Wife: He’s retiring so he’s not gonna run for the next election.

Me: Oh so he’s going to walk?

Wife: No he feels that he’s been there long en…

Me: Hey, come on that was a good joke right?

Wife: <crickets>

Well it worked. I received confirmation today that my mom’s pension will resume retroactively to cover the payments she didn’t receive since the spring.

I’m not one to believe in conspiracy theories. But this one sure felt a lot like the system was designed to make people give up.

It’s a huge relief for me that this is resolved.

And I do feel some validation regarding my decision to raise my voice and tell them how upset I was. Sad but sometimes you have to.

I raised my voice and used stern words today with a customer service person and I don’t feel good about it. I did it intentionally, in the sense that I wasn’t reacting and I had planned to raise the intensity a notch before the call. And I think I remained respectful, apologizing to the person, telling her she was very nice and I wasn’t upset with her. But I still don’t like doing it.

It’s because my mom hasn’t received her monthly pension for five months. At this point we’ve called about 10 times. Every time I get some vague reassurance that it’s processing somehow. The company’s a black box. There is zero communication from them. Their system is too complicated for my mom and I know many people would have given up by now.

We have no recourse. The only tool they give us is to talk to a customer service person, so I did what people do that have no other leverage. The poor person committed to escalate and have someone call me back within 3 business days. I hope it’s true this time.

I haven’t checked but I’m pretty sure that the total daily mealtime for my dogs is about 30 seconds.

Last winter I was dreading a fight with Nissan to honour the battery warranty on our old 2016 Leaf. But this week our dealer performed the replacement and I couldn’t be happier. Really A+ service. They were super nice, took care of everything, went above and beyond, and I never had to take out my wallet. Surreal experience, we’re so not used to great service anymore.

Best of all, the car appears to have a larger battery as it reports ~300 km of range on a charge, whereas this car was spec’ed at 172 km in 2016. It’s like having a new car without all the waste associated with switching.

Years ago I got a job at a reputable and storied company. The employment contract said I agreed to abide by the Employee Handbook. But I could only read said handbook after I signed the contract, which made no sense.

I told them I couldn’t sign. They asked why not? I said because I can’t agree to something without knowing what I’m signing up for.

After a delay they sorted it out, but I still wondered how many people before me were shown this contract and this wasn’t challenged.

I received an email from Ticketmaster saying they had a data breach. Usual stuff; takes me 1 minute to deal with it. But it’s 12 steps, and many of these would be close to insurmountable for many people I know. Raise your hand if you do too.

1. Verify it’s a legit email.
2. Sign into my account.
3. Find where password setting is.
4. Enter a new strong password.
5. Save new password into password manager.
6. Wait for email with passcode and enter it to confirm change.
7. Site auto-signed me out so sign back in to verify all is well.
8. Investigate why site refuses credentials.
9. Realize password manager saved a new entry.
10. Copy new password to old entry, delete the duplicate.
11. Try signing in again, all good.
12. Identify and delete all the related emails.

Empathy did not come to me naturally and making people feel seen and heard without necessarily agreeing is a skill I’m still learning. I’m not into advice columns but I’ll vouch for this one, from The Guardian:

Relationships, especially romantic ones, need to be based on mutual recognition and understanding of emotional experiences

From Rebecca Saltzman’s last entry in her series Family Tours in the Kingdom of the Sick, this passage touched me:

Our experiences of illness and love and grief tie a thread between ourselves and all humanity.

While I was on the road for a week in the US, food choices were either more limited or we were guests, so my go-to was chicken which is the only meat I still eat.

Since eating chicken every day for a week, I find that I’m borderline repulsed by it. The obsession that the world has with meat puzzles me. Sure it made sense at some point, but now? With all the ways we can get nutrients from things other than by killing animals?

I’m surprised that an asteroid 200 meters across is today shooting by Earth at a distance closer than the moon and we only saw it coming a couple weeks ago.

If it had had Earth in its crosshairs, there is nothing we could’ve done about it. Not a reassuring thought, and I’m someone who puts a lot of trust and belief in science. I hope they’re re-evaluating the usefulness of our asteroid detection program.

This is completely unacceptable:

The average asking price for rent in Canada hit an all-time high of $2,202 per month in May.

That’s not one city. That’s the average for the entire country. How are people supposed to get by? There is an outcry but it’s just that and little is done to fight it. Are we supposed to riot and burn everything down?

