Rob Fahrni

I’ve gone backwards.

I’m absolutely exhausted and my brain is really foggy. I thought by today I’d be feeling close to normal. It’s a very disappointing setback.

My younger brother got COVID and he said he was exhausted for well over 14-days from the time he had a positive test. I’m not thrilled with the thought of that.

The cough is better, body aches are gone. I hadn’t mentioned waking up in a sweat in the middle of the night. That’s happened every night since I tested positive.

I’ve taken Friday off in hopes a long weeked will help get me over the hump.

Here’s hoping.

Doing much better today than yesterday! 🥳

Am I at 100%, no way, not there yet, but getting closer each day.

My head is still stuffy and foggy and I’m tired. I still have cough but it doesn’t happen as often as it was happening, not even close.

My back and lungs no longer ache, that’s pretty nice.

I figure a few more days of taking it easy and I’ll be right as rain.

Today’s test was positive. Which surprised me. Total bummer.

Better today than yesterday. I like the upward trend. I’d say I’m at about 80% now. A small bump from yesterday but a bump nonetheless.

My head is just as foggy as yesterday, no improvement there and I’m still really tired.

I’m not coughing as much. That’s definitely welcome, now maybe my lungs won’t ache as much.

My lower back pain has improved tremendously! It’s down to a minor ache.

Tired. That and a foggy head are now my biggest complaints. I just want to sleep all day.

I worked for a while this afternoon and now I just want to crawl back in bed.

Funny thing is, I’m craving a really nice Double IPA and some Popeye’s Chicken Strips. Is that weird? 😳

How cool is this? Our oldest daughters neighborhood has an albino squirrel.

It’s really beautiful.

I think I’m getting better. My eyes feel better today. I know that may sound like no big deal but it was really bothering me how much they hurt.

My head is less foggy this morning, that feels rather nice.

I’m still really tired, even after a good nights rest and my cough persists.

My lower back seems to hurt more today than yesterday. I wonder if that’s because I’m feeling slightly better in other ways and I’m noticing my back pain more? Could be.

I still fee pretty wiped out. When I stand I’m a bit dizzy and still have that out of body experience feeling, but it’s not as bad.

Still no fever. That makes me wonder if I had a fever in the days prior to feeling miserable? Who knows?

I think I’ll get outside today and sit in the fresh air.

Number Five

PB Over the Top

This is a fairly new flavor to the Ben & Jerry’s lineup. My youngest daughter turned me on to it, said she liked it, so I gave it a go. She’s right, it’s a keeper. The ganache over the top of the ice cream is super tasty and I like peanut butter cups as well as peanut butter in general.

Number Four

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

I think it goes without saying the chocolate chip cookie is the best cookie in the world. If you don’t agree, you’re wrong.

Number Three

The Tonight Dough

The only way you could possibly make ice cream with chocolate chip cookie dough better would be to add some peanut butter dough to the mix. Nuff said.

Number Two

Cherry Garcia

No, you don’t have to like the Grateful Dead to like this ice cream and I know what you’re thinking “this can’t be number two?” Oh, but it can. Try the number one flavor first, then decide. The cherry flavor is perfect and I love the chocolate and cherry chunks. Super delicious.

Number One

Chubby Hubby

My wife bought Chubby Hubby for me as a joke. She thought it had a cute name and fit well with the state of her husbands physique. Little did she know it would become my favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor. It’s really hard to find. We know of one Super Market in Charlottesville that stocks it.

And there you have it! 🍦

Macworld: “There will no doubt be a few Mac users who are disappointed by that list. Many of the Macs that are not supported by Ventura were still being sold by Apple until quite recently. The 2014 Mac mini was sold until 2018, the ‘trash can’ Mac Pro until 2019, and the 2017 MacBook Air was sold until July 2019. We had thought that Apple wouldn’t remove those Macs from the supported list, since people might have purchased the model such a short time ago.”

No doubt indeed.

