Ugh, Adobe.

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I’ve used a pair of custom fonts, Museo and Museo Slab on this site since I debuted my custom child theme on New Years Eve of 2011. I originally got the fonts through a company called TypeKit, which Adobe bought a couple of years ago.

A nice security feature of the CitiCard app is that I get notifications when a card not present transaction happens . Saturday, I got a notification that I’d been charged by Adobe. I assumed at that point it was for my annual font license, and didn’t think much of it.

Then today, I got an email from Adobe, “You’ve bought Adobe XD, but haven’t downloaded the app yet.” WTF??? I don’t remember ever buying Adobe XD, a vector-based user experience design tool, and it’s not a product I would want. My first thought was that my Adobe or credit card account had been hacked, my second thought was that maybe something got fouled up with the font subscription, and that I should talk to Adobe.

It is not easy to talk to Adobe. They make it very hard to talk to Adobe. You can’t find their number on their website, and and when I found the number on gethuman.com, I fell into a phone tree that I escaped only by semi-randomly mashing on the phone keys, then waiting on hold for a while.

Fortunately, the first person I spoke to gave me the essential clue. He told me that I’d had the subscription for a year, and that it had simply just renewed. I didn’t remember subscribing a year ago, so I dug through my old emails, and found this:

You’ve subscribed to Typekit — thousands of fonts you can use on the web or your desktop. As we mentioned in our last email, we’re making some changes to our service that will affect your plan for this email address …

As part of our move to Adobe Fonts, we have discontinued standalone Typekit plans, and will not bill you again for yours. You’re still covered for fonts on web and desktop and there will not be any interruption to your font service. 

In early 2019, we’ll add a free year of Adobe XD CC to your Adobe account, which will extend your font licensing for a full year. This is just one of the Creative Cloud single-app plans that includes our complete library of fonts.  

At the end of your free year, you can renew Adobe XD or choose another Creative Cloud plan that fits your needs and price point. There are more fonts in the library now than we’ve ever had before (over 14,000), and we’ve lifted sync and domain limits to make them a lot easier to get to. 

I hadn’t paid much attention to it, because I didn’t care about the free year of Adobe XD. I simply perceived it as a free perk I wouldn’t use. What I didn’t understand was that in order to continue the subscription — and the Museo fonts aren’t included in the free level of Adobe fonts — I would have to have some sort of Creative Cloud subscription.

I’ve used Photoshop off and on for decades, starting with Photoshop 3. My own personal copies were never for professional use, so I never saw the need to keep it up to date every year, especially when the annual upgrade was a couple hundred dollars. Still, I did buy about six different versions, culminating in Photoshop CS 5. Photoshop CS 6 didn’t seem like enough of an upgrade to bother with, then Adobe switched to their subscription model, and I held onto CS 5 for as long as I could. It became crash-prone two versions of macOS ago, and unusable in macOS Mojave. I’ve been using other image editors instead, like Pixelmator Pro and Acorn, but haven’t felt as comfortable with either as I do with Photoshop.

I actually have been looking at Adobe’s Creative Cloud plans for a little while, but they don’t offer the bundle I would really want: Photoshop + Illustrator at a reasonable price. Photoshop and Illustrator singly are each $21/month. They do offer a “Photography” plan which combines Photoshop with Lightroom for $10/month, but I don’t really need Lightroom — I’ve just finished settling into Apple Photos, and I don’t like the idea of my photo library being bound to an Adobe subscription plan

Nonetheless, once it became clear that I had to have some sort of Creative Cloud plan to keep the fonts on the site, I decided I would rather have a subscription to an app I would use. For me, that’s Photoshop, and the cheapest way out is the Photography plan.

I’m not happy at all with this situation.

