Do we still like our iPhone Model Xs?

Do we still like our iPhone Model Xs?  A question I received this morning from reader (and all around crazy person) Dick M.  Answer: why, yes, we do.  The large screen in a small form factor is great for our ancient eyes.  The brandy-new biometric feature (face ID) works amazingly well, and it's been integrated with nearly all of the apps I use on the iPhone that require identification.  I love the resulting ease of use.  There's a security tradeoff there, obviously: someone who wanted something on my phone badly enough could tie me down and hold the phone up to my face to get access.  On the other hand, someone who wants access to my phone that badly is probably going to get access anyway. :)  The one situation I can imagine where there's a risk I don't like is border crossings, and if I ever take my phone across a border I will be disabling face ID for the crossing.  It's not the foreign countries I worry about, it's the U.S. border agents with their freedom to examine (and even confiscate!) my electronics.

And I left the best for last.  The iPhone X's camera is superb.  My videos are notably less shaky, and I find myself using the 2X optical telephoto very frequently.  The camera is enough better that I'd be happy with the iPhone X even if the camera was the only new feature.  But it's not!

A few mornings out of the year ...

A few mornings out of the year ... several things line up just right such that the morning sun angles into one of my office windows and strikes the “Tuscan yellow” wall.  The result is a bright, cheerful glow that lasts just a few minutes until the sun climbs high enough that the lit spot is on the floor.  This morning was such a morning...

So what has to line up, and why does it happen only rarely?  For starters, to our east are the Wasatch Mountains.  Generally by the time the sun climbs over the mountains in the morning, the angle is already high enough that my wall won't be lit up.  The point where the sun comes up varies over the course of the year, as the seasons change.  Within the range of sunrise points there are two “notches” from the perspective of our property.  This morning the sun rose in the bottom (lowest point) of one of those notches.  The other notch (which the sun comes up through in the summer) is so far north that the patches lit up in my office on those mornings don't strike any walls.  The sun rises through the other notch in late November and mid March.  Then there's another bit that needs lining up: the patch of sun has to strike the wall where nothing is hanging.  That's about half the possible time.  Finally, it has to be a nicely clear day – even haze will diminish the brightness enough to ruin the effect.

A good start to my morning!

A reader asks...

A reader asks...  Mary L. wrote to ask me if I use an ad blocker for my web browser, and if so, which one?  The answer is “Hell, yes!” I use an ad blocker!  I hate seeing those ads, and even more I hate the delayed visual “pop” when they populate after the text I want to read renders.  I have to say, though, that because I read so much on an iPad (with no ad blockers, dang it) I am getting to the point where tuning out the ads is nearly automatic.  I consciously (almost) never click on an ad, though, as I know that information will be collected and used to target more ads to me.  As things are right now, the ads I see are almost entirely comprised of three categories: things that I've looked at on Amazon, things that Debbie has looked at on Amazon (we share an account), and things related to electronics.  The latter, I presume, is because some vendor I've dealt with has sold my name to a list (I'm betting it's Newark, where I bought my 'scope). 

As for which ad blocker: at the moment I'm using Ublock.  I'm happy with its performance, it eliminates virtually all ads, and it's available for both Chrome and Firefox (I still use both browsers about equally).  It's also available for Safari, but I can't speak to its performance there as I almost never use Safari (because of compatibility issues on several sites I visit daily).

A slightly weird snowfall...

A slightly weird snowfall...  I spotted this pattern on our front door walkway when I was about to carry some groceries in.  Nearly all the areas of rock have melted, but the areas of sand/rock fines have not.  I'm going to guess, from this, that the larger thermal mass of the rock takes longer to drop below freezing (once warmed up) than the sand/rock fines areas – and so there was enough heat in stored up in the rock to melt the snowfall, but not so in the sand/rock fines.

What bothers me about my theory is that I haven't seen this before!

The groceries I was carrying in were a bit different than our normal fare.  Our local Boy Scout troop is having a food drive this week, specifically asking for canned goods.  When I took some cardboard up to Hyrum to be recycled this morning, I noticed that our local grocer was having a “case lot” sale on canned goods.  I'm sure it's not a coincidence that the sale is during the same week as the food drive.  It's easy to imagine here that the Boy Scouts were clever enough to hold their drive on the same week as the sale – but it's equally easy to imagine that the store manager decided to contribute to the food drive by holding the sale on the week of the drive.  However the coincidence happened, as I picked the canned fruit, vegetables, and meat I noted that all of the items on sale were of the right type for the food drive – and that all three of the other shoppers choosing with me were buying for the food drive as well...

We love living here!

That pesky white stuff again...

