Thoughts

Just because a business user asks for it doesn’t mean it should be done. You have to be able to tell your end users no sometimes. Saying yes to everything makes for technical debt in the future. I just had to argue this point to both a user and one of our consultants. Users hate me sometimes. 🏴‍☠️

There was a time I loathed the use of Emojis and thought they were for lazy people. But times and minds change and I find myself using them more often as of late than I otherwise would have allowed myself to back in the “old days.” ✌️❤️

Battery life on the New MacBook Air M3 is impressive. Going on day four of moderate use from a full charge and the battery is only down to 52%.

I find it hilarious when people start pounding on their keyboard as the answer to fix a hung up or seriously lagging computer. Like it’s going to suddenly knock something loose inside instead of adding to a buffer that’s already backing up.

I stopped using external monitors with my laptops a couple weeks ago as an experiment to see if I could adapt. I tried connecting my work monitors today to see how it felt. Nope. I’ve become accustomed to a Retina display and can’t use external mons now. Plus, I’m way more productive this way.

Woohoo! New MacBook Air is ready for pickup at the Apple Store today. Even though it only took 10 days for the custom config to arrive, it feels like it’s been 20 at least.

It seems I may have flooded the Micro.blog timeline with a crap-ton of Scribbles posts by pasting the discover feed from over there instead of my own when adding a MB crosspost feed. If you silently cursed me under your breath for it, I totally deserve it. The lameness has been corrected. Sorry!

Hah! I landed on the perfect domain name for my Scribbles blog today. How this domain was not already registered is beyond me, but alas, it was not and I snagged it up. It should be resolving properly soon if it isn’t already…

I had hoped to get some good beach photos this afternoon, but the surf was small and blown-out from a brisk onshore wind. Still, it was nice to get the bike out and ride along the sand. I am looking forward to summer returning though.

Drinking a “Fauxrona” (alcohol free Corona) this afternoon. Surprisingly, it tastes very much like the real thing. Non-alcoholic beer has come a long way from the days of O’doul’s being the only option. Cheers! 🍻

I’m taking the rest of the week off from work. My wife and I were going to take the RV out for a relaxing long weekend, but yet another “atmospheric river” rain storm is bearing down on SoCal. I’m hoping to get a little beach time in for myself tomorrow before the deluge begins on Friday.

After trying to use Apple Calendar for just one day, I’m back to Fantastical. Our InfoSec team won’t approve BusyCal, so it looks like I’ll be forking out for another year’s subscription. That’s okay. I use the app a lot.

I just set up one of my other domains as a podcast site on Micro.blog since I have extra domains sitting around doing nothing, and Micro.blog premium allows five different sites. This will either be really interesting, or a total bust. More later…

I’m giving Apple Calendar a spin for a while to see if it can replace Fantastical. I absolutely love Fantastical and have used it since the beginning, but the $57 subscription price is getting too expensive for me. This year’s goal is to only pay for subscriptions that are absolutely necessary.

And… Taxes are now complete for the household. It’s been a very productive day. Time to wind down.

Awake for a few hours already. The rest of the house still sleeps. I watched the sun rise through the kitchen window alone. It was beautiful.

Life is a blessing to be amazed by.

My wife found a non-alcoholic hazy IPA at the grocery store that actually tastes pretty damned good. All is right with the world again…

The CFO has given her blessing to make the new MacBook Air purchase. I planned to wait until I had the whole amount, but hey, what’s an extra $200 a month added to my 0% interest Apple Card? Yeah, I think I’ll probably pull the trigger sometime today…

Sadly, I must use Google Chrome for my browser at work. I’m trying out tab groups, but I’m not sure I like it. It seems like way more effort than it’s worth to manually move a tab into a group. I open and close tabs so often that grouping them seems like wasted effort. Thoughts?

Thanks to the reminder from @canion in this post a few days ago, I’m giving Bear another spin myself. I think I’ve finally landed on the holy grail of note keeping to keep my stuff in order.

I was able to get hands-on with a MacBook Air 15” display model in the Apple Store when picking up the new HomePod the other day. It’s an awesome form factor and I will be ordering the fully spec’d model as soon as the budget allows for it. I didn’t even notice the notch when I looked at it.

Gotta say, HomePod sound is pretty decent…

If you use Micro.blog or WordPress to publish content and use the Tinylytics platform by @vincentritter, this is a reminder I have two plugins to make integrating with Tinylytics easier – one for Micro.blog and one for WordPress. If you like either of them, show your love with a donation.

I took a break from Micro.blog while I worked on some WordPress stuff. That’s all done now and I’m happy to focus attention back here. There are so many awesome people in this community that it was hard to be away.

Just pulled the trigger on an Apple HomePod for main living area music. We’ve been using an Alexa, but the sound is not really all that good. Hoping the HomePod sound is even better than the HomePod mini I have in my office. It sounds pretty good for the size.

After thousands of tweaks to my site’s WordPress theme over the years, sometimes undoing what I just changed, I’m self-imposing a code freeze. It’s 99% of the way to where I want it. I can live with whatever the 1% ends up being. It’s time to come up with content instead, like I wrote about back in 2018 and never followed through on.

I switched up my desk set up today, opting to just use the laptop & mouse instead of laptop + 2 external monitors and keyboard. I’m finding myself to be more productive than I thought I would be. I may have to do this more often, or maybe move to it completely.

Though I haven’t read much of it yet, it looks like there are lots of great new features coming up in WordPress 6.5. I’m setting some weekend time aside to get caught up.

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/03/15/wordpress-6-5-field-guide/

I released my newest WordPress plugin, Basic Copyright, on the plugin repository last night. Its sole purpose is to make a dynamic copyright notice available for your theme footer so you don’t have to change the copyright notice yearly. Super simple, but kind of useful.

wordpress.org/plugins/b…

Interestingly, after starting meds a couple of weeks ago, my eyesight seems to have suddenly gotten worse by a significant amount. My computer glasses are no longer working whereas they’ve been perfect for more than a year. 🤓