August 2020 – Fascination Place

The Stayest of Staycations

Originally the plan was that this was the year we’d take lots of trips. I haven’t taken many vacations the last few years, largely because I’ve been working on some exciting and rewarding things at work (most notably Xcode’s new build system, and support for Apple Silicon Macs), so we’d mainly just taken our annual trip back east to visit our families in the summer. But this year we’d planned to do that, and go to Hawaii, and maybe visit a friend in Portland, and maybe go somewhere we hadn’t gone before, such as Seattle or San Diego.

Well, we managed to get a trip to Disneyland in. And then the world ended, courtesy of COVID-19.

But, I still had lots of vacation time saved up, and was getting close to our vacation cap, so after taking the odd day off here and there, I decided to take last week off.

Originally I’d figured I’d spend some time walking around outdoors, and hopefully make a trip over to the coast when I could visit the seashore with fairly few other people around. But that was before a freak lightning storm a couple of weeks ago touched off enormous wildfires around the Bay Area. In particular the CZU Lightning Complex lit up large sections of the mountains between here and the Santa Cruz coast, which wiped out historic FDR-era buildings in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Other coastal communities asked people not to come to the coast since they were where affected people were evacuating to (I have a few friends & cow-orkers who were in evacuation zones from various fires).

So, a staycation it was. And mostly inside because the air quality was often quite bad. I went out for walks when I could, sometimes with a bandanna just to filter the air particles a bit, but I tried to avoid the worst times. And I put running on hold.

I spent a lot of my vacation playing Magic Arena, leveling up on the constructed ladder. I made Platinum, which was pretty nice since I wasn’t trying that hard. Still a long way to go if I ever want to make Mythic, though. Someday, maybe! I also played a bunch of Overcooked 2 on our Switch with Debbi and her sister, and we’ve been getting pretty good at it.

My other project was to sift through the stack of old – in some cases very old – Apple hardware I had sitting around unused, and figured out which pieces I could trade in for gift cards. I got through most of them, and the trade in process seems pretty nice: Apple sends me prepaid boxes to ship them back in. They also have a recycling program for stuff which isn’t worth anything, but you have to find a box and pack it yourself. For that I decided I’ll just take it to our community E-waste center, which is where I usually took such stuff. All of this made me feel accomplished, but it took a while because pulling serial numbers and info off of the old, often wiped-clean machines was not simple. Collect this info before you wipe your devices, kids!

I also did a bunch more clean-up in the study, and it’s looking pretty good now.

Beyond that we did a bunch of random stuff at home: Worked on a puzzle, I made my favorite Indian dish, played with the kittens, had a socially-distanced happy hour with a couple of Debbi’s friends, and so forth.

Not exactly where I’d wanted to spend my vacation time, but I expect I’ll take at least a couple more such weeks before we have a vaccine, so, shrug. I realized by the end that I had been pretty burned out at work, so I really did need some downtime.

If all goes well, a year from now maybe we’ll be back visiting our families again. If Incompetent Racist Impeached President Trump is reelected, it might be another year or two after that before things start getting back to normal.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I love our home, but this has been a lot of home.

Kitten Update

It’s been over two months since Simon & Edison joined our family, so it’s time for a kitten update!

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first: You may recall that they had upper respiratory infections and kitty conjunctivitis when they arrived, which we treated them for. Well, it turns out it was worse than that: The infection they almost certainly had from the start was kitty chlamydia, which we learned when their big brother Jackson’s right eye started watering and got hecka inflamed. We found out because we took him in to get tested.

So the three boys were on antibiotics for three weeks. We decided not to treat Sadie and Roulette because neither of them had showed any symptoms, and both of them had been avoiding the kittens (and Roulette avoids Jackson anyway). It was a bit of a risk, because if it turns out one of them was infected, then we’ll get to do this again, for all five of them. So of course every time I see Sadie sniffle I think, “uh oh”. But Sadie is a sniffly, slightly-drooly cat anyway, and she hasn’t shown the eye watering that all three of the boys showed. It’s been a week and a half since we finished their meds and none of them seem to be showing any symptoms, so it seems we got away with it.

The other downer is that a couple of weeks ago we were watching The Mandalorian, while the kittens were playing hard, when Edison jumped down off the top of the cat tree and must have twisted his ankle or something because he stopped putting weight on one of his rear legs and went and hid behind the couch. We put a stop to playtime for the night and corralled him and took the kittens up to their room and closed the door and left them alone for half an hour. Then we checked on them and he was limping, but he was using the leg again. So we decided to let it go to the next day, and while he was favoring the leg he was using it, and it wasn’t stopping him from running around. So we’ve kept an eye on him, and will probably ask the vet to take a look when we bring him in for their next shots. He was less adventurous about jumping for a while, but maybe it was psychological. Recently he’s been back to his old self, getting all kind of places, so hopefully it was something small.

