Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

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I have to say this past weekend my mental health took a step backwards: anxiety levels were hugely elevated throughout, weighting me down with a sense of constant dread. The hot weather certainly didn’t help, piling on to the oppressive feelings, of being trapped with nowhere to escape. These COVID times are indeed tough for everyone, a massive psychological burden that affects you no matter how lucky you’ve been relatively to other that’s got it much worse.

You can’t expect to be completely okay through these decidedly abnormal times.

And I certainly expect to have bad days when it comes to my chronic anxiety issues. The journey of solid mental health is one of always a work-in-progress, and as such there will be days of improvement and calm, but mix in there are days of dread and despair. Only with consistent work can you hope to eke out slightly more good days than bad, and on those not so good days, the negative feelings are blunted, rather than being super acute.

But the rough moments are what we study and train for. It’s superbly easy to be calm and steady when things are going well and there’s nothing annoying you - you don’t need to study Zen Buddhism to handle those situations. Practicing the stoic arts comes into play when life isn’t particularly going your way, or your’e stuck in a intractable problem. You think you’ve got a lid things until life punches you right in the face; that’s when the training of going with the flow and remembering to focus on only what you can control is needed, that’s when you’ll be tested.

This past weekend was not the best, and for sure there will be many more days like it in the future. I just have to prepared for that eventuality, and utilize the coping mechanisms that’s being continuously cultivated with my philosophical studies.

I hope we all have a great week ahead.

Adventures at the DMV

No one enjoys going to the DMV ever, but sometimes you must do so in order to keep your motor vehicle on the road legally. Yesterday morning was such an occasion, as I went with my dad to the local office to get replacement license plates. Someone saw the shiny new 2021 registration sticker on his Hyundai Tucson and thought it would be nice to steal the rear plate that it’s stuck to. Not wanting to drive for very long without a rear license plate on the car, a trip to the DMV was begrudgingly called for.

This may be the times of COVID, but some things don’t ever change, such as the long queue for the DMV in the morning, well before the doors open. Of course, the line is socially-distanced, so it stretched well onto the adjacent sidewalk and out into the residential area. We arrived half an hour before the office opens at 8:00AM, and the wait time ultimately came to about two hours, which is not all that different from “normal times”, if you’re so unprepared as to not have an appointment.

Appointments aren’t possible at the moment except for driving tests.

In these not so normal times, you get your temperature taken and answer a few questions as to the condition of your health vis a vis the coronavirus. Once the building reaches a capacity deemed safe, they take down your phone number and asks you to wait inside your vehicle - you’ll get a text when your number is called and ready to be served. Other than the unusual waiting and screening situation, the procedure at the DMV is not all that different: you’ll spend most of the time waiting, while the thing you’ve come to the office for takes less than five minutes (driving tests notwithstanding).

Excluding the wait, we were in and out of the premises in no time with newly issued metal plates. Fingers crossed these survive long enough to last a calendar year!

I am not getting the Playstation 5

The next generation of gaming consoles is upon us, and I can’t believe people are so willing to drop $500 left and right for both the forthcoming Playstation 5 and the XBOX Series X. Of course, I am the same guy that just dropped well over $3,000 on a custom-order 16-inch MacBook Pro, so who am I to criticize others on how they should spend their dollars frivolously. With this new generation of consoles, I can finally admit and resign to the fact that I’m just not that big of a gamer anymore. Spending $500 on a Playstation 5 just for it to sit underneath my television gathering dust is exactly the same fate as my Playstation 4.

In grand total, the number of games I bought for the Playstation 4 over its lifetime is under 10, which is indicative of how little I game. While the COVID-19 quarantines have turned many into more gaming, I never really participated, preferring instead to read a few more books (nerd!). I don’t think I’ve even finished playing a single PS4-era game through to the end - not even Grand Theft Auto 5 - which absolutely screams out that I am not a gamer anymore. Therefore there’s really no incentive for me to get the Playstation 5; besides, I don’t have the requisite 4K television set to utilize it fully.

