Ora et Labora

Today: Apple announced new studio displays and I’ve always been tempted by them, especially when the old Asus monitor would constantly flicker when using an M Series mac. Luckily the Dell Monitor I picked up a few years ago has worked really well and reduced by desire for a studio display, but darn if it isn’t still there.

Also curious about the cheap Macbook Neo they’re releasing. I really do not need the level of tech I have, and the allure of a cheap, efficient laptop is really compelling. That being said I don’t exactly have faith the 8 GB of RAM is going to hold up very well.

Status: Spent past of yesterday tinkering with screen time and app limits. Frustrating I have a few apps that are defined as separate based on if it’s an iOS or MacOS app.

Reading: I read some more of Martyr! after about a month of not reading it, still not sure I’m committed.

Last Watched: Penultimate Game of Thrones episode. It really is rushed. I never paid attention to why people hated the end of the show, but the final season really does feel like a sprint to get everything tied up as quickly as possible. You’re already in for so much money in these seasons, would seven more episodes across two seasons have added that much to the cost in the long run?

It’s nearly 80 degrees outside and we’ve got rain on and off for the rest of the week. Spring in other words.

Today:

These explanations fail because they assume something has gone wrong. If we start instead with the premise that something has gone right, the puzzle solves itself. - Why Are American Passenger Trains Slow?

Status: Bought a new low profile mechanical keyboard and I’m ready to throw it out the window already. Never had so many typos with a keyboard as this one, which I just switched away from mid sentence.

Also considering experimenting with utilizing Obsidian, templates, and it’s various plugins to run a self-hosted Hugo blog. My idea was to utilize micro.blog as my default blog platform moving forward but even though I like a lot about it, it just doesn’t feel right for a number of reasons, none of which are the platform’s fault.

1. It feels weird to write anything long on the platform. Yes people do it, yes you can do it, but it doesn’t feel like the right place, especially when you look at the social feed.
2. While Micro.blog backs everything up to github, it still doesn’t provide the simplicity of something like a regular static site where all my posts and materials are in individual files and I can easily move them around and use them as I see fit.

The templates in Obsidian and the ability to use git to publish the blog generally solves my major issues with Hugo in the past, namely that it never felt simple to write and publish something.

Anyway, it’ll probably get filed away in my to-do list for the summer.

Last Watched: I can see why Game of Thrones lost support towards the end. We’re in the last season and there’s basically three episodes to wrap everything up and a lot of the plot points in the 4th episode were iffy at best.

We had a thunderstorm and hail yesterday, which yes, fell on the start of meteorological spring, but feels far too early. We had one snow storm this winter and while it could still happen, our temperatures are very quickly trending up. Time to put away the winter coats and uncover the outdoor faucets.

Status: Tired, went to bed early and did nothing on Sunday but a busy week last week is still hitting it seems.

Reading: Trying to plan out lectures for the African American experience in Indian and Oklahoma territories

Last Watched: Game of Thrones, “The Long Night.” I remember the complaints about how dark this when it came out but it wasn’t nearly as dark as I expected. The ending was less than pleasing for a handful of reasons, but a good, moody, hour and a half of violence.

Today:

• The dumbest people still have high-powered lasers
• US Olympic hockey player distances himself from White House video trashing Canadians
• Paramount Beats Netflix in Months-Long Fight For Warner Bros.

Status: Tired. Maybe 5 hours of sleep last night.

Listening: Eric Church in concert. This is the first concert I’ve left early in quite a while. Not because it was terrible, but because it started so damn late and I’m just not really committed to Church’s music to stay out past 11PM. He didn’t take the stage until after 9PM (thanks to playing the full suite of Pink Floyd’s Time / Welcome to the Machine / Run Like Hell, as the intro music). I like Church for basically three reasons: the nostalgia of “Springsteen”, the Mr. Misunderstood album, and his willingness to play covers relevant to the area. After getting “Springsteen”, JJ Cale’s “If You’re Ever in Oklahoma,” and “Record Year” I called it a night.

Also, venues, please notify people ahead of time when you upgrade seats to close off the upper bowl. While it’s always nice to find out the cheap upper level seat is now a more expensive lower bowl seat, at least email and tell me to check in at the box office if you can’t distribute a new ticket. If a section is that undersold, you know about it well in advance. Don’t make me stand in the security line only to have to fight my way back out and walk around the whole building.

Last Watched: Game of Thrones, nine episodes left.

Today: The TV upstairs that I saved from the dump a few years ago by replacing the motherboard, may finally have decided to give up the ghost again. When it first died it starting acting weird, not correctly changing inputs, turning off when told to; basically little annoyances that piled up until it just died. If it is dead, I’m not all that sad, it managed to make it another few years with a relatively cheap motherboard off ebay, I’d just rather not buy a new TV right now. Although being able to buy one with an antenna jack will be nice because I currently can’t get over the air channels seeing as how this TV is a glorified monitor.

Status: Spring weather in Oklahoma. One day it’s 24 in the morning and 48 hours later it’s 50s and 60s. We’ll be passing 80 by the weekend if the weather is to be believed.

Listening: Roger Deakins talking about cinematography at Magic City Books in Tulsa last night. My favorite response to a question, on lens flares: “I wouldn’t put it that way, but I hate them.” (in response to his wife saying he hates them). He was thoroughly British in all the best possible ways.