We have another appointment for them to get their next round of shots in a week so we’ll have the vet check them out and make sure they’re okay. Fingers crossed!

Anyway, end of bad news.

The good news is that both kittens are growing up and are now in that delightful time where they’re able to do more, and they’re interacting with us more.

You may have guessed that they’re no longer confined to a bedroom. We staged letting them out, first giving them play time upstairs – usually with Jackson monitoring or even playing with them – and then giving them supervised visits downstairs. Next we let them out all day from morning til night, putting them back for the night. And finally last weekend we left them out overnight, which predictably ended up with us being kitten-piled at 2:30 am, but otherwise they seem to have adjusted well.

Jackson, somewhat to our surprise, is quite fond of the kittens. At first when they’d run up to him he’d tackle them too hard and they became wary of him, but after a week or so he figured it out, and the kittens would look for him whenever we let them out of their room. Simon in particular loves Jackson and would rub up against him whenever he first saw him after being released. We eventually caught Jackson and Simon sleeping together, with Jackson roughly grooming Simon and Simon purring away in happiness. The next development was hearing cats running around the house and spotting Edison chasing Jackson through the dining room. That chase ended with a hiss, I think because Jackson didn’t think a kitten could keep up with him, but they’ve had some chase time since then and it’s gone well. Jackson sometimes gets a little tired of the kittens and finds a place to get away from them, but mostly they get along great.

Sadie and Roulette… it’s a work in progress. Sadie I think has been trying to figure out how to play with them, but has been having a hard time finding a way to do it without wapping them with her paw. It’s funny because she and they all have their spaz-all-over-the-house moments, but they haven’t played chase yet.

Meanwhile, I think Edison is looking for his special big cat to love, the way Simon has Jackson, and he’s chosen… Roulette, our grumpy 17-year-old cat who has spent most of the time since the kittens arrived under our bed. Fortunately we quickly identified that she came down to eat and use the litter, and finally she started coming down to hang out with us in the evening. But Rou would really like to be an only cat. Which is why Edison giving her the hard sell has been so funny: Sitting near her, watching her, trying to sneak up on her and lie next to her or lick her head. She is getting less belligerent, but I don’t know whether he’ll win her over. But he’s trying so hard. It would serve her right if he does, though, since that’s basically the hard sell that she gave my cat Jefferson when she was a kitten.

We’ve been trying to promote acceptance by giving everyone wet cat food together. Roulette and Simon are both very food-oriented, and Jackson and Edison will also join in. Sadie is not really food-oriented and often sits and watches.

As you probably know California has been wracked with wildfires for the last couple of weeks, and the air quality combined with unusually warm weather this month has led us to keep the house closed up and the A/C on for most of the time since we released the kittens for good. So they haven’t really gotten the full experience of sitting in windows and watching things outdoors. They’ve gotten a little of that in the last couple of days, and it seems Simon is a sunbeam cat, while Edison is going to be the one who tracks every little thing that goes by outside. Hopefully we can make sure that doesn’t include him.

The best part is that both of them like to snuggle with us, and each one will spend time sleeping on our chest or sometimes our lap. Edison in particular will sometimes get up and visit each one of us, sitting on our chest for a couple of minutes purring away before he goes back to whatever he was doing. And sometimes we wake up in the middle of the night with one of the cats snoozing next to us.

Despite the hiccups, these are still great kittens, and I’m really glad we got them.

Farewell, Fitbit

Back in 2012 I bought Debbi a Fitbit One for Christmas. Early in the next year Debbi bought one for me. We’ve been using them all this time, but this month my device finally gave up the ghost, first the button started being finicky, and then today it just shut down and couldn’t be resuscitated, even though I’d charged it just a couple of days ago.

For context, the Apple Watch didn’t come out until April 2015, so for over two years these were the only activity trackers we were using. And they seemed to do a pretty good job of tracking steps. I think I peaked at somewhere over 24,000 steps in a day in Las Vegas once.

For most of that time my daily step goal was 9,000 steps. I would usually beat that goal by a few thousand steps on running days, but I set it to be achievable on non-running days, which it usually was.

