Personal essays
On noting abundance not scarcity
Holding it wrong
I went out to run some errands yesterday.
I had to mail some tax stuff, return a couple of library books, and pick up a box of envelopes.
By the time I was heading home the snow was falling heavy and wet and the sun was setting - it wouldn’t be dinner time for a couple of hours.
Just a few days before the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year.
But maybe that’s the wrong way to think of these things.
Instead of the gross, slushy snow on my driveway as I walk from the garage to my back door, why not focus on the warmth waiting for me on the other side of that door.
I open the door and get a reminder as I’m greeted by the smell of the sandwich rolls I baked before I headed out on my errands.
Instead of us heading to the shortest day, maybe we should celebrate the longest night of the year and take time to remember when I used to do things at night worth smiling about.
Actually, my bed has become a different sort of magic place for me. I often am settling in when I start to see a solution for a problem I’ve been struggling with or a paragraph I’ve been unable to craft.
The wrong tree
So I’ve been updating my TopTracks app. It already worked on the iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV. Now it works on the Mac, Car Play, and the Apple Watch - at least you can control the iPhone version from the watch.
This last part had me stumped. I needed to send messages between the phone and the watch.
The watch needed to get the list of stations from the phone and the phone had to know if the user had selected a station to play on the watch or had played, paused or went forward or back in the currently playing song.
I could send some information from the watch to the phone but I didn’t seem to be able to send anything in the other direction.
I spent a day testing this and that.
I got tired of looking at my phone to see if the message got through so I put a “Play Random Station” button on the watch and I could hear the results without looking.
That turned out to be one of those accidents that led to me adding the ability to play a random station to the phone app as well. I may add it to Car Play and the AppleTV version - but then again, I might not.
After a day of trying everything I could think of to send the list of stations to my watch, I decided I just couldn’t figure out how to do it and I went to bed.
The bed where answers sometimes pop into my head.
No sooner had I placed my head on my pillow but a voice inside my head asked why I needed to send the stations to the watch from the phone.
The phone was able to sync with my iPad, TV, and Mac using iCloud - why not use iCloud to get the stations to the watch as well.
Forget the technology, the last thought I had before falling asleep was that I’d spent the day trying to climb the wrong tree.
Celebrating failure
So this morning I got the stations listed on the watch.
Then I started to work on making it so you can tap a station on the watch and play it on the phone.
And then I realized a mistake I was making yesterday - and I fixed it.
And then I thought, thank goodness I didn’t fix it yesterday or I would have had a way harder approach to displaying the stations.
Thank goodness I couldn’t figure it out because the solution is way nicer.
Sometimes it’s nice to celebrate a long night instead of grumbling about a short day.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 195. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe