moving day

My company has been gradually remodeling our office building, and the remodel has finally hit my group. The plan is to move us to a temporary space, on the other side of the building, for a couple of months, then move us back when our space is done.

Today was our final day in the old space. We all had to pack up our stuff and label our computer equipment and chairs. And hopefully it’ll all be on the other side of the building when we’re next in the office, on Tuesday. I’ve been with the company for more than ten years, working in the same cubicle, so, theoretically, I should probably have accumulated a lot of crap. In reality, I managed to fit nearly all of my stuff into one plastic crate. The stuff that didn’t fit was: (1) my Batman statue, and (2) my modest collection of programming books.

I’ve been mentally comparing this to the last big office move I had to make, at NMS, in November 2007. That one was a doozy! (Probably best not to get too deep into reminiscing about that. I could really find myself in a spiral if I go down that road…) Anyway, I had a ton of stuff to move back then. Now, it’s mostly just a bit of hardware, and cables, and some stuff I need to keep myself from falling apart (tissues, cough drops, aspirin, etc.).

I only have about a half-dozen printed computer books now, in the office. And I don’t really use them. They’re mostly on old tech that I needed to learn to do some maintenance programming, like SharePoint 2013, and VSTO, and other random stuff. I thought about throwing them all out. For now, they’re in a box in the back of my car. Maybe I’ll get up the nerve to move them from the car to the dumpster over the weekend.

I’m pretty sure our temp space is going to look like our current space, with similar size cubicles. I guess I’ll find out next week. When they move us back, into the remodeled space, I’m a little worried that we’re going to have smaller cubicles, with lower walls. That seems to be the way they’re going with the other remodeled spaces I’ve seen. Or maybe they’ll take into account that we’re programmers, and we need a bit of peace and quiet to get out work done, and give us higher-walled cubicles. (Probably not, but I can hope…)

I’ve still got a chip on my  shoulder about the whole “return to office” thing. There’s a reasonable amount of evidence that office mandates don’t help companies make more money, and they certainly don’t make employees happier or more productive. Oh well. At least I still get to work from home on Mondays and Fridays!

Wheel of Time and other distractions

Today is, for me, the last day of a three-day weekend. I took Friday off as a “well-being day,” which is a new category of PTO at work, started last year. We get two of them a year. The concept in general gets an eye-roll emoji from me, but I’m certainly not going to turn down two extra PTO days.

Anyway, Friday was the twentieth anniversary of my brother Patrick’s death, so I though I’d take the day and maybe do something in his honor. On the tenth anniversary, I’d made an attempt to visit the tree that was dedicated to him on the lawn of the Rutgers library, but that failed for a couple of reasons, one being a snowstorm that had left a ton of snow in the streets (hence no street parking) and my confusion over which Rutgers library it was. (Turns out there’s more than one library at Rutgers!)

So I thought maybe I’d take another shot at that, but it was kind of cold and rainy, and i couldn’t talk myself into it. The tree is probably gone by now anyway, or at least the tag with his name will be. In the end, I read several chapters of Lord of Chaos, watched four episodes of NCIS:Sydney, and took care of some bills and stuff.

All of which is preamble to what was going to be the main point of this post: I finished reading Lord of Chaos yesterday. And also finished watching season two of the Wheel of Time TV show. I’d started reading Lord of Chaos at the end of December, and finished at the start of February, so it took just over a month for me to read. That’s pretty fast for me, considering the length of the book. LoC is book six of fourteen, so I’m almost halfway done with the series. And if I can keep up that pace, I could finish the series this year. (But I probably won’t keep up that pace!)

I kinda needed this three-day weekend, as things had been getting pretty hectic at work, and I think I was getting close to… something. I don’t want to sound dramatic. Not a nervous breakdown or anything. I just needed a quiet day or three to hit reset and drown myself in dumb books and TV.

New Year’s Day 2024

Well, here it is: my traditional New Year’s Day blog post. I first wrote one of these in 2008, and have been writing them on and off since then. Here’s a link to last year’s post, and just for fun, here’s a link to the post from ten years ago (2014).

I don’t have a lot of energy today, so this may be less organized and comprehensive than some of my previous posts. When I think back on the last year, I really feel like I’ve barely stumbled through it. I took no real vacation last year. And I didn’t go into NYC at all. I did get out to see a couple of movies in a theater (Across the Spider-Verse and Elemental). Both were reasonably good, but I got sick after both of them. If there’s a theme for 2023, for me, it’s “every time I go out, I get sick.” And, of course, this was the year I finally actually got COVID. And, to complicate things further, at work, we switched from 2 days in-office per week to three days, in September. I’ve been having a little trouble with that.

