
It felt entirely too strange to go through this week without working at the first venue for Nutcracker. We weren’t allowed in until Friday this year. For the last three years, we’ve moved in on Tuesday, held a tech rehearsal on Wednesday, and a dress rehearsal on Thursday. To make things even more difficult, we didn’t get in until after noon Friday. It usually takes us a full eight hours to move in, and this year we had about half that.
We’re not sure what caused the issue, though we had a couple of problems last year with venue staff.
Such is life.
We’re premiering a new prop this year too, that we had no idea how to use until Thursday night.
Oh, and we found out the first venue doesn’t have any heat in the building. There was apparently a very brief discussion about canceling our shows at the first venue, but “the show must go on.”
Load-in went much better than I expected. We got into the building at about 1:30 and were ready to go by 5:30.
Opening night was a good show. The lack of heat ended up being a non-issue, because it wasn’t that cold locally this weekend. We had a fog effect in Act 2 that went off better than it ever did last year. The new prop, a giant mousetrap, was a big hit, literally. It was very cool to be able to perform with three of my kids all on stage at the same time.
We’ve got one more show at this venue, then we pack it up Sunday night and get ready to do it again next week at a different venue.
Gadget Tomfoolery
When are automated/required phone updates a bad thing?
When they interfere with a medical app.
My Samsung S21+ was finally approved back in October for the mobile bolus service on my Tandem insulin pump. This was a big deal in that when Tandem rolled out mobile bolus, it was limited to a very few phones and operating system versions.
And I get that. The FDA wants to make sure things are going to work right when you’re remotely controlling a medical device that could kill someone if it malfunctions. Give too much or too little insulin and bad things happen. I get that.
But Samsung and T-Mobile are pushing the Android 13 update, and Android 13 doesn’t have approval for mobile bolus on any Android phone right now. That means the Tandem app will break for anyone who updates to Android 13, and you can only push the update back a few days.
Now granted, losing mobile bolus isn’t the end of the world for anyone. It’s really just a convenience feature, but I don’t doubt that some families of younger diabetics have already come to almost depend on that feature. It seems to me that Tandem, Samsung, and the cell providers could all have gotten together a lot sooner with the notoriously slow and overworked FDA to do a better job coordinating the rollout of the new OS. Now we’re going to have to wait another several months to get this function returned to our phones. And the problem is that Android updates almost every year. How prepared are they going to be for October 2023 and Android 14?
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share a thought in the comments. Sign up for my infrequent newsletter here. Find some of my other writing at The Good Men Project, too. Subscribe to the blog via the link in the right sidebar so you never miss an update here, either. You can also add my RSS feed to your favorite reader.
Share your thoughts!