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Travel

Anchorage

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After the cruise, we went to Denali National Park and Preserve. With the vagaries of travel we opted to get off the boat, bus from Seward to Anchorage (2 hours) and then stay the night vs. hopping right onto another bus for the 6-ish hour trip to the park and our lodge.

A parking lot in Anchorage

Anchorage is an interesting city. In the 60s there was a big earthquake and they had to rebuild much of the city.

They’re also hemmed in by water, permafrost and mountains so real estate is at a premium.

Yet, they didn’t, and aren’t building up…

The tallest building we saw was maybe 15 floors? 10 tops. Sure they’re on a fault line, but so is all of California and Los Angeles ain’t being shy about reaching for the clouds with their buildings.

Another parking lot in anchorage

I imagine Anchorage is what Denver was like until the late 80s. Car centric, empty when not a work day. The parking garage in this pic, is new. It likely replaced a surface lot, of which Anchorage has no shortage of.

I don’t know if it is a revenue thing, a lack of interest thing, or what, but as tourists, Anchorage was bleak. Which is sad because there’s no shortage of awesome history, it’s just not well displayed.

We were there on a day (Monday) that I guess people don’t work? Downtown was empty except for the unhoused. Tuesday before we got on the bus, the city was very different. The surface lots filled in, people were walking around. Still a bleak get where you’re going fast, kind of busy-ness, but better than the ghost town that was Monday.

We went to Alaska

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The NCL Jewel in Skagway, AK

Technically we’re still there. I’m writing this from a hotel room (With actual balconies that you could jump off of if you wanted) in Anchorage before he head into Denali National Park.

We did a cruise. I like cruises, mostly. I know what you’re thinking, ”June 2022, a cruise ship? Gross, COVID City!”

You’d be wrong.

Let’s get the safety stuff out of the way.

You had to get a PCR or Antigen test done, 2 days before your departure day. You had to have proof of vaccination (at least 2 doses), and for kids too young to vaccinate, they had to be tested on board at the halfway point. Since we never got any notices from the boat after that point about infection, I assume the kids were fine, which as a sample, likely means most of us are. So yeah. They took this shit seriously.

Once on the boat, the moment you stood up from a chair or table, a crew member would swoop in with disinfectant and wipe everything down. You couldn’t use the same cup or plate twice. Once it was at your table, that was it, get a new one.

They had a strict no licking policy… Just kidding, making sure you’re still here.

A house on the water

Ok, so the fun parts.

We sailed out of Vancouver (oh yeah, currently at least, Canada also still requires masks on flights, and random pull aside COVID tests on arrival). We sailed through up to Alaska stopping first at Ketchikan.

We did the Misty Fjord excursion, which was fun. It was made more fun/worth the price, when we saw orcas, which we were told was pretty rare that far into the fjords.

Orcas in the Misty Fjord

So that was kinda cool. I learned that photographing whales is hard as shit when the water is murky (Maybe all the time). You have no idea where they’ll surface next other than roughly (Hopefully) in a straight line from where they were last.

That said. It was fun. We got back to the ship thrilled to have seen the whales and the rest of the fjords. The weather was perfect (for pics).

Then we went into Juneau, which despite being the state capitol was a tiny sleepy little town. Well, a tiny sleepy little town that entertained several cruise ships a day. We got our first view of a glacier (The Mendenhall), and wow are they noisy. Like semi-constant thunder. It was weird to think that somewhere behind the face we could see, tons and tons of ice was gnashing its way forward.

Mendenhall Glacier

After that we had a whale watching tour. It was fun enough, didn’t see much that we hadn’t seen. Hard to imagine becoming jaded so quickly about freaking humpback whales. It was a great time.

From there it was on to Skagway. We didn’t book any excursions. Well, we did. I did. Mom and I were gonna do a train ride. Except Dad’s COVID test came back positive, and the NCL policy is that the entire party are canceled, so mom and dad weren’t able to join us.

It was fun, we just walked around, enjoyed some beer and fish and chips. Skagway is one of those places that lives on tourism (and probably fishing, but mostly tourism). COVID really did a number on the town. 2 in 4 storefronts was shuttered. Artists that sold in the various shops were forced to do other things and didn’t (as yet) come back to art. It was honestly sad. It really showed how poorly our country handled everything about the pandemic as it relates to businesses, especially the small ones.

