Added a December folder. I also spent some time looking for a previous post on this site that I thought existed, but it doesn’t. I can search the files that make up this blog in 

, but maybe it’s time to figure out a search feature for the site itself.

 dusty but for some reason I bought it and now it’s a website, so please enjoy 

Lorelei got her second shot so we celebrated with donuts from 

 thing up, and this is a highlight from mine:

 in this house. We’re very excited for Season 2 tomorrow. You will often hear one of us say “none of us are comfortable until we are all comfortable” (watch from below if you have no idea what I’m talking about. Then go back and watch the entire show).

How long will browsers be the UI target of choice

 feature. I only knew from Twitter because, why would I ever run Edge. But more to the point, how far are we from when browsers are their own compile targets. We’re close enough already with web to native frameworks, why not just reduce everything to 

 and let a compiler figure out what that turns into.

Sometimes, and not enough to keep me up at night, but sometimes, I think browsers are getting boring, the same e-commerce and silo’d text update websites being given all of the priority. Other times I find things like 

. There’s still “cool” stuff being made for the web, but there’s a heavily biased incentive to build things that feed the beast, and if AR and VR grow like some companies hope they will, I can only see the monetization wedge being driven even deeper.

None of us are comfortable until we are all comfortable.

Weeknotes for the week ending December 5, 2021

Since we did the family Thanksgiving last weekend, the last four days have been nothing but relaxation for us. The six-year old watched TV until her brain melted, my wife read books or did research until her brain melted, and I just kind of chilled until my already melted brain reshaped. Or something. Maybe it’s still a little gooey.

  remake around Halloween. I finally beat it this weekend. I’m not usually a fan of  games that you have to play through twice to completely enjoy but I went through both the Claire and Leon runs and I'm glad I did. I played the original game on the N64 and never beat it, so this might set a record for the longest time to finish a game.

 that I would start reading again, and I did. I finished 

, which was a well done little bit of horror. I think pretty early on it became obvious where the plot was going so I sped through the later half of the book but I'd still recommend it [^1].

Put up the tree. Immediately the cats starting losing their minds.

 which is the lesser known of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas movies. Arguably the better of the two.

Every year around Christmas / New Years I look at the systems I used for my personal life the year before and reevaluate things. This year I wanted to get a head start on it, mainly because in past years if I start something at the beginning of the New Year and then find out three months in it’s not working I think “well I’ve already got three months” in or “well there’s only nine months left?” or some such silly ideas.

Today I sat down and organized Things, Bear, and iCloud to all be in line. Essentially I borrowed the structure from Things (Areas with Projects in them) and used that in Bear and iCloud. So now at the top level of iCloud there’s the areas, and inside of that there are folders that correspond to a project or context for that area. Same with Bear, there’s top level tags for the areas, and second level tags for the projects / context.

I did find this in one of my Bear notes, from 

As Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid was I a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.”

So I guess I learned something in the last year?

I might have more thoughts on this later[^2], but for now I’m just here to point out that with us entering COVID round three…

…we’re looking at two years of whatever we’ve been calling the last two years, and should probably stop talking about “the new normal” or “the way things were” and start living like things are as they are. I suppose it’s a human way of thinking to say “now is 

 but the future will be different and better!” but… I dunno, it’s probably not!

[^1]: In case you’re thinking “Joe that doesn’t seem nearly lazy enough for a lazy long weekend” I also made it to the final boss of 

. This isn’t quite pre-kid levels of lazy but now that she’s old enough to be lazy herself it’s getting closer.
[^2]: Is having thoughts on days that aren’t Sunday part of why I reorganized all my projects/notes/files? Stay tuned!

Letting your brain turn to the consistency of canned cranberry sauce.

Weeknotes for the week ending November 28, 2021

We did Thanksgiving this weekend with my parents. I’m a big fan of doing holiday gatherings 

 on holidays, whenever possible, because traveling and planning is so much easier. Some menu notes from this year:

I don’t have any pictures because this isn’t Instagram. I made the food, I ate the food.

I ordered new speakers / tried out switching around the ones we had. I picked up the two base, not ad-revenue-driven “smart speakers” on the market, the Apple Homepod Mini and the Ikea Symfonisk shelfspeaker. Both are around $100. They’re both… ok. They work for what I wanted them for, the Homepod (mini) is in an office, and the Symfonisk is in the basement literally being used as a shelf. If I didn’t also want a shelf I think a stereo pair of dumb speakers would have blown it away. I also tried the mini as the output for the TV (haha - no!), and tried the Homepod in place of the lower-end soundbar we have. I think a stereo pair of Homepods would sound great. I’d think a stereo pair up front and stereo minis as satellites should work really great. I expect that will be a thing Apple sells and supports just before the heat-death of the universe.

Weeknotes for the week ending November 21, 2021

Weeknotes for the week ending November 14, 2021

Not a lot of updates this week. It was a super busy one at work, so that was my main focus. When things get busy my journaling falls off first, then scraps of notes, 

 photos, and I’ve got like two photos from this week so I guess that means something.

The Solar Dial is my “weekend” watch face for my Apple Watch. It’s set to show the temperature, when the Sun is going to set, and if it’s going to rain - and also the date because I have never, in my life, had any fucking idea what day it is. Today it gets a bit more fun by lining up on both sides.

