Watching My Health

I’ve been using my Apple Watch for long enough now that it feels like I can better evaluate how useful it has been for health monitoring.

Activity

The ‘three rings’ method of activity tracking is still only partly-useful. The calorie and exercise rings are generous to the point where just walking to and from work each day easily completes them, so I don’t pay much attention to those two.

The stand counter is more useful, but still has quirks. It’s inconsistent about what it counts as ‘standing’, so plenty of days it’ll hit the goal even though a lot of the ‘stand hours’ were just me waving my arm around doing whatever, not actually standing up. I wish there was a way to adjust the sensitivity so that it required more activity to count as a ‘stand’, but lacking that, I’ve tried to compensate for this a bit by bumping the goal up to 14 times per day from the default 12.

It’s also a bit weird how the tracking is based on whether you stood up or not within a certain one hour period, which leaves it open to edge cases, like if I get up and do some stuff in the kitchen at 1:58pm for a few minutes, it’ll wind up counting that as two ‘stand’ events, for the 1-2pm and 2-3pm blocks, and then it won’t complain about needing to stand again for almost two hours after that. I think I was expecting it to be more like “if it’s been an hour since the last time you stood, notify you” whenever that time happens to be.

It kinda feels like that if you want to be more serious about activity tracking, you’re probably going to want a different, more specialized app for that.

Heart

I’ve done ECG readings now and then, and none of them (or the passive monitoring) have indicated any afib risk, so that’s a good sign at least. Heart rate seems alright, and the blood oxygen readings are still highly variable, but at least still within a fairly consistent range and trend.

There’s also a ‘Cardio Fitness’ evaluation of my VO2 max level, but I’m not sure how much to trust this. I obviously didn’t actually cram a sensor into my lungs, so it’s just extrapolating this based on heart rate, walking pace, and probably a bunch of training data and ML, so who knows how accurate it is. I can’t say it’s wrong though, as it does rate me as ‘Below Average’ and I do get a bit short of breath while walking…

Apparently there are blood pressure cuffs that can integrate with Apple Health to let you track that as well, so I might have to check that out.

Sleep

This was one of the main things I was interested in, and…I’m still not sure what to make of it yet. The sleep stage charts are interesting, but I’m not sure what to do with them. Yeah, one day the chart will show that I was awake too much and didn’t get good sleep, but I already kinda knew that, based on how I felt like crap that morning! Yeah, I didn’t get enough ‘core’ sleep one night, but…what do I do to fix that? *shrug*

The ‘breathing disturbances’ chart has been more interesting though, as I’ve seen a lot more variability and actual patterns there.

It immediately started off highly elevated, which was a bit concerning, but also made a bit of sense. Immediately after getting the watch I went and visited my mom, and had to sleep on a rather uncomfortable cot. As soon as I got home I caught a cold, so it was a bit difficult to breathe at night. Then it settled down to ‘not elevated’ for a while, but then I’ve been a bit sick for the last couple weeks, leading to more breathing trouble at night, and all of this pretty roughly correlates with the above graph. It was even a bit of advance warning, as I saw a spike in the graph one day before I actually started feeling sick.

So, the ‘elevated’ levels here probably aren’t sleep apnea, at least. But I still kind of worry about it at my weight, so I’ll continue to keep an eye on this chart.

Miscellaneous

There are also a bunch of other stats it tracks that I wasn’t expecting, like ambient environmental sound level, walking asymmetry and steadiness, stride length, stairs climbed, etc. Nothing in them seems to be worth worrying about right now, but it’s kind of neat to check on them once in a while just out of curiosity.

Overall it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but it’s useful enough that I’ll continue checking these stats just to make sure nothing starts trending in unexpected directions, at least.

The Briefest Revisit

I needed to use my previously-deactivated Facebook account to help my mother set up Facebook Messenger for dumb reasons, and I was able to log into Messenger, so I guess my account was not quite fully deactivated but still in that Deactivated Except Messenger (DEMA) state.

Except that things in DEMA are a bit…wonky. Trying to search for new contacts didn’t give me the list of filtering fields to narrow them down. Opening the “control your visibility to others” option took me to a Facebook login that doesn’t actually reactivate my account, but gave me an extremely-stripped-down Facebook interface that didn’t actually let me adjust any settings. All of the instructions I could find about adding contacts refer to fields and menu options that just weren’t there.

