Thursday miscellanea #355

• Returning to Facebook has been a lot of fun. Other than that, I’d return this week for a full refund. Sick and stressed are two of my least favorite adjectives.
• I haven’t predicted a lot of scores in public lately, but I’ll offer one for the Alabama-LSU game. I don’t think the Tide front stops Fournette, but hopefully it will bottle him up enough to hold production down. Alabama needs some mistake-free offense to win, and I think they’ll get it. Alabama 27, LSU 23
• The official release of Windows 10 Mobile has been pushed yet again, so I went and tried the latest Insider build. Custom text tones are not supported, and that’s a deal-breaker. So, back to Windows Phone 8.1 again. Admittedly I’m not a software engineer, but I don’t understand how stupid little crap like that stays broken for builds on end. Even with something as disruptive as moving to a common code base across Windows platforms, wouldn’t the code for such a function be pretty similar no matter where it lived? (And simple?)
• So speaking of texts and a good application for a unique tone, do you know about Nixle? Nixle alerts come primarily from public safety offices, like police and fire departments. It’s the realest real-time there is when it comes to learning of traffic accidents and such. Text your ZIP code to 888777 to sign up. (And use a little siren for the text tone.)
• We’ve not yet had any unpleasant experiences with Aldi’s squirrelly little brands no one’s ever heard of. The barbecue potato chips are the only item I’ve tried that I think is a step down from what we usually buy (Lay’s if Lea’s shopping; Golden Flake if I am). They taste all right; just a little too smoky.
• Battering Ram is a step back for Saxon. It’s not bad, but the six Saxon studio albums beginning with 2001’s Killing Ground and ending with 2013’s Sacrifice have been somewhere between excellent and outstanding. It was inevitable that a Saxon record would eventually find the preceding run a contextual liability.
• Several films that I wanted to see on a big screen have come and gone in the past few months. We can’t let that happen with the new Star Wars movie. Aaron wants a refresher of Episodes I – VI first, because he says he was too little when he saw them to remember them well. We can do that! (Maybe I’ll even break out the VHS and show him Han Solo shooting first…)

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