I’ve got two sets of Apple Airpods Pro: my original set, which I bought in 2020, and a Pro 2 set, which I bought in the middle of 2024 to upgrade the first set after the microphone started failing. I had the originals replaced under warranty in 2022 when one side went bad and started clicking constantly, and they returned to faithful service. I use the good ones for everything but working in the garage, and I relegate the first set for getting dirty under the truck or painting a bedroom. They’ve been crackling in my ear for several weeks now, and I finally took the time to look up a solution: the noise cancelling circuitry is going bad, apparently. Turning it off solved the problem immediately, but leaves me without a cocoon.
Here’s some clips of some of our runs yesterday. Your host wiping out and cracking ribs is at about 6:20. Gnarly dude!
Here’s an earworm I’ve got at least a slight connection to: the Drop Nineteens just re-released their demo album from 1991, which was reviewed by Pitchfork over the weekend. In the recap the reviewer mentioned a vocalist named Hannah who joined the band briefly during that demo session, who then left and transferred into MICA while I was there, and who came through the design program a year behind us. I knew her from the scene and remember hearing she’d sung on an album by a famous band (I’d heard it was the Sneaker Pimps) but this makes much more sense now.
Anyhow, the song Daymom is really good—it’s got a lot of the things I know and remember of the music from that time. It’s got a very chill vibe even though the tempo is fast, and I’m a sucker for a double layered male/female vocal with bass guiding the melody. There’s a lot of Cure/New Order happening here, and that’s not a bad thing.
In a rare case of planning ahead, I had a stacked four-day weekend full of learning, entertainment, and adventure. Friday, I did the HQL course to get my license sorted out, as mentioned earlier. On Saturday I was in the car headed down to Southern Maryland to visit with my father-in-law, take him out for some Mission Barbecue, and go through his mail. We sat and talked for 2 to 3 hours, mainly me listening about his history in rural Pennsylvania, and then I drove back home through cold dark rain.
Sunday, we hosted Karean and Zachary to go to see the Lion King at the Hippodrome in Baltimore. This required a ton of housecleaning, which mainly fell on Jen, but I threw in that morning to finish up the last minute stuff for their arrival. We were also finishing up an overhaul of the guest bedroom, following a remodel we did last year where the new color turned out to be a bit too vibrant and a couple of values too dark. It was a nice color but made the room feel smaller. We bought a lighter shade of the original color and I rolled it on three walls, leaving one for an accent. Jen framed two pieces of art we bought in Portugal and bought a third for over the bed. After sewing up the new blackout curtains and building a roller shade for the bathroom door, the whole room really came together. Jen picked out fabrics and colors that accent each other and it really feels great in there now—much lighter, larger, and complete.
Sunday morning we got churched up and drove into Baltimore at noon for the 1 o’clock show. This marks the third show we’ve seen at the Hippodrome and it never fails to deliver. This show was amazing: it’s the traveling Broadway troupe and they do an incredible job. The costumes were breathtaking and the set design is incredible. I would bet it’s even more inspiring on a large Broadway sized stage (the Hippodrome is a smaller, Vaudeville-era venue) but we enjoyed every minute and a double Vodka Matata (vodka, ginger, beer, and lime) made everything even more pleasant. After the show, we drove to a fancy Ramen restaurant in the inner Harbor and loaded up on noodles, pork rolls, and gyoza. Properly stuffed, we headed back to the house, got in some warm PJs and caught up on the couch before getting to bed early for the next day.
Monday’s activity was driving up to Roundtop for a day of snowboarding. Finn declined to go so it was just Karean, Zachary and me. We got our rentals sorted out, accompanied Karean to the bunny slope, and gave her some pointers to practice on before her lesson. After watching over her for a run or two, Zachary and I broke off and hit the blue slope. After he got his confidence under him, we really started having fun. The mountain was pretty empty, which was fantastic: the lift lines were almost negligible and we didn’t have to avoid crowds of people on the way down. The snow was typical manmade Eastern stuff, but there was enough down that it wasn’t a sheet of ice and it was cold enough outside to not be slushy and wet. But after enough people went down the slope it started getting rough in patches as they dug in and started making grooves.
On my third or fourth run, I was switching directions, my board caught an ice ridge and I flipped downward on the mountain landing on my left side with my arm underneath me. It all happened very fast and I didn’t have time to cushion myself, and I got the wind knocked out of me. My ribs felt very sore and tender, but I got up and kept boarding. Zachary and I got about seven more runs in before lunch and the grin on his face got bigger and bigger with each ride down the mountain. We did about five more runs after lunch and wrapped things up at three, meeting Karean up in the bar above the lodge. Zachary is really into snowboarding, and I’m going to redouble my efforts to get him out at least twice a year.
My ribs are very tender this morning. It’s mainly the fifth and sixth, directly under my left arm on the side. Jen found me a Lidocaine patch and I put that on last night before bed; I’m going to keep applying them until the soreness goes away. If I had to guess, they’re either bruised, or possibly fractured, but there isn’t much any doctor could do other than tell me “don’t fall on them”.
