I was sad to read the Japandroids are both releasing an album and breaking up after the tour cycle is over. It’s pretty amazing what two people can do with a guitar and a drum kit, but that’s also got to be both limiting and exhausting after awhile. Near to the Wild Heart of Life got me up and out of the hospital after cancer surgery (well, that and NACHO FRIES!) and both their albums to this point have been awesome.
President Biden offers three simple ways to reform the Supreme Court: a Constitutional amendment to clearly state that no person is above the law; an 18-year term limit for sitting justices, and a binding code of conduct. Simple, commonsense, and desperately needed.
In America, no one is above the law. In America, the people rule.
This one has been in my head for a couple of days, so there you go: Mexican Moon, by Concrete Blonde. This is one of those CDs I don’t ever remember buying but somehow wound up with; it’s not their best album (that’s Bloodletting, which had Joey and Caroline, which are both fantastic) but this song is absolutely beautiful. Johnette Napolitano had an incredible, individual voice.
I just got my lab results back from my GP, and from all accounts my cholesterol is in good shape. I was surprised to see they did a comprehensive battery of bloodwork including the stuff I would normally see during a cancer checkup. Overall there’s nothing to worry about; it all looks good (red blood cells are low, but that could be a result of COVID) but the interesting thing is that I’m dealing with two different medical systems—my whole cancer experience was through the Johns Hopkins network vs. my GP who recently shifted over to the Mercy Medical network. Looking at the lab results, Mercy’s thresholds—their high and low ranges—are lower than Hopkins’. Mercy says I’m in the clear, while Hopkins says I still have a ways to go (most of the important stuff has seen no change since December).
I’m sticking with Hopkins, as their baselines are what I’ve been working with since this whole thing started, but I find it funny how two practices see the same results differently.
Update: Updating my files this afternoon, I found a scan of a paper copy of a lab from February 2017—eight months before the cancer diagnosis. I updated my spreadsheet and the four graphs above with the extra information.
This is just a test of the system; I don’t have the dash officially installed (still waiting on rubber firewall grommets) but I got a package of replacement connectors for the last two firewall plugs and swapped out the old brittle ones. Because I couldn’t help myself, I hooked things up and tried it out. The turn signals trigger the dash lights, so there’s clearly something not connected correctly, but the truck starts off a new ignition barrel, and none of the fuses blew!
We were in the car on the way back from a lovely bayside brunch when an alert popped up through CarPlay from Jen’s brother, prompting us to look at the news. I can’t say I’m surprised. My anxiety has been ramping up over the last couple of months from a distant rumble to an almost deafening roar; it seems like every new thing I read about is another giant roadblock for my team or portent of doom for my country. It’s to the point now that I’m pausing making any long-term plans past the fall because I don’t know what’s going to happen and I don’t know how bad things are going to get. I stand against facism, xenophobia, racism, and oligarchy. The fact that one half of the country is nakedly, enthusiastically embracing these values is confusing and heartbreaking. I feel like the bad guys have all the money, attention, and momentum and I can’t do anything to stop them.
So, the verdict on AirPods Pro 2nd Generation: holy crap are these an order of magnitude better than the first gen. The noise cancelling alone is worlds better. I’m not used to the feature that listens to your voice and lowers the content of the audio you might be listening to, and there are some other bells and whistles I haven’t sorted out yet, but these are nice.
I’m headed into my GP for the first time next week in I-don’t-know-how-long for a general physical checkup; it’s been so long since I’ve seen him that he changed practices and is now in a different part of town. The goal here is to get an update on my regular bloodwork, with a focus on cholesterol (something they don’t check when I go in for cancer annuals). My blood pressure and heart rate have all remained low during the post-cancer phase but I want to make sure my heart is healthy and I’m not pouring grease in the pipes.
Theoretically I’ve got a new set of glasses coming from Warby Parker in a new frame style. There was some online confusion when I had to upload my pupillary distance information that got stuck, so I had to call and sort it out with someone online. They assured me the order had gone through, but I still have an order stuck in their cart on the website, so who knows? Update: it hadn’t gone through; a follow-up phonecall solved this.
This is the first big change I’ve made to a frame style in probably ten years or more, and I’m a little nervous. The frame size is larger than the ones I’ve been wearing which should give me some more distance for the progressive part of the lenses—and my reading prescription has changed so it’ll be good to get that updated. This is a little more of a distinguished professor/creative director look—I’ll share a picture when I get them.
I’ve been using a particular sticker vendor for probably six years now, and I was always very happy with their service, along with monthly promotions they’d run to do one-off shirt designs and other things that I found very handy. It was a surprise, then, when I got a promotional email from them last week where the founder expressed his support for Trump and added some tone deaf lying bullshit about respecting all people. He followed it up with another email a few days later claiming his staff had received death threats, which I would gather is further bullshit, as well as playing directly from the right-wing false victimhood playbook. Luckily, I’ve got another sticker/t-shirt vendor, and will be ending any association with his company.
Here’s the video update from the last month, with a big chunk of July chopped out of the middle for vacation.
In other video entertainment news I was happy to see that Roadkill, which used to be on the MotorTrend channel until MotorTrend blew themselves up, is now on Max, so I’m catching up with all the seasons I missed (something like 6 years’ worth). They’re also showing a couple of related shows like Roadkill Garage and Junkyard Gold, as well as Mythbusters. So there is a reason to keep Max around for a while.
I decided to take advantage of Prime Day to upgrade my Airpods Pro from the first generation to the second. I have used my original pair almost every day since I got them, and for just about everything, I love them. The case is battered and scratched, and the scratches are filled with iron shavings and dirt no matter how hard I scrub them. But I’ve been getting complaints lately that the sound is bad for people on the other end when I’m using them. I’ve also noticed that the noise-cancelling functionality has been getting weaker and weaker. I’m told the new generation is better and the battery life is longer, which I’ll be happy about, as well as a USB-C connector to replace the last remaining Lightning-based appliance I own.
I also ordered an Anker 6-port charger to handle the growing number of peripherals I’ve got sucking up space on the shelf behind my desk; I spend hours trying to sort out cables and wires and swapping out this for that with this cable or that connector, which is getting old. The goal here is to set up 4 USB-C wires and 2 USB Mini wires and just leave it there to charge stuff. I bought another one for my desk at work because I face the same issue there and it’s just as exhausting.
Super. Apparently AT&T left all of their customer phone numbers, calling and text records, and location data out on a cloud server somewhere, and “criminals” downloaded it. The timespan is from May—October 2022. Guess whose network is AT&T? I submit: the true criminals are the fuckheads at AT&T who continually leave this shit out on cloud servers for anyone to stumble across and download.
Countdown to useless, lawyer-enriching class action lawsuit: 10, 9, 8…