In the end I wound up having to fully reactivate my Facebook account just so I could actually add a new contact to Messenger. And, having been exposed to the full Facebook UI and feed, I am now depressed again. Hopefully it doesn’t take too long to get my mother’s stuff sorted out so I can deactivate it again ASAP.

Sick Stats

I wish I could say more about how the new watch is working out now that I’ve had a chance to use it for a few more weeks, but…it’s been a chaotic time. Immediately after the last post, I went to visit my mom for the holidays for a while, and slept on a cot that was rather uncomfortable. And then, as soon as I got home I caught a bad cold, which I’m still recovering from. The result is that the stats the watch has collected for sleep states and breathing disturbances are just all over the place, thanks to a lot of shifting around uncomfortably and coughing up a lung. Hopefully things should return to normal soon and then I can start seeing stable data.

I am trying to start doing long walks regularly again though, and here I ran into a bit of a conflict. I’ve previously used the Runmeter app to collect data for these walks, and I’m still using it since it collects a lot more detail than the built-in workout tracking does. The built-in workout tracking does by default try and detect when you’ve started a walk though, and pops up with a “hey, do you want to track this as a workout session?” prompt even when I’ve already got Runmeter going.

For a couple of times I figured I’d let it do so since hey, the more data the better. But, then at the end of the walk I now have two apps I have to toggle off on the fiddly little watch interface. The built-in workout app also struggles a bit to decide on exactly when the walk started — it’ll look back in time to try and figure out when the walk started, but it was often off by 5-6 minutes, probably counting a bunch of stuff like walking around in the apartment and getting dressed for outdoors, putting on shoes, etc. as part of the walk. I could manually start the built-in workout at the right time, but honestly, it wasn’t really adding anything of value that Runmeter wasn’t already tracking, so I just disabled the automatic start detection of the built-in workout app. The ‘exercise’ portion of the daily ring tracking increases whether it gets formally logged as a workout or not anyway.

Watch This

So, I have an Apple Watch now. No, I didn’t feel a sudden need to check what time it is a few seconds faster (though ironically it does help because my new iPhone is a bit bulkier and a bit more awkward to pull out of the pocket).

I was primarily interested in getting something to help with general health and fitness monitoring. The Apple Watch wasn’t the only option here, as there are various other devices from Fitbit, Garmin, and other more fitness-oriented brands. After looking at various reviews and recommendations though, they all seemed about equivalent functionality-wise (there’s only so much you can do with a sensor package on your wrist, something to keep in mind when considering the accuracy of anything here), and I’m already tied into the Apple ecosystem, so what the heck, the Apple Watch it is.

Wearing It

It felt a bit weird to be wearing something on my wrist again, after decades of not having a watch, but it didn’t take long for that feeling to go away, and sleeping with it on hasn’t been a problem either. The crown is kind of awkward to turn though, but that might be partly due to my dumb fat fingers, and fortunately it’s not needed a lot since swiping up and down on the face usually works as well.

I probably would have liked the strap to be just a little longer, though. It’s fine on my wrist, but taking it off requires squeezing my hand an uncomfortable amount. Just a couple extra millimetres would probably have helped a lot. It’s not enough to bother taking it back and getting a longer strap though, for that small a difference.

So far the battery has been lasting about two days, in my usage. A bit disappointing compared to the other competing devices, many of which could go a full week, but it shouldn’t be too bad in practice. Most days I’ll have to take it off for the morning shower anyway, and that’s long enough to charge it to full.

Activity Tracking

One of the first things you notice is that it’ll start pestering you about doing certain activities, and standing in particular. There was a bit of configuration of this in the initial setup, but I kinda just rushed through and left most of it at the defaults. With that, it’ll track three metrics on a daily basis: calories burned, minutes exercised, and times standing up and moving around. I’m kind of skeptical about the first two; I have no idea how it’s tracking calories, and it seems pretty generous about what it considers exercise.

