Covid is still present in New Zealand, but the various mandates have pretty much gone and we're just living with it. Somehow I have avoided it. I work in and around the city hospital so I kind of expected to get it in 2020 when things first kicked off but.. Still nothing. I suppose I could have had it and been asymptomatic, and the idea of passing it on unknowingly is also quite scary. That work situation? I met with the head of IT, and within this week I've been asked to attend an interview for a role I didn't know was being advertised, and have heard back from hiring managers in other areas seeing if I'm interested in their spots. The dude was rapid in his follow through, I was hoping to talk and get some information and he spat out genuine job opportunities within 48 hours. One of the offers is in a helpdesk scenario, which I'm in two minds about. One, it's a gateway into IT which I want. The other, it's rostered and I'd feel like I'm going backwards (even though they believe they can keep my current salary). I'd feel strange being probably the most highly paid but inexperienced person there, but it would serve as incentive to be worth what they're throwing me. It's either take these various options seriously, or continue in my current role that I understand very, very well, but don't enjoy at all. I think i'd rather take a punt than continue being grumpy and poorly treated.
I managed to spend entire September in travel without a hitch, and today fucked up my foot at home, slipping on some crap in the basement. Sprained ankle, have fractures in two metatarsals, had to crawl upstairs Gattaca style and get my ass to emergency room. I was almost there by car before remembering fucking Uber exists, so it's fair to say shock generally puts a decimal point in front of my IQ. But it's cool now, got the neighbor to bring the car back, and didn't need anything stronger than paracetamol so far. Officially between jobs, and slayin' it.
I hate Bluetooth. I hate how audio is controlled on our modern devices. Case in point: I'm working in my shop. I have my Spotify playlist up on my phone, and am connected via Bluetooth to my speaker, so I have music playing. If a call comes in, it projects over the Bluetooth speaker, which is in no way a useful or valuable place to have phone calls sent. Or I take a break for a minute to sit down and have some water, and play a game on my phone. And now that game is bring projected over the sound of the music through the Bluetooth speaker. Why can't I just have music sent to the Bluetooth speaker, and all other audio routed through my phone's built-in speaker? What about my car? I connect to my car's entertainment system via Bluetooth, and I listen to podcasts and music while driving. But every single notification that comes in pads my audio 25%, so I miss what the podcasters are saying. If I get multiple notifications in a row, I can miss a LOT of information. Or maybe I want to use my AirPods, instead of the car's stereo system... but nope. Trying to get the car to release its Bluetooth lock on my iPhone is impossible to do when driving. And even when I do get the audio re-routed to my AirPods, if a call comes in, my phone disconnects from my AirPods, reconnects to the car stereo, and plays the call over the stereo system! Fixes. "Fixing" these problems is actually two different solutions to two different problems; one fix is possible, the other impossible. The first option is to have some sort of built-in mixer into the OS, that allows me to specifically route specific app outputs to different places. So, send Spotify output to the Bluetooth connected device (speaker in the shop, or car stereo, for example) and send all other audio through the phone's built-in speaker. The second option is to have multiple outputs available via Bluetooth. So I can send Spotify to my job site boombox, and phone to my AirPods. This can't happen, because Bluetooth cannot address more than one destination; there can be only one Bluetooth device connected at a time. Most of the time now, I just drive with no audio at all. It's just less annoying to have to deal with these asinine design flaws in "modern" technology products. Waaaah. (But hey ... at least I'm not trying to avoid conscription gangs and looking at leaving my homeland for good and becoming an exile from my own country. (Yet.)
For the notifications while driving and listening.. I recall at some point while tinkering with an older, rooted, android phone - I could set my phone to automatically turn those notifications off, specifically when I was connected to something via bluetooth. Once disconnected from bluetooth the phone switched notifications back on. I used some kind of app akin to If This Then That, but it's name eludes me now. I guess fucking with an iPhone is far less appealing to achieve something similar! Not sure why I don't have that setup on my current phone and car. Probably laziness.
Yeah. The iPhone OS has a similar function called "profiles", that you can configure for this purpose. But you need to set it up, and remember to turn it on - and off! - and do so BEFORE you get in your car and head out. I just don't sit on the couch watching TV thinking, "oh geez, I should configure my iPhone Profile for driving so my podcast doesn't get interrupted when I go driving on Thursday...." I'm just being grumpy/lazy. Ignore me.
iOS and Android both handle this most elegantly through Carplay/Android Auto. It's possible to run Android Auto on an android not connected to a car stereo. It's not possible to run Carplay. Android Auto basically turns your phone into Android Auto and mirrors it to the car's display, while Carplay is an auxiliary screen for iOS. In each case the different apps in the car stereo modes allow you to set whatever level of annoyance you want to deal with. Doesn't help you with your boom box, I know. Frankly it's all been downhill since this guy.