  • Their initial email announcing the demise of TypeKit should have made it clearer that some sort of Creative Cloud subscription would be required for more than the free tier of TypeKit
  • If I have to have an app, last year’s email should have let me pick the app I wanted to tie it to. The way the email was worded, it seemed like Adobe XD was just a free perk they were throwing in, one that I disregarded since I didn’t value it.
  • I’m not happy with the plans available. I’ll probably try Lightroom, but I don’t really want it. I definitely don’t want the cloud features, I tend to do my stuff on one device
  • I really wish they had a Photoshop / Illustrator bundle. Or a limited app bundle. If they’re willing to bundle Photoshop and Lightroom for $9.99 /month, surely they could afford to sell Photoshop + Illustrator — or any two apps — for a reasonable rate. The two options are to buy both apps singly for $20.99 / month, or to buy all app access for $52.99 / month — but I neither want all 20 apps, nor can I afford them.
  • Adobe’s telephone support is ridiculously bad. The number isn’t on the website, the support options aren’t helpful — and I would not have deduced that the issue was the initial “free” addition of Adobe XD to my account a year ago, because I’d scarcely noticed it a year ago, and had forgotten it since. To be fair, the first operator I spoke to first did pick up that it was a subscription I’d had for a year, but couldn’t address why I had it — I had to look through my old emails to find out why. I then got transferred through three other representatives before determining, yes, I had to have a Creative Cloud subscription to get the fonts. To the credit to the final operator I spoke to, he did price out the cheapest app for me, but if I have to have a subscription, I’d rather get something I want.

I guess it’s good to have Photoshop again. But I’m feeling rather shaken down right now, and it doesn’t feel good.

16” MacBook Pro

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On Black Friday, I ordered a Christmas present for myself, the new 16 inch MacBook Pro.

Writing this post on my new 16” MacBook Pro.

Its predecessor was five years old, and showing its age. Even though I’d replaced its built in 500 gigabyte (GB) solid state drive with a 1 terabyte (TB) SSD, its onboard drive was nearly full. Worse, it was restarting randomly and was having trouble waking from sleep. I worried that one day I would go to start it up, and it wouldn’t.

I generally try to get four years out of a computer, so the old one didn’t owe me anything. Unfortunately it was the Era of the Butterfly Keyboard. In the interests of thinness, Apple had gone with a hyper-thin keyboard that was uncomfortable to type on. As time went on, it also became clear that the keyboard was unreliable. So I held onto the old one, hoping that Apple would reverse course.

I’d hoped that they would release a butterfly-less laptop during the June World Wide Developer conference, but no. Then I hoped it would appear during an event during the fall. Nope. Then finally, in mid-November, this computer was announced.

I did a little hemming and hawing on it – the timing is not great for work, and I initially thought I would need to get a 4 TB model, which would have cost $4000. My old computer was nearly full, and so was the external drive I keep my media library on. But then I took a second look at what was on the external drive. Half was an old Aperture vault, which I don’t need anymore, another quarter was video, which I was happy to leave on the external disk, and another large chunk was scans, which I was also content to leave on the external disk. That only left about 100 GB for my iTunes library which I wanted to move back onto this computer. I decided to go with a 2TB build-to-order (BTO) model, with extra memory as well, but with the base CPU and stock GPU.

I ordered the computer on Black Friday, with my new Apple Card, figuring I’d get the 3% back for the card, and assuming Apple’s Black Friday discounts would apply. It turned out they didn’t, at least not initially, but I did get a $200 refund from Apple a few weeks later. I also traded in my old Early 2011 MacBook Pro; it’s been mostly gathering dust since i took advantage of the repair extension program. They offered me $170 for it, which I thought was reasonable for an eight year old computer.

Because this is a BTO computer, I had to order online, and wait for the computer to be built and shipped. It was fascinating tracking the shipment from Shanghai China to the West Coast to here, and it arrived earlier than Apple had estimated.

This computer is actually a little bigger and heavier than its 2019 15” MacBook Pro predecessor, but about the same width and slightly thinner than the 2014 15” model I had. The bezel on the sides of the screen are narrower, so it can fit more active area on the screen.

Like all of Apple’s more recent laptops, this is a USB-C machine only, so I’ve had to pick up a number of adapters. I got a small dock with USB-A and HDMI ports, a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 adaptor, for connecting to my external monitors, and an external SD card reader for reading camera memory cards. I also picked up a new wireless Mighty Mouse since I would need to use the adapter with my existing mouse. In actual practice, the SD card reader is the one I will probably use the most, and I do feel that it would have been a better machine if it had been built in.

So far, I like it a lot. I took a lot of pictures the week before Christmas, and processing photos is a lot faster on this machine. Importing pictures on the 2014 machine would slow it to a crawl as it would try to index all the new photos; not so with this machine.

