Weekend!

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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37 Responses

  1. Will Truman says:

    I finally reached my boiling point with Apex Launcher, on my Android phone. In addition to the regular crashes , I’m increasingly losing functionality. Across multiple devices (though worse with Lollipop than on the others).

    So I’m back to Nova Launcher, which is what I used previously. (I’d only found and switched to Apex because Nova didn’t make the transition to KitKat very well.) I had to sacrifice a feature that only Apex seems to be able to do, but I’m working around it.

    Specifically, Apex lets you set different grid patterns based on whether or not its in profile or landscape. That allowed me to have one screen dedicated to car functionality and designed to be put on its side in Landscape, while the rest was meant to be in Portrait. What I’m doing is actually losing a separate launcher app for horizonal (car) use. It’s not ideal, but I am being reminded that there are things that Nova has always done better than Apex. So even if Apex fixed itself – and I find out – I may stick with Nova.Report

  2. Slade the Leveller says:

    Off to my annual minor league baseball weekend with my son. This is our 10th trip, and first above A ball. Bats, Clippers, and Indians, with golf and a bit of sightseeing thrown in. It’s a weekend I look forward to all year.Report

  3. Burt Likko says:

    Dinner guests Saturday. Nine holes Sunday morning before it gets too hot, then brewing.Report

    • Slade the Leveller in reply to Burt Likko says:

      What is this too hot for golf you speak of?Report

    • Francis in reply to Burt Likko says:

      Supporting the existence of golf courses in the desert? tsk tsk.

      (my bet is that the course is irrigated with reclaimed non-potable water so it’s not quite so much an environmental crime. but still, it would probably be a better use to scrape out recharge basins near Edwards AFB and not lose quite so much water to evapo-transpiration.)

      (although, i was reading john fleck’s blog, and apparently some water district [IID?] discovered that recharging water through vegetation worked better than on bare dirt. this actually makes sense as the root systems provide a path for water to get through the fines that clog up the surface. so, who knows? alfalfa farming or even worse a golf course could be coming to a recharge basin near you.)

      As for my weekend, well, after saying goodbye to my 13-year old dog about a month ago, my six-year old decided to play too rough and tore her cruciate ligament. To the vet we go for a consult to schedule orthopedic surgery. Pets! Cheaper than kids, but still… Then maybe the Orange County Fair for a binge on fairground food.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Francis says:

        So sorry about the dog. It’s a peculiar wound when a beloved pet leaves the family.

        As for the water on the golf course, yeah, that’s some nasty stuff. The ducks and the bullfrogs love it, though.Report

  4. Maribou says:

    Soooo much planning and packing. Then I have to get to the airport at 0 dark thirty so I can arrive at my destination by the NEXT 0 dark thirty. Sigh.

    But the week AFTER the weekend should be pretty awesome, with beaches and family dinners and reading and playing with nieces and the provincial exhibition. One hopes.Report

  5. Road Scholar says:

    Closing in on home for the weekend. Delivery in Denver then beg, whine, plead, and wheedle my way eastward for my scheduled (!) home-time. It’s always kind of a complicated pain in the tush due to where I live relative to the terminal locations and freight corridors, but made much more fun this time by the fact of my Driver Leader (direct supervisor), who’s job it is to run interference on this sort of thing, being on vacation this week and the office drones generally being understaffed.

    Anyway it’s my oldest daughter’s birthday (Monday, but close enough) and I hope to share a drink or three with her. Adult children can be a lot of fun.Report

  6. Alan Scott says:

    My cousin and her wife just officially adopted their daughters (after a year of being their foster parents). They are having a celebration at/through their temple in Berkeley on Sunday, and the extended family is invited. I’m also going to spend the night before at my friends’ house in the Silicon Valley–folks that decided to be grown up and move away from their college town when they graduated, and who I don’t get to see enough of these days.Report

  7. Michael Cain says:

    In Omaha for my niece’s wedding. Spent yesterday driving from Denver with my almost-two-year-old granddaughter, who was terrific. To the zoo today, then the wedding tomorrow, and drive home on Sunday.Report

    • Chris in reply to Michael Cain says:

      Sounds like a wonderful weekend.Report

    • The zoo trip could have been better — they’re in full construction mode for a new 24-acre “African plains” exhibit right in the heart of the zoo, so it’s a long hike around the perimeter to see everything. The wedding and reception were very nice.

