Back in March I bought the 16″ MacBook Pro I’ve been using this year, and by using I mean it’s basically an electronic RV that I move from place to place and live out of – for both work and home use.

The machine runs about eighteen hours a day, seven days a week – and longer on holidays. I even tend to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in front of the machine while I’m working on things…

So, this morning I broke out my iFixit oddball screwdriver set and popped open the laptop for a thorough cleaning to evict any accumulated cruft.

And after two lengths of eight weird apple pentalobe screws and some tense moments prying on the bottom cover to release the clips – I was in.

Overall the insides were cleaner than I expected; the several right-angle bends used for the intakes (three oval holes on each side where the battery is) does a pretty good job of separating out the dust. Most of the grittier stuff was on the case lid, where it falls out of the air stream as it flows around the bends – which is good.

The fans and heatsinks themselves were pretty clean, and given the extremely fine blades and fins this is also a good thing… It wouldn’t take much to impair them.

Anyway, cleanup took a few minutes, then I put it all back together… The hardest part of the whole ordeal was getting the bottom back on the laptop; it’s held on with massive amounts of over-engineering to remove *any* flex so that the laptop feels like a solid chunk of aluminum.

Listening to "Cliffhanger" by 80's Stallone

Made it to another Thanksgiving – yay me!

Dinner tonight was a Prime Rib done sous vide, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, fresh dinner rolls, and a chocolate silk pie.

The prime rib itself was a 5-pounder, so I have plenty left over for dinner tomorrow and some sandwiches over the weekend. 🙂

Listening to "A Thousand Lives" by At 1980

I bought my first copy of Photoshop about thirty years ago this month… Which seems like an insanely long time ago.

I ran Photoshop 2.5 on my Powerbook 165C back in the day. It was remarkably similar to Deluxe Paint IV, which I ran on my Amiga during the same time period, so for me it was just learning the tools of the trade on a different hardware platform.

For the most part my early Photoshop expenses were just ‘the cost of doing business’; I needed to learn the software, and the software was expensive… I wouldn’t really make any money off of Photoshop until 1996, and Photoshop 4.0, where I started making spare cash designing web sites and UIs for various software projects.

The above screen shot is from the installed version of 4.0.1 on my Powerbook G3 Pismo, which dual-boots MacOS 9.2.2 and OSX public beta.

By the time Y2K rolled around I started running Photoshop on PC hardware, so most of the newer versions in my collection are for Windows…

I used PS7 for like five years before moving to CS3, and then used CS3 up until CS6 in 2012 – which is when Adobe went to the subscription model. I have a license for CS6, which was the last non-subscription version to be offered, but for the most part I’ve been on the yearly plan since CC (Creative Cloud) in 2013.

Another long, strange trip I guess. 🙂

Listening to "Secrets of Hiroshi" by Futurecop!

Back on July 4th I sent off a request to the SSA for an itemized list of where I’ve worked and when – mostly just to keep the dates and places in my memoirs straight.

Today they got around to charging me the $92 fee for the service, so I may have a mere 120 more days to wait for this information.

Again, dealing with the government is good for you – it asks you to slow down and take it easy, because getting uptight over it taking a year to do something that should take ten minutes won’t change anything but your heart-rate. 🙂

Listening to "Innocence" by Morgan Willis

So, here I am a bit over a week from when I came down with the 2022 model year of the flu – and I’m pretty much over it I think.

This year’s iteration of the flu was definitely something special, and this was the sickest I think I’ve ever been with it… Luckily it kinda bounced between my sinuses and my throat and never really got into my lungs, so the coughing has been merely annoying.

My treatment regimen was the usual; sleep, hot showers, orange juice, Theraflu, cream of chicken soup, and any time I felt up to it – something cataclysmically spicy. And I worked from home through the whole ordeal, so I didn’t miss any work and nothing fell too far behind.

I did manage to score the bonus sinus infection, so I’m on a week-long course of Doxycycline to clear that up.

I’m pondering taking a few sick days though simply to rest a bit. That and the Doxycycline makes me a bit sick to my stomach…

Listening to "86'" by Kalax