The keyboard is nice. I never had to deal with the butterfly keyboard, but this uses a traditional scissor switch mechanism which has a decent amount of throw, and should be more reliable.

Battery life is noticeably better than the old machine. I’m not sure how much of this is improvements to the new machine’s batteries — it now comes with as big a set of batteries as the FAA will permit for carry-on luggage — and how much is the aging of the batteries in the old computer, but it’s been a pleasant surprise. I can be reading on this computer unplugged for hours before having to charge.

Heat management is supposed to be better on this computer. I haven’t really taxed it the way I tax my work computer, but I haven’t heard the fans spin up.

Apple has been bragging about the sound quality of this computer, and it’s real. All my previous laptops sounded kind of tinny, and I never played music through their speakers — they didn’t sound good, and it was better to listen to music through headphones. With this computer, it’s rather pleasant to have it play music while you’re using it.

The color gamut of the screen is improved compared to the old one. I notice this most in vivid greens and reds — they seem more saturated.

The side bezels of the screen have been narrowed, but the top bezel is roughly the same width as older machines, which looks a little weird. I think it would have been better to have a tighter corner radius on the case, and have narrowed the top bezel too.

Narrower side bezels give more image width, but the top bezel remains the same size, probably because of the radius of the case’s corners

This computer did come with the latest version of macOS, Catalina, and this has meant getting rid of my old 32 bit apps. I think the one I miss the most is Sweet 16, my Apple IIGS emulator. Catalina is supposed to permit the use of an iPad as an external monitor, but I haven’t been able to make it work yet.

One minor thing I’ve noticed is that there are vent grooves on the underside of the machine, along the sides. The edges of the grooves are sharpish. Not sharp enough to cut, but sharp enough to feel a little rough. Hopefully, Apple will correct this in a future revision.

Speaking of revisions, this machine comes with a revised version of the TouchBar, which replaces the physical Function keys on older machines with a small touch sensitive strip that displays a changeable user interface, which the application can tailor to its own needs. The TouchBar debuted with the first butterfly keyboard MacBook Pros; this version is slightly narrower; there is a physical Escape keyboard once again, with the TouchBar placed next to it. I know I’m in the minority, but I rather like it. I don’t use it a whole lot, but it’s handy sometimes, especially with dialog boxes that present a pair of buttons to accept or cancel an action.

On the other side of the TouchBar is a Touch Id sensor; you can train the computer to recognize your fingerprint, and this will authenticate you anywhere you need to enter your password. It’s awesome. I can log in by touching, Safari can enter a site password by touching, I can confirm a purchase on the App store with a touch.

Overall, I’m very happy with this machine. The nitpicks are minor, and I’m getting five years of improvements in battery life, display, and performance with a keyboard that I can like.

Making of a Christmas Card, 2019

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I wasn’t sure I even wanted to do a Christmas card this year, with everything that’s going on. But at one point, Mum indicated she would like to join my card (she later changed her mind), so I started looking though my photo library to see if I had anything suitable. I knew that even more than most years, I did not have the spare time to devote a lot of time to cards. Fortunately, I was able to spend some time on them Thanksgiving weekend.

I quickly zeroed in on a picture I took at First Night last year of Boston’s 2018 Christmas tree. I would have liked a scene with snow, but this picture was decently framed, didn’t have any passers-by standing in front of it, and I felt that with a few simple enhancements, it would do.

Boston’s 2018 Christmas Tree, at First Night 2019

It was pretty simple. Unlike most years, I didn’t use Photoshop, as my ancient copy of Photoshop CS 5 has given up the ghost, so I used Pixelmator Pro. I cropped the photo, to change the aspect ratio to 4:5 and to get rid of most of the empty foreground. Then I added a translucent layer over the tree, and blurred it slightly, to lend a glow to the lights. Finally, I added another blur layer over the remaining foreground, to make the texture of the dirt a little less obvious. I briefly considered adding snow, but realized that it would take several hours that I don’t have this year.

I then moved to Pages. I used to lay out my cards laboriously in Illustrator, but then macOS dropped support for PowerPC software (I detect a theme) and I wasn’t able to use it anymore, so several years ago, I looked into Apple’s Pages, and found it had a built in template for quarter-fold cards.

