Various things of very little interest.

[seryn]

Gel polish lasted almost a week. I peeled up one fingernail's worth today, 6 days after getting it done. Totally a better product than regular polish if you're not a fancy girl.

They dried each layer with this blacklight thing. I'm wondering if it's required or just speeds things up. Because it's kind of a pain to have to go out somewhere to get your nails painted every 5-6 days. On the plus side, I didn't bite any nails. There were no dried crunchy cuticle corners that have to be clipped if you don't want to pull on them until your fingers bleed. Obviously for me if I want to have good looking (even if they're short, maybe I mean "not bleeding and raw" as my definition of "good") fingernails, I'm going to have to have this done a lot more often than every 6 months.

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Giving people advice kind of sucks if they can't take it. Because then it makes them feel like you won't want to know them anymore and they've lost a friend or an acquaintance that might be a friend at some future point. It made me not want to talk to anyone anymore, ever. It's actually the anti-supportive, also, please stop that.

Next, all of you who tried to be generic about your advice, telling me to take care of myself, this isn't about you.

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I have something I like. Tech books that come with a code to get an ebook version if you buy the paper.

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Something I don't really like, Namaste's Bitty Bag... the strap keeps it from being openable while you're holding it. The flap that gets stuck is almost completely useless. The strap is "adjustable" but if you set it on anything but the largest setting, you can only open the bag if you set it down and pull the strap out of the way. Plus the strap is lumpy at the buckle, so they really should have just picked a length. It's like they didn't see the mini-messenger bag before they designed this. It is really mediocre. I've had better bags from Kmart. They could have made the flap a quarter that size with angled corners. This wouldn't have changed the functionality of the flap but would have had a massive improvement in the usability of the bag while it's hanging on your arm. Also, interior elastic straps for water bottles are stupid. The bottle doesn't fit in there when it's full and it's LOUD to move it around when it's part-empty. The bag also has no pen slots. Personally I would also like an outside book pocket and this bag doesn't have any pockets like that. The pockets are all flat like for people who need 6 different kinds of business cards to hand out to people who are all extremely patient while the bag holder arranges the strap, touches the bottom of the bag (ew!!), unzips an ill-placed pocket, and pulls out a card from a slovenly pile of mildly mangled cardstock. This is NOT a bag designed by the same people who did the mini-messenger, it's clearly someone's early attempts before they understood what features are important.

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I found an ice cream shop. It's next to a pizza place I have a groupon for. I invited two friends to come with me and they both insisted on a particular day. But even though I said "all of us" were going, they didn't ask if that day was good for anyone else, just insisted that "Tuesday" is the only day or "Wednesday" is the best time. They both tried to pin me down to agreeing with them. I'm kind of thinking they can get stuffed and I'll go for pizza by myself. There's a minimum purchase, but nothing saying I can't order enough food for 4 and take the rest with me.

It was strange because I don't usually run into the problem where women friends are forceful. Normally my female friends are so wibbly it can take a week to set logistics.

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I'm finding myself dismayed by all the women wearing dresses. I see them everywhere now. I get people wondering how I can stand not having hair since it detracts from my femininity. I've had people tell me that I should get flats that have a "bit of a heel to them" so I look more womanly.

I'm just old enough that I remember when it was shocking for a married woman to have a job. And the neighbor lady was not allowed to wear trousers to work. People who say the pendulum swung too far are wrong. We had equality and it turns out a lot of women missed getting special treatment. Men don't hold doors open for women in jeans.

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I went to the Apple store last week. I can't figure it out. iPads are HEAVY. Like picking up a kitten and finding out that it's actually rock kind of disproportionately heavy. You couldn't possibly hold that in one hand and use it with the other. There doesn't appear to be a stylus or a handwriting app. The screen is also very shiny, which meant I wasn't able to see the demo video (which is, oddly, only a quarter-screen size black and white claymation thing---the kind of video that would look okay on my phone now and does nothing to make use of the extra screen space or those fancy colors it touts in the ads) because of the overhead lights. So. Can't use it indoors if your desk has overhead fluorescents, can't use it outdoors, exactly where can you use it? I'd seen people using them at a talk recently and they seemed really useful. Small thing that allowed silent typing without being a huge issue when people needed in and out of the aisles. (unlike the people with 17" laptops) But after holding one at the store, you'd need a year of buffing up at the gym before you could do that while listening, scooting out of the way, and not dropping your coffee.

Are there things out there that show video decently and can take handwriting input and record it (whether it OCRs is optional at this stage)? It needs to run for most of a day of light use.

Also, it turns out that you can't just touch your iPhone, iPad and Macbook together and have them clone content across your posse of devices. You can't say, "Phone should get calendar and email and music but not documents or video. Pad should get all phone content plus video and documents but these should be curated by use and recency." There is no automagic sharing even if you buy all Apple devices. It would still be just as much of a pain in the neck as if you bought an iPhone and wanted to run iTunes on a 5 year old laptop. (At that age, iTunes is actually poisonous to windows laptops, just so you know.)

I wasn't impressed with the iPhone 4S either. It's clunky. It's slow to load data (even demo data that you'd think they'd pre-cache). And for all their touted ease of use, I found it fairly opaque with no accessible help utility. The iPad had a getting started app which explained how to open and close apps and how to find the menu again and how to get the on-screen keyboard to show up. So it might be a matter of training the user. I did like that the phone was feasible to hold in your hand. I've been having problems with some of the Android phones that look like runt-sized tablets. I can't imagine holding that up to my face for an hourlong conversation.

It was weird because the Apple people didn't seem to want to sell anything. You're either an iPerson where you've come in knowing what you want and will beg to be allowed to purchase or you're not. But it's not worth their time to actually explain anything to me. Admittedly I don't wear a dress and heels so maybe I don't look like I have the money. It no longer surprises me that AT&T had an exclusive contract for the iPhone. I got the same treatment from AT&T as I did at the Apple store, like they thought they were too good for me and my money.

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