So, we have a very full week, here at the Cat Farm. The roofers arrived this morning at the crack of 7:30 am, and began with rather terrifying efficiency to set up their scaffoldings, the Great Bender of Metal, and other divers Tools of The Trade. We are told that they “hope” to be finished the job by Friday, which will be timing, indeed, as the weatherbeans are calling three to five inches of snow on Saturday.
In Technology News, my phone (this being the replacement refurbished phone from about a year ago) started playing Let’s Freeze the Screen about eight months ago, and had progressed to Let’s Load Every Single App, THEN Freeze the Screen, THEN Play Coy About Rebooting. Clearly, this was a message from the small gods of pixels that I needed a new phone. I was fortunate in the timing, for it is The Season of Potlatch, and Lenovo was having a sale. I now have a Moto g5s Plus, 32 GB, in *cough* Lunar Gray. It manages to be just slightly larger than the Droid Whatever, though both are supposed to have a 5.5 inch screen.
I’ve had it online since Saturday evening, and, so far, I’m liking it a lot; a well-behaved little machine, and while I miss Jude (the old phone had Moto, which is like OK Google, except less rule-bound), I’m reaching an accommodation with OK Google; though, MAN! I wish they would let you name the assistant. I really dislike having to say OK Google.
Today, in addition to the roofers, I have scheduled an extra! mammogram, and yoga. By the time I get home, the roofers ought to have left for the day, so I’ll be able to do some work on Fifth of Five/Monkey Business.
Tomorrow, of course, we will have the roofers again, and Thursday, I will rise Before the Roofers to take the car to Augusta for its annual inspection.
I have more or less fallen off the Gym Wagon; it’s been hard to carve out time in-between the various appointments and trying to preserve some blocks of time for, yanno, work. Have to figure that out, somehow.
We have been looking for a house in-town again, and had two near-misses. What is it about the newer houses in Maine (by which I mean houses that were built in the 1950s and 60s); every single one of them has a full bar in the basement, many of them with pianos. They can’t all have been after hours clubs (what our realtor calls “cigah bahs”), can they?
At the moment, given the oncoming economic apocalypse, we’re sorta rethinking a move, weighing the wisdom of simply hunkering down where we are, and not taking on any unnecessary risks.
Well. Interesting times.
I think that pretty much catches us up. Hope everyone has a interesting — but not too interesting — week!
For what it’s worth, I find pointers that suggest “OK, Jarvis” will work as a substitute for “OK, Google”.
but if one could say “Hey, Jude” wouldn’t that be cool? (I mean, if it could be made to substitute for “Hey Google!”)
And on my old phone, one could indeed say, “Hey, Jude.”
A word of warning: I have the Moto G5 *Play*, and while it is a a likely little device, it has on several occasions decided that the sound chip did not actually need to interact with the speaker. This is apparently a Thing with the G5 Play, though I’m not sure if the Plus suffers the same issues.
In any case, it is a rare case of modern technology where the solution is still “percussive maintenance”.
As I understood the case from the reviews, the Play and the Plus are two different machines. There wasn’t any mention made of a failure to sound, and some of those reviewers are crazy strict.
My old Samsung 4 quit charging back in November, so I shopped seriously for a replacement and also settled on the Moto G5 Plus only I splurged on 64GB of memory and bought the gold one. DH talks to Siri on his IPhone, but I haven’t used OK Google yet. If I want to search, I’ll type. I am most impressed with the battery life compared to my prior phone; I can often get by with charging every other day. All in all, it feels like a phone I’ll be happy with for a while.