Raindrop and the Wheel of Time

Following up on my previous post, I guess I’m sticking with Raindrop.io as my new bookmarking service of choice. At this point, I’ve done so much cleanup work in Raindrop that if I wanted to go back, I’d have to clean out my Pinboard account and import the stuff from Raindrop back into Pinboard.

The main bit of pointless cleanup work I’ve been doing is working through my unread bookmarks in Pinboard. Since the unread status didn’t import to Raindrop, I’ve been going through the 1000 or so unread links in Pinboard and deciding what to do with them. I detailed my process on that in the previous post. I think I’m about halfway through the backlog of unread bookmarks.

I have bookmarks in my collection back to 2001, so I’ve been assuming that that’s when I started using a bookmark service, but I see now that Delicious wasn’t founded until 2003, so I’m not sure where those 2001 and 2002 bookmarks came from. Maybe those were just browser bookmarks. (But I also have a bunch of bookmarks dated 1/1/1970, which I assume were the initial browser bookmarks I started with.) Well, anyway, I’ve been doing this for a long time, which makes the 20,000+ total seem less insane. (Maybe about 1000 per year? So around 2.75 per day average? That’s not too crazy for a working programmer, right?)

On a different topic, I finished reading Knife of Dreams yesterday. This is the last of the solo Robert Jordan WOT books, so it feels like I’ve hit a milestone here. All that remains are the three that were co-written by Brandon Sanderson. I started KoD in mid-July, so it took a little over a month to read, which keeps me on pace to maybe finish the series by the end of this year.

I was listening to the Wheel Weaves podcast this morning for the final chapter of the book, and they started it out by reading this letter that Jordan had written to Locus Magazine back in 2006, when he was diagnosed with amyloidosis. Quite a sobering letter. This part really got to me:

I sat down and figured out how long it would take me to write all of the books I currently have in mind, without adding anything new and without trying [to] rush anything. The figure I came up with was thirty years. Now, I’m fifty-seven, so anyone my age hoping for another thirty years is asking for a fair bit, but I don’t care. That is my minimum goal. I am going to finish those books, all of them, and that is that.

This came after a few sentences talking about how long he probably had left: four years. He actually passed away in 2007, so he only had about a year left at that point. But I think his attitude and his goals were admirable.

Coincidentally, I’m 57 now too. I don’t have any immediate health problems, but stuff like this really makes you think about what you’re doing with your life. For me, I don’t have a big pile of books that I want to write. (Or, in my case, maybe a big pile of computer programs.) I do have a “to be read” pile of books and comics (both physical and electronic) that would take me about 30 years to get through, so maybe I should make that my life’s goal. (I’m not going to die until I’ve finally read all 100 Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four issues! And Don Quixote!) Anyway, I seem to be at the point in my life where I’m taking things day by day, setting small goals, and just trying to be a decent person, I guess.

Trying Raindrop.io

After much dithering back and forth, I finally decided to give Raindrop.io a try, over the weekend.

TL;DR: I think I’m going to switch over from Pinboard, and use this as my main bookmark manager from now on.

More detail:

Starting an account was quick and easy. And importing my Pinboard bookmarks was easy too. I have around 20,000 bookmarks in Pinboard. Exporting from Pinboard is easy enough, and I’ve been doing that periodically, as a backup in case Pinboard goes down. Raindrop had no issue handling Pinboard’s JSON export file. It took a little less than ten minutes to complete the import.

The one big missing feature in Raindrop is an “unread” flag. In Pinboard, I had around 1500 unread bookmarks. So that status didn’t transfer. (Raindrop also doesn’t support the “private” flag, but that one wasn’t important to me.)

It occurs to me now that I could have written a little program to go through Pinboard’s JSON file, looking for the “toread:yes” field, then adding an “unread” tag to all of those bookmarks. Oh well. Too late for that now!

What I’m doing instead is putting Pinboard in one browser tab and Raindrop in another, going through the unread Pinboard links, and deciding what to do with them. For those that point to NY Times stories, I’m just adding them to my Times reading list. Ditto for Washington Post articles. For some, they were just quick temporary bookmarks that I never got around to deleting, so I’m deleting them. For music links, I’m trying to add them to MusicBox. And for YouTube links, I’m adding them to Play. For the rest, if I still want to read them, I’m adding an “unread” tag.

I might later change that to an “unread” collection. Collections are an interesting feature in Raindrop, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them yet.

Raindrop has a pretty good web interface, and a decent browser extension for Firefox. The iOS app is pretty good too. I could probably nitpick a few things about them, and there are definitely a few things that Pinboard does better, but I’m happy with them.