That pesky white stuff again...  By yesterday afternoon our spell of warm, sunny weather had cleared nearly all the snow from the Cache Valley floor.  Then, last night, despite slightly-above-freezing temperatures, it started snowing again.  I got up around 1 am to let our dogs out, and there was three inches on the ground.  When we got up at 7 am this morning, there was just an inch of a mix of snow and slush, and the temperature was well above freezing.  We have rain and warmer temperatures forecast for today and tomorrow.  So it's all white outside (and it's still snowing), but none of this is going to stick.  I hope!  Our driveway had warmed up nicely, so there's no snow accumulating on it.  Snow plowing bullet dodged!

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!  It's the second birthday for our youngest field spaniels, brother Mako and sister Cabo.   To look at them, you'd never guess they were related.  Cabo is small for a field spaniel, with an unusually short muzzle and a unique, perpetually startled expression on her face.  Mako is big – nearly as big as our second field spaniel, Mo'i – and shares much of his appearance, with lots of muscles, 50% more weight than Cabo, and a massive, lunky head.  Their personalities are also very different: Cabo is curious, mischievous, and very active.  Mako is calmer, clumsier, very strong, and a lunkhead of the first order.  We love 'em both!

A day in Salt Lake City...

A day in Salt Lake City...  We ended up spending most of our day down there.  The main purpose of the trip was a routine visit to Debbie's endocrinologist, but of course we stopped at the Red Iguana on the way home. :)  This time Debbie and I both ordered the same entree (that doesn't happen very often): one of their specials.  This one was three tacos filled with shrimp, queso quesadilla, avocado, poblano pepper strips, and shredded lettuce.  They were, quite possibly, the best tacos I have ever had.  We did enough reverse-engineering of the recipe to convince ourselves that we could make these at home – and we're gonna give it a try!

Along the way on this trip we passed the 25,000 mile mark on my Tesla Model X.  The last time I was in for a routine service the technicians there told me they don't see very many Teslas with that kind of mileage.  That surprises me, as in our household the gas-powered car (a Lexus SUV) gets driving about 1% of the total miles we drive.  Basically it only gets used if Debbie wants to go somewhere on her own.  If I'm driving, we go in the Tesla.  Now it may be true (I have no idea, actually) that we drive more miles than the average retired couple, and that might be contributing as well.  It's still true that I have had no major problems with the Tesla; just a few almost trivial issues that were all quickly resolved by the Tesla service folks.  At 25,000 miles that's also true of the last four or five Toyota products we owned, too...

The magic of topology...

The magic of topology...  This is awesome!  How to fit a big circular object through a too-small square hole in a piece of paper.  I couldn't figure it out until he showed how it was done...

A little winter trip...

A little winter trip...  Debbie and I drove up to Hardware Ranch yesterday afternoon, through Blacksmith Fork Canyon.  It was particularly beautiful, with clear blue skies and less snow than we've seen for a while.  The red osier dogwood were especially brightly colored, as you can see in the three photos below.  When I took these photos we were about 4 miles west of Hardware Ranch, along the right fork of the Blacksmith River.  The last photo is focused on a teasel seed pod, one of my mom's favorite craft materials.  We have bears, Santas, and reindeer that she made from those seed pods.  She even made a set for our friend and neighbor Tim D., and they are prominently displayed in their house at Christmas time – her gift really meant a lot to Tim and his wife Jeannie...

On the way in we saw just one small group of deer, about six animals.  We parked in the visitor center parking lot and scanned the hills, and found a herd of several dozen elk, and a group of about 25 deer.  Then on the way home we were seeing deer around darned every bend!  We probably saw over a hundred deer in all.  We didn't see any birds, unless you count turkeys and magpies (they're a constant here)...

An unusual snow artifact...

An unusual snow artifact...  The photos below were taken from our deck a few days ago.  This was a couple of days after the snow you see actually fell, and the day was relatively warm: slightly above freezing.  Somehow that made the conditions right for the snow to slide off our roof in those sheets you see, while staying strong enough to stay in one piece up to five feet long.  When I examined them closely, I could see that the side toward me (as I took those photos) was a sheet of crystal-clear ice about a quarter inch thick, while the rest was wet snow.  For a sense of the scale, those beams you see are 10x12s (with the 12 inch side vertical on the top beam).

Dog drawings...

Dog drawings...  I've posted before about Sema Hussein, a young woman from England who makes colored pencil drawings of animals from photographs, for a very reasonable fee.  She's making enough money to put herself through college and pursue the training necessary to become a French astronaut.  Seriously!  This young lady is very talented, and she's made a half-dozen drawings of our cats for us.  The most recent drawing she made for us is of our first two field spaniels.  They passed away a few years ago, and we wanted something to remember them by.  Their portrait is now on our “dog wall” – a wall full of dog art in our dining room, mostly not of our own dogs.  Check it out!

Well, this was totally predictable!

Well, this was totally predictable!  California bullet train: now 5 years later and $13 billion more expensive.  California continues circling the drain, and we continue to be overjoyed that we've escaped...

