Urgent Order

Psychic at work in lower Manhattan
Psychic at work in lower Manhattan

“Hello paul,
Could you help us source for the product we need
kindly contact me directly for more detail
Waiting for your timely reply
Best Regards
Dr. Alfred”

I spend a few minutes each morning sifting through the junk email. I add rules for the constant offenders but just swipe to delete most with hardly a glance. Some though, still draw me in. Chris Gratin (below) “stormed onto” some of my works. He looks forward to reading from me.

Subject: Wedding Anniversary Gift
Aloha… I am Chris from Chester Springs, Pennsylvania. have been on the lookout for some artworks lately in regards to I and my wife’s anniversary which is just around the corner. I stormed on to some of your works which I found quite impressive and intriguing. I must admit you’re doing quite an impressive job. You are undoubtedly good at what you do.

With that being said, I would like to purchase some of your as a surprise gift to my wife in honor of our upcoming wedding anniversary. It would be of help if you could send some pictures of your piece of works, with their respective prices and sizes, which are ready for immediate (or close to immediate) sales. My budget for this is within the price range of $1000 to $8000.

I look forward to reading from you in a view to knowing more about your pieces of inventory. As a matter of importance, I would also to know if you accept a check as a means of payment.

Regards.  Chris Gartlin

And this text spam looked pretty funny on my watch.

Screenshot of watch spam
Screenshot of watch spam
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The Event Log File Is Full

Glitch on scale at Wegmans
Glitch on scale at Wegmans

When a mango 99 cents at Wegmans why does the customer have to put the mango on the scale, enter the PLU code and then reply to a “How Many” prompt? I understand that most produce is sold by weight but why couldn’t they put a sticker on the mango that rings up as 99 cents? But I have already digressed.

I had not seen a Windows error log in quite a while. Back in the early html days when we were coding websites and writing if IE clauses to work around errant behavior we had a few Windows machines with which to preview what we call “Worst Case Scenarios.” I used to take screen captures of these “Error” messages and work them into the sites we did fun. The internet used to be fun. Code: 800705DE, Source: Null, Error: The event log file is full. OK.

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Jesus Goes To The Super Bowl

Jesus's house, Rochester, New York
Jesus’s house, Rochester, New York

We sat on a couch with my sister as we watched the Super Bowl. She laughed heartily at many the commercials and said she thought they were especially good this year. We see so few commercials we really have no reference point. The big budget ads featured a parade of celebrities, Beyoncé, J.Lo, Arnold and even Messi but that only cheapens the appeal for me. I like to think I still have a sense of humor but I didn’t find them funny. There was one I found really interesting though.

Called, “He Gets Us,” (there were a few in this series that ran last year) one ad grabbed my attention with a simple technique. A series of still photos. Or rather carefully crafted, staged and lit illustrations of hyper real people in role reversal parts. A policeman washing a Black man’s feet. The ad is payed for by the Hobby Lobby family and their hate group foundations. There are multiple layers of deceit in the one minute ad and then a tag line that reads, “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.” 

The illustrations were surely created with AI and the concept was probably generated with twisted prompts. The Times ranked the ads, Best to Worst, and included this disclaimer. “Religious, political and social advocacy spots were not included so He Gets Us was not included. USA Today ranked them all and He Gets Us came in at 44. For me, this one stood out from the pack.

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“Embracing the Uncharted”

The highway department got cute this holiday season and had their signs alternate between "If You Drive Under The Influence" and "You Are Out Of Your Mind." I tried photographing the second part.
The highway department got cute this holiday season and had their signs alternate between “If You Drive Under The Influence” and “You Are Out Of Your Mind.” I tried photographing the second part.

I asked ChatGPT to “Write a short blog post for New Years in the style of Paul Dodd.” It came up with the heading above and this:

“As we bid farewell to the old and embrace the uncharted terrain of the new, let us channel the spirit of Paul Dodd and embark on a journey of self-discovery and growth.

In the canvas of time, each stroke of the clock paints a unique masterpiece, and the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve is a symbol of renewal. Dodd’s approach to art teaches us to find beauty in the imperfections, much like the tapestry of our lives.

