Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

Get Your Veto Pen Ready, Mr. President

…and pray that no Supreme Court Justices decide to retire before the Democrats regain control of Congress, because you’ll never get them approved now.

What comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, the pod people took over the Senate yesterday and I suspect that during the coming months the country will slowly wake up to one hell of a “what did I do last November? (or more likely, what didn’t I do last November since so many people couldn’t be bothered to get their asses out and vote) hangover as the full extent of the amount of crazy elected to office comes to light.

What does that mean? At the very least, two years of posturing, inactivity on any of the issues that the citizens of this country actually care about, religious batshittery and the political circus of Impeachment proceedings against the “black communist Kenyan about-to-unleash-ebola-on-the-good-upstanding-white-christians-of-this-country usurper” (did I forget anything?) in the White House—all the while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, what remains of the middle class will get bent over and screwed even more forcefully than before.

And though it all, the right-wing fear machine will continue to screech what they’ve been screeching for the last six years—that everything is still “Obama’s fault”—except that now at deafening levels.

As many others have opined today, I agree that in the long run this will be a good thing. By the time 2016 rolls around the country will once again be so thoroughly and completely disgusted with the Jeebus-lovin, bible-quotin’ obstructionist republicans, it will all but assure a Democratic sweep. (There’s also the fact that Presidential elections tend to bring out a younger, much more progressive voting crowd—versus the mid-terms where it was pointed out the average age of people voting in yesterday’s election was over sixty!)

That’s not to say the next two years will be without pain. You can count on the Republicans doing everything in their limited time in office to royally fuck over the greatest number of people as possible.

1 comments

Posted on

I Actually Liked It

…a lot more than I expected, considering some of the reviews I’d read.

Disclaimer: I have never read the book(s), and frankly one of the main reasons I wanted to see it was because I think Dylan O’Brien is cute. And at my age I realize that makes me a bit of a perv, even if the guy is 23 years old.

Anyhow…

It was an engaging story. There was plenty of attractive eye candy in the casting and I didn’t find myself nodding off, or reaching for my phone to check the time. I didn’t leave the theater feeling like I’d been cheated out of $6.50.

Some reviewers had issue with the “ending” (there’s a sequel in the works, natch), of the film. Even I found it a bit of a letdown as the expected “it was aliens” storyline didn’t pan out, but that’s not my beef with the last act.

[Spoilers ahead]

My beef—and it’s not something that immediately slapped me up the side of the head while watching the film, but only came to me as a WTF moment when I was thinking about the film much later—comes from the fact that Gally, one of the characters who chose to remain behind in the Glade when Thomas and the others left to find a way out, miraculously showed up in the control room shortly after they arrived there and started to (pardon the pun) put the puzzle together.

So wait, let me get this straight: after Thomas’s group dispatched several of the dreaded and deadly grievers in the maze by bringing down the huge stone doors and blocking further access to the promised exit as well as having the only key to open the portals—not to mention the knowledge of the numbers necessary to unlock the final door—Gally somehow manages to recreate all that by himself?

Seriously?

Okay, I realize he was a bit of a dick character from the get-go whose offing wasn’t exactly mourned by the audience, and whose presence at the end of the movie was necessary to dispatch one of the more sympathetic players, but still…HOW DID HE GET THERE?

And while I’m thinking about all this, the perv in me keeps asking, “So we have this group of (presumably hormone-addled) teenage boys thrown together for the last three years with only each other for company and there wasn’t one instance of bump-bump going on out in the forest or even any romantic pairing? Or more importantly, when a girl arrives, she isn’t immediately passed around like a party favor?

I guess I really am jaded.

1 comments

Posted on

Beautiful


As NASA’s Cassini spacecraft soared past Saturn’s moon Titan, it recently caught a glimpse of bright sunlight reflecting off hydrocarbon seas. In the past, Cassini had captured, separately, views of the polar seas and the sun glinting off them, but this is the first time both have been seen together in the same view.

[Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. Arizona/Univ. Idaho]

1 comments

Posted on

A Clean Bill of Health

I saw a new Otolaryngologist last week for my bi-annual post cancer treatment checkup. I wasn’t impressed with the guy who examined me two years ago, so I mentioned to my Primary Care Doc that I wanted to go to a new one.

Good news all around. After snaking that scope up my nose and down my throat (first time I got to see what she was seeing via a pair of attached display glasses), everything is good. Yeah, my larynx still looks like a war zone with one cord still immobile and the rest of the area remaining permanently swollen, but no sign of any recurring malignancy.

11 years and counting, baby!

4 comments

Posted on

Why I Hate Television

Such a provocative title.

I don’t hate all television, and I don’t hate the medium in and of itself. I hate the way networks have decided to push out series in 8, 10, 12-episode increments and then go on hiatus for what seems like years before returning. (I’m talking to you, Mad Men.)

It’s not just Mad Men; it’s pretty much any dramatic, scripted show these days. It seems that once you get hooked on something and really start getting into the current storyline, it’s the end of the season’s run—or worse yet, they split a single season up into two parts.

Pretty much everything we watch (or have watched) on a regular basis falls into this category:

Nurse Jackie
Helix
American Horror Story
Z Nation
The Strain
Doctor Who
Masters of Sex
The Walking Dead

Now I realize the cost of producing a full 30 episodes of a series like networks used to do when I was young is astronomical these days—especially when you factor in many of the shows we enjoy are heavy on special effects, but c’mon people. 8 episodes followed by a year-long hiatus? What’s the logic in that?

I mean, it’s gotten to the point that we cancel our premium channels for half the year because everything we watch is missing from their lineup. That’s costing you money, HBO & Showtime.

