75 thoughts on “Weekend!”

  1. The phone isn’t tethered to a particular carrier?

    You might want to consider going with one of the subcarriers. Which one would depend on which carrier your phone is tethered to, but if you’re not going to go hog-wild, and Maribou isn’t going to get one, you’ll save money that way.

    Among the big carriers, I still consider T-Mobile to be the least evil, but they’ve been stepping up their game.Report

    1. Well, if you are only ever in one of three places the first thing to do is make sure the carrier you want works in those three places. You’d be surprised that in any given office building AT&T might work, but T-Mobile won’t or the other way round.

      I travel cross up and down the east coast and sometimes cross country… so Verizon’s coverage is key. They are evil in that their service is expensive, but has never let me down… so I guess that’s not as evil as I’d like to think.Report

      1. For a while I had a work phone that worked everywhere I went except at my desk – there was a giant steel server room chiller (the server room itself having been decommissioned, but the A/C thing was left behind being too heavy / complicated to remove) across the wall from my office chair, and directly between it and the nearest cell tower. If I stood up and walked one step to the right of my desk, I got reception again.Report

  2. Need to clean some sheets!

    The mother-in-law is arriving next week, so I need to get some cleaning done. As always, but this time with a deadline.

    When MIL comes to town, I will finally be able to get a haircut. It’s odd being in my mid-thirties and having such shaggy hair.

    The weather has been pretty awesome here.Report

        1. For a while there I could slap some product on it and it looked big and crazy in a sort of David Lynch-y way. Which was cool.

          Now it just looks big and crazy in a “I have an enormous undifferentiated mass of poofy hair on my head” way. Which is NOT as cool.Report

          1. “I have an enormous undifferentiated mass of poofy hair on my head” way. Which is NOT as cool.”

            Hmmm, for someone who is my age, I would say you have the better of the opitions…Report

              1. Gentlemen, as we get older, we learn to disregard the nonessential; a continuous process of paring down to only that which is needed, until the day when finally, nothing is.

                You are missing naught (except, I suppose, on very sunny days).Report

  3. I got a little bit of bad news on the health front today and have been placed on ketosis induction. I am NOT happy about this, not even a little little bit. WTF am I going to do with all this beer I can no longer drink?Report

          1. Well, sort of. I’m also on a sodium restriction. So, not so much cheese. It’s a good thing I know as much as I do about cooking meats because that will let me get some flavor into them without using salt.

            I’m allowed one piece of fruit a day and if yesterday was any indication I’m likely to get pretty nasty towards anyone who stands in between me and that one piece of fruit that actually makes me feel not hungry.

            As you can tell, I’m still in the “anger” phase of mourning after my loss. I feel like I’m being punished for doing something bad. Which, in a way, I am: I knew I was born with bad genetics for this sort of thing, and I knew I was carrying around more weight than I should, but didn’t pro-actively moderate my diet accordingly. I figured keeping my alcohol consumption moderate, having at least moderate physical exercise most days, and generally using good ingredients would do the trick, but no, that wasn’t enough. So now I get to re-actively moderate it, and the results are more drastic than they would have been had I taken it easy sooner.

            And the worst thing about it is: I’m going to die anyway. I’ll just have a slightly longer, significantly less joyful amount of time before I get there. When it’s put that way, it becomes a temptation to ignore the doctor’s advice, so I’m going to stop now before I talk myself into doing something foolish like eating half a bagel.Report

              1. Hypertension. Much like the I-won’t-believe-he’s-actually-overweight @tod-kelly describes below, the prescription is “here’s some pills, now go lose a lot of weight and don’t eat salt ever again.” Which sucksucksucks but it is better than a cardiac event.Report

    3. Google suggest that ketosis induction is phase I of a low-carb (Atkins) diet. My regrets. I offer to help you drown your sorrows by swapping your (good) beer for low-carb alcohols. Like gin. Mixed with sugar-free tonic.

      So, G&Ts at your house?

      (We are in the same county, at least.)Report

        2. COCONUT CURRY TIME. Meat of your choice. Peapods and peppers and beansprouts and garlic.

          With lime juice. And lots and lots of coconut butter and coconut milk.