I like very much that Raindrop has a first-party app for iOS. I’ve used a few third-party apps for Pinboard, and there are always issues with them. (No fault of the developers, generally. It’s mostly API issues/limitations, I think.)

Raindrop also has a broken link detector (once you pay for the Pro plan, which I did today). It’s showing me 630 broken links right now, so I’m going through those too, trying to clean them up.

The one thing that kept me away from Raindrop until now is that it’s blocked at work, while Pinboard isn’t. No clue why. Bookmarking isn’t really a security risk, as far as I can tell. So I’m going to need to come up with some kind of workflow for work-related bookmarks. I’m really not sure what I’m going to do there yet.

Anyway, I have spent way too much time over the last couple of days organizing bookmarks. I know that I don’t need to go nuts with that, but I can’t help myself. And I do occasionally stumble across something cool that I’d forgotten about, so there is some reward to it.

 

Brian Eno

I’ve been a fan of Brian Eno for a long time. There’s a new movie out about him, and it looks interesting. It’s a “generative” film: different every time it’s shown. Here’s some explanation for that from the NY Times review:

The word “generative” has become associated with artificial intelligence, but that’s not what’s going on with “Eno.” Instead, the film runs on a code-based decision tree that forks every so often in a new path, created for software named Brain One (an anagram for Brian Eno). Brain One, programmed by the artist Brendan Dawes, generates a new version of the film on the fly every time the algorithm is run.

Hmm. If it was anyone else, I’d say it’s a dumb gimmick, but since it’s Brian Eno, I’m curious. I assume some version of it will make it to streaming and/or Blu-ray at some point, but I wonder what they’ll do with that. I imagine they’ll have to create a single standard version of it at that point, but it would be cool if they found a way to keep some randomness in it.

I was listening to the soundtrack from the film yesterday on Apple Music, and I like it, but the version on Apple Music doesn’t have all the tracks. So that sent me down a rabbit hole trying to decide if I should buy the CD or maybe the digital download. You can buy the CD direct from Eno, or from Amazon, or a number of other places. I could only find the digital version here. I wound up buying that.

I think this is the first time I’ve bought a digital album in quite a while. I’ve really just been relying on Apple Music. And if the whole Eno soundtrack was on it, it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to search out the MP3 or CD versions. Well, anyway, I’m having a fairly nice Sunday listening to Brian Eno now!

a little more WordPress, and some bookmarking notes

OK, so this is probably my last post on my WordPress issues for a while. The last thing I did with the sites, over the weekend, was to move my databases from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.11, and to switch the sites from PHP 8.1 to 8.2. Both of those things worked out fine, and I haven’t had any trouble. So I guess I’m OK for now, and I’m going to leave the sites alone for a bit.

One related thing: I’ve started looking at WP-CLI again. I first starting using it… exactly ten years ago! Weird coincidence. Anyway, I stopped using it, since I was having some trouble with it on my IONOS account, due to some PHP thing. I could probably have figured it out, but I gave up, and have just done WordPress updates from the admin GUi since then. But I think it might be time to try WP-CLI again.

Next subject: bookmarking services. I’ve stuck with Pinboard for years, and it’s mostly worked fine, and I just take it for granted. Every once in a while, though, there’s an outage of some sort, and that always gets me thinking about maybe switching. And there was an API outage this morning that got me looking at social media to see if there was any info on it, which surfaced some stuff about the Pinboard guy tweeting something kinda anti-trans, related to the Olympics. So of course that’s got me looking at alternatives again.

Raindrop.io seems to be the most popular choice. But they block it at work, for some reason, so I’d only be able to use it at home. There’s a new one I saw a reference to today called Linkwarden, and that looks promising. $3/month, it’s not blocked at work, and it’s got an import function, so I’m assuming I could import my Pinboard data. I might sign up for a trial account this weekend.

Honestly, I don’t know if any of the alternatives to Pinboard are likely to be more reliable than Pinboard. They mostly seem to be side-projects from small developers. (And I don’t really know who’s behind any of them, so I can’t really say if their opinions are more or less acceptable than the Pinboard guy’s opinions.)

WordPress woes, and more San Diego stuff

Since my last post, I’ve continued to have some WordPress issues. I called IONOS support, and they were not super-helpful, but there probably wasn’t much they could do. I did as much clean-up on my sites as I could. I deleted a bunch of unused plugins and templates, and disabled a few plugins that I probably didn’t need. The site went down for about an hour, two days ago, but has been fine since. So maybe I’m OK. It’s frustrating when you’re troubleshooting something like this, and there’s no “aha!” moment, just “eh, maybe that helped?” and a shrug.