I spent four hours on Friday talking to a nice older man about guns. Specifically, we talked about a handgun qualification license, which I’ve been interested in getting for a while now, but have been stalled by for different reasons. This course was very good. He’s been training for forty years, so the class went by smoothly and he filled it with a ton of good information. We went over safety first and he had me handle several different types of actual guns after we talked about correct grip and fit. It turns out my long fingers require a fat grip to get my finger in the right place on the trigger. We talked about the dominant eye in relation to sighting and I learned my left eye is dominant, which made him suggest I learn to shoot with my left hand, something I was not expecting. Then we went downstairs to the range and reviewed range safety before he had me set up and fire three different pistols: a SIG chambered in .22 for target and stance practice, a SIG 365 chambered in .380 and a Glock 48 chambered in 9mm.
The .22 was easy to shoot and got me set up for the larger calibers. He had me shoot 10 with both hands in a combat grip, then 5 with my right hand and 5 with my left. I got the best results with my left hand, followed closely by the dual grip.
The .380 also felt very good—it’s a smaller frame but fit snugly in my hands—and I found the amount of recoil to be just right. I got a good grouping with this one as well, better than the .22, actually. I was very impressed with this pistol, and it’s a modular design which allows for longer and wider handgrips in various sizes, and can be chambered in 9mm. It’s also smaller size, which is good for concealment, but at the end of the day I’m not interested in carrying it.
The last Glock I shot years ago, a 17, I didn’t like so much because the grips didn’t fit me well, but I also found out yesterday that I was holding the trigger wrong. My finger was hooked around the trigger past my first knuckle, when it should have been centered on the first pad. This 48 had a sleeve over the grip and fit much better, and I got a very clean grouping in the 9 ring. As much as the other guns were good, I think I would go with the Glock and get it set up for my hands better.
So next up is a fingerprint card, and then I send in my paperwork to the State Police to hopefully get approved.
I could have sworn I’ve posted this before, but a search tells me otherwise. The opening bass riff to You Can’t Quit Me Baby has been rumbling through my head for the past week; there’s something hypnotic about this section and the pre-chorus, with a wailing slide guitar echoing the background vocals. The bass is just a little ahead of the drums, which gives it a laid-back, stoned vibe. This is one of my favorite tracks on the first Queens album, and a lot of fun to play.
In related news, I received the payment for my Steinberger yesterday, quietly putting a bow on that transaction. I will say that my experience with Reverb was very positive—knowing there’s a third party helping guarantee the sale seamlessly was a huge relief.
John Gruber does a deep dive on the current state of bootable Mac cloning software in 2025. It’s been a minute since I’ve had a bootable backup drive for any of my machines, and while he recommends SuperDuper, I was always a fan of Carbon Copy Cloner. I used to diligently keep a bootable backup of my primary laptop, and kept another drive handy for catastrophic recovery back in the days when I was a freelance Mac support guy. With the switch to Intel and then to the Apple Silicon architectures (not to mention various flavors of OS and file systems) it got hard to stay current with all the required flavors needed. Apparently the last update of Sequoia blew everything up, but this was a bug and has now been rectified.
- When someone pronounces et cetera (/et ˈsedərə/) as “eggseddera”. We are not making salad with mayonnaise; we are denoting the fact that there are more things in a list we aren’t mentioning. There’s a T in there, friends, let’s use it.
- The word trainings, e.g., “we’re having some trainings on proper use of company credit cards.” I know we talk about meetings, but trainings was never pluralized until I entered the NGO space. Now I’m going to go have a walkings with my dog.
- Corollary: Learnings. E.g.: What learnings have you taken away from this event?
- When someone talks about being orientated towards something. Especially when it’s a BBC reporter. I suppose this is a British English thing, but it still hits me like nails on a chalkboard. You’re oriented towards something. You attend an orientation.
What bastardizations of the English language have you heard lately?
Here’s the latest YouTube video from the last two and a half weeks. It’s a bit overdue because of the weather, but it covers a bunch of different projects.
I walked out of the UPS store this afternoon with a paper slip in my hand and a feeling of melancholy. It didn’t help that the sky was gray and the wind was blowing. a few moments before, I walked in the store with a neatly taped box to mail off to a guy in Miami: inside a protective cocoon of Kraft paper lay my Steinberger bass guitar, something I’ve owned since college and carried with me since then. It’s been sitting in the corner for years, and every year I would take it out and play it, but after I bought the bargain Jazz bass and compared the two, I realized how much more I enjoyed playing the Fender. I’ve shopped it around to several stores in this area and gotten lowball cash offers for it, so I put it up on Reverb at a price that seemed to be reasonable for the market and waited. That was four years ago.
Last Thursday an offer popped up from this guy in Florida, and after some back and forth we settled on a price that I felt OK with. It’s lower than I was asking (after having reduced my initial price once) but still much more than I paid for it, and at this point in history I feel better about having cash in hand than a bass collecting dust in the corner. Strangely though, I’m not as bummed out as I thought I would be; I think I came to terms with selling it a few years ago, and was just waiting for circumstance to catch up with me.
So the bass will make its way to Florida, and when the buyer takes possession, I’ll get my payment from Reverb. I feel better about rolling the dice this way—eBay was never an option—and I’m hoping it all goes smoothly.
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Happy to have this completed. My team was awesome; I couldn’t be prouder of all of them.