What's it all about, Alfie?

Well... Apple's concluded it's Watch/iPhone event, and I have to say, the rumors were not wrong, and it's still interesting and exciting to see the new iPhones and Watches. Some of the things they are doing on the Watch now is just amazing. ECG on the Watch - one finger on the crown and then the watch's sensors. Crazy.

The new iPhone Xs sounds amazing... faster Face ID - which I use all the time, and the specs on the CoreML engine - 9x the performance on 1/10th the power... 6 cores on the A12... it's just amazing what Apple - Apple is doing on these machines. It's a company that just always makes me smile.

Needless to say, at 2:00 am on Friday, I'll be sitting at my computer and ordering my iPhone Xs and it'll ship a week later. Add in that iOS 12 drops next Monday, and macOS Mojave on the Monday after that, and it's just a big banner September for Apple.

What a company!

I've just finished a book that I really enjoyed, but I'm glad I read it last of the three - in fact, I'm glad I read each of them in the order in which I did. It made for a much smoother reading experience - because I started with Pragmatic Scala and this was really based on the fact that we are using Scala in The Shop, and as such, I felt it was important to get up to speed on the language, and the Pragmatic Books have always been pretty good, in my experience.

Well, this was a fine book on Scala, but I have to say, I'm stunned that Scala is as popular as it is. I understand that one of the key design goals of the language was to be a pure Object Oriented language - and as such things like static methods and variables are not allowed in the instance variables, but they solve that with partner classes, and that's OK... but it is confusing for many folks - simply because most coders are not going to have a Theory of Languages in their past.

Still... Scala is a language we use at The Shop, and that means for better or worse, this is something that I needed to know. The next book was a little more fun because it was all about Xcode. In Xcode Treasures, the author walks through the tool not the SDK. This is nice, because in my recent work, I've re-written my crypto quip solver to Swift 4.2, in Xcode 9, and the times are really not horrible - compared to ObjC and Ruby, but Clojure still wins the speed race, but that's to be expected.

And while I spent plenty of time in Xcode quite a while ago, it's nice to see how much progress has been made in Xcode recently. The handling of assets like icons and images, and being able to load them without worrying about the resolution is really nice. Also, the entire Gatekeeper and Code Signing is now simple, and it used to be a pain. That's a great relief.

So this was a really good chance to catch up on a lot of the capabilities with Storyboards in Xcode and the scripting and such... very nice book. The final book was Mastering Clojure Macros and this is one I've been trying to get through for quite a while - many months, in fact. It's not a long book, but it's dense, and it takes time to make sure you understand the concepts because macros in Clojure are hard enough, and some of the examples are compact - as Clojure is want to do, and that just makes it all that much harder.

But the book was just amazing! What a great study of the subject. This was one of the few topics I really wanted to get better at with Clojure. Yes, I'd like to get a little more into spec, and core.async could be very useful if you're making small, independent apps, as opposed to big, multi-host apps where you typically share messaging queues, etc., but still... macros are in everything when you really get into things and I have been able to do quite a bit with them to date, but I wanted to know more.

Of the three - they are all worth reading - if you want to learn the material, but I really enjoyed the last two far more than the Scala book, but that's because of the subject - not the book.

Yesterday I decided that it was time to accept that my attempts at being present for my two youngest kids by texting them every Sunday morning - just to say "Hi!" and wish them a good week, wasn't what I would have liked from my Dad at the time, and they hadn't written back in more than a year, and at the time it was not kind. They need space. If they never reach out to me, it's not because I haven't made it clear that I'm here... it's a conscience, willful choice to not reach out - and they deserve to make those decisions, no matter how it impacts me.

So I wrote them one last time - telling them that if they wanted me to continue - just say so, and I will... but if not, I understand, and I'll be here, if they ever change their mind. I thought it was a pretty good way to put it.

I don't think I'll hear from them except when they want money for college, and then the first time after college they ask - like grad school, or rent, or vacation, or something - and I say "No" - that will be it. Their choice - not mine.

At the same time, I said the same thing to a friend that I used to work with, but hasn't written back in more than three months. I don't want to appear to be a pest, so again... if they want to chat - I'm here... but getting weekly updates from me is something else, and it's OK... people change, things happen, jobs change, and so it goes. That's fine.

In short, I'm deciding that it's OK for people to change. Pick different likes and dislikes, and even if I'm one of the dislikes, that's just the way life is sometimes, and I'll have to be OK with that - family or not.

Moving on. I need to get on with it.

I happened to fall into a funny show on Hulu recently - Stan Against Evil. And it's really good. The premise is a completely over-the-top older sheriff's wife dies, and he goes a little off the deep end, and has to be replaced by a much younger, woman, sheriff. He of course, has no time, respect, tolerance, or interest in this new sheriff, and keeps acting like he's the sheriff.

The wrinkle to this is that his late wife was really protecting him from all kinds of supernatural threats that have been cursed on the sheriffs of this town for the last 400 years. He knew nothing about this, of course, and that his wife even had anything outside the home - let alone protecting him against evil is just too much for him, in the beginning.

Then he realizes what's happening around him - basically, that he's no longer protected, and he has to defend himself - and the new sheriff, as she is cursed for the same reason as he was - being sheriff of this town.

So I stumbled onto this show on Hulu, and watched the first two seasons there, as the new third season is starting soon on IFC. It's silly. It's over the top. It's just fun, and there isn't enough of that these days...