Glacier Bay National Park

And then we saw more glaciers. We had two days at sea, hitting first Glacier Bay National Park, then Hubbard Glacier. We got to see one of the Glacier Bay glaciers calve three times, which was awesome. Much like whale photography, you literally have no idea where a calving will take place, and then it’s half over.

A glacier calving

Then it was onward to Seward, where we disembarked. After that an uneventful 2.5 hour bus ride from Seward to Anchorage. Tomorrow (at the time of this writing) we board a bus for 6 hours into Denali. I’m making sure my airpods are charged and my Kobo is ready, LOL.

Part 1 Final Thoughts

I’ll post about Denali seperately but will end with, cruises are great if you’re the type of person that likes to mix your vacation days with ”go go go, do the things” and ”Chill out and relax”. The at sea days are enforced relaxation. No leaving the boat, not awesome internet (but better than it used to be to be sure. More on that next time too). It’s a time to read, for me to write, to just generally not be going. I love that.

One more Orca fin pic

Apple’s ‘Pro’ Problem

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So the other day, Apple held its first 2022 event. It was flashy and everything you’d expect from an Apple event. And yet again it showed that they really have lost all sight of their ‘pro’ users.

Sure they released the Studio Mac, avoiding adding ‘Pro’ to the name. It looks like an excellent machine. I’ll probably buy one next year (or maybe 2024) to replace my 2018 Mac Mini. Of course, I have less than zero hope that Apple addressed the Bluetooth issues that have plagued the Mac Mini form factor for the better part of eight years now.

What I really wanted to hear was how they were leveraging the iPad Pro. I wasn’t hoping for a new device, but a tease of something, anything coming in iPadOS would have been nice.

Instead, they released a new iPad Air that it spec for spec almost an iPad Pro, sans cameras.

Image of iMac pro from Wikipedia

I hadn’t thought too much of it, until this last Apple Event. Apple has a track record or releasing ‘Pro’ things, then letting them languish, being overtaken by their standard models until they quietly discontinue the.

The iMac Pro. Released in 2017, quietly End Of Life’d before the Mac Studio was released.

The iPad Pro has been refreshed over the years, but iPadOS has been virtually stagnant most of that time.

Sure we got some simplistic windowing, but it’s just that, simplistic.

As you likely know, when I’m not at my desk, I’m 100% an iPad-only user. During the Apple event, I was at the dining table of a rental in the mountains for a little retreat from the house.

A screenshot of my iPad Pro trying to multitask

The only way to watch the event, AND still work, was to float a firefox window over my workspace. Which as you can see obscured the compose window for Tweetbot, forcing me to constantly move the floating window from one side to the other just to see what I was doing.

I didn’t actually need to see what was going on, but audio can’t stream from background apps (that aren’t sports app or music apps… despite the iPad Pro having the same CPU as Macbooks and Macbook Airs [the M1]).

But they offer “side by side”

And it’s trash. You’d think, cool, I’ll have one app on one side, and the other in the other side. When you’re giving one app focus, you’d expect Alt-Tab to swap out just one pane, but not. It switches back to single app view, killing background audio. Because of course it can’t tell which pane you’d like to swap an app out of.

Image of the Mac Pro from Wikipedia

The ongoing Mac Pro Joke

Many folks in the Mac world joke that Apple releases a Mac Pro every decade or so. Whole new design, absolutely marvelous looking. Expandable and powerful…

Then they ignore it.

Then they release a wholly new Mac Pro and the cycle repeats, leaving the previous buyers with a beautiful retired product.

I’m beginning to worry that the iPad Pro is going to suffer the same fate. There’s an iPad (basic?), an iPad Air, and the iPad Pro. The last two are nearly identical unless you really fancy taking super pics with your tablet or holding it up to play AR games (if any are offered). The ‘Pro’ aspect of the iPad pro is just the name. The spec of the Air is the same, so why pay more for the ‘Pro’?

So what’s the point of a ‘Pro’ iPad?

Writing on the iPad is pretty straightforward. Everything else is an exercise in pain and suffering.

I was creating a slide presentation to end 360|iDev 2021. Keynote is a trash app on the iPad, using a browser to find images to use required saving them to files or the photo reel, tabbing back to keynote, which went into hibernation to save resources (why I don’t know) so I had re-open my presentation get to the slide, tap + then navigate to my saved image.

Try to do anything that requires more than two apps, and you’ll find one put into hibernation to save resources, usually forcing you to start over.

