Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1196
Biko. Bingo. An eyeglasses catastrophe. Apple's Safari's privacy efforts and Google/FB's thwarting thereof. A lot about irrigation both lawn and drip. Broken wells.
Hi there! I'm on my way, I'm making it. I've got to make it show, yeah. So much larger than life. Wait a minute. Today is a “Biko” day. Jane randomly started singing “Biko” this morning. Or maybe I just wanted it to be “Biko.” So then we played “Biko” and we sang along with its hyper-literate chorus:
Biko Biko Biko Biko Biko Biko
Biko Biko Biko Biko Biko Biko
Here’s Biko from the tour last year jesus H that tour was so good:
Profound. It did, however, get me to momentarily think about Apartheid (does one capitalize “Apartheid?” Feel like I should know this) and I was hit with a sudden wave of emotion and anger at injustice, almost cried, then went about my day. All good.
Look I know the last few issues have been long. I just have a lot on my mind.
I have to confess to you, readership-therapist, that I have been a little angry with Peter Gabriel since finding out he used to sleep with Sinead. She had nothing but good things to say about him, well, mostly, and I, myself, never wanted to sleep with Sinead so it is not jealousy per se but… I dunno, man. I suppose I should let this go.
Jane also pronounced “Einsturzende Neuabauten” correctly at the age of six, so, you know, she has about thirteen years on me.
She did not, however, go to camp again today. But you know what? Fuck it, it’s fine. She’s coughing again. Complaining about an ear ache. Won’t go to the doctor, of course. Though I did describe X-Rays (I’m increasingly worried she needs a chest X-Ray) and she said those sound fun, so that’s promising. I said “you wear a heavy comfy blanket and then just don’t do anything. You can bring a stuffy.”)
So we went to the recycling center and Walmart and she was great and evidently thought she deserved a reward for going to these places with me, and I agreed cuz I am a sucker, and she chose a book so I am very happy. It’s a Bluey book, so, you know, more sky-high expectations of dad performance, but on the other hand, fiction. Jane’s been scared of fiction books since she took it too far and read some Babysitter’s Club novels when she was four. Whoops. So, you know, ease back into it with some talking dogs. Bingo is the real star of the show there I said it.
Bingo Bingo Bingo Bingo Bingo Bingo
Bingo Bingo Bingo Bingo Bingo Bingo
Oh man I didn’t even see that coming till I wrote it down.
Yesterday was Juneteenth, as you know, and I had it off, as you know, so I got a bunch of great shit done. Finished all the drip irrigation. The entire garden is now self-watering. This will help a lot because I am crap at watering and my garden has very obviously been suffering for it.
Got my drone fired up and took a photo of Chore House from above so I could turn it into a wireframe map style (bet there’s not a single generative AI that would do this for me even though Adobe Streamline was trying to do this in 1996) and map all the underground utilities. Talked to the irrigation people who installed the ultra-deluxe, eighteen zone irrigation system at Chore House about giving me a map of where all their underground tubing is because I accidentally cut one already. They do not have it. They do not map properties they riddle with tubes. Kind of crazy. I wonder if any irrigation company does this. Shit I wonder if we do it at the pool company. Will investigate. Could be a differentiator huh.
We did get the drip turned on at our main house, and the backflow repaired, and a spiffing new irrigation control panel that we can control with our phone, so that is exciting.
But the pump in the pump house is leaking at Chore House, so I gotta get that fixed by the plumber. Who, coincidentally, is coming today.
Here’s a drone shot of the greenhouse:
(Don’t worry I will be staining that brown walkway grey soon. I have done about 100 hours of research on concrete stains, have samples of four colors, and will be ready to roll soon.)
(God those pepper plants on the left are embarrassing for this time of year.)
Listening to a german synth goth band called Caput Madusae this morning. They may or may not be a joke band, I cannot tell. Shit, maybe they’re not even German. But I stan a band that has a song titled “I Wear Black ‘Til iI’m Dead.” They even capitalize things correctly what’s not to love.
