Friday Funiculars

I love a good funicular.

A few things I’ve been musing about … nothing which warrants a stand alone post. Happy Friday!

Do you realize how much you rely on Face ID?

Here’s some idiotic advice - don’t break the camera at the top of your screen. That’s not really advice because unless you’re a complete maniac this isn’t something you’d do on purpose, but I’m here to tell you there are screen cracks…and then there’s this.

Last week, my phone - which had a very strong case (shielding the SIDES of the device) slipped off my desk at work, landing face down on the bolt of the table. I saw it fall in slow motion and heard a slapping sound upon impact.

My phone is my camera, so this isn’t MY screen. But please know that there are no worse places for your screen to crack if you drop your iPhone.

Yep, the screen was cracked, across the entire top half. But the true damage happened at the top of that screen, where the camera is used for things like FaceID. Absolutely shattered, to the point that using that authentication stopped working immediately. Let me tell you, for me it was almost everything. Half the applications I use that require login are set to that - all of that can be worked around, but it IS a pain.

Then there are things that cannot be worked around. Logging into my work email or Teams requires an authentication that demands FaceID.

FaceID is so cool…until it won’t work.

I went to get the screen fixed, and immediately discovered that a) My Apple Care had expired and b) My Verizon care had also expired. Which meant I had to pay for a new screen which was just not a smart decision given the cost of getting a new iPhone. (But, really, don’t be like me - get coverage from Apple or your cellphone provider, these screens are too easy to crack.)

You know what ELSE you can’t do, normally, without FaceID? Wipe your old phone and set it up to be returned. At one point, Verizon suggested I replace the screen after all so that I could return it. (Um, no. That’s how we got here.)

Fortunately, someone at the Apple Store noted that you can do this old-style. If you connect your phone to a MacBook, you’ll get an opportunity to restore it via that route - which does not require FaceID. It took awhile, but I got there.

This is not my info, but this is where you’ll end up." “Restore iPhone” got me where I needed to be.

So if you, too, find yourself without FaceID and trying to wipe your phone clean, this is how you do it.

What’s on TV?

Like a lot of folks, we recently discovered Dept Q on Netflix and absolutely raced through it. We are, in general, big fans of detective shows and this one - despite having some similar tropes to most of these shows - had at least two genuinely surprising twists and turns, and was just chock full of great performances and writing.

I’m pretty excited that this is based on a series of novels, which means we should see future seasons in the future.

Raffy Big Stick Comes To The City

I have been a San Francisco Giants fan for literally forty years at this point. The first season I really started going to games was 1985, the lone year they lost 100 games. I had season tickets for maybe 15 years at the new ballpark, and saw all three World Series. Good stuff - but I won’t pretend to be a huge BASEBALL fan, at least not in the way I’m a football fan AND a 49ers fan.

This is all to say that I certainly knew who Rafael Devers was before the trade, but not so much that I didn’t have to gauge the reaction to the trade from both Giants and Red Sox fans. The consensus from BOTH sides seems to be that the Red Sox giving up on a hitter the caliber of Devers is hard to fathom, let alone the mechanics of the trade - as Boston apparently didn’t shop around with any other teams, echoing the Dallas Mavericks trade of Luka Doncic to the Lakers.

Listen, if the trade is being discussed like that, and I’m on the “Luka/Lakers” side of a deal, I’m happy. And it’s huge for the Giants, who have been winning despite a lack of consistent power hitting, relying a lot on targeted clutch hitting and excellent pitching. In Devers, they get:

• A nine-year veteran who is somehow still just 28 years old, signed through 2033. (That’s just one year older than Vladmir Guerrero, Jr. for reference.)

• A hitter whose 162-game average looks like this: .269 BA, 33 HR, 107 RBI, with 175 hits each season.

• Someone who can play 1B or 3B as well as of course be a DH.

This last part is the complicated part - to hear the Red Sox say it, Devers didn’t want to play 1B, wasn’t a clubhouse leader and … I’m sure there has to be some truth to that. But upon arrival in San Francisco, he said he’d be happy to play anywhere. That likely means rotating at 1B and DH with Wilmer Flores, and that’s a huge improvement for the offense.

These are the kinds of swings, pun not really intended, that you have to make if you want to be a contender - and GM Buster Posey just hasn’t been shy at all thus far in his first full season. Signing Willy Adames (who has started to find his swing just prior to this acquisition), making this trade (and evaluating what it means to give up on Kyle Harrison and recent first round pick James Dibbs, as well as Jordan Hicks)…it’s just what you WANT to see. Posey said about a month ago that as a player, he LOVED when the Giants traded for Carlos Beltran, even when that meant giving up on Zack Wheeler who has turned into an even better pitcher than any rabid Giants fan could have feared. It was the “we’re going for it” mentality that he liked, and you can only control so much about how it works out.

If you miss on some of these, move on - this is a historic franchise that has the bankroll to do things like this - and they are doing it. And the fact is, Rafael Devers is a San Francisco Giant for the foreseeable future. For years and years. That’s fairly great.