Anne's gonna be out of town for the next few days, so I get to live in bachelor mode. It's a good to take a break every now and then n try to catch up on a lot of the little things that I don't get to while she's around. I'd have gone with her but I've got so much up in the air with a couple of clients thought it was better for me to stay home. Plus she could go without us having to worry about Frosty or taking care of the garden. Quite frankly, since I've been under employed for a bit, I'm not sure I deserve a vacation, who deserves a vacation from under earning?

I've gotten into the habit while she's out of town of sleeping on the couch.   I started doing it a few years ago while she was caring for her father at his house. The boiler at the co-op was having issues, so the apartment was often under 60°. I'd run a space heater during the day to keep the living room warm and livable. I didn't want to run one at night while I was sleeping for safety reasons. Also, if I spent the day warming up the living room, I didn't want to stop using that room and retreat to the bedroom at night and warm up a second room. It's the same over the summer I don't wanna spend the day cooling off the living room only to retrieve to the bedroom and cool off a second room.

The big issue when she's gone, is that I tend to eat less healthy. In my head it's too much effort to cook for myself, I'll gladly cook for us but cooking for myself just feels like too much work when I can fry up a quick burger, throw on a TV dinner in the microwave or open a can of something, food that I'd never serve while she was around.

 I was surprised to find out that the Yankees were off today. I remember in the days when I was younger that on the three summer holidays: Memorial Day, Independence Day, and  Labor Day baseball teams would play single-admission day time double headers. Fathers would take their sons for a long day at the park.  As a New Yorker, I have to admit that I was spoiled. It was always a home team since the Yankees tend to be home when the Mets are away and vice versa there is always a home game for one of our teams.  Nowadays, it's like any other day in the summer if it falls right on the calendar you'll have a game, it might be a day game it might be a night game. No difference at all compared to the game on July 1 or August 15.

 It's not just baseball that's different, it's everything. Stores used to close early if they were open at all. Whenever I point out that stores are now open holidays and open later on those days, someone will point out to me that if EMS workers or the military need to work on these days everyone should work. I'll growing up my dad worked for Con Edison, and as you can imagine he would often not be off on holidays they said he needed electricity 24/7 and he was a part of the process that delivered safe electricity to homes in the city.  This meant that they were years that we celebrated Christmas on December 26 had Thanksgiving dinner at 11 AM and sometimes my Grandfather would have to step in for him to go to the game on some of the summer holidays. So I understand that sacrifices sometimes need to be made by essential workers. But it's not a sacrifice, if everyone does it for mundane reasons.

As a technologist, I'm on call every day of the year. As I like to say I'm only off on the days that the Internet is closed. When I woke up this morning, I checked the service as responsible for, made sure the sites that I'm responsible for our are up and then I can go about my day. However I try to find a way to respect the holiday, no matter what holiday it is. I like to reflect on the meeting of the day, try to find ways to connect with people.

TLDR:  I’m looking at my options for a new machine.  I’m debating a MacBook Pro vs a Mac Studio.

 In January of 2021, my 2015 MacBook Pro died.  I was in the middle of a large project for John Deere and needed to replace it, quickly The Apple’s M1 had just come out, so I didn’t want to pick up an older Intel Mac but everyone knew that the M1 MacBook Pro was on the horizon which is the machine I was waiting on.   So I go the MacBook Air with 16 gig of RAM add a terabyte of SSD, since that model was in stock, and I needed that day to work on the project

The new machine has treated me well over the last year and a half. I've been amazed at how well a machine without a fan performs, it is the fastest machine I have owned. It does about 95% of what I need and a development machine. The problem is of course that other 5%. I'm trying to get swapped over to using Docker and Lando for the local development. For a few of the larger sites I manage I'm running out of memory when using updating the site using  Composer in Docker.  I work around it, I'll build sites outside of Docker, sometimes instead of local development I'll do\ development on a remote server. Both of these work but they're a pain in the ass and not efficient. Generally speaking when I buy a machine I try to hold onto it for seven years, but when I bought this machine I knew that wouldn't be the case. So I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing next.

It's interesting for the past 20 years, I've always owned laptops. I've wanted the flexibility of being able to work from my home office and be able to easily work at a client site when necessary.  But the world has changed, even developers who are full-time employees are more likely to be working from home then going into an office. In the 18 months or so that I've owned this laptop it spent the majority of its time and clamshell mode hooked up to a Thunderbolt Display I could've saved a few bucks and bought a Mac Mini and been just as happy.

So I'm sitting here evaluating my options. Since the guts of the M1 Max MacBook Pros are the same as the guts of the M1 Max Mac Studios, I have an interesting debate in my head.  By all reports, there's little difference in the performance of the MacBook Pro M1 Max and the Mac Studio M1 Max, so I'm not giving up anything if I take the laptop over the desktop (I figured that enhanced thermals in the studio would've allowed Apple to overclock processor, they're not doing that).

I've gone through the effort of specking 3 machines: a Mac studio, a 14” MacBook Pro, and a 16” MacBook Pro all with the lower end M1 Max, 64 GB Ram, one terabyte of storage.  The 14” is $900 more, the 16” is $1100 more.  Either way an increase of about 50%.  Given my quinquagenarian eyes, I’d get the 16”.,

 If I decide to get the Studio, I can keep the MacBook Air, and use it when I need to be on site or when I travel. I also have an added benefit with the studio that I can probably eliminate the home server from the network. I have an older Mac of mine sitting under the television set working as a media server, file server, home automation server. There's no reason I couldn't put those drives onto the Studio, and use it for both purposes, and save a few bucks on electricity.  I can also use some of the money I saved to upgrade my monitor, something 30”, maybe with an 21 x 9 aspect ratio might be better for my needs.

 On the other hand, if I decide to go with the laptop, I can sell the MacBook Air and use the money I received from that to offset some of the difference in cost.  And I have the flexibility of working more efficiently on site if the world changes back to the way it was two and a half years ago. Of course, if I miss out on one opportunity because it harder to work on-site, buying the laptop is immediately worth it.

The goal of course, is a machine that will last seven or so years. I'm trying to figure out how to get the best ROI out of this purchase and be prepared for the future.