Author: David

A day of technology or something like it

I may have made a few mistakes recently when it comes to technology.

I’d had an iPad Pro for several years and thought it was too heavy and awkward, so I traded it in for a new iPad mini 7th generation…which I then gave to Diane in exchange for her iPad mini 6th generation (she does a lot of photo editing on her iPad and wanted the Clean Up feature of Apple Intelligence, which the 6th generation doesn’t have).

I soon discovered that the screen of an iPad mini is truly *mini*, and found it less comfortable for reading than I had hoped. And I no longer had a hardware keyboard, which was awkward when I needed to type more than a few sentences.

So today, I went to Best Buy and traded it in, buying a just-plain-iPad (A16) and a Logitech Combo Touch keyboard folio. My hope is that it’ll have enough oomph to let me blog when we travel without carrying my MacBook Air; this post is an attempt at doing just that. I’ll see how things go when I have a lot of photos to edit and include, especially photos from my “big” camera.

The other tech mistake I made today was accepting Amazon’s nags to allow my Echo Show to upgrade to “Alexa+”. It’s got a much more annoyingly enthusiastic voice; it reminds me of Eddie, the shipboard computer in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its Genuine People Personality. And it’s stupid, as shown by the question it posed in the photo below.

Speed Run

To Hawaiian’s credit, once they got the replacement airplane and crew to Maui, things began to happen quickly. They started boarding early, getting us into the air ahead of the revised schedule; they got to Oakland 15 minutes before they expected; and our luggage was in our hands no more than ten minutes after we’d gotten off the plane, something I’ve never experienced before.

It had been many years since we’d flown through Oakland; it’s changed. Probably for the better, but I didn’t stop to admire the changes. :-)

We got home about 5:30am – today’s Mercury News was already waiting on the driveway for us. We’d only slept for an hour or so on the flight, so we crawled into bed and slept until 10am, then went to the supermarket because we didn’t have any food in the house for breakfast (or lunch or dinner, for that matter).

Back to mundane life…would you believe I didn’t see a single person wearing a swimsuit or carrying a snorkel today?