Health

In terms of all this health stuff, I’m not really sure what I’m going to do in 2024. I guess I’m just going to continue being careful about going out, and stumbling through as best as I can.

In terms of other general health stuff: my weight right now is just under 160. I started the year at 150, so I’ve once again put on almost 10 pounds in a year. I’m still not too worried about that, since a few people have told me recently that I look healthier than I did when I was in the 130’s, so maybe the 150’s are where I need to be. Regardless, I really do want to draw the line at 160. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do that or not, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been doing pretty good with exercise. I’m still using my Apple Watch to track everything, and I’m still getting a lot of walking done. (In fact, I just ordered new shoes and insoles, since the ones I’m wearing are getting a bit worn out.) My move goal is currently at 540, and I generally meet that goal, if I’m not feeling sick.

Work

There have been a lot of changes at work over the past year, and I think there will be a lot more in 2024. My long-time boss retired at the end of 2023, and I’m now under a new guy. He’s new to the company, so I don’t have any previous relationship with him at all or really know anything about him. So that’s a big unknown for 2024. (Most of IT management right now is new guys, brought in from outside, so there’s a lot of uncertainty there for the folks like me who have been around a long time.)

And I got moved back out of management myself in 2023. I’d had three CRM programmers under me for a fairly short period of time, from Nov 2022 to July 2023. But they decided to consolidate things, so there would be fewer managers with more direct reports. So I didn’t do anything wrong, or get demoted. It was just a reshuffle, and I’m fine with it.

In theory, we should start working on our migration from on-prem Dynamics AX to the cloud-based Dynamics 365 this year. That’s anticipated to be a three-year project. And I’m not sure how involved we’ll be with that (vs. how much is going to be outsourced). So all I can do at work is do my best with what I’m assigned, try to build up a good reputation with the new guy, and see where it takes me.

Finance

There’s a lot I could say about finance right now, but I’m going to hold off on that. I did fine in 2023. I’m starting to look ahead to retirement, in around 10 years. I may write up another post, later, about subscription services, and other stuff I’m spending money on, but I don’t want to do that now.

Fun

I often put a section in these posts with links to my Goodreads and Letterboxd “year in review” pages, and stuff like that. I don’t really want to do that now, since it’s getting a little late, and I don’t have the energy. I will say that my big reading accomplishment in 2023 was starting the Wheel of Time series, and getting through the first five books. I blogged about that a few days ago.

For the rest of the day today, I want to read a couple of chapters in Lord of Chaos, and maybe watch a movie or two. And I may need a nap at some point. Then back to work tomorrow.

progress? (maybe a little.)

I thought I’d post a follow-up to yesterday’s post, with a few little items.

  • I did manage to send my Christmas cards out yesterday. I only sent out seven cards. And, two seconds after dropping them all in the mailbox, I realized that I hadn’t put return address labels on any of them. Oh well. My handwriting is atrocious, so they may or may not make it to their intended recipients. And, if they don’t, they won’t make it back to me. But, eh, I did my best.
  • I did get that email from our “talent team” confirming that the guy I assumed was going to be my new boss is, indeed, going to be my new boss. Also, there is no change in my title or salary. So that’s (probably) good. (Certainly better than getting laid off or demoted or something…) That reminds me that I never did find out if I got a raise after my year-end review. My old boss was supposed to let me know, but never did. So I guess that’s another thing I’ll have to figure out at some point.
  • Still no clue when my work machines are going to get upgraded to Windows 11. Theoretically, that should happen at some point this week, and I’d like to get it over with, but I guess I still have to wait.
  • I still want to write a new blog post about subscription prices. In addition to the aforementioned Instapaper price doubling, I got an email reminder today that my Evernote subscription is going to renew in January, at the new rate of $130/year. (The old rate was $70/year.) I knew that was going to happen, but hadn’t been thinking about it lately. I’m going to let it renew, since I couldn’t convince myself to switch to Obsidian, back when I was experimenting with it over the summer.

And one thing that’s unrelated to anything from yesterday’s post: Ever since I got a fancy new router last year, I’ve been having an intermittent problem with noise coming through my PC’s speakers. I have the router on my desk in between the speakers, so it’s not that big a surprise that this would happen, but it’s never been a problem with any of my previous routers.

