Author: wwlawyer

A couple of highlights from things I’ve heard today. As I posted earlier, a client texted me this morning and after discussing his case, told me he hopes but I have a good social support system considering the stressful nature of what I do for a living, and of course I didn’t have much to…

“What if we could somehow limit voting to only people who could demonstrate actual understanding of the relevant issues and policies? Wouldn’t that be a solution to our toxic politics?” Arguably, it might be, and I found myself thinking about that a lot recently. Unfortunately, something nominally similar was tried once in the US, and…

I spent two hours on the phone with Apple today, and their techs cannot answer the following question: What conditions need to be met for my photos in the Photos app to upload to iCloud at full speed? I asked three senior technicians and not one was able to give me a clear answer. There…

I am rereading Dune, in light of my general personal crisis of feeling out of control about the world around me being too far lost to have hope of my making a difference. I’m trying to figure out why the story makes me feel so good and in essence, it is this idea that it…

Long overdue update. This is a place I call Jackson Acres. It’s my home in West Virginia, for a little over a year now. It’s been an incredibly eventful year in my life. I haven’t truly been settled down by any stretch of the imagination, spending on balance less than half of the past year…

I had a frustrating conversation recently. And sure, my fault. Anyway, I’ve got this friend who to me looks like they’ve got all of the symptoms of a new and growing syndrome of despair arising from social media manipulation. I don’t believe that there is a clinical term for it yet. But here’s the phenomenon:…

One major frustration that I ran into during the RV trip was digital storage. During the course of the trip, I shot enough photos and videos to fill up all the storage I had with me, including my 4tb MacBook Pro, my 2tb iPad, my 512gb iPhone, and the one external drive I had with…

Day one review of the 15 Pro Max: In short, yeah, it’s good. The dynamic island is way more of a benefit than I expected it to be. It certainly wasn’t the only possible way to accomplish this, but they made things like phone calls more unobtrusive (the old active call dialogue obscured much more…

Been a while since posting about the “homestead.” To catch you up: Last summer the circumstances of my life aligned to make moving out of Buffalo financially feasible for me. Basically, the housing market was so hot that I didn’t even have to bother making my house marketable or even fully cleaning it out. I…

This should not be possible. Behold, a Notification Center full only of spam push notifications. Each of these apps needs push notifications for a legitimate reason because of how the app is designed to work. Uber to let me know when my ride arrives, the fast food to let me know when my order is…

Perhaps my greatest disappointment along the journey of scientific discovery was when I learned the truth about what’s next in human evolution. What comes after humans? Science fiction and speculation has given us all sorts of exciting things. Trans-humanism ideas like mind transfer into immortal computers. Or maybe just super intelligent AI. Maybe genetic modification…

I tried to set this up so that my friends could easily create accounts to comment. But as always happens with spam protection efforts, it turns out that while the hackers have no problem getting around the spam protection measures to create accounts for unknown malice, my actual friends report that nobody can figure it…

As a whitewater kayaker, I am estimated to be one of around 50,000 Americans with that hobby/skill set. Apparently, that’s quite close to the number of published authors. So arguably, this next project is no harder to get into, statistically, than one of the other things I’ve already done.

Apple, 2015: “We’re introducing USB-C charging for our laptops. Soon all of your Apple devices will just use one connector to charge. It’ll be great. Apple, 2017: Oh, hey, we’re introducing wireless charging. You can now use three different connectors to charge your Apple devices, none of which interoperate across multiple device categories. You’re welcome.…

I’m back at Jackson Acres getting into I guess fast four now. Got back on Thursday evening, and now it is Sunday. I haven’t left the property at all since, despite being overdue to appear at the river and get some groceries. Anyway, the plan was and is to spend my time here doing the…

I suppose arguably today was day one of the “sit down and commit to writing” part.  I got down more than the Stephen King guideline of 2000 words.  Close to 3000, when all was said and done, and it started quite literally with me saying to myself, around 9 pm, I need to write something…

AITA for re-gifting a sentimental graduation present from a deceased relative? I graduated Law School over 10 years ago and my father gave me an interesting but kind of strange gift. At an antique store, he found an old brass balance scale that happened to have an eagle on top of it, and I guess…

I can’t believe the phone captured this so well. It’s the sort of sight that hovers easily in my imagination, yet that I as a photographer always struggle to capture. Yet the sort of thing I feel a lot of authors can capture better than a photograph. How would that go? On this cloudy moonless…

Note: This is actually a cross-post from my post to Apple’s user support forum on the topic, a place I expect to now start contributing in lieu of /r/applehelp. —- This is kind of bordering more on an article than a question at this point. I’ve tried everything including long discussions with AppleCare. As far…

I have come to the conclusion that essentially all social media is inherently toxic. I feel a moral problem myself with posting to social media at all, because even if I do everything in my power to keep my content healthy, to the other side it simply serves as bait to assist social media companies…

I’m getting reports, on Facebook, that people are getting a spam page when they try to click to this site. I think it’s a Facebook issue, but my sysadmin is also helping me look at the WordPress side. The issue with WordPress is that, it turns out, keeping it safe from hackers and spam is…

It’s surprisingly tough to talk about human nature in a venue with a comments section. Why? Simple. Because the comments will almost always be dominated by “this doesn’t apply to me” comments. But the beauty is that almost always, the “this doesn’t apply to me” commenters will usually include a hilariously non-self-aware explanation for why…