Matthew Weber:

The thing, though, about being comfortable in your habits, is that nothing really new happens. If you don’t do things differently or try new things, your life is going to pass you by, because the new experiences are what make life worth living. They are what create new and cherished memories.

It is Good to Be Uncomfortable

Alain de Botton:

While we may not be able to overcome our burdens themselves, it does lie in our power to alter what these burdens have to mean to us. We may not have to take them as proof of our stupidity or ill-adjustment, they can be signs that we are destined to have interesting lives rather than calm ones, lives marked by a high degree of exploration, psychological understanding, and striving rather than settled certainty and equilibrium.

An Interesting Life Rather Than a Happy One

Now that we’re back to a standard work week, we have to squeeze all of our domestic responsibilities and fun into two days. Rhonda had to renew her drivers license Saturday morning, so we were out of the house by 8:30. Refreshed ID in hand, we ripped through a complement of errands: butcher, vegetable market, farm stand for corn, and even groceries at Shop Rite. We were back before noon, which gave me time to iron and hit the squat rack and bench for some strength training.

We took Moscato with us to the winery on Saturday, too; she was looking at us as we were fixing to leave, and remembered that we had been talking about taking her with us recently. It’s a nice loose place to hang out at: lots of outdoor seating, and they have poop bags on hand for cleaning up deuces. She was OK about it; she hates riding in the car, and was a little worked up when we got there. She settled down though.

Belmont Peanuts

The director I used to work for (now a friend and colleague), Teri, used to buy a can of Belmont Peanuts for the office sometimes. They’re the nice dry, slightly salty take on the humble peanut, as opposed to the greasier canned type you get from Planters and other vendors. They remind me of the excellent Monkey Joe’s peanuts.

When Rhonda first ordered a can for the house, we found them on Amazon for like 20 bucks. When I told Teri that I got them on Amazon, she tsked at the price and suggested we check our local Marshalls. While Amazon is hella convenient, getting them locally for six bucks is worth the effort. I eat about 15 grams of them every day at work, mixed in with almonds and some roasted edamame.

Kettlebell Swings

I’ve done 1,000 or so this month. They’re supposed to be great exercise. Watch some videos to ensure that you’re using proper form so you don’t hurt yourself. Bonus: Pavel Tsatsouline’s accent. I can listen to this guy talk about kettlebells all day.

Matiz Piri Piri Sardines

I read an article earlier this week about ways to eat sardines. I like them a lot but don’t always have a way to eat them, and after a particularly funny incident that I experienced at work years ago, am reluctant to eat them there. I grabbed a can of these yesterday with the intention of taking them to the winery, and I ate the whole can myself. I try to limit how many processed carbs I eat (crackers and bread), so I was slathering everything with the sardines: radish slices, cheese, salami, and more. They were great and not very spicy at all. I love all manner of “trash fish” including mackerel and bluefish.

El Paso, Elsewhere

This game is a shameless copy of Max Payne (a game I’ve played through dozens of times on the Mac) in the best way. It’s got the noir detective vibe, monotone voiceovers, bullet time, and a complement of satisfying weapons for taking out vampires. Lots of fun.

Lost in Play +

I read about Lost in Play on Jolly Teapot, so I downloaded it and tried it out on my iPad mini. The audio is amazing, and sounds great using AirPods. The gibberish the characters speak is delightful, and the variety of monsters you encounter are comic yet artful. It’s a point-and-click puzzle game, so it’s not about speed. Also lots of fun.

I mentioned doing 100 kettlebell swings two weeks ago in Sunday Serial (“Starting Over”). I’ve done 100 every day since August 31st (except for yesterday), and probably won’t today because I’ll do skwats and the bench press. I can squeeze them in after a 20- or 30-minute row, four sets of 25 usually, and so far, so good.

I loved Apple’s original bumper case. They’re releasing a new one-but only for the new Air. Alas.