I’ve read a few articles about ways to fix this. The obvious thing would be to move the router away from the speakers, but that’s easier said than done, given the constraints I’m working with. There’s really no other place to put the router. I’ve seen conflicting opinions about whether or not putting ferrite core(s) on the speaker wire(s) would help. And I found one suggestion that wrapping the speakers in aluminum foil could help. (I’m not trying that. But I’m tempted…)

My speakers are pretty old. I got them from my brother Pat, and he passed away in 2004, so they’re at least twenty years old. So maybe I just need new, better shielded, speakers. But trying to get info on which speakers are well-shielded and which aren’t is a little tough. One other thought I had was to switch from a pair of speakers to a single soundbar. If I did that, I could put the soundbar right under my monitor, and that way, I wouldn’t have a cable running right past the router. But the speaker would then be right above the router, so maybe that’s not any better… I don’t know.

The noise comes and goes, and it’s usually not noticeable if I play music through the speakers. For some reason, it was really bothering me today though. That might just be because I was unusually twitchy today. I’m also wondering if I should wait on this until I get a new PC. (Assuming I do get a new PC… that’s another thing I’m dithering about…)

stumbling through the holiday season

We’re almost at mid-December, and I’m really stumbling through the holiday season this year. I got a bit sick last week, and had some trouble making it through the work week. I worked from home on Wednesday, but then decided to go into the office on Thursday, and I think that was a bad idea, because it left me really drained on Friday, enough that I had to take a half-day. My intention for Friday afternoon was to fall asleep on the sofa, but, of course, they started playing Christmas music outside at noon, and that made it impossible for me to fall asleep. Instead, I watched the latest episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+ and several episodes of Godzilla Singular Point on Netflix. Nothing drowns out Christmas music quite like Godzilla!

The Christmas music thing this year has been a pain, but it could be worse. They’re only playing it on certain days. I guess it’s just when there’s some kind of Christmas thing happening on Main Street. And it’s generally just been noon to 6 PM. (And no one has screwed up the timer this year, so there haven’t been any surprise midnight Christmas music incidents. Yet.) But it’s been noticeably louder this year. Hence the necessity for Godzilla shows to drown it out.

I think I’m now over whatever it was I had last week. I was still pretty bad yesterday, but I have a lot of energy today, so far, for some reason. I just came back from a 30 minute walk, after getting zero exercise Friday and Saturday. (The reason I have so much energy this morning might have something to do with the fire alarm we had at 6:45 AM. Nothing gets the blood pumping like having to throw on your clothes and run outside early on a Sunday morning!)

This coming week is going to be interesting, I think. My boss at work is retiring at the end of the year, and there’s a lot of uncertainly about what’s going to happen to my group next year. I got an email late Friday from the guy I assume I’m going to report to. The email was a heads-up that the transitions that would have happened in January have been moved up, so I should expect an email from our “talent team” next week with my new assignment info. He didn’t come out and say exactly who I’d be reporting to, but I guess it’s either going to be him or somebody under him. He works out of our Austin office, but will be in NJ next week, and I have a one-on-one meeting scheduled with him. So I think I’m going to need to stay healthy next week, and make it into the office on all the days I’m expected to be in, so I can get some “face time” with the new guy.

Meanwhile, I haven’t sent out Christmas cards this year, and I’m not sure if I’m going to. It’ll be the first time in a while (or maybe the first time in my adult life) that I haven’t. If I can work up some Christmas spirit this afternoon, maybe I’ll do it. I only really want to sent out a half-dozen or so, so it shouldn’t be too hard to manage.

One other work thing: We’re supposed to be doing a company-wide Windows 11 upgrade this month. They’re sending out weekly status emails, and apparently we’re 90% done. But I have a Windows 10 laptop, desktop, and VM, and I haven’t seen any sign of the update getting pushed down to any of them yet. And there’s no way to “force it” on my own. So, on top of all of my other anxieties, I’m also worried that they’re going to push out the update to me at the worst possible time, and it’s going to fail and screw up one of my machines or something. Oh well.

I have a bunch of other stuff I want to blog about, including:

  • my efforts to figure out if I can upgrade my personal desktop PC to Windows 11, despite it being unsupported, and whether or not that’s a good idea.
  • some notes about shopping around for a new Windows 11 PC.  (And thinking about a Mac Mini instead.)
  • my mixed feelings about the three new David Tennant Doctor Who specials.
  • my thoughts about starting a reread of Jaime Hernandez’s earliest Love & Rockets stories, in Maggie the Mechanic.
  • Instapaper doubling their price to $60 per year, and getting me to rethink read-it-later services.
  • more thoughts about the Godzilla shows mentioned above.