The standing tracking is useful though, as I’m prone to getting into long binges of just sitting at the computer. If my watch notices that I haven’t stood up in a while, it’ll ding and tap me on the wrist and display a reminder, and then I have to actually get up and walk around a bit to increment the counter towards the daily goal. Intrusive, but I do really need to get up and stretch more often. I just wish there was an option to ‘snooze’ the reminder, so it reminds me again in 5 minutes or so, in case the notification happens to come up in the middle of something that can’t be interrupted. It also sometimes seems to think that I’ve stood up when I actually haven’t, but maybe I’m just flailing my arms around too much while gaming…

Sleep

One of the features I’m really interested in is the sleep tracking, since lately it’s been feeling like I’m not getting the best sleep. You set the start and end times for when you usually sleep, wear the watch to bed, and in the morning you can review various stats. I’m not very consistent about exactly when I head to bed, or when I wake up on the weekends, but it seems to be able to handle variations in that well enough. You have to keep in mind that it’s not going to be 100% accurate (again, only so much you can do with just a sensor pack on your wrist), but it’s supposedly one of the most accurate of the current field of watches/wristbands.

I am a bit surprised with the data collected so far, though. It feels like my sleep lately hasn’t been so great, but most of these days the stats look pretty normal. There are nights where I wake up too often, but it doesn’t seem to last long at least? I’ll have to learn a bit more about how to interpret the results.

I’m also a bit skeptical of data like this:

where it looks like I fell asleep immediately, but I know that I didn’t, and just lay there for a long while before finally falling asleep. I guess I was staying still enough that it got interpreted as sleep? How much of that ‘deep sleep’ was just me lying there trying to doze off? Did that throw off the results somehow and that’s why there was no other ‘deep’ sleep recorded, or did I actually miss out on deep sleep that night? I’m not sure, and I guess it’ll take some more testing and seeing how I feel lines up with what the stats say. (Though it probably doesn’t help that I’ve been full of sugar from holiday snacking…)

It also claims to be able to notify me of sleep apnea events, which is something that I’m also concerned about. It tracks respiration rate and ‘breathing disturbances’, but the stats for that seem fine, and I haven’t gotten any warning alerts so far.

BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD

As you may recall from previous articles, I’m also a bit concerned about my heart, and it can track some stats related to that. Heart rate is a pretty simple one that anything can track nowadays, but it’s interesting to see the trend data for it. There are times where I thought my heart was beating rapidly, but upon actual measurement, it’s within perfectly normal range.

It also claims to be able to measure blood oxygenation level, but there are some caveats to it. Individual readings can vary quite a bit, so the general recommendation I’ve seen is to not pay much attention to those single readings, so don’t freak out if I do a sampling and it comes up at 93%, but to look at the overall trend line, which so far is staying in a pretty safe 93-100% range.

The star of the show is the ability to take ECG readings, though. It’s a very limited ECG since it’s only one-point, but it’s still supposed to be able to detect potential atrial fibrillation from that. It’s not continuous detection, unfortunately, which would apparently be impractical due to needing you to touch the crown and the battery drain it would cause, but it’s better than nothing. It’s kind of reassuring to feel a slight chest twinge, fire up the ECG app, and see that no, my ECG hasn’t turned into a big scribble.

Again, due to the limits of what it can measure and interpret, all of these should not be considered comprehensive proof that things are guaranteed to be fine and healthy, but it’s still nice to have a potential way of warning me. Consider it the SMART data for my body.

Apps

And of course, as an Apple Watch, there are numerous other apps available to do various other things. I haven’t looked into these too deeply yet, as I don’t really have an urgent need to play games or music or write texts or whatever from my wrist. Maybe later.

Overall, although I do have some skepticism about the data, it does seem like it will actually be useful. I need to get back into my walking routine, so we’ll see what kind of data I can collect from that as well. Worth the cost? Eh, hard to say, if cost is a major concern for someone, many of the other devices on the market will probably do just as well and cost a lot less.

Fresh Apples

My iPhone 7 has served well, but it’s falling behind on updates now and the battery is…finicky…so it was about time for an upgrade, and I picked up a shiny new iPhone 16 Pro today. Expensive, but when you only upgrade every, uh, nine years, the cost-over-time’s not so bad.