(Aside: I like both Illustrator and Photoshop, but I don’t use them enough to justify keeping them up-to-date, and I don’t like Adobe’s pricing model of charging an ongoing subscription, so I’ve had to find substitutes. I use Illustrator so little that it hasn’t been a problem, but I do miss having Photoshop available.)

I started by duping my 2016 card, which was also a vertical photograph. I removed the old photo, added the new one, and then chose a different font and text treatment for the text.

The inside was the harder issue this year. My normal holiday greeting didn’t seem right this year, but how much to say about Mum? I ended up with three versions this year — blank, with a hand-written note, and two versions that addressed her stroke, with one version being a little more personal for recipients who know her themselves.

For card stock, I went back to quarter fold card stock this year. I hadn’t liked the half-fold cards last year, and besides, the quarter-fold cards print faster, since you get two per sheet. This year, all Staples had when I picked it up was textured paper. I liked the feel of it, but it lowered the contrast of the photo. But I didn’t have time to go chasing around for plain stock, or to order some online, so the textured stock it was.

I’d accidentally forgotten one of my old friends last year (Hi Trixi!) , and she asked me about it when I saw her this spring, so I made sure she got card #1 this year.

Fortunately, the printer behaved itself this year, and I was able to manufacture the cards relatively simply and without too much waste, and was able to get them out without too much trouble.

Finished 2019 card

Merry Christmas everyone.

Still Alive, but in Limbo

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Yes, I’m still alive. Yes, I know I haven’t posted anything since August 31.

About three weeks after that last post, my mother fell several times the same day. After the first fall, I asked if she was OK, and she brushed me off, and I went to work. When I came down for coffee, she’d fallen again, and in fact, she had fallen two other times, managed to catch herself, and didn’t say anything. I insisted she go to her doctor, who inspected her for a few minutes, and sent her across the street to Norwood Hospital in an ambulance, where we found out she’d had a stroke. (Pro tip from her doctor, when a relative has had a fall like this, just call EMS and let them deal with convincing the patient she needs attention).

It’s been a loooooong fall. She’s been in and out of three acute care hospitals (Norwood, Brigham and Womens, and Mass General), and had a couple more strokes, plus a bleeding episode when they got too aggressive with the blood thinners. She’s been back and forth from Spaulding Rehab for about six weeks, and she’s finally scheduled for discharge to a skilled nursing facility tomorrow.

My boss has been very supportive, and I’ve been trying to keep up with work, but between work, keeping up with the essential house and yard work, and hospital time, there just hasn’t been much time for myself. I’ve been letting a lot of stuff slide.

Because I live with her, I feel like my whole life is in flux right now. I don’t know when or if she’s coming home, or what kind of help she’ll need if she gets back.

Emotions are running high for all of us right now. It doesn’t take much to make me well up, and I know my siblings are in the same boat. I went to see the WinterLights installation over the weekend with my sister, brother and sister-in-law, and it was really nice to do something fun and relatively normal. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but remember that Mum would have loved to have been with us.

I’m hoping that maybe they’ve finally found a balance between preventing further clots and causing bleeds, and that she can continue to progress in the rehab facility. Spaulding was very good to her, but it’s been an ordeal getting over there; about an hour each way. The new place is much closer, and I’m hoping for more time for myself. But it will take a while to feel comfortable that there won’t be any more emergencies for a while.

Brickyard Pond, Barrington, RI

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Near the midpoint of the East Bay Bike Path you pass a large pond, Brickyard Pond. The pond is large, about 84 acres, and, from the bike way seems quite wild, as it’s ringed by marsh grasses and has several small islands covered with marsh grass and trees. In fact, it’s man-made – it was the site of a clay quarry used to make bricks that eventually filled with water.

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I Am Not Your Best Buddy

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I signed up for an online course late last week, and immediately noticed something I’ve noticed before. The company started flooding me with advertisements.

Message to companies: I am not your best buddy. I am not your parent. I’m not your lover, and I’m not even necessarily a fan. I am your customer, and I have no need to be in constant contact with you.

It’s not unreasonable for a company to request an email address with an order; after all, they need to be able to get in touch if there is a problem. I don’t even mind occasional updates if there is something new to say. But constantly bombarding me every day — and I think I’ve gotten one from this online course nearly every day — with mail of “offers” is supremely counterproductive; it is the fastest way to get me to hit the unsubscribe button. And I think twice before dealing with the company again.

