Blog

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

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.

A rough week

I guess last week was a really tough one. You ever just break down in tears at the end of it because all the pent-up stress and emotions simply floods out? That was my Friday evening, at the tail-end of a truly stressful week. I was listening to some tunes trying to relax for a bit, and the floodgates sort of just started. It was nice to release it out.

The utter lack of getting any amount of vitamin-D probably did not help the situation I was in. It’s been said that getting some sunshine is helpful for the mood, and unfortunately none of us got any last week. Much of the Bay Area was (and still is) blanketed by a cover of smog due to the numerous wildfires that are currently burning in California and up the coast in Oregon. Most eerie and apocalyptic was on Wednesday: our marine layer kept the smoky air up high, causing it to quite literally block out the sun. The brightness level at noon was more akin to evening, and the sky was this ominous orange the entire day.

I can’t imagine what it must be like for people dealing with real depression seeing such apocalyptic scenes right outside their windows. And let’s not forget: we are still in the middle of the worst pandemic of our lifetimes.

What was causing me stress was the health of our cat. He’s been dealing with stomach issues, and last Tuesday it was confirmed he had severe inflammation of the intestines. Therefore, for much of the week – on top of my work duties- I’ve been giving extra care for the kitten, making sure it’s eating properly and drinking enough water. Like a parent caring for a sick child, it’s really difficult to concentrate during your regular routine when the nagging feeling of worry never leaves the back of your head. No surprise that quality of sleep is negatively affected as well.

On top of all that, some lowlife stole the rear license plate off of my dad’s car, so that was something additional I had to deal with. The life of an immigrant kid never leaves you – it will always be up to me to help my parents out with anything that involves heavy English. I don’t normally complain about this – can’t choose your parents, after all – but last week was not the best time to have that added on top, honestly.

I hope this week will be better. For all of us.

It's so freaking hot

I woke up yesterday feeling rather parched, which was strange because I am the type of person who hydrates properly. Then I remembered: the air-conditioning was on the entire time the day before, and the negative side-effect to having a chilled room is that air-conditioning removes moisture, leaving your skin and mouth dry if you don’t drink more water than usual. So I got up, skipped the coffee (a diuretic that also dehydrates), and made a giant jug of lemon water and promptly drank half of it.

The desperate need for fluids is a small price to pay for the comforts of having air-conditioning. The long three-day Labor Day weekend saw historically high temperatures in much of California, with San Francisco hitting 100 degrees on Sunday afternoon. Since the last such heat-wave, I finally broke down and purchased a portable air-conditioning machine, not wanting to suffer the hot nights of uneasy sleep any longer. Our relatively tiny 10,000 BTU unit did a superb job at keeping our living room at a comfortable (read: not cold enough for multi-layers of clothing) temperature during the day, and evacuating the latent heat in the bedrooms before sleep time.

So glad we bought it in time for this heat-wave, and probably should have done it way sooner.

Traditionally, the long Labor Day weekend is a time for us who work in education to take a breather after the intense opening weeks of the Fall semester. I had plans to the write the August installment of the GT3 diaries, and to devour a few books. The weather gods had other plans of course, and it was entirely too hot inside the house to have any productivity. I feel guilty sometimes being for being such a wimp: temperatures go past 90 and suddenly I can’t work anymore! But you try putting together cogent sentences when merely sitting down and not moving is enough to cause a sweat; my room was a sauna.

It didn’t help I recently just sold my Macbook Pro, so I didn’t have a portable device to bring to the air-conditioned living room to continue working. Instead, I lounged around for much of this past weekend, trying to stay cool and hydrated. Sorry, dear readers: the August update for the 911 GT3 will have to wait another week.