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Things Behind, Other Things Ahead....
Apr. 10th, 2019 09:28 pmHumpday One, of the two for this hellish fortnight, is almost done. Tomorrow will be a travel day, with plenty to do, but worse things are behind me now.
Monday required an early departure for a ridiculously short and unproductive court hearing in Rochester- one I tried to arrange to do by phone and failed. I then had all of about an hour before having to turn right around and head back here for another ridiculously short, but slightly more productive, court hearing in downtown Buffalo. That one has, I think, resulted in a settlement, as did one other I worked out yesterday.
The biggest stress of the week, though, began while waiting for the court hearing here on Monday- as an order came through from the bankruptcy case I filed late last week. One of the judges I appear before has been on a Case Management Crusade for much of the past year. For the most part, bankruptcy cases do not mandate the judge's active involvement until somebody asks him or her to do something; one of the major changes shortly before I started practicing, when the largely 19th century Bankruptcy Act was replaced by the modern Bankruptcy Code, was to unentangle bankruptcy judges from day to day case administration and make them more traditional judicial officers. But, like swallows in the Capistrano springtime, some judges have returned to the older ways. The longtime judge in Utica got in the practice of scheduling regular status conferences in Chapter 11 cases, despite there being nothing in the Bankruptcy Code requiring, or even explicitly permitting, such things. Judges are expressly prohibited from attending the "meetings of creditors" (which creditors rarely meet at but debtors are required to attend), so they get their 411s through these alternative means. In our local judge's case, those means are "case management orders." Lots of them. I expected and got my first general one after filing this one, but did not expect to get a specific one three days later, telling me I had 48 hours to do something I was not yet ready to do, and to be before Hizzoner a week thereafter at a specific time I was also not able to be present for.
After some sleeplessness Monday night, I took the lawyerly way out of the problem and moved to extend my time to do those things. There resulted not quite 24 hours of phone calls, deficiency notices and total uncertainty, when I left my office today, about whether I'd missed that deadline. Fortunately, word came late this afternoon that I'd been granted my brief reprieve.
In other reprieve news, I'd been scheduled to spent this entire afternoon in a deposition, but was asked to postpone it and agreed to do so. That gave me the time to stress out about the other business, but also to get some other work done in the meantime. This included taking a state court filing downtown here late this morning. Since I was just waiting on the other thing, I treated myself to a few free minutes of mental health, and stopped at the gallery where Eleanor's debut piece is still on display. The artists prefer not to have photos of the pieces themselves out on The Interwebs, but these are the tags for hers and for the one which the juror gave the first prize award to (the latter, as of today, was also the only one with a "sold" dot on it):
The show continues through a week from Friday. Saturday is the last weekend day, and I've invited a dog park friend or two to join me to see the pieces (I'll hang around outside with the pups) and then take them to a city park while our own usual venue is still waiting to reopen.
Earlier today, Eleanor returned to the framing place to have two more pieces readied for display. The funds for that came from me finding takers for two of our four Hamilton tickets for next month in Rochester. She's also cleared getting off work for the days of and after the play, which should make it easier for us to get to and from it. And since it snowed slightly today, the chances of it doing so in the first full week of May are probably diminished. I'm still not ruling out 45-car pileups on the 90, hurricanes, or the sudden arrival of a black hole.
----
Speaking of black holes:
Eleanor made herself a to-do list for this past weekend:
Start new lettuces
figure out iCloud
look for chair fabric downstairs
I almost added a snarky reply to the second, that I don't think the weekend's gonna be enough, but I'm proud to say she pretty much pulled it off. Her purpose was to take advantage of cloud storage for the increasing number of photos of her pieces, and the inspirations for them, that have been slowing down her phone. I've never had much luck figuring out iAnything, particularly iCloud, and even wound up deleting the app for it from my PC once it started messing with my syncing of calendars between PC and phone.
She did find that it helped to have had so much experience mucking around with how iTunes stores music on PCs- a lot of the same workarounds came into play. This program has also befuddled me almost entirely. After going through four laptops in just over three years (including the two I'm working with now, one always at home and the other almost always at either office), I've developed massive rabbit holes of nested file folders. Even a clean install from scratch prevents the Windows PC user from depositing music files in the onboard folder called, oddly, "Music." No, iTunes drills down into that folder and creates a sub for "iTunes," a sub-sub for "iTunes Media," and then sub-sub-sub a dub dubs for every artist and album (and often for "unknown artist" or "various artists"). It's a mess. But perhaps, just perhaps, Apple is gonna finally dump the core<:
People have been complaining about iTunes for ages. The bloated and confusingly arcane piece of software has been updated and repurposed and jerry-rigged to handle new tasks for the past 18 years, and one developer says it won’t live to see its 19th birthday. It looks like Apple is finally about to kill iTunes and release separate apps for music, podcasts, and books. Rest in peace, iTunes, you digital dinosaur.
Or maybe, BRAINNNNNNS will prevail:
On the other hand, Apple might just double down on its convoluted iTunes strategy. The company announced that an “iTunes Movies and TV Shows” app would soon be coming to Samsung TVs. Hilariously the too-long name of the app barely fits on the mocked up icon Samsung revealed in a press release. This announcement also happened well before Apple’s big TV+ announcement last month, so it’s possible that Apple will still ditch that iTunes branding. Which it should because it’s time for iTunes to die.
Now THAT I'd welcome. Apple-based streaming programs are the only ones which our smart Samsung does NOT allow us to watch without connecting a laptop to provide the content. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime and even a wonky but usable YouTube app are right in the tv itself. I just hope I'll be able to navigate to it without breaking the remote drilling down nine layers just to get to a show.
