So that's November done. It got dark around 4:30 today and I had the heat on before 6pm, which feels like some kind of surrender, but here we are. My apartment has one radiator that works and one that just ticks ominously and does nothing, and I've been meaning to call the landlord about it since basically October. I will probably still not have called by December 31st. Some things about me never change.
Anyway, month in review, mostly because I said I'd start doing these back in September and then completely forgot for two months.
Apps I actually used this month
Instapaper is still the one app I open every single day without thinking about it. I've got something like 40 articles queued up and I read maybe 2 a day, so the backlog just grows, but that's fine, that's what it's for. Tweetbot got an update that I liked a lot better than the last one — the swipe gestures finally feel like they're not fighting me.
I also spent way too long messing with Kindle for iPhone after my brother got an actual Kindle Fire ($199, he ordered it the day it showed up on Amazon back on the 15th) and started sending me screenshots of it running Angry Birds like that was a normal thing to be proud of. It's fine, apparently. Kind of chunky. He likes it more than I expected him to.
Siri, on my sister's 4S, is still mostly a party trick two months out from launch. She asked it to set a timer at Thanksgiving dinner and it worked, everyone clapped, and then nobody used it again for the rest of the night. I don't have a 4S. I'm still on my 3GS, which is embarrassing to type out loud, but the contract math doesn't work for me until next year.
Things I learned
I finally sat down and actually learned how jQuery's .on() method replaces .live() and .bind(), mostly because I was patching up an old side project and the console was yelling deprecation warnings at me. jQuery 1.7 came out a couple weeks ago and apparently this has been the "right" way to do things for a bit now and I was just behind. Also poked at jQuery Mobile 1.0 for about an hour on a Saturday, decided the page transitions were kind of janky on anything that isn't a brand new phone, and closed the tab. Maybe later.
The bigger thing I learned this month: don't install carrier-pushed anything on your phone without reading what it does first. All the Carrier IQ stuff that blew up the last week or so — the logging software sitting on a huge number of phones, apparently able to see keystrokes and text messages depending on who you ask — has had me going through settings menus on every device in the house like a paranoid person. I don't fully know what's true yet and honestly neither does anyone else right now, but it's the kind of story that makes you want to read the fine print for once.
Also tried Ubuntu 11.10 on an old laptop this month, mostly out of curiosity after all the noise about Unity. I get why people are mad. It's not bad exactly, it's just very insistent about doing things its way, and I kept hunting for buttons that used to be somewhere else. Went back to Windows on that machine within a week. Sorry, Ubuntu people, I wanted to like it more than I did.
The complaint, as promised
It's cold. Not interesting-cold, not first-snow-of-the-year cold, just the boring gray kind where you put on a jacket to go get the mail and immediately regret every choice that led you outside. I complained about this exact thing in my post back in like February and I'm sure I'll complain about it again in about three months, so, sorry, recurring feature I guess.
That's November. Going to go find a blanket.