Setting it up was not without some difficulties, though. I wanted to do a backup of the iPhone 7 first, but the options were limited. They really want you to back up to iCloud, but nah, I’m not putting all my phone’s data in the cloud. The other option is to back up to a computer, which is what I had been doing before, but the laptop I previously used for that no longer worked, and I didn’t have a cable that would allow my new(er) laptop to connect to the phone; the laptop only has USB-C and I only had a USB-2-to-Lightning cable. Fortunately, I also got a multiport adapter when I got the new phone, which allowed me to set up a USB-C -> USB 2 -> Lightning connection to the phone.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work very reliably. I could see the phone in Finder, and start a backup, but within a couple minutes it would always fail with an error about the phone being disconnected. I thought it might have been the phone going into lock mode, but even setting it to stay open permanently didn’t help. I guess going through the multiport adapter introduces some kind of flakiness or incompatibility? *shrug* I wasn’t about to spend $25 for a brand-new USB-C-to-Lightning cable that I’d use exactly once and never again, though. In the end I wound up doing the backup on my Windows 10 gaming PC. Not where I’d prefer to keep that data, but at least the backup worked perfectly the first time, even if it did mean installing ye olde iTunes.

With the old phone backed up, I could then start the phone-to-phone transfer, and that actually went pretty smoothly, using the Quick Start that comes up when you use the new phone for the first time. The only things that didn’t carry over were some authenticator apps. Some of those I could restore from the cloud, others I’ll have to manually switch while I still have access to the app on the old phone.

But there was a slight hiccup here, too: moving the phone number over. It tries to as part of the migration, but for some “incompatibility” reason it couldn’t do it automatically with my old phone. Bringing up the Telus app on the old phone and using a “Migrate your SIM” option gave me some choices on how to do it, but it took some trial-and-error. The option to transfer the SIM to an Apple device took me to a page with a bunch of instructions that only work if the old phone is still a relatively recent model. The option to transfer the SIM to an eSIM QR code voucher seemed promising, since the new phone can use eSIMs, but it wanted me to buy a voucher, with a delivery time of 5-10 days…wait, what? It apparently would have sent me a physical card in the mail with a QR code on it. That seems…unnecessary, besides there being a postal strike going on at the moment. But upon revisiting the first method, I noticed it had the option of entering an ‘EID’ instead of going to the instructions, and after a bit of searching, I did indeed find an EID for the new phone in the tiniest print possible. Upon entering that, the phone number moved to the new phone fairly quickly, and all was well.

So, I’ve got the new phone basically back to the same level of setup as the old phone, and I’ll have to fiddle with it some more, see what’s new, what’s better, etc. And I have one other thing to set up, though I haven’t even opened it yet. Yes, I finally caved, and after decades of not wearing one at all and scoffing at the idea, I will soon be…an Apple Watch wearer.

Getting Spicy In Here

I have an old iPhone 4 that I was keeping around since it’s the only way I could play a lot of the old 32-bit iOS games that I bought long ago. I kept it hooked up to a USB port to charge, and today I heard it make a sound and reset, which it does once in a while. Upon picking it up and taking a closer look, though, I noticed that the case had cracked open. Yup, the battery was swelling (the ol’ “spicy pillow” as some people call it) and had pushed the case apart.

Honestly, I’d rarely ever gone back and actually played any of those games, so at this point it’s not really worth replacing the battery and getting it repaired. So, I just did a factory reset to wipe it and put it aside to be taken down for recycling at some point.

That reminded me that I still needed to finish cleaning up my old MacBook Pro, which had been sitting languishing in a corner ever since I replaced it. It’s broken in various ways, but I still wanted to at least wipe the drive. I fired it up…and found that I couldn’t log in because I couldn’t remember the password. I thought it was the same one I’m still using on the new system, but I guess not! The other option is to boot from one of the install DVDs and run Disk Utility from there, but I found the discs, put one in, booted, and it ground away for a bit and then just spit the disc out. Guess I can add the DVD drive to the list of parts broken on this thing…

Fine, as a last resort I can just open it up, take the drive out, and ‘dd’ it full of zeroes from my Linux box. I popped it open, managed to get the drive out, and in the process I noticed that the battery in it is also swelling a bit! Which might explain why the trackpad was feeling so stiff since the battery’s right underneath it.

And this is all in addition to my old Android tablet, which also developed a spicy battery and cracked the case earlier this year. Now I just have to get around to actually taking these in somewhere…

Update: Took the laptop and iPhone (and another even older laptop) down to the Apple Store and dropped them off there for recycling, so it’s just the Android tablet left now.

Hunt The Download

I’m sure we’re all familiar with those download sites riddled with ads that put up their own fake ‘Download’ buttons, but this one takes the cake.

