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I was so excited last week at the announcement of the new third-generation AirPods and here we are a week later and I’ve decided to return them. I had two problems. First, they just don’t fit well in my ears. The previous version were snug as a bug but these felt uncomfortable from the very moment I put them in and I never got used to it. Worse, they would come out in situations where I’d never had a problem before (e.g. eating). Second, I don’t like the controls being in the stem. I really only want the ability to start and stop the AirPods and being able to do that with a simple double-tap (which I can do with either hand regardless of which AirPod is in) is far more useful to me than being able to skip forward and back.
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Based on the reviews I read/watched/listened to, it doesn’t seem like my complaints are common and that’s got me worried that the second-generation will be phased out and replaced with the third-generation. If that happens, I’m not sure what I do. I guess buy the AirPods Pro and hope the silicone tips solve the problem? Or maybe just buy a bunch of second-generation ones and hope the batteries don’t decay too much while they’re in the box.
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I met up with a colleague from work on Saturday at a nearby park and it was very nice to talk to another adult. I think I said this the last time I did that but the novelty hasn’t worn off.
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We celebrated Halloween with the kids on Sunday and they had a lot of fun. Eri put up some Halloween decorations a few days prior and then on the actual day, the kids put on the costumes we’d bought last year (they still fit) and we did trick-or-treat in the living room. It was bittersweet. Emma has a friend from preschool down the end of the street and it would have been nice to have had her go up there and that friend come down here. We’ll move out at the end of March and so this was the last chance.
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Were we being overly careful? Maybe. The number of detected cases in Tokyo continues to be very low. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party won the general election held over the weekend (ABC News).
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I released a new Janet library over the weekend. Argy-Bargy is an argument parsing library for command line apps. I started work on it after trying to integrate Watchful into another project and being frustrated that the argument parsing library that it was using didn’t work in the way I wanted. I’m not sure that the project maintainer is going to want to take on Watchful, let alone Argy-Bargy but I guess I couldn’t help myself. Also, I just loved the name.
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Sticking on programming stuff: I fell into a rabbit hole of Richard Feldman videos over the weekend. I’m intrigued by what he’s doing with the Roc programming language even if it sounds like it’s not something that will be available for some time. If you’re interested in learning more, I especially liked ‘The Edge of Cutting Edge Languages’.
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And now that I’m linking to YouTube, Dan Olson released a new video, ‘James Oliver’s War on Nuggets’, and it’s 17 minutes of delicious goodness. Olson’s range is unmatched and I’m always happy when he pushes out something new.
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I also watched some episodes of TV. I’m now up to episode 3 of Foundation and I dived back into Succession. I only made it to episode 6 last time I watched it but I’m feeling on a bit of a roll at the moment. (I’m cheating because I’m actually writing this on Tuesday and I know I’ve made it up to episode 10. More on that next week!)
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Dan Luu put out some essays I really liked. I don’t know if they’ll help me improve my productivity but I found ‘What to learn’ inspiring.
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I certainly found time to squeeze in a lot of content consumption this week because in addition to all of the above, I also made my way through the 90-minute episode of Slate’s ‘Hit Parade’ podcast focusing on pop punk. I don’t think I realised how much I was simply following the crowd when I got into Fall Out Boy in the mid-aughts. That was a little damaging to my ego and so in a desperate attempt to not play entirely to type, let’s link to ‘I Write Sins Not Tragedies’ instead (Apple Music).
