Category Archives: Grumbles

Some of the things that annoy me.

Just Another COVID Christmas

by

(With apologies to the Bangles.)

It turned out Mum’s funeral was quite the super-spreader event.

Tom returned to California the day after, and texted us from the Denver airport to say that his friend Rich has COVID.

Since then, my sister-in-law and brother-in-law and nephew definitely have COVID, as do my cousin and his wife. While we’ve tested negative, Tom and I have both been quite sick, and I would not be surprised if we actually had it. I’ve now filled a couple of wastebaskets with spent tissues.

In light of this, Nancy and I deferred our Christmas plans until Friday. I’m now in the goopy mucus-y stage, so I’m thinking I may go for a drive in a little while and see some Christmas lights. I expect to be feeling sound by the end of the week, and definitely non-contagious by then. In the meantime, for the next couple of days, I’m keeping to myself.

Stop ‘n’ Shop’s Self Service Checkout

by

I went to Stop ‘n’ Shop tonight to pick up a few things. Not a full order, just enough to round out a few things I’d run out of.

I usually go through the cashier line, because things go much smoother, and it’s better for my blood pressure, but there was only cashier open, and there was a line of several people. So I figured, “this is a partial order, why don’t I use the self-service?”

What. A. F—ing. Mistake.

Going through the Stop ‘n’ Shop self service always ends up making me angry and frustrated, because it is so bloody minded brain dead. Invariably, I will have to stop and wait because I dared to do something it didn’t expect. And the attitude it gives you! Snotty to the nth degree.

Tonight, the problem was that I dared put an empty bag in the bagging area. Sacrilege, I know, right? IT’S NOT LIKE I MIGHT LIKE TO PUT THE ITEMS STRAIGHT INTO THE BAG AFTER SCANNING. I mean, which makes more sense — to put the items directly into the bag, WHICH IS WHERE I WANT THEM TO WIND UP, or to just pile them into the bagging area, and then bag them later?

For the first bag, it just sniveled at me, and then shut up while I filled it. When I put a second empty bag into place, it then locked up, told me “help is on the way” and refused to let me do anything else. Rage filled my mind, and I wanted badly to just bash that stupid thing into a million billion pieces, But then I realized I really didn’t want to pay to replace it, and forbore. Barely.

The final indignity came at the end. It wanted to know how many bags I’d be using. IF YOU’D LET ME BAG THEM AS I SCANNED THEM, I’D KNOW, YOU STUPID PIECE OF S—. As it was, I guessed four, I only really needed three, but I’d paid for four, goddammit, so I stuck the sack of potatoes in the bag.

I don’t know why they have to be so braindead. I also shop at Wegman’s (I love their yogurt and a few of their other things), and nearly always use the self-checkout there, without problems.

All I know is that if they ever decommission these machines, I’ll be among the first to volunteer for the baseball bat brigade.

Damned Mice

by

I got a custom Corbin saddle for the FJR in August. Overall, it’s been comfortable, and lowers the riding position so that I feel safer with it, but I’ve also noticed my back hurts. This is not necessarily new, but I decided to put the stock seat back on, and check it out.

When I did, I found the under-seat area was filled with pink fiberglass insulation taken from an old roll that’s been in the garage for decades. Clearly, mice have found the bike.

Mouse nest

Worse, they’d found the insulation on the wiring harnesses tasty, and had stripped the insulation off.

Bare wires

So now, I have some free time, and the peak foliage season, and I don’t dare use the bike because the electrical system is likely to short out if the wires happen to touch.

About the only good thing about the situation is that I discovered it in the driveway instead of being stranded someplace. I’m enough of a believer in Murphy’s Law to know I’ve dodged a bullet, but the shop can’t even look at it for a couple of weeks, and who knows what they’ll find then. I’m hoping the wiring harness is orderable as a unit, and can simply be replaced completely.

The Tyranny of the Stupid

by

I think the single most upsetting thing about the pandemic is the sheer amount of stupid running rampant in the country. This country, that once sent men to the moon six times and out-fought and out-manufactured the Axis powers in World War II, has fallen prey to nitwits and charlatans who won’t take the science of the situation seriously.

These folks are so adamant about asserting their personal freedoms that they forget that with freedom comes responsibility, including the responsibility to choose to do the right thing, both to protect themselves, and others. You may have the right to be stupid, but you shouldn’t choose to be, and your right to be stupid ends where it affects my freedoms.

Last year, because we were stupid, we let let the pandemic get out of hand. Because the stupid would not refrain from gathering, and refused to wear masks, the virus spread further than it should have.

Last Thanksgiving and Christmas, because people were too stupid and too selfish to give up the gratification of holiday fun, the virus spiked, and people died. Needlessly.

Now we have vaccines that are highly effective, free, and widely available. And yet people still won’t take them. Because people are stupid, the virus is spiking again, and people are dying again. And for no good reason. While the vaccines are not completely risk-free, the odds of having a problem are exceedingly low. Millions of doses have been given out; the number of people who have had serious complications from the virus is around a couple hundred,

Because people are stupid, COVID restrictions will be coming back, even for those of us who have been vaccinated. Because people are stupid, there is more COVID around, and the odds of vaccinated people getting a breakthrough infection are higher. It won’t send us to the hospital or kill us like it would an unvaccinated person, but it’s still needlessly unpleasant. And of course, it can kill the unvaccinated. But because people are stupid, mask mandates will be coming back for sure, and if that doesn’t work, authorities will have to decide whether to implement further restrictions to protect people who are too stupid to protect themselves.

Because people are stupid, medical people, who have been dealing with crushing workloads and the emotional burden of dealing with comforting dying people, are dealing with a new load, this time, more or less self-inflicted,

Because people are stupid, we are having get used to there being a spike in cases in the two weeks following each holiday.

I’m not asking for the government to require vaccines. But I wish people would freely choose to do the smart thing.

The Christmas That Isn’t

by

It’s Christmastime… but it isn’t. Not with COVID it isn’t.

Normally we would have a big family get-together Christmas Eve. Not this year. Last year, we weren’t able to, with Mum in rehab for her strokes. I was really hoping at the beginning of the year that we could have our get-together again this year. Nope. We’re going to have to content ourselves with video calls this year. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do it in 2021.

We’ve gone up to Rockport most years for the past several years, to shop the stores on Bearskin Neck, and see the decorations. Mum was very fond of the Christmas pageant, because it was a re-enactment of the Nativity. Even if we wanted to take the risk, it’s just not feasible this year.

I’ve gone Christmas shopping every year since I was in college. This year, I ordered a couple of things off Amazon, and that was it. (To be fair, most of this is due to the fact that none of the nephews and nieces are little anymore, and most of my siblings agreed long ago not to do packages.

I wasn’t sure I even wanted to do a tree this year. I’m frankly not feeling it much this year, and I was concerned about laying out the living room — Mum now spends most of the day in her chair in the living room, and whatever I did, I would need to ensure that there was room for the chair and room for her to maneuver with the walker.

Most years, I like to make an occasion of putting up the tree, but not this year. I was also aware that I’d be doing most of the work of putting it up and taking it down. In the end, Mum wanted one, and I realized I did too, so I picked up a relatively narrow tree.

As it happened, there was a gash in the bark about 4 inches from the bottom. We had this a couple of years ago, and ended up with a tree that dried out pretty rapidly, so this year, I made a new cut above the gash, and cut off the lower branches. This had the benefit of making the tree smaller overall — both narrower, and shorter. I was able to use two fewer strings of lights. This meant I was able to skip the older LED lights I’ve been using for the past couple of years. My first set of LED lights were too blue for my taste; eventually, I found a couple of strings of warmer colored LED lights that I like much better. With only the warm LEDs and one string of mini-incandescent lights, this year’s tree is much more pleasing to me. And I was able to fit the angel on the top easily for the first time this year.

Christmas tree and Mum
Christmas tree and Mum

Even though it’s smaller, it’s still a pretty nice tree. And there’s still room for Mum next to it.

Ugh, Adobe.

by

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.