It’s already kinda hot outside and now I am inside and in the HVAC bubble and sweating like a pig which is fine becuase I am in my home office and shirtless but my god, this, this alone, this is reason enough that every office in New York should be torn down. It is insane, in hindsight, anyone was ever expected to work productively while sweating like a pig. The anxiety of every single morning in the summer while working in New York was BS. Utter BS. Good riddance.
My world was thrown into chaos yesterday. Back in, god, I don’t know, March or whatever when I went to the eye doctor, I felt bad and bought a pair of glasses from them. What can I say my eye doctor is alluringly attractive and she did the hard sell and — I think I mentioned this previously — she walked me through the economics of the whole situation, which is essentially an affiliate model, and she gets a cut, and I liked her so that was promising. I had tried to buy glasses from them the year before, but they ended up lying to me and saying they could make progressive Ray Ban sunglasses and they couldn’t. So I was loathe to try again but gosh darn it that doctor has sway over me. I chose another pair. Monstrously expensive.
My eye doctor tells me I should wear progressives. I had made up this whole reason why I couldn’t wear them, because of my neck disease and my habit of leaning my head back when driving, but also I figured I should try them around the house because the whole “watch TV and looking at your phone” thing was becoming impossible, physically impossible. And Zenni doesn’t do progressives in my eye strength (-10/-1.25/axis185). I don’t know what’s up with that. Thank you for making me feel like a mutant, Zenni.
But I sucked it up and bought a pair from the eye doctor. Five months ago. And then forgot about it. And so did they. Apparently they called me on something called a “telephone,” once, to tell me about the glasses being ready. They did not leave a message. Because they called the wrong number. Then they texted the wrong number. Mind you, I have communicated with these people exclusively via email in the past. They did not think to email. Until I emailed in June asking them what was up. Then they told me what I just told you in this paragraph. Then I got annoyed for a week. But then I sucked it up since, you know, I already paid for these glasses like four months ago.
I picked them up yesterday.
And reader, they are so f’n good. This is such bullshit. My god, I can see so well. It is insane. The progressive progression works flawlessly. They are crystal clear. No blurs, no rockets bursting from the streetlamps. Just amazing.
They blow every pair of Zenni glasses away.
And they cost six times as much.
This is absolute bullshit and I am bereft. Verklempt.
There is this whole pupillary distance issue, where Zenni makes me self-measure and my eye doctor does not put PD on their prescriptions and Zenni requires it. And maybe I’m measuring it wrong and the eye doctor is doing it right. So maybe that’s not Zenni’s fault. And maybe I should insist the eye doctor gives me my PD. But I mean I have measured it like ten times and I always get the same number, so if I’m doing it wrong this is maybe Zenni’s fault anyway?
God. They look good too. Here’s a realtime Photo Booth photo (I have a shirt on again, don’t worry. Jane was adamant I put it back on):
(Photo Booth evidently not an App that Apple feels compelled to laden with machine learning. Also it’s two words, the Apple app, which seems weird.)
Another topic: Apple, privacy and the battle against Facebook and Google. Exhibit A:
I guess this was my thing this week: weighing in on Twitter Threads and then dipping out because my opinions were too complex for such a limiting medium.
Anyway, I have been having this problem too. Facebook and Google have been kicking me out of their apps constantly on my Mac for the last… weeks? Months? And I don’t just mean the whole once-a-month-or-two they make you put your password in again. Like each time I re-log in it’s a whole ringomorale, they make me use my security key, they email me that they have detected a new login. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening, but I knew it wasn’t happening in Edge, where I use my Poolco Google Login, or Chrome, where I use my work Google login, though that is a whole more complex thing with Okta and Duo and SAML and hardware keys and yadda yadda. Though, that kind of proves the point, right? Like it it was some new fashion trend in security in Silicon Valley, presumably it would also be happening to the account that has Google Advanced Threat Detection or whatever it’s called.
