This new Music app on macOS is going to take some getting used to.

Where are the reviews? How can I purchase an LP? Where is the pre-order section?

Why does the sorting drop-down for New Releases only have a single option (“Featured”)?

At least there’s still a Metal genre.🙄

L-I-S-T-E-N

~>

S-I-L-E-N-T

So how bad is it when you are upgrading to Catalina, and it is stuck on the final “Setting up your computer…” screen for four hours?

I’m through airport security and on my way to Release Notes 2019. See you all soon!

Gotta head to the airport in about five hours.

I should probably go to sleep.

The leaves on the bike paths are becoming more numerous. 🍂 Guess I should start considering a stationary bike or something similar for the winter. ❄️

Anyone have any recommendations or cautionary tales? 🚴‍♂️

Been biking kind of regularly the latter half of this summer. Enjoying it! When pressed for time, I’ve been doing a “short” 7-mile route, trying to improve my pace with it. I was on my way to a record time —the final half-mile to go— when I had to wait on car traffic forever. 🙄 Oh well.

Thanks for the time-saving, Overcast!

I’ve just been informed that I’ve read 27 books this year. 🤨📚🤔🧐

My Sunday: Slept in. Did laundry and played guitar. Took a leisurely 24mi bike ride. Now sitting in the sun with a Cuban cigar and some cold water. Next, a cool shower, some chores, and a few overdue tasks. Later, spicy pizza for a family dinner out.

Oh, cruel world!

The terrible misery, horrible distress, wretched anguish, and stinging reality of…

…always being last on the delivery route when waiting for a new iDevice to arrive…

Woe is me!

Every single piece of Apple tech I own is misbehaving today.

The key takeaway? That my ability to get angry with inanimate technology is especially well-developed. 🤬 🙄

Goes and re-reads some Stoic and Buddhist passages to calm down…on my iPad.

I like the Apple Card so far. However, in lieu of a “normal” way to import Apple Card transactions into QuickBooks, I’m hoping someone figures out a way to at least partly-automate it soon (before I’m driven to try myself).

Maybe manual export to PDF statement, detect that file, scrape the data out into a CSV, then manually import that into QB?

A patch-laden denim vest, metal-fan style, but instead of having traditional band logos, I’m envisioning one with anti-Ticketmaster, anti-Live Nation, anti-ClearChannel/-iHeart, anti-Spotify, anti-Apple Music, and more emblems that protest other artist-hostile and monopolistic entities.

Maybe throw in some music-unrelated anti-Monsanto, anti-NRA, and other patches, perhaps?

An exercise in perspective.

(It is also a free, 8-minute video version of a short story by the author of The Martian where the audio book version costs $2 on Audible.)

So. Many. Things.

To learn. To do. To address. To experience. To throw out. To see. To clean. To fix. To adjust. To enjoy. To endure.

Excited and tired.

I’m reading about sleep health, and now even more convinced that my decades of (often intentional) sleep deprivation were one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done.

In other news, I hit a mini-goal yesterday.

I have weight data for myself going back ten years, and I’m officially the lightest I have been since I started tracking. \o/

I’ve definitely got a ways to go still, but it feels good to reach that milestone.

The last year has been tough professionally.

But, I feel like I’m about to enter a period filled with serious, renewed growth – both professionally and personally.

I’m ready to reach some new levels. 🤘

So far today I’m playing a shuffle of two European bands with catalogs that span many decades and whose names both start with the letter “S”: Scorpions and Saxon. 🎸

“Whatever university you start at, you always end up graudating from I.O.U.”

Tonight my wife, myself, and some friends went to a concert. A hard rock / 80s metal concert. On a school night.

Totally worth it.

Sebastian Bach performed, in its entirety —for its 30th anniversary 😱— Skid Row’s first album.

Good, fun stuff. 🎶🎸

I’ve been ramping up my reading again lately –which is I’m thrilled I am doing— and I’ve further added audio books to the mix over the last 9 months or so. Audio books steal some time away from my podcast subscriptions, but it has been worth it.

I tend to listen a bit less intently to most podcasts, whereas I try to focus more when listening to audio books. Some of this difference probably lies in the fact that most of the books I read are not fiction, which I tend to think of as usually being “easier reading” than the technical, business, self-improvement, history, biography, science, and philosophy books I usually read. I listen to podcasts (unless I’m listening to music, which is just as, if not more, likely) when multi-tasking: getting ready in the morning, doing dishes, driving; but audio books I save for things like walks (which I’m also doing more of lately – yay me) or when enjoying a glass of bourbon.

Anyway, the dilemma I now find myself with is whether to get new books in eBook or audio book format. As an aside, it is almost always clear if it is a book I’m going to get in printed form.

I generally don’t get technical books in audio format, as there’s just too much detail I need to see with my eyes, at my own pace. After that criterion, I try to guess whether I’m going to want to take notes, make highlights, re-read passages, or refer back to sections. My wife got an Audible subscription that we both use, and we often have credits at the ready, so the audio format is, in a sense, already paid for, but will I be able to get enough value from the audio format?

So far, I’ve usually been correct in my determinations, yet I still have a several books in more than one format – admittedly, though, two of those were intentional: James Clear’s Atomic Habits (because I wanted to ingest it more than once, in more than one way) and Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time (because it was awesome and my wife was reading it at the same time).

Enough of my rambling. Back I go to my trying to decide about Scott Young’s Ultralearning… Actually, I think I just decided to go with the audio format for this one, with the thought that if I find it worthy of a “re-read,” I’ll go in the opposite direction I went with Atomic Habits and get the eBook second. I guess my rambling helped clarify my thoughts a little, which is a result I hoped for when I started this post. :)

It arrived! 🎶

Refreshing my memory of how to play R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion and part of Rod Stewart’s Maggie May on mandolin since my brother-in-law is bringing a carbon fiber mando over for me to check out.