          Over fresh, cold avocado chunks (hot/cold textures, yumm).Report

          1. Last summer when I had to spend two months on a low fat diet, I couldn’t have avocado. It was akin to torture, as I put it on everything: burgers, chicken, eggs of any sort, tacos, other tacos, still other tacos, pork chops, shrimp, tuna, tacos…Report

            1. Portland!!!

              I’m on it! I know a ton of wineries, breweries, distilleries, restaurants, parks and hiking spots. Oh, we have to talk Tod in to hosting a BBQ at his house and his wife in to making her brownies!!! Care for a second birthday party, Tod?!

              There’s a bacon and bourbon festival this weekend at the museum of science and industry, but I’m sure there will be another fun festival any other weekend we plan.Report

        1. I’m actually quite a bit overweight.

          But more than that, the dreaded threat of hypertension has suddenly and rather unexpectedly reared its head. So no I have to be changing up a whole lot of things about my diet, including cutting carbs and sodium way, way down.Report

          1. Doctors are prescribing low-carbohydrate diets now? Didn’t see that coming.

            Anyway, don’t forget exercise. Both aerobic and resistance exercise have been shown to be effective treatments for hypertension, independent of their effect on weight loss.

            Potassium helps, too, as it acts as a sodium antagonist. Your options are limited on a strict low-carbohydrate diet, though. I guess fish and greens would be your go-to.Report

            1. I was pretty surprised too. “Isn’t that sort of thing hell on the kidneys?” I asks. And the doctor says, “That’s why you’re also going to drink a ton of water and come back to see me in two weeks for more labs and further instructions.”Report

  4. I am thinking about buying a tablet. The laptop is getting long in the tooth, and tablets seem to be getting to the point they might be useful for anything I do from my home on a personal level (I am sure everyone here is like Duh, but I am an unrepentant luddite.) I started physical therapy this week, so that is the big thing with me lately. Mostly just chill.Report

    2. I have a couple of years old Nexus 7 (no cellular, have to find a wifi hotspot). Great e-book reader, fine for maps, okay as a browser if you don’t want to do much data input. Speech recognition for browser searching is okay. I’m not good enough to do spoken input for e-mail. Skype is very nice on it. For me, definitely not a laptop replacement.Report

          1. I tried a bluetooth keyboard on a tablet recently, and after having to touchscreen the text box and switch to typing a few cycles, I just ended up using the screen keys.Report

    3. R. went without a laptop for 3+ years with two tablets (iPad and Transformer), and only recently purchased a new laptop for work. And she did so begrudgingly.

      Personally, I hate tablets, so I have no clue how she lived that way. I guess it’s entirely a matter of preference and purpose.

      We’re about to buy a desktop, because my son needs it for some of the stuff he’s doing for school. Any time I have to spend money like that (and we’re not even looking at expensive desktops), I start freaking out and drag the process out, so it may be 5 or 6 years ’til I pull the trigger. Of course, I’ve put it off so long already that my son now talks of nothing else, so my fear of spending money may be outweighed by my annoyance at constantly having to talk about it.Report

        1. We actually talked about building one together, but let’s face it, I am not that guy. We had a long talk about the hermeneutics of suspicion today. That’s gonna have to be my contribution. The building computers thing he’s gonna have to do with his uncle or my neighbor who seems to have turned his entire home into a complex of computers.Report

          1. Almost every time I build a computer, there’s one hard-to-diagnose problem. In theory it’s easy, but there’s always that one thing.Report

  5. I recently upgraded my second gen Android to a galaxy 5 mini. It was only one of a few that had a similar size footprint and removable battery. That’s important, because, frankly, I’m on the NSA list….

    Pro tip…if you’re dating a dual citizen from Iran, don’t let her email you. 🙂

    But I really find the huge sizes very annoying. I have a good deal with verizon and i’ve read that they are aggressively pricing their data plans, so you should shop around.Report

      1. Back a few years when the NSA was telling us what they were legally authorized to do, vs what they actually were doing, they said that they could snoop on emails from foreign nationals to americans.

        So I know that that email got copied into the “system” 🙂

        Recently I submitted my visa application to go to China. A few days later, I was contacted by a woman on a dating site and we had dinner. She was VERY eager to meet. She disclosed that she was a CIA counter intel employee. I wonder the following: 1) if that was true, 2) if she might have been a foreign agent, 3) If I was being investigated or 4) probed for any classified/business info.