      The almost-two-year-old (birthday this week) was amazing throughout. She trudged — at her own insistence, seldom taking up the offered rides on shoulders or her stroller — for miles through the zoo, remarking at length on all of the sights, although much of it is still in her own dialect of English. At the raptors, though, she was quite clear about “Don’t hurt eagles. Cars hurt eagles. Too many cars.” When I looked at my daughter, her response was, “Yes, she’s apparently going to be a hippie.” The granddaughter stayed up long past her regular bedtime at the wedding reception, dancing her little heart out.Report

  8. Reformed Republican says:

    I understand about baching it. Over the summer, my son was back in Florida to visit his mom and his grandparents, leaving me with the house to myself. That meant that, in the evenings, I was watching Archer instead of anime while eating dinner. Such an exciting life. It also meant I had to mow the lawn myself, since he was not there to do it. Not sure that tradeoff was worth it.

    Friday nights had been the night my fiancee and I would watch Lucha Underground, but season 1 has ended, so we are done with that. We will start watching NXT together instead.

    Saturday, we plan to go to the Natural Science Museum.

    Sunday, no plans.Report

  9. dragonfrog says:

    To a friend’s place out of town for his daughter’s first birthday, where we’ll be camping in their country “yard” (something like what I’d think of as a “vast park” compared to our city “yard”).

    Consequently the weekend is mostly out for going to see any plays at the Fringe festival – we’ll just have to be cleverer about finding time during the week.

    I got to do a bit of batching it last weekend, including a bit of a hike with a friend (I found some fossils!), and watching an entire movie that would be uninteresting to a child. It was a nice little change of pace.Report

  10. Morat20 says:

    Work, playing Fallout Shelter a bit (finally on Android), and hopefully not stressing over some new issues.

    On a totally unrelated note to that, one day I hope to find a nice, talkative lawyer and ask about the ethics courses they take and the legal ethics they adhere to. (Not snark, I know they take those classes and have professional codes they’re supposed to hew to). Because I look at, say, the proliferation of personal injury lawyers (had a car accident recently? Expect half a dozen letters in the mail from them) and some of the horror stories I’ve heard and wonder….is it the lawyer or the client?

    Because I know — I’ve seen — people who were in minor car accidents deciding that meant they won the lottery (heck, I’ve even personally seen someone with soft-tissue injuries alone asking a court for 200k. For a glancing 25 mph fender bender. Not even rear ended!). Is that a negotiating tactic? A client thinking a few bruises means he or she is set for a decade? A lawyer who is just throwing mud at insurance companies, figuring if even 5% pay 10 or 15k it’s well worth his time?

    Because I’ve also seen someone who got a 130k settlement from a car accident. She was in ICU for weeks, in the hospital for another month, lost a spleen and had permanent spinal damage. She had broken bones, and bruises in places so deep they didn’t fade for months. I got no problem with that. It settled her bills and the months she couldn’t work — pretty much just that, in fact. (I was a little appalled that there was no pain and suffering, in the end). But 100k for weeks in the ICU, for loss of organs, for months in the hospital and more months unable to work and undergoing physical therapy — that at least makes sense. She was hit at 70+mph, flipped upside down, and hit again. They cut her out of her car, broken and bleeding.

    100k for someone who was walking around after a fender bender, clearly talking to a lawyer while the dust was still settling? That doesn’t feel quite so…obvious.

    I’ve never actually met with a personal injury lawyer. Never had to sue anyone. Never had to be in court for anything but jury duties or tickets. But one minor fender bender with the wrong person, and I might end up there. And I’d wonder about the other person — and their lawyer. Who is asking for the moon here?Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to Morat20 says:

      Well, I’m a lawyer and perhaps I can help you.