That’s all going to have to wait though. This post was probably useless to everyone but me, but felt necessary, just to clear my head today.

A rambling Sunday post

OK, so having gotten the previous Grammarly post out of my system, and having gone for a walk, I’m now watching the early-morning Frankfurt game on NFL+, and ready to write the long, rambling post I mentioned in the Grammarly post. (Side note: I like this short ESPN article about Belichick’s experience in Germany. I almost feel bad for Belichick this season, but not really. I mean, well, he’s still Belichick.)

Ever since I got COVID, things have been a little shaky for me. I keep getting a little sick, then a little better, then a little sick. I don’t think I’ve gotten COVID again (since that first rebound), so that’s good. I was fighting these low-level cold symptoms this past week, culminating with enough nasal congestion on Friday that I risked taking pseudoephedrine. I say “risked” because I often get some side effects from that. It definitely helped me get through the day Friday, but then I had some trouble sleeping. I was OK on Saturday morning, and got through my usual Saturday morning tasks: laundry and grocery shopping. But, after that was done, I sat down at my computer to pay some bills, and started getting a migraine aura.

I haven’t had serious migraine problems since 2016, but I’ve gotten a couple of mild ones this year. Looking at my notes in Day One, I see that I had one on June 1, and might have had one in May too.  (Day One is great for logging this kind of stuff so you can identify patterns.) This one was bad enough that I had to give up on the computer and lie down. I had planned to spend some time Saturday finishing up a LinkedIn course on more AI stuff, and to maybe finish watching season five of Dragon Prince, but that all went out the window. Instead, I listened to some podcasts and audiobooks. I listened to a bit more of the Locke & Key audio drama that I’ve been listening to on & off for about a year now. (I can never get myself to stick with it and finish it. Maybe I’ll get it done before the end of this year…) And I started listening to Neil Gaiman’s Warning: Contains Language, which I got as part of a Humble Bundle about ten years ago.

Eventually, I got to the point where I could sit up and watch TV. But I didn’t feel like I could deal with anything too challenging, so I settled on college football, which I haven’t watched at all in the last several years. I watched most of the Florida State vs Miami U game. That was the kind of game that could have been a blowout, but was actually a pretty close game and kind of fun to watch. (I’m still a little iffy on the whole Seminoles thing, but apparently the actual Seminole tribe is OK with it, so who am I to argue?) I don’t know that I’m going to get back into watching a lot of college football now, but maybe it’s an option for Saturdays when my brain isn’t working well enough for anything else.

Anyway, I managed to get a good night’s sleep last night, and feel like I could handle something more challenging than football today if I had to. But I’ve gotten used to spending Sundays watching NFL football this year, and I’m enjoying that, so I think that’s what I’m going to be doing today. I probably won’t be paying a lot of attention though. The Giants are playing at 4, and the Jets are on the Sunday night game. The Giants are terrible right now and they’re playing Dallas, so that game should be a blowout. The Jets are playing the Raiders, and both of those teams are mediocre, so that game might be competitive, but not that interesting. So I’ll probably go with having football on in the background all day while I do other things that don’t require too much concentration. So: writing rambling blog posts, catching up on email newsletters, and that kind of stuff. Maybe I’ll mute one of the games and finish that LinkedIn course I mentioned above.

I probably still have COVID

I got sick with COVID two weeks ago. I took the whole week off from work, started Paxlovid, and got better. This week, I worked from home the whole week. I was feeling better Monday through Thursday, but was still testing positive as of Thursday. Then, on Friday, I got sick again. And I’m still feeling sick today. I haven’t taken another test yet, so I’m not sure if it’s a rebound COVID infection, a cold, or something else.

Here’s a good article on the Paxlovid rebound thing. The article says that a rebound usually lasts two or three days, but can last as long as ten. I’m really hoping for the two or three days, so I’ll be better by Monday. I’m not sure I can hack another week of being sick. And I’d kind of like to show my face in the office next week, if I can. (Not that I like being in the office, just that I don’t want people to think I’m slacking off…) I really wish we had, as a society, normalized the idea that erring on the side of caution is fine, and good, and pushing yourself to get back into the office as soon as possible isn’t good for anyone.

My Paxlovid was free, surprisingly. I’d assumed that, with the public health emergency over, there’d at least be a co-pay. But I guess the government program that pays for Paxlovid is still going. I did just see some articles about the coming price hike for Paxlovid though. Yikes. I hope my insurance will cover that, if I ever need it again.