It feels like Apple is following Android’s ill-fated path when they released honeycomb as their ‘tablet OS’ separating it from Android proper only to offer a crappy experience and ultimately give up on the idea.

This was a long post, mostly to vent my frustration. Someone tweeted that Apple was really “The Mac Company” and that’s beginning to feel right. More to the point, they’re the “Powerful hardware, basic OS Company”.

I want to love Apple gear, I know many do, but it’s getting harder and harder to take it seriously.

Guess I wasn’t alone in noticing.

By the way, did you know you can sign up for my newsletter to stay in the loop on my writing? Plus, subscribers get free short stories and access to deck plans and character drawings. You should totally sign up, like right now!

Taking Your Media with you

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We decided we needed to get out of the house a bit. So we went to Park City Utah for a week.

Road Trip!

Nicole skied, I wrote and attended an online event, and we watched our shows like we would have at home.

I’ve long been a huge fan of Plex. Been using it for years to manage our media library (TV and Movies). I gave up trying to let iTunes be a home media server, it just sucked over time, but that’s not the point here.

I had a spare AppleTV that will eventually be shipped to my mom, but since it was here, I took it with us.

Set up

What’s nice about AppleTV is that you can plug it in, click a few things, then hold your iPhone over it and boom, it is set up. Handy to be sure.

Within a few minutes I had Netflix and Plex installed. I was able to continue my binging of Person Of Interest, streaming it from my home network media server in Denver, to Park City. Seamless, lag-less.

Do I wish the AppleTV wasn’t so “big”? only a little. I see people moaning about it not being a dongle like others, I honestly don’t care. It’s literally 3 inches square, I’ve got the space. If you don’t, I don’t know what to tell you.

Usage

As mentioned above, it was 100% seamless to watch an episode of Person of Interest the night before we left (It’s my current writing in the living room background show) and have Plex at the rental know what episode was next.

The one biggest issue was not the AppleTV at all, but the TV in the rental. At home I have a nice Sonos ARC soundbar with Atmos. The TV on the wall of the rental had nothing, just the pitiful little stereo speakers mounted inside it.

It took me a day of cranking the volume on the TV to its max to realize it sounded so bad because the TV was doing it’s best (and failing) to still produce sound at Atmos. Thankfully it was easy to tell Plex to play the shows or movies in stereo. It was like night and day sound-wise.

One of my biggest gripes with traveling generally is not having access to my media, short of whatever I’d load up on my iPad. I hate being in a hotel room and having to watch a show on my iPad because that’s where it is and the big screen in the room is useless.

Is lugging an AppleTV around ideal? sorta, it’s not that big, easy to set up and better than nothing.

Hope you enjoyed some pics from our trip. Park City was beautiful.

So, I went to Africa

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(I realized I wrote this up and never posted it)

Elephant, very close to us

And saw lots of elephants. Lots of lions, cheetahs, zebras (So many zebras), giraffes, wildbeests, warthogs, hyenas, and more.

This was one of those ‘once in a lifetime’ kind of trips. I’m always leery of that type of statement, often making fun of the people who say, “I went to Costa Rica and it was life-changing.” But honestly, it was one of those trips that open your eyes to things you likely only understood in the abstract.

Nicole and our friend Suman decided to climb Kilimanjaro (She summited!!). I was in no way interested in that, so Suman’s mom and sister and I joined them for post mountain safari and mini beach vacation on Zanzibar.

The three of us arrived a week after Nicole and Suman. That was the day they were heading back down the mountain so we’d see them the following day. It was cool to be there when they climbed out of the van at the lodge. Also, the lodge was dope and it was pretty cool to just hang out and get some writing done, to play with my loaner camera, etc.

Safari was truly awe-inspiring. It sounds goofy, but it’s gonna be hard to see a zoo the same way after this. Watching lions walk within a foot of the car and keep going, makes seeing them behind a fence not as appealing. Seeing a cheetah and her cubs eating their kill just ten feet away, fantastic. Also gross and full of flies, but awesome.

Lazy lion taking a nap

There’s no way to share all the pictures, I took over a thousand and that’s not the point of this post. Side note, I’m a fan of DSLRs now! Man i got some great shots that my iPhone couldn’t have done. I was bummed to give it back.

We spent the entire trip in Tanzania (Outside our layovers in Frankfurt and Addis Ababa) and if time and money had not been factors I’d have loved to visit other countries. There’s so much history and culture to explore.

Tanzania has only been free of the British since the 1960s. Let that sink in, barely 60 years of freedom.

