Labor Day today, which in practice meant I spent way too much time at my desk anyway, just without the excuse of it being a "workday." Funny how that goes. The laptop was supposed to stay closed till at least noon. It did not.
What actually happened is I opened up the blog's drafts folder for the first time in months and found thirteen unpublished posts going back to 2013. Thirteen. Some of them are just a title and one sentence ("why does everyone hate RSS now, more on this later" - never got to the "more on this later," apparently). One is a nearly-finished rant about Google Reader that I clearly abandoned once the shutdown stopped being news. I'm not publishing any of them as-is, but I did copy a couple of paragraphs into a new note because a few of the jokes still hold up, which felt like a weird kind of time travel for a Monday morning.
Anyway. The actual reason I opened the laptop was that Apple's invite for the September 9th event landed in my inbox Tuesday morning, "Glowtime," swirly gradient logo and everything, and I've been half-thinking about it since. New iPhones, presumably new Watches, the usual September choreography. I have zero inside info and I'm not going to pretend otherwise like half the tech blogs do this time of year with their "sources familiar with the matter" nonsense. What I will say is I'm mildly annoyed that the invite itself became a two-day news cycle. It's a picture of a glowing Apple logo. People wrote six hundred words analyzing the color gradient. I get that's the job for some folks, but from the outside it's a little much for what amounts to a save-the-date card.
I'm also going to say the quiet part: I've been on the same phone for going on three years now and I don't feel the itch this year that I usually do. Battery's still fine. Camera's still fine. The thing I actually want improved is completely boring - I want the flashlight toggle to stop requiring two taps when my hands are cold, that's it, that's my whole wishlist, and no keynote is going to address it.
Also worth saying, because it's been sitting in the back of my head all week: the two NASA astronauts who went up on Starliner back in June are still on the ISS, and it sounds like they're going to be up there a lot longer than the eight days everyone originally planned for. I don't have anything smart to add to that beyond it being a genuinely wild situation to just be casually true right now - two people at work, except work is low Earth orbit, and the ride home got cancelled. I keep thinking about how that would sit with me personally, showing up somewhere for an eight day trip and finding out sometime later it's now an eight month trip. Put a pin in that one, I'm sure it'll be a bigger story once there's an actual return date.
Back to the drafts folder, because that's really what today was about. I deleted about half of them outright - stuff that was clearly just me thinking out loud in 2016 about whatever framework was hot that week (remember when everyone was rewriting their blog in Jekyll? I rewrote mine in Jekyll. Twice.). The other half I'm keeping around, unpublished, on purpose, because I've decided the drafts folder is basically a compost heap and not everything needs to become a finished post to have been worth writing. That's a very "thirteen years into running a blog" thing to say, I realize.
One small logistical thing before I go make lunch: I moved the site's RSS feed generation to run off a cron job instead of triggering on publish, mostly because I got tired of the feed occasionally double-posting an entry when I'd edit a typo within a minute of hitting publish. Small fix, nobody but me will notice, but it's been bugging me since maybe March and it took four lines of config to actually solve. Sometimes the backlog item you've been avoiding is the easy one and you just haven't sat down with it.
Grilling something for dinner tonight, weather's actually decent for once. Back to normal posting later this week.