I find this retro-leaning blog absolutely cheeky and delightful. I even found myself shopping for a typewriter last night, but I’m sure there’s something I can try at the office. The mechanical thunk you get using a mechanical typewriter is wholly satisfying, in the same way the shutter in my mirrorless camera is.

Adjacently, see “On the Reverse Flynn Effect,” where Cal Newport quotes James Marriott:

“Print requires us to make a logical case for a subject. A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up. You can’t just assert things in the way you can on TikTok or on YouTube…print privileges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense information, that is more intellectually challenging. If you lose these things in our culture, which I think we really are in the process of losing them, it’s not surprising that people are getting stupider…and that we seem to find that IQ is declining.”

One Typed Page

Last week was the official start of the 2025-26 school year, which brings with it much harried work and fewer boundaries and edges around the work day. Comes with the territory! I’m back to a five-day workweek, which of course is tough to adjust to compared to the more languid rhythms of summer, but the longer days and weeks will certainly give me more time to get stuff done. Execute on the vision, as it were.

Here are some things to check out.

TabTab

In my quest to find an analog for Chrome’s tab search view for Safari, I stumbled upon TabTab. Like Witch, TabTab can replace the default command-tab application switcher feature in macOS, but adds a cool search option (also like Witch).

Unlike Witch, however, TabTab has a bespoke design that is all its own. You can search through open tabs, browsers, and application documents, or focus on one in particular (ie Safari). It’s pretty great and I’m excited to have finally purchased the pro license. In addition to searching open applications and browser tabs, TabTab can act as an app launcher as well. It’s a swell utility.

Bellview Winery’s Adella Blend

Rhonda and I met my former boss at Bellview Winery recently, and she tried some of their excellent Astraea, which I’ve gushed about here. Bellview describes it thus:

A beautiful dry white blend of Gruner Veltliner, Viognier, Vidal Blanc, and Cayuga. This crisp white is light and refreshing to enjoy on a warm summer weekend.

I can’t argue with any of that. Astraea replaced the excellent Hyacinth, which replaced their Perseus. My understanding is that they use the wines on tap to test blends to see if they would be worth bottling.

Gone is my beloved Astraea, replaced by a new blend– Adella. It’s a blend of their Viogner and Traminette, if I recall correctly. It’s very light and crisp and will carry us nicely into the fall.

We took our own cheese and salami, as we have a decent stash of cheeses and a big salami from both Baglianis and Appy Hour.

Chole Bhatura

We nipped out to Royal Spice, an Indian restaurant in nearby Millville. We went for a long time without an Indian restaurant nearby, and we’re glad to have a decent option locally now.

Rhonda and I first stopped in there on our annual Anniversary date: we usually take the day off, have lunch out, and go shopping. I had tried the dish for the first time at the now-shuttered Indeblue in Collingswood while I was working in Camden County, and fell in love with the dish (they still have a location in Philly). Indeblue’s version was a fiery affair, with a rich red sauce and the namesake fried bhatura flatbread. Royal Spice makes a good version as well, and I suggested we try it back in 2022 when we first went. She loved it too, and subsequent visits revealed the dish to both Joey and Aaron, who similarly enjoy it. Even Joe, a more selective diner, finds himself scooping up some with the fried bread.

Chole bhatura is a great dish in that it’s vegetarian but still wholly rich and satisfying in a way that doesn’t rely on jacking the star of the show with cheese or anything. The chickpeas shine in the stewy, fiery sauce, and the puffy bhatura is at once visually arresting and wholly pleasing in texture and chew.

How did the summer disappear? The pool is too cold for swimming, but the weather is divine. We’ll be having spritzes and apps on the deck soon. With Aaron off to college, and Joey commuting to school + working a lot at his new job, we’re effectively empty nesters.

I reflected yesterday, en route to Bellview Winery after a late lunch at Sharrott, that the familiar pattern of diversions of our lives have gradually reemerged, in an unsurprising way, to what they were before we welcomed the kids into our lives: shopping, nipping out for something to eat and drink, and domestic futzing around.

