Friday, September 30, 2022

Setting the Record Straight

"Getting to the facts can be difficult, but it’s always the right thing to do. Except when it isn’t."

Act 3 argues what I've been saying for years about "UFOs" and life from other planets.

Direct link to the podcast in the This American Life archive.

Related: Metabunk

Thursday, September 29, 2022

Abigail Disney

Marc talks with Abigail about her social awakening earlier in life and her current roles as an activist, philanthropist and filmmaker. They also discuss her new documentary, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, about the unequal economy as exemplified by the corporation that bears her name.

A terrific conversation that may light a fire under one's ass.

Direct link to this episode in the WTF with Marc Maron archive.

Thursday, September 15, 2022

Wonton

So. This happened.

This person is a member of the House of Representatives.

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Adventures in Mac

I will offer my unsolicited advice at the beginning to save you some time: If your early-2015 era MacBook starts throwing errors and restarting and you take it to the Genius Bar and they wipe the drive to fix the problem, and you take it home and set it up again and you keep seeing the errors and the restarting, do not throw up your hands and give up and go and order a new MacBook Air.

Keep running your machine. Keep restarting. Keep seeing the errors. Push the thing for a while. It may require this before the issue is fixed, and apparently, the geniuses at the Genius Bar do not tell you this.

That’s the kind of month I’ve been having. Spending every Saturday for the last three Saturdays milling around in the Eastview Apple store, the first Saturday they wiped the drive completely only to see the problems continue; the second Saturday to be told that the logic board, which is essentially a Mac’s motherboard but Apple has to name everything differently, and the third Saturday to order a new MacBook Air.

So last night, I got out my vintage machine and fired it up to collect some information for trade-in. I’d been running it on and off throughout this whole process. So I left the Mac running while doing my “day job.” And the thing has been running ever since. No errors. No restarting. I’m typing on it right now.

So by way of explanation: The reason they wiped data to try to resolve the issue is because they assume that some third-party app is running a process that is interfering with the computer’s boot-up. Wiping the data, including all third-party apps, is thought to cease the harmful process.

But wiping the offending app apparently didn’t stop the process from running. It needed to run its course before it stopped. So I experienced the errors after the alleged fix. And now, I’m not. One would think the geniuses at the Genius Bar would inform its customers.

Looks like I’m about to cancel a MacBook Air order and save myself a couple thousand dollars.