UGG: I’ve never cared for UGG much but recently found myself desiring a pair. I pulled the trigger on Amazon ($180 gulp) for a pair of chestnut UGG Men’s Classic Short Boot. They remind of Birkenstock sandals and Doc Martens: lovably ugly and lusciously comfortable.
CARROT Weather: This iOS/iPadOS/macOS weather app got another mention on Upgrade #493: Upgradies Hall of Fame and I thought maybe I should give it a look. I was a long-time subscriber of Dark Sky before Apple bought it, and I’ve really liked Apple’s integration of Dark Sky into their own weather app. But CARROT boasts a few neat tricks: snarky reporting, multiple data sources, and a highly configurable interface. I let the sub continue after the trial. Rhonda likes to pay attention to the phases of the moon, and CARROT Weather has a great feature for tracking this, too.<sup>1</sup>
Frozen blueberries: Buy a pack of blueberries at the market, chuck the whole thing in the freezer, and you can have a guilt-free handful of tiny popsicles whenever you’re craving a sweet.
UGG boots on my feet
CARROT Weather
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<sup>1</sup> Teachers are terribly fond of attributing aberrant behavior to a full moon.
Inspired by Episode 496 of Upgrade, “40th Anniversary of the Mac Draft,” I got to thinking about my first Mac: the Color Classic. I came home from my senior class trip to Busch Gardens in the spring of 1993 to find that my Dad had purchased one for me to take to college, despite my saying that I didn’t really use computers and that it wouldn’t be useful. He knew better for sure.
I fell in love with the Mac in short order and found myself something of techie compared to my peers in college. It was still rare then for people to have their own computer; most students went to one of the labs on campus and suffered the degradation of using DOS and WordPerfect, writing to floppies. I found myself enjoying just using the Mac in my dorm, changing the wallpaper, playing Maelstrom, and installing Shareware my dad would send me on floppy disks. I had an app that played Oscar the Grouch sounds when you emptied the trash, and a another the played a vomit sound when you ejected a floppy disk. I wrote all of my papers in the comfort of my room in WordPerfect at whatever hour I needed, and printed to my StyleWriter II. People would come into my room to write their papers.
We updated the processor with some kind of DayStar accelerator board which must have cost a fortune. I replaced it prematurely with a 630 CD and an external SCSI hard drive in my sophomore year, mostly so I could play Marathon and Doom. It was faster and had a larger display, but never the charm of the Color Classic.
Find My: This week, my youngest son (Aaron) went over a friend’s house and they went sledding in the woods. He called in a panic from the site and said he couldn’t find his phone. I used Find My on my phone to send him a pic of where iCloud was seeing the device, but they still struggled to find it. I suggested that he log into iCloud using a friend’s phone (on Safari or Chrome) and try to ping the phone from the woods. Having suggested it, and having his password in 1Password from way back when he got his first iPhone, I decided to try it myself. That did the trick; he was able to recover the phone, buried in a good bit of snow. His friend’s mom, hearing of the solution, declared that she wanted the same setup for herself. I’d suggest everyone who isn’t inclined to buy a new phone the moment theirs is lost to make sure you know how to fire up this valuable service and test it out with the family unit.
DiBruno Bros Brie Cheese: Rhonda has been buying brie of various qualities at the local Shop Rite (and other cheese mongers) for years. I like any kind of brie, I suppose, but having tried a brie from DiBruno Bros at the excellent Bellview Winery, I realized how much the grocery store stuff pales in comparison. What’s funny is my inability to describe the different (I am not usually at a loss for words). The only way I’ve been able to satisfactorily describe it to myself is to call it “stank” and “funk.” DiBruno doesn’t appear to make their own cheese; they sell the crafts of other fromagers. I suspect this is the Normandy Brie.
FoodNoms: I’ve written a fair bit about my weight loss here on Uncorrected. I do, however, remain bewitched by the patterns I (try to) discern. Writ large, I jump on the scale each morning with a notion of what I’m going to see, and while I’m sometimes spot on, I’m often surprised to see things swing a pound or so in either direction. I will eat a handful of M&Ms the day before and some peanuts and find a slight gain; I will split a bottle of wine and some cheese and salami for lunch with Rhonda and find a slight loss. I don’t obsess over my weight (well maybe a little) but I do find the matter vexing.1. So in the same way that I have used Concept2’s ErgData app to track my rowing data in a way that allows me to understand my progress, stagnation, or decline, I thought I’d try a food tracker app. I wanted to answer some questions: how many calories do I actually eat in a day? What habits could lead to gain or loss? If I want to drop a couple of pounds, what can I do? I am hoping FoodNoms will help me with that.
Brie
FoodNoms (yes, I had a Bellini again
1This is an enjoyable part of my pathology: Having serially lost weight month over month, to the point that I’m at the BMI I should be for my height, with zero instances of mysterious weight gain to frustrate me, I silently fret that one Sunday I’ll wake up and POOF gain ten pounds.
Downloading the iPadOS Copilot app and running it on your Mac is a nicer experience than running it on Windows, where it’s usually stuck to the right side of the screen or (worse), stuck in Edge. Copilot is a great service and a good introduction to AI.