We were also reminiscing about all the fun things we’ve done as a family over the years, and the crazy, hyper-local, mostly free adventures I’d take them on when they were little. I saw the same brownies at a farmers market that I got for the boys after our first summer in Ocean City.

There are many more to be enjoyed, too, which is a joyful thought indeed..

Witch

Witch by Many Tricks Software is an alternative to the Mac’s default command-tab app switcher. It’s an ingenious utility that allows you to create a number of different kinds of switchers, and in my case, I was interested in making a Safari tabs switcher (although I still think Launchbar might be the best solution for me).

macOS’s default switcher is great, and as I discovered before, there’s a bit more to it than meets the eye. Pressing on the up or down arrow key while selecting a running application from this menu will show you the open application windows and hide everything else that’s running, and along the bottom row, shows recent documents.

Witch does something similar: invoking the app switcher shows a menu of running applications, but you can style the list such that it’s vertical, for example, or tabs from right to left (a test, perhaps, of a person’s sanity), and more.

Most salient, however, is Witch’s ability to search through your stable of running apps. Let’s say you’re using the excellent Bike outliner to take some notes, and you do a web search to understand a feature. In this situation, you have an app named Bike running, as well as a Safari tab or two with articles about Bike. Invoking Witch and smacking the escape key allows you to search for the phrase “Bike” and see all of it. That’s a pretty simple example to illustrate the feature.

You can create multiple “actions” in Witch and assign them to different keyboard shortcuts. I have a second action that shows only the frontmost app’s windows in a vertical array. It’s perfect for switching and searching Safari tabs.

MacSurfer

Way back in the 90s, when I was in college, my dad’s browser homepage on his enviable Centris 650 was MacSurfer. It was emblematic of that era’s webpage design: a white page, mostly text, very low rez. But it was the source for curated Apple News, and it became my homepage for a long time, too. I eventually replaced MacSurfer as my homepage with Google Reader (tuned to the Apple tag group).

And it’s back. Eric Schwartz interviewed the new owner, who has resurrected the site. It’s been a welcome return to a curated news page; I love my RSS collection, but this is fun, too. I’ve always appreciated how the page is organized

Starting Over

Being a beginner is fun. You’re expected to make mistakes and you improve quickly. Contrast, though, with “Expertise is not a Tombstone.”

Starting over has a similar charm, with caveats: you remember your past progress, have experienced the law of diminishing returns, but get a chance to start over in a quasi-noobie frame of mind.

I started rowing back in 2014 I think, and logging my efforts some time in 2015. I swapped out rowing for strength training in the late winter of 2016 after reading an article on the Art of Manliness about the Stronglifts 5×5 program. I purchased the app and followed the program and was very happy–even impressed–with the progress I made.

You can’t possibly do Stronglifts for much longer than six months or so. If you can put in the time, you go from zero to hero pretty quickly. I started, for example, with a 45-pound squat and finished the program with 305 lbs.

Once you reach that point, your body can’t recover from the serial work sessions at Stronglifts’ pace, so you have to back into a different program, which for me was Wendler 5/3/1. Wendler’s model backs you down to doing the four core exercises (squat, deadlift, overhead press, and benchpress) once a week, which is much less volume than Stronglifts.

I continued to make slow and steady progress using Wendler, almost reaching a 400 lb squat. But serial injuries (some back pain from deadlifting, should pain from overhead presses, and eventually some IT band issues from squats that were so bad that I couldn’t sleep at night) led me to slowly excise some of the movements from my routine. And then, in December of 2022, I started rowing again. A lot.

Rowing is a great exercise, engaging more of your musculature than walking, running, or cycling. I had been thinking about adding in the bench press and squats again, not necessarily looking to get back up to where I was before (at my current body weight, I’m not sure that’s even possible, and I’m well into being 50 years old now).

