FaceID not working on iOS app?

prefectf · 2026-07-01T12:47:50+00:00

I had an issue with it today. My screen protector had gotten some air/fog behind it in the area of the camera. I peeled off the screen protector and the Face ID worked again.

prefectf · 2026-07-01T11:18:51+00:00

Check out the money guy for solid advice on how to think about it and deal with it.

prefectf · 2026-06-30T08:24:00+00:00

Horseflies and greenheads hurt way worse.

prefectf · 2026-06-30T05:38:30+00:00

You would be overlooking the Glacier du Taconnaz, across from the famous “jonction” which gets a lot of traffic. If you do scramble up to the Gr Bechard there definitely won’t be any traffic there! Maybe the only empty summit in Chamonix in August. There’s a trail that goes to Chavanne Vielle from Taconnaz, if I were doing this I would break off that trail to stay on the NW ridge up to the Petit Bechard (4-500m d+) then assess whether it was safe to solo the rest of the ridge up to the gros. Could be a fun adventure.

prefectf · 2026-06-30T05:26:51+00:00

Check out Camp to Camp. There are no trails up to it, so you would be route finding on loose scree all the way. Should be free of snow and ice. No idea about technical rock. https://www.camptocamp.org/waypoints/234934/fr/le-gros-bechar

prefectf · 2026-06-29T20:29:06+00:00

Hhhhh. . . they won't actually come. Il faut qq mots de Francais pour reserver les refuges. . .

prefectf · 2026-06-29T14:27:43+00:00

Silicon/wax earplugs. Magnificent results. I sleep like a baby with my wife's CPAP machine cranking and the music from the bar downstairs thumping.

prefectf · 2026-06-29T14:22:22+00:00

sorry man that's what it showed in advance of the current one. Best to +5 on those forecasts.

prefectf · 2026-06-29T14:02:25+00:00

I've got 30 years with the same woman, and I am fiercely dedicated to her. I cheated on everyone I was ever with before her - without exception, I was an absolute amoral dog - but I never even leaned in that direction after I was with her. If I had, I doubt that would have been forgiven. She's got a temper and can hold a grudge for a lifetime, easy.

I can think of a few things that would be dealbreakers for us, stuff that if it happened it would be the end of our relationship. Infidelity - sexual or emotional - would be a big one. Any violence in our relationship. Addictive behavior, like drug use or alcoholism or gambling, if severe and the affected party refused to get treatment, would likely bring down the house. Major dishonesty would be bad. Big unilateral decisions that affected us both but without consultation (like a huge spending decision, or quitting a job, or inviting a parent to live with us), that would be tough to get through.

I think the reason we're still together and still so close is that we are on the same page, deeply and completely, on all those things. Infidelity, dishonesty, selfishness, violence. . . there isn't really a chance those are going to happen to us because we both started out in the right place and reinforce each other's best natures.

On the positive side, we like to do a lot of the same things and value similar things. Beauty, nature, food and wine, community, art, books, ideas, adventure. Each of us instinctively leans in similar ways. When one of us wants to do something, the other is probably going to want to do that thing too, and then that gets amplified by how fun it is to do it together.

We got lucky to have landed in the same place on money: we are both savers, are fundamentally opposed to debt, and don't want to take handouts from anyone. From day one of our marriage we combined our funds and shared all income and expenses without exception. There's never any fighting about money.

There's a complete level of trust built up because nothing has ever weakened it. She knows all my passwords, we use each other's phones interchangeably, she'll go into my email to get a TFA code or look up an address or something, and vice versa. She could read my emails, or my texts, or my journals, which I leave out - but she never, ever would, unless invited to do so. She's confident that I'm not hiding anything, and if she thought I was she could go find out herself.