It was interesting to contrast it with my Apple Watch once I had both of them. A couple of years ago something happened so that my Fitbit thought I was running significantly faster than my Watch, and I suspect something was amiss with the Fitbit, measuring the distance I was running differently. Looking at the activity map it thought I zig-zagged all over the place, likely accounting for the discrepancy. Since I assume both devices were getting the positioning information from the same source – my iPhone – I’m not sure why they were so different. Even if the Watch has more accurate GPS built-in, it doesn’t explain why the Fitbit’s measurements suddenly changed. It was weird.

Fitbit had pretty good customer service, too: Both of our Ones died at some point – I think Debbi’s died twice – and each time they sent us a new One. Hard to argue with that. So I guess our current devices are really 5-6 years old, not almost 8 years old. Still, not a bad run for a tiny device with a presumably small battery. And mine has gone through the washing machine at least twice.

Our friends with Fitbits have mostly switched to other devices, and Fitbit has discontinued the One and as far as I know only makes wrist-based devices these days. And, well, I have my Apple Watch now.

So, farewell, noble Fitbit. It’s been fun.

Star Trek: Voyager

As long as I signed up for CBS All Access to watch Star Trek: Picard, something made me decide to watch Star Trek: Voyager. Longtime readers may recall that I was not a fan of The Next Generation, and I only made it through a season and a half of Deep Space Nine before I hit the eject button, as by that time Babylon 5 had sucked all the air out of the room for television science fiction. (It’s still the best SF series I’ve ever seen.) So I had little interest in Voyager when it debuted in 1995.

I think what made me decide to watch it this time was hearing that it had a bunch of time travel episodes, and I’m a sucker for a good time travel episode. Once I decided to watch that many episodes, I figured I’d draw up a list of the supposed best episodes and go through those. I didn’t really have the interest or patience to watch the whole thing, and while I assumed I’d miss out on some nuance of character development over the full 7 seasons, I also figured – based on the other “NuTrek” series between 1987 and 2005 – that characterization would not be the series’ strong suit. If the episodes I came up with ended up being surprisingly great, then I could branch out to some second-tier episodes.

We powered through the 48 episodes on my list (plus one we watched by accident) throughout June and July, and the verdict is: It was okay. Not great. Most episodes were watchable, none were great, none were outright awful. Definitely some disappointments, though. But I doubt I’ll watch any more than this. (It’s over a quarter of the series, which seems sufficient.)

Anyway, spoilers for a 20-year-old TV show in case you care about such things.

Here are the ones we watched, with my grades (on an A-F scale):

Caretaker (season 1 episodes 1-2) C+
Parallax (S1 E3) C
Time and Again (S1 E4) C-
Eye of the Needle (S1 E7) B
Non Sequitur (S2 E5) D+
Deadlock (S2 E21) B-
Flashback (S3 E2) C
Future’s End (S3 E8-9) D
Unity (S3 E17) C+
Before and After (S3 E21) B+
Worst Case Scenario (S3 E25) D
Scorpion (S3 E26, S4 E1) B
The Gift (S4 E2) C
Year of Hell (S4 E8-9) D
Message in a Bottle (S4 E14) B-
Hunters (S4 E15) C
Prey (S4 E16) C+
Living Witness (S4 E23) B
Demon (S4 E24) C-
One (S4 E25) C
Hope and Fear (S4, E26) C
Drone (S5 E2) B-
In The Flesh (S5 E4) C
Timeless (S5 E6) C
Dark Frontier (S5 E15-16) B
Course: Oblivion (S5 E18) D+
The Fight (S5 E19) D (this is the one we watched by accident)
Relativity (S5 E23) C+
Equinox (S5 E26, S6 E1) C+
Survival Instinct (S6 E2) B
The Voyager Conspiracy (S6 E9) B-
Pathfinder (S6 E10) C-
Blink of an Eye (S6 E12) B-
Memorial (S6 E14) B-
Collective (S6 E16) C
Unimatrix Zero (S6 E26, S7 E1) C+
Repression (S7 E4) C
Shattered (S7 E11) B+
The Void (S7 E15) B-
Homestead (S7 E23) C-
Endgame (S7 E25-26) B

I also erratically live tweeted watching these episodes, and if you care you can read my at-the-moment reactions in this thread.

For those unfamiliar with Voyager, the premise is that the USS Voyager is captured and taken to the Delta Quadrant by an alien called the Caretaker, along with a ship of insurgents from a group called the Maquis. The ships end up stranded there, with casualties on both, and integrate into a single crew on the Voyager, captained by Katherine Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), who makes the Maquis captain Chakotay (Robert Beltran) her first officer. 75,000 light years away from the Federation, it will take them 75 years to get home, through entirely unknown territory.

