much of an internet back then.) I’ve been slowly working my way through Apple’s The Swift Programming Language text ever since.

The bulk of my non-wasted time, though, has been sunk into another Rails app that I’ve been hacking on since March. I thought it’d take a month or two, but feature creep has extended that—and I still have some annoying problems to face down, still. (Hence this post: procrastination at its finest!)

Moon Animate Make-Up!: I’m pretty sure that this is the first full episode of Sailor Moon I’ve ever watched, and it explains SO MUCH.

This is a new one

I preordered Drakengard 3 too early to get the preorder bonus.

“[P]layers who place their pre-order from today [February 6th] through March 3 will receive a special Japanese voiceover DLC…”

:facepalm:

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