In which we need to have a talk, #Apple…

On March 10, 2015March 9, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy8 Comments

First things first. This is my desk:

Now, normally it doesn’t look like this, but I’m trying to make a point, and that is: it is extraordinarily difficult to be more of an Apple fanboy than I am. I literally have one of every device Apple produces, and there are two iPads in that picture. I have so many Apple devices, in fact, that I forgot one while taking the picture– although I wouldn’t have disconnected my Apple TV from my set in the living room anyway– and I currently can’t find my old clickwheel-style iPod.

This is my current watch:

The only difference here is I have a leather strap on mine, as the rubber one my initial Pebble came with broke in half a couple of weeks ago.

I do not want an Apple Watch. Ordinarily (some of you will laugh at this, but I swear that I at least think it’s true) I do not believe my opinion to be a bellwether of broader reality, but I have to believe that if I don’t want an Apple Watch, then no one wants an Apple Watch. I own every device that Apple produces and am at this exact second wearing a smartwatch, a device that I have on multiple occasions referred to as my favorite tech purchase since my original cell phone back in 1998-99 or so. I am a white male with sufficient disposable income, a demonstrated interest in tech gadgets, and a distinct preference for Apple hardware. There literally cannot be a more accurate picture of the target demographic for this item than I am.

And I have no interest in this thing.

It gets worse. There are two watches in this picture. I have preordered one of them.

The watch on the right is a Pebble Time Steel. It will cost me $270 at the end of the month when the Kickstarter finishes and Pebble actually charges me. It comes with a backup strap made of metal in addition to the leather one, and is made of stainless steel. I’ll get it, if I remember right, at the end of June. Maybe July, I’m not sure. My current watch will be fine until it shows up.

The watch on the left is an Apple Watch Edition and it costs SEVENTEEN THOUSAND FUCKING DOLLARS.

I love you guys. Truly. I do.

But you are out of your fucking minds on this one.

#WordPress stats page: credit where it’s due

On February 16, 2015February 16, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking12 Comments

Is everybody else seeing this? Still not exactly gorgeous, but this represents real improvement. If I wasn’t as cynical as I am, I’d think that someone had actually listened to complaints from their users.

The new hotness (REVIEW: Das Keyboard Model S Professional)

On February 2, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews4 Comments

It’s the keyboard. The new hotness is the keyboard. The rest of this is just my usual mess. I managed to black out my name where it shows up on the main monitor, but feel free to examine everything carefully for clues about my lifestyle.

This is my primary workstation; I do a lot of work on my laptop but I brain better sitting at a desk than I do on the couch or at my dining room table or whatever, especially when my family is home. I’ve had this computer for, what, two and a half or three years now, and while I upgraded the keyboard from the wireless, silly little thing that actually ships with an iMac, the Mac wired keyboard is still a teeny aluminum chicklet keyboard that doesn’t make nearly enough noise when you pound on it. I like my keyboards clicky. Really clicky.

Plus the keys were white, and after three years of tapping on white keys they were starting to look a little… we’ll say funky.

Thus: Das Keyboard. I know the picture’s crappy; here’s one from their website:

On one hand, it’s a keyboard, so it does exactly the same things that the other keyboard did only it’s a lot louder about it. This is the Das Keyboard Professional Model S with Cherry MX Blue switches in it. It is awesome. Don’t know what Cherry MX Blue switches are? Neither did I, until I started researching mechanical keyboards. Twitter brought me this article, which is interesting enough that I’ve read it for fun a few times.

Fun thing about this keyboard: the Backspace key makes a distinctly different clicking sound than the others, meaning that if you were listening to me carefully you’d be able to tell how often I screwed up. That entertains me, even though I’m pretty sure that no one will ever be carefully listening to me type. I just hope the boy can sleep through the noise; his room is next door to my office, and I’m not shitting you: this thing is loud.

I love mechanical keyboards.

THE FARTENING, PART III: Holy Hell, that didn’t last long.