Eastern Africa is home to tremendous archeological finds. Americans like to bask in our excellence, it’s so easy to forget that not only are we not native to this country, but also that we came from the same place as everyone else, and it wasn’t Europe.

I wish more Americans were lucky enough to be able to afford to leave our country and explore (though sometimes I’m glad to not see so many of us, LOL) the world. There’s so much to see, so many cultures to explore. Being a visitor in a country (to me) really helps drive home that we’re all struggling to do the same things; put food on the table, keep or get a roof over our heads, etc.

An art piece outside the East African Slavery museum

Learning about the East African slave trade was also eye-opening. If you’re able to visit Zanzibar, do it. I had no idea about the depth of the slave trade in that part of the continent.

Nicole and I and a lion
Yup, that’s a lion

This was by far our longest trip both in terms of how long we were away from home (3 weeks for Nicole) and how long it took to get there and back.

Since I forgot to post this, and am doing so now in November… We got home mid-late February… A few weeks later at most and things would have been a lot harder to get home I’m sure. As we moved through airports and spent hours killing time, the reports were beginning to trickle in around the virus. Addis Ababa had some seriously strict enforcement going on. This could have been a very different trip.

Our Lodge had lots of neighbors

Moving to a more iPad oriented life

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I’ve always loved the iPad. I’ve owned an iPad since the first one came out. Up until the last few years, despite Apple’s advertising, and die hard fan’s shoehorning, the iPad was mostly for consumption.

That’s not a dig.

It was an awesome RSS/Blog reader. I love relaxing on Sundays and reading the Washington Post (via app) and Colorado Sun (via browser) while holding my iPad in one hand and my coffee in the other. I love watching TV and movies on flights, reading comics, etc. It was perfect as a media consumption device.

Over the last couple of years things started to shift to more actual creation. The Apple Pencil (despite Steve’s insistence that Stylus = failure) opened a major door for creativity on the iPad. I know there were stylii before that, but meh. Now anyone could doodle, not just the more dedicated. And the more dedicated artists could create wonders.

Then we got got keyboard folio cases, whether Bluetooth or Smart Connector. Again there were solutions before that, like lugging around a full sized BT keyboard (No thanks, tried it, it sucked). Now writing on the iPad was a real thing. An easy, non hacky thing. It immediately made the iPad more useful, overnight.

My recent trips to Egypt and Tanzania were both iPad only trips. It was awesome. My bag wasn’t overloaded with a laptop, chargers, etc. In Egypt I took a much smaller bag, which fit in airplanes easier, was less burdensome to carry. I wrote a large chunk of a Space Rogues novel in Egypt floating down the Nile river with just my iPad and Apple folio keyboard. It was awesome. I also used the pencil to write in my digital journal (using GoodNotes, go get this app, it’s incredible). In Tanzania I took my regular backpack because I had a camera and a bunch of gear, and my iPad was negligible in size and weight.

I can’t imagine I’ll ever bring my laptop on a trip again, short of work specific travel.

Which brings us to now.

Now, I’m sitting in my living room, my MacBook Air (complete with shitty keyboard that works intermittently, thanks Apple) is in my office. I’m writing this on Sunday, and my laptop spent most of Saturday in my office as well.

IPad and keyboard

Adding trackpad support to iPadOS, plus this new keyboard folio, has come pretty damn close to removing my need for a laptop. It’s not perfect, and that’s fine, I don’t want the iPad to be a laptop replacement directly. If it were it’d be clunky and lame without a keyboard attached.

I picked up a Hyperdrive for connecting to monitors, SD cards, etc. I wished I had had it in Tanzania as my goal was to offload the SD card each day, but I quickly realized my iPad didn’t that that much storage, so I was left hoping nothing happened to the SD card/camera.

My goal However is to start doing more work on my iPad. I’ve already proven I can write novels on it, now I want to see if I can do 360|Conferences work on it. Sadly I doubt I can run a virtual conference from the iPad, not that the MacBook Air is much better equipped for that. Thankfully I have an eGPU to plug the laptop in to. It’s entirely possible, when it comes time to replace the MacBook Air (likely sooner than normal thanks to the keyboard) I’ll move to a Mac Mini solution, and when mobile, it’ll be all iPad.

I told a friend it felt weird to be so excited about a keyboard (a not cheap one at that), but we both agreed it really was a bit of a game changer for the iPad. And it is.

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