I suppose I should just give up complaining about this because the companies that produce what we watch don’t give a shit as long as the advertising dollars (or paid subscriptions) keep rolling in, but sooner or later if enough people just flat out cancel their premium channels for half the year they might wake up and take notice…

2 comments

Posted on

Wow

In my wildest dreams I never thought I’d see this in Arizona. I figured the state would have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century.

Wow. Just wow.

2 comments

Posted on

Ready for Prime Time?

As I wrote a few weeks ago, I went back to the Yosemite Beta (or, more specifically) the Developer Preview. Apple released Gold Master Candidate 2 last Tuesday, followed up almost immediately with Candidate 3 two days later.

While the MacRumors 10.10 Forum remains abuzz with complaints about things that still aren’t working properly, it seems from my very unscientific and non-professional viewpoint that most of them are of the “if you stand on your head and shake your right foot vigorously, your left hand starts turning purple” variety. Maybe I have a very generic setup and use very generic applications, but I haven’t experienced any of the issues that people are recording. In the interest of full disclosure, there are still a few minor graphic inconsistencies, and I still haven’t fully solved the Magic Mouse disconnection problem, but with Apple’s next big event coming up on Thursday and its expected release of Yosemite to the public at that time, I would say it’s damn close to being ready for Prime Time.

Others, of course, may disagree.

 

1 comments

Posted on

It Just Works

I don’t know what I could add to this (emphasis mine)…

From Rusty Rants:

My first Apple product was an iPod Mini. I still vividly remember being hooked by the design and functionality of such a tiny, sexy device. My next Apple product was a Powerbook G4. Those two products started a long journey of buying and loving Apple products. iPhoto. iPhone. iPad. iWork. I bought them all, and I loved them all. One phrase always kept me coming back for more: “It just works”. After coming from devices that always felt buggy and half-finished it really did feel just like that. Everything, well, just worked.

Fast forward to today, 2014. Zoom in to me. I’m typing this on a Macbook Pro. In my pocket is the iPhone 6. Three metres away sits a Mac Mini. On the surface, nothing has changed. The problem is, it feels like everything has changed. In short while Apple’s hardware continues to impress me, their software has gone downhill at a rapid pace. iPhoto is an unusable mess with the volume of photos I now have. Aperture has been discontinued and is badly lagging behind in terms of both performance and features. iTunes takes forever to launch, and is bloated mess of way too many features and functions. iCloud is still a mess that I wouldn’t dream of storing my important data in. iOS 7 crashed so often that I became intimately familiar with the Apple logo that appeared every time it did. iOS 8 fixed the crashing, but introduced thousands of little paper cut like bugs. I used to install updates from Apple the second they came out, now I wait a few days to see if they are actually any good.

If you think this is just my experience, let’s take a quick recap of the last few weeks of Apple news:

  • iOS 8.0.1 was released, with bugs that prevented iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners from connecting to the cell network, and using Touch ID.
  • Users trying to fix iOS bugs, reset the settings on their devices. This had the fun, unexpected consequence of wiping their iCloud documents, and syncing those deletions to all their other devices.
  • Apple released HealthKit as part of iOS 8, only to pull it, and any apps that supported it due to bugs.
  • Apple ‘fixed’ HealthKit as part of iOS 8.0.2, but my Twitter timeline is still full of people complaining about bugs. By all accounts, and going by the iOS 8.1 change log released today, it’s nowhere near ready for prime time.

On the developer front recently:

  • iTunes Connect is still amazingly buggy, and Apple managed to make it more so while developers were submitting their iOS 8 updates. I saw so many automated rejections, upload errors and bugs fill my timeline.
  • Xcode still crashes for me, at least once or twice a day.
  • Apple bought TestFlight, much to our delight, only to reveal that their answer to ‘beta testing’ is to let us distribute to 25 people that have administration rights over our apps. Do you want your beta testers to be able to change your app prices, descriptions, screenshots and to be able to pull apps from the store? Yeah me neither. The alternative is to submit your app for app review, before you’re allowed to distribute it to beta testers. Really Apple? Did I mention that the review queue is currently 9 days long and growing? Thank Thor that HockeyApp still exists.
  • Size classes, Apple’s answer to ‘how on earth are we going to deal with the new screen sizes’ lack even the most basic functionality required to do that. The iPhone 6 Plus has it’s own size class, in landscape, but in portrait orientation? Every single iPhone ever made is treated the same way. That’s right, you can’t lay out a different UI for the 3.5″ iPhone in portrait than you can for the 5.5″ monstrosity of a 6 Plus. How Apple missed this basic developer requirement is baffling to me.
  • Swift, the language we were all amazed by in June, has turned out to be a bag of hurt for anyone that jumped into it headfirst. It’s clear that it too wasn’t ready for prime time. I would have happily waited another year or two, especially if Apple built some major apps using it first. As it is we’re beta testing it for them, even after the 1.0 release.

Tim Cook keeps telling us that ‘Only Apple’ could do the amazing things it does. I just wish that Apple would slow down their breakneck pace and spend the time required to build stable software that their hardware so desperately needs. The yearly release cycles of OS X, iOS, iPhone & iPad are resulting in too many things seeing the light of day that aren’t finished yet. Perhaps the world wouldn’t let them, perhaps the expectations are now too high, but I’d kill for Snow iOS 8 and Snow Yosemite next year. I’m fairly confident I’m not alone in that feeling.

All that being said, at this point you’ll still have to pry my Apple devices from my cold, dead, hands.

2 comments