I went to download something, clicked on the one I wanted in the list of packages, it did a ‘Your download will start in…’ countdown, and then…no download started. The area I had just clicked on did get replaced by a big box with one of those fake download ads, though. The package I’d clicked on had been scrolled down the page to below this box, and I clicked on it again, and this time I got a popup window with a Download button…that said ‘Ad’ in the title bar.

I finally noticed that at the bottom of the page there was a “Do you accept this site’s cookies…” prompt and an OK button. Fair enough, they might want me to agree to that before allowing downloads, but that bar hadn’t appeared until after I’d clicked to start the download. And now, trying to navigate to it, I couldn’t actually press it because there was another partially-transparent fake Download ad layered on top of that prompt, where you might inadvertently click on the fake ad part depending on your window size.

After finding the teeny little ‘X’ to dismiss that ad, and agreeing to the prompt, and re-clicking the package again, I finally actually got the download I wanted.

I know these sites have to sustain themselves somehow, but ad fakery to this degree ought to be illegal.

Save Money, Spend Time

I’ve gotten a lot of value out of Humble Bundle’s ebook bundles, which have let me cheaply amass a library of good books and comics that it’ll take me ages to get through. But I do have a few minor complaints…

  1. It feels like I spend more time fixing up metadata than actually reading them. Books tend to be okay, but the comics are usually missing metadata entirely aside from the title, which is in a compressed format like “dropsofgodvol12.pdf”. Calibre at least has some tools to let you batch convert titles like that into a more reasonable form, but then I still have to fill in the author, artists, genre, etc.
  2. You can get the books in various formats, but often it’ll present a choice between like a 150 MB PDF, a 254 MB EPUB, and a 18 MB CBZ. Is there a significant quality difference between them? I typically would grab the CBZ for comics, but this CBZ is suspiciously small, so is it very poor quality? Sometimes the bigger file is the higher-quality one, but sometimes it’s just unnecessarily bloated, too. The only way to be sure is to download them all and compare, and which one is best is often different from book to book.
  3. The ‘batch downloader’ is kind of a joke since it just automatically kicks off an avalanche of individual downloads, which causes a flood of popups to confirm the save location. Some of them inevitably fail to download properly, so I still have to go through manually and verify and redownload them. There’s a bittorrent option, but it’s still a separate torrent file for each book that you have to download.

Some of this might just be my urge to keep things organized, and it’s definitely still worth it to get the bundles, though.

Possibly Crazy

The complex my mother lives in has suffered from bed bug infestations before, so as a matter of course they do some occasional checking of the units for any new signs of bugs. A couple months ago, my mother called me to warn me that they’d found something and treated her unit.

Now apparently it was due to finding just a single spot on her sheets, which isn’t definitive proof of anything, but they did the treatment anyway just as a precaution, since it could have possibly been a sign of bed bugs. Since she’d just travelled to Vancouver recently, she could have possibly picked some up on that trip. It could have possibly been a hotel she stayed at, and since I was on the trip and stayed at the same hotels as well, I could possibly have picked some up and brought them back with me, too.

Now that’s a lot of possiblys, so there’s only a chance I could possibly have bed bugs as well (it’s not even proven that she actually had them to begin with), so I started keeping an eye out for any potential signs of them. And now, about four months after the trip and a couple months of checking the sheets and mattress and some traps, I haven’t seen any definitive signs of them yet, so that’s a pretty good indication that I don’t have them, right?

If only it were that easy to convince the stupid brain…

It’s easy to put the mind into overdrive about possibilities and become paranoid. Oh no, I see a spot on the sheets! …oh, that’s just lint; I tend to wear dark-coloured sleepwear. Oh no, I feel an itch at night! …like I always do in the dry winter climate; I get those itches all day long too, but it’s a lot easier to notice them when you’re lying there trying to blank your mind. Oh no, a tiny little egg-shaped speck! …that crumbles in my fingers because there’s a ton of little bits of random crud everywhere, really. Oh no, spots on my skin! …and I’ve long been prone to random breakouts of acne and rashes, especially again in the winter and when I’ve been eating poorly like I have lately. There’s a ton of ordinary things that make that fear instantly resurface, so it’s never long out of my mind.

And then even when I can recognize all of the above as paranoia, there’s still the lingering thought that, logically, it’s still not proof there aren’t any bugs… They’re sneaky little buggers, I might just not be looking hard enough, the signs could just be hidden away, and how would I even tell if there was an actual bite among the acne, and maybe there’s a secret colony that’s just getting bigger and bigger and… Even getting something like a sniffer dog wouldn’t necessarily help; from what I’ve read there’s still enough of a margin of error to leave lingering doubt of a false negative, and a false positive would be a massive expense and hassle.

