Spy watch

[rbandrews]

BGG Spring was a BGG Spring. I've gone to (I think) every one of the Spring cons they've had, and only missed one of the fall cons (2021). So by this point BGG is sort of a known quantity; it's a lot of fun but I know what to expect and what it'll be like. It's not a new experience. The spring one is still in the old hotel, which was very cold and dry and I think I got dehydrated some, which I'll come back to.

Then my birthday! And my birthday curse! Something always goes terribly bad for me. I can now say with authority that having a kidney stone on one's birthday is almost as bad as having your wife leave you on your birthday. It was close but I think 2018 is still the worst birthday. I went to an urgent care and an ER and got a CT scan and about three quarters of the way through all this, the pain just... abruptly stopped. From ten to zero in seconds. I waited around for half an hour to see what would happen, then left "against medical advice." I have a couple new (and temporary, for a couple weeks) prescriptions and no pain whatsoever now. There's still supposedly another stone on the other side, but, I think maybe the whole problem here was I was dehydrated so things got stuck? Regardless, this lasted just long enough to torpedo my birthday plans with my parents and then ended. I spent the rest of the day just taking a nap.

I did get myself a birthday present though, a Garmin smart watch. I've been resisting these for a while because I play games with someone who wears an Apple watch and it kind of drives me nuts with the constant checking for messages and emails. So I did some research and picked this one:

• An Apple watch was right out because I don't have an iPhone.
• I wanted it to do some health-stuff...
• ...But I also wanted it to do something else, because I didn't want to be a person who would buy a thing just for exercise and health-nuttery.
• I also insist that it do the useful things without connecting to a phone and constantly adding to my background-ding-load or giving me yet another daily thing I need to charge.

The Garmin watches fit all these criteria. Their upper-end watches seem designed for the sorts of people who aren't near cell networks anyway: the spy watch (they can call it a smartwatch, but anyone who watched spy movies as a kid knows the truth) has a GNSS receiver and topo (not just road but actual topographic) maps of all of North America stored on the watch. So I can ask it where I am and it'll tell me, absent any sort of network signal but satellites. This is actually the primary use of the watch as far as I can tell; Garmin as a company isn't known for their quality heart monitors, after all. So I didn't buy a health toy, I bought a navigational toy.

Its face is a solar panel; it technically needs no charger if you're outside a lot. It lasts over a week on a charge otherwise, with bluetooth turned off. It'll monitor everything imaginable about me and then not send that data anywhere unless I tell it to; the only thing it actually needs an internet connection to do is stuff that directly involves the internet, like phone notifications (which I actively don't want) or weather updates. And it's hackable. Most of the data seems stored in either plain text or well-documented formats, and is accessible by just plugging it in.

Anyway I love the thing so far and I've started going for walks, partly to play with the watch, partly just because I want to exercise more. So far Megan can't keep up, but hopefully that'll gradually change, and anyway I don't mind walking with her for only the first part.

Other stuff that's going on is, I started playing Magic again after 30 years. But I'll let that one develop some more before I talk about it.