With all the testing I’ve been doing, I almost ran out of COVID tests. I ordered a new batch from the free government program, but they haven’t shown up yet, so I ordered a couple of kits from Amazon. The retail price for a 2-pack seems to be $24, but Amazon had them on sale for about $16. So that’s not too bad, and of course they showed up the next day. (I also checked to see if my insurance would pay for them, but apparently that’s not a thing anymore, since the official “public health emergency” ended.)

Not that I would wish COVID on anyone, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one getting COVID recently. Stephen Colbert caught it too, and did one show from home, then skipped the rest of the week. So, if he can take some time off, I can too, right?

 

I got COVID

I got my COVID and flu shots on Saturday, as planned. On Sunday, I had a fair bit of pain in the arm where I’d gotten the COVID shot. But no other obvious side-effects. Then, on Monday, I woke up with my usual set of cold/flu-like symptoms: headache, slight fever, runny nose, etc. I assumed it was just side-effects of the COVID and/or flu shots.

It was still pretty bad on Tuesday, so I did a tele-medicine thing through CVS. The doctor there told me that, yes, it was probably just side-effects from the vaccines, but that I should do a COVID test. So I did that, and it came back positive. I really should have gone back and done a second call with CVS, but I didn’t. I can’t tell you why, except that I was pretty sick and just wanted to sleep. And I was hoping maybe it was a false positive.

I  was still sick on Thursday, so I did a second COVID test and that came back positive too. This time, I decided to call my regular doctor and see what she said. She wasn’t in the office that day, but her receptionist acted as a go-between, and she prescribed Paxlovid for me. In retrospect, I really should have reported the positive COVID test on Tuesday and gotten started with the Paxlovid then. Better late than never, I guess.

So now it’s Friday, and I’m feeling a little better. I probably could have gone back to work today (remotely of course), but I decided to just take a full week off. Better to get one more day of rest. The Paxlovid has a couple of side-effects. The worst is the metallic taste it leaves in my mouth. It’s quite unpleasant, and it doesn’t go away. (It’s not just the aftertaste of the pills, so you can’t just wash it out.)

So the plan now is to isolate through the weekend and start back at work on Monday, working remotely all week. Our company doesn’t have a firm policy about that, but I’m pretty sure it’s OK for me to do that. I’d like to be in the office for at least one day next week, if I could, since we’re supposed to have a meeting with the guy who (I think) will be my new boss, and it would be good to meet him in person. (My current boss is retiring at the end of the year.) But hopefully I can participate in that meeting via Teams.

Meanwhile, NYCC started yesterday. I guess I’m glad that I didn’t make plans for that, since I would have had to cancel them. I haven’t kept up with any news coming out of the con, since I’ve been pretty out of it, prior to today. This whole thing has made me even more reticent to go out and re-enter the world (as it were). And it’s made me realize that I’ve gotten a bit too lax about masking up. Lately, I’ve been skipping the mask sometimes, in environments where I should probably be wearing one (even though no one else is…).

 

Jury duty and a rough week

This has turned out to be one of those weeks where I feel like I’ve barely made it through in one piece. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it was still kinda rough. I had jury duty this week. I thought that might be kinda fun and interesting, but now I’m regretting not just finding a way to dodge it. In and of itself, it was perfectly fine, but I picked up a cold or something there, and I’m still getting over it.

I thought it might be fun to write up a few notes on how jury duty worked out. The process was kind of interesting. It started with a Zoom orientation session last Friday. That lasted about two hours. There were about 300 people in the session. It mostly consisted of watching this video. So that wasn’t too bad, though there’s no reason why they couldn’t have just emailed us a link to the video and a few notes and skipped the whole Zoom thing.

Then, I had to show up at the courthouse on Monday, at 8 AM. That’s not a big deal for me, since I live just a few blocks from the courthouse. And I was actually looking forward to seeing the inside of that building, since I’ve lived here for so long and never had a reason to go inside.

The jury assembly room is inside an old church that was built in 1898. It’s pretty cool. We spent an hour or two sitting around in that room. They showed us another video there, this time on bias. I think that’s something they started doing about a year ago. And I think there were about 75 people called to come in that day. (And, of course, I can’t stop wondering why they showed us one video over Zoom and the other video in person. Why not both on Zoom? Or both in-person? Or just email us the links and let us watch at home?)