“Caretaker” appeared on several best-of-the-series lists, and while it wasn’t a bad episode, I figured if it ended up among the ten best of the series then I was going to be glad I didn’t watch the whole series. Having not watched deep (heh) enough into Deep Space Nine I didn’t have any knowledge of the Maquis, but I could take them on principle. So the first half of the episode was mostly based around Tom Paris (Maquis) and Harry Kim (Starfleet ensign), which was enjoyable enough, but once the Doctor showed up, he overshadowed everyone else as a character.

I didn’t have many episodes in the first 3 seasons in my list, and what I did have wasn’t great. Despite being a bit padded, “Eye of the Needle” was the best episode of the first 2 seasons, with a nifty kicker which I wondered whether it would become relevant near the series’ end (it didn’t). “Before and After” was a touching episode which foreshadowed some future events, but unfortunately those didn’t really play out very satisfyingly either. The other time travel episodes were pretty mediocre. “Future’s End” was sort of the centerpiece of these three seasons, I guess, but it was basically another dumb “go back to the 20th century” yarn.

Maybe the best episode of the whole series was “Scorpion”, which introduced Seven of Nine. It was a solid adventure, gripping at times, with a fairly smart interaction between Voyager and the Borg. Species 8472 is (briefly) a breath of fresh air in introducing aliens which look and feel alien compared to the typical Star Trek fare, and it’s just about the only episode of the series which has a genuine “yeah!” moment when Janeway tells Chakotay to execute “scorpion”.

It’s not exactly all downhill from here, but it’s a bumpy ride from here. The biggest change is that Seven of Nine sucks most of the oxygen from the room as far as characterization goes, as she far overshadows almost everyone else in interest and development. Tom Paris had been nominally the point-of-view character (certainly he seemed to be the one with the best mix of practicality and moral compass), but he gets smothered by Seven. I guess there’s a subplot which leads to him and B’Elanna Torres getting married, but Torres was not a very interesting character to me.

The biggest disappointment of the series was “Year of Hell”, touted as the best episode of the show in at least one list, and teased in “Before and After”. It was basically a big waste of time, the dumbest of time travel stories (everything gets reset at the end), with lots of questionable decisions by Janeway and others. I guess it was trying to ramp up the tension and the stakes, but it was all so artificial and manipulative it was hard to take it seriously. And of course it didn’t track with “Before and After” at all.

“Living Witness” was a nice little surprise in the middle of a bunch of otherwise unremarkable episodes, feature the Doctor being revived 700 years later to help set straight what happened when the Voyager encountered a particular planet on their journey. While not an entirely original premise, it was one of the best executed of its type. I certainly enjoyed it more than the maudlin NextGen episode “The Inner Light”.

The biggest disappointment of Voyager was without a doubt the portrayal of Captain Janeway. While I guess they were aiming to show her as less perfect than Kirk or Picard, in a different way from Sisko, she was written very erratically, often headstrong and stubborn and honestly something of a tin dictator at times. “Year of Hell” had some of this, but the peak of Janeway stupidity was “Equinox”, in which the Voyager encountered another Federation ship, the Equinox, which had also been pulled to the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker and had been trying to get home despite being a short-term research vessel. That ship ended up making some morally reprehensible choices to try to get home, which by the end of the first half left the Voyager in a bad spot. But in the second half Janeway goes around the bend, engaging in her own morally disgusting actions, and everything comes to an end when the Equinox captain has a change of heart for no apparent reason. A great set-up wasted by lousy writing in the second half.

(Several Equinox crew end up joining the Voyager, and I assume are never mentioned again – they weren’t in any of the episodes I watched.)

Though if she was frustrating as a Captain, her interactions with Seven and Chakotay were her high points. I suspect I missed the full nuance of her mentoring Seven to become a functioning human being, but even the glimpses I got were engaging. Jeri Ryan’s portrayal of Seven as imperious and haughty felt a bit off in her debut as a full Borg, but seemed more and more spot-on as Seven’s personality developed. Seven got many excellent moments, disagreeing with Janeway, confronting other Borg, interacting with one of the few children on the ship. She was surely the high point of the season.

Then, Chakotay ended up filling Tom Paris’ role from the first 3 seasons, as the ship’s even keel and moral compass. One of the final season episodes, “Shattered”, was a clever way of revisiting a number of key moments from the series without doing a clip show, but it was Chakotay as the featured character who held it all together, recruiting and convincing a much younger Janeway to help.

