Weeknotes: 3/17/24-3/23/24

This week:

• It was Hartwick’s Spring break, so things were a bit quiet around here.

• I spent the time putting up some Anna Richards Brewster paintings for an upcoming exhibit.

• I did some logistical work for our upcoming talk by Neal Powless. We’ve gotten a good buzz and we’ve moved to a larger venue to accommodate!

• I also did some more work on repatriation, both in meeting with tribal reps, and working on a grant to get objects and ancestors back home where they belong.

• I finished reading “Trouble Boys: The Real Story of the Replacements”, which is an incredibly detailed rock biography about one of the great unsung bands of the 1980s. It makes clear that the Replacements were a working class rock and roll band, all of whom came from essentially tragic circumstances, and whom the record industry of the 1980s treated with either ignorance or outright predatory maliciousness. There’s something both heroic and tragic in frontman Paul Westerberg’s quote that opens the book, stating that the band was the only future available to them, outside of “jail, death or janitor”. Mostly, the book made me revisit the music, which is sloppy, fun rock and roll that and in some cases reaches sublimity.

• Sunday, we took a quick jaunt up to Utica to do a little shopping. We ate great Greek food at Symeon’s which has become a regular stop for us when we’re up in Utica.

• I’ve now a Light Phone 2 for a month. Its advertising tag is that it’s “designed to be used as little as possible”, and it’s essentially an up-market “dumbphone” with little to no internet or apps attached. The concessions it makes to 21st century devices are a podcast aggregator, a music player, and a maps/navigation feature. I’ve gone back and forth from smartphones to feature phones in the past, and I’m fairly happy with this new minimalist phone and hope it will stick in the future.

  Things I like about it:

  • It’s small and very light, especially compared to the android brick I used to carry around.
  • Call quality is good, maybe even better than my last android phone.
  • Interface is intuitive with everything is basically right where you want it.
  • The e-ink screen is very easy to see and read

  Things I don’t like:

  • It can be a little quirky. It’s sometimes slow to respond, and you have to write texts on a small, thumb keyboard very slowly to get anything legible. The maps app is better for plan-ahead navigation that actual turn-by-turn navigation.
  • Battery life is pretty abysmal–I need to charge it about every other day–but that seems to be a common criticism of the device and something the developers are working on.
  • I also miss taking pictures with my phone, but it’s made me use my good Olympus camera more, so there’s an upside there too!