A minor miracle...

A minor miracle...  But one that looms quite large for me.

I have suffered from insomnia for my entire adult life – almost 50 years now.  Over the years I've tried just about everything one could imagine to address it, including two overnight “sleep studies” at clinics, both over-the-counter and prescription medications, meditation, and probably 30 other things.  Nothing worked.  Nothing.

Something like 30 years ago I got into a rough pattern of having 3 or 4 nights of little-to-no sleep (probably averaging 4 hours) followed by one glorious night of 7 or 8 hours of wonderful sleep, repeated ad nauseum.  A few things could predictably cause variations in this.  If I drank some alcohol a few hours before going to bed, I'd go to sleep easily – and then wake up 3 or 4 hours later with no possibility of further sleep.  A big meal too close to bedtime would keep me awake.  Watching an exciting movie before I went to bed ensured a sleepless night.  Working hard, physically, for a few hours would ensure a good night's sleep.  Other than those things, though, that pattern was what I could expect.

The first sleep study I participated in (about 25 years ago) identified one thing unusual with me: I responded to opioids backwards from most people.  Instead of making me drowsy, it's more like I drank 5 cups of coffee.  If I took even a small dose of any opioid after about noon, there was zero chance of me sleeping that night.  From what I've read more recently, this backwards reaction is true of 5% to 10% of adults (the proportion depends on what study you read).

The second sleep study I did just two years ago.  This time they had me wired up with about a bazillion sensors, and I didn't sleep at all – not one wink.  The technician who monitored me wrote of my sleeplessness in her report.  The doctor who reviewed the results diagnosed me with sleep apnea – something that, by definition, you can't exhibit the symptoms of if you're not asleep!  My GP tried her best to persuade me that I should try a CPAP machine, but I refused on the basis that the diagnosis couldn't possibly be right. I wonder, actually, if there's some incentive for the sleep center to make sleep apnea diagnoses...

About six months ago I was feeling achy, as I had been working hard that day (shoveling, as it happens).  I did something rare for me: I took a couple pills of a “nighttime” pain medication that we had lying around for some reason.  It was concoction of acetaminophen and diphenhydramine.  To my knowledge I'd never had diphenhydramine before in my life.  It's most commonly used as an anti-allergy medication; it's an antihistamine and the active ingredient in Benadryl.  I slept like someone who had been knocked out, for ten hours.  Further, I woke up groggy as hell – it took a couple hours, a hot shower, and two giant mugs of tea for me to be even barely functional.  I don't know how unusual that sounds to you, but for me that was a stunning result – I hadn't slept for ten hours straight for at least a couple of decades.

That, as you might imagine, got my attention.  I started experimenting to see how often I could take that drug and have it still work.  I quickly figured out that if I used it three nights in a row, the third night it hardly worked at all.  That was repeatable, too.  More experimentation and I figured out that I could take it one or two nights in a row with good effect, and then I had to lay off it for a couple days.  That means I could get 3 or 4 nights of good sleep in one week.  This was the first miracle for me – the best sleep, overall, of my adult life.  But it gets better!

About a month ago, I started worrying about the effects of regular use of diphenhydramine, so I started researching it on the Internet.  If you've ever tried to research a common medication on the Internet, you can probably already guess what I ran into.  I'm sure I could have found a paper whose conclusion was anything between “essential for life” to “potent poison”.  However, in general the papers were very reassuring: there don't seem to be any generally recognized horrible outcomes of regular diphenhydramine.  Great!

But in the course of that reading, I ran across one paper (and I can't find it now, dang it!) that noted something that resonated with me: a significant percentage of people with “backwards” opioid reactions (like me!) were unusually sensitive to the sleep-inducing effects of diphenhydramine.  Furthermore, these people often could reduce the bedtime dose of diphenhydramine to as little as 5 mg (I was taking 60 mg).  At the lower doses the quality of their sleep was actually better, and most of them could adjust the dose to eliminate the early-morning grogginess.

I suspect you would have to be a long-term insomnia sufferer to understand why that was so exciting to me. :)  I immediately started experimenting with lower doses, and within a few nights I had positive results.  I'm still experimenting, but I have a relatively narrow window to refine: my optimal dose is somewhere above 7.5 mg and at or below 15 mg.  I've tried as many as four nights in a row at 15 mg, and it still works just fine.  My morning grogginess is very mild at 15 mg.  Next up are some tests at 10 mg.

But the bottom line is that for an entire month now, I've been able to sleep well most nights.  Quite literally, I cannot remember another month like that in my life.  I've completely stopped my old pattern of waking up at 2 or 3 am.  This morning I slept like the proverbial log until 7:30 am – something that until this past month was something I only rarely experienced.  It's probably to much to say that I'm sleeping “normally”, but this is by far the closest approximation I've ever made to that!