1) Bluetooth sucks. It's a protocol designed to transmit Danish business cards. Even 20-odd years later it's an inferior audio protocol. 2) Under Bluetooth settings, per device, you can set whether or not the phone goes there. 3) Connecting your phone to your car's bluetooth sucks. Don't buy a car that lacks Android Auto & Carplay or lacks a DIN or double-DIN stereo. My wife's Fit fails all these tests but it also has an audio in jack. 4) That said, notifications can be silenced. It involves a lot of fiddle-fucking in the preferences to get it to work but in general, flipping the STFU switch on the side of an iPhone radically improves life. 5) on an iPhone call screen, pressing the "source" button will swap the call to wherever you want it to go. In a car that shouldn't be AirPods. It's a moving violation. 6) Your phone's operating system does have a mixer. It also has a matrix router. However, that mixer/router doesn't have a handy-dandy GUI, it has a bunch of if/then statements and individual volume controls. And yes - Bluetooth is only one destination, and that is appropriate because Bluetooth sucks balls. These are all surmountable problems. You just have to start from the standpoint of "I can't be the only person this bugs the shit out of. Surely other people have addressed this ridiculously annoying issue." To be fair to device manufacturers, most every device manufacturer has gone "the less control we give to car manufacturers the better." Carplay/Android Auto are vastly better experiences than anything any car company or stereo manufacturer can come up with. They're imperfect? But substantially more livable than Chevy.
Yeah, what I need to do is spend a couple hours configuring "Profiles" in the new iOS for every conceivable situation where I would want Audio A going out there and Audio B going out there and THOSE particular notifications silenced when I am in Profile X mode but allow other notifications, and then have Profile Y configured for when I'm in my shop, and and and... ... and using AirPods in the car is illegal? How you supposed to do hands-free in a pre-2017 vehicle?!? (Rhetorical question.) And yeah, I'd buy a new car with ApplePlay or whatever it's called, but they stopped making my car in 2015 and nobody has come up with its equal yet. I'm taking a week off next week. I've decided I'll make time to fix all my technology issues then... which include getting my new fiber internet router to get signal to the WHOLE house and back yard, and upgrading my OS and Native Instruments on my Mac Mini, and setting up Profiles on my phone for the common use cases I have, and getting Moxie set up and starting to use her FluentPet buttons so she can demand more treats from me, and updating all the services that are whinging at me because I changed my credit card number.... And maybe I'll install my spiral staircase on Wednesday when the new steps arrive...
Like Devac mentions, you can send audio to different devices in Windows. I'll stream music or movies to my stereo and keep system sounds on the laptop. Android pauses audio during notifications, I'm sure I'd be annoyed to driving and really want to rewind to hear what I missed if it just muted during notifications. I know that they always talk about making Bluetooth work better with multiple streams and devices every standards update but it's always aspirational.
iOS allows me to set up Profiles for whatever I am doing, which is effectively a buncha presets that I can automatically switch between, like weapon-switching in my favorite game. Problem is, I have to set it all up. And then I need to remember to change my Profile. Recently I went three days without realizing my phone was on Silent mode.... so yeah... I may just be too old for modern technology. :-)
I know just about nothing about Apple ecosystem, but there's exactly that in Windows called App Volume and Device Preferences. The article mentions 3rd party apps only for older system versions, but I'd suspect someone wrote something like that for iOS/whatever.The first option is to have some sort of built-in mixer into the OS, that allows me to specifically route specific app outputs to different places. So, send Spotify output to the Bluetooth connected device (speaker in the shop, or car stereo, for example) and send all other audio through the phone's built-in speaker.
I figured out how to do it on my shitty bargain-bin Alcatel with ancient Android, so there likely is a solution less tedious than your profile setups. Almost willing to bet there's already something like this or better, hidden behind even less-specific name.
... and that auto manufacturers release ONE version of software for their head units, and then ignore any software updates forever. Oh wait. That's not right. I can get a software update for the head unit in my 2015 Chevy... for $632. (Literally sticking in a USB, clicking a button, and waiting for the update to complete. And it is over $600.)