July 20, 1969

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I remember the Apollo 11 landing.

I was 9, almost 10, and had been a rabid fan of the space program. I remember watching the later Gemini launches. I remember building a Saturn V model with my Dad, and building larger models of the Apollo spacecraft itself.

We had just started our two weeks on the Cape. Mum had been visiting her sister in New York, so I’d had to watch the launch at my uncle’s house, but she was back, and we were on the Cape. It was only our fourth year at Sands Road.

Dad and his brothers had found the mast of an old boat, and were going to erect it at the Cape house as a flag pole. I remember them spending the morning planing down the bottom of the mast so it would fit into the steel sleeve that would actually go into the ground, and adding the fittings to it. I remember the bright gold ball at the top.

And then around 4, Mum called me into the house. The landing was about to happen. And on a snowy, staticky black and white TV, I saw Walter Cronkite announce the landing. What I did not notice, as I was too young, was what a close thing it had been, how close to running out of fuel they had come.

Then I went back out, to see Dad and his brothers finish erecting the flagpole. They’d set it in concrete, and in the base of it, Dad had inscribed, “ON THIS DAY, SUNDAY JULY 20, 1969 MAN LANDED ON THE MOON”

According to the flight plan, the astronauts were supposed to rest after the landing, with the moonwalk in the middle of the night, way too late for a little boy. But then the astronauts requested permission to go out onto the surface first, and rest later — they were too keyed up to sleep, and Houston agreed. This would take them outside around 10. Could I possibly stay up that late?

My mother said no, and sent me off to bed, deeply unhappy. Then Dad came upstairs, and told me I could watch the moonwalk after all. So I came back down and watched. The reception was crummy — without cable, television on the Cape was snow and static. It seemed to take forever for Armstrong come out of the LM — it took a long time to get ready, and to drain all the air out of the spacecraft, and then open the door.

Then finally, a fuzzy white blob came down the screen, and we heard the words, “Thats one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

My parents let me stay up a little while longer. I think I saw Aldrin come down too; I don’t remember if I saw the President’s phone call to them. But I’d seen enough; I’d seen the historic first steps. And I remember the newspapers the next day, with their huge headlines, “MAN WALKS ON MOON”

Putting up, and taking down the flag became part of our Cape Cod rituals. I would run the flag up the pole around 8:30, and take it down and respectfully fold it into triangles at the end of the day.

The flagpole is still there, but rarely used nowadays. The concrete with the inscription was broken a while back to permit the pole to be repainted, but it’s been a long time since and the paint is nearly gone, and the inscription is barely visible. I’d love to restore it.

For someone who was so deeply invested in the space program as a child, I haven’t been that much into the 50th anniversary hoopla; I’m not sure why. I first read Command Module Pilot Mike Collin’s book, Carrying the Fire, decades ago, and have re-read it several times since. It’s one of the best accounts of the mission I’ve seen, and I keep a copy on my phone and iPad, and dip into it from time to time, including today. And I did see the IMAX Apollo 11 movie.

But I haven’t been watching all the specials and news coverage. I haven’t bothered to watch the videos of Cronkite’s coverage on YouTube yet. I suppose part of it is a distrust of hoopla, and an annoyance with the typically shallow coverage things get nowadays — I can often pick holes in the Apollo coverage.

But I suspect that part of it is that I remember.

Fort Ticonderoga

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After finishing up the Star Trek Tour, I had dinner, then headed for the motel, the Trout House Village Resort, and checked in. The Trout House has frontage along Lake George, with floats, a swimming area and some kayaks. It was windy, and near dusk, by the time I settled in, so I contented myself with settling into an Adirondack chair on a float on the lake.

The next morning, I headed for the fort. I didn’t know much about the fort other than the fact that it was the site of a Revolutionary War battle, but I figured I’d find out there.

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Martha’s Vineyard via Wrangler

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I enjoyed my trip to the Vineyard last year with Brian and Pam, and I’ve been thinking about getting a Jeep Wrangler for a while. Since the Vineyard is one of the places where you can rent a Wrangler, it made sense to me to kill two birds with one stone and go back and rent a Jeep to see how it felt.

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