There isn’t really any way to prove they aren’t there but for enough time to pass, so the mental war rages on…

Virtual Ride

I wrote before about how it was fairly painless to get around Vancouver by bus thanks to their Compass card system, and when I went to visit my mom, I discovered that Edmonton is doing something very similar with their Arc card system. The weather here lately has made using the ticket machines a bit tricky though, so I finally looked into Calgary’s system, and it…went a different path.

In Calgary’s system, instead of a physical card, you have to use a smartphone app. In the app, you purchase ‘virtual tickets’ ahead of time, and then just before you get on the bus or train, you have to ‘activate’ a ticket in the app. If you’re getting on a bus, you then have to show the QR code the app displays to a scanner on the bus. This is…a bit less convenient than just tapping a card.

You also can’t just load up on a bunch of tickets or put $x into it ahead of time. The virtual tickets expire after only 7 days if you haven’t used them, and you can only buy 5 at a time, so you’re likely going to have to make purchases of them on a regular basis. This then becomes yet another app that wants to hold on to your credit card details for your convenience. (It’s supposed to integrate with ApplePay too, but I’ve had separate troubles getting that working.)

It works, but it’s not great. I guess after several aborted attempts to come up with their own homegrown system, Calgary Transit just gave up and went “look, we’ll just use…those guys” and picked a service already operating in some other cities.

Personal Logistics

I recently took a trip with my mother to Vancouver Island, both to take care of some family business out there and to do a bit of sight-seeing. The main challenge of the trip, though, was just getting around; neither my mother nor I drive, and we needed to get to multiple locations around both the island and the mainland, so just how does one get around a place like that without a car? The obvious ways are taxis, buses, rideshare, and good ol’ walking, but it took a bit of planning to make it all work.

When we arrived in Nanaimo, we needed to get to Duncan. There is a bus between them, but it was already later in the day, and I wanted to make sure we got to the hotel before check-in closed, so we just grabbed a taxi. At over $100 this was by far the most expensive option, so I didn’t want to do this too often, but I just wanted to get there ASAP.

My mom’s mobility is a bit limited these days, but fortunately Duncan itself is fairly small, so walking around was perfectly viable for the places that we needed to reach within Duncan. We also needed to get out to a business in Maple Bay though, and that was way too far to walk, but there’s a bus system within Duncan that runs out that way. I never carry exact change anymore, but we could buy tickets from local shops for the bus and use those instead, so that was no problem. We also wanted to visit Chemainus, and the buses even ran all the way up there.

We needed to get to Tofino next, and that was a bit trickier since it’s a good 3-4 hour trip, so the local bus and taxis weren’t an option. Fortunately there are a couple of other bus services that run up and down the island (the Vancouver Island Connector, and Island Link), and we could take those right to and from Tofino. There’s a gotcha, though: they don’t run every day of the week. I had already booked the hotel in Tofino before I realized that there was no bus at all coming back the day we checked out, so I had to scramble to adjust the booking to ensure we’d be leaving on a day where there would actually be a bus. Scheduling these ahead of time is essential just to make sure you can even get a seat; one of my biggest fears was something going wrong with the booking or the buses somehow and being stranded in Tofino with no easy way back.

Tofino is also a pretty small town that’s extremely walkable, with one exception. We were staying close to the ‘downtown’ section, and the beaches are actually pretty far from there. Within walking distance for me, but not for my mom. Normally there would be a free shuttle bus that would be able to take you pretty close to some of them, but our timing was bad: it stops running for the year at the start of September. So, we wound up calling a taxi to get to and from the beach. Turns out that there’s only one taxi in Tofino, just one car operated by one guy, so we got to see him both directions and chatted a bunch about the area.