This has got me considering moving to a simpler hosting arrangement again. IONOS is pretty cheap for me right now, only $9 per month. (I’m not even sure why it’s that cheap. It used to be $14. There was some confusion with the billing a while back, and it landed at $9 somehow.) IONOS has dedicated WordPress hosting that’s not expensive, and would give me more resources, I think, but a little less flexibility. I’ve also considered moving to WordPress.com. They’re kinda expensive, but they do have an $8/month that would probably work for me.

Back on the topic of San Diego Comic-Con: Here’s an article about all the folks who got COVID at the con. And here’s an article from The Beat about “winners and losers” at the con. I’ve seen a few interesting things coming out of the con. Stuff that makes me think “yeah, that’s cool,” but not “yeah, that’s so cool it would have been worth the grief of cross-country travel, COVID, and the cost of travel and lodging”.

I do need to take a vacation this year, at some point, somehow. And I still haven’t figured out what to do about that. But that’s a topic for another day.

Not at SDCC, 2024 edition, and WordPress issues

It’s become kind of a thing for me to write a “not at SDCC” post every year, during SDCC. I’m probably not going back to SDCC ever again, honestly. The pandemic really created a “hard stop” for me on a bunch of stuff, and I’m thinking now that I’m not likely to go back, ever, on a lot of that stuff.

I haven’t been following the news out of the con too closely. Most of it isn’t that interesting to me, honestly. I haven’t read a lot of comics lately, since I’ve been concentrating on getting through the Wheel Of Time books. And I’m not too interested in any of the upcoming nerd-related TV or movie stuff. I still haven’t watched the latest Star Wars, Marvel, or Star Trek streaming shows. And I only just watched Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, since it just came out on Netflix. I might go see Deadpool & Wolverine in a theater, but probably not. So all this talk about the next big thing doesn’t matter to me, when I still haven’t seen the last big thing.

Anyway, I wanted to see if I could recapture some of the old “con spirit” this weekend, so I decided to watch Alan Tudyk’s Con Man series yesterday. I watched the whole first season. (Which isn’t hard, since the episodes are just 10 minutes long.) I watched some of those previously, when they were on Comic-Con HQ, which I subscribed to, during its brief existence. The show is now available on Amazon Prime, so that’s convenient. I laughed out loud a few times, which is pretty rare for me, these days.

On an unrelated topic: My blog has been kind of flaky this week. I got notices that it was up and down all last night. That doesn’t really matter much, of course, since nobody really reads this blog, and there’s nothing much important on it. But it annoys me. So it sent me down a rabbit hole of WordPress troubleshooting. I don’t think I have much to say about that, though. No big revelations that would be worth sharing, or documenting so I remember them next time. Just a bunch of stabs in the dark, then a shrug, and an “eh, good enough for now.” Everything is working, but still kind of slow, so I’ll just have to see if it gets better on Monday.

I haven’t been sleeping well the past few days, so my energy level is pretty low. I got some exercise this morning, and now I’m likely to spend the rest of the day reading, watching random bits of the Olympics, and maybe watching Con Man season two later.

CrowdStrike, Pluralsight, agile, anime

Today’s another day where I feel like I have a bunch of stuff to blog about, and it’s all pretty random. So I’ll break it up with some sub-headings.

CrowdStrike

I woke up this morning to news about this issue, via my Mastodon feed, which I always check first thing in the morning. It didn’t hit my company, thankfully. But it does seem to have caused a lot of chaos. I almost kind of hoped it would hit us, since it would have been nice to have a day off. (Not really though.)

Pluralsight

I’ve had a Pluralsight account since 2016. At some point, my company got a corporate account, and I got myself added to it, so I don’t have to pay for it anymore, which is nice. Recently, my company has decided to go all-in on Pluralsight, and they’ve given everyone in the IT department an account. (Previously, it was just a select few.) They’ve also put some structure around it, asking us all to do three skill assessments, then pick one of them to try to get better at. I’m going to try to improve my score on “C# Coding Practices.” I’m currently “above average”, so I guess I’m shooting for “expert” now.

I’m a little puzzled about why they seem to have put so much effort and expense into this one particular thing, but I guess I’m glad they have.

Agile/Scrum

My group within the IT department is currently going through an “Agile transformation.” I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. Things are going… OK, I guess. We’re in our first official sprint right now. I think we’re on the right track. We have a scrum master who seems to know what he’s doing.