And if I were to get a 4K TV, it would have to be an LG OLED unit, which is massively more expensive than a typical LED unit from other brands. Not an expense I want to do right now. Again, says the guy that just spent more than $3,000 on a MacBook Pro. I’m the type of miser that saves to only then spend money on expensive things - no saving for saving’s sake here.

Anyways, will my history with the Playstation brand - I’ve owned ever iteration of the console thus far - end with the Playstation 4? Chances are good, though the proverbial never say never applies here. One can never predict how effective future releases of my perennial favorites like Gran Turismo and Grand Theft Auto will compel me to buy the Playstation 5 (and the OLED TV). But as of right now, I am not joining the preorder frenzy that’s currently going on. No worries here whether or not I can get a unit on release day!

One laptop to rule

So I recently purchased a 16-inch MacBook Pro as a “one laptop to rule them all” replacement for both my 2017-vintage iMac and 2019-vintage 15-inch MacBook Pro. Admittedly this is a bit of a frivolous expense because I could have simply sold the iMac and kept the still relatively new 15-inch laptop as the main workhorse. But, who doesn’t like the latest and greatest things, am I right? Buying the 16-inch MacBook Pro allowed me to do something I’ve wanted to do for the longest time: custom spec a laptop to what I need, rather than anchoring to a certain purchase price (read: being cheap). If this is indeed one laptop to rule them for a long time, then might as well go for it fully.

The primary extra cost is the two terabyte SSD upgrade over the paltry 512 gigabyte standard issue. I want to fit my extensive collection of music and the back-catalog of digital photos - some 800 gigabytes worth - right onto the same MacBook Pro, rather than storing them on an external drive like I have done since the Mac mini I bought back in 2014. With this new laptop I no longer have to plug in a drive anytime I want to listen to music or edit pictures, and I have to say it’s well worth the extra cost for this convenience. This 16-inch MacBook Pro now quite literally holds my entire digital life.

Don’t worry, it’s very well backed up.

Some of you may ask why would I buy current 16-inch MacBook Pro when the entire computing world knows Apple will soon be releasing laptops running their own silicon chips, rather than the current Intel products. There’s much expectation the future Macs with Apple silicon will run rings around the Intel chips both in terms of speed and efficiency, so why I didn’t I simply wait a bit? Why buy what is surely the last of a dying breed of laptops?

Because I am of the mindset that you should buy what you need right now, instead of constantly waiting for that’s next. You’ll never be disappointed if you get what you need right this moment, and use fully that particular thing’s potential. You wouldn’t have time to think about whether or not something new is on the immediate horizon, and that you’ll be missing out on something better, if only you had waited. One constant in the tech world is that improvement is always coming up next, so if the fear-of-missing-out emotion is strong in you, then you’ll never be satisfied no matter how long you wait.

I bought what I wanted right now and am enjoying the new machine immensely. For sure the Apple silicon Macs will be brilliant, but future potential is not something for the present me to fret over.

Good news!

Great news: our dear pet cat does not have cancer!

Frequent readers would know that our kitten has been dealing with a stomach issue, leading him to not eat or drink much, and therefore losing weight relatively massively. We took him to the doctor a few weeks back, and found a critically inflamed intestinal tract. As a precaution, a biopsy was taken to check for potential lymphoma. Results came back early last week, and it confirmed it’s but only a bad inflammation, nothing more serious. As of this writing, the beloved cat is well on the mend and back to his old cheery self.

The past week is one of much anxiety for different reason. I had ordered a custom MacBook Pro to replace both my old MacBook Pro and iMac desktop - one laptop to rule them all, if you will (hello, Tolkien fans). The laptop arrived fortuitously on Thursday, which I was lucky enough to be home to receive as it was a day I was designated to not physically go to campus. Of course, with a fresh new piece of tech to entice me, I couldn’t wait until I was properly off work hours to get started with the data migration, so I started to multitask.

Let me be the umpteenth person to say: multitasking does not work. The brand new laptop distracted me from work all the way into Friday, because there was a snag with transferring my huge music collection (I don’t do streaming). As someone who practices the buddhist art of going with the flow of life and patiently waiting for events to play out, when reality presents me with an opportunity to put it into action, I utterly failed. The “unfinished” state of the new MacBook Pro was such a distraction that I had trouble going to sleep until the data transfer was finally completed on Saturday.

