Posts

I recently took a new job and my new employer gave me a choice between a Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows and an M1 Macbook Pro with MacOS. Even my least dedicated readers know that I have no love for Windows and have spent literal years trying to rid myself of it. So of course I chose the Macbook Pro. Well dear readers, I’m going to be blunt: I wish I hadn’t. The reason why is simple: MacOS is a mess of bugs, half-baked features and is clearly only being maintained because Apple obviously feels like it has to. Over ten years ago when I last used MacOS on a regular basis at work, MacOS was perfectly serviceable by the standards of the day. It was competitive and Apple was clearly still excited for it’s future prospects. It wasn’t lacking in any noticeable way. ...

I’ve spent a lot of time debating on whether or not I should even write this blog post. Truth is that I was this close to just letting the entire thing fade into oblivion but after searching out some reading material on the subject, I decided that I needed to write about this, if only to remind future Jay what he just escaped from. Future Jay has a tendency to forget important things like that. ...

There is no great way to put this without a certain segment of my readers recoiling in horror, so I’m just going to say it. I’m tired of fighting for things on the job. After over 20 years of professionally being combative when I thought the situation called for it, I have resolved to turn over a new leaf. If you’ve worked with me, you know how it can be at times. When the company, the team or the boss decided to go down a road that I strongly disagreed with, I pulled every ethical tactic out of the bag to try and reverse things. Sometimes I was right and sometimes I was wrong on a technical level. But looking back I now realize that the level of technical correctness is not particularly relevant. ...

To those who don’t already know: I will be starting a new job next week. This is notable for one reason above all others: It marks my return to a much more normal situation. You see, for the last four and a half years I have actually had two jobs with two different employers. One of the conditions of the arrangement with one of my employers was that I had to largely keep this a secret from my coworkers there. So I mostly did (excluding those I worked very closely with who needed to fully understand my availability). For over four years. That included not discussing it on this blog. ...

The point of today’s post, or diatribe if you prefer, is to push back against the notion that once you have a piece of tech integrated into a workflow, you are pretty much good to go barring any sort of critical failure. Sadly a lot of people believe this. However since the first rule of the “Set It and Forget It” club is that you don’t talk about said club, you rarely hear much about it. ...

Before I launch into this month’s diatribe I want to offer my readers a word of warning: I’ve been feeling very pessimistic about tech in general as of late and this piece will expose a large portion of that to my audience. If you are already depressed about tech, you might wanna skip this one. In any event, I have been fond of occasionally awarding various industries / institutions with the label: The new “priesthood” of society. Whereas American society likes to bandy about the veneer of religious morality, the truth is that we moved past religion being an actual difference maker in how we conduct ourselves a very long time ago. For at least 15 years now (probably longer as that timeline really just represents the first time I consciously realized this myself), I have described the Wall Street Banks and their friends at the Federal Reserve as being our new priesthood. This country and its economy are built on idea that encouraging an ever growing amount of greed benefits everybody and those groups represent the standard bearers that drive and ultimately legitimize such a belief system. ...

Well two and a half weeks ago I finally put on my big boy pants and took Annette down to the local Apple Store… and bought two iPhones. That decision came about because of years of accumulated frustration with Android, Google and Android OEMs. If you want my overall opinion on the iPhone experience, here it is: It works like it should. Which is a back handed way of saying that the wide variety of Android phones I have used over the years haven’t worked that way. At some point as a consistent Android user you get so used to endless quirks and buggy behavior that it almost becomes some sort of meta game in and of itself. ...

So its been a few months since I have posted anything here and the reason why is simple: I just haven’t been feeling all that chatty lately. Now you might be thinking, “Has Jay finally run out of tech things to talk about?” and let me assure you: This is absolutely not the case. It is the case however that despite all of the tech things that I’m embroiled in right now, real life is forcing that to mostly take a back seat at least when it comes to spending the time crafting some long winded diatribe about said tech things. Long story short: My father-in-law has lung cancer and my wife has been mostly living in Augusta for almost two months acting as his home healthcare nurse. I’m managing my father-in-law and step-mother-in-law’s finances for them and handling all of the household duties that Annette and I would typically split amongst us. ...

Some weeks it sure seems like things are always changing, doesn’t it? Well these past few weeks have definitely felt that way for me. Just when I think things in my tech landscape are solidifying to the point where I won’t have any more material for tech related blog posts here, lo and behold the universe delivers some. So last week I decided, in a huff mind you, to dump Pop! OS and replace it with Fedora. Now those of you who know my Linux history should be shocked by this as the last time I seriously used an RPM based distribution was back in the early 2000s before I got hitched. It has been a VERY long time. ...

So ya’ll have been following me on my hardware journey for awhile now and you have probably noticed that I keep focusing on different facets of the hardware experience. Well today I have some good news: I have finally found the exact combination of factors that are required to bring me joy on this front and I’m about to reveal the details of that secret sauce. Once upon a time, I used to be your typical PC Gamer type: I valued performance at the cost of everything else. When I met my wife in 2003, I had just built a dual Xeon workstation with an ATI Radeon 9700 that was huge and exceptionally loud. I loved that machine. It was fast and it did everything I wanted. Sometime after getting married, I discovered that my wife didn’t much care for me spending hours on end in a separate room playing video games, so I transitioned to gaming laptops. ...