Wednesday, May 27, 2020

In which we teach Siri to sit up, beg, fetch and pull Timmy out of the well

New computer up and running? Check.

Essentially I’m replacing my old Mac Mini, which over the years has slowed down to a crawl. It works fine, once it gets in the mood, but that takes a while. And honestly, who’s got the time? So what I did was take my MacBook (the 12-inch one that apparently is the most hated computer since HAL 9000) and hooked that up as a desktop, disconnecting it when I needed to travel. That’s been working great, but it is a little hinky about reconnecting when it’s been away from home for a while, sort of like a bratty kid coming back from boarding school. So when the new Macbooks came out with the good keyboards—not that the bad keyboard ever bothered me much, but I’m easy to please—I figured the time was right to get a new traveling computer, especially since I’m not traveling anymore. So, meet the new MacBook Air. I spent a while this afternoon getting it to work exactly like everything else I already have, and I’m quite happy with it. Plus ça change… On the other hand, the new Touch ID is a nice, uh, touch. 

One thing that took a while was getting Slack organized. I’ve been a WhatsApp person for a while now, but I can see how the functionality of Slack is better suited to our virtual tabbing. I’m looking forward to testing the jitsi interface, via which you go into a Slack channel, put in a jitsi command, and voila, a videochat of unlimited duration and unlimited size. Or so they say. We’ll see. Anyhow, I have a good half dozen Slack groups, which seems like more than enough. One of the things I’ve been hearing is that people are getting communicated up the wazoo these days, and enough is enough. Having had a career where if I saw another human being in any given month it was a remarkable event, whereas others around me in other divisions had more meetings than Trump has tweets, I can appreciate how some people need to communicate 25/8 while others just want to get some work done. 

What a world.  

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