Rounded Silver Pot

Rounded Silver Pot

Almost-nothing medical things, too-soon software upgrades, could-be-shinier shiny trinkets and farcical security circuses.

Weird, tiring, stress week. Had a medical appointment and the thing I have is usually very serious, but I apparently have the mildest case ever of it. Doctors and nurses are asking about how bad Symptom A is and I haven’t had anything even like it. Waiting for appointments I’m surrounded by people who are grey and wheezing and apparently close to death. They’re not even sure I have actually the condition they think I have so I might get a whirl on an MRI at some point. Everyone says it’s no fun and sure, it’s cramped and whatever but OMG spinning superconducting magnets OMGWTF how is that not cool?

I bought a random trinket from Etsy because I really liked it. It’s a silver plated sugar pot. I know, random. I really like it though, it’s cute. Most of the silver has rubbed off so it’s mostly brass coloured so I’m thinking of electroplating it to bring back the silveryness of it. I really like the colour of silver when it tarnishes.

Lulu customer support came through in the end after I messaged them through Twitter. Typical American company, spamblocking any email address that isn’t from a Big Country or a com, net or org. They never received any of my emails. Sigh.

I upgraded my personal laptop to Catalina. I wouldn’t recommend it just yet. I’ve got a thing where it’s whining at me to sign into iCloud again, but when I do, it asks me again. And again, and again. So that’s screwed. The fix is apparently to sign out of iCloud, but what happens to the ‘copy’ of your data when you sign back in? It doesn’t say and I’d rather not have duplicates. The permissions thing in the upgrade feels good, like when an app wants to access keystrokes from every other app, but it’s not a utility, it’s just an art app. Very suspicious and feels good to DENY. Ha!

The other downer in Catalina is the flood of popups and error dialogs everywhere about every damn thing. I was asked three times to sign in when launching Apple Music. I thought I’d got my password wrong but I hadn’t, it just feels like bad app design or system architecture or something.

For all these things, whatever new features an app has, or whatever it wants to tell me, it should wait until I’ve been able to check that all my stuff is still there. I’m not going to be in the right mental state to answer all these damn settings questions or look at these features until I know that. But no, modal popups everywhere. Jeez.

Oh, and Siri turned itself back on on my phone because I re-paired my AirPods. It randomly decided to phone someone and then crashed so I couldn’t cancel the call. I hate Siri. I hate all voice UI. I really do. It doesn’t understand me, and it doesn’t ever maintain context. It’s just shit.

So there.