WordPress is being wonky and I don’t have a ton to say tonight anyway, but so far school is going pretty well– fourth hour continues to be a sore spot but it’s the only one– and I finally got around to actually ordering a watch tonight after literally months of dithering about it. We’ll see if it actually fits once it gets here! I expect to tumble into despair if it does not.
Anyway, I had to reload about a dozen times to get the page I’m typing this on to actually become available, so I’m going to hit Publish until I actually have a post now.
As I suspected, no one— and I include myself in this, for the record, I’m not trying to be demeaning– has any idea what an expensive watch looks like, at least not from pictures.
Most people thought watch B was the most expensive.
A tie for the mid-range watch, with some people thinking it was B and the rest choosing C. And finally:
A somewhat more significant majority picked watch A as the cheapest watch.
The truth: none of them are watches at all! Everything is cake.
Nah, not really.
Watch C, the Caliber 0210, is the most expensive watch, retailing at $8400.
Watch A, the Eco-Drive One, is the mid-range-for-our-purposes-but-still-holyshit-expensive watch, at $4750.
… which leaves Watch B, the humble Weekender, as the $236 watch. Which means that the plurality of votes for the most expensive watch went to the least expensive watch, and most people believed that the Eco-Drive One would retail for a price one-twentieth of its actual cost.
Now, I’m cheating just a bit here. We’re just using images, and I have no idea if it would be much more obvious in person that, at least, the Weekender was the cheapest one; I have to assume it would. I deliberately chose three watches that were as similar to each other as possible, too; I can imagine a world where I rerun this experiment using watches that are as different as possible to see if correct answers are more common.
As for the reasons for this little game: I’m annoyed with my current (and second) Apple Watch. I apparently went with a lower grade of glass when I bought the second watch, and at least compared to the first one it’s scratched to hell. I replaced the first watch after several years when the battery stopped consistently getting me through a full day, and this one is starting to head toward that neighborhood in less time, but the first watch was spotless when I got rid of it. There wasn’t a single mark anywhere on the damn thing. Not so much with this one, and I really don’t want to spend $800 on a new watch with the higher-end glass.
Also, I’m tired of being so tethered to devices all the goddamn time, and I’d kind of like a watch I don’t have to charge, which is how I’ve fallen down this current rabbit hole. I’m old enough and I have enough money that I’d like a Nice Watch; I don’t want to just go to Kohl’s and pick some $29 piece of bullshit off of a shelf, but the problem is that watches are proving to be really difficult to shop for on the Internet. You really need to be able to see a watch on your wrist to be able to judge whether you like it, and while Citizen(*) has a cool app that sort of mimics letting you try a watch on virtually, it ends up making everything look awful and so probably doesn’t work the way they want it to.
The other problem is that if I don’t want the aforementioned $29 piece of bullshit from Target or Kohl’s I have to go to an actual Goddamn jewelry shop, most of whom, at least around here, don’t really put their stock on their websites, and (I suspect) don’t really specialize in the $300-500 sweet spot that I arbitrarily-and-kinda-randomly decided my price range was going to be. Plus, clearly, no one can tell the difference between a $236 watch and an $8400 watch, so why would I shell out more than a few C-notes? I need the fucking thing to tell time, not impress people.
Also, every watch I liked on Citizen’s website had people complaining in the reviews that it was hard to read.
Also also, most watch companies appear to top out at 9″ bands. I continue to not believe I have enormous wrists, but I apparently have enormous wrists. I can’t order a single watch from Citizen that I’m confident will fit well. Which means I’m back into stores, which … rinse and repeat.
Style is stupid, is what I’m saying here.
(*) Also more or less chosen randomly, as a known Classy Brand that isn’t, like, fucking Rolex or something.**
(**) Did y’all know Swatch was back???? I’m pretty sure I went to school at least once wearing three Swatch watches at the same time. (***)
*** There is also such a thing as the South Bend Watch Company, which isn’t the original South Bend Watch Company, which was apparently a big deal in the early 1900s. They sell precisely three different watches and each of them costs $599.
Been a slug all day today, and I’ve got nothing in particular I want to talk about. So instead I’m going to have to insist that you watch this entire video of this man trying to destroy testing a Cybertruck. I’ve seen clips of it all over the place but the whole video is so much worse than I was expecting.
