Child No. 2 asked for one, and I was happy to oblige:
- one egg plus the yolk of another egg
- Cooper Sharp American cheese
- Bacon
- Croissant
One-Pan Egg Sammy
No High-Stakes Testing This Spring for the Garden State
The New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association send this email to members today:
Earlier today, the US Department of Education sent a letter stating that New Jersey’s proposal to replace this spring’s NJ-SLA exams with a series of alternative assessment tools is in compliance with federal requirements under ESSA
Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona, has held the line on the testing requirement required under the Every Student Succeeds Act. The US Department of Education, however, did accept waiver applications from the state departments of education, of which New Jersey was one. The NJDOE asked districts to provide data on assessments that were administered during a late winter-early spring timeframe, which turned out to be related to the waiver application.
Questions remain about the ACCESS and WIDA assessments for special education and English language learners, but we should have answers soon.
Full memo here.
Greg Morris on Blogging
Greg Morris sees a resurgence of the humble blog, and welcomes them like Whitman:
Pick a platform and do it. Let me know what’s going on in your life, the pictures you take, the articles you read and the thoughts you have on them. There are enough publications out there writing news, or reviews or whatever pays the bills. The internet needs your voice, however you see fit to share it. Cover everything and anything and publish it.
Brent Simmons on To-Do Apps
More Brent Simmons, this time on the Goldilocks to-do system:
But it’s not around the corner. It’s really not. There’s no perfect system for anybody. All of these apps are pretty good, and you may find one fits you better than another, but you’re not ever going to make it the perfect system for you. Even if you started from scratch and wrote your own, you’re not getting the perfect system.
There are a few things to consider with to-do applications. I think first and foremost, they are, to some degree, their own entertainment industry. If you like tinkering with productivity apps, just own it and enjoy it. If you start getting obsessed, though, take a step back and reconsider this:
To-do apps are supposed to help free your mind from having to worry about what you have to do. As David Allen says, your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. A corollary to that is you shouldn’t be spending a lot of time thinking about your system–as long as you trust it.
The other thing, as Brent mentioned, is that they require constant input. You need to review what you put into them. You need to do the things on the lists, in the projects, or renegotiate. You can’t automate that. The colollaries here are:
- You need to like using the software, and,
- You need to find meanining in the things you have to do. You don’t have to love your job or your home improvement project, but there has to be a sense of purpose and mission there.
Otherwise it’s all intention and cruft.
Brent Simmons, Thinking Big About Vaccines, and the Social Contract
Brent Simmons recounts having chicken pox as a child, and laments the lack of a vaccine:
I was in third grade when I got a severe case of chicken pox. This was in the days before there was a vaccine for it. When I returned to school, I found I couldn’t read the blackboard anymore, and I had to get glasses.
…
But was this all better than getting a vaccine would have been? I could have died, and I’m still living with the effects. In a heartbeat I’d swap that experience for having had the vaccine.
His story is one of my talking points when I mount the soapbox after people suggest that COVID-19 isn’t so bad, or that the vaccine might be worse than the disease. It’s not an either/or proposition: yes, some people fully recover from illnesses, and some tragically die–but others live with debilitating after-effects. And if you you happen to feel cavalier about your chances of either contraction or transmission, consider the impact of spreading it around like a goddam lawn sprinkler.
For me, chicken pox was a week of from school and watching a lot of “My Favorite Martian” in syndication. But I sure as shit got my kids vaccinated.
I’m Still Living with the Longterm Effects of a Disease that Now Has a Vaccine
The Book of Eli
The Book of Eli
Rewatched the Hughes’ Brothers “Book of Eli” last night. Ebert reviewed it back when:
The Hughes brothers have a vivid way with imagery here, as in their earlier films such as “Menace II Society” and the underrated “From Hell.” The film looks and feels good, and Washington’s performance is the more uncanny the more we think back over it. The ending is “flawed,” as we critics like to say, but it’s so magnificently, shamelessly, implausibly flawed that (a) it breaks apart from the movie and has a life of its own, or (b) at least it avoids being predictable.
Denzel Washington is one of those actors you can’t not watch… which put me in mind of the interview Terry Gross did with him on Fresh Air. As is her tendency, she asked a question based on a detail that caught her eye:
GROSS: There is a scene in this where you’re holding two guns on someone, and you kind of scrape the guns against each other as if there two knives that you’re sharpening.
WASHINGTON: Mm-hmm.
GROSS: Was that a bit of business that you came up with when you were holding the guns?
WASHINGTON: Of course. I mean, you know, it’s just rhythm. You know, acting is like music, you know, and you improvise and you, it’s like jazz, you know, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s not a plan. I just did it. You know, it’s just rhythm. To me it’s just a rhythm. It’s like you do – Stanislavski said, you know, you cut 90 percent. You do all your research and you prepare and then you let it rip, you know, and that’s how it is. You know, you practice to music and you just play it.
Denzel Washington Remembers ‘Malcom X’ And ‘The Wizard Of Oz’
Second Dose Down
A fine public-private partnership if ever there was one.
Good Friday Apple Arcade Drop
Apple announced a number of new Arcade games today. There are a number of classic titles, including Cut the Rope, Oregon Trail, Chameleon Run, Don’t Starve, Fruit Ninja, Monument Valley, and the excellent Threes.
I’m not sure if they were underwhelmed with the games developers were offering or if it was a negotiation all along, but almost all of these are phone-friendly games that found life in the touchscreen, casual-gaming era ushered in by the iPhone. Having sunk many nights on the sofa feeding Om Nom, I recently peeked at Cut the Rope for a dip into nostalgia, only to find that the game had flipped over to a subscription model. This is good news for Apple Arcade subscribers.
DIY Origami Unicorn from Blade Runner
Via Boing Boing, here’s how to fold Gaff’s origami unicorn.
In the theatrical cut of Blade Runner, the unicorn is a clue that Gaff had been at Deckard’s apartment. But the symbolism gained greater import in the director’s cut, suggesting that Deckard was a replicant:
For instance, in Ridley Scott’s 1992 Director’s Cut of the film, the filmmaker added in the famous “unicorn scene” dream sequence that appeared to confirm the Deckard-as-replicant speculation. Early in the film, Deckard dreams of a unicorn during a drunken reverie. Later, one of Deckard’s fellow blade runners, a wigged-out dandy named Gaff (Edward James Olmos), leaves an origami unicorn for Deckard to find. This suggests that Gaff knows Deckard’s memories, which means they’re implanted, which means he’s a ‘bot.
I don’t personally think he was a replicant, but I love the debate.
PasteBot Filter to Eliminate Newlines
One of my favorite (under)uses of BBEdit is using Grep in Find/Replace to remove all newline characters. I figured that surely PasteBot would be have a built-in filter to handle that, but alas. I found an article by Michael Kummer that got me halfway there; I was able to figure out the rest.
Complete Collection of Mac OS Wallpapers
Happily, I was able to find the Tiles wallpaper and many, many more, at this MacRumors forum post.
20 Years of OS X
In celebration of Mac OS X’s 20th birthday, I’m posting the second oldest pic in my Photos library: a screenshot of Internet Connect, which I used to connect via dialup modem to Earthlink. I’d like to get a refreshed version of that wallpaper.
Another Keyboard Maestro Option
Launchbar-App-Swticher.mp4Speaking of Keyboard Maestro‘s app switcher, another option I tried out was to remap Finder’s Command-Tab to:
- Invoke LaunchBar,
- Execute Command-R, which is LaunchBar’s application switcher.
It’s not really an application switcher, but Command-R in LaunchBar shows you a list of running applications. It is sticky, so that the list of applications remains on the screen until you either mouse or use the keyboard to select a running application; macOS’s app switch disappears when you release the Command key. In LaunchBar’s list, you can use the arrow keys to navigate the menu, but the power-user move is to type the name of the application you want to switch to.
As with Keyboard Maestro’s application switcher, friction comes in that you may be so used to Command-Tab and Shift-Command-Tab to switch applications that, for however much you like the feature in LaunchBar, you won’t use it. Replacing Command-Tab with your LaunchBar invocation command and adding Command-R to the chain solves that problem nicely.1
1I’m still sticking with the Finder. Old habits die hard.
The Curious Case of Keyboard Maestro’s App Switcher
I bought Keyboard Maestro back in 2018 after reading good things about it, but have yet been able to make much use of it. This is partly because a lot of software that I’ve already added to my life does what KM does: Launchbar, TextExpander, PasteBot, and others. I have the feeling that I’m only considering a fraction of what it can do.
One of the features that I played with a bit is the application switcher. Keyboard Maestro hijacks one of my most-used keyboard commands, Command-Tab, and shows a grid of running applications over a turquoise background. You can continue to tab over the application icons, or mouse to your selection.
Keyboard Maestro’s Default App Switcher
As with all things Keyboard Maestro, you can customize the background color of the palette, the size of the icons, and more: vertical alignment? Sure. Familiar horizontal row? Of course. Transparent black background? By all means, yes please.
Keyboard Maestro’s Horizontal App Switcher
Keyboard Maestro’s Vertical App Switcher
I very much like this version of the app switcher, and I was ready to have it replace the system default. There is, however, at catch: Shift-Command-Tab does not move your selection in reverse. Tapping the shift key cycles backwards (to the left), but I have too many years of muscle memory for that to work for me.
Meghan’s Small Victory
Caitlin Flanagan, writing for The Atlantic:
Meghan had, in fact, realized the highest aspiration of many married people: She had convinced her spouse that his entire family was a bunch of losers.
Meghan Markle Didn’t Do the Work