As the year turns, let us not just make resolutions but rather, let’s sculpt intentions. Dodd’s artistry lies in the ability to capture the essence of the moment, to freeze time with a stroke of his brush. Similarly, let us freeze our aspirations in the frame of purpose, creating a roadmap for the months ahead.

In the spirit of Paul Dodd, let’s not fear the blank canvas of the year ahead but instead, embrace it with open hearts. May we paint our stories with courage, resilience, and a touch of the extraordinary.

As the clock ticks, let the stroke of midnight be a celebration of the infinite possibilities that lie ahead. Here’s to a year of artful living, where each day is a canvas waiting to be adorned with the colors of joy, love, and purpose. Happy New Year!”

Hear, hear!

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Fake Me

Two swans on Durand Lake in December fog
Two swans on Durand Lake in December fog

My neighbor wears headphones when he takes the dog out. Who reads anymore? If I were you I would skip reading what I have posted below and just click the play button.

Does my voice sound funny? That’s kind of what I thought. I created a fake voice and I’m tryin’ it out. If you didn’t know better, would this fool you? I know the cadence is wrong. It is too formal and the personality is a little flat. I plan to do another take – loosen it up.

This is not a tech post by any stretch. I stumbled my way through the setup process. I read about a new feature in the latest IOS and I couldn’t wait to check it out. Apple gives you 150 sentences to read. Mundane sentences that have no relation to one another. All matter of fact like. And when you’re done you plug your device in, lock it and let it grind away. In the morning you’r’ll find a “Personal Voice” waiting for you, one that sounds an awful lot like you. But something is off.

Our friend, Pete, was using this technology back around the turn of the millennium. He created a radio show called “Ask Mr. Breakfast.” The guests who called in spoke in the default system voices. This track is on the recently released $100 invisible box set of digital downloads of twenty full length projects. A real cd is available here.

Listen to “Ask Mr. Breakfast” by Pete LaBonne
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Creating A Sensation

Court Street Bridge as seen from Most Hope Avenue
Court Street Bridge as seen from Most Hope Avenue

I took the photo above yesterday. Today was just as nice.

We were heading through the park along Log Cabin Road on our way to the lake when an exceptionally clean cut man approached us. Peggi thought he might be a religious missionary. He asked if we had heard that a body was found in the park last night and we told him we had seen the headline. He asked if we minded answering just a few questions. At that point we started putting it together. His shirt read “WROC News” and he had a camera in the bag he wore around his shoulder.

He introduced himself as Alex Love and and I asked if that was real name. He said it was. “How often do you walk in the park?” “Almost everyday.””Do you think there should be a bigger police presence in the park?” “No.” “Are you afraid to walk in the park now?” “No.” He told us he had talked to woman earlier who told him she usually walked alone in the park but she brought her Rottweiler with her this morning. And then, “Do you think this is some kind of trend?” We laughed. Sure, this is the second body found in the park this year but people aren’t gonna start stabbing people because it is trendy. Here is the news clip.

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Tim Cook Doo-Dad

Scraggily tree at Durand Eastman beach
Scraggily tree at Durand Eastman beach

I spent most of this week, well, on and off, trying to figure out what we could do with an Apple AirTag. Our friends on the west coast sent us one of the Tim Cook doo-dads from a two pack that they had purchased. I spent some time wondering what they may have used theirs’ for, their kayak maybe or the catalytic convertor on their new used car. They told us there has been a rash of thefts from their parking lot.

I was thinking we could put it inside Peggi’s saxophone case but we’ve only had one gig in the last year. We occasionally lose the tv remote but the AirTag would look pretty stupid attached to it. It’s about the size of a thick Communion wafer. I finally decided to put it in our car’s glovebox. Maybe we’ll take the car to a Woodstock reunion and be happy to be able to find our car after the psychedelics.

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Toad Trill

Two toads mating in Jared's pond
Two toads mating in Jared’s pond

Jared describes the scene in his fish pond each spring as an orgy. When that trilling sound fills the air on a sunny day the toads are happy! They are so sensitive it is hard to sneak up on them. They stop trilling when you’re twenty feet away. But in time they get right back into it. There were at least three other pairs of toads getting it on while we were there. Our neighbors plan to have a few friends over tomorrow to watch the proceedings – at a safe distance of course.

