Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Author: fish1964

  • More Jeter

    Amusingly, being an Apply fanboy and hating the Yankees must be tough. Because your best blogger is a huge Yankees fan.

    And he’s a much better writer than I am…

    It felt like fall, not summer, last night in the northeast. Chilly and damp, dark already by the time the ballgame started just after seven o’clock. Yankee Stadium was sold out. Full house. Electric with anticipation.

    And then…

    Winning run on second base. One out. Everyone in The Stadium is standing. I’m standing watching at home. My son, 10, is standing on the couch next to me. The tension is excruciating. First pitch, Jeter jumps on it with his signature inside-out swing. Single to right! Richardson beats the throw to the plate. Yankees win. Yankees win. Pandemonium. My boy jumps off the couch into my arms and we run around the house, hugging, screaming, laughing like the maniacs that we are.

    Things like this just aren’t supposed to happen. Real-life endings aren’t like scripted storybook endings. Except with Jeter they so often were. That broken-bat RBI grounder in the 7th was a realistic ending. A spectacular walk-off game-winning single in the bottom of the 9th was not. It felt like the World Series. It felt like the old days.

    Yes it did.

  • Storybook

    Even the weather behaves for Derek Jeter. The forecast was for rain all night. The papers were saying that ticket brokers could lose a million dollars if the game got rained out. But no, the weather changed and Jeter got another story book night.

    If you wrote this in a story it wouldn’t be believable. Of course the Yankees blow a three run lead in the ninth so that Jeter can come up in the bottom of the ninth with a chance to win his last game at Yankee Stadium.

    And of course he does it.

    JeterCover

  • The Genie Question

    I discovered Wait But Why through the blog post on the Fermi Paradox (yes, I’m a geek). The author then decided to let his readers pick a bunch of random countries for him to visit. And I do mean random.

    1. Russia
    2. Japan
    3. Nigeria
    4. Iraq
    5. Greenland

    At the beginning, he said,

    Finally, I’m going to ask 50 random people in each country the following question: If you had a magical Aladdin genie who granted you any three wishes, what would you wish for? I’m not totally sure what will come out of it, but I think it’ll be interesting to see how the answers differ from country to country.

    Here’s the results of The Genie Question

  • Wedding in Italy

    A good friend of my wife has been living in London for many years. About a year ago she announced she’s getting married (no surprise, they’d been together for years) and she wanted to do it in Italy in September.

    September is after “the season” for these places (i.e. not as expensive), so that made sense, but it also meant during school. My wife really, really wanted to see her friend get married. I cringed at the cost of going to Italy for a 4 day weekend, but I knew we were doing it. We declared it the combination of our 15 year wedding anniversary celebration (last year) and my 50th birthday (upcoming) and booked it.

    It was last weekend. I’m crazy jet-lagged at the moment, but the whole thing was spectacular.

    The wedding was in Santa Margherita, Italy. I had never heard of it, but it’s near Genoa. This was the view from our hotel.

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    There’s no beach there, but stairs have been carved into the rocks to go down to this, if you want to swim.

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    There were wedding events each day, but some free time as well. We walked to Portofino a couple of times. Portofino is a very cute town tucked into a little bay. There are many expensive boats there.

    The walk is along the coast, so very scenic.

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    As you approach Portofino, you start to see the boats:

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    The main area of town:

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    There’s a small castle (Castello Brown) near the point of the peninsula. The views from there are postcard-like (and yes, that boat on the left was ridiculously huge).

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    For reasons I cannot explain, there are statures of pink meerkats looking over the harbor.

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    Even stranger was this one…

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    Oh yes, and there was a wedding. In some beautiful villa in Santa Margherita. The bride and groom looked fantastic, of course…

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    All in all, a fabulous whirlwind trip.

  • iPhone 6 Review

    Via Daring Fireball, a well done review. But what a fanboy line:

    Disneyland is the Apple of theme parks

    Dude, Disney was picking up trash the second it was dropped before the original Mac existed. A guy named Walt drove this, not a guy named Steve. For attention to detail, feel free to say that iPhone is the Disney of smart phones.

    Not the other way around.

  • Apple Watch

    It’s a longish read, but Gruber has the most thoughtful piece on the Apple Watch I’ve read.

    First point is that this isn’t really a tech item, it’s a luxury/fashion item. You’ll note that Apple never calls it a smart watch.

    Second point is that it will be expensive by tech standards. Gruber’s estimates:

    • Apple Watch Sport (aluminum/glass): $349 (not a guess)
    • Apple Watch (stainless steel/sapphire): $999
    • Apple Watch Edition (18-karat gold/sapphire): $4,999

    In short: hundreds for Sport, a thousand for stainless steel, thousands for gold.

    Most people think I’m joking when I say the gold ones are going to start at $5,000. I couldn’t be more serious.

    Gruber knows his stuff. This is speculation, but pretty well reasoned speculation.

  • Small Sample Size

    Via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

  • Remembering

    Another 9/11 anniversary. As always, I’ll link to my post remembering the friends we lost.

    I actually flew home today. I had a meeting in Chicago yesterday. When I booked the trip for a meeting on the 10th it didn’t dawn on me right away when I’d be flying home. Clicking on the return date, there was a real pause, should I really do this?

    I was only slightly freaked out this morning…

  • Wisconsin is very Dangerous

    Must be, they got 1.7 million dollars worth of MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protection Vehicles) from the Pentagon (average cost around $700K).

    I grew up there before they had all that stuff. Somehow I lived…

  • iCloud Hack

    I’ve been laying off Apple over the nude photo hack because the facts weren’t in. Yes, they had an issue (recently fixed) where you could guess passwords forever without being locked out (really bad). They had an issue where you could detect if an email was a legit iCloud account (fairly bad).

    But this is ridiculous.

    For $400 I could steal iCloud data from everyone in my office

    The article lists 5 good things Apple needs to do:

    • 1) Encrypt iCloud backups.
    • 2) Stop storing iCloud Authentication Tokens in plaintext.
    • 3) Make two-factor authentication actually protect something more than just payment methods.
    • 4) Make two-factor verification easier to set-up.
    • 5) Be more transparent about how secure iCloud backups are and how easy it is for others to access that data.

    Otherwise tell people not to use iCloud…