One interesting dynamic was Janeway and Chakotay meeting privately, since they were effectively the only people on the ship who were truly equals. They could air their differences, and argue all they wanted, as long as it was behind closed doors where their reports couldn’t see. This was one of those bits where the show almost seemed to understand what it had – a chance to show the power dynamics among Starfleet personnel, especially in a high-stake scenario – but it mostly treated it as an opportunity for NuTrek’s patented irrelevant character moments, showing things the character liked or remembered or experienced without really giving us a reason to care about it.

What about the rest of the cast? Well, in true NuTrek fashion there were just too many characters for all of them to be treated as major characters. The aliens Neelix and Kes were both somewhere between “just there” and outright annoying (though Kes at least got a good story in “Before and After”). Most of the rest just never really grabbed me, either. Torres was the typical “grumpy former rebel”. Paris also kind of filled that role, but with a vaguely self-destructive, sarcastic attitude, but I wish they’d played up a lot more. Ensign Harry Kim seemed like a cousin to Geordi LaForge, especially in that both of them were a little too earnest and a little too underdeveloped. The real missed opportunity was Tuvok, in whom Tim Russ turned in a pretty good Vulcan performance in the style of Leonard Nimoy, but the character himself was quite generic, and could have just been “Vulcan Science Officer #1”.

The only other character that worked for me was the Doctor, as Robert Picardo immediately brought humanity and humor to the role of the ship’s artificially intelligent medical officer. He got several good stories to play off of characters other than the main cast, including off of himself in “Equinox”. He was also the best part of “Blink of an Eye”, which was a fairly routine “this planet is in a faster time frame than our heroes” story elevated primarily by his performance.

Watching Voyager in 2020, it seems like a series of missed opportunities for story and character development: The ship just flits from place to place with no continuity. When the Equinox showed up I wondered just how they were able to make it through the obstacles Voyager had just barely cleared with far fewer resources. Sometimes they’re badly outclassed by the Borg, other times they’re willing to face them directly. The characters change in very small increments, but mostly there’s no character development here. All of this was par for the course for The Next Generation, making Voyager a natural successor to it, but it’s also very much an 80s/90s series with storytelling that seems shallow by today’s standards. It shows just how far ahead of its time Babylon 5 was compared to Star Trek.

The series finale, “Endgame”, is one of the very few episodes I’d seen before. When I did, I was glad I didn’t sit through 7 years of stories just for that. Watching it again, it works to the extent it does largely because of Kate Mulgrew’s performance as Admiral Janeway, who is driven to save her old crew but is also convinced by her old self to try something different. The story ends very abruptly, with no denouement, no winding down of the characters after they make it back to Earth, despite the backstories they’d all built up. It was pretty disappointing, and other than a brief appearance by Janeway in a NextGen film, and Seven appearing in Picard, I don’t think we learn anything about what happened to the others. (I imagine other media covered this, but I don’t care about anything other than what’s shown in TV and movies.)

So am I glad I watched it? Glad enough, I suppose. It wasn’t bad, but it always felt like the really good stuff was right around the corner… right up until the end, when it still felt that way.

The Last Crest

This is an entry about toothpaste.

I’ve been using Crest toothpaste for as long as I can remember, presumably because one or both of my parents used it when I was a kid. Sometime in the 90s, toothpaste manufacturers (or are they extruders?) started diversifying their products, and after trying various kinds, I eventually settled on Crest tartar control fresh mint gel as my preferred product.

(I don’t really strongly about paste vs. gel, but I’ve tried both cool mint and cinnamon flavors, and say “no thank you” to both of them.)

Back around 2013 I noticed that I could no longer find the gel in stores, so I turned to Amazon, which sold them – either directly or through third parties – in batches of 5-to-10 tubes. Annoying, but whatever. I also learned that you’re only supposed to use a pea-sized blob of paste to brush your teeth with, and while I still use a little more than that, cutting down made the tubes last a lot longer.

Unfortunately, my reprieve seems to have reached the end of the line: Amazon no longer offers this product, so I assume Crest has stopped making it. Which means sometime in the next week I will crack open the last tube of my favorite toothpaste, and sometime in the next eight months or so it will be gone. Alas.

Crest does still make something similar: Fresh mint gel+paste mixture with baking soda & peroxide whitening with tartar protection (and doesn’t that just roll off the tongue?). I bought a tube, and will try it out when this last tube is gone. It will probably be fine. Maybe just a touch weird, I don’t know.

I guess I should blame the millennials for ruining my favorite toothpaste, but probably it’s just good for me to try something new. Kind of.