Airline pilot Karlene Petitt is doing transition to the Boeing 777 and blogging about what she learns:
Series will continue at Karlene’s blog
Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Airline pilot Karlene Petitt is doing transition to the Boeing 777 and blogging about what she learns:
Series will continue at Karlene’s blog
Over the last year I’ve had several opportunities to drive to remote parts of Oregon. Often we stop by a local grocery / convenience store to pick up groceries or a snack. These stores are small and often with a single check out lane and a very quaint atmosphere of old-time store goods.
A bit of fun for me is to walk up to the credit card reader which usually has the icon for near field connectivity (NFC) and I surreptitiously use my Apple Watch with Apple Pay enabled to quickly pay for groceries without taking out my credit card. The cashier gets flummoxed and wonders what happened, and I show them my Apple Watch with my card image and they laugh.
What is sad is that Apple Pay works “out of the box” at most of these remote grocery stores but it doesn’t work at many of the large retailers in the city. Instead of encouraging Apple Pay or similar google technologies, the retailers want to control the experience and the data and so they turn off this feature. You have the unfortunate alternative of putting your credit card in the chip reader and waiting for 5-10 seconds which slows the line for the whole process. Worse than the inconvenience is the fact that Apple Pay is much more secure than any card reader – Apple Pay doesn’t provide your “real” credit card to the store, instead it uses a “token” for the transaction.
Accustomed as I am to contemplating matters more serious than the doings of the denizens of Hollywood, I can’t keep away from the current spectacle regarding the casting out of Harvey “Jabba the Hutt” Weinstein from all polite (hah!) Hollywood and Democrat political society, where once he strode like an unstoppable behemoth. (How seriously can you take a guy who cannot either grow a decent and serious beard, or learn to use a razor. Really.) It’s like one of those horrific multi-vehicle pile-ups on the internet super-highway, which leave vehicles teetering, smoking and crunched together in improbable formations and all us normals out in Flyoverlandia left thinking thoughts along the lines of “what brought all that on?” and “he did what … in a potted plant?” or meditating upon the ghastly nature of the mass entertainment business, especially when it climbs into the sack with politicians, and begins the calculated roughing up of the establishment news media.
Dear journalists, here’s the link to Harvey Weinstein’s IMDB page. For every entry, there are potential questions you could be asking. The man has 331 production credits, 79 credits where he plays himself, and 34 movies which offered screen thanks to the man.
For example, Piers Morgan used HW as a guest host multiple times over the course of four years. Did he behave himself? Call up each and every one of those 34 movies and ask for comment on HW’s situation and ask if any new prints will continue to offer him thanks.
The opportunities just go on and on and on. All from one single web page, and I gave the link.
You’re welcome.
I’ve gone all in on Apple through a series of semi-random decisions. I bought a MacBook Pro back in 2011 and, thanks to my friend Brian who upgraded the memory and hard drive to an SSD, that machine still works great in late 2017 and I was able to upgrade to the latest Mac OS High Sierra without a challenge. I have had several iPhones over the years and am on an iPhone 7 now. My current iPad is an iPad Air 2 which also seems to have several years of life left in it. Finally, I bought an Apple Watch and recently upgraded it to Watch OS 4.
I’ve also been moving everything to the cloud slowly. I looked at my MacBook and it said I hadn’t done a backup in over 1000 days. I don’t really care because I put the (relatively few) documents that I care about in iCloud (and can access them across any Apple device), my contacts are in the Apple Cloud, while my photos (the core of most of this post) are already in the Apple cloud and I gave up on physical music and moved almost solely over to Apple Music. My email is in the cloud with various providers, as well. So what’s on the device that I really care about, anyways? Cloud storage is also pretty cheap… I think I spend about a dollar a month on it for Apple (plus $9.99 for Apple music). The only high space items I have (in terms of MB or GB) are photos, since I’ve given up on music.
It is a hard decision to put all your photos in the Apple cloud. You need to make the move to put your photos up in the cloud and have that be the primary location, not the ones on your hard drive or your phone While someone with more technical expertise might tell you that is not an irrevocable decision, from my perspective it seems like it would be exceedingly difficult to “go back”.
I came to this decision because I love the features that Apple Photos provides. Specifically: