Month: March 2019

For my birthday, I received a Fitbit Charge 3 SE. It’s been on my wish list ever since I got the wife one for Christmas to replace her aging and flaking Charge, and I was immediately taken with it for several reasons:

* It was under $200, in a world where a current Apple Watch will set you back at least twice the price of a Charge 3.

* It features NFC payment, so I have the same caliber of easy pay that I would get from Apple Pay on the watch.

* It can get notifications from apps, unlike most previous non-smartwatch Fitbits, so messages from Slack or Signal show up as readily as texts. This is huge, you have no idea. Now if only it supported Duo Push for 2FA…

* It’s waterproof, so no need to remove it to shower, and the battery life is supposed to be seven days. Which means it only has to come off once a week for a couple hours.

* It gives me everything my Alta HR did in a package not much larger and with a far more reliable touch-button instead of relying on a million taps that don’t actually turn the vibrating alarm off in the morning.

In short: everything I need and nothing I don’t, other than the 2FA bit for work. Problem is, on my Series 0 Apple Watch, the differentiating features like Siri never actually worked that well. Remote control for the audio, whether iTunes or Downcast or whatever, was always kind of iffy. And you had to take the damned thing off every night to charge, which meant sleep tracking – the thing I need more than almost any other health feature – was off the cards. 

I think there may still be a future for me with the Apple Watch, as we move toward a more verbal call-and-response model of mobility computing. If I could reliably get conversational information from Siri (especially reading back messages from Slack or Signal) and count on the watch lasting three or four days between charges, that would be interesting. If it were an LTE model and could do all this while the phone sits at home a couple train stops away, even better. But for now, it is again possible for me to leave my main phone upstairs as soon as I get home and putter around on a stripped-down device knowing that the stuff I really need to see will come to my arm.

Which is a pretty good present.

So apparently this week the New Yorker made the amazing discovery that Fox News is nothing but the propaganda arm of the Trump administration, setting the agenda and delivering marching orders to the goggle-eyed faithful while keeping things at fever pitch. Not one meaningful revelation in the whole article that wasn’t agonizingly obvious to anyone paying attention ten years ago. This is a huge part of why I finally gave up on the New Yorker subscription after two decades plus: it got old reading other people discovering and recapitulating what everyone already knows. I don’t need to wallow in it.

Because this is how it’s worked for a quarter century. The history of the GOP in the 21st century can be described in a single sentence: ignorance, stupidity and fear harnessed in the service of safeguarding wealth. That’s it and that’s all. All the racism, all the perpetual outrage, all the made-up inflammatory garbage to ensure that the dull-eyed yokels will reliably and religiously pull the lever for the people who will ensure that big money stays protected and that the awful socialist conditions that prevailed in (checks notes) the 1950s cannot return.

I mean, how many times do we have to go over it? The top marginal tax rate in the Eisenhower years was 91%. One-third of the working population belonged to a union. But whenever people talk about going back to the good old days, it’s alway the cultural ones – the 1950s where you didn’t have to acknowledge the existence of anything but white, mostly Anglo-Saxon, mostly Protestant (hell, the Irish and the Italians were slur-able ethnics in the Rat Pack era) culture. And the perpetual cry of the assholes from George Wallace to his modern heirs has always been the same: “we can go back to how it used to be.”

This didn’t remotely begin with Trump. It was obviously in play from the beginning of the Contract With America era, but because the South was still plausibly able to select Democrats, had several in office (including in the White House) and the media Wurlitzer wasn’t fully in place, it took time before it could really get rolling. By the end of 2001, though, you had GOP control of Congress (effectively), a chucklehead Southern Republican as a pliable White House occupant, and the promise of a new wartime milieu to varnish racism and authoritarianism as the only true American way. And after that, it’s just a chase scene.

Thing is, this is unsustainable. Demography and geography are at cross purposes, and we are reaching a point where the ability to govern America is being handed out on the basis of acreage rather than votes. The Senate is no longer viable as a parliamentary body, and the Electoral College is a worthless appendix infected to bursting (arguably has already, when you get right down to it). I don’t have an answer right now that doesn’t involve migrating to Ireland and living out my days in a shack on the coast.

But if it meant I would be five thousand miles from the bullshit farm, it might be worth it.

My wife gets it.

If you look at the last few months and years, where are my happy places, my comfortable spots, the things that relax me? The coast. In the fog. By the fireside. Craft beer, good books, low-stakes baseball, no alarm set. And thanks to the Marriott-Starwood merger and a surfeit of accumulated points, she was able to put us up at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay for the night. Complete with a fire pit and two Adirondack chairs outside our sliding-glass door. And a s’mores kit for the big fire pits outside next to the bar with the local beer, as the bagpiper played down a sun you couldn’t see for the marine layer. And dinner at a local brewery on the quiet-to-empty main drag of a a quiet downtown, with Vandy’s own Tyler Beede pitching two innings of spring training ball for the Giants on the overhead TV and a hazy IPA so loaded with citra that I took it for an orange juice-based drink at first. 

It turns out my most fully realized state – drink, phone and hotel bar – works just as well out on the patio monitoring a Vandy baseball sweep. Or roasting marshmallows and interrogating another guest’s 10-year-old about a new VR-laser tag experience. We used to go to the Ritz a lot more, just for drinks and the fire pit hangout, and I hosted a couple such birthday hangs there (in 2010 and 2014, if memory serves) but it’s been off the radar for an awfully long time for one reason or another.

But she thought to couple it with an excursion to go see the seals at Año Nuevo, and we managed a 24-hour getaway that felt like we’d just taken yet another trip. And it was the perfect antidote to the gloom – not of turning 47, which is materially indistinguishable from 46, but of the inevitable reflection of where you’ve gotten to in life and whether you’re on course to the kind of life you want. And if I were able to retire with her in another ten years or so to the nearby senior-living trailer park, walkable to the Ritz for drinks or electro-bikeable to downtown for dinner, that might be just about dead solid perfect.

You need things to look forward to.