Indeed it can be tough sometimes to have patience, even when you know a particular process will take a bit of time. I am the type of person who would constantly check shipping updates, agonizing over each detail: I dropped the package off at the post office an hour ago - why hasn’t the tracking reflect this? Oh my god, what if they lost the package?! I get quite antsy when various things are in progress, and won’t find peace until those things are brought to a conclusion and taken care of. But that’s a false promise, isn’t it? Life continues on and will continue to bring more things and challenges.

As always, it’s a work in progress.

I'm not getting the Apple Watch!

With release of the latest Apple Watch Series 6, is it finally time for me to hop onto the smartwatch game? As much as I love stuff from Apple, I’ve managed to avoid buying any of the first five generations of Apple Watch, principally because I don’t believe in dropping that few hundred dollars on a watch only for it to be slightly more functional than the true mechanical watch I was wearing. For sure it would be nice to have some of the health monitoring functions– the heart-rate monitor should be hugely beneficial in noticing when my anxiety levels have increased – but the barrier to entry in terms of price remains something difficult to get over.

Until now! Alongside the introduction of Series 6, the Apple Watch can now be bought on a 24-month interest-free installment plan using the Apple Card. Much the same as an iPhone, I can now spread that relatively high entry cost over a long period of time. $20 dollars a month is definitely more palatable than dropping over $400 at one time. Coincidentally, I recently just finished paying off my iPhone’s own installment plan dating two years back, so there is a $60 per month hole burning in my pocket right now.

But that’s how they get you with the lure of payment plans, isn’t it? To entice you to buy things you wouldn’t otherwise, had you needed to cough up the whole cost at once. It’s indeed a clever trick that got me pondering the viability of buying the Apple Watch now that I can do so in installments with zero interest. What’s another $20 a month on top of the numerous things I am already doing monthly payments on? I’d be using the Apple Watch to monitor my health and keep me fit! That’s worth something, isn’t it?

Ah, so many ways to justify wantonly spending money. I just plop down quite a bit of cash for a built-to-order 16-inch Macbook Pro, so I’m not terribly inclined to spend yet more money on a shiny Apple gadget, even if I can now amortize that price over a longer period of time. Payment plans are a great tool of flexibility for people who can otherwise afford the Apple Watch but have better things to do with their money, and if I ever do buy one, I’d be going that route.

Until then, let me say for the time being I am not getting the new Apple Watch Series 6. Hold me to this, blog-reading friends.

September Apple

A happy Fall Apple event day to you all. Under normal times, we’d be highly anticipating this annual tradition of the next iPhone release, so eager to give Apple ever more of our monies. High-end smartphones have gotten so expensive that I would not be surprised if soon people would be able to finance the purchase of one for longer terms than the typical two years. Think expensive pickup trucks and the often absurd seven or eight years payment plans that go along with those. Would we soon be doing the relative same with buying our beloved iPhones?

I mean, if interest is zero…

Anyways, 2020 is definitely not normal times, and by most accounts, this typical September Apple event will not be about the annual iPhone release at all. Instead, it will be focused on the Apple Watch and the iPad, plus surely various news on when we can expect to download the the latest major releases of iOS and macOS software. Can the tech-buying audience get excited about a keynote without the singular most important product in Apple’s portfolio? We’re about to find out in less than two hours as of this typing.

I won’t be tuning in, not because I don’t want to, but because I have work during the livestream.

Would I even upgrade my iPhone this year - whenever the new one comes out? I’ve done the yearly upgrade like clockwork since way back to the iPhone 6S, and in this year of the pandemic, I’m not sure there’s incentive to do so. My main reason for spending so extravagantly to get a new smartphone every year is because of the camera: when traveling it’s nice to have a phone with a capable camera system so I’m not relying on the big DSLR setup the whole time. Break news: I’m not doing any traveling anytime soon due to COVID, so perhaps my current iPhone 11 Pro will be just fine for one more rotation of the calendar.

Of course, that’s counting on Apple only giving the new iPhone incremental improvements. Should it wow me with, say, a 120Hz display, then what I said in the previous paragraph can be considered moot.