      What you ask for is not necessarily what you expect. In some jurisdictions (like, say, California) there are rules about how you take judgments. You must put a defendant on notice that you intend to demand “up to” X dollars from a court.* Once you do that, your damages are capped at X because you’ve said, yourself, that this is the full amount of your claim. If you don’t state the amount at all, then you can’t proceed to get a default judgment in the event the defendant doesn’t answer. You may not reasonably expect that you’re going to get X. But you never know because things might happen that the lawyer who writes this document wasn’t aware of or didn’t fully appreciate when the document got written.

      For instance, let’s say that you’ve got something more serious than a soft tissue injury coming out of an auto collision. Broken bone. Needed reduction in surgery before it got patched up. Lawyer gets hired fairly quickly (because that’s how these things go and I have some gripes with that but that’s not your question) so the lawyer knows “I’ve got a sure-fire liability collision, an an open reduction on a broken bone. That’s six to ten weeks before my client can go back to work, a surgery and two days inpatient care, so hard damages of around $50,000 in medical bills and maybe as much as $10,000 in lost earnings.” Using the traditional valuation of three-times-specials to compute general damages (aka “pain and suffering”, although that characterization is inaccurate through underinclusiveness) you get a total anticipated value of $240,000 to that claim.

      What the lawyer can’t know is that staphylococcus got into the patient’s bone marrow during the surgery. Yes, the hospital and the physicians may very well have direct responsibility for it, but the auto collision set that chain of events in motion, so it’s up to that defendant to come into court and argue “independent, superceding, and unforeseaable subsequent causation” as an affirmative defense. And they either succeed in that or run up against the doctrine of “you take your victim as you find her.”

      Anyway, a staph infection in bone marrow might take some time before it manifests and grows malignant, and now you’ve got a patient with a seriously compromised immune system, a body that is literally rotting from the inside out until some pretty powerful medicine gets deployed to stop it (if it gets identified and applied in time, and if it’s effective). So now you’re looking at lifetime injuries, if not death. Much higher damage profile than you were looking at before, which was a serious broken bone.

      That would really be a million-dollar claim.

      And you’ve gone and put the defendant on notice that the value of your claim is less than a quarter of a million dollars, for no reason other than good optics to third parties. Now, you’ve just shortchanged your client out of three quarters of a million dollars. That’s legal malpractice, buddy, and you’re on the hook for it, buddy.

      Same thing might apply, probably with a less dramatic scope, in a soft tissue injury case arising out of a low-impact collision, like the kind of case you’re discussing above.

      That’s why I phrase the purpose of the statement of damages as advising the defendant that the plaintiff will claim “up to” a certain amount of money — “up to” includes all smaller amounts, but excludes all larger amounts. Meanwhile, there is functionally zero disincentive to putting in $10,000,000 in the box on that form, even if you expect that the claim is worth $240,000 dripping wet based on what you know at the time you fill out the form. So someone reads this form and says, “Holy cow! How can she possibly ask for that much money based on an accident like this? It’s just a broken bone out of a run-of-the-mill accident, she hasn’t won the lottery! Frivolous lawsuit! Greedy, unethical lawyers! Harrumph, harrumph, harrumph!”

      It’s quite likely the case when you read that paperwork that there is some cocktail of a) this dynamic of caution, b) there are facts at play which you don’t know, and c) standardized practice based on the cautionary principle above at play.

      The result has bad optics, I know. The reality of it is that it’s very unlikely in a soft tissue, low-impact case that the plaintiff or her lawyer actually expect to recover seven figures.

      * At least in California, in a personal injury case, that demand may not be included in the complaint itself at all. CCP § 425.10(b). It’s served on the defendant in a separate document called a “statement of damages” which is typically not filed with the court except in the event of the plaintiff taking a default judgment. In other states, including Tennessee where I practiced for a while, the amount of the demand is in the complaint, but again, the cautionary dynamic is sort of forced on the lawyer by the rules: you can understate your client’s actual damages in a filing and get the recovery capped and thus commit malpractice, or you can overstate your client’s damages in a filing and maybe scare some people but avoid liability to your own client after the real value of the case becomes apparent, and leave yourself the ability to settle or get a judgment for the actual damages.Report

      • Morat20 in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Hmm. That does make a lot of sense. Thanks. 🙂

        The only case I’m personally familiar with is unlikely to meet that particular criteria (soft-tissue injury only, it’s been over a year since the accident, and assuming I haven’t been lied to by my friend, the negotiations for settlement showed no claims of pre-existing or permanent injury, just — per my friend — what he called a ‘truly excessive number of chiropractor visits’. Heck no injury at all that showed up on any image, x-ray, or test) but filing for “up to 200k” makes a bit more sense in the context that that’s a cap.