I can still scarcely believe that this common, cheap, over-the-counter drug could have such a profound effect on my life.  It's undeniable, though.  Now I have a new fear – that this miraculous change in my life will somehow disappear or become ineffective.  I'm being stingy with its use because of that, and if I see that starting to happen I'll back off even more.  But in the meantime ... not suffering from the effects of insomnia sure feels good!

One word of caution for any fellow insomniac reading this: from my research, it appears that my reaction to diphenhydramine isn't the most common one.  It's also, apparently, not exceptionally weird.  If you decide to try this, your results might be anywhere from the opposite of mine to merely wildly different.  In other words, your mileage may vary.  But for me (so far, at least) it is well into miraculous territory...

Quote of the day!

Quote of the day!  This explains a lot of politics.  It also explains why I like Megan McArdle's writing so much: it's the opposite of this.

“Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable in principle of understanding it (either because believing this dampens their insecurities about the unpredictable world, or makes them feel more intelligent than others, or both) then you have an environment in which dopey, reductionist, simple-minded, pat, glib thinking can circulate, like wheelbarrows filled with inflated currency in the marketplaces of Jakarta.”

Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon (p. 629). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

I'm re-reading Cryptonomicon for the third time, and (as usual with Stephenson's writings) discovering things I never noticed before...

Ipo is doing great!

Ipo is doing great!  A couple of readers wrote to prod me because I didn't tell the results of her latest surgery.  In short, it's all good.  The vet found the proximate cause of the irritation, fluid accumulation, and bleeding: a tangle of suture about the size of a pea.  Somehow it had come loose and twisted up into a mess.  He took out all the old sutures in her skin and redid them much more tightly with smaller suture (not the normal procedure for a dog Ipo's size, but experience seemed to suggest it).  Within an hour of taking her home, she was acting like nothing at all had happened.  Now, close to 48 hours after the surgery, there's zero fluid accumulation and she can't understand why we're treating her specially. 

There was one telling event, though.  When she first came out to see us after the surgery was done, she was trembling and oh-so-incredibly affectionate.  That continued for a couple of hours after we got her home.  It was as if she was asking us “If I’m really, really, good will you NOT take me back to that place?”  Hopefully we won't have to, at least not for anything related to her spaying.

This morning she was her usually bubbly, spinny (she likes to spin at the door at approximately 4,800 RPM before we let her out), spanielly (if you own a spaniel, you'll know what I mean) self...

Humans are very weird critters, part 1,978,638...

Humans are very weird critters, part 1,978,638...  Megan McArdle, writing from her new perch on the Washington Post, has an excellent piece on the unexpected result of a new study: the availability of naloxone may actually increase opioid mortality – not because it's ineffective, but because its effectiveness appears to change human behavior...

“Rocket Man” and the North Korean government...

“Rocket Man” and the North Korean government ... are so loony-tunes in general that today's news of a possible move toward denuclearization is really hard to get excited about.  Their sincerity seems so unlikely.  But if it were for real, it sure would be a wonderful thing.

And, interestingly, a vindication of Trump's approach to the NoKos...

The Ipo saga continues...

The Ipo saga continues...  Ipo was spayed about 10 days ago, but her incision is not healing well.  We've been back to the vet with her three times since the initial spaying.  This morning I took her in for a second surgery.  The vet's going to go through the skin on her belly to expose the sutures in from the spaying in the muscle layer, to make certain there are no issues there (he's not expecting any).  Then he'll remove all the old sutures from her skin, on the theory that she's been having a reaction to those sutures – then he'll close the new incision with staples, because the stainless steel in the staples doesn't provoke any bad reactions.  Poor girl! 

She was all excited when I took her in this morning, though.  First, she loves the staff there (all of whom came over to pet her).  Second, another dog was waiting with us: Bailey, a six month old female German shepherd.  The two of them got along famously.  There was much puppy-bowing and gentle play, entertaining all of us waiting.  She's a happy girl, especially as she has no idea what's about to happen...

It's so hard...

It's so hard ... for me to go through my mom's things.  I don't know exactly why that is, as most of the things I'm going through have no personal meaning for me.  For instance, this morning I sorted through a box full of memorabilia from her grandchildren (my nieces and nephews), letters, and photographs.  The photos are almost entirely of people, only a few of whom I know.  The letters were all from people I don't know.  I'm saving them because almost all of them are thanking my parents for some kindness they bestowed; I'll scan them one of these days so my whole family can see them.  I wouldn't have guessed I'd find this activity so emotionally intense, but ... I do.

A (possibly) cheerful thought...

A (possibly) cheerful thought ... occurred to me this morning.  Maybe Trump's announcement of steel and aluminum tariffs was just a negotiating tactic, trying to win concessions on NAFTA.  Maybe he really doesn't have any intention of implementing them.

Maybe...