My First Mac: The Color Classic

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.

My Favorite/Best Mac Model Ever

Inspired by Episode 496 of Upgrade, “40th Anniversary of the Mac Draft,” I got to thinking about my favorite Mac. I’ve had a solid run of Macs:

That’s a lot of Macs!

If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the MacBook Air. It was my first Mac with an SSD, and I absolutely loved it. I only stopped using it because my son needed something to play Minecraft on; I was not in the market for a replacement. The 13” Pro I replaced it with was superior, technically, but I didn’t really need the extra power and the Air was just the right size for everything I needed it for.

The PowerMac G4 was my first pro desktop and holds a special place in my heart; I was in grad school and while I did have the PowerBook Lombard at the time, I didn’t use it unless I was out and about because the G4 was a screamer. I installed Mac OS X, as it was called back then, on both, and only the G4 ran it usably. I gamed a lot on this machine, especially Oni. I have never actively disliked any of my Macs.

The 16” MacBook Pro is the last of my Intel Macs that still sees some usage, but I don’t care for Intel Macs compared to either of my Apple Silicon Macs for reasons of power efficiency; the 16”’s fans fire up a lot and the battery gets nuked fast. And it’s really big.

The MacBook Adorable was (still is, it runs just fine) amazingly portable and I used to carry it around pinched between my index finger and thumb. I would probably go for a 12” M2 or M3 Mac of that size if I work were springing for a new Mac and I needed to replace this 13” M1, which is a great machine but heavy for my needs. I currently covet a 13” M2 Air in Space Black the most, but I’m not due for one any time soon. I suspect an Air will be my next Mac. But who knows.

The Studio, named “Anthem” (I name my Macs after Rush songs) is a fantastic machine, overkill for my use case, but it’s an amazing machine.

But that first Air? Ahh. Fond memories.

Next post: the Color Class, my first Mac.

Sunday Serial: Find My, Brie, and FoodNoms

Here’s this week’s list of things to try out:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

DiBruno Bros Brie

Brie

FoodNoms

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.

Sous Vide Filet Mignon

I wrote about the filet mignon at Drift in Reboboth Beach back in the fall, and the perfect doneness found me swearing to cook mine a bit lower the next go round. We grabbed a three-pack of filet at an ACME yesterday, and true to my word, I left it in the Anova at 124 instead of 128 for an hour before finishing it on the jet engine method I use to grill off a sous vide cut. (I cribbed this move from Alton Brown, albeit a variation of his innovation.)

Sous Vide Filet Mignon
Filet Mignon

This was one of the best dishes I’ve done, a perfect medium rare, very little “gray line,” as Aaron calls it. I used to fret about overdoing filet, but sous vide neatly solves that problem.

Serial Sunday: Cipriani Bellini, Phô, and NotePlan

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

  1. Ciprianni Bellini: this is a premade Bellini, the storied cocktail from Harry’s Bar in Venice. This is sweet for my tastes, but I’ve never had a proper Bellini.1
  2. Phô: The three of us were dining last night and remarked how long it had been since we’d had phô. Aaron and I were into the traditional Vietnamese soup for a while. We found ourselves today at Phô Cali in nearby English Creek. I got the P1 with several proteins: brisket, steak, tendon, tripe, and meatballs. So good.
  3. NotePlan: I test-drove this notes+todo app last week for the duration of the free trial. It’s a Mac-only app that helps you orgnanize your to-do list using both project notes and daily journal pages, all connected intimately with your calendar. NotePlan offers support for tags and other metadata (including due dates), and relies on Markdown. Also works on the iPhone and iPad. I could easily replace my notes and to do managers with NotePlan. I’m an inveterate switch of apps and systems, which is a bad habit I’m keen to break. Sometimes.

Cipriani Bellini
Cipriani Bellini

Phô
Phô

NotePlan
NotePlan

1I traveled to Venice once but never went to Harry’s.