Speaking of rear entry. The Zoom meeting we attended last night, a virtual First Friday art studio tour, was bombed. Full blown. It started with someone writing “Nigger” and drawing swasticas on a white board. The hosts and participants tried to carry on but their voices were being drowned out with all bitch talk. And then the little squares and full screen went graphic. We bailed but checked back after an hour the rude quests had left.

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Outskirts

Are You Sure To Execute It? screen capture from 2002
Are You Sure To Execute It? screen capture from 2002

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I’ve been cleaning house on my computer. I tend to procrastinate so I get really stubborn when I finally take on a task and don’t stop until it’s finished. I found this screen capture from 2002. I was obviously taken by the prompt that had popped up. “Are you sure to execute it?” It looks like it was activated by something I did in the CDR Updater, whatever that is.

The capture is interesting for few reasons. I see aliases to early versions of Photoshop and Quicktime on the desktop. It looks like my hard drive is named “Farm” and and my external hard drive, named “Outskirts,” hardly has anything on it. I wish I could twirl the mp3 folder down because I had just added something the day before. I think I was raiding Napster back then.

I see I was using a Kodak DC 4800 camera, something my father bought for me at the Kodak Store. Earring Records was preparing to release Pete LaBonne’s “Glob” cd. And that “WandaBobKathy” file is a photo of the three principles in a virtual company that we had just begun a long relationship with. Yeah, I am sure to execute it.

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Impossible Tasks

Two tone pine needles on small tree near the marsh on Hoffman Road
Two tone pine needles on small tree near the marsh on Hoffman Road

When we were young my mom had us try to be quiet between noon and three, the hours Christ is said to have hung on the cross. If he could hang up there for three hours and die for our sins the very least we could do is be quiet. Needless to say, it was an impossible task. I think of that each Good Friday. The grand bargain and impossible tasks.

We never had meat on Friday during Lent. Not that that was much of a sacrifice. But we gave up stuff, like candy, and the five weeks seemed to last forever. We are starting our fifth week in near isolation. We used leave school in the middle of the day to observe the Stations of the Cross in the church next door. I liked the solemnity of it all. The graphic depictions of the crucifixion felt very real, human. It was not all glum. My father would bring home hot crossed buns on the weekend.

And then poof! The Resurrection. That never felt right. But Lent did end. And the pandemic will too.

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Shut Down

Snow covered green at Durand Eastman GolfCourse
Snow covered green at Durand Eastman GolfCourse

I feel as though I accomplished something even though it took the best part of the day to straighten out our Apple ecosystem. I mentioned how our iTunes stream crapped out during our party. The Airport Express, sitting next to our stereo, lost its wifi connection but it still had the green light on. I only found that out the next morning when I opened Airpot Utility and saw it had no signal. I rebooted the Express and my computer and then HomePod played what it wanted while something else was coming through the stereo. I tested HomePod by asking Siri what the definition of is is and then “When was the War of 1812?” I learned that HomePod remembers commands and when we asked it to shuffle music, it will until it gets further instructions (which it lost when the Express went under). And I found out where you go to control it.

I got up the guts to turn iCloud Music Library back on in iTunes and stuff flooded onto my iPad mimi and I’m good to go. What did I learn? I’m thinking maybe I didn’t unplug the Express long enough in order for it to straighten itself out. It is good to shut everything down. It fixes things. Pete LaBonne wrote a song about it, “Shut Down,” on Glob. I’m planning on shutting down right now.

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Through The Roof


Dumpster, ongoing series of dumpster photos by Paul Dodd

When we were doing websites for a living we used a number of servers. We always had a new favorite and we had sites scattered all over the place. PopWars wound up on DreamHost and only when we decided to update the blog portion did we have to contact their tech people. We did that via chat and weren’t even sure if the problem was on their end. I suspected it was something we did. I was using the original WordPress theme. Anybody remember Kubrick? I updated it for years and then switched to AutoUpdater but it stopped working. After eleven years we installed a new WP version on the root level and switched to a new theme. My internal links went haywire and Google sent me a chart that plotted the errors their auto crawler found. Through the roof. The Dreamhost representative said they would pass our case on to their WP expert and at nine that evening he emailed that he had corrected the problem. This is a recommendation.