I’m just going to use paper logs instead of an app to make sure that I’m tracking how much weight I put on the bar. I’m starting off plenty heavy for a person who hasn’t been lifting for a couple of years, but well below my old PRs. My understanding is that you don’t exactly start over physiologically after a break; your body remembers your previous level of fitness and capability, and you can expect to reasonably return to a previous level of strength.

Part of my motivation is to add some muscle for aesthetics, sure, but I also want to juice my basal metabolic rate. I lost close to 90 pounds all told, but I’ve added about 10 more back on since last fall into winter. I’m less strict about how much I eat and drink during special occasions, but I have to be mindful about things, too. You don’t lose 90 pounds overnight–it comes off slowly, with deliberate effort. They can come back, too–not overnight, but slowly, with mindless sipping and chewing.

Another move I’m keen to add in is the kettlebell swing. I have a 25 and a 50. I did a bunch of swings yesterday and today, and except for a little twinge in my back from my deadlifting days, it felt good and surprisingly hard. It’s an interesting contrast: I can row at a slow pace and not get winded at all, but there’s really no way to do kettlebell swings at a low intensity. If you’re swinging a 50-pound ball of metal, it’s all or nothing. I’m writing them down on my paper squat log and I did 100 today after a 20-minute row.

On September 3rd, 2023, I posted my first Sunday Serial. It was a perfunctory list indeed. In the early days and consonant with the spirit of this blog, it was Serial Sunday sometimes, and Sunday Serial other times, until I started checking it before posting to make sure i was being consistent. I don’t remember what caused me to decide on a dedicated weekly theme; I think I was driving, kicking some ideas for posts around in my head, and the idea that every Sunday, once a week, I’d publish a list of things I found noteworthy.

And save for a couple of Sundays, I’ve stuck to it.

Sunday Serial is emblematic of Uncorrected: it’s a list of things that compel me to write. My focus is broad, as is Sunday Serial. I often feature posts from the week as an item in Serial, and likewise, a mention in Serial might turn into a post later in the week.

I’ve dabbled with creating post categories, as I am guilty of following a link to a site and reading a story, but learning the contents of the site are otherwise not interesting to me. In these cases, I’ve wished for a category list or tagging system. I have a draft of categories that I’ve settled upon, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be so fastidious here.

I’ve never wanted Uncorrected to be fiddly. So far, no categories. I write about what I want to when the spirit compels me, and I make a list every Sunday.

It’s an old-school blog. Thanks to you for reading it.

Aaron was digging through some drawers and bins while packing for school and culling some accumulated cruft, and he popped out of his room with two keyboards: first, the terrible Logitech K480, which I never liked, and my old Logitech Keys to Go. It’s the original from around 2015, which has an Alcantara-like fabric coating and a great keypress. The keys are admittedly small, but it’s still nice to use on the go. He had them from previous vacations for his iPad.

The newer model  has a smooth, rubberized coating, and is both less satisfying to the touch and harder to press the keys. I haven’t used it very much due to this, so I’m pretty psyched to have the original back.

I also have the new Logitech Keys to Go 2, which I also really like, but it’s a much bigger piece of kit than the wafer-thin original. It’s nice to type on, but feels a plasticky. I’m sure if you stripped the cover off the OG Keys to Go, it would feel plasticky, too. It’s a touch more narrow than Apple’s Magic Keyboard, and noticeably lighter.

We moved Aaron into college today. It was a busy, hectic, emotional affair for everyone. We left at 8 am sharp and made it up to campus and his dorm by 10 am. There was plenty of traffic due to all of the first-year students moving in.

In addition to using the elevator, we took a lot of trips up and down the six flights of stairs to his dorm. We helped move the bunks and other redecorating, but I was definitely starting to get in the way.

We lit out together for lunch and a Target run to pick up some hangers and other necessaries we forgot.

We were all three of us choked up leaving.

Rhonda remarked tonight, after looking in his room when we got home, “He never made his bed. But today, he did.”