When I went to install macOS Monterey on my 2015 MacBook Pro, it failed. Turns out when I bought my used MacBook I didn’t know the original SSD had been upgraded. Apparently some sort of hardware check is performed and if the hardware isn’t all Apple original the OS wouldn’t install. That’s fine, time marches on.

I figured this year my 2015 MacBook Pro would fall off the list of supported hardware, and it has.

I was surprised to see how aggressive Apple is being about supporting older hardware.

This time around the 2015 and 2016 models were dropped.

We’re now left with 2017, 2018, and 2019 Intel based Macs. See where I’m going?

At this deprecation rate we may only have two years of Intel based support on new OS versions.

Ouch. 🤕

This cat.

He would stay here all day if I didn’t have to get up once in a while. 😄

Flynn doing what Flynn does best.

Slept until 9:45 this morning. I really needed it. I’ve been taking NyQuil at night and it seems to help with the runny nose a bit and I don’t have fits of coughing through the nigh, just once in a great while.

I don’t feel any better this morning but, thankfully, I don’t feel any worse.

Exhausted, my eyes hurt, raspy dry cough, and a runny nose are still at work.

My lungs ache from coughing. I’m not sure if it’s the bed I’m sleeping in or what but my lower back hurts.

Since testing positive I’ve isolated myself in our guest room, worn a mask when I use the toilet, or get something from the kitchen. I’m constantly washing my hands and generally stay in the room. I have my kitty cat, Flynn, to keep me company.

Please, mask.

😷

Conducting a little experiment here to see if coffee helps cure COVID.

Even if it doesn’t, it still tastes great. ☕️

Kolby enjoying his time outside on the porch.

Such a proper young man.

I feel largely the same as yesterday. Here’s a list of my symptoms.

1. Achy
2. Headache behind my eyes
3. Dry Cough
4. Runny Nose
5. Really Tired
6. Brain Fog

No fever - at least none I’ve recorded. My lungs ache from coughing so much. I managed to get some rest after taking some Tylenol and NyQuil. I was surprised I slept so well to be perfectly honest.

Day One

I woke up yesterday morning feeling like crap. I figured it was all the events I’d been attending at our company on-site this week. Boy, was I wrong.

I went to breakfast with some coworkers unaware I was a walking virus factory. Had a wonderful breakfast, came home, still felt crummy so I decided to take a PTO day.

Around 1PM I decided it was a good idea to take a COVID test because our daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren were coming for a visit on Saturday. At that instant I was confident I was in the clear. I figured it was just severe allergies and being tired.

I read the test directions, did what it said, swabbed my nose, dropped it in the provided vile, and squeezed four drops into the tester.

It lit up in less than 30 seconds, in fact, mere seconds after the fourth drop hit the color was already starting to change.

Yes, I have COVID.

I reached out to our HR team, my branch leadership, my team, and anyone else I could think of I’d been in contact with.

I called the restaurant and the local coffee shops I’d visited during the week.

Here’s hoping I didn’t infect anyone. I think the chances of that are pretty slim. 😔

TL;DR - Yes, for certain types of apps.

I know Apple has started to dog food SwiftUI, but it’s being used for UI that fits nicely into what SwiftUI is good at. It can create basic UI elements in a window; labels, text input, lists, checkboxes, etc.

Take the new System Settings App. It’s written in SwiftUI and it looks nice. The UI design is simple enough to use what SwiftUI is really good at!

I don’t want to discourage anyone creating a new app. By all means, start with SwiftUI, especially on iOS if you’re writing an app that is small to medium sized and doesn’t venture outside the things SwiftUI is good at. All of my simple little apps could be converted to SwiftUI today, if I thought it was a good use of my time.

How will we know when SwiftUI is a true replacement for UIKit and AppKit?

We’ll know it’s a real replacement when you can build Xcode, Keynote, Pages, or heaven forbid, Photoshop with it. When our favorite Mac shops like Panic and Omni Group can rewrite their flagship applications using 100% SwiftUI. It’s as simple as that.

Great apps. That’s the goal.

