perfect Sundays

I feel like I’ve been having a nice run of near-perfect Sundays lately, so I thought I’d blog about that a little. Since at least 2020, I’ve been organizing my weekends so that I generally get all of my chores done on Saturday, and I can spend Sunday relaxing. And I’ve developed some habits that work well for me.

I started reading the Sunday Routine articles in the NY Times around 2020, and enjoyed a lot of those. I haven’t kept up with them, but I think I may have taken some inspiration from them, without really meaning to. A lot of them are easy to make fun of. But many of them are also inspirational and interesting.

Anyway, here’s my Sunday routine: I generally get up at 6, because I’m old and I can’t really sleep late anymore. But Sunday is the one day I don’t need to get up at 6, so sometimes I’ll sleep in until 7, if my body lets me do that. I almost always make a variation on the same breakfast: two eggs, one slice of pork roll, and two slices of toast. And I make coffee with my Moka pot. At some point after breakfast, I go for a walk. Generally for 20-25 minutes, just around the neighborhood. When I come back, I read a few chapters of whichever Wheel of Time book I’m currently reading. At 10 AM, I walk over to the Somerville Farmers Market and buy some stuff. I’ve been going to that consistently enough this year that a lot of the vendors know me now, and I can have some little chats with them. So that’s quite nice. After that, I might go back to reading my Wheel of Time book. For the afternoon, I might make a sandwich and watch a movie on TV, or a football game. There’s usually an afternoon nap in there somewhere.

So there’s not much of a point in writing all of that out, but I like thinking about it. And it’s good to recognize the nice things in your life and be thankful for them.

And all of that is leading me up to thinking about the election results from last week. I have to admit that it all kind of broke me. (I was going to link to a news article about the results here, but browsing through them now is only making me angry again…) I’m trying to think back now to how I felt in 2016. And, because I have a blog, I can check on that! Here’s a post from (coincidentally) today in 2016. It’s kind of funny to see that I embedded a bunch of Twitter posts into that blog entry. I would never do that now; Twitter is worse than useless at this point.

There was a lot of reaction to the election on the social networks I now follow (Mastodon and Bluesky, mostly), but nothing I feel like I need to share. In fact, I avoided social media for the day after the election, except for a couple of quick check-ins to see if there was anything I needed to know about. I’m starting to rethink my media diet again. I’ve found that I’m not ready for stuff like Colbert or other typical last-night humor again. So I might lay off all of that for the rest of the year. I will probably keep watching NJ Spotlight News, but I might be fast-forwarding through parts of it now. (That’s what I was doing last week. I just couldn’t bear to watch anything related to the election results.)

One thing I did see on social media today was a post from Michiko Kakutani on Instagram quoting W. H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, which I’ve mentioned on this blog before. I was going to stick a quote from it in here, but you’re better off reading the whole thing. (It’s not long.)

And there have been a lot of blog posts and essays and think pieces written about these election results. (Of course.) I’ve looked at a few of them, but haven’t read many, past the first paragraph or two. (That’s probably healthy. Reading too much of this stuff would only make my state of mind worse, and probably wouldn’t result in any useful action on my part.) I’ll like to one piece though: And Yet It Moves, by Ken White.

OK, that’s it for now. Back to relaxing.

vacation review

So I guess my vacation is just about done. Looking back over the week, I’m curious to see what I’ve accomplished, what I didn’t, and how I feel about it.