In Thoughts on Turning 49, I wrote about about not doubting your capacity for change. Here’s a great quote from Mark Manson in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*uck that makes the case for committing:
I’ve been referring to the break between Christmas and New Year’s Day as “The Week Between” ever since I found John Roderick’s version of the songhttps://youtu.be/x5dlcUGZqGY?si=-mLBmvLWpsjqtbz5 by the same name on YouTube. I have been lucky that for much of my adult life, I have been able to take the week off and be home with the family, most appreciably since becoming a father.
The Week Between is a time to make some plans and do some things that you might not otherwise have time to do, although we are not inclined to do anything exotic or costly.
I have the lists of things I’ve spitballed doing in both DEVONThink and even Workflowy, and it’s fun to look at the notions I listed there. Usually we don’t end up doing many of them, but I like to have a list to check if we get bored.
This year’s Week Between was emblematic of our typical fun, with some new twists:
True Detective: There’s not much new on that’s been interesting to watch, but in her style, Rhonda found herself watching the first season of True Detective while we prepped for Christmas dinner. I loved season one but never got back into the show after that, so we finished off Season One and then watch the second as well. I liked the second season much more than I thought I would have.
Wonka: I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and also Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator when I was a kid, and both novels were magical escapes. I didn’t even know about the original Gene Wilder movie until I was well into adulthood! This musical, starring Timothy Chalamet (from the most recent take on one of my favorite novels, Dune) plays Willy Wonka in a non-canonical prequel to the original story. It’s excellent and dreary and colorful and magical and a lot of fun to watch.
Bellview Winery: I’ve been sniffish about local wines for no good reason until recently, when I attended a celebration of life for a retired VPS employee at Bellview. I had a nice glass of their dry rosé and was well impressed. Rhonda and I have been meaning to go back and check it out, and our recent jaunt to Willow Creek Winery was so much fun that we resolved to get to Bellview. We went earlier this week and are getting ready to go again as I write this. It is considerably less expensive than Willow Creek but is quaint, charming, and offers equally good wine.
Pitman, NJ: Pitman didn’t have much going for it when I was younger, save for a cool hobby shop and the Music Museum, but it has experienced a downtown-shopping-district renaissance along with other notable downtowns in South Jersey in the last decade or so (like Collingswood and Haddonfield). We went about a year ago while Aaron was at the Deptford Mall with his girlfriend and tried lunch at Merryman’s Pub (meh), a beer at a now-defunct brewery, browsed the guitars at Just Antiques, and bought some cookies from Just Cookies. This year, we hit Crave and the Crazy Cat for cookies and cupcakes, and grabbed a pour-over at Endgrain. The coffee took a while to brew, and because they were single origin, only served black. I asked for milk, and the barista repeated, firmly, that they only serve the single origin coffees black. OK, fine. (I can’t argue with the end product, which was delicious.)
Leave the World Behind is an apocalyptic Netflix original film. It is complete with some very cool camera moves, a bleak and urgent vibe, and a wholly unexpected ending.
Bonesaw Brewing: After Pitman, we hit Bonesaw for a German altbier, and an IPA. My alt was interesting and I was wholly unaware of the history of the style, which includes an age-old competition with another of my favorite styles, Kölsch.
Toy Stores: The boys still collect, so we hit both House of Fun and Play with This, as so often happens with our Camden County trips (Joe even called ahead to find a coveted Mezco Dr Doom).
I should be writing my essential software lists; I have macOS to cover, as well as iOS, but this year, I’m adding Windows software to my list. I really like Windows 11 and am keen to write about it and the software I’ve been using.
Umi: We tried this sushi-forward buffet as part of our Camden County trip. It’s a good self-serve buffet experience if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s not gourmet or chill, but it’s kinda casino style. Fun.
This will be in my next Sunday Serial for sure but I’m jumping the gun in case anyone is looking for booze suggestions for the holiday. Make a Manhattan:
3 oz rye
1/2 oz sweet vermouth (Carpano Antica if you can)
Dash of bitters
Maraschino cherry
Stir over ice for one minute and strain into a glass. Simple and classic.
The Oatmeal: I haven’t read the Oatmeal in a long time, but we were doing some shopping yesterday for Rhonda’s class and I chanced upon a collection of Inman’s cartoons in the book section. This one in particular, about running, made me laugh and see myself at the same time (see the cartoon below). I too am an introspective person full of self-doubt and insecurities, and the net effect of rowing for me does help with that (plus I look better, generally speaking). While physically rowing, I go into dark corners of my mind. I anticipate this, but the me that emerges from the basement is a better version of me. It’s a kind of est or cathexis or primal scream. I flipped open to this cartoon in a moment of synchronicity, perhaps, a delightful, ephemeral, human moment that only great humor can invite.
Headway: I’ve seen the ridiculous Blinkest “Be the Most Interesting Person in the Room” ads and was wondering what Blinkist was. Turns out, it’s a kind of Sparknotes or summary service for books you want to read but maybe don’t have the time to. Headway is basically the same thing, and this month, there’s a big sale. So I took the leap.
Blackstone Griddle: We picked up one of these four-burner models at Walmart a couple of years ago, and it’s the size of the professional grill at which I toiled in my long-ago part-time high school job at Atkinson’s Takeout. I make all kinds of things on it: eggs, stir fry, burgers, salmon, stir fry. They are great and worth having, even if you usually grill on a charcoal or gas grill most of the time.