I would like to move my web content into pages on the blog. I’ll need a few plugins to get it looking the way I want. I found one that restyles the audio files into a nice looking player and I’m playing with the gallery display options. I started with this collection of Dumpster photos from a few years back. You can click the photos for enlargements or just watch it go by.

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Formerly Non-Responsive

Blurry Autumn trees from train
Blurry Autumn trees from train

While we were in Spain we got a message from the PopWars server that read, “Our performance monitoring system noticed that your account hit its memory limits. When you hit these limits, our system temporarily stops the related web processes, slowing performance.” Could it be because I was still using the default WordPress theme, something Google kept warning me was non-responsive? We bit the bullet and updated the php version, the theme and the plug-ins and then we moved the blog to the root folder of the site. No more www.popwars.com/blog, just www.popwars.com will do it. It was quite an undertaking.

Peggi and I spent the better part of the last five days researching templates, plug-ins and ways to tweak the code. Peggi did all the heavy lifting, using an outdated version of Dreamweaver, the hosting control panel and custom code in the child theme and additional css panel. I was afraid to touch it until now.

Everything works better than ever and it should be compliant for a few months but I’m waiting for one strange behavior to get sorted out. If you try to go to the old address (www.popwars.com/blog) you are immediately sent to a post of mine from 2014 (http://www.popwars.com/2014/05/bloggers-law/).

Is it because I have the word “blog: in the title? Why didn’t it pick other posts of mine like “Face2Face Blogging,” “Pimping My Blog,” “Takin’ Care of Blog Biz,” “Can I Comment On My Own Blog?” or “Trapped In My Blog.”

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Douglas Anthony Bridge

Leo Dodd "Douglas Anthony Bridge" watercolor on display at Rochester Contemporary as part of "Witness" exhibition 2017
Leo Dodd “Douglas Anthony Bridge” watercolor on display at Rochester Contemporary as part of “Witness” exhibition 2017

We lay pretty low, I think, but the last five days were a whirlwind. It started last Wednesday when Pete and Shelley came into town. Pete joined us on piano at the Little Café and of course we carried on into the night after the performance. There is so much to talk about when you come out of the woods with a bottle of homemade dandelion wine. My brother and his wife came up the day Pete and Shelley left. They operate in their own time zone so even though we gained an hour we still managed to see 3AM two nights in a row. They left Sunday afternoon and we met Alice and Julio, who were visiting from Maine, an hour later.

We visited “Witness” with all three guests. The exhibition is up for another week and my brother became an integral part of the show once we connected the dots. I met Alice when I first started taking Fred Lipp’s class at the Creative Workshop. At that time she was painting luscious abstract constructions but she has moved closer to landscapes. She is one of my favorite painters and I was so pleased to learn that she was knocked out by the new charcoal drawings in the show. Her comments carry more weight than anyone else I know.

I was lucky to be at RoCo when Howard Ressel, the chief design architect of the Douglas Anthony, was there. He was drawn to the show by the postcard image, my father’s painting of the bridge. He told me he remembered someone sketching the construction and told us how the initial design was modified to include the bigger central arch, the one that shared weight from both directions of the eight lane highway. Formerly known as the Troup–Howell Bridge the triple steel arch bridge carries Interstate 490 over the Genesee River and Exchange Boulevard and is a major commuter route connecting eastern and western suburbs to downtown Rochester.

The official name of the bridge is The Frederick Douglass – Susan B. Anthony Memorial Bridge, a mouthful. And it is commonly referred to as the Freddy-Sue Bridge but Howard Reseal refers to it as the “Douglas Anthony Bridge.” I like that. The other was irreverent to such important figures. I told Howard the “Death to the Inner Loop” chant was a lonely cry twenty years ago and today the eastern half is filled in. So I will from hereafter refer to the bridge as the Douglas Anthony Bridge. Pleas pass this along.