        Note, my China visa requires that I disclose who I work for and the address…It was curious 🙂 And even if it’s none of the above, I’m sure as hell telling the story for the rest of time as though it was…..Report

  6. I can’t believe it’s only Thursday! I’ve had a heck of a week.

    I’m on call this weekend for my first job and I’m physically working at my second job. Saturday night is girls night (cards against humanity and whiskey!). Sunday I have theater tickets!!!Report

  7. I have a Kindle for reading (which I would not even consider replacing with a non-E-ink device), an Android for mobile internet (and occasionally making calls), and a 15-inch MacBook pro for computer stuff and Netflix. I can’t imagine what I’d do with a tablet.Report

  8. I’m having something of an odd weekend.

    Tomorrow I might be going to an improv show if tickets have been procured for me as promised, but I haven’t heard from the guy in a week so I don’t know. If not, I’ll have to find some kind of a plan B.

    Saturday I am going through a second round of being recorded *and* a second round of being filmed. The filming is for a documentary where I doubt I will survive the cutting room floor. The recording is for a multi media art show in September, where they’ll be doing visual mixed media and film around audio of personal stories that are edited to sound more like poetry. Or something like that. I think. Anyway, they’re using my voice and stories. Kind of curious to see what it ends up looking like.

    Sunday I’m going to find some way to treat myself.Report

  9. I didn’t know where else to put this, but…I just got to chat with Lawrence Lessig, you guys! I’m nerding out SO HARD right now.Report

  10. I’d suggest setting up TextSecure as your default texting app – it’s the best bet at NSA-proof encrypted text messages for exchanges with other TextSecure users, and if you set TS up with a local storage passphrase and the phone with a screen lock code (highly recommended), your whole text message database has a good chance of being local police force-proof.

    Also, for a while I was using one of the many motion-sensor-using alarm clocks you can get. The idea is that instead of the alarm going off at an absolutely fixed time, it goes off up to twenty minutes or half an hour before, but at a point in your sleep cycle when you’re sleeping lightly. You put the phone on your mattress, and it uses the motion sensor to detect when you’re already tossing and turning a bit. I found that it eliminated the feeling I sometimes get of being kicked out of a deep and important slumber by the alarm. I stopped using it though mainly because it drew down the battery on my phone something intense, and as the phone aged the battery lasted less and less well.

    Now I want to try putting one of those on my new phone – I’d forgotten all about that…Report

  11. Saturday is the Pride parade, which is always a lot of fun. This year Mr. T and some other friends are going to be in a float – the only live band in the whole parade. They were rehearsing last night, and sounded pretty great. They’re playing the Care Bears theme song! And a disco version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow!

    Also later there’s a picnic thing with the school where Kiddo’s starging kindergarten in Autumn.

    Sunday volunteer at the bike shop like usual. The other shop the organization runs has come to the outraged attention of some MRAs for having a women, trans* & gender non-binary folks day a few times a month, and now our wonderful shop coordinator has to deal with a human rights complaint and a whole bunch of awful harassing phone calls. This Sunday will be a WTGNB day at the other shop – it probably won’t affect us much, but hopefully there won’t be too much impact on them (I’m half hoping we get a few misdirected rant-y calls, so I can tell off some jerks).Report

  12. I will be crashing hard after one of the most exhausting non-start-of-school weeks I’ve ever had. There’s a point in covering-for-people-who-are-definitely-more-in-need-of-the-time-off-than-you where it stops being ANY fun at all, and I reached that point on Wednesday. But here I am at work today, 7:30am-6pm.

    Fun times.

    So I’m hoping to do as little as possible this weekend while looking at how much I need to get done this weekend. Ah, paradox.Report

  13. Germane to the phone: if you want cheap service, get the same provider Maribou has so that you can share minutes and data.

    If you travel enough and you want better coverage, get one of whichever of the two Big Three Maribou doesn’t have so that wherever you are you have a better chance that one of the two of you has coverage.

    Verizon’s family plan was better than AT&T’s, last time I looked. T-mobile doesn’t have good coverage some of the places we go so that’s out for me, but my coworker Dave has had it for years and he hates it less than I hate both AT&T and Verizon, so that’s notable.Report

  14. @jaybird I went through my archives, and several months ago when my mother-in-law got a smartphone, I found that the best deal was Straight Talk. Straight Talk uses AT&T’s network, and if your phone is branded AT&T, it’ll almost certainly work.

    H2O looks pretty decent as well. Also AT&T.Report

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