Pretty sure you can click for bigger, if you want— but I popped over to work this morning so that I could drop a few things off, and my classroom has officially been moved, so I went in and sat for a while, trying to figure out where to put everything.
Two big problems to be solved right now: one, you will note in one of the pictures that there are huge globs of thick brown glue all over one of the walls. That glue used to be behind a blackboard which they just removed; I don’t mind losing the blackboard in favor of more wall space, but I was assuming they’d take the glue down with it? Maybe it’s on somebody’s To-Do list; I’m just gonna hope and not worry about it until August. Also, there’s print on one of the whiteboards– that bit that looks like watermarking on one of them is actually there— which is hopefully also removable somehow.
Second, I’m coming from a classroom where there were literally wall outlets every two feet around the perimeter of the classroom (my old room used to be a computer lab) to a room with a total of eight– two in each corner of the room. I am trading this for more floor space and an actual window, so I’m not mad about it– I made this decision on purpose, after all– but it’s still something I need to figure out, since I have a shitton of stuff that needs to be plugged in. I mean, extension cords exist, but at some point the building services folks are gonna get mad at me, right? Plus I have to control all those cables somehow, and that’s going to be a lot of work.
There’s a ton more storage, too, so I can probably get away with putting one of my bookshelves back in the old classroom, but I also want to have at least a small classroom library this year, in case we are doing silent reading in Advisory again.
(I am thinking about cell phone solutions, too, and I just discovered this exists. I don’t really want to pay for it, but an actual locking cabinet specifically to hold phones seems like a pretty useful idea, more so than a bunch of pouches on the wall.)
(falls down a rabbit hole)
Actually, let’s talk about that a little more: the state of Indiana just passed a law literally making it illegal for kids to have their cell phones in school, or, to be slightly more specific, requiring schools to have a policy that says the kids can’t have their cell phones. Now, we can say that all we want; we’ve been saying it for years and it doesn’t matter. The kids aren’t going to leave their phones at home, and they aren’t going to leave them in their lockers, but it’s not impossible to set up something where they put them in a specific place in the classroom, so long as it’s reasonably secure and other people can’t walk off with their phones. This is the problem with the “pouch poster” system– anybody can walk off with anybody else’s phone, and if I’m going to monitor when people get their phones out of a pouch on the wall, I may as well lock the damned things up somewhere so that I can just lock and unlock a box at the beginning and the end of class. I’m already planning on having as deviceless of a classroom as possible next year; we’ll be starting most days next year with everyone’s iPads in a pile in the back of the classroom where they’re out of reach. I just have to figure out a phone solution.
Anyway, back to thinking about what to do with that classroom. Anything stand out to you?
Spent the last couple of days putting this little thing together:
I took the picture from a couple of different angles and then realized if I was going to give you a picture of the TantiveIV, it really ought to let you see the engines, which are the most iconic part of the ship. And once again, while putting a Lego set together, I found myself musing on why the designers make the decisions they do on certain things, and just how dedicated these crazy bastards are to including Easter eggs. To wit, an earlier, in-progress photo of the front of the ship:
What you don’t see there is a third two-stud stack behind the white and blue one. That one has a white base and a brown top, to go with the one that is gold-on-gold and the one that is blue-on-white. Note where this is in the picture above; it’s completely invisible and covered up by the pieces that attach to those clamps on the side.
Why are those there?
Well, it’s C-3PO, R2-D2 and Princess Leia, of course. Each rendered as two single studs in the right color. And it’s just there to put a little smile on your face as you’re putting the set together, and as a little secret that you know about once the build is finished. The Tantive IV, of course, is the ship that Leia is trying to escape Darth Vader in during the opening moments of A New Hope, and so of course she has to pass the Death Star plans on to the droids.
In other news, as of last night I thought I’d fixed my computer again, only to spend forty fucking minutes trying to get the damn thing to launch Chrome this afternoon so that I could work on writing practice finals for my classes this week. The following all happened:
Apple Music crashed, repeatedly;
Chrome crashed, repeatedly;
One hard restart;
After the restart, my desktop images on my extra monitors were on the wrong monitors (?!?)
