, but by far the most frustrating thing about any new technology is that when it doesn’t work there’s absolutely fuck-all you can do to try to debug the issue.

I picked up a Eve smart plug for the Christmas tree. Added it to Home, flipped it off… couldn’t flip it back on. Unplugged it, plugged it back it, flipped it on, off… and that was it. Says it’s “not responding” in home. Then I notice one of the lights in that room (which has worked consistently until now), also “not responding”.

The answers online seem to always be “reset everything”, “power cycle everything”, “toggle every feature on your router”, or some other combination that would be easy if I had a trained monkey to push buttons in sequence.

Anyway, I haven’t figured it out yet, so tonight I’ll be unplugging the tree… from the smart plug.

I’d flip this table but it’s a smart one and it’s not responding

Did some holiday decorating and baking after going out to see 

, which I rate a solid “ok”. The central plot (which I won’t spoil) I enjoyed, and some of the visuals were well done, especially the comic book style introduction, but the meat of the story was pretty forgettable. Lorelei’s favorite part: “when the dog licked the thing”. I agree, the dog is funny.

Also I’ve seen the “movie theaters are dying” stories and, sure, COVID, but I didn’t think much of it until today when… we had the entire theatre to ourselves. Early afternoon, and the theater is in the middle of a mall (that also might be dying), but geez, that doesn’t seem sustainable.

Did some holiday decorating and baking after going out to see Strange World.

You can’t catch me

We did “early” Thanksgiving with my parents this weekend. We do it the weekend before because then it’s easier for my parents to visit us, and on the actual weekend of Thanksgiving we usually have four straight days to do “not much”.

Every year I struggle to find the recipes/timings/temperatures I used the year before, even though every year I write it down somewhere. So this year, it’s here. Maybe next year I’ll find it.

I wish that turkey only cost a nickel

That was an actual web, with webmasters, and crawlers, and spiders. It feels like the current web is a lot more spiders dangling from a very high ceiling on a single thread, just waiting for a strong wind to blow them off.

I miss the old metaphor for the web

I use iA Writer, Bear, and Obsidian these days. I use iA Writer for writing (like writing this post), Bear for notes, and Obsidian at work for work notes. I wish all three could be smooshed together.

A quick example of Obsidian queries. Two separate daily notes with a #workouts tag on them.

I’d drop Bear for Obsidian on features, but Bear is miles ahead on UI, especially on mobile. Bear 2.0 seems like it will be released “soon”, but I might start taking advantage of Bear’s export to markdown features to then import in Obsidian for querying.

The best parts of my favorite note and writing apps.

Can we smoosh iA Writer, Bear, and Obsidian together

Andrea had a good idea the other day to set up a digital display in our kitchen area to be able to see shared calendars, reminders, other digital debris we individually see on our devices but don’t have a great way of seeing as a family.

We do everything in the Apple-ecosystem, Homekit, iCloud, all that, so it 

 that setting up an iPad to be a simple controller/view screen for this information would be easy, but Apple has made iPadOS the most frustrating OS in existence. Some things I ran into:

Anyway, it’s up and running now, I’ll see how it works out for us. It remains baffling to me that the iPad exists as this “super simple” device for kids and grandparents but also a pocketable super computer. And also why isn’t there an Apple TV with a display. Also why can’t you hide the dock. Also… I think that’s it for tonight.

Wherein I consider throwing my iPad into the river.

Setting up an iPad as a multi-user device

It’s a bad pun, I spent a fair share of time today mucking about with tires, swapping a bike one for a trainer tire for the still-not-yet-here Cold season, and putting on the Winter wheels for our Subaru (for the still-not-yet-here Snow season).

They are deceptively simple, especially a bike one. Bit of rubber with some air in it, but quite amazing (or terrifying) when you realize that’s the bit of rubber keeping the wheels turning at 80 miles per hour. Uh, in the car, that is.

The wheels on the vehicles go round and round.

Tired

. We talked for hours about a few significant days in his life, but at the time it was hard to find any information about it online. Well I searched again this year and found this, 

This paragraph describes the main conflict my grandfather saw in the war and described to me in detail:

Irwin broke off the attack the following day and replaced elements of his battered 11th Infantry with fresh troops from his 2nd and 10th Regiments; the two units renewed the assault on October 7. This time, the Americans attempted to fight their way into the underground entrances to the fort but made no better progress; they soon were bogged down.

The 26th Division alone reported 3,000 cases of trench foot during the November offensive, Patton said.

Which was what eventually sent my Grandfather back to America.

Veteran’s Day

At this point I have to hope Twitter fails because if it’s successful a lot of other CEOs are going to wonder if they can cut half their staff and force people back to offices.

If I had to guess, in a year from now it’ll still be around, but some incredibly pared down version of it’s former self that still lives at twitter.com but isn’t recognizable as anything you’d think of as Twitter. I mean Myspace isn’t even completely dead yet.

We don’t need more bad ideas getting popular.

At this point I have to hope Twitter fails

, bit of a joke title but good ideas in here, especially this one:

Let’s not keep maintaining this feature.

I’ve gone so far as to slip some features into the red-lined diff during a refactor to see if anyone noticed [^1].

, definitely a little more pointed after recent stories about a particular new social media owner hiring or firing engineers based on lines of code:

Jeff Atwood: “the best code is no code at all. Every new line of code you willingly bring into the world is code that has to be debugged, code that has to be read and understood, code that has to be supported. Every time you write new code, you should do so reluctantly, under duress, because you completely exhausted all your other options.”

Robert Galanakis: “The fastest code is the code which does not run. The code easiest to maintain is the code that was never written.”

Dijkstra: it is only a small step to measuring "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced per month". This is a very costly measuring unit because it encourages the writing of insipid code, but today I am less interested in how foolish a unit it is from even a pure business point of view. My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

Bill Gates: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

[^1]: They did, they always do. They couldn’t explain why it was there but oh boy did they miss it!

My favorite programmers are the ones that are smart and lazy.

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