Listen to the Rain

Microsoft is having a world-wide outage right now. And since 30% of Microsoft's code was written by AI last year (probably higher now), I'm going to blame the AI for this. And by blame I mean praise, because it got me out of a meeting where I'd have to make a presentation.

All hail the Machine Gods.

So lately, I've really been getting into using Shortcuts on my iphone lately. Some of them are just basic things that probably everyone could use. Like, when the battery gets to 20%, automatically put on low power mode, when plugged in and above 50% power, turn it off; send me a description of the day's weather at 7:45 a.m.; turn screen rotate on when I open Youtube and off when I close Youtube; that kind of thing. I have a few other shortcuts from specific apps I used, like a shortcut so that when I get a message on Signal, Minifolders puts a red dot on the Signal app in the folder, and removes the red when I open Signal.

Lately though, as per the post title, I've been trying to reduce my phone use on Shabbat, so I developed a bunch of automations around it. I made a Shabbat focus mode that turns all the icons to maximum Liquid Glass so it's extremely annoying to look it, I set shortcuts so Shabbat mode activates 15 minutes before sundown, automatically turns back on when I deactivate Sleep focus on Saturday, and ends 1 hour after sunset on Saturday. Just yesterday, I set up some automations so that when I open a bunch of time-wasting apps--Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc.--and apps dealing mostly with secular concerns like my banking apps, they auto-close. I rarely look at them and almost always close them anyway when I open them on Shabbat, but hey, another reminder can't hurt, right?

I found an app that does this called Shabbat Mode but they wanted $30 a year (and were charging $4 a week if you wanted to pay by week!) and it annoyed me so much I went to look up a better way to do it.

Now, you might ask, "dorchadas, why not just turn off your phone?" which is a fair question. The most selfish reason is that I want my Shabbat walks to count as exercise in my stats, but I also want me phone in case I'm somewhere and sashagee needs text me, like if something happens with Laila. So, in lieu of that, I'm trying to make my phone as annoying to use as possible so I just don't want to do it. Hopefully it works.

Happy Hallowe'en!

Last year we took Laila trick or treating in our neighborhood, since our block is quiet but one block south of us is a madhouse, with every house decorated, people sitting outside roasting marshmallows on their camping stoves and handing out candy to to kids, sidewalks literally packed full...last year Laila could mostly handle it but this year it probably would have been pretty overwhelming for her. Fortunately, on Saturday morning, Papa and Nana came out, picked us up, and took us out to visit them in the suburbs.

We had a costume for Laila we were planning, and sashagee had started working on it, and it involved balloons--it was going to be ススワタリ/soot sprites from My Neighbor Totoro, so she had blown up giant balloons and was covering them with papier-mâché. Laila came home from school, saw some giant balloons, and just went to town on them. That ruined any attempt to make the costume since there wasn't enough time, but fortunately Grandma and Grandpa had bought their own costume and were willing to give it to Laila on short notice:


Laila was bouncing off the walls ready to go trick or treating for an hour, but at 4 p.m., when we left to go with the neighbor kids, the ones who often play with Laila in their sandbox or trampoline that they graciously let Laila use, she had become totally passive. She was so timid she wouldn't go up to anyone's door and say trick or treat without having someone come with her, though we eventually managed to get her to go with the other kids instead of needing one of us to come, and by the very end of the route, she finally managed to go get candy by herself. Here's to next year!

Of course, we're rationing her candy. We took a less-traveled route so she came back with an absolutely full plastic pumpkin bag. She got some full-size candy bars! A lot of houses were handing out handfuls! Fortunately she wasn't paying too much attention, so we can distribute them reasonably and she won't demand to eat huge handfuls of candy, the way she did when she saw how much was in her pumpkin.

After the trick or treating, we left Laila to help Nana give out candy to any late-comers while sashagee and I got ready for our yearly Hallowe'en party, now at mabown and alainamwhite's new house! They had only recently moved in and had originally thought about holding the party somewhere else, but after some thought they decided to have a spooky haunted house them and invited everyone over. I was expecting an abandoned house vibe, with undecorated furniture, boxes, that kind of thing, but what we got was a lovely home that was a bit sparse on furnishings:



There was a furnished basement with a wet bar, a sitting room with two couches and a TV playing spooky music, a dining room table...there were way more furnishings than I was expecting! I asked mabown about it and he said that all the boxes had been put upstairs for the evening, so they could have had a more haunted look but leaned away from it. Fair enough.

The evening went mostly well--sashagee and I even won a Best Couples' Costume prize for our "YouTube ghost hunters" costumes--with one major hiccup. Around halfway through, I was chatting with some people in the basement and decided that I wanted to get some more food, so I went up the stairs and right as I climbed the top step there was a loud thump. Looking through the people I saw there was someone lying on the floor, and when I said, "Is he okay?" one of my friends, who is also a nurse, said, "He's having a seizure, call 911." Well, let me tell you that I have a lot of practice keeping my cool when someone is having a seizure, so I pulled out my phone, called 911, gave the party address, explained the situation--yes he's on his side, yes he has a pillow under his head, no there's no furniture that could fall on him during his movements nearby, etc.--and stayed on the phone until the EMTs arrived. The dispatcher said that I was doing everything right and I replied that my daughter has epilepsy so I know what to do. The EMTs showed up, checked everything out, and loaded him up and took up away. Later, I learned that he had fallen at work a couple weeks ago and hit his had, badly enough that he didn't trust his driving and called someone to come pick him up. I texted him but haven't heard anything back yet. Hopefully he's okay.

The next day sashagee went on a walk to go look at the fall colors and mostly let Laila hang out with Papa and Nana, since that's part of the point of the visit. She didn't really want to spend much time with us anyway, and she wasn't sad when we got on the train to head back home. She's going to have so much fun with Papa and Nana before it's time to go back to school.

There's not enough money in the world to pay for the AI boom. Archive link here.

See also the classic website Is AI Profitable Yet? (answer: absolutely not).

I don't think AI is useless--the math proofs coming out show it's not, and Claude is genuinely very good at doing things that every programmer hates like checking for bugs (slightly less good at fixing them) and writing unit tests, much less the pattern-matching in medicine like early detection of cancer. But it doesn't matter how useful it is because there is not enough money, computing power, or energy in the world to turn everything over to the soulless machines. The physics just doesn't work out.

These people think if they just build one more data center they'll create the Machine Gods who will solve all our problems and they won't. It's not going to happen.

"Human beings may not be perfect, but a computer program with language synthesis is hardly the answer to the world's problems."
-JC Denton, Deus Ex

Back in 2024, I got a new model iPad for myself to replace the iPad Pro I had bought in 2017, and I got sashagee one too so she could read manga and watch TV on hers. She doesn't use hers as much as I expected but she still uses it, and Laila was too young to get her own tablet (and to be honest, she is still too young to get her own tablet), so my old iPad went into the dresser and remained there for years.

Well, we've been having some issues with being all on the same page because sashagee has ADHD and "just check your notifications" is not reliable for her, so a week or so ago I thought of something else. I fished out that old iPad and, after reading all the horror stories about battery health online for a lithium-ion battery that hadn't been plugged in for two years, I plugged it in. For an hour it did nothing, but it turned out the slow-charge to preserve the battery function worked and eventually it did start charging. I wiped all the apps, renamed the iPad, updated iPadOS (to 17.7, the max it supports), and bought a magnet holder to put it on the fridge.


On the empty home screen, I installed four widgets. The top has the weather, with sunset/sunrise times, cloud cover, UV measurement, weekly forecast, and predicted precipitation. The middle is a calendar of today and tomorrow's events, which opens up into a daily view when touched (I had it as a weekly view but sashagee said it was a bit overwhelming). The bottom-left is a smart reminder list made from our shared family to-do list, which pulls all overdue reminders and all reminders due in the next two days--it turns out that just doing a reminder widget shows all reminders, even if they're not due for weeks (like "pay the mortgage"). The bottom-right is an app I found for family meal planning, so it shows the meals for the week all at once. I was going to just use another reminder list for this, but this saves past weeks, orders meals by how often you've eaten them, lets you attach recipes to the meals, has a "suggest" option that pick something you haven't eaten in a while, and other useful features that just a checklist reminder would not. It also has some AI garbage attached to it that I don't care about.

The next part is getting sashagee used to checking this. Right now she mostly uses it to stream music to her speaker. But while talking to her about this very post, she walked over and checked off two tasks she had completed but not checked off, so maybe it's working! We'll all be on the same page yet.

