Category Archives: Pals

The absolute helplessness of Tier 1 support

I just got a new phone. I held off as long as possible because it just seemed wasteful when the old phone worked fine. It seems like the network support for sub-5G phones is decreasing though – and that impacts my experience.

My old phone was old enough that it didn’t support eSIM, which I discovered was a problem when I was in London buying a short term plan.

So when I got an error while trying to activate newPhone, I had an inkling this was probably the issue.

I opened a support chat with this info “I have oldPhone, which doesn’t support eSIM, and I suspect that’s preventing activation of newPhone” – but with more details.

Friends, it took 40 minutes of troubleshooting to come to a conclusion, and yes, that was it.

I was frustrated. My experience has been that trying to steer just slows down the process through the support tree. And so it feels helpless. I can’t get them to do the thing faster and so I have to sit.

I am empathetic though – following the support tree is required for the job, and they won’t get fired for following it. I sense that they, too, feel helpless- they cannot take a short cut.

Of course this lends itself to being a position that is automated away, since there is little benefit to having a human typing the words they don’t come up with.

And at the end of the, of course, they tried to sell me insurance.

Everything’s a trade-off

My hands, damaged from pull-up and hanging practice with callouses I have to file down or risk tearing off.

My fitness goal for 2024 is to be able to do a single one armed pull-up on each arm. I still want to maintain my previous progress of being able to do a pistol squat (and improve it to be less ugly).

This means I now have to do hand maintenance, which is new to me. I have to take a FILE to my hand to sand down callouses or they build up and TEAR OFF.

Jan 2024 Media Diet

Books

I started a couple of good ones as well. I track all that over on bookwyrm.

TV

The Brothers Sun – This was really good. Fun, violent, funny. Real challenges and character arcs and good twists. The fight scene at the driving range was incredible. A deftly shot, well choreographed smash. Loved it. Michelle Yeoh is getting what she deserves. Justin Chien is great.

BLUE EYE SAMURAI – Stunningly smart. The twists are vicious. Gorgeous as well. Gets dark.

Over the Garden Wall – a really off-kilter cartoon from one of the creators of Adventure Time. Kids and I liked it a lot. They said it seemed like Centaurworld, which was also very yum.

I rewatched Shoresy because it really helps me SET THE TONE.

And I’ve been slowly working my way through Moonlighting, which is such a treasure from my childhood. Jason Lefkowitz turned me onto this – I love the casual 4th wall breaking, the bits they throw in to fill time, the Christmas episode that pulls back to reveal the whole production company singing. And the actual episodes are also good!

Krapopolis – I love everyone in this and cannot bother myself to watch another episode unless I want to fall asleep.

Chad and JT Go Deep – a heartwarming dumb silly journey. Half dramedy, half hidden camera prank show, funny. A Tim and Eric flavor sprinkled over it all.

Movies

Maggie Moore is a very light dark comedy. Really enjoyed this – Tina Fey is good at being not just Liz Lemon. Jon Hamm is good at being not just Don Draper. Micah Stock steals the show as a very pathetic villain.

Dredd – I was stuck in bed with a bad back and thought I’d check it out. It’s horrible. It’s one of those movies that takes the fascist joke seriously and makes it unfunny. Very violent and gross and well shot.

The Imitation Game – brilliant. Deserves all the praise it got.

Counting to 90

I’ve been doing stretches in the morning.

This post is about that and a new meditative technique. It’s uh, the title.

My trainer, the incredible Christina, saw there were some exercises where I was limited by mobility, not strength. For a pistol squat, at a certain point I couldn’t go lower without tumbling over.

So, at the end of October she challenged me to do a set of stretches every morning for 30 days. It’s based on these from the Strength Side guys.

  • 1:30 Seiza
  • 1:30 Squat
  • 1:00 Downward Dog
  • 1:00 Crab
  • :45/side Long Lunge
  • :45 Horse Stance

Not too much! Too much doesn’t get done.

I’ve been using this on most mornings as a way to be silent, mindful, meditative and fully inhabit my body instead of jumping into a million thoughts and todos.

