Stats from Student Loan Hero:

PSLF borrowers: 890,516* (Total number of borrowers who have one or more approved PSLF Employment Certification Forms)

Borrowers who attempted to certify for PSLF: 1,173,420

Borrowers who submitted forgiveness applications: 19,321

Borrowers who were granted PSLF: 55

Huh. 55 approved out of 19k applications. Maybe it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. No way around loans other than repayment.

I don’t think that Apple News is all that great.

Apple Maps continues to suffer from its false start. iOS users download alternatives like Google Maps and Waze to fulfill their navigation needs. Yet, if you look at the three products, they each have a competitive advantage. Nothing can touch Waze when it comes to beating traffic. Google is the king of business, shops, and places. Apple Maps brings beauty in design, along with the tight integration between phone and Watch. While I normally use these mapping services for driving, I thought I’d have a great time using Apple Maps for walking navigation in Chicago last week. I was very wrong.

The problem with Apple Maps wasn’t really a problem with Apple Maps, it was GPS. The high buildings interfered all of the time, to the point where I couldn’t rely on the directions tapping me on my watch. At times, Apple Maps had me a block and a half away from my actual location, and was far too slow to update my position.

I wonder if 5G will fix this problem. Not that 5G will improve inner-city GPS woes, but because the individual 5G tower will be able to relay that location information to apps. If there are 25 5G towers (or spots, or whatever they’re going to call them), along my route, conceivably each of those towers could hand off my location to my mapping app as I moved along my route.

This experience gave me a real appreciation for cities as they build their emergency services and communications networks. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to coordinate and dispatch emergency services to the right location in an efficient manner.

Location data within a city is a problem for a lot of people. Hopefully we’ll get a fix soon enough.

It is easy to correct auto paint.

Spring evening.

The Mighty by O.A.R 🎵

Alison went to a lecture recently on fad diets. She showed me the slides, and they were pretty much what you expected. What was incredible is just how many fad diets are out there. It’s easy to get busy, lose track of your health, and not focus on eating the right foods. Plus, there’s a lot of conflicting information out there about what foods are good and what foods aren’t.

In thinking about our collective health, I realized that there’s a stark similarity between our own unhealthiness and the relative health of our websites. I’ve been working on my own websites for over a decade. There are redesigns that occur, but for the most part, improvements are added to my sites without much taken out.

This bloat, over time, gets in the way of user experience and can have a measurably negative impact on load times. The lecture of fad diets got me thinking that maybe my websites need to go on a diet.

I hate to do it, but from time to time, I’ll use a browser extension that will count the number of trackers on a website. When the number gets over 30, my desire to stay on a website dramatically decreases. There are analytics, ad networks, Facebook Pixel, and services from companies that I’ve never heard of, all watching my every move.

Zero. That’s the number of trackers that are now on my websites. To the extent that its within my control, I’m not going to add a single tracker to any of my sites. I want to keep my web presence healthy, and honestly, I think my content stands on its own. It’s important for me to write and publish regardless of the number of visitors or where they come from.

So when you visit any of my sites, be confident that you’re the only one who knows. Stay for a while or just a few moments, read my thoughts, develop a few of your own, and then move on. It’s a better, faster experience for you, and a healthier one for my site.

Just discovered that WSJ didn’t stop using RSS, just moved the feeds. Looking forward to Reeder 4

The AirPower announcement would’ve been nice immediately before the AirPods 2 release. My guess is a good chunk of orders for the wireless case were customers who planned to use it with AirPower.

Following up on my blog post on paying for news, I checked out a few major news sites to grab some headlines that I will never see from The Wall Street Journal. All of these articles were on the main page, some prominently so.

Meghan Markle's rumored new nickname will reportedly make Prince Harry 'angry,' royal source claims

A great piece of journalism from Fox News about only the best in palace intrigue.

Want a happier relationship? Pay attention to your partner's 'bids' to connect

In case you went to NBC for the top headlines, but decided in the end you just needed to work on you.

The 43 most outrageous lines from Donald Trump's phone interview with Sean Hannity

43 quotes and painfully witty commentary by an editor-at-large over at CNN.

Keith Olbermann unleashes fury at turkey hunter, tells Twitter followers to make his life a 'living hell' — and they do

Slow news day over at The Blaze newsroom. I hate articles about what’s happening on Twitter.

Mum's plea for girls to ditch leggings sparks protests

Thanks, BBC! Message received.

When we don’t pay for news, media organizations have to put out these pathetic articles that aren’t worth the time they spent writing, editing, and publishing.

This guy is always having a good time.

I want to do a fresh start in YNAB, but I want to do it on the first day of the month. April 1st seems like a poor choice.

The Angel 🍿

Is it just me, or is the layout off in Safari and Mail in 12.2?

So much delicious food in my pantry, so little time.

I did a pretty good job of documenting my adventures on my trip to Chicago. Lots of pictures, a few short updates, and five podcast episodes covered my movements though-out the city. I wanted to sit down and reflect on my overall experience.

My time was mostly my own, and the list of things that I wanted to do was pretty short. For the most part, I only spent money on food and beverages. There weren’t any experiences that I was interesting in, mostly due to the cold temperatures outside.

I thought that I was going to use ride-sharing and food delivery services a lot more, but we only made one round trip and had food brought to us twice. I walked everywhere, and everything was within a mile or two of the hotel.

Everyone wore headphones in the city. I joined in for the same reason, so that people wouldn’t talk to me. I caught up on podcasts, which is what I normally listen to while walking. I did listen to music on my last day, which was also nice.

I wore a backpack almost everywhere I went. My iPad Pro was a great travel companion, allowing me to write, update websites, and read the news wherever I set up shop. Chicago has a $.07 bag tax, so it was also nice to be able to throw whatever I bought into my bag and keep on moving.

Amazon Go was a great option for ready-to-eat meals and snacks. The employees were very attentive and its clear that corporate wants the stores to be clean, bright, and neatly stocked. That may be partially due to the limitations of the camera system, but regardless, it was a net positive for the customer. Prices were also fair.

I think Molly’s Cupcakes was my go-to spot. They had the best coffee that I found, and a great environment. They also played 90s music which was good for the setting and not offensive. The cupcakes were award winning, but I was partial to the cheesecake. Yum!

YNAB was a great travel companion. I don’t often add transactions on my phone on the go, instead opting for doing the heavy lifting with receipts and the web app when I get home. It was also nice to be very aware of my budget balances as I went through the day. That being said, this has been a crazy two months, so I did my second Fresh Start of 2019 when I get home.

I closed my rings with ease each day. I have a Move goal set at 600 calories. At home, I close that ring if I do my 60 minute walk in the morning, otherwise its usually in the 300-400 range. It was nice to be active while just going about my normal day instead of a scheduled exercise time.

I had a nice time in Chicago, even if the city life isn’t for me. This was a much better vacation than our trip to Orlando, where I had to drive from the hotel to get anywhere. Also, Lake Michigan is awesome.

Paying rent is very different when you physically write a check as opposed to letting Bill Pay handle it.