Month: November 2020

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World Meet Jesse, Jesse Meet World.

I mentioned in the last post that we were expecting a new resident.

Here he is. He had no name, no history, and nobody to love. The shelter said he was retriever / husky mix.

That should probably be amended to husky / retriever mix, because he’s a lot more like a husky personality.

He talks, he becomes fixated on things, (sometimes things he really should let go). Trying to dissuade him from digging right now is a major impossibility.

I made the mistake of letting him watch me pull the gopher stakes out of the ground. the small 2 inch diameter holes were all expanded to 12 inch holes in seconds. They were deep enough for him to put his whole head in.

I suppose he was trying to help, but didn’t realize the gopher stakes were to keep gophers out of the yard, not to cover up gopher holes. I’ll admit, his solution was elegant. Dig the little bastards out of the ground and eat them. Thankfully, he didn’t find anything or that would have been a serious mess for day 3.

I decided to call him Jesse after seeing just how fast and agile he is. Jesse Owens, or Jesse James your choice…

The shelter said he was a year old… Uh wrong! he’s still teething. Add that to the husky determination and you get a bit of a buzz saw.

I’ve thus far been able to mostly keep ahead of it, but It’s a challenge to say the least. Vigilance must be 100%. Take your eyes off him for a hot minute and he lives up to his name regarding speed, and you’ll never know what he has in his mouth. think 2 year old human on speed.

On the plus side, I’ve radically increased my activity and surprisingly my BP is down.

More as anything of interest develops.

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Okay I like the look of the new MacOS

It’s almost intangible, meaning it’s tough to describe with words. But the overall effect is visually, the information on the screen “feels” lighter and more open.

Even on my 10 year old 20″ Samsung display the icons and text are crip and clear. On the Retina display of my laptop itself, things “pop” and the OS appears to be as fast as the previous version. Upgrades always worry me because there comes a time when the OS begins to exceed the hardware capability of the computer. In this case, it looks like the improvements haven’t created any noticeable lags or issues.

That may change as I get further under the covers of the system. I know there will be something I use regularly that will be odd or slow, but I haven’t stumbled upon it yet.

The unwritten law of computers is that the problem will not rear it’s ugly head until you’re in a time crunch.

For reference, I’m running on a late 2019 MacBook Pro 13″. While I am interested in the new M1 apple chip Macs, I’m probably going to stick with Intel for at least a couple more generations of the M series. I don’t have the cash necessary to go buying a new Mac every year. The current machine is a replacement for my 6 or 7 year old MacBook Air (It may be older than 7, I honestly don’t remember.)

For me, that’s the beauty of my Mac. They typically have long lives and provide me with great service over their life spans.

Hmm, I just noticed something very neat. it’s a detail, but a nice one.

My Mac changes the background screen image every hour. I’ve had that setting on, on Mac or Windows systems for years. The transparency and tint of the menu bar changes automatically to ensure best readability of the menu based on the background image.

Unlike Windows 10 where the menu bar at the bottom of the screen changes based on the theme (sometimes with unexpected results), this seems to be based on something other than an arbitrary color pallet selection.

I’m just getting to play with the OS this morning. We had a scheduled power interruption last night and by 10:45 PM I’d shut down all the electronics at their surge bars. It was probably un-necessary but I didn’t want to risk my rotating drives getting partial power then power loss, then partial power, then powering up again.

This morning it was like Christmas with me running round flipping on surge protectors and waiting with anticipation as everything came on. Then finally powering up the Mac to make sure all the drives were happy.

It was only after I’d powered the Mac up, that I remembered I had a new OS too.

The Mac startup “Chime” is back. I was like, “Oh, Hello!”

Neat thing was that all the stuff I needed to get done was normal and the OS wasn’t bugging me about all the new features. I finished what I needed to do and when I paused for a bit there was a nice polite notice asking me if I’d like to review the new stuff.

“Good Minion!” My computer is my minion and there’s nothing worse than a minion that gets in the way while you’re trying to accomplish something.

Apple Mail is completely redesigned. It’s going to take some time to get used to that. It’s not bad, just different and when I opened it, the change was a bit jarring. That’s not a criticism, just an observation that the look is very different. I think everything I’m used to is still there just moved around and I’ll have to take some time to find the new locations.

I’m off to find other new features and then to clean the house a bit.

We have a new arrival due later today. There was a young dog we heard about at a shelter. Went down to meet him yesterday and he’s moving in today. He’s probably not going to be feeling all that well when he gets here but over the next few days I’m sure he’ll be entertaining and entertained. Have no idea what his name is, I guess he’ll tell me in due time.

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24 Hour Fitness and I have divorced

Just got the final dissolution papers (in Email) today.

Eh, we had a good run. After pondering the question and visiting a couple of open gyms I decided that without the magic of the big giant eye off the 405 I just wasn’t that into them anymore.

The mega gym that I’d spent so many hours in was “home” and all the other gyms in the 24 hour chain paled by comparison. The local gyms in the chain are simply not that impressive and the clientele is less so.

There was a reason that I liked the more expensive gym, and that reason was that cost limited the clients to people that had some respect for others and typically left the place pretty clean.

The local gyms I visited were, shall we say… shitholes. That is of course when they were open. One actually made me glad I needed to wear a mask, if only I’d had some bleach to spray inside the mask, when I went in.

Should I need the services of a gym, I’ll find one. Until that time, I’ll work around the house and take walks. At least those things, I can do without a mask and without wondering what kind of fungus or other disease I’m being exposed to.

Another tie to my California Life cut. It’s been interesting to discover the threads that bind me to this place and more so how few there are left.