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New Pencil

New docks in Port of Rochester
New docks in Port of Rochester

We ordered a few coloring books for my mom, one on birds and one on butterflies, and we rode our bikes over there today to drop them off. I also had a computer problem to address on my dad’s machine. He watches Charlie Rose most night and he sketches the quests on his iPad with a program called SketchBook Pro and lately he has been unable to save his drawings. His iPad is out of disc space and there are maybe a hundred drawings on it that I can’t transfer to his computer because the application wigged out when it ran out of room. I kept getting a message that says I cannot sync because there is not enough free space even after I took a bunch of apps off the iPad. The Apple forums suggested I “reset” the iPad and that helped. At least the error messages now made sense. But I still couldn’t transfer or even email the drawings to my father’s computer without getting messages that the files were corrupt. It is the first generation iPad and the times come. I’m thinking of heading out to the Apple Store with him and picking up the iPad Pro and Pencil combination. It will make it a lot easier on his tech support.

We crossed Portland Avenue at an intersection, on a crosswalk and with the light but a woman turned right into us. Came right at the side of us on our bikes with her car and we swerved. No acknowledgement whatsoever. I know “close” only counts in horseshoes but I was struck by how indifferent someone can be to snuffing out another life. Don’t know if she was on a phone, texting, spaced out or what but I’m quite sure if she had taken one of us out she would have kept going as if nothing happened.

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Litsplosion

Louise Wareham Leonard at Visual Studies Workshop Pub Fair in Rochester, New York
Louise Wareham Leonard at Visual Studies Workshop Pub Fair in Rochester, New York

I was on the roof, making a racket with our leaf blower. We don’t really have any leaves up there yet but plenty of sticks, acorns and moss to dislodge. I had my Home Depot earmuffs on, in my own world, trying to remember to be careful when I got near the edge when I spotted the green Google Earth car coming down our street. I was out playing horseshoes the last time a Google car visited. In fact I can be seen taking a photo of the car in the Google shots of our house. I’m hoping they got me up there in my element.

Visual Studies Workshop had their annual Pub Fair on Saturday. The auditorium was filled with book artists and self publishers. It was tempting to buy something from every table but we held off until reaching Marc Pietrzykowski’s table. Peggi bought his novel about a murder in an old age home and I sprung for a three volume set of his poetry. We ran into Anne Havens and made plans to get together and play music before she heads back to Florida. Visual Studies has such a great art book collection in their library it is upsetting to see them sell parts of it off each year but we always manage to scoop up a few things. Peggi found a book of Flannery O’Conner photos and I came home with “Ninety-Nine Drawings by Marsden Hartley.”

The writers’ readings, which should have been on the main stage, all took place upstairs. Rob Tyler read eight vignettes, each wry and crisp. They walked a funny fine line between mundane and absurd. Louise Wareham Leonard didn’t so much read as perform her Rumpus piece, “How To Date A Writer.” Her performance was hilarious and especially searing in the room full of writers. Reading entries from her new book, “52 Men,” she brought new life to the pieces and made you want to read the book all over again.

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Ppwrs

Flickr and Tumblr dropped a vowel and their name got so much cooler. I’ve dropped two in PopWars for this post. I back up all my photos to Flickr. They give you a terabyte of space for free and I’ve been using their slideshow embed code on my home page for years but it never worked on the phone or tablet. You’d think they would be hip to all that stuff. I found this little “Flickrit” java script page that lets you link to a Flckr set and create slideshows at fixed or responsive sizes and I stuck iframe in up above. It stops at 100 photos but it even works on my first generation Touch. Update: The slideshow has stopped working.

Google’s new policy of ignoring sites that aren’t mobile friendly has tearing apart all sorts of stuff. I hardly get anything done anymore. I feel like I’m going backwards. If don’t have anything better to do for a few days drop a url in here and see what I’m talking about. Even my Tumblr signs page flunked. “Text too small to read.” “Links too close together.” “Mobile viewport not set.” Anything Else?

My Google custom search at the top of the site is not even mobile friendly. Everything needs reworking. I have all these web pages open now and will probably not come up for air for awhile.

