When Uber is Being Rude

I recently came back from a one-week vacation in Cancun, Mexico. The first thing I did before leaving the airport to go home was to call an Uber taxi. My last experience with Uber went well, but it was quite a while. Boy, this time it was a surprising and unexpected experience. After ordering the car, I was met with a plethora of notifications and ads within the application and via Uber Eat to order food on the go or before arriving at home. Those ads took the form of notifications, but also big popups taking the whole screen within the application. It was so intrusive, it wasn’t always clear how to dismiss the ad to return to the actual trip details.

I understand the idea of integrating two different services from the same company, but doing so at the expense of a great user experience with the basic feature of the application is not the way to go with me. Even Apple sometimes seems to be going in that direction. Not good.

Wondering About Returning to Podcasting

Now that I’m finally having my dedicated room in the house for working, I’m wondering about returning to podcasting (I used to have a podcast, in French) or even testing the YouTuber world (even though I wrote in the past that I’ll never be a YouTuber). Why is that?

First, a dedicated room is mandatory to be able to record without being disrupted too much. Second, sound quality would probably be much better than recording in an open space. Third, I could create a better background because my room is decorated to my personal tastes.

But is this enough to convince myself to seriously consider getting back to audio or video content creation? I have all the tools: a great MacBook Air, a Mac mini, an Apple Studio Display, a good microphone, a NAS for archiving purposes, etc. Yet, I’m not really good at audio or video production, and it’s very time-consuming for me. I would certainly learn a lot while working hard at this. Moreover, should I do this in my native language which is French or do it in English, which I’m not perfectly fluent with? Maybe I could try to do it together with other podcasters (I know a few of them). Too many questions, not many answers.

Photo credit: Will Francis on Unsplash.

War Games

🇺🇦 It’s fascinating how the war in Ukraine makes me think about many video games. Let me explain. Looking at some Telegram channels feeding the results of attacks with anti-tank missiles or other means. You’ll find many short video clips with music and animation while a tank is destroyed. It makes things look like they aren’t real, only a game, which is far from the case for obvious reasons. Yet, there is the gamification of some aspects of what is filtering out of this ugly and devastating war. 😟

BTW, many tidbits flowing on Telegram are utterly disgusting. Is this the first war to feel so close to the action?

When the coalition attacked Iraq during the Gulf War, I remember people saying it was the first war to be televised. The war in Ukraine is probably the first one made public on social media.

Weekly Posts Digest from Numeric Citizen Microblog

It’s Was So Fun

This weekend I did some cleanup in my old papers and documents. I found an old bank account statement where I can see a withdraw transaction to help me pay for my Macintosh 128K in 1985: 3460.75 CAN$. 🤑 Ouch. I did some research to better document the time when I had a Macintosh SE while studying at the university and remembered about using Think Pascal, Prototyper and ResEdit to build a floppy disks indexer. That was before the Internet. It was so much fun. It’s gives you an idea how old I am. 😜

2022-04-03

When Apple Pivoted

Thanks to MacRumors, as reported today, I didn’t know today was the fifth anniversary of a special meeting between Apple’s top brass and select journalists to talk about Apple’s plans with the pro users and their commitment to the Mac.

At the time, we didn’t know how serious Apple’s upcoming pivot would be. In retrospective, Apple delivered and then some. It is simply a tour-de-force to flip the Mac product line upside down and bring power efficient, mighty and beautiful Mac designs. The Mac transition to Apple Silicon is probably the most important change to come to the Mac line since its inception in 1984.

I can’t wait to see what the next ten years will be made of.

2022-04-05

Two quick questions: how do you cope with what’s happening in Ukraine? Are you watching the news?
2022-04-05