For the record, not that anyone asked, but for the record, I think Godzilla vs Kong was by far, the WORSE Godzilla movie ever made. It was so poorly written, with so many terrible moments, I’m surprised I sat through the whole thing. The fact that it’s well scored by both reviewers and audiences makes me think that our standards as critical, conscientious consumers of media have dropped off a cliff. Why do I mention this, you ask? None of the teams I rooted for this year are in the playoffs, and the way The MKB does listen sing for broadcasting games, watching playoff games is a headache under the best of circumstances. So, until The World Series starts, I’m gonna binge watch Godzilla and Ninja Turtles instead, cause my ability and therefore chances of catching a live game, unless I go to a sports bar, are practically zero. But, no. Seriously. Godzilla vs Kong was a kaiju sized turd.
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” ~Marcus Aurelius (allegedly) If you’re talking about Power Rangers with Elizabeth Banks, that movie was fun. Haven’t seen the Pattinson Batman, but Pattinson is actually a good actor. Godzilla vs Kong though? Bad writing. Like, every five minutes you’re like, “Dud anyone take time to clean up the script? Anyone at all?” Let me throw some examples at you. Bryan Tyree Henry’s character is infiltrating a corporation to expose them for their evil craziness, and does so by video blogging the whole thing. No disguised face. No disguised voice. Nothing. Like, you expect me to believe he’d be doing that for any length of time and not get caught? There is a battle in the ocean where at one point, Godzilla tries to drown King by dragging him down to the depths of the Ocean and everyone is like “We gotta help that dang guy? What do we do?” Well? What do they do? They drop depth charges!. Literalky in the previous film, Godzilla was at ground zero of a nuclear explosion and survived unharmed, but depth charges are gonna help? And I’m Kong: Skull Iskand, Kong got hurt by conventional weapons, and you guys expect him to survive depth charges? Are you sure? Like, cmon! Oh yeah, and in the climatic battle, King suffers a heart attack, and how is he saved? A geologist somehow magically knows how to fly an experimental antigravity hover craft thingy AND turn it into a giant defibrillator? Are you serious guys? Look, I’ve seen literally EVERY Godzilla film and quite a few of them ask for a bit of give on the part of the audience to make them enjoyable. But when you have s movie where, every five minutes, EVERY FIVE MINUTES, you expect me to give up on reasoning to enjoy it. No. No. It’s badly written and I want a written apology from Warner Brothers and basically everyone involved in this film. It’s bad. It’s terrible. I wanna watch it again only to remind myself that no, I’m not crazy, it really was that awful the first time through.Fuck society. Live by your own rules.
On a website made by a physicist-biomedical-RC guy... I have no horse in this race, but it's a scientist having to do a science thing in a hardly-grounded franchise. No less believable a convenience as everyone in Star Wars being at least tri-lingual or Dr Benton Quest being in his mid-thirties.A geologist somehow magically knows how to fly an experimental antigravity hover craft thingy AND turn it into a giant defibrillator? Are you serious guys?
No, I expect them to abide by "storyworld rules." This is basic and fundamental: The audience will go along with whatever you tell them, so long as it's consistent. GAME OF THRONES: there are dragons and white walkers but other than that, what you understand about physics and chemistry hold. LORD OF THE RINGS: Sauron is Satan, Wizards have semi-unlimited power, elves are immortal unless proven otherwise. STAR WARS: aerial combat is like WWII newsreels except space ships can fly all the fuck over the place. That's where things fall apart - you can make "ocean" into "space" if you presume that all weaponry is directional. You can shoot at the "destroyer" because you're flying around going pew pew pew. Lucas just couldn't keep it in his pants and needed to "drop" bombs because fundamentally, his whole vision is carrier warfare. Could he have been satisfied with torpedo "planes?" Yes indoodly doo. But he didn't. He went "some things you shoot and some things fly around but the plane of our performance is whatever the fuck I say it is because I'm George Lucas." Kinda like how for the first two Star Wars movies he really needed sexual chemistry between Luke and Leia and then for the third movie he decided to have Leia be Luke's sister and the third corner of his Luke Leia Han love triangle. He's just a lazy fuck who gives no shits about the audience.
After years of carsharing I am now getting my own car from my work (on lease? is that how you say it?). It’s not that I desperately need it, but the carsharing options are very sparse where I live now. I’ll be doing more sales work on the road, so I politely asked at an opportune moment and will be driving a VW ID.3 for like €150/mo for at least the next few months (that’s including charging and insurance). There’s also an option to lease an e-bike and I still get to keep my unlimited work PT card (there’s a 30 trains an hour train station ~25 comfortable bike minutes away) so I have, like, all of the options now.