Mobile Friendly Test
Google Webmaster Tools
Custom Search
Learn About Sitemaps
Responsive Typography With REMs
Responsive Web Design Fundamentals
Understand key points in going mobile

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Bleak But Beautiful

Staub's Cleaners on East Main Street in Rochester NY 1994
Staub’s Cleaners on East Main Street in Rochester NY 1994

Batch processing a folder of photos and throwing them into Apple’s Keynote and then exporting the whole thing to html is so much easier than creating individual web pages. But of course there are all sorts of drawbacks. Like how do you link to a particular page or photo and how do you write tags for the pages so a search engine could find them?

These photos were taken in 1994 with a film camera when I was just beginning to develop an idea for a contemporary setting of the Stations of the Cross (the Passion Play or Way of the Cross; in Latin, Via Crucis), an idea that is still in the developmental stage twenty years down the road. We lived across from East High at the time and we’d head downtown on this route most days. While I was taking the photo of East High a security guard came out and told me “You can’t photograph the school.” East High became a perfect location for Jesus to get sentenced and I pictured him crucified at the Liberty Pole. The route looks rather bleak but it is quite beautiful. The photos were really just location shots for possible staging of a particular station but I found them interesting to look back on especially because so many of these places are gone.

East High School, Carroll’s Bar and McDonalds are all there. Mooneys (formerly Effingers) and Fams Party House are still standing but the businesses have left. El Palladium and Jimmy’s Short Orders have both been knocked down for a monstrous new Regional Transit Bus Terminal. Volunteers of America, Fatboys, Chase Bank, Tucker Printers, the Adult Book Store and Otis Lumber are still there but have changed hands. The Armory Building has actually come back to life as a venue. Corpus Christi Church, Staub’s Cleaners, the Penguin Restaurant and Hedges Funeral Home are still there but are empty or repurposed. WDKX is not going anywhere. Kentucky Fried Chicken is an Asian place. Richmond’s and the Chinese place are still there with new owners. Cathay Pagoda and the Tea House Art Gallery, Snuffy’s Birdland and McCurdys are gone. The Liberty Pole is still standing.

And the Inner Loop is being filled in. Chuck Cuminale, who would lead the Colorblind James crowd in “Death To The Inner Loop chants, would be elated.

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Spacing Out

View from car on the road to Maine
View from car on the road to Maine

“Do you have any idea why I pulled you over,” he asked as I rolled the window down. I went with, “I have no idea why you pulled me over.” He said I clocked you at forty-seven in a 30 MPH zone. The speed limit was 55 last I looked and I apparently missed the sign that dropped it to 30. It was a speed trap and he had me.

Thing is I wasn’t driving fast to get somewhere in a hurry or anything. I just spaced out. No excuse, I know. So when are these Google cars going to hit the market. I would be perfectly content to leave the driving to the robot.

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U2 Removal Tool

Wind surfers on Lake Ontario near Rochester, New York
Wind surfers on Lake Ontario near Rochester, New York

We tuned in for part of Apple’s recent keynote, the part with the Chinese translator competing with CEO Tm Cook’s delivery of the goods. We’ve been early adapters for the desktops and the iPod and we stood in line for the iPad on it’s launch day. I’m updating to OS8 on our mini as I write this but we still don’t have a phone.

As much of a fan as I am. I’m a little worried about the behemouth. Does Apple really want to stick their brand neck out there with Apple Pay? Couldn’t they give it another name, something that doesn’t stake the company’s reputation on on such a tempting target? And how did they let iTunes grow from a juke box to a such the monster we use to keep our apps up to date and our devices synced? And why don’t the icons for the apps we use on both a desktop and IOS device look the same? Blue “Message” icon on desktop and green on the iPad and the same goes for the whole suite of Apple apps. Is this the same design company that brought us the watch that requires a phone to do more that tell time? Will I be able to take a shower with that watch? And can’t Apple align themselves with a hipper band than U2?

Nobody wants to hear this primitive tech talk. It’s perfect weather for windsurfing or watching the women’s National soccer team play Mexico in downtown Rochester tonight.

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