On January 6, 2015January 6, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

I am forced to announce, with no small amount of shame, that the experiment known as The Fartening has ended. Because holy shit, this looks like nothing more than it looks like caked-on vomit on the side of the toilet bowl, the kind you didn’t clean off because you were sick as fuck and the best you could do was drag yourself to bed.
I was not expecting to make Soylent a lifestyle choice. I was expecting to have the intestinal fortitude necessary to make it through at least half of the packages before giving up the ghost. But no. Sadly, I cannot do this. That right there is exactly how far I got into my final cup of horror mud, and I done drunks all I can drinks and I can’t drinks no more. I simply cannot get past the goddamn texture of the stuff, and I refuse to continue torturing myself with it in hopes that it ends up magically catching on somehow. So I give up.

If anyone is interested, I’ll ship you my remaining six packages and six bottles of oil for $40, which is way less than they’ll charge you. Just drop me a line in comments.

THE FARTENING, Part II(a): Consuming #Soylent

On January 5, 2015January 5, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

I’ll admit it: I am a little disappointed that this story is going to turn out as mundanely as it’s going to. Then again, I’m sure everyone I work with is perfectly happy that nothing insane happened with my digestion today.

This is what roughly one-third of a day’s ration of Soylent looks like:

I mixed this up last night and left it in the refrigerator overnight without tasting it. This morning I poured what looked to me to be about a third of the container (I’m now slightly doubting that measurement, and will have to experiment) and downed it for my breakfast this morning. I put maybe a teaspoon of vanilla extract in it just for some flavor.

First, Soylent is not nearly as thick as I thought it was going to be, which is entirely my discretion– I followed the directions that I was provided with; I plan to use a bit less water next time so as to impart more of a shake-like consistency. The texture is… well, it’s gross as hell is what it is. I’d liken it to drinking river silt. It’s more like a suspension than a solution; the Soylent doesn’t dissolve so much as float in the water, and the oil had separated to the top of the container, requiring a lot more shaking. However, from what I’ve seen on the boards, everyone is horrified by the texture at first but most people get used to it fairly quickly, so I’m not going to let this stop me just yet. But yeah: Soylent, even with a bit of vanilla in it, tastes pretty damn bad. Future iterations may include a banana; we’ll see.

I wanted to report back on gastrointestinal issues; there were none. Slight TMI here: I did have a bowel movement in the morning (this is typical) and it was entirely normal. I can report no gas. I was a little belchy after lunch, but at the moment I’m attributing that to pop and not to the Soylent. Now the good news: part of the reason I’ve purchased this stuff is that meals at work are very difficult, and furthermore I’ve been finding myself crashing in the morning in a way I really don’t like– and since my gall bladder surgery several years ago I can go from not hungry at all to nearly fainting from hunger in a matter of just a few minutes. I have to have something that evens my mornings out, and I’m hoping Soylent can do that for me.

I not only made it to lunch with no issues but lunch was late– I didn’t make it out of a meeting until almost 12:30, which would kill me most days. No problem today.

Tomorrow, I plan to take what’s left to work with me in a thermos, keep it in the fridge, and sip from it all morning, with the idea being that it’s breakfast and lunch, just spread out. If I get home from work without wanting to eat the entire kitchen (another problem: even if I eat a largish lunch, I get home hungry, and just eat anything I can find) I’m gonna call this stuff a win. At the moment I don’t plan to replace dinner with it; we may try a day with that this weekend to see what happens, but not quite yet.

So: not funny yet, unfortunately, but not a waste of my money either. Winning?

OH WAIT SHIT I ALMOST FORGOT edit: As I said, I tend to get home from work hungry. My thought today: I’d had a regular dinner glass full of the stuff for breakfast, and I thought I’d try drinking roughly a whiskey glass full as a post-work snack. So I poured some into a glass and got the vanilla and added some. A couple things:

Essence of peppermint is contained in a bottle that is exactly the same as vanilla extract;
Peppermint essence is an incredibly thin liquid that pours very quickly;
Soylent with way too much peppermint essence in it is completely fucking undrinkable.

So so much for that experiment. I decided to reserve the rest for tomorrow.

Random question for the olds

On December 29, 2014December 29, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized32 Comments

I’m guessing you’d need to be at least 30-35 for your answer to this question to matter to me– old enough that you spent your life on analog/wired phones, and that you bought *yourself* your first cell phone. Two questions:

1) Do you actually remember getting your first cell phone? Like, was it an Event? Can you describe the phone, or nail down what year it was that you bought it?