But nope. Just the Safari ones.
And then I realized it’s because Apple has turned on “Apple Private Relay for Safari” by default. Or whatever it’s called.
Which is good! It is very well meaning! It will protect people from malware and shit : sort of, not really, mostly just protect them from ads, quelle horreur, but even though I am an Adtech CEO (sorry), we’ll roll with this as a good thing. And by having it on by default, they are protecting millions, if not billions of more people. Oh wait this is the Mac not iPhone: thousands, if not millions. Lol lol Macs are so unpopular.
BUT the whole thing is kinda fucked because, as any VPN user knows, rotating your IP address and logging in from different IP addresses is a very low-hanging-fruit security metric for, you know, kicking you out of your login and making you re-prove you’re yourself. And, of course, Facebook and Google make their money off of advertising, quelle horreur, and they are certainly under no incentive to, you know, make Apple’s life easier.
So the end result of Apple’s “well-meaning” (lol) privacy innovation is a shit ton more tech support. For Apple. For adult children of boomers everywhere.
And, ultimately, probably a slightly lower adoption rate for Safari, which has a ton of other useful privacy features that Chrome does not have, that now fewer people are using.
Feels like a real faustian bargain.
And, I mean, yes, Facebook and Google make money off of ads, but also… they’re not wrong? People logging in from rando IP addresses all of the world is often a security issue, and it is totally logical to penalize those people with additional security.
So, like every other Apple privacy feature, I have turned it off. Which sucks. But also, it was inevitable. I’ve been forced to turn off Apple privacy features for decades. It was probably, god, at least ten years before FileVault, Apple’s hard-drive-encryption functionality, was at all usable. It was just too slow. And again, they turned it on by defauilt. Millions of people thought their Macs were slow from, like, 2004 to 2020 or so, when they weren’t. They were just encrypting the whole read/write thing on the fly. On shitty Intel silicon and slow-ass physical drives. Now, with Apple Silicon and SSDs, it’s not too bad. Probably still a major speed drain, but off of a very fast speed so it’s not so bad.
Was Apple right to do this ten years “early?” Tough to say. Tough to say.
BUT, I do think both these episodes are evidence that Apple “means it” about security? I mean, I can weave a narrative about how the more Apple kills ads the more apps have to rely on subscriber revenue, wherein Apple gets a cut of the action, which they do not get with ads. And all of that is true!
But it is also true that they keep making privacy products that are manifestly not in their own self interest.
God. These little passing thoughts. Take 30 minutes and 2,000 words to actually verbalize. No one can do it. It is too fucking hard. We are doomed as a species because we cannot communicate.
But I’m sure ChatGPT will help.
(Lookin’ spry, Ki-Adi.)
Jane is getting into the “why” game, but with a twist. She likes to be a know-it-all, so she wants to be the one who gets asked “why” six times. For a kid who is so secretive she won’t tell you her name, this is a golden opportunity. I actually got a few things out of her about camp this morning. She does not want to go to camp because sure, the day week was fun, but they were probably just doing that to make the kids think it was fun, to trick them into coming again. I pointed out that unlike school the point of camp is to have fun, but she was not buying it.
I swear I did not intend to make my daughter so skeptical and paranoid, but I guess that’s just 21st century America for you.
Okay got a shoegaze mix for you today. All new, even though it has Ride and Drop Nineteens on it, what a world, what a world. Wait that Majesty Crush song might be old. NOPE. That album was great too. Okay the Pale Saints song is old. One old. Shoegaze Borrowed Shoegazed Blue.
Tomorrow I head off to Boston for Jussi’s Birthday, the Church, the Afghan Whigs, Sean and Dave’s goth band, and to see Megan and Woody. All very exciting. Hopefully I can get an issue in and hopefully it’s not just screenshots!
Though I do have some doozies.