We’ve divided the group into two “feature teams”, which is kind of weird, since it seems to be a fairly random split. I guess I understand why they did it; scrum teams aren’t supposed to be too big. They also want us to come up with names for the teams. That’s one of those things that initially made me groan, since the only acceptable corporate team names are all going to be terrible. I’ve accepted the inevitable now, though. I was pushing for a Harry Potter house name for the team, maybe Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw. Consensus seems to be on “Scrumbags” which I also kind of like.

Anime

I finally finished watching all of my Master Keaton DVDs this week. I bought most of them in 2006, and I think I’ve finally watched all of the stuff I bought from Right Stuf back then.

I still have a couple of DVD sets from long ago that I need to watch. I think I might start Devil Lady soon. I bought that from Overstock.com in 2005, so that’s been collecting dust on my shelf for even longer than the other stuff. And I have a set of Excel Saga which I got in 2007. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why I bought either of those. But hey, they should both be fun to watch.

Rambling and Links

I’ve been meaning to write a post here for awhile, but just haven’t gotten around to it. (And I feel like I’ve probably started more than one post with that sentence already, but hey, I’m going to repeat myself occasionally here. I’ve been doing this on and off for 20+ years…)

The plan for today is pretty simple: Watching the Wimbledon men’s final at 9, going over to the farmers market around 10, then checking out the Somerville street fair (now called the “Somerville Market” for some reason) at some point after lunch. It’s too hot to do much else.

I’m not exactly thriving in the heat wave we’ve been dealing with over the last few weeks. I guess it’s not technically all one big heat wave, but it feels like one. I guess it’s a new one kicking off today, really. Either way, I’m too old for this.

I just finished reading New Spring, the Wheel of Time prequel novel, and I want to start reading Knife of Dreams today. I think I’m on-track to finish WoT this year, maybe. I’m pretty sure the prologue for KoD is a typically long WoT prologue, so it may take me a while just to get through that. (The WoT podcast I listen to takes 3 episodes to cover the prologue, so I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a lot.)

There are a few things I’ve seen on the internet recently that I thought I should mention here, so in no particular order, and with no particular relation to each other:

  1. I’ve been reading Jonathan Clements’ Humble Dollar blog on and off for several years, though I haven’t looked at it recently. Apparently Clements has cancer and likely less than a year to live. He’s only a few years older than me, so that’s… sobering.
  2. Here’s a behind-the-scenes article about the folks who change the light bulbs at the Met. (OK, there’s more to it than just changing light bulbs, but it’s still mostly about light bulbs.) This is the kind of thing I really like getting some insight into. I haven’t been back to the Met in a long time. And, honestly, I may never make it back; I just get sick too easily these days, so it’s always a risk, dealing with public transit and the crowds in NYC.
  3. I’m pretty sure I had at least one other thing to mention here, but now I can’t remember what it was, and I’m too tired to figure it out. So never mind!

 

Heat Wave

We’re in the middle of a heat wave here in New Jersey. And I haven’t been doing well with it. I started feeling bad Wednesday night, then had to call in sick on Thursday. I already had Friday off for Juneteenth; if I didn’t, I would have had to take another sick day. It’s Saturday now, and I’m feeling a little better, but honestly, just doing my laundry has pretty much exhausted me.

I had my groceries delivered from Whole Foods today. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. (I think the last time was in March.) I definitely wouldn’t have had the energy to go over to ShopRite today. (Well, I probably could have managed it, if I had to, but I’m better off resting, I think.) I didn’t leave the apartment at all Thursday or Friday. I might try to venture out briefly today, maybe to get a croissant from the bakery or something like that.

I’ve been thinking about why I’m sick and whether or not I could have made any different choices on Wednesday that could have prevented this. We had an IT Town Hall meeting on Wednesday at work. It was a 90-minute in-person all-hands meeting. I wore a mask, but there were likely a lot of germs going around. Then, later, we had an “ice cream social.” That was outside; they got a couple of ice cream trucks to set up on the patio. I got in line for that, but it was so hot I gave up and went back in. Someone had left a birthday cake in the break room, so I had a slice of leftover cake instead. So now I’m wondering if I picked up the cold from the town hall meeting, the ice cream thing, of if the leftover birthday cake did it. And I’m wondering how much the heat had to do with it.

Honestly, I’m wondering if I can do large (or relatively large) in-person stuff at all anymore now. And/or if I should avoid any kind of shared/leftover food that might have germs on it. I guess it’s good that I gave up on NYCC this year. Garden State Comic Fest is happening today in Morristown. I’d been thinking about going to that. It’s much smaller than NYCC, so I was thinking that I could probably survive it. But I’m definitely too sick for it.