Where are the mind-blowing apps powered by SwiftUI? Why isn’t Apple making them to show what’s possible? Come on… prove me wrong!

If the new Settings app on the Mac is any indication, I fear that the new generation of great apps isn’t coming.

— Ken Kocienda (@kocienda) June 10, 2022

Apple could really help propel SwiftUI into common use by starting with Keynote. That is an important application to many folks and having it rebuilt with SwiftUI and taking it to the next level would cement SwiftUI as the real deal.

For now it’s kind of wait and see. Apple has done a really great job of prioritizing features for SwiftUI to cover the 90% case on iOS; lists (table views) and basic controls used to make those. I’ll bet that accounts for a huge number of apps in the App Ecosystem.

I started Stream for Mac with UIKit and I’ll probably finish it that way.

Then I may do one of my apps in SwiftUI since they’re all very simple from a UI perspective.

A Swift Only Future? - Yours truly in 2016.

My thinking has shifted, slightly, on the topic. But only just.

Oh, one more thing. SwiftUI is the worst name ever for a framework. Just sayin’. 😄

Good morning y’all. The big news this week is I have COVID. I’m not proud of it. We had an on-site at work last week and I attended. It was really exciting to meet a lot of my team I’d never seen in person. I was masked on day one and day two (most of the time.)

On day two after lunch I forgot to mask. Went about my day and realized I was unmasked at some point so I put it back on.

On Wednesday and Thursday I didn’t mask at all. Don’t let your guard down like I did. It’s so easy to do since the world has seemingly moved on from COVID. Everything felt normal, but it wasn’t.

Don’t be a dummy, like me. Stay safe out there. Mask.

Becky Hansmeyer: “Here are a few things I’m hoping to see, in no particular order:”

It was WWDC week last week, which is basically Christmas for the Apple Development world.

I love reading Becky’s site because she’s usually very upbeat. This post didn’t let me down.

Cliff Harris: “You might think thats an embarrassing typo, so I’ll be clear. TWO THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED FILEs and 237MB of executables and supporting crap, to copy some files from a client to a server. This is beyond bloatware, this is beyond over-engineering, this is absolutely totally and utterly, provably, obviously, demonstrably ridiculous and insane.”

I was talking with a co-worker this week about this very topic. I feel pretty lucky as an iOS dev. I install Xcode and can write a fully featured iOS application. No additional code from the outside required.

Do I use some packages. Yes. I do try to limit them and I’ve started removing them as I move forward because I don’t want to rely on them. There are a few exceptions but I can do the work to replace them and make them work 100% how I want them to work for my app.

I feel really bad for web client and backend devs. Their setup seems crazy difficult and fragile.

It’s up to Merrick Garland to do his job and indict Donald Trump.

— Steven Beschloss (@StevenBeschloss) June 10, 2022

Yes, this week the January 6th committee began presenting their findings on national television.

Nothing will come of it. Trump will become President again, Civil War will erupt, and our Republic will disappear (only for a while, I hope.) 😔

Hacker News: “Hello, I was hired as a remote full-stack engineer at Tesla during the pandemic. We were just told that remote employment agreements (mine was over email, not in my contract) are void, and we have to move to a Tesla office by August.”

I feel bad for this person, I really do. Life circumstances can make decisions extremely difficult, especially if you’re happy in your work.

I’d talk to Tesla HR, let them know my circumstance, and see if I could work out a short term deal so I could stay remote for the time being. This person mentions being able to move in early 2023.

If they won’t work with you, get that resume ready, and find another gig that works for you. There are so many wonderful places to work out there that don’t require you to be in the office.

CNN: “Del Bosque is one of the many Latino farmers and workers whose lives revolve around California’s agriculture industry and who have been forced to make difficult decisions due to the ongoing water crisis.”

This is going to bite us all. Much of the worlds fruits and vegetables are grown in the San Joaquin Valley of California. To lose a fraction of that production will show at the grocery store.

We are in a lot of trouble. It’s just starting. Climate change is real. Just ask Mr. Del Bosque.

Robert Sweeney: “I asked him what the on campus interviews were like and how I should prepare for them. He explained that they would ask a random programming question that I would need to solve on a sheet of paper. If you did well, then they would fly you out for a full day of interviews at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. He had been asked to write a function that, when given an array of length n + 1 containing integers 1 through n, find the duplicate integer in an array.”

Bottom line. If you want to work at one of the BigCos you’d better know your stuff.

I tried to get on with Apple numerous times. Failed each time. It’s tough out there, especially if you’re working for a company making the underlying technology.

Study up! Don’t cheat if you can avoid it. 😄

David Smith: “This year, more than any I can remember, WWDC was the tangible manifestation of Apple’s genuine care for developers, and their desire to facilitate us to do our best work.”

I thought I’d end on a good note. David Smith is super upbeat about everything he does.

David’s post doesn’t disappoint. Go read it if you develop for Apple platforms.

It’s not a WWDC name tag, but I do plan on having a lot of fun this week!

AP: ”Elon Musk is threatening to walk away from his $44 billion bid to buy Twitter, accusing the company of refusing to give him information about its spam bot accounts.”

Of course he’s trying to manufacture a reason to get out of the deal. Twitter has lost value and Tesla has lost value since he made his offer and Twitter agreed to it.

Oh, he also came in like a home buyer paying all cash and doesn’t ask for a home inspection. All of a sudden he worried he found termites after making the deal.

Suck it up buttercup.

If he does backout Twitter should sue him for breach of contract, or whatever this is called, take the billion dollars he’d have to pay for backing out and go on their merry way.

Perhaps I’ll just sit outside all day?

View from the side of WillowTree’s Woolen Mills office in Charlottesville, Virginia.

It’s been a while since I’ve been back in this building.

Enjoying the morning out front, sipping my coffee, listening to the birds.

Good morning.

Cliff Harris: ”There was a golden age of programming, back when you had actual limitations on memory and CPU. Now we just live in an ultra-wasteful pit of inefficiency. Its just sad.”

I do love a good curmudgeon. I’m one, mainly because I’m old, but also because I do care about performance, stability, and efficiency of any app I work on. This is not to say I’m some magical coder, I most certainly am not, but I try really hard to deliver all those things and more.

I do appreciate his stance. Development today is one big hodge-podge of packages glued together each depending on some other set of packages.

Back in the olden days — yes when dinosaurs roamed the earth — we wrote everything for the app. We didn’t have the luxury of getting something someone else had written. Having to write everything yourself makes you stop and think about every little detail. That’s a good thing.

Forbes: ”Congratulations state of Florida. You have successfully threatened the Special Olympics and forced them to drop a public health measure designed to protect people against Covid-19.”

I don’t know which jerk in the MAGA crowd deserves the coveted Jerk of the Year Award but Ron DeSantis is definitely in the running. It’s pretty bad when you threaten the Special Olympics with a $27.5 million dollar fine for using common sense.

Florida is full or wonderful people coping with a cesspool of government corruption and self dealing. Well, of course it is. It’s a GOP stronghold.

Becky Hansmeyer: “New and/or third-party watch faces. When I think of all the amazing designers I follow on Twitter, it makes me sad to imagine the gorgeous, fun watch faces they could come up with that will probably never see the light of day.”

It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a blog post from Becky and it’s always fun to read her wish list.

My wish list is simple: Custom Apple Watch faces.

Of course most developers want SwiftUI improvements. I’m fine with that but not in a real hurry. I’ve contributed to a couple SwiftUI projects and I found it very confusing — it’s yet another brain shift — but I get the idea.

It’s really nice when “it just works™️.”

CNBC: “In 2017 and 2018, as some workers sought to form a union at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company was paying a consultancy, MWW PR, to monitor employees in a Facebook group and more broadly on social media, according to invoices and other documents reviewed by CNBC.”

Remember, pay attention to what they do, not what they say.

Musk drones on and on about freedom in the “town square” of Twitter but he sure doesn’t care for his workers right to organize, does he?