2) Can you remember sending or receiving your first text message? (Preferably, for the purposes of this question, these two events did not occur on the same day– in other words, you had a cell phone before text messages were a Thing.)

Just curious. And, for the record, I’m just as interested in the “no” answers as the “Yes, this is when it was” answers, so if you don’t remember one of the two, let me know. Thanks.

In which what’s old is new

On December 22, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

Told my wife yesterday that if the rest of break was as busy as Sunday was, I wasn’t going to have to worry about going crazy to get back to school again like I usually do at the end of a long break. So far today I haven’t quite kept up yesterday’s activity level– took the boy to the eye doctor’s office and puttered about in the house a bit but that’s been about it. Hoping to get some writing done before my wife gets back home with him in a few hours but if I end up spending the whole day playing Dragon Age I’m not gonna feel too bad about it.

Have you ever taken a toddler to an eye appointment? My kid knows the alphabet well enough to handle a standard alphabet thing but under six or so they all use pictures for the “identify this small item” part of the test. They’re all black and white, high-contrast clip art pictures– there was a horse, a Christmas tree, a house, a car and a truck, things like that.

And, well, that. The icon up there isn’t exactly the one in they presented him but it’s really really close.

See the problem?

It came up, and I raised an eyebrow at it. The doctor happened to be looking my way at the time.

“We don’t worry about this one so much anymore,” he said.

“Phone!” my kid hollers. The doctor is openly surprised.

This fascinates me. A phone, to my kid, is a magic glass rectangle that isn’t attached to anything. He’s three– he’s never seen a rotary dial phone. My only guess is he recognizes it from one of his books or a TV show we’ve watched, because hell if I know how he knows that otherwise.

The future!

In which the future is subtle

On November 30, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

original (I pulled the sale post off of the front page because I’m tired of looking at it; the sale is still good at least through the end of the day and I might extend it through Monday if I make some sales today. Yesterday went well; expect a roundup early next week for those of you who enjoy data posts. Buy my booooooooks!)

I Tweeted about this yesterday, but Twitter is by nature kind of ephemeral and those posts are already off the front page, and also I’m inexplicably wide awake at 7:20 AM on my last day of Thanksgiving break, so I might as well write about something— I had two outbursts of The Future yesterday that struck me as interesting enough to write about.

Outbreak the First: I am about to take a shower, but have a couple of random computer tasks that need doing on a desktop first. I leave my phone on a bookshelf in the living room and go into my office to use the computer. My mother calls.

My watch lets me know my phone is ringing. My phone’s on silent. I don’t hear it and neither does anyone else. The phone’s a good fifty feet away and behind a couple of walls.

I proceed to answer the phone with my computer and have a conversation with my mother about having lunch today. She appears to have no idea that anything is odd about the conversation.

I got my first cell phone fifteen years ago; prior to that, I’d always been tethered to land lines. Now I don’t even need the phone with me. That’s awesome.

Outbreak the Second: We made the kieflies (I really need to find out how to spell that) at my in-laws’ place yesterday. Or at least we put them together there; the recipe requires about 24 hours for the dough to chill before you can fill and fold them. My mother-in-law and I were mostly doing the filling while my father-in-law and my wife alternately put things in the oven and monitored the boy.

At one point we had to explain to him that Grandma and Grandpa’s TV didn’t work like Mommy and Daddy’s does, because they don’t get to decide when to watch things. See, we’re cord-cutters and we watch everything through Netflix, Hulu or iTunes on our Apple TV. My parents have a DVR and have filled it with an assortment of kids’ programming that he likes.

Her parents, on the other hand, have the same kind of TV that everyone did prior to, oh, seven or eight years ago: you get the TV that is being piped into your house at the time it’s being piped in and that’s all the TV you get. And the boy just did not get it. He wanted his Mickey Mouse show or the Winnie the Pooh movie he’s been into lately and just absolutely did not comprehend why the TV in front of him couldn’t produce it on demand.

Which, when you think about it, is awesome. I like TV a lot more now that I don’t have to wrap my life around its schedule, y’know? And he’s young enough that he has no idea that that ever happened.

The Future!