Some time between 9 and 10, they starting taking people up to the courtroom, which was on the fifth floor of the courthouse. (This is the newer, modern, courthouse, and not the nifty historic courthouse that was built in 1907. So I still haven’t been inside that building.) They took us up in groups of ten, and I think they took up maybe 40 or 50 of us, total.

In the courtroom, they had us fill out a questionnaire while they went through some preliminaries. I was a bit surprised to find out that this was a murder trial. I had assumed it would just be something fairly ordinary, like a civil suit, or a low-level criminal thing.

Then, they picked 14 people to move into the jury box. And they questioned them one by one about any “yes” answers on their questionnaire, which would all be reasons why they might not be able to serve on the jury, or things that might prevent them from being impartial. There were some conversational questions too, like “what do you like to watch on TV?” and “where do you get your news?”. It was interesting to sit through that, and listen to what everyone said.

The judge dismissed a number of people fairly quickly. Those were mostly folks with prior commitments, or where being away from work would cause a hardship for them. And there were a few folks who knew some of the police officers involved, and one who knew the prosecutor personally. Then, a bunch of people were dismissed by the prosecutor and the defense lawyer. I guess they don’t have to state their reasons aloud for those, but I think they’re supposed to have reasons for most of them. I’ll admit to wondering about why some of them were dismissed. A few were kind of obvious, but most weren’t, to me. The whole process of going through the questions, dismissing people, bringing more people up, questioning them, dismissing some of them, and then bringing up more people took quite a while. It was long enough that we had to take a lunch break and come back. They finally had a full jury at 2:30 PM, and dismissed the rest of us.

Overall, initially, I was glad I got called in, and glad I got called up to the courtroom to see how the process worked. It was all pretty interesting, and everyone involved was professional and courteous.

Later, though, I kind of wish I’d found a way out of it. I got pretty sick on Wednesday, and it’s obvious that I must have picked it up at the courthouse on Monday. I’m a bit mad at myself for that, since I didn’t wear a mask. I’d brought one with me, and intended on putting it on at some point, but nobody else was wearing one, and I got lulled into a false sense of security, I guess. So I had to use up two sick days this week, on Wednesday and Thursday. I worked from home yesterday, and was feeling a bit better, but I’m still not back to 100%. I guess this is only a cold, since I took two COVID tests and they both came back negative, so that’s good.

So now, I’ve missed a half a day of work last Friday, most of the day Monday, and all day Wednesday and Thursday. And I wasn’t really 100% on Friday, and didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped to. Now I’m hoping I can shake the remnants of this cold over the weekend and be ready to work a full week next week. It’s a little annoying to me how easily I can get thrown off track by something like this, but I guess it’s part of getting older. And I guess I should appreciate that I have some flexibility at work, with regard to time off and working from home. But I don’t want to push things too far there. Oh well. I guess this weekend will be spend mostly watching TV and napping.

first week back

Well, it’s the end of my first week back in the office on the new schedule. Short version: I survived working in the office for three days in a row. Longer version: I don’t like the “everyone is in the office at the same time” deal. It’s too crowded and too loud. If you go back to before the pandemic, the norm was to have meetings in person, in meeting rooms. Now, they’re all on Teams. So everyone is at their desk all day, and a lot of people are in a lot of meetings. So it makes it hard for a programmer to concentrate when I’m hearing bits and pieces of other people’s meetings all day. My AirPods Pro are a necessary tool at this point. I’ve been listening to The Pretenders a lot this week.

Going back to the football part of my previous post: Ugh. The Giants lost to the Cowboys, 40-0. That’s about the worst start they’ve ever had, at least in my memory. The Jets won, but Aaron Rodgers is done for the season. The Eagles won last night, and are now 2-0, so maybe I switch my allegiance to Philly!

And some notes on some tech stuff I’ve been working on: I started trying to learn Jenkins this week. I haven’t gotten too far yet. I keep getting interrupted. Reading up on installing Jenkins send me down a side trip to also consider installing WSL 2 and maybe Docker Desktop for Windows. I got as far as installing WSL 2 on my work desktop, and on my personal Windows 10 desktop and Windows 11 laptop. (I’d been meaning to do that anyway.) But no further. I got caught up in a support issue this afternoon, and never got back to any of my other work.

Next week could be interesting. In addition to having to go into the office Tuesday through Thursday, I might have jury duty starting Friday. I won’t know for sure on that until Thursday night. I could actually use a break from work, so I wouldn’t mind it if I get put on a jury and can miss a few days of work…