----
Oh, and I sucked on the Jeopardy! test again last night. But at least it's behind me now. Also: I don't have to worry about the director of The Room getting the gig if I were ever to appear;)
Monday required an early departure for a ridiculously short and unproductive court hearing in Rochester- one I tried to arrange to do by phone and failed. I then had all of about an hour before having to turn right around and head back here for another ridiculously short, but slightly more productive, court hearing in downtown Buffalo. That one has, I think, resulted in a settlement, as did one other I worked out yesterday.
The biggest stress of the week, though, began while waiting for the court hearing here on Monday- as an order came through from the bankruptcy case I filed late last week. One of the judges I appear before has been on a Case Management Crusade for much of the past year. For the most part, bankruptcy cases do not mandate the judge's active involvement until somebody asks him or her to do something; one of the major changes shortly before I started practicing, when the largely 19th century Bankruptcy Act was replaced by the modern Bankruptcy Code, was to unentangle bankruptcy judges from day to day case administration and make them more traditional judicial officers. But, like swallows in the Capistrano springtime, some judges have returned to the older ways. The longtime judge in Utica got in the practice of scheduling regular status conferences in Chapter 11 cases, despite there being nothing in the Bankruptcy Code requiring, or even explicitly permitting, such things. Judges are expressly prohibited from attending the "meetings of creditors" (which creditors rarely meet at but debtors are required to attend), so they get their 411s through these alternative means. In our local judge's case, those means are "case management orders." Lots of them. I expected and got my first general one after filing this one, but did not expect to get a specific one three days later, telling me I had 48 hours to do something I was not yet ready to do, and to be before Hizzoner a week thereafter at a specific time I was also not able to be present for.
After some sleeplessness Monday night, I took the lawyerly way out of the problem and moved to extend my time to do those things. There resulted not quite 24 hours of phone calls, deficiency notices and total uncertainty, when I left my office today, about whether I'd missed that deadline. Fortunately, word came late this afternoon that I'd been granted my brief reprieve.
In other reprieve news, I'd been scheduled to spent this entire afternoon in a deposition, but was asked to postpone it and agreed to do so. That gave me the time to stress out about the other business, but also to get some other work done in the meantime. This included taking a state court filing downtown here late this morning. Since I was just waiting on the other thing, I treated myself to a few free minutes of mental health, and stopped at the gallery where Eleanor's debut piece is still on display. The artists prefer not to have photos of the pieces themselves out on The Interwebs, but these are the tags for hers and for the one which the juror gave the first prize award to (the latter, as of today, was also the only one with a "sold" dot on it):
The show continues through a week from Friday. Saturday is the last weekend day, and I've invited a dog park friend or two to join me to see the pieces (I'll hang around outside with the pups) and then take them to a city park while our own usual venue is still waiting to reopen.
Earlier today, Eleanor returned to the framing place to have two more pieces readied for display. The funds for that came from me finding takers for two of our four Hamilton tickets for next month in Rochester. She's also cleared getting off work for the days of and after the play, which should make it easier for us to get to and from it. And since it snowed slightly today, the chances of it doing so in the first full week of May are probably diminished. I'm still not ruling out 45-car pileups on the 90, hurricanes, or the sudden arrival of a black hole.
----
Speaking of black holes:
Eleanor made herself a to-do list for this past weekend:
Start new lettuces
figure out iCloud
look for chair fabric downstairs
I almost added a snarky reply to the second, that I don't think the weekend's gonna be enough, but I'm proud to say she pretty much pulled it off. Her purpose was to take advantage of cloud storage for the increasing number of photos of her pieces, and the inspirations for them, that have been slowing down her phone. I've never had much luck figuring out iAnything, particularly iCloud, and even wound up deleting the app for it from my PC once it started messing with my syncing of calendars between PC and phone.
She did find that it helped to have had so much experience mucking around with how iTunes stores music on PCs- a lot of the same workarounds came into play. This program has also befuddled me almost entirely. After going through four laptops in just over three years (including the two I'm working with now, one always at home and the other almost always at either office), I've developed massive rabbit holes of nested file folders. Even a clean install from scratch prevents the Windows PC user from depositing music files in the onboard folder called, oddly, "Music." No, iTunes drills down into that folder and creates a sub for "iTunes," a sub-sub for "iTunes Media," and then sub-sub-sub a dub dubs for every artist and album (and often for "unknown artist" or "various artists"). It's a mess. But perhaps, just perhaps, Apple is gonna finally dump the core<:
People have been complaining about iTunes for ages. The bloated and confusingly arcane piece of software has been updated and repurposed and jerry-rigged to handle new tasks for the past 18 years, and one developer says it won’t live to see its 19th birthday. It looks like Apple is finally about to kill iTunes and release separate apps for music, podcasts, and books. Rest in peace, iTunes, you digital dinosaur.
Or maybe, BRAINNNNNNS will prevail:
On the other hand, Apple might just double down on its convoluted iTunes strategy. The company announced that an “iTunes Movies and TV Shows” app would soon be coming to Samsung TVs. Hilariously the too-long name of the app barely fits on the mocked up icon Samsung revealed in a press release. This announcement also happened well before Apple’s big TV+ announcement last month, so it’s possible that Apple will still ditch that iTunes branding. Which it should because it’s time for iTunes to die.
Now THAT I'd welcome. Apple-based streaming programs are the only ones which our smart Samsung does NOT allow us to watch without connecting a laptop to provide the content. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime and even a wonky but usable YouTube app are right in the tv itself. I just hope I'll be able to navigate to it without breaking the remote drilling down nine layers just to get to a show.
----
Oh, and I sucked on the Jeopardy! test again last night. But at least it's behind me now. Also: I don't have to worry about the director of The Room getting the gig if I were ever to appear;)