Thanks to the good folks at Vintage Iron Cycles, I took possession of my first e-bike today! I’m looking forward to putting this Radster Trail through its paces.

Right now I have to wait because we’re getting more thunderstorms.

I’ve been looking to get an e-bike for like three years.

Last month I finally found exactly what I was looking for with the Radster Trail. I was supposed to go pick it up today.

But Mother Nature decided otherwise. Just as I was on my way to the shop, the biggest thunderstorm of the year started. Rain was pouring down like you wouldn’t believe.

The shop was closing at 7 PM. The rain also stopped EXACTLY at 7 PM.

Instead of talking about my wishes for WWDC ’24, I’d like to mention a favorite recent addition: Xcode Cloud.

After Apple purchased Buddybuild in 2018 and kept it running with subscriptions turned off, it took a while to know where they were going with this.

Now it’s hard to imagine development without Xcode Cloud. Along with TestFlight, it’s one of the best one-two punch development tools that we get by default. It can’t be overstated how easy this is now.

I’ve been reading every piece of the Family Tours in the Kingdom of the Sick series by Rebecca Saltzman. My wife having gone through health crises of her own, I recognize so much of the emotions and feelings Saltzman describes. It’s validating, in a way. It also helps that she writes in a tongue-in-cheek style. Her last piece didn’t disappoint.

Speaking of YouTube, I really hope for PeerTube to take off like Mastodon did. But for that to happen, PeerTube will have to figure out the monetization part. The problem is, there aren’t a zillion ways to do it. Usually it’s ads or subscriptions or both. Not really words that are compatible with decentralized, open-source software.

I just reactivated the Classic Editor in WordPress. Because life is too short for dealing with overcomplications like the Block Editor when all I want is to write. Just let me write. Can I write? My deepest desire is to have a big text field where I can write. Did I mention all I want is to write?

Note to self. I was getting bombarded with ads on YouTube, thinking that 1Blocker had stopped working so maybe YouTube had found a way around the blocker. But then I realized that the 1Blocker Scripts extension was only activated for m.youtube.com, not youtube.com. Once I activated the latter, ads went away, thank goodness.

It struck me today that I make roughly three times more money now than I did near the beginning of my career, but in that time home prices have gone up by a factor of about 15.

Buying a house was a thing we could do then. I don’t know how young people today are supposed to do the same.

Life’s too short to spend two hours a day in the train to commute to work.

It’s funny that hysteria is not fun but hysterical means funny.

I just released a little app for iOS that I made in the spirit of scratching my own itch. You might find it useful if you rewatch a lot of movies like I do and find yourself wondering “when did I last watch that?”

The Rewatchables

Version 1.0 is pretty basic but I’m thinking of adding things like stats and recommendations in the future.

Cereal box wisdom this morning:

Change your opinions, keep to your principles. — Victor Hugo

It reminded me of the common value seen at many tech companies to have “strong opinions loosely held”.

Considering how difficult of an ideal this is to uphold in a field where opinions are a dime a dozen and people are often inexperienced, I prefer Victor Hugo’s version. Because what’s important is not having opinions, but having principles that guide your practices.

My designer of a daughter has updated her web site and I think it looks great. Of course I’m totally biased and you shouldn’t take my word for it so go check it out right now!

40 goals for Crosby.

I can’t decide whether it speaks to his greatness that he’s still Pittsburgh’s best player at 36, or it shows how ordinary the rest of the team is.

Probably a bit of both.

I wish pedestrians didn’t make such a production out of it when I ring the bell on my bike. I just want to avoid surprising them, but most hurriedly turn around, grab their kids, and move waaaay out. Take it easy people, it’s not like my bike was 6 foot wide and I was going to plough right through you.

Ah, I bet things would be different if I lived in the Netherlands.

I disagree with Dan Moren and his piece about Apple TV. The problem with tvOS is that it’s often impossible to tell what the hell is currently focused or selected on any given screen. I use this thing every day and I still have to move focus around to figure out where it is.

That’s job number 1, Apple: highlight clearly what I’m interacting with. That’s it.

I always thought that ads were one of the worse things to plague modern life. But I’ve changed my mind. In the year 2024, no one can seemingly conduct business of any kind without requesting reviews.

Ad blocker? Checked.

Review request blocker?