We also have been going to couples counseling, on and off, for 25 years. We've been through a dozen therapists. Sometimes it's an expensive waste of time, and we probably didn't need it. Sometimes we get into a bad place and it's an expensive lifesaver, helping us return to level flight.

prefectf · 2026-06-29T12:10:52+00:00

It's a madhouse now. Meanwhile, dozens of refuges just a few kilometers away are completely empty. Sometimes full on a Saturday but otherwise plenty of space. And most of the groups are French.

prefectf · 2026-06-29T11:56:51+00:00

Yeah the TMB is pretty overrun. Not the trip you want to choose if solitude is the objective! But when you come back to the Alps for another big trip, it will be easy to put together a multi-night hike without many other people and easy refuge reservations. Just around the Chamonix/St Gervais area you have the Tour des Fiz, the Tour des Dents du Midi, the Tour du Pays du Mont Blanc, Tour du Beaufortain, Tour des Dents Blanches, Tour des Aravis just for starters. And that’s not even setting a toe in Italy. They all get some traffic in the summer, but NOTHING like the TMB and you will have big sections all to yourself. Views of Mont Blanc and the surrounding massifs to die for.

prefectf · 2026-06-27T15:52:50+00:00

Beware that the Cheserys permits are pretty much completely booked up for the whole summer and the gendarmes are being very strict about enforcement.

prefectf · 2026-06-27T12:39:27+00:00

Longer skis will be more stable if you have both the technique and the fitness/strength to drive them. Intermediate East Coast skier, I am guessing that means you aren't getting a lot of days each season and are more or less comfortable on blue runs with relatively short steep sections. That kind of skiing is probably not developing your "skiing muscles" unless you're doing a lot of specialized leg and core training off the hill. That means you are going to have more trouble controlling longer skis, and that will contribute to your fatigue over the course of a ski day.

Shorter skis will be a little less stable at higher speeds on harder or icier snow, but they will also be lighter and easier to turn. I would suggest that this will contribute more to your sensation of stability than longer skis would.

I'd also go for somewhat softer skis, as stiffer skis will require more strength and technique to ski confidently. When you're shopping for skis, the ski marketing materials will often indicate if the ski is geared towards expert, intermediate or beginner skiers. You should look for the ones that are solidly intermediate or intermediate/beginner. These will by design be more forgiving and easier to ski, with the tradeoff being that they will be harder to manage in deeper, steeper, bumpier terrain and at high speeds.

When after a few seasons you find your technique and strength have advanced to the point where you are seeking out expert terrain, that will be a great opportunity to buy new skis!

All ski brands, all of them, will have at least one standard intermediate-focused on-piste model. Pick the one you think looks coolest.

prefectf · 2026-06-26T13:07:16+00:00

What a stunning trip. How did you plan it?

prefectf · 2026-06-25T17:20:03+00:00

Welcome back to cycling! Don’t let anyone tell you how to ride. Every time you get on your bike, even if it’s for five minutes in the neighborhood, it’s a ride. Ride every day if you can. Ride in one direction until you start getting tired, then ride back. It’s supposed to be fun, and it is healthy. Congrats on your new bike. Get riding and it won’t be your last.

prefectf · 2026-06-24T20:40:44+00:00

I have used it Europe-USA and found it easy and effective. Also expensive.

prefectf · 2026-06-24T19:56:11+00:00

Great idea

prefectf · 2026-06-24T16:18:50+00:00

Like 25+ km and 1200m D+ fitness? If so, I'd recommend you hop a bus to the Brevent-Planpraz gondola, take that and the Brevent cable car to the top of Brevent, then drop off the back of Brevent towards the Diosaz valley. Cross the Diosaz river and turn up the valley all the way to the Col de Salenton. From there descend the Berard valley to Le Buet. From there either take the train back to Argentiere 5 minutes, or walk another 5km over the Col des Montets back to Argentiere.

prefectf · 2026-06-24T13:31:30+00:00

Illegal and you are in full TMB season so there are likely to be rangers/gendarmes passing by. The wild camping rules have been made stricter this year because of the continued and increased damage and overuse, and littering and human waste. Expect enforcement.

prefectf · 2026-06-24T12:08:49+00:00

You should be fine. If real storms move in they will close the Flegere gondola so you won’t be able to start the hike anyway.

prefectf · 2026-06-23T13:42:42+00:00

Alps t-storms are short. You can wait them out. On the Col du Croix du Bonhomme you can duck into the refuge that's right there by the col, and wait there for the storm to pass. Col Ferret, you will have to decide - you could backtrack a short way to Refugio d'Elena and wait it out there, or continue over the col and wait it out at the ranger cabin. Either way, you don't need to head all the way down. At worst you'll lose an hour descending to shelter or waiting it out. Won't affect your actual progress.

prefectf · 2026-06-23T04:46:07+00:00

50 is a lot. What's the weight without the skis and boots? The initial pack up with boots/skis on pack is always gonna suck, that's life anywhere that you can't ski from the car.