Odds & Ends

by

A few little items:

I’ve been working from home for the past month or so. We’d been in a co-working space in Boston for the past year, and it was decided that since most of the developers are remote from the main London office, we should work remotely too. I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I’m finding that I personally end up working very late. On the flip side, I did pick up two lovely 27″ Thunderbolt monitors which work just as well with my personal Mac as they do with my work Mac.

There’s been a nasty strain of what’s probably the flu going around this week, and I managed to pick it up. I was fine on Sunday, with just a little cough, Monday, I was a little achy over the course of the day, and I was pretty much out of it the rest of the week. Tuesday and Wednesday I managed to get up and get dressed, get some code reviews done, do some minor work, and then fall back into bed. I haven’t felt this crummy for so many days since grade school. No appetite, achy and feverish all over, chills, headaches, the works.  By Friday I was starting to feel a little better, but I’m still feeling a bit light-headed. It’s also run through my brother’s family, my sister’s family, the family across the street, and my friends report being sick too.

We’ve had a pretty strong nor’easter Friday and Saturday. Rain and snow Friday, heavy rain yesterday that turned back to snow. And then today, I noticed the first of my new planting of crocuses had blossomed.

New crocuses

First of the new crocuses

Spring time, and better days, are ahead.

Non-Breaking “Breaking News”

by

I’m getting very annoyed with the way local media is abusing the term “breaking news”. To my mind, stories must meet these criteria to be termed “Breaking News”

  1. The story must have just become known,
  2. and be of an urgent or emergency nature
  3. or supremely important

I’m a Boston Globe subscriber, and we watch the Channel 5 news. Both are bothering me with their misuses of “breaking news”.

The Globe sends out breaking news emails, and they’re pretty good about doing it in timely fashion, but I’m really starting to wonder about their news judgement. For example, Friday, I got an email from them: “Breaking News Alert: Baker promises state funding to offset any Planned Parenthood cuts”. This is not urgent, this is not an emergency, it doesn’t rise to the level of importance I would expect —and it is done via an email, which means it’s an interruption. Lately, they’ve been supplementing it with “morning”, “midday” and “afternoon” reads.

I do read the news. But it if isn’t pressing, I’d prefer to read it on my own schedule.

They also send out a morning digest of the headlines— that, I do appreciate and enjoy, because it comes on a schedule and is not an interruption. I also do appreciate the breaking new alerts that truly are breaking; for example the alert they sent out last week of a major problem on the expressway. They weren’t doing the email alerts at the time of the Marathon bombing, but it would have been entirely appropriate then.

WCVB misuses the term in another way, to promote news stories that have already been broken. This weekend’s example would be the fire in Warwick that happened overnight, but was still being described as “breaking” on the 6 PM newscast the following day. It’s especially annoying when there is nothing new to the story, and they’ve been telling the story all afternoon on their various newscasts. If there is nothing new to add, and the story is more than a couple of hours old, it is no longer “breaking”.

The term “breaking news” used to imply some sort of emergency. If news organizations continue to abuse it, like the boy who cried “Wolf”, the public will learn to ignore it.

 

 

Stupidity #1,836,753

by

Sometimes, I find myself doing the same stupid thing over and over again.

I bought Seasons 1 and 2 of the remastered Star Trek: The Next Generation. TNG is probably my favorite of the Star Trek series. I managed to wade through Season 1 but didn’t make it very far into Season 2.

When Borders was closing, I saw a complete DVD set of The World At War on sale for $30. My Dad and I used watch it together when it first came out, and I can still remember the theme music. The box set is sitting in a drawer, unopened.

I started re-watching episodes of WKRP In Cincinnati on YouTube. I didn’t care for the quality, and the bootleg versions they had were clipped top and bottom, so I bought the complete box set of all the seasons. So far, I’ve just made it to the middle of Season 1, where Mama Carlson does a performance review of the station.

A couple of weeks ago iTunes had a sale on the first season of Batman, for only $10. I loved Batman as a kid, and still sometimes catch it on MeTV. I enjoy it differently than I did then, but it’s still fun. I haven’t watched any of it yet.

And now, I find myself wanting to sign up for HBO in order to get Game of Thrones. I haven’t seen it, but it looks interesting. Lot of people are really into it. But am I really ready to binge watch 60 hours of it? The clock is ticking; the next season begins this summer.