So today was the day that the Anime Central 2027 hotel rooms opened, which meant that 40,000 people all try to sign up for a hotel at the same time. And this time, the hotel rooms were opened up in two separate blocks, hammering each hotel with even more people.

At 11:55 a.m., I pre-logged into the Hyatt website, double-checked my credit card info, and triple-checked my successful login. When the rooms dropped at noon, I clicked the link, selected a room, adjusted the days, clicked through, got to the confirm screen, hit confirm...and the website crashed. When I came back, I was logged out. Needless to say, I did not get a room.

At 3:55 p.m., I pre-logged into the Hilton website, double-checked my credit card info, and triple-checked my successful login. I clicked through everything without adjusting the particulars and managed to get a room just fine.

I'll have to call and see if I can get Thursday added to the room, but that's not too bad. But boy was the time from noon to 4 p.m. extremely stressful! On the other hand, some of my friends who are going got up to five rooms per person in case anyone didn't get a room (and some of us did not), so I needn't have worried, it turns out. But boy was it nerve-wracking for those few hours.

So, I'm sure if you're a parent you've read at least one of those articles about how modern school classrooms are in a terrible state because IEPs and inclusion means that students who disrupt the learning process and take up a disproportionate amount of teacher time and energy are included with students who want to learn.

Well, Laila is that student.

We had a meeting at lunch today to touch base about how to best help Laila. Now, B"H it's not that Laila is disinterested in schoolwork or that she's willfully defiant, it's that she has ADHD and had brain surgery on her pre-frontal cortex and so has a lot of trouble with focusing. She comes home with worksheets that she's filled out herself, so it's not that she's totally disengaged. And one thing her special education teacher mentioned is that she never seems angry or frustrated, even when she's being disruptive, she always seems happy. They thought that was a good sign because it means she's not acting out due to trauma at home. They were also happy to hear that we had her in private speech and occupational therapy and suggested that we fill out some forms to allow her private therapists to coordinate with the school so they can all work on the same thing and reinforce each other's messages. We also told them that most of Laila's behaviors, like running out of the room, aren't something that only happens in a school environment--I got an email about Laila running out of Hebrew school too. So, at least they know it's not something they're doing, but also, it's not quite so easy to fix.

I did go to a Peirce parent meetup and talked to a woman there who was both a parent and a teacher, and she said her son with ADHD also kept running out of the room but, worse, he would run to her room, bang on the door, and start crying while she was trying to teach. But, she said he's in second grade now and he doesn't do it anymore, so hopefully Laila will grow out of it. We just need to discourage it until then.

I think the meeting went pretty well, overall. Laila's teachers clearly want to figure out how to engage her and keep her focus on the material. I just wish she wasn't taking up so much of the air in the classroom--sashagee heard from other kids when she went to volunteer for Peirce's Moveathon about Laila randomly screaming during class sometimes (with a smile on her face). We got a sheet tally of her concerning behaviors, so we're going to give that to her therapists so they know what to work on.

Hopefully we (and they) can civilize Laila so she's not quite so disruptive!

When they called us all back to the office, they offered up a bunch of perks. One of the ones we got a company-wide announcement about a partnership with an app called Picnic, which is Yet Another Food-Ordering App but with the benefit that all orders are delivered together up to the lunchroom so we don't need to cover delivery costs. Well, I spent all of yesterday running around with Laila doing various things so I didn't have any time to go shopping or make a lunch, so instead I ordered something on Picnic. After like ten minutes of looking through the offerings, most of which were obvious treif and inedible, I settled on a chicken rice bowl from Umami Express because it said it was dairy free.

I didn't take a picture when it came because it was the platonic slop bowl--chicken, cauliflower, green onions, broccoli, add-in pickled onions, with lemon garlic soy sauce--but it was fine. But the thing is, if I had ordered a slop bowl from Sweetgreens it would have been at least 75% larger and cost only a couple dollars more and I still wouldn't have had to pay delivery so I'm not left with any downsides other than having to go outside, and it's still 17°C here and sunny so that's not so bad. In January it'll be a bigger problem, but it's not January.

That said, the real solution is still more meal planning. Have to head to the grocery store after work to pick up some meat to make more meals.

Alright, after reading up on the necessity of taking actual rest periods from exercising--from dedicated muscle-group exercise, anyway--I've come up with what I think a good overarching routine is.