        So I’m likely to feel that particular case represents either a pushy client or a sleazy lawyer — but at least that places a lot of the other big numbers in some useful context.Report

        • Burt Likko in reply to Morat20 says:

          Back when I did P.I., I’d not really blink at 2-3x weekly visits to a chiro or P.T. for about three months, at least on a pure soft-tissue claim. A lot of that is palliative, and it’s reasonable to imagine that there would be soreness and pain for about that long. But the soreness and pain tends to go away all by itself if you do nothing at all after 2-3 months for a typical person.

          So 4 months? Maybe I let that slide when I give my client settlement advice, maybe not if the plaintiff’s lawyer was a dick (or my insurance adjuster wants to be a dick). 6 months? You’re definitely going to get some friction from me about that. More? I’m going to be talking to the judge about that.Report

          • Morat20 in reply to Burt Likko says:

            Well, it’s at least going through the beginning steps of a lawsuit (it’s been filed, insurance has assigned a lawyer) so the next phase ought to be interesting. Probably won’t hear details until it’s all over in a year or two, if ever.

            Seriously, though — I can’t imagine any soft-tissue injury where damages should even breach the Texas required minimum liability of 30k.

            Not unless you already had some sort of chronic problem at least.Report

            • Burt Likko in reply to Morat20 says:

              Yeah, hard for me to say without knowing the specifics of the case. I would anticipate that the general damage calculus in Texas will likely be not so generous as California’s, although that may vary based on how urban the jurisdiction in question is. You’d really have to consult someone with on-the-ground experience to understand that.Report

              • Morat20 in reply to Burt Likko says:

                Like I said — he’s got insurance (State Farm or Geico, I think) and they’ve hired a lawyer for him.

                Honestly, I was more interested in how the big sums were generated and why — and if there’s a good rule of thumb for, in the cases of truly excessive requests when enough facts are known for a “WTF?” response — who is driving it. A lawyer who figures “why not?” or a client who figures it’s better than a scratch off.

                I mean, it’s not like it’s real money, right? It’s insurance company money! *eyeroll*.Report

  11. Will Truman says:

    In other news, we officially have satellite television. The guy came by Wednesday. Which makes the Linky Friday apropos because among the first things I did was set Sesame Street to record.

    It also appears that some of the problems I previously had with the Vizio showing crummy SD may have been Dish Network’s fault rather than the TV’s. It looks better now. The new Samsung TV, alas, did not quite meet expectations. Speaking of the new TV, there’s none of that feature that everyone complains about that makes everything look like a soap opera. Or if that feature is on the TV, I can’t find it. I’m not sure, but I *think* that’s what makes SD look so good on my father’s TV.

    It’s kind of weird to have three separate devices plugged in to the living room router: the computer, the TV, and the DirecTV box.Report

  12. aarondavid says:

    Looks like I am going to be “batching” it next week also, wife needs to head out to Tenn for a while off and on for the next two months due to family catastrophe followed by by further fun, while I cannot leave the vicinity due to workers comp rules. So, hopefully at least a nice trip to the beach and a good dinner before she goes.Report

  13. Saul Degraw says:

    Right now I am being very grumpy at the never ending party in the apartment building next door because I just want to go to sleep.Report

  14. Miss Mary says:

    Three day weekend starts today!!! My boyfriend and I are hanging out a bunch on and off, but I work my second job (best job ever) today. Junior and I will be inseparable Monday and Tuesday with the exception of a couple of hours on Tuesday night around his bedtime when I indulge in drinks with the gals.Report