We also wanted to stop in Vancouver for a bit to see some family, so we took the bus back to Nanaimo and took the ferry over to the mainland. I was initially uncertain how to handle things from there on, since the ferry drops you off at Horseshoe Bay, a ways away from the city proper, but it turned out to be easier than expected. Horseshoe Bay, West Vancouver, North Vancouver, and Vancouver itself are basically one big integrated transit system, and there were buses going right from Horseshoe Bay all the way downtown, where our hotel was. The only glitch was that I didn’t want to drag our luggage through a transfer onto a second, busier bus for the final leg, so we wound up walking through downtown a bit farther than I’d liked. Dragging two pieces of luggage. Uphill. (I’d forgotten how hilly Vancouver is.) I kind of wish I’d picked a hotel a little bit closer to the ‘main’ bus routes, but I didn’t book as early as I should have so my options were limited.

Getting around Vancouver to see the family was also fairly painless. Again, no exact change, but I was able to use my contactless debit card on any bus, and I bought a pre-loaded ‘Compass card’ for my mom so she just needed to swipe it. Way easier than what we’re trying to roll out in Calgary, where you have to manage and activate virtual ‘tickets’ in a mobile app. Figuring out the routes to take was easy enough through Google Maps, which had a surprising amount of detail about exactly where the buses were. And there wasn’t too much waiting at any point, even though we wound up getting dragged across both West and North Vancouver to chase some of the family down (don’t ask)…

And then on the last day we could simply take the SkyTrain all the way from downtown right out to the airport, where we flew home. So, in the end we only needed to take taxis three times, and managed to bus it the rest of the time. Going into the trip I had a lot of anxiety about successfully navigating all of this, but in the end it was actually a lot easier than expected.

Meet Bob

I occasionally have to work on integrating with APIs for various user directory services, and as part of that I have to create a bunch of fake users with silly names for testing.

These services are also rather hungry for you to sign up for their more advanced/larger volume services though, and some of them are not beyond trying to contact users to try and upsell those services. So, every once in a while, I’ll get an email that literally says “Hello Bob Testuser, I’d like to discuss how we can help you in the mobile space…”

Well, That Was Fun

I had my little heart incident last year and haven’t really talked about it since, but throughout 2022 I did a lot of exercising, started eating better, and gradually felt better. By the end of the year I was pretty much feeling back to normal (aside from the bout of COVID). And then 2023 started…

Soon after the start of 2023 I started getting those weird trembling-but-not-really sensations in my legs again, but not consistently; they’d come and go a lot. Over the last month or two I started being able to feel my pulse a lot more strongly, where I’d be aware of it a lot more than I normally would be and could feel it pounding away at night and against my skin in more places. Plus, it felt more erratic at times, suddenly speeding up and slowing back down again for no apparent reason. Along with that my head felt a little, well, not really dizzy or light-headed, but slightly ‘off-kilter’.

And then yesterday, at work, it all kind of hit me at once, as besides all of the above hitting a strong point, I started feeling some tension in my chest and some occasional twinges of pain in my left arm. That was it, I was somewhat actually scared now, I couldn’t put it off any longer and had to get this checked out now, and headed to the ER.

Once at the ER there was a lot of waiting involved because, well, as great as universal health care is, we still perpetually underfund it, and I had to stand around for about an hour in line just to get to the triage assessment. While in line I was feeling bad enough that I started to wonder what would happen if I just collapsed right there in line, but I got through it and they immediately did an ECG after registering me (they do ECGs for a lot of cases, but suspected cardiac cases get to jump the line on that). More waiting until I got called into the back, where they installed an IV, took some blood work, and then a lot more waiting interrupted by checks on vitals and a couple more blood draws.

Eventually, about seven hours later, I got to see the doctor, who took more information, did a physical check, and then he had to inform me that…my heart is doing fine. Sounded fine, the ECG looked fine, the blood work came back fine (slightly above-normal troponin levels, but nowhere near worrying), my heart is actually in a lot better shape than I’d expected.

So, that was kind of a wasted trip, but it’s also a big relief. I still don’t know what the actual problems I’ve been experiencing are caused by yet; I’ll have to seek a more general diagnosis on that with a regular doctor to see if it’s something besides general Getting Olditis. But it’s not my ticker about to explode, at least.

(The doc was pretty cool and we talked for a while about general fitness and exercise and nutrition and such and he had some good advice without being judgy about it. To the point where I suddenly realized that oh jeez, I’ve been tying up this ER doctor’s valuable time blathering on about the shift between WFH and returning to the office and such and I should probably let him get back to work…)

Unnaturally Clean

This is the first week since the pandemic started that I’ll have actually gotten up, showered, and gone to the office all five days of the week. When we were fully work-from-home, why even bother showering more than two or three times a week when you’re not even going to see another person for days at a time, and even when we had to start coming into the office once or twice a week, it doesn’t matter as much when there are only going to be two people there.

