Weekender #34

• Birb watch: Still no sign of Handsome myna.

• Each Sunday, Audra and I get lunch from our favorite local Japanese eatery, Higoto. This week, they were featured on Hawaii News Now (our local television news station) during the popular food segment called Cheap Eats. Higoto has steadily built a loyal following because their food is so good. There’s almost always a line outside the shop just before opening, and they regularly sell out. The owner and staff are wonderful, and it’s nice to see their business featured and gaining popularity.

• It was exciting to finally see the first trailer for Marvel’s Hawkeye series that will debut on Disney+ on November 24. Audra and I are huge fans of Matt Fraction & David Aja’s Hawkeye storyline from 2012. It’s one of the only superhero type comic that I’ve seen Audra really get into, probably because it’s so different from your normal Marvel comic story. Of course the “other Hawkeye”, Kate Bishop shows up, but I also caught glimpses of the other characters from Fraction and Aja’s storyline like Pizza dog and the Tracksuit Draculas. I’m really hoping that they allow Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton, which is usually pretty serious, to lighten up for this series. I’m looking forward to folks calling him the “Hawkguy”.

  • For anyone interested in the Fraction and Aja Hawkeye series, I can highly recommend the omnibus, but the printed version is priced a bit ridiculous, as perhaps it’s out of print? The Comixology/Kindle version is still available at a reasonable price. If you want a printed collection, Marvel is re-releasing the book under a different name: Hawkeye: The Saga of Barton and Bishop on November 2, 2021, but it looks like it has the same collection of stories. *Disclosure: *If you use any of the links above, Audra will get a small cut of the sale.

• It’s the time of year that I don’t really look forward to: the week when pre-orders for the new iPhone go live. This has nothing to do with how I feel about Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 13, but more the change they made a couple years ago to start pre-orders at 5am PST. Apple used to start pre-orders at 12am PST, which is 10pm in Hawaii Standard Time (HST). With the move to a 5am pre-order time, I need to set an alarm to wake up at 1:45am in order to prepare for the pre-order madness.

  • As I mentioned previously, I shouldn’t complain. It’s my fault for being on the Apple Upgrade Program. I don’t need to get the new iPhone on the day it’s released. However, pre-ordering on the first day ensures that I qualify for upgradning to the next iPhone in the following year on launch day if I want to. This is a very first world issue, but it gets worse…
  • The Apple Upgrade Program, for those that don’t know, is a way to lease/rent an iPhone instead of paying for it outright. It allows you to upgrade to the latest iPhone each year, as long as you’ve paid for the first 12 months of the previous lease. The usual drill for folks on the program is to go to the Apple Store prior to the pre-sale start, choose your next iPhone, pre-qualify for it, get approval and reserve the phone in your cart. If all goes well, you simply launch the Apple Store app when it opens for pre-ordering and check out. I think I’ve had only one year when this process worked smoothly. This year was not that year.
  • Audra and I work up prior to the pre-order time. We were both tired and groggy. When the Apple Store opened, we were able to get to the checkout, but each time we attempted to checkout, we’d get an alert that stated: “There was a problem with the card details you entered. Please try another card.”, which was strange because the card that was having issues was the Apple’s own Apple Card, the same one that was the default card used for the previous iPhone purchase. We tried to check out multiple times and kept getting the same message, even after re-entering the Apple Card information into the payment settings. Finally, we tried a different credit card and both of our orders went in. What should have been easy and over in 5 minutes, became an extremely stressful 20 minutes, especially since we were only half awake. I was fully awake after placing the order and had a hard time getting back to sleep.
  • The next morning, I woke up to more than a few reports saying that their iPhone 13 pre-order was broken when they attempted to pay for it with the Apple Card. While misery enjoys company, I didn’t find the news very comforting.
  • Later in the day, AppleInsider had an article that stated that Goldman Sachs honors 3% Daily Cash for Apple Card holders impacted by iPhone 13 preorder issue . As of this writing, I’m still not able to change the payment method for the iPhone that is coming next week. I guess we’ll see what happens.

• I made it through this busy week by listening to the funky grooves of Cory Wong & Dirty Loops - Turbo. I don’t know how Wong keeps coming out with new albums seemingly every other month, but I’m really enjoying this collaboration. Listen on Apple Music.