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Golden Week began in Japan. We don’t normally do much anyway, preferring instead to take a big trip around Christmas, but the fact we’ll be spending it almost entirely indoors at home is a little depressing.
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Are things that bad? They are (NHK)! It’s not unexpected that the state of emergency hasn’t had an effect yet but early reports suggest that compliance with this state of emergency is particularly weak. My favourite story was probably the cruise ship (!) that had to immediately return to port after discovering a case of COVID-19 among its passengers (Kyodo).
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As I’ve reduced the amount of online reading I’m doing, I’ve increased the amount of time I spend checking Twitter. And it was impossible to spend much time on my Twitter this week and not see a lot being written about the decision of Basecamp to prohibit the political discussions on its work Basecamp account (New York Times). Unsurprisingly, Twitter was full of very strong opinions on this. My initial view was that it seemed reasonable for a company’s management to make a decision like this. If pushed, that’s where I’d still land but when it feels like the majority of people from different identity groups (be it gender, ethnic, economic, etc) to me come down the other way, it always gives me pause.
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I spent some time considering whether or not I’d upgrade my Mac this year. My primary Mac is the 2017 MacBook Pro 13” (i.e. the MacBook Escape) and it’s been my primary Mac for more than 1400 days. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I went to the effort of creating a spreadsheet of all the Macs I’ve owned to see how long I went between upgrades but since I did, I know for a fact that this is the winner. The thing is that I don’t really need to upgrade this Mac. When I was working on Flext, I did occasionally feel the limitations of this device but the rest of time that’s not the case. Perhaps I just wait until the next Mac Mini (and hope that Apple doesn’t again go years between updating it).
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I decided to use the Golden Week break to finally release my iOS app, Flext. In testing whether it still works on the latest version of iOS, I discovered that I need to upgrade to Big Sur to do so (iOS 14.5 requires the latest Xcode to test and the latest Xcode requires Big Sur). I don’t hate the UI as much as I feared I would and the update did finally fix my Spotlight problem so that was good. On the other hand, Xcode still takes forever to update. Like, seriously. What is it doing?
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Oh, and speaking of iOS apps, I ended up cancelling Castro and crawling back to Overcast. I don’t know if it’s my imagination but the Watch app feels like it’s been more responsive. It’s probably my imagination.
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I thought Eri might enjoy watching Veronica Mars and we tried watching the first episode. It was all right but I don’t know if it really connected with either of us. I like Kristen Bell but the show definitely feels like it’s from the mid-2000s and fhe fact that each episode is 45 minutes long is a huge disencentive. Not coincidentally, we watched a couple more episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine over the course of the week. Meanwhile, I’m almost done with season four of Deep Space Nine.
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I’m not listening to much new music any more (that isn’t disposable pop) but a few months back I added Celeste’s Not Your Muse to my library for some reason or another and I was listening to it again this week. It’s good (Apple Music).
