Good morning. Hello. How are you? #610
Bad dreams, booze, Spotify gripes, Facebook gripes, CVS gripes, I guess I'm just gripy today also we're having a party in Boston in June.
Good morning! Hello there, how’s tricks? I just had a terrifying dream where I was a Ukrainian soldier, doing a patrol on a lake, swimming around in a wetsuit, laying in small rubber rafts and the like. I think the Lake part was because I talked to an old colleage on the phone yesterday and we talked about kids and swim lessons and ponds and whatnot, while I started out at my pond. Then my platoon got back to HQ, and we got shot at by a rogue Russian soldier while I was in a meeting with my wife and commanding officer. So then I killed the assailant with my bare hands out of sheer terror. It was horrible.
Also worth reading if you’ve been curious about the air war in Ukraine is this piece in the Times today.
Here’s a report that the Times calls “startling” but I’m pretty sure any one of us could have called this one: Alcohol-Related Deaths Spiked During the Pandemic, a Study Shows. Shocking. I definitely drank way, way too much the first year of the pandemic. I mean, probably not as much as my 20’s, or 30’s, when I was going out every single night for months on end, but a lot more than I had been recently, and a lot more than I should have been. By early 2021, though, I got that more under control. These days it’s about a half a bottle of wine a week, or, like, two glasses a week. I’m back to believing that drinking at home is mostly no fun, and it’s only worth it when you’re out in the world with other people. Also, only at night. No day drinking except at SXSW and very few other occasions, and those occasions haven’t been happening, alas. The report says preliminary data says that 2021 numbers look as bad as 2020 and I find that hard(ish) to believe. No word about 2022 yet. What about you is your drinking back down since early pandemic?
Oh wow well this is a cheery start to the day! Sorry! Yesterday I remembered I had to send a couple documents out. One was a document I’d written, answering a bunch of questions on a questionnaire. I also needed to send along an NDA that the company had sent along wo return with the questionnaire. So I’m all done, and the document I’d written with all the answers is on my desktop. I go to my mail to grab the NDA, except I grab the wrong document, I grab the original, blank questionnaire, and I copy it to my desktop and, without thinking, replace the copy already on my desktop with the one from the email. Except the copy already on my desktop was the one with all of the answers—pages and pages of text I’d written— and it was now just gone. Poof, as Hagrid says. Not in my trash. Not findable by any search. I searched my entire computer for an MS Word document made in the last month: nada. I was really starting to panic, but then I remembered: Time Machine! I’ve been running that stupid app in the background for, god, years and I’ve never needed it but yesterday was the day that Time Machine saved my life.
Also the Time Machine interface is still ridiculous and cartoonish and also, weirdly, super slow, even though Macs have gotten, like, 5x as fast since they invented it. Still just painfully slow, silly animations. At least they’ve gotten rid of the starry background, and now it’s just your desktop blurred. That’s a bit better.
Facebook’s memories feature has decided that it’s a good idea to show people memories from two years ago, which is just batshit insane, and this is coming from someone who works at a memories app. I mean, we show memories from two years ago too, but we still offer the ability to hide a memory, and also your memories are in the context of your whole life. Facebook just shows you one a day and hey, if it’s from two years ago, no problem let’s just throw that right back in your face with no context. It really is sad how Facebook ripped Timehop off, but ast least they have changed the design of the Facebook memories feature to no longer be a yellow color with cartoon characters that basically exactly match Timehop’s trade dress, thus elevating the ripoff from normal run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley rip-off to full-on trade dress IP piracy.
Not problematic at all, nope.
So I think I’ve made some progress on this Spotify migration, finally. I now have a single playliast — my main “All the Good” playlist — available on both phones and my desktop computer in a separate iTunes library from my main one, so that it can sync to the cloud and not try and sync my half-million MP3 files. It seems to be working. So now all that remains is that I migrate over the other 200 or so playlists, which is a hellish manual process, though I do know a bit more than I did the last time.
I am still commited to this process, partially because Spotify can still go screw about Joe Rogan but also because, let’s face it, Apple is luring me in with seamless integration with the speakers throughout my house. It really is shocking and suspicious how much more poorly Spotify works with Airplay devices compared to Apple apps. If Lina Kahn is looking for a case I suspect where there’s smoke there’s fire there, but I guess so far Apple has masterfully distracted the political world from their dominance over our lives. It’s doubly fishy, this improved Airplay support, because virtually every other aspect of Apple Music as an actual app sucks compared to Spotify. It is so badly built, it’s shocking.
So much whining about tech companies today maybe Noah Kalina is right:
I got so much done yesterday. I made efforts to get all my prescriptions re-filled, which is proving to be essentially impossible since, you know, all my doctors disappeared. But I made an actual doctor’s appointment for this Thursday with a fill-in newbie doctor, hopefully she is awesome and she can write prescriptions and she doesn’t, you know, act like a cop. Because, you know, Azelastine and Wegovy are hardly opiates. Also CVS is such a drug pusher. They are nagging me right now, texting me EVERY DAY about how I have a refill on one of my meds, even though a) I already have two bottles of the stuff at home, they’ve been “re-filling” the prescription so fast I know have a three-month supply in the house, and b) I turned off refills in the CVS app and they just don’t care. It’s insanity. Paging Lina Kahn.
Exciting and somewhat terrifying news: Sean and Jussi and I are planning our 50th birthday party in Boston on June 4th and you should come. It’ll be fun. I mean, our 60th birthday party will definitely be more fun, but this one should be a good time. All are welcome. We picked a place with an outdoor area as well, so, you know, if this pandemic continues upon its merry way we will still have that option. But.. fingers crossed. And if things get really bad maybe we’ll just postpone for ten years.
Today’s mix is the same mix I posted two years ago. Well, two years ago and a couple days. Except Spotify sux and they don’t have the Daisy Chainsaw Love Sick Pleasure EP, but that has actually caused me to listen to the entirety of their album Eleventeen for the first time in ages and that was very satisfying. Also they don’t have the Steven Jesse Bernstein album which is kind of shocking, actually. That was a Sub Pop release I wonder what is up with that. Also the mix is on Spotify now instead of a download link which honestly was a lot better but no one liked that so hey now you get this one in straming form!
Okay that’s all I have for today I am going to go and do my map flashcards and update my Quicken transactions and do my 750 words and get my daughter out of bed and feed her breakfast now I will talk to you tomorrow xoxo gossip girl.