I will say, I pay for the Apple combined package, so most of this is me using free weights with Apple Fitness, I don't have any gym memberships.

( Schedule )

I put in reminders in my phone for the rest weeks--I'm currently in week 4. We'll see how long I can hold to this. That mostly depends on whether it works well or not. I had at least been able to hold to the 1-3 schedule for basically a year with some occasional swapping in of yoga if I'm not feeling 100%. Everyone's trying to put a "training readiness" measure on their fitness bands and smartwatches and IIRC they did a study and none of them are as accurate as just asking someone "Hey bro, how are you feeling today?" I can tell when I need to swap things up.

Every year, since sashagee and I went on a Plague Years-era date to an apple farm, we've gone apple picking in the fall. And this year we went once again.


We stayed with Grandma and Grandpa, but Papa and Nana met us at the farm amidst the giant crowds. It was the most crowded I've ever seen the farm, probably because the weather report had indicated it would be cloudy and slightly cool. But well...it wasn't, it was sunny and warm, and it's a good thing that no one seemed to notice line #2 because line #1 snaked out the door and all way back to the end of the ropes that were set up to contain it. We just walked in, paid for our tickets, and within a couple minutes we were getting our apple picking explanation (lift and twist the apple, don't just pull it) and released out into the orchard. Two varieties (Honey Gold and Liberty) were at one end and the other (Pixie Crunch) were at the opposite end, so we went to go pick some Pixie Crunch first. It was...okay? It had a nice crunch but the taste was pretty understated, just a faint sweetness, so we picked half a bag and then continued on to the rest of the apples. We filled two bags with Liberty apples and the other half of the remaining bag with Honey Gold (a green apple, not our favorite), and then our picking was done.

I ate half a dozen apples fresh off the tree, though. You can't get a better crunch.

Here's sashagee picking a Liberty apple:

After that, we went into the store and got our usual load of pickled goods (peaches, beets, etc), sauces, and apple cider donuts and then went back to Grandma and Grandpa's house. Apple picking done for another year...though we may be back to the store again. There's more apple goods to get.

For years at this point, my Yom Kippurs have been the same. I go for Kol Nidre, I come home late and sleep, I spend the entire next day at the synagogue. But not this time.

The first big difference is since I go to Mishkan's zoom minyan (daily prayer quorum) now, I was invited to dinner by the same person who hosted the second Passover Seder I went to, involving a bunch of the minyan members, some of which had flown from as far as London to attend (we actually have a woman from Finland who comes sometimes, but she did not attend). We ate a bunch of asparagus, challah, and turkey, chatted, and then went to Kol Nidre, where I ran into dana.kroop, who invited me to sit with her and her husband, so I did. We davened for Kol Nidre and then I headed home, because it was late and I had a big day the next day.

This is where things changed--I took Laila out of school for the day because we were going to the kids' service for Yom Kippur. All the Baby Shabbat services we went to (ages 0-4) were pretty much songs about how great Shabbat is and just kind of dancy, happy tunes, but that's in the past. Now she's up to kid services and those, at least for High Holy Days, are a compressed version of the adult services, with a selection of the appropriate prayers and even a Torah reading--they hauled in a 9th grader and gave him an aliyah. Laila said she liked it afterwards, but she also said it was too loud, and she said the reason she didn't really want to duck into the grown-up service afterward either is because it was also too loud. She never really used to be bothered by loud noises but ever since her first surgery, she's been more and more sensitive to them. So, because of that, we didn't stay much after the kids' service ended. I took her back to the bus and we went home.

...and then I turned around and came back! I got back into time for Yizkor, which I don't (by custom) attend since my parents are both still among the living, so I went for an hour walk in the local park (my custom). Then I went back around 3:30 p.m. to go to the afternoon classes. The first class I went to was the Jonah class, which I always attend--we traditionally read the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur, and this year the class was about the differences between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interpretations of the story. Jews and Christians draw from the same text but interpret it differently, like Christians view Jonah's time in the fish as symbolic of Jesus's time dead, but Muslims have an entirely different text: Yunus (same meaning as יונה / Jonah--"dove", which I know because Duolingo intro Hebrew has a lot of sentences about how much doves love wine) is from Ninevah, and when he first tells them G-d's judgement they laugh at him. It isn't until stormclouds start gathering and the sky lights up red that the people of Ninevah actually start to repent. However, Yunus had left after the Ninevans first laughed at him and that's how he got on the boat and got put into the fish. It was very different than previous Jonah classes and really neat.

Also, is this why Christians use the fish as a symbol?

Afterwards, I waited in the same room for the Breathwork class, which I had gone to in previous years but which wasn't offered last year. It was led by someone I had sat next to at dinner the previous night, so it was nice to see her again, though we didn't really talk very much. I lay down on the floor and focused on my breathing. It was a lovely way to refocus before the end of the day.

I also got to meet the daughter of the facilitator, home for the High Holy Days. It turns out the facilitator had married a Japanese man, so her daughter had the classically Jewish name of "Eimi Matsuhashi."

Neilah opened with my favorite prayer of the entire year (El Nora Alila) and proceeded as it always does. I stood in front of the open ark, in front of the Torah, in a practice that the rabbi called "mildly idolatrous" but which is tradition anyway, and offered up my last personal prayers of the day. Then we said, as we always do, לשנה הבאה בירושלים (L'Shanah haba'ah b'Yerushalayim, "Next year in Jerusalem"), made havdalah, and dispersed.

Previous years Break Fast was usually Mediterranean food, but this time it was actual breakfast--French toast, hash browns, (vegan) sausage, bagels and lox, fresh fruit, etc. It was amazing after 25 hours of fasting and, as usual, I ate way too much. We also had assigned tables, so I got to talk to some people I hadn't met before (people mostly asked me about Laila). Then, since I had a long bus ride home, I said my goodbyes, walked over to the Jefferson Park Transit Center, and caught the bus home.

Next up: Sukkot.

Not lunch?? Gasp!

I'll eat different things for lunch but I often eat the same thing for breakfast for days on end--for years it was Japanese traditional 一汁三菜 (ichijū sansai, lit. "One soup, three dishes"), with rice and fish and miso soup and pickles, but sashagee's pregnancy broke the habit because even a whiff of fish would upset her stomach. I still have it sometimes, generally on winter mornings before I have to go into the office, but lately I've been eating a slice of toast with butter and some Greek yogurt with fruit. Today, though, we had leftover rice just sitting it the rice cooker, so I decided rather than throw it away, I'd make what the youths apparently are now calling TKG.


Also visible are clockwise from upper right: 茄子の煮物 (nasu no nimono, "simmered eggplant"), takuan (pickled daikon), pickled herring, and Western-style pickled cucumbers, with sakura green tea as an accompaniment. Making tamago kake gohan is pretty easy--as long as the rice is hot enough, just crack an egg into it, add a bit of soy sauce, maybe a bit of furikake, some fried seaweed (as I have done here), mushrooms, etc., mix it all up, and then eat. As long as you have the toppings ready to go, it takes maybe a minute, which is good because Laila didn't wake up until after 7 a.m. today due to the rain, which meant we didn't get out of bed until after 7 a.m., which means I was late for work. I did get to walk Laila part of the way to school, though, so that made up for it.

Easily, delicious breakfast on a rainy day.

When I originally got my iPhone, lo these eighteen years ago when they first came out in Japan, I gradually accumulated apps and kept putting them in folders, until my front page was a top row of icons (Messages, Phone, Contacts, something else), and then just folders below it. Over a dozen folders, each containing at least six or more apps, and eventually it spilled on to a second page where I put games but still in folders. So many folders.

When Apple came out with the ability to delete apps from your pages but keep them on your phone in combination with search, I re-did everything. I had six dedicated pages--general apps like Contacts and Messages plus social media stuff, then health stuff, then productivity, then a catch-all, then games, then system things. I'd usually use search to find apps that were more than a page away, but sometimes I'd page back and forth. And eventually on the productivity and catch-all pages I added folders there, and I realized that this was spiraling out to be even more of a mess than my old two-page setup.

Well, a couple days ago I came across the information that the Smartstack widget on iOS lets you pick what to put in the stack. I have no idea how I missed this--I guess I just thought from the name that it picked apps to put there and you had no input--but once I knew that, I thought that maybe I could organize my phone around widgets instead of a bunch of apps. I already use search to find nearly everything that wasn't on the top two pages, so after some fiddling with a combo of apps and widgets, I decided to go full widget and this is the result:



( Details )

I kept my first crazy folder layout for a decade. We'll see how long I keep this.