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Ten Years Ago

Ten years ago today, after a nearly a month of exchanging emails trying to set up a date to meet, Ben and I—on very short notice—finally connected in person at Starbucks on that warm Sunday afternoon.

And the rest as they say, is history.

And believe me, meeting such a wonderful, caring man at 50 was the absolute last thing I had been expecting. But then, most of my life since somewhere around the year 2000 had not been what I’d been expecting.

It’s been ten years of adventures, both good and—stressful. And as I sit here and look through our Instagrams, I am reminded how wonderful it’s all been.

This year was one of those “landmark” years and we had such plans for celebrating (I seem to remember a trip out of the country being discussed at one point) . I was turning 60. Ben was turning 35. We’ve known each other ten years, and in a few short days from now we’ll be celebrating 5 years married. But life has intervened—as it is increasingly wont to do these days. So instead of jetting off somewhere, tonight Ben fixed a delicious steak dinner for us and afterward returned to the scene of the crime…

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Name Three Movies

Name three movies that no matter how often they show up on cable, you’ll stop to watch.

For us, they’re:

● The Fifth Element
● Pitch Black
● Resident Evil

What are yours?

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Turn Back Time

Have you ever thought about that sci-fi trope of going back in time to kill baby (fill in the blank – in most cases, Hitler)?

For the sake of argument, let’s say that it’s possible. You go back and successfully take Hitler out of the equation. What then? You immediately change all the future timelines of anyone and everything that Hitler touched. Yes, you saved the lives of 6 million Jews but it could then be argued that there’d be no need for the state of Israel to be formed. Einstein and German rocket scientists remain in Germany, leaving the very real possibility that the German flag would be flying on the moon, not to mention they’d most likely be the first country to possess a nuclear weapon.

No World War II, no baby boomer generation, and probably none of the myriad scientific advancements that came out of the US and its allies because of the war.

My view of this thought exercise is that someone will rise fill the void to recreate the timeline as much as possible. If there’s no Hitler (or Trump), there would be someone very much like him that brings about the same general timeline that you attempted to change.

And who’s to say someone from our future has not traveled back to our time to take out someone who creates a future hell?

What say you?

 

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How Much Longer?

Humor is one thing, but now it’s increasingly obvious that he is BAT. SHIT. INSANE, how much longer do we have to suffer through this Trump nightmare?

It’s going to be a miracle if 3/4 of the country (your host included) isn’t diagnosed and being treated for varying degrees of clinical PTSD when it’s all over.

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Quote of the Day

Sometimes I think it’s useful to think of this presidency as a hostage-taking situation. We have a president holding liberal democracy hostage, empowered by a cult following. The goal is to get through this without killing any hostages, i.e., without irreparable breaches in our democratic system. Come at him too directly and you might provoke the very thing you are trying to avoid. Somehow, we have to get the nut job to put the gun down and let the hostages go, without giving in to any of his demands. From the moment Trump took office, we were in this emergency. All that we now know, in a way we didn’t, say, a year ago, is that the chances of a successful resolution are close to zero.” ~Andrew Sullivan

When Andrew Sullivan starts sounding sane, you know we’re in trouble.

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Bat. Shit. Insane.

Too crazy to go under oath and speak to Mueller, but somehow okay to run the country. SMH.

From John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

The Washington Post, with highlights from Bob Woodward’s Fear, which comes out next week:

Cohn, a Wall Street veteran, tried to tamp down Trump’s strident nationalism regarding trade. According to Woodward, Cohn “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.

Cohn made a similar play to prevent Trump from pulling the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, something the president has long threatened to do. […] Under orders from the president, Porter drafted a notification letter withdrawing from NAFTA. But he and other advisers worried that it could trigger an economic and foreign relations crisis. So Porter consulted Cohn, who told him, according to Woodward: “I can stop this. I’ll just take the paper off his desk.”

Defense Secretary James Mattis ignores him too:

After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward.

Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.

These officials get away with disregarding Trump’s orders — with literally stealing letters off his desk — because Trump is a nitwit. He’s just dumb. His own lawyer thinks he’s an idiot:

Dowd then explained to Mueller and Quarles why he was trying to keep the president from testifying: “I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?’ ”

“John, I understand,” Mueller replied, according to Woodward.

Later that month, Dowd told Trump: “Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit.”

When Trump was elected I wrote that “Trump voters are ignoramuses, bigots, and/or fools.” Everything that’s gone so horribly awry with his presidency was easily predictable. Anyone who still supports him today must be at least two out of three.