After I get the coffee brewing, I do these stretches before cooking breakfast. I’m doing it this way to take advantage of something I learned from my book club inspired reading of Atomic Habits by James Clear. I am setting up a chain where the obvious thing to do while the coffee brews is to do these stretches. Not look at all the slack messages from India that have piled up in the night. Not check my calendar. Not check the news. Just do my stretches while the coffee brews. This is actually working for me as a way to create a good habit. It feels great.

Just one thing is irritating though.

My timer going off on my phone after 1:30 is jarring. Setting the timer again is disruptive and lets me look at notifications. Midway through a stretch I find myself tapping the phone to see how much time is left (as if it matters!).

So I switched to just counting and it’s going great. One one-thousand, two one thousand…

Turns out if you just count and concentrate on the counting, you can get all the way up to 90 just fine. Turns out that counting helps me focus and be single-minded – it’s a meditation technique.

When I’ve finished counting and stretching, I find myself loose and ready and centered. I can eat, clean and get kids ready easily. I can thumb through notifications and Slack messages and make sure I’m ready for the agenda for the day. But I’m doing it because I’m done with what I wanted to do first in the morning.

Managing health overwhelm

Just finished this great episode from my favorite health nerds at Wild Health.

It’s a short, very accessible episode focused on how to do “not too much” health. It’s especially good because these are really data intensive folks that go deep on lots of different tailored practices. Here they talk about not doing all the trends, focusing on what actually helps you embody what you value in your life.

Elisapie – Taimangalimaaq

Found via Said the Gramophone’s Best songs of 2023. I don’t know what to do with the earnestness of this. The song is beautiful all by itself, but with the video it becomes a whole ‘nother celebration.

She’s got a ton of other transformative covers, and I’m listening to some more of those.

This stuck out for me as being like a sad-sweet-Sufjan-Stevens take.

Take a moment if you can for this original – as growly and dangerous as early PJ Harvey.

Reasons to get kicked down the stairs

Look, I don’t like to talk about Elon Musk and I don’t like to read about Elon Musk. I have “elon” muted on Mastodon so I don’t have to hear all the chatter. I’m too old to idolize people and I’ve actually watched as many of his promises failed to materialize.

Elon musk next to two different "smashproof" windows on his cybertruck that he smashed.

But I didn’t stop the “Dial M for Musk” episode of TrashFuture when it started playing.

And I was rewarded with this fantastic tidbit you can hear starting around 45:40.

Musk has a story that he’s fed to some uncritical biographers like Ashley Vance and Walter Isaacson about how he was horribly bullied at school. How a kid at his school kicked him down the stairs, injuring him horribly. Hell, this is part of the pitch of Isaacson’s book – you can see in the blurb on GoodReads or BookWyrm. His dad apparently doesn’t care and boy what a jerk his dad is.


When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

Blurb for elon Musk Biography

To be clear, I stand firmly AGAINST kicking children down stairs. Even after you read the rest of this, know that I do not think little Elon Musk should have been kicked down the stairs. But if you want to understand why…

It turns out Elon’s dad has a version of this story.

His dad tells the story and there’s a detail that Elon Musk leaves out of the story and that’s that the kid who kicked Elon down the stairs, his father had actually killed himself, you know, had committed suicide and Elon Musk was making fun of the kid because his dad had committed suicide and that’s why he kicked him down the stairs. It’s like it’s probably an important detail to know…

Paris Marx in Dial M for Musk on TrashFuture

And this all seems very of character with what I read of the man – and I TRY NOT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HIM. Please do not contact me if this post made you chuckle or angry I do not want to talk more about him.

An Ode to the Dremel

It’s not the tool I use around the house the most. That’s probably the Skeletool I keep on my hip or my drill. I actually look forward to seeing how fast I can assemble flatpack furniture with my drill.

But the Dremel makes little impossible things possible in a small apartment.

Like when the top for my daughter’s favorite water bottle broke.

It’s a very short task to use the carving attachments to cut the sharp bits off and then use a sander to round over the edges.

A water bottle covered in cute pandas and goat stickers. In front of it, the top is roughly rounded over and sanded down where it was damaged previously.

Little things become easy. Or if we need to cut off a section of our outdoor tiles or small metals sections. If you can’t fit it in tin snips, you can still use the metal cutting disks to cut through it or score things enough to snap.