✱ One never knows when Murphy’s Law is going to strike. We have this Epson printer home, seldomly used nowadays as mostly everything became electronic, either emailed to us or easily obtainable via PDF files. We generally only use it when we need to print something for my son’s school assignments or when I sell something used and have to send it via mail to someone, when I have to print labels. This week I did it but when I tried to print the corresponding labels, my printer’s control software didn’t allow me past a warning saying I was out of magenta and yellow ink cartridges. No big deal — except until I went to the store where I regularly buy them, and found just the magenta one. With the yellow cartridge not available there, any not at any other retailer in my city, I needed to order it online and wait for 5 days for it to get home. Quite a wait for having something printed out, if you ask me. But what really stuck in my mind was where did all yellow Epson cartridges go?

✱ No matter how much technology advances, certain things remain done only when you go about attending places in person. This week I had to go see a notary, as my oldest son was in need of authenticating a couple of school documents in order to pursue a college scholarship. He had never been to a notary in his whole life, and I guess it was interesting for him to see such procedures being executed.

✱ I’m not a tennis person, meaning I seldom follow anything related to the sport. But Brazilian media had been talking about Bia Haddad all week long and how she came to play the semifinals against Polish female tennis player Iga Swiatek, current number one in the ranking — so I felt that was a game I needed to watch. Bia had very good moments, and led the second set for some time, but in the end she fell 2 x 0 against the world’s current best player, partials 6/2 and 7/6. But even falling, she was a giant and made history, becoming the first woman semifinalist of a Grand Slam in singles for Brazil in more than 50 years. She also entered the top 10 of the world rankings for the first time, both reasons for us, Brazilians, to be proud of her.

✱ William Poor, a video producer, story editor, and reporter from The Verge premiered a short documentary on YouTube last Sunday, telling the story of the Apple Lisa, released in 1983 as Apple’s first GUI desktop computer: its operating system had many user-friendly features, such as icons, windows and menus, all of them made interactive with the help of a mouse. It was also way expensive at $10,000 — equivalent to approximately $30,500 in June, 2023, making it instantly doomed and discontinued in 1985, so only two years after its release. A September 24, 1989 news article mentioned the burial of the remaining inventory of 2,700 Lisas in a garbage deposit in Logan, Utah, and the documentary dives into this story that I watched the day it came out, a really interesting video.

✱ After almost 3 months without watching almost no episodes of any of the series I follow, I’ve finally finished Spy x Family. The show’s second season is still to start airing in October this year, so I still had some time to watch the four episodes I hadn’t watched — and now that I’m done with them, I can reaffirm that overall, it’s quite a nice story and narrative. I’m looking forwards season 2 (and the upcoming feature movie, to be released in December).

✱ I’ve been watching every NBA Finals game as a Miami Heat supporter. They were East Conference champions but, the way things are going, unfortunately, favor Denver Nuggets much more, as they won last Friday’s fourth game 108-95. While I’m waiting for next Monday’s fifth game and for an almost — and likely — impossible victory away from Miami, though, I have to say that this last game gave us all the most interesting and unexpected moment of all: with 2:07 left in the third quarter and Denver already leading the score 76-68, Bam Adebayo missed a two-hand dunk attempt and hung onto the rim for a moment, making it seemingly torn. This caused the game to be interrupted for about 9 minutes, while a ladder was brought onto the court for an investigation, after which the basket was declared ok. From my part, I don’t recall having ever seen anything like that, and it was as amusing as unexpected to me… 😂v