Sunday Serial: Fuji Sushi in Haddonfield, Bellview Winery, and Tabby for Mac

Here’s this week’s list of things to try out. I took a couple of weeks off for the holidays:

  1. Fuji in Haddonfield: We dined here tonight (and many times before) for my son’s brithday, my dad’s birthday, and Joey’s girlfriend’s. It was excellent as always. I can’t avoid the crispy salmon skin roll every time.
  2. Bellview Winery: Bellview Winery has been open for something like 20 years. They did our wedding favor splits back in 2003. I went recently for a celebration of life and had two glasses of their rosé. I was smitten and talked up coming back to Rhonda many times. Our Cape May jaunt ignited a renewed interest in checking it out, which we have several times since.
  3. Tabby: One of my favorite keyboard shortcuts on Chromium-based browsers is shift-command-a (on Mac) and shift-control-a (Windows) to search open browser tabs. This makes finding open tabs much easier than scanning horizontally across the toolbar when you have a lot open. Tabby is a tab manager for the Mac that exposes and allows you to search your open browser tabs across browsers. Pretty killer and infrastructure for me.

Fuji
Fuji in Haddonfield, NJ

Bellview Winery
Bellview Winery Rosé

Tabby for Mac
Tabby for Mac

Weighty Matters

I described a bit how I’ve lost some weight rowing and changing my diet here on Uncorrected. I keep close track of this by weighing myself every morning and appending the data to a CSV file via an action in Drafts. The resulting data file made it easy to ballpark how much I’d lost overall, and analyze some patterns (Monday mornings after three-day weekends=a bit of weight gain, for example). But I wondered about the larger data set and what I might learn from some analysis in Excel. So I fed the sheet into Excel and ran a pivot table.

Weighty Matters

Takeaways:

  • Quarter 2 in 2023 was my greatest loss on record (28.5 lbs), with the most lost occurring in May. This puzzled me at first, but the reason is that I got a new rower for Rhonda to use. It had the newer PM5 computer on it, which synced with my iPhone over bluetooth using Concept 3’s ErgData app. As you can see below, I didn’t log the most meters of all of the months after which I started tracking the data using the PM5, but I moved from using the PM3 on my older rower and tracking the data manually to getting more competitive with myself. I did track data before this, but I used a Drafts action to write to a text file. I was not as concerned with my standings when I was using Apple Fitness+, only getting in a 20 or 30-minute workout with Josh or Ana. I would like to look more closely at my output prior to moving to the PM5 in the future.

2023-24 Season Data

  • Closing in on losing 80 pounds, I’m starting to plateau. And while that causes me a twinge of panic, obviously you have to stop somewhere. I have to stop somewhere. Considering I was hoping to just move down a pant size, (I’ve moved down to a size 30 from a 38, when the 38s were cut generously), I should be just fine with that.

So what’s next?

Maintenance, I guess. I have considered cutting a day of rowing out of the schedule (I generally do six days a week). I have a hunch that I will be able to break some new goals if I rested more in between rowing sessions. I have also been thinking about adding some strength training back into the routine, if my left shoulder will cooperate (probably just bench presses). I can do up to 10 pull-ups now, which is 10 more than I could do a year ago. I don’t want to get bored and I don’t want to get frustrated if I’m not setting PRs. I even find myself getting anxious before attempting a PR now. I have a good idea of what I need to do to lose weight were I to gain some back, but I still fret.

It’s a crazy ride, this life. This goofy mind of mine.

Def gonna row tomorrow though 😉.

How Much Weight Comes Back If You Stop Taking Weight Loss Drugs?

In a study of people taking tirzepatide, people who were switched to a placebo gained back 14% of the 25.5% of their lost body weight (the placebo group continued to receive coaching). It’s not necessarily unexpected, though:

“If a patient wants to go off the medicine, we’ll try. But we also say what the results are — so far, it seems like most people are going to gain weight back,” Dr. Jay said. “And that’s not your fault. That’s because obesity is a disease, and this medicine is helping to address it.”

How Much Weight Comes Back After You Stop Using a Weight-Loss Drug?

The Week Between 2023

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.

Crave in Pitman
Crave in Pitman

Crazy Kat in Pitman
Crazy Kat in Pitman

Old Rail in Barrington
The Old Rail in Barrington

Rosé at Bellview Winery
A Glass of Rosé at Bellview Winery

Bonesaw Brewing's Alt Bier
Bonesaw Brewing

Bonesaw Brewing's Alt Bier
Bonesaw Brewing

Engrain Coffee
Endgrain Coffee

Wine and Cheese and Bellview Winery
Rosé and Santa’s Favorite at Bellview Winery

1 “The Week Between” is originally on “One Christmas at a Time” album by Roderick and Jonathan Coulton