A Promised Land – Part One

I’m not an avid book reader. Most can talk about the many books they’ve read but for me, reading a book to the end is a very difficult thing to do. I can count the number of books that I’ve read as an adult and it’s not many. The last complete book was Steve Jobs.

Over Christmas, I got A Promised Lane, a book by Barack Obama. While I can’t claim to have finished the book, I’ve just finished Part one. The first few chapters explained a lot about how he got started and the end of Part one got me excited about reading the rest of it. It talked about how he sought to become president and the most memorable parts have been about why he needed to be President – the world would look at United States differently and also to lift the spirits of every American out there.

The last 4 years have been somewhat of a circus. My Republican friends would say that it’s been a great 4 years. Let’s see, the first two years when Republicans controlled Senate and House, we had the longest government shutdown ever.

Now, watching the 2020 pandemic, I can say that America has been handling the pandemic terribly. Has anyone else done it right? Let’s see Denmark, Australia, South Korea & Taiwan to name a few… You can say we developed a vaccine quickly. But we failed to get it to the people quickly. There are many other ways to get this out right.

Pandemic aside, let’s not forget about the Solarwinds hack. Let’s focus on the facts and figuring out how we can fix this.. If by some strange reason, the election results are over-turned, this would be stealing the election. The definition of third world country elections is a sitting president undermining the election process and casting doubts.

These were the thoughts that came to mind as I recalled 4 years ago, I asked myself – how bad could it be when Obama left office. Perhaps we could give this guy a chance since he did get elected. 4 years later, we know the answer and now that we’ve seen how bad it can get, we can only hope the next 4 years will be something great…

HomePod Issues iOS 14.3

I’ve shared these feedback with Apple and hoping to share this with others.

What I’ve encountered… I have iTunes Match enabled, I do not have Apple Music and HomePod set to default to my AppleID. I could ask Siri to play music from my library and it works just fine. The problem occurs when I ask Siri to play specific songs. I would sometimes add context like “Play xxx song from my library”. Siri would respond that it cannot find the song in Apple Music. I could repeat the instruction 5-6 times with the same result.

Hmm, why would it default to using Apple Music when I don’t have it? Sounds like a bug to me. Or Apple is forcing me to subscribe when I clearly do not want to…

I’ve noticed this since iOS 14.0 and it’s now 14.3. The problem persists.

#HomePod issues