My touchpad lost connectivity three times, and had to be turned off and turned back on again;
Audio was coming through the wrong monitor at one point;
Every so often I could move the mouse around but couldn’t click and the haptics on my touchpad were disabled, and every so often I could click on things but not move the mouse;
Attempting to open the systems settings crashed every other open app, then the system settings opened as if nothing had gone wrong;
Probably a few other things.
At this point, I have officially caved and ordered a new screaming fucking beast of a computer that is so much more computer than I need that it’s actually kind of sad. Like, I’ll need to develop a new hobby or go back to gaming on YouTube or something to justify this purchase. Naturally, after dinner, the computer had mysteriously reverted to working just fine, and I’ve been sitting here for just over an hour, writing the two initial practice exams and this blog post with no issues of any kind. I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I’ve had enough of dealing with it.
I have had my current desktop for just a noodge over five years, and I am starting to think that I might need to replace it sooner rather than later. It is the most insanely aggravating tech problem I have encountered, in that it isn’t one tech problem. Shit just Keeps Going Wrong, and I can’t for the life of me isolate what the problem might be beyond a vague suspicion that my dedication to Apple products is about to bite me in the ass. If this were a home build, I could start replacing parts– I mean, that would be expensive and insane, but I could do it. I could keep replacing bits of the computer until this random fucking series of crashes, application hangups and hardware shutdowns — my trackpad, for God’s sake, keeps shutting down, and it has a physical on/off button– stopped, or I’d managed to create the iMac of Theseus and just gave the fuck up.
The Music app crashes. Chrome crashes. Safari crashes. The monitors are going wonky. The trackpad shuts down randomly. The entire computer keeps hard restarting in the middle of the night and when I first wake it up after a hard crash it takes a good ten minutes before everything starts behaving, and then it’s fine for an unpredictable amount of time– anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days– until it’s not anymore.
I don’t know how to diagnose this. I thought a Safari patch had cleaned it up but that only lasted a few days and now Music is crashing, and there are 65 fucking gigabytes of music on this damn computer, so moving to another one is going to be a huge pain in the ass. Also, just to make it worse, Apple isn’t making 27″ iMacs any longer, so I can either move to a smaller main monitor or a Mac Studio, and those start at two fucking grand before you buy a monitor to go with it. I mean, I can spread that out, and truth be told I can afford it, but I really don’t fucking want to right now. I want to fix this, and normally “fix my computer” is included among my skill sets, but there are enough things going wrong that I’m starting to suspect it’s either the motherboard or the hard drive, and … that’s a new computer, since I can’t replace either.
I mean, I could go back to Windows, but I could also shoot myself in the fucking face and not have to worry about it, and those options are of equal attractiveness right now. I loathe Windows and I’m not interested in going back into that ecosystem when every other piece of tech in the house has a picture of a piece of fruit on it. If Apple was still making 27″ iMacs this wouldn’t be that hard of a decision, because $1600 is a lot more palatable than $2000 plus a monitor. But even if I stuck with the two I have (and remember, I’m running a supervillain lair here)* it’s still $400 more than the iMac I’d probably end up with, which is pushing it.
Anyway, I’m off to spend three hours Googling “everything is wrong with my computer” until it crashes again. Wish me luck.
*Three monitors and a standing desk, and how the fuck is it possible that I can’t find a picture of my desk on this website anywhere? NO way.**
My favorite moment at my kid’s Spring Concert tonight was realizing I recognized a piece of music they were playing, asking my watch to recognize it basically for no reason at all, and being greeted with an error screen I had never seen before– “No Music Detected.”
No Music Detected being tossed at me during a middle school band concert is a little on the nose for a smartwatch music app, don’t you think?
I deleted my TikTok account last night, because I can’t take it anymore. Or, at least, I sort of did; if I log back into TikTok in the next thirty days it will reactivate the account, and I have never managed to take a 30-day break from the service, so I don’t have high hopes, especially since my wife has already told me she misses sharing videos with me.*
This leaves a sad, neglected LinkedIn account under my real name as my sole social media presence.
Also, if you were wondering (no one was wondering) if I was going to watch and/or react to the State of the Union tonight … no. No, I am not. I’m going to go sit on the couch with a book until it’s time to go to bed, and then that book and I will go to bed.
(*) Yeah, yeah, the government is trying to ban TikTok again. I wish a motherfucker would. I continue to maintain it’ll never happen.
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