“I’m looking forward to … reading a whole lot next week” — said everyone who ended up doing nothing of the sort. Hopefully I’ll get around to it in the first few days of next week while I’m still on vacation time.
You know how you try to avoid visiting the part of town where your office is on weekends and public holidays? It’s tainted ground; a place where neither levity nor leisure can survive within a kilometer’s radius of your desk until years after you move on; a commercial real estate Chernobyl invisibly blackened by exposure to Outlook and your own psychic stress. Well, I’ve got a leak of that sort in my upstairs study where I now work from home. I’ve found myself not wanting to even look at its door this week. It’s funny. Maybe I need to rent another place to live.
One thing we did manage to do: finish all available episodes of Billions! I love it, because the writing just loves to wallow in its own proud pen of audacious pretension. It’s the kind of show where dialog doesn’t strive to be realistic; it strives to be good.
Not even in the same country, let alone ballpark, but a lot of my week probably went to watching crypto price tickers as if they were live sports I actually cared about. It’s a fascinating hobby. As the numbers go up and down, it’s not unlike a ball being dribbled up and down a pitch, except sometimes there’s a goal and you’re not quite sure whether it benefits your team or the opponents.
It only took three months, but we finally visited Apple Marina Bay Sands, Singapore’s third Apple Store to not sell HomePods. As it was a weekday afternoon, there was practically no queue and we were in within minutes. It’s a lovely space, and probably better experienced on a less cloudy day, at night, and without COVID procautions. But these days I hardly see the need to buy these things in person anyway. They only had a few AirPods Max units out for testing (not sale, as they’re backordered everywhere), and that’s probably the only thing apart from watch bands that I might want to try in person first. Yes, you can return any online order within two weeks, but I think that’s pretty wasteful from a logistics and refurbishment perspective.
I decided to keep my AirPods Max after all. They are just too much of a joy to listen with. I saw the rumor about the cheaper and lighter “sport” version still being in play and perhaps releasing sometime this year, with plastic in place of metal. I think lighter is a feature that should cost more, not less, and if they really maintained the same audio quality in a cheaper AND lighter package, I’d be pretty mad. But I didn’t want to wait around for a product that may never come, so.
sangsara.net 