Unfortunately for the next months it will slowly descend into a tiny sliver of sunlight. I should put on my bucket list taking it to a location with 24 hours of sunlight.

Weeknotes for the week ending November 7, 2021

Writing this while manning the trick-or-treat duties. Not a lot of kids so far this year[^3], which is surprising. Last year we had a decent turnout even with COVID and it being below freezing.

 on Hulu, but I’d forgotten the exact plot beats of the comic. 

 was the first comic I got into when I got 

 into comics as an adult, and I’m enjoying how the TV series is going deeper into some character’s backstories, being 

 subtle about others[^1], and splitting other characters into multiple characters (and going deeper into the backstories of both!). I’m glad it’s getting the treatment it deserves.

I ripped down a bunch of builder’s favorite Closetmaid shelves in our house this week, and replaced them with Elfa shelving. They aren’t cheap, but I do like that you can set the entire thing up with 6 screws in a headrail, and then make infinite[^2] layers of shelves in-between. The only complaint is that every piece has a sticker on it, and about 84% of the installation time is peeling stickers and getting rid of packaging.

Lorelei is back home with a pile of candy. Small turnout this year so… I think I’m gonna help myself to 

 a few of these candies we bought to hand out.

Oh and if you’re curious, my Halloween candy power rankings:

[^1]: No spoilers, but the comic starts off by throwing a bunch of theories at the reader as to why all the men died, and the TV series is very much keeping one of them a secret!
[^2]: Or like, 8, max. It’s still a clever system.
[^3]: By the time I finished writing this we were at about 20 trick-or-treaters, closer to average for this house.

Weeknotes for the week ending October 31, 2021

Went to a concert for the first time since COVID. The show was 

 (first punk band I’ve seen use a xylophone), 

, short one member, but made up for with some mouth trumpet and backup from the previous bands.

And shoutout to Dan for getting the tickets and convincing me to leave the house. We both acknowledged it’s a lot harder these days.

An iPhone 13 Pro showed up this week. I wasn’t planning on upgrading my XR (it was fine), but the AT&T trade-in for a decent amount of money only to be mind-controlled by them for the rest of your life[^1] was hard to pass up. Also, the number of cameras. My XR was definitely lacking in 

So far that camera has been great for taking pictures of my child who finds the most adorable faces to make.

Just posting this for posterity, so some day my kid can find this and know that I was good at video games (some times, when other people are bad).

[^1]: I was just pushed an update (over 5G, of course), that informed me this is not true.

I’m just glad I’m not the oldest person at this show yet.

Weeknotes for the week ending October 24, 2021

 from… October of 2015. Also worth noting when the find the cure, no one (not even Applejack) makes a fuss about how they can’t be forced to take it.

 last week, and there’s a scene where Will Smith’s character talks about how his father (who he pretends is Sidney Poitier) is going to make a movie version of 

Even Zecora knows to wear a mask!

The very first blog post on this blog is about 

. I’m glad to see the new M1 Pro/Max fixes everything. I already bought an M1 Air but someday this touchbar/butterfly workbox will get replaced with one of these, so there’s that to look foward to.

Also, that Dell I went with was fine. I ended up getting rid of it because I don’t game on PC any more. You’d still be better off with any Dell with a dedicated GPU than a Mac for gaming, even if it will pull down 400 watts of power to run.

They finally remade my 2013 Macbook Pro


Q: What do a couch and a baby have in common?


A: If you want one now, you have to wait 10 months.

We purchased an Ikea sectional when we moved into this house not many years ago. It was fine, it filled the space we wanted to fill, but lately it’s become spine-tinglingly uncomfortable[^1]. We went to the Jordan’s superstore which is… definitely not one of my favorite places on Earth, but the combo of nice weather / COVID / and the fact that every scrap of furniture upholstery is sitting in a cargo ship currently lost in the middle of the Pacific meant there was hardly any one there. We ordered some new couches and a chair and they’ll be in our house (

Since it was pretty empty, we took Lorelei to do the 

 they have there. The excitement of it was enough to get her into the harness and up to the first level, but after a few crossings I got two big thumbs down while she held on to one of the landing posts.

The team got together in Woostah on Monday. This is the third time I’ve seen them IRL since starting at Chewy. The entire team has joined during the COVID 

Growing up we had a few people in the neighborhood I trick-or-treated in who would take things too seriously. Like, put on a hockey mask then hide in a leaf pile with an actual chainsaw seriously. So, I’ve always been a fan of more sedate Halloween decorating. A few pumpkins, maybe some sugar skulls, a couple of leaves I failed to rake blown about. Lorelei had a specific request for spider webs this year. Sure, why not. I had to go to Home Depot anyway, so I brought her along, thinking they always have a seasonal display with some decorating stuff in it. Well, apparently the “season” appropriate for October 15th is Christmas. But! It’s 2021, and “thanks” to COVID there are hundreds of empty retail stores out there for 

 to sink its creepy claws into. So we found one of those, which, amazingly I don’t think I’ve ever been in. They had an entire rack full of decorative spider webs. The store had probably the most people I’ve seen in a retail establishment since the beginning of the the COVID 

 era. We passed on the 7+ foot animatronic 

 but man for $300 that puts the animatronics in some local theme parks to shame.

[^1]: Or, I’m getting old. Or it’s both.

You can have the things you want a long time from now, and the things you don't want now.

built with coffee