§ I pickled a couple jars of cascabella peppers from the garden. I’m pretty sure I did everything correctly but I’m not yet confident enough in my canning skills to store them outside of the refrigerator.

§ Since starting this job, which regularly requires me to work between four different floors, my daily “flights climbed” Apple Health metric has been averaging right around 38. This is up from 15 when I was living in the flatlands of Chicago and 5 during the height of the pandemic.

§ I was gifted a 65 inch television to replace my previous 50 inch panel. There is something obscene about the truth revealed by a screen of this size. Yes, the television is often the main focus in my living room but I don’t want to be constantly be reminded of that fact. I want to live a life where the TV plays an ancillary role in my leisure-time activities. A 65 inch screen doesn’t bring me any closer to achieving that.

After a few days I put my old small screen back and moved the 65 inch panel to a closet. Anyone need a big monstrosity of a TV?

§ It is shocking to me how poorly designed some of Amazon’s products are. The Kindle app on iOS, in particular, is indisputably the worst user interface I’ve seen in quite a while.

I really wanted to like it. “Whispersync for Voice”—their feature that syncs reading progress between ebook and audiobook copies of the same title—sounds incredible. The idea that I could listen to a audiobook while driving and then pick right where I left off later in the ebook version is deeply compelling to me. So compelling, in fact, that I downloaded the Kindle and Audible apps and signed up for a trial of their “Kindle Unlimited” service. The last time I was so confused while navigating an interface was when I tried AWS a few years back.

Apple has all of the pieces in place to add a similar ebook/audiobook sync feature to their Books app. I hope one of these days they finally get around to it.

§ A major reorganization of my bathroom closet has made an inconvenient fact unavoidable: I own at least two dozen towels.

As with cups and mugs, the correct number of towels to own, per capita, is greater than one but certainly less than twelve.

§ I decided not to review my subscription to Glass—the hip new social photo sharing site. It is a beautifully designed service but ultimately not something I have a need for in my life at the moment. After doing so, I realized that without an active subscription I can’t see or export my own photos.

Relying on my own website is clearly a much better decision for the long run. I tweaked a few elements of my photos page to borrow some of my favorite design ideas from Glass.

§ By Monday morning it had become apparent that I had caught a cold. It has been less than two months since my last one—not great! Thankfully it was short-lived. By the time Friday rolled around my synonyms had all but cleared up, save for some lingering congestion. Perfect timing on the phenylephrine news.

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