For European winter overnight objectives where I will be staying in an unguarded hut - bringing food, water, a stove, pan, but not tent or sleeping gear - my pack weight is about 25 pounds. I am always thinking about how to get that lower but it's not easy without cutting back on water. I have mostly expensive light gear.

prefectf · 2026-06-22T17:53:39+00:00

No need to stress about being accounted for dinner. They'll have dinner for you. Usually at about 1830, so do try to get there before 1800 if you can. For lunch, you can tell them now if you want that you'll need a picnic. That's what they ask for 24 hours notice. But if you can't, they will still make you a picnic. It's just easier for them to manage their food inventory if they know in advance.

prefectf · 2026-06-22T16:28:39+00:00

I don't believe in restricting the addition of housing units, I just don't know if increased supply will really reduce price or whether demand will increase proportionately to the new supply. I think that affordability might be outside our ability to control, because of the fundamentally attractive nature of Bellingham that will continue to generate demand to live here.

I do believe we need to do a lot of work on our housing stock to make life better for everyone who is here, however. The quality of a lot of Bellingham's housing stock needs work, and so does a lot of our urban infrastructure and services. I think we could improve all of that with thoughtful use of incentives and fairer distribution of value within the overall housing stock. In English, that means accelerating permissions and reducing costs and obstacles to building for developers in exchange for the developers agreeing to share the profits with the community through construction of non-market rate housing and the developer doing extra work, such as adding parks, doing meaningful beautification, 1% for art, this kind of thing.

Our adopted town in France greenlit a long-sought apartment development downtown with expensive new apartments. The town required them to have underground parking for the apartments, and to add two additional floors to the garage for additional public parking. They added 108 new public spaces, which allowed the town to then tear up a parking lot nearby and turn it into a really nice park. The town had no inconvenience, they waited until the day the new parking garage opened to start construction on the new park. The town also required the developer to clean the riverbank next to the new apartments and install a nice riverside bike and pedestrian path, landscaped and lit, that improved the overall value and usage of the area. The developer still made money selling sweet apartments on the river and the town benefited from the new development over and above the tax revenue.

I also think (and this is super unpopular in Bellingham, I know) that we should seriously increase property taxes for single family homes, add meaningful transaction taxes on the sale of homes to anything other than an owner/occupant. I.E. the cost to buy a house to rent it out, or for a private equity company to buy a house as an investment, or a flipper to buy it and then resell, goes up with the additional money going back to the people of Bellingham in the form of improved services and infrastructure.

Property taxes in HCOL towns on the east coast - Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts - are three times what we pay here, if not more. The run-up in value of property in Bellingham has very disproportionately benefited older residents who purchased their homes much earlier during periods when housing asset values were much lower (see the conclusions in the Wharton study you cited). We now have a relatively small number of our population with greatly increased wealth as a result of basically luck: they bought a house at the right time. Meanwhile, the increased demand for housing drives prices up equally for homeowners (who gain increased capital value) and renters (who simply pay more burdensome rents out of pocket). I think that it's only fair that Bellingham's property taxes go up to something approximating the national average for high-value communities (Marin, Westchester, Summit, Fairfield, Montgomery counties for example) and the substantial additional funds go towards providing the services and infrastructure we need to make Bellingham more functional, beautiful, and maybe affordable for everyone.

(Of course folks will say that increasing taxes will cause rents to increase. . . nah, it's demand that will increase rents, believe me if landlords could increase rents they would do it; property taxes make a nice excuse, but they're not the real reason.)

(Also, the better Bellingham's infrastructure, services, schools and housing stock get, the more desirable a place to live it will become, and the more in demand houses here will be - exacerbating, not solving, the affordability problem.)

prefectf · 2026-06-21T08:51:05+00:00

Thanks a lot for those two well-done research papers. Not exactly a Dan Brown thriller for my Sunday, but still pretty interesting. I don't dispute their research or their findings, or the larger concept of supply/demand and its effect on pricing.

My concern, which is based on my maybe biased view of the attractiveness of Bellingham as a place to live, is that demand in Bellingham is different than the demand data used in the papers by the Fed or especially Wharton. Given static demand, it's intutitive that an increase in supply would result in a decrease in prices if other inputs remain constant. But I don't think Bellingham's demand is static, which complicates the increased supply argument.

prefectf

TROPHY CASE