Whew boy… we’ve been packing Aaron up for his first semester at Rutgers. It’s spritzes and cheese now before a big crab fest for dinner.

Joe landed a gig at Walmart filling pickup orders, which is great for him! But we missed him at last night’s dinner at the Maplewood with the ‘rents and will at tonight’s shellfish extravaganza.

I will certainly (over)write something tomorrow to commemorate the big move in, so I hope you’ll check in here tomorrow, too. As always, here are a few things to check out, thanks for reading.

retroStrip

I saw retroStrip featured earlier in the month on MacWorld and was excited to try it out. retroStrip resurrects the old Control Strip from System 7 and beyond. I used the hell out of the Control Strip on my PowerBook G3 Lombard. This is a hackier affair than the original, but that’s the target market,

Hawk Haven Naked Chardonnay

Rhonda and I took Aaron to Sweet Amalia for lunch Friday, partly to celebrate his last Friday before going off to college, and partly just because we all love the place. We sat outside in the hard afternoon sunlight, baking away but lavishing in a stunning lunch.

We made the mistake of “just grabbing a bottle there” and paid close to 40 bucks for a 20-dollar bottle of Hawk Haven’s Naked Chardonnay. It was a perfectly gluggable and dry white, eblematic of the style. I enjoyed every sip.

Speaking of chardonnays, Dave Mullen has a great article on oaked vs unoaked styles. Worth a read.

Bellview Viogner

Speaking of white wine, we grabbed a bottle of Bellview’s Viogner this weekend, since it was 10% off. It’s a refreshingly different varietal: I detect the flavors that I often associate with dry sherry, a nuttiness that doesn’t always present in fruitier whites. Viogner is one of the grapes blended into their Astraea, which I enjoy on tap.

Aaron is off to college in two days! Sheesh. He had his last guitar lesson with his longtime teacher, Merritt, on Thursday. It was a bittersweet hour and sad but fond farewell.

We got his first guitar at the now-defunct Music Central nearby. It was one of those my first guitar beginner kits and the guitar was predictably terrible. He upgraded to my old electric in short order after his first teacher gave us the thumbs up to do so.

His first teacher, Devon, left teaching at the end of 2018; he moved over to Merritt’s Music Service in Millville when Guitar Central closed, and we followed him there. Merritt took Aaron as a student after Devon’s resignation, and that worked out for everyone. Aaron even played at a big recital back in 2019. The COVID shutdown in 2020 led to lessons over Zoom, which proved helpful even after things started opening up after quarantine–in situations where we couldn’t make a lesson, we could pivot to virtual and not miss.

Merritt eventually moved his operation to his house, and we would roll over to his house and play on the enclosed back porch with Rufus, his dog, and occasionally Mr. Gray, a big ‘ole cat. Once, Merritt handed me a bass or an acoustic (I can’t remember which) and I started playing during the lessons, too. That really made it fun for me and I learned a bit myself after nearly 30 years of noodling.

I was tempted to keep the time slot for myself and take lessons until Aaron was home on breaks and the summer, but I don’t really have that much time to practice in between Thursdays. Or it’s not enough of a priority.

For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word ‘happiness’. And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one’s circumstances. One way to do this, the Stoics argued, was by turning towards negative emotions and experiences; not shunning them, but examining them closely instead.

Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote

The word “equanimity” comes from the combination of two Latin terms: aequus, meaning “even, level” and animus, meaning “mind” or “spirit.” Equanimity is characterized by the ability to remain calm, composed, open, and non-reactive in the face of challenging or distressing situations.

Equanimity: The Holy Grail of Calmness & Grace?

We are in the end who we are, that there seems to be a certain essence in us that we must allow to guide us through life. If we defy this compass, we can end up in places we don’t belong. But if we trust it, follow it, we might do something as grand as fulfilling our purpose.

Rebecah Toh, vague, inchoate feeling