Meanwhile, at work next week, I’ve got continuing fallout from the big project that went into production a couple of weeks ago. I think I’m managing that well. We also have an “agile transformation” project going on. We had an in-person training class on that on Thursday that I missed. And we’ll have two more in-person classes next week. I’m hoping I can make it into the office, and get through those in one piece. But I’m worried about it. Of course, I probably know more about agile and scrum and all that stuff than the people who are running the classes. But I need to show up and engage and figure out whatever hoops the new management wants us to jump through.

To refresh my memory on Agile, I started reading Clean Agile by Robert Martin last week. It’s not bad, so far. I read Clean Code a couple of years ago, so I’m familiar with Uncle Bob’s writing style and his various quirks. His style probably isn’t for everyone, but I’m OK with it. I’m curious to see how far we really go with agile at work this time. There was a big push for scrum a few years back, and we never really did it right. It’s easy to be cynical about this stuff. I hope we “do it right” this time, or at least close enough to right to be useful rather than just an additional layer of meetings and paperwork, but we’ll see.

I also started reading a fairly random book by John Maxwell recently. There was a push at work a while back to learn and embrace the Maxwell leadership style. This was back when I was still a manager. I haven’t heard much about it lately, but then again, I’m not a manager anymore. I noticed this book in my Kindle library, and decided to give it a try. I acquired it in 2009. apparently. It must have been a freebie. I have no memory of buying it, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing I would have spent money on. It’s a self-help book on achieving your dreams, which is definitely not something I’m worried about right now. I’m just hoping to make it through the day, one day at a time, at this point in my life. But the book is interesting enough, in the sense that it’s giving me some insight into a mindset that isn’t my own.

I guess I’m taking a break from the Wheel of Time right now. I finished Crossroads of Twilight about a week ago. I think I’m going to try to read New Spring next. It’s a prequel novel, and was published after Crossroads of Twilight, so it’s next up, if I’m reading in “publication order.” It’s also a lot shorter than most of the main WoT books, so that’s nice.

Well, I guess that’s enough rambling for now. It should get up to 97 later, so I should probably give up on getting anything else done today. Time for a nap, maybe.

new cubicles and other changes

This week, at work, my group moved back into our old space, after having it basically gutted and refurbished. I mentioned last week that I wasn’t too enthusiastic about it. Now that I’ve been working in it for a few days, I guess it’s not too bad. I still don’t like it, really; the cubicles are smaller, the walls are lower, and there’s not much storage space. But I’m getting used to it.

Overall, it’s been a rough week at work. We started using a new process this week that I designed and wrote (mostly) on my own, and we had some hiccups. I was hoping things would have smoothed out by the end of the week, but we’ve still got some issues that I’ll need to tackle next week.

One other random issue we’ve been having at work, which has been getting worse over time, is that Verizon cell phone reception keeps getting worse. It’s obviously a saturation issue, since it’s fine early in the morning, then gets worse over the course of the day. My cell phone is basically unusable by noon. It seems like AT&T works better, so now I’ve starting looking into switching carriers. That would be a big step for me; Verizon is the only cell carrier I’ve ever had, going back to when they were Bell Atlantic Mobile.

I’ve successfully made a few changes to long-standing accounts recently. (See previous posts about YouTube TV, my renter’s insurance, and my new Marcus account.) So that’s emboldened me to look at even more stuff, like maybe switching some stuff around with my phone plan. The first thing I’ve decided to do, finally, is to park my old home phone number. Verizon cut the copper in my building several years ago, so I switched to their wireless home phone service. I’ve had no problems with it, but at this point, I’m really not using it. But I still don’t want to give up the home phone number that I’ve had for 30 years.

So I’m moving it to a service called Park My Phone. They have several options for what you can do with your number there. I’m choosing their $6/month call forwarding service, so I can continue to get calls on the number. I initiated that today. It may take a week or three to complete. I’m pretty sure Verizon will put up some stumbling blocks. I did remove one myself, by logging into the Verizon site and unlocking the number, so the transfer won’t be blocked. I’m sure there are other weird little details that might get in the way.

I initially tried moving the number to Google Voice, which wouldn’t have had any monthly fee, just a $20 one-time fee, but that didn’t work. (And, Google being Google, there’s really no one to reach out to for help.)

Once I’ve got the home number off the Verizon account, then I’m going to think about moving the cell number to either AT&T or Consumer Cellular (which uses the AT&T network, I think).

Consumer Cellular actually has a wireless home phone service similar to Verizon’s, so I thought about moving both home and cell lines to them, but I decided it was really time to retire the home phone. It’ll feel weird not having an old-fashioned phone in the apartment, but I guess I’ll get used to it, the same way I’m getting used to a cubicle with no bookshelf and only two drawers for storage.