11) Swap one of the dysfunctional DSMs with another DSM, swap some cables back and forth, discover that of three DSMs, two are bad in two excitingly different ways. This is extremely fucking annoying as both of them were fixed at the start of COVID. They were, to be fair, in the garage and apparently living through a 118 degree summer killed a few things. Fuck you, global warming. So now we're at 12) Order capacitors off eBay because while neither Mouser nor Digikey have what I want in stock until November, eBay has 2016 Panasonics for 30 cents each. Meanwhile, their density is such that apparently I need to get that solder rework station I've never bothered to own. Spent three hours last night in a zoom meeting learning how to be a "stroke & turn official" for my daughter's swim meets. Which apparently involves walking around in a polo shirt and white shoes for 50 hours a year finding reasons why nine year olds aren't doing the breast stroke properly, but only after I've taken two tests, gotten a background check and apprenticed for sixteen hours.
Had a fling for a couple weeks and it got weird. Broke it off last Wednesday. Got way too drunk and killed it on the dance floor on Friday, and a woman with red hair told me I'm gorgeous and gave me her number. I woke up with her in my contacts as "Cuuuuuuuute (cutie)" with her number entered as the last name. Texted her and we're getting brunch tomorrow. A Wednesday I guess? Not sure if she even knows I'm trans--hard to have those conversations when you've spoken a sentence to each other and met while drinking in a fairly dark room. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic though! It's nice to make a connection the old fashioned way--dating apps are burning me out. Now I'm back on the job hunt looking at full-time engineering positions, while scared to death to work full-time. I spent this summer part-time at my job, part-time on online courses trying to bridge the gap between what I know and what I need to know to get the work I want, and part-time on my mental health. I'm scared I won't have any energy left over after work to relax, take care of myself, and date. And I need to keep getting out and meeting people even if it gets weird. The pain of being alone becomes acute once you've spent even a moment with someone else. I don't think people recognize how much work goes into being trans. I recently went through the process of changing my name and gender marker through the county court, the DMV, social security, and my voter registration, and changed my name with all my utilities, my credit cards, my nearly depleted retirement account, my car insurance (which then raised my premium), and my Xfinity account which was somehow the worst of all of them. That somehow took three half-hour phone calls. I spend an hour in therapy a week, I spend an hour or two decompressing from that hour, I spend a few hours a week just processing where I fit in the world, and I write a few thousand words in a text document that I bring to therapy so that I can try to squeeze a week of experiences into that hour of therapy to get help making sense of them. A backlog continually builds while I get help putting out fires in my day-to-day life but overall I guess I'm doing better. Some day I'll take the plunge and sign up for psilocybin-assisted therapy and get into the real shit but I can't imagine that happening for a while.
Well WaPo finally changed their pricing from $4 to $12/mo, so I guess I'm done with them. I guess they're hoping that less than 2/3 of people will not bother to cancel their subscription. I just did, and it was really easy. Clearly they didn't learn from NYT that you're supposed to make it impossible to quit, which is the reason I continue to read that rag.
I think regional papers often price themselves based on "what we need" rather than "what we provide." Most of them just regurgitate Reuters or AP and your fees go to sports reporters and columnists who make their 'boomer physical subscribers happy. If you wanna pay $20 a week to feel the greasy black screeds of fellow 'boomer cloud-shouters, more power to ya. Me? I got better things to do with my money.
It’s funny you mention sports, because that’s how I found every paper these days have a paywall. It was frustrating at first, until I quickly discovered a few things. If the article is any good, in a few days it’ll get republished on either Yahoo or MSN. Chances are you’re gonna come across the ideas of the article in a couple of days because people on Reddit and Twitter will be repeating ideas from said article as if it’s they thought of it themselves. This is where I warn that they often hold the idea that they did indeed think if it themselves, and therefore, will quickly and vehemently argue to the last breath with anyone who disagrees (more so on Twitter than Reddit, but to get a feel for this, look at conversations about Judge and Bonds and The Home Run Record or Judge and Ohtani and The MVP Race). If there is a sports team you like, there is at least one Podcast about them. Often there are multiple. The Pidcasts are often more informative and more interesting. Lastly, and most importantly, just watch the sport and the teams you like. The commentators and sideline reporters are more than sufficient in keeping you up to date. In short, I’m not paying to get past your pay well, your article isn’t essential, and chances are I’m gonna hear about whatever your paper has to say from other, and often better, sources.