I was there the second night and wasn't at all surprised that the show was seismic. I assume the big seismograph peaks coincided with 22 and Shake It Off. Lumen Field was really bouncing around.

...laura

I'm currently doing development on Android and iOS. On Android we use Firebase. On Apple we use APNS directly.

As recommended by both Apple and Google our notification payloads are minimal: "You've got mail!". The app then phones home to retrieve its messages. I'm curious what you could learn from the notifications. We know the messages themselves are sensitive and take care to protect them. We know about CALEA and related laws, but this is way about my paygrade.

...laura

How did they all get to Dubai? Oh. Right. OK...

If such a conference is necessary and must happen in person, it might be a nice touch to have it in a town that is genuinely on the front line. In Canada I nominate Timmins, Ontario or Prince George, BC.

That the climate is changing is obvious. What to do about it (if anything) is not at all obvious. Socialism always seems to be the answer, no matter what the actual problem is...

...laura

Years ago my employers decided we needed maps on our web-based application. Google Maps was in its infancy and didn't really have commercial terms, so we bought a mapping package (MapInfo) and figured out how to make it play with our software. The initial performance was disastrous. I figured out how to make it less disastrous.

I also spent some time designing attractive maps. I collected paper maps (I like maps anyway), picked out the ones I liked, tried to identify why I liked them. Made MapInfo draw similar maps. Liked what I saw. I even bought a couple of fonts from Adobe to dress up the presentation, to try to make the maps ours. I subsequently attended a map design session at a MapInfo user's conference and confirmed I was generally on the right track.

Then the Powers That Be said our maps had to look like Google Maps. So they did.

...laura

I loved The Eras Tour, first time I'd seen a movie in a theater snce Skyfall.

On TV/streaming I'm just finishing up Reacher, but that's a 2022 leftover.

...laura

We know where Taytay stands on various subjects (e.g. Lavender Haze, You Need To Calm Down), but it's never intrusive. Her music comes first. Fans respect that.

I saw her in Seattle back in July. A spectacular show, worth every penny.

...laura

Give people what they want and they'll pay money to see it. Don't, and they won't.

Taylor Swift's home movie was the second-highest-grossing concert film before it even opened.

...laura

The Beatles were enormously influential in their day - and, arguably, still are - but they broke up when I was 9 years old. I'm 62 now. A lot has happened since then.

Like all modern recordings/reissues/remasters this one sounds more like a really good tribute band than the Fab Four themselves. Nor are they breaking any new ground: Now and Then sounds like a B side from Abbey Road or Let It Be.

...laura

If an electric car meets my needs at a price I can afford, I'll consider it. If it doesn't, I won't.

At the moment no EV meets my needs. They're interesting, but (for me) just not there yet. If I had somewhere to plug one in at home I'd consider a low-end EV as an around-town runabout. They're good for that. Since I don't - I live in an apartment and the building management aren't interested - I won't be driving an EV any time soon.

...laura

How are transmission rates a useful metric? Testing positive isn't a death sentence and never was. It's no joke, but it's not ebola. COVID really fucked some people up. That's the metric that matters.

People just didn't like masks. Scientific results were beside the point.

...laura

I work from home, and have done so for a long time. I have to be really sick to not be able to work. Maybe once in the last 10 years?

I used to have colleagues who viewed their sick time as extra personal time to be taken at will. I didn't. I don't.

...laura

Here in western Canada the temperatures were seasonal this summer, despite the OMG WERE ALL GOING TO DIE narrative.

The drought, on the other hand, is serious. Low snow pack over the winter, bone dry spring. We've had a really bad forest fire season. I know the fire people are working their asses off, but if we're spending that much with that little to show for it, maybe we need to rethink things?

What are we supposed to do about it?

...laura

Visual Studio for Mac always seemed to be behind the curve of Visual Studio on Windows. I argued with it for much of the last year doing MAUI development targeting iOS (and Android) until the Powers That Be decided the app they told me to create wasn't actually the one they wanted after all...

VS Code for Mac is slick. Hell, VS Code for anything is slick. I moved my MAUI iOS development to it as soon as I could so I could implement fixes for a couple of show-stopper bugs that were fixed in .net 8.

...laura

I'm typing this on an M2 Mac Mini that I bought earlier this year, replacing an Intel Mac mini, that replaced an earlier Intel iMac, and so on.

None of these upgrades were motivated by support; my 1st generation 2014-vintage iPad Air still works beautifully, though I can't install much new software on it and many websites tell me my browser is no longer supported. So be it. I still use a 4th generation iPad mini for flight planning. It works fine but is on its last iOS and ForeFlight updates. After this many years the battery life is poor. But not poor enough...

My hardware updates have been largely motivated by new things I wanted to do with my computers. My latest update was prompted by how slow my old Intel Mac Mini was at building apps. I got tired of waiting half an hour for an iPhone simulator to come up. My new Apple Silicon Mac Mini builds things in seconds, both Xcode and Flutter. Nice!

...laura

The rental vacancy rate in Canada's major cities is approximately zero, and what little is available is extremely expensive. Buying a place is even more expensive and is incompatible with a visa anyway, i.e. do your thing then go home. Everybody wants to live in Vancouver or Toronto. I guess they can live in a van or something, because that's all they'll be able to afford.

A number of well-known high-tech companies already have facilities in Canada so they can bring in cheap overseas workers in excess of available H1-B visas.

How many Canadian high-tech people are un- or underemployed?

...laura, employed high-tech Canadian