So, things are “normal”, I guess. I can still technically work-from-home three times a week, but for the new stuff I’m working on now it really does help to have the beefier multi-monitor PC at the office rather than the single-screen potato I’m currently using at home.

Trying to do things “normally” still feels weird, though. Having to get back to a more rigid wake-up schedule, not having the freedom to take mid-day walks anymore, having to arrange lunch ahead of time instead of just grabbing something from the fridge… I used to do all these things for decades before, but it feels foreign now.

Where Does The Time Go

My new MacBook came with a three month trial of Apple TV. I wouldn’t normally consider subscribing to it since there’s not a lot of stuff on there I’m interested in, but there are a few intriguing-looking shows (Severance, Foundation, For All Mankind), so I figured that I’d just use the free trial period to binge the ones I want and then cancel.

The free trial period is just about to end. Number of episodes I’ve watched of anything on Apple TV: 0

It’s not really Apple TV’s fault, as the same thing is happening with Netflix, really. It often just feels like I don’t have the free time to just sit and watch episodes of something, or I figure I’ll watch it ‘soon’ and that ‘soon’ just never materializes. But at the same time I’ll binge a bunch of random junk on Youtube, including true crime recaps, video essayists, disaster documentaries, video game LPs, etc…

I guess the difference is that the Youtube stuff is a lot more bite-sized and low-investment, something where I can just throw on a random video and when it’s done that’s it, whereas an ongoing TV or streaming series feels like more of an investment I have to be prepared for, so I keep putting it off until I feel more ‘ready’ to take it in. Maybe I just need to set aside a specific time slot specifically for catching up on streaming shows.

Through QA’s Eyes

I have had zero luck getting anyone to take my bug reports seriously lately.

“Hey, your scanning tool throws an error and fails to generate any output when I scan this particular application.”
“Yeah, the archive file contains a file with an invalid filename on Windows. Closed as WONTFIX.”
You’re not even going to try to work around the problem, skip just that one file, so it can at least still scan the rest? I don’t control that app, that came from somewhere else, but I’m stuck with it and it’s my builds that now fail because your scanner can’t handle it.

“Just FYI, your checkout process is a little weird because it wouldn’t let me get past the shipping address until I changed the province to something else and back again, even though the default province was the correct one.”
“Yeah, that’s just how that dropdown control works by default, and we want to make sure people actively make a selection, not accidentally leave it on the default value. Closed as WONTFIX.”
If you want to force people to make a selection, then don’t let the default selection be a valid choice that forces people in Alberta to do an extra little dance, make it “Please select a province:” or such. The default behaviour of the control doesn’t matter, these things are within your power to change!

I wonder if this is how the QA department sees me…

Don’t Call Me

“Oh hey, my old landline number is still in my Paypal profile, I should remove that.
…
There’s no option to remove it…”

Turns out that you *have* to have both a Primary Mobile and Primary Home number, and you can’t remove a Primary number. So, what you wind up having to do is add your mobile number *again* as a Home number, make it the Primary Home number, and then you can remove the old landline number, so you wind up with the same number listed twice.

This is not good UI design, guys!

Hitting The Streets, Again

I need to get back in the habit of walking again. Things like holidays have a good chance of derailing habits like that, as I spend time travelling and not doing them regularly for a while, and then when I get back I have to force myself back into doing it. The last couple of weeks I’ve only been doing it once every other day or so, which isn’t quite enough. Especially since the holiday overindulgences have caught up with me and I’m feeling some of those old symptoms again…

But I also need to step up the intensity a bit, as it felt like I’d kind of plateaued before. So, today I extended the walk out to include the 14th Street bridge as well, which added about 15-17 minutes to the walk, for a total of about 65 minutes and 6.2km. It also adds some steeper climbs onto the bridge; only brief ones, but it helps get the heart rate up early on. The walks are getting long enough that I’m going to have to queue up some longer podcasts or something though, so I feel like I’m still being a bit more productive mentally as well, not just physically.

The new route also takes me along some paths I’ve never taken before, and it’s weird how strange and new they feel when they’re right next to areas I’ve traversed for ages now. It also gets me some under-the-bridge sights I’ve never seen from these perspectives before: