I don’t generally think about it in these kinds of terms, but I can’t tell you how many times I find myself “stuck” with someone who won’t budge from an insurmountable obstacle.
Whether’s it’s a work colleague, one of my kids, or someone I’m trying to work with in the community — one of the most clarifying questions I ask in these situations is, “What do I want, really?”
It’s easy to form an adversarial relationship where what I want is to win and for the other person to lose. That’s human nature when you don’t get what you want. You’re not giving me what I want, so I’m not going to give you what you want, nanner nanner nanner.
But rarely do I really want them to lose. And recognizing that neither of us are getting what we want right now enables me the freedom to think outside the box and give something I don’t care about in exchange for something I really, really care about.
The new Ivory client for Mastodon was just released for iOS and I was skeptical if it would be that much better than the official Mastodon app, but it really is great.
This just makes me wish we had a similar app for blog publishing. The WordPress app is fine but it would be nice to have something a little more polished.
I went through this plan previously in either 2019 or 2020 and it was a great plan. One of the things I like most is that it’s a five day plan, so if you—like me—inevitably miss a day or two (or even 3), it’s very forgiving and easy to get back up to speed.
We get angry at broken things, and want to throw them out — and this impulse often governs us even when the broken thing is not a car or a drain but democracy or education. (Maybe democracy and education are not objects but rather hyperobjects.) But what if we were to think not that our education has betrayed us but rather that its need is greater than ours? What if we were to think that towards even something so vast and complex we have the obligations of friendship? And, if we meet those obligations, perhaps we could even enjoy the benefits of friendship.
While this is focused on objects — who among us has tried to repair a shoe instead of buying new shoes? — I think our cultural values around objects are starting to shape our views of relationships and people. It’s easier to get new friends then it is to repair friendships. It’s easier to throw a relationship out then to do healing repair work.
There’s a hundred things I want to say about this but I don’t have the words. We are fostering again, a wonderful teenage boy. Who knows what the future holds though we hope to do everything we can to help his hopes and dreams.
Parenting has been one of the best and hardest things I have ever done. It’s revealed a million flaws in my own life and my own heart. Pray I can do it. Not by my own strength.
Interesting that these announcements were made in a press release, but I am really looking forward to all of these changes.
I’m really looking forward to being able to use a hardware MFA token to lock my iCloud account. Between this and Amazon finally supporting multiple MFA devices — 2023 is going to be a really great year for hardware MFA use in my house.
Every time I see a post from Aegir in my RSS feed, I make sure to open it in my browser.
Every post is a unique visual style. I love the craft, and photography posts are just wonderful. One of my recent favorites was the post The Yellow Season.
Earlier this year, Alissa and I decided we wanted to take a big trip just the two of us for the first time since 2018 when we went to Peru together. With a son off in college and a (for now) empty nest, the world a bit more open since Covid, this fall seemed like the perfect time.
We debated a bunch of different destinations. Hawaii? Greece? Iceland? New Zealand? All sounded great but not quite right, and I threw out: what about Switzerland? I think we both latched onto that idea and it felt just right. Trains and villages and mountains. All things we love.
We flew direct on Lufthansa from Denver to Munich. Then Munich to Zurich, which I didn’t realize was going to just be a 35 minute flight. Haha.
We did not come into this trip with any pre-planned agendas. “Ride trains and look at mountains” was about all we had planned. We booked a hotel in Zurich for one night, and two nights in St. Moritz, beyond that we planned to play it by ear and see where the wind would take us. Here’s where the wind ended up taking us:
Day 1. Zurich. Rest in the hotel from jet lag, and exploration of the old town during the evening.
Day 2. Train ride to St. Moritz, via a quick stop in Chur. Beautiful lakes, spectacular mountains. St. Moritz has a beautiful lake and town.
Day 3.Bernina Express train to and from Tirano, Italy. Viewing the village of Poschiavo from above with the alps in the background might stick with me as one of the most spectacular villages I’ve ever seen.
Day 4. St. Moritz back to Chur for a single night here. I spent most of the 2+ hour train ride in the observation car taking pictures. Spectacular! And since I was taking pictures from a moving train, I had to be fast. The first time landscape photography felt kind of like sports photography! Had some local Chur wine with dinner, so good!
Day 5. Chur back to Zurich, to Bern, to Interlaken. Wow, what a spectacular little town Interlaken is! The mountains around the town remind me so much of when we visited Banff, Canada.
Day 6. Paid the money to see Jungfraujoch, the “top of Europe”. It involves riding a cog-railway train inside a mountain and a spectacular gondola ride into an environment that feels a lot like Hoth in Star Wars.
Day 7. Visited the Matterhorn. Uh. Wow. I thought yesterday was spectacular but this is even better. We took the lift up to the Klein Matterhorn and wow, just wow! We could see all the way to Mount Blanc on the Italian/French border which stretches up 15,774 feet high.
Day 8. A more low-key day. Took the Harderkulm above Interlaken. Then took a several hour cruise on Lake Thun.
Day 9. What better way to spend the day than to cross the entire country by train? Went from Interlaken to Bern to Geneva. Lake Geneva is cool and the town is old and beautiful. Got lunch and then headed from Geneva (the far south west corner of Switzerland, right on the border of France) to Zurich (on the north east side, closer to Germany).
Day 10. Airport and travel home, heart completely full.
If you decide to travel to Switzerland (and you should), we recommend the Swiss Travel Pass. I also used Holafly with an e-sim on my iPhone to get unlimited mobile data to keep me in touch with Instagram. Do it for the gram!
A few weeks ago I hopped on a plane and my altimeter on my Watch has not been the same. Either it wouldn’t show a value (just three dashes) or it shows a wildly incorrect one. (off by 2,500-5,000 feet)
A live view of my elevation while hiking was one of the factors for upgrading my watch so this was a bit frustrating. I tried a lot of things on my own, and finally ended up contacting Apple support for the first time in … ever? Even unpairing my watch didn’t do the trick.
Last week I let my watch sleep overnight turned off. In the morning I decided to try something different. I turned my iPhone off, then I turned my Apple Watch on.
That was about a week ago. It’s been correct ever since, even through two additional flights.
