Flying ✈️

Ollie got to be the pilot 😁✈️

The family and I are flying out to Virginia today to watch a good friend get married. I’m excited to be out there, but I can’t say I’m excited to be on a plane with two kid under three.

The Huntsville National Weather Service Office got a report of a 5.25 inch hailstone 😳

Here is the radar reflectivity from around the time of the hailstone.

Any WordPress experts have any idea how to get emoji to show up in the native system font instead of being converted to images?

I decided to add a run to my normal strength workout today because the weather is so perfect. I immediately regretted it. Running is stupid and I hate it 👎 🏃🏽

If there’s one phrase I would like to eradicate from our language it is this.

Why?

We’re all working with the exact same 24 hours in our day. We all have the same time. We all have the time we have. I have the same amount you have. The same amount in a day that everyone and everything else has.

The difference is how we choose to spend that time. There may be some very valid reasons why you choose to spend your 24 hours differently than how I choose mine. And, there are some things we all have to choose in order to simply stay alive. We all need to sleep, at some point, for instance. But, trust me, even those are choices.

Dave Munson:

I’ve always liked things clean and simple, but haven’t had a clean and simple briefcase since the Thin Briefcase. But since that one is now golfing and collecting seashells everyday in Florida, I designed a new one for my brother-in-law who has one of those real-deal corporate office jobs, and asked him to give me his feedback. He LOVED the simple function of it and got a lot of compliments around the office. So I made a couple of small tweaks and got more friends using them. Based on what I hear; it is going to be one of the favorites from now on. It has a wide but slim front pocket for carrying smaller things, an interior pigskin pocket up against the back for files or a laptop and then an open interior section for water bottles, shoes or pretty much anything bulky. He’s a handsome one… and clean.

I have had my eye on a Saddleback bag ever since reading Gabe Weatherhead’s review of their classic briefcase back in 2013¹. Even though the classic briefcase was a little big for my daily needs, it was the one I wanted.

Luckily, they released a new Laptop Briefcase yesterday that is exactly what I want in a briefcase: It has two pouches that can hold a MacBook Pro and an iPad and it has a large pouch that I can put bigger items like books, lunch, water, or maybe some new headphones in.

It is quite a bit smaller than the classic briefcase, but I would not need that extra size unless I was traveling. As a bonus, it is a few hundred dollars cheaper too.

Unfortunately a few hundred dollars cheaper still means $500, so I won’t be buying it anytime soon. At least that gives me more time to figure out if I want to get the Tobacco or Dark Coffee Brown version².

From the Apple Developer site:

With Watson Services for Core ML, it’s easy to build apps that access powerful Watson capabilities right from iPhone and iPad, so you can provide dynamic, intelligent insights that improve over time. And with the IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple, you can quickly tap into Watson Services for Core ML and other services on IBM Cloud.

It is clear that Apple is really pushing machine learning on their platforms. Providing access to IBM’s Watson through their Core ML framework seems like a great way to do that.

Even though I worked as an undergraduate assistant doing machine learning research for two years in college, I feel like it is still something that I don’t really know anything about. With the current trends in mobile computing, I think that basic knowledge of how use to use machine learning in apps will become table-stakes. So this is an area that I feel I really need to start looking into now before I get left behind.

I can’t wait to watch this documentary about Mr. Rogers. My son loves Daniel Tiger, so I hope he enjoys seeing where it all started.

Entering the draft is absolutely the right choice for Trea Young. I hope the disappointing second half of the season does not affect his draft position too much. He will be fun to watch next year. 🏀

Michael Steer for 9to5Mac:

The introduction of iOS 8 in 2014 brought the Health app to our iPhones and marked a milestone in Apple’s efforts to help people live healthier lives. The success of the Apple Watch in the following years brought a renewed consciousness to healthy living to millions of customers. Now that the Health app is turning into a critical tool for managing medical data, let’s take a look at how it could become even more friendly and motivating to a growing community.

The majority of people using iPhones and Apple Watches to track their health have the simple wish to reach their goals and monitor their wellness. While today’s Health app is rich with data points and charts, it takes valuable time to dive in and parse the information. Even more challenging is drawing accurate and informed conclusions from the data without a medical background.

The Health app of the future could be a dashboard for your body, filled with daily insights into your wellness. Helpful tips for living a better life could be drawn from the treasure trove of data synced from your Apple Watch and connected apps, tailored to your specific health history and needs. Rather than just a data aggregator, Health could become a proactive and motivational tool.

The thing that I like the most of out his concept is having the actual health goals inside the Health app instead of just having it serve as a database, especially for nutritional data. I have tried to use third party apps like Lifesum and MyFitnessPal for nutritional tracking in the past but they never stuck because they all seem to want to replace the Health app instead of work with it¹.

They both will save data to the Health app, but they do not read data from it. Water that I track with WaterMinder (which is much better suited for tracking water) will not show up in my nutrition app even though it is available in the Health app. So to really use those nutrition apps right, you have to exclusively use them to track everything.

If the goals were a part of the Health app, I could ignore all those features in the actual nutrition apps and just use them for the tasks that they are best at like tracking my meals.

Tools like Slack and HipChat are supposed to save you from email but instead I just set up email forwarding to save me from Slack and HipChat. Progress?

Cabel Sasser at Panic:

A few months ago, a complaint started popping up from users downloading or updating our apps: “Geez, your downloads are really slow!”

If you work in support, you probably have a reflexive reaction to a complaint like this. It’s vague. There’s a million possible factors. It’ll probably resolve itself by tomorrow. You hope. Boy do you hope.

Except… we also started noticing it ourselves when we were working from home. When we’d come in to the office, transfers were lightning fast. But at home, it was really, seriously getting hard to get any work done remotely at all.

So, maybe there was something screwy here?

I loved reading this blog post so much – It was like following a little detective story. Plus, it is not every day that you can read a story where Comcast comes out not looking horrible.

Looks like storm season has arrived.