Got the call that my new new new phone arrived at the Monterey Apple Store on Friday afternoon, and since I had no interest in fighting traffic, I went over first thing Saturday morning to pick it up.

Yes, I made sure to test for the presence of wireless antennas before leaving the store this time, and was pleasantly surprised that this one had up-to-date firmware on it as well. I let it charge all day before restoring my backup to it just after midnight.

Why? Because after it’s all done, I have to erase and re-pair the watch, which wipes out the day’s activity and exercise, and it won’t re-sync music until it’s hooked up to the charger. So, as soon as 9,000+ songs finish syncing to the phone, I can pair the watch, plug them both in to charge overnight, and go to bed. Then spend the morning re-authorizing apps to use the fingerprint reader, refresh cached data, re-download in-app purchases, re-assign ringtones and alarm songs, erase all but three of the auto-synced watch apps, etc, etc.

Special thanks to Neal for the iPhone 7 loaner that was actually useful, unlike the Apple Store loaner.

Bonus: the Del Rey Oaks Safeway has a fully-stocked Boar’s Head deli. It’d be nice if the ones near my house upgraded, but this is closer than Morgan Hill, unless I’m coming from my office.

With all due respect, “data detectors” are bullshit.

When I type “1​/2-pound roast beef” into a shopping list, I am most definitely not planning a meeting on January 2nd at noon. Particularly not the January 2nd that was nearly three months ago.

Seriously, if you had a QA department, would you know what to do with it?

…either that, or a clear case of statuary rape.

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From work: documentation-based performance analysis is adorable. You just want to reach through the Internet and start bitchslapping.

From home: somehow I got the impression that progressives were better than bifocals. I should have known that anything called “progressive” would have focus issues.

I think this is an illustration of Joe Biden’s chance of winning the Democrat primaries, but there are so many possibilities right now.

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I’ll take the pair, with a large milkshake.

NSFW

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Every time I see this picture, I think about how much she must hate him, to wreck his back this way.

Saw this sign a while back in my local mall (which is trying really hard to go upscale, to the point that it’s pushed out so many of the old stores that it’s almost more “coming soon” than “open for business”). I figured that it was either an attempt by Daiso to go upscale, or a direct competitor riffing on the name. The fact that the katakana of their logo says “meisou” was a little odd, though.

Turns out that Miniso is a 100% Chinese company that just puts Japanese text on their house-brand products, and stocks things like Pocky to help prop up the facade. Their only connection to Japan is in their typesetting.

I happened to be in the mall again the day of their grand opening (twice in the same year!), and they’d attracted a curious crowd, but they didn’t really stock any interesting stuff. I can’t imagine any reason to go back, much less buy something there.

Unrelated, both times I was in the mall, I was the only white person there. Surprising, since even the local Walmart is usually more diverse. Salinas used to be 51% hispanic, but I think the next census is going to show a higher number. Also, it provides some perspective on the growth of the hispanic middle class that the mall has spent a crapton of money expanding and going upscale.