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Some Thoughts About That Company in Cupertino

Mojave

For the past couple months I’ve been playing around with the beta versions of Apple’s latest OS, “Mojave.” I smartly installed it on an external SSD drive instead of mucking up my main drive like I did years ago with Yosemite. The problem with this approach is that my external drive won’t hold all my data, so I’m kind of limited in what I can test.

Since Mojave is currently up to Beta 9, and based on Apple’s history, the final version will be probably be released in the next couple weeks, last night I backed up my main drive and pulled the trigger.

All this little exercise did was confirm my initial impression that this may be the first macOS update that I skip.

There’s just something off about it. I can’t put my finger on any one thing, but it just feels wrong. It’s not dark mode, the fact that you can now change the highlight color to a virtual rainbow of tones, the convoluted way of making screen shots, the dynamically-changing wallpaper, or any of the other new “features” in and of themselves. It’s the sum total. To me, none of these things are wanted or needed, and once again, in Apple’s infinite wisdom, they chose to remove features I actually used.

The laptop also ran slower. “Oh don’t worry about that. Everything will return to normal as soon as Spotlight if finished reindexing your files.”

(Warning: First World Problems)

With the full implementation of dark mode, they’ve taken away the ability to have a dark title bar and dock while retaining the regular light mode everywhere else. This is something I’ve used for years, since most of my wallpapers tend to the dark side (Do I hear mechanical breathing?), and in my opinion it just looks better. But now it’s gone. All dark or all light is your only choice and I don’t care for the all dark mode in its current iteration. There is a workaround via a Terminal command that will restore that dark title/light window functionality—to a degree—but it really screws with the shading of the light windows once in place: none of them seem to match any more.

Because Apple.

I used a program called cDock for years to customize the appearance of the dock. Since Yosemite I’ve hated the default Apple dock. Among other things, cDock allows you to kill the dock background altogether; to make it “transparent.” It also has dozens of various other combinations, each of which can be tweaked to get the exact look you desire. To be honest, ever since Apple implemented SIP it’s been a bit of a pain in the ass to set up, but at least by temporarily disabling SIP you could install the program, re-enable SIP afterward, and it would run fine. Now SIP needs to be permanently disabled (which isn’t a good idea from a security standpoint) in order for cDock to run at all.

Because Apple.

Safari initially refused to load the AdBlock plus extension which really pissed me off, but when I finally got it running, it nagged that it would slow down my browsing.

Because Apple.

Adobe Bridge came up…with a completely black screen, something it never did when I was running Mojave from the external drive.

I’m not going to bitch about that too much because this is beta software and I’m sure that particular glitch will be worked out before release day.

But it was at that point that I’d had enough of new-and-improved. I shut the machine down, rebooted, wiped the drive, and restored my backup. I’m such a Luddite.

Hardware

The last MacBook I owned that still had a removable SSD was the MacBook Air in 2012. Yes, it was prohibitively expensive to replace the drive with a bigger one, but at least I knew I could do it if I ever wanted to.

Beginning in 2013 however, everything was soldered in place. I was okay with that, since I was now on a regular backup schedule so in case anything did go south at most I’d lose a day’s worth of data.

I learned recently from getting lost in Louis Rossmann videos (yes, I watch more online than guys banging each other) that up until the 2018 models, all MacBook Pros with soldered-in SSDs had a special port on the system board that would (at least theoretically) allow a technician to transfer data off a SSD even if the rest of the system board was toast.

Well, Apple has now removed that since everything is now encrypted as it passes through the T2 chip. Better pray that you’re backing up nightly and you don’t have any issues with said backup.

Remember when everything “just worked?” Yeah. Good times.

While it looks like the butterfly keyboard issue has been resolved (we won’t know for sure until the 2018 models age a bit more), there’s no chance Apple will ever go back to their much-loved previous design. And that’s the crux of a lot of my beef with Apple these days. They will never admit they made a mistake on anything and go back to earlier tech that worked perfectly well. Build a MacBook that’s 1mm thicker so the old keyboard design can be put back into use? NEVER.

So why do I keep buying Apple products? Because I like their design and overall build quality enough to justify their premium price. And despite what I just wrote about Mojave, I do still prefer the Mac OS over anything else out there. And lastly, I trust Apple with my offsite data a hell of a lot more than I do Microsoft. I realize they are not the same company they were in 2009 when I initially joined the legion of fanboys. They’re far bigger, have many more customers, and frankly, screwups happen. But they can’t coast on goodwill forever if these type of QA and design problems continue.

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