  • The boil water advisory was lifted last night, and water pressure seems to be back to normal, so I guess that’s over.
  • I mentioned in my last post that I’d wiped my TiVo. Today was the first Saturday of the month, which is when they accept electronics for recycling at our local recycling center, so I took care of that today. I got rid of both the TiVo, and my old answering machine (which I unhooked back in June when I parked my old home number).
  • On the way back from the recycling center, I tried to stop off at Duke Farms, which I’d wanted to do earlier in the week, but couldn’t because of the water main break. Alas, it turns out that this is the last weekend of the year where they require a parking pass to be reserved, rather than the first weekend when they don’t, as I’d thought. So they turned me away. I guess I can try again next Saturday.
  • I managed to watch some pretty random movies this week: The Mummy, John Wick: Chapter 4, Sita Sings the Blues, and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract. So that was nice.
  • I got some dental work done on Friday, and I’m still recovering from that. I’m glad I had that whole day off. I was supposed to have one follow-up visit after that, but now it’s two follow-ups, because there was an issue, and the dentist couldn’t finish up on Friday. So, one visit in mid-November and one in early December. Sigh. These things never seem to end.
  • Ditto for the car work I did on Monday. I was hoping to get everything done, but, for one problem, they just did a bit more diagnostic work and gave me a price for it, rather than just going ahead and doing it. So I’m going to have to bring the car back again at some point.

So am I ready to go back to work? I guess so. I’m very tired today, due to a lack of sleep last night (which I think is partially due to a lingering headache from the dental work, and partially due to some noisy folks outside at 1 AM last night). If I can get a good night’s sleep tonight, and have a good trouble-free day tomorrow, I should be good for work on Monday. But did I really succeed in de-stressing at all? Eh, a little, I guess. It was nice not to think (too much) about work for a week, and have some space to just hang out and get some stuff done.

vacation clean-up

So we’ve got water back, though the water pressure is a little weird, and we have a boil water advisory. Meanwhile, I’m trying to check a few things off my to-do list today.

A few days ago, I finally wiped my TiVo, unhooked it from the TV, and boxed it up for recycling. I got it in 2015, so it had a good run. Almost ten years.

That made me look at the situation under my TV a bit closer, and convinced me to see whether or not it was worth keeping my PS3. I got that in 2008, so it’s even older than the TiVo. I’d unplugged the HDMI cable on it at some point, for some reason. I plugged it back in today and turned it on, and surprisingly, it worked.

It wasn’t hooked up to my current WiFi network, which means it’s been at least two years since I’ve turned it on, since I bought that router in 2022. It took a bit of work to get it going. I had to reset my PSN account password, then generate a new device setup password, and get it entered on the dumb on-screen keyboard on the PS3. But it’s working now.

The PlayStation store for PS3 was discontinued in 2021. And I’m not sure if the Blu-Ray player works. So I’m not sure if it’s at all useful. I should probably talk myself into resetting it to factory defaults and recycling it. One thing at a time though.

My other big cleanup thing today was to put together a pile of old tech books and dump them in a book donation bin. (I know tech books usually don’t have much resale value, but this bin specifically says that it’s OK, as long as they have UPC codes. They might just toss them, but I’m fine either way.)

It took some effort to convince myself to dump them. I know they were all out of date, and I can access most of them through O’Reilly Learning if I need them, but it was still hard, for some reason. Most of them were from the stack of books I used to keep at my desk at work, before they moved us to our new smaller cubicles, which don’t have any space for books.

I guess I still have trouble letting go of old stuff, in general. Part of me still thinks I’m going to finish reading that book about SharePoint 2010 development, or playing Final Fantasy VIII, or watching all the Svengoolie episodes on my TiVo. But I need to let go of some of this stuff and move forward.

vacation week and water main break

I’m in the middle of a vacation week. I’m not really doing anything with it, other than taking care of some miscellaneous stuff and just trying to relax. This is my first vacation this year, and also really my first time taking a full calendar week vacation in… quite some time. I took a full week off last year, but that was when I got COVID. And the last few years before that, I’d only really taken long weekends, essentially.

So this is kind of a nice break. Of course, I scheduled some car stuff on Monday, and some dental work for Friday, so Tuesday through Thursday are really my only 100% free days. Today is Wednesday, and I had some ideas in my head about maybe going over to Duke Farms for a walk. But, when I got out of bed, I discovered that we had no water. And it’s a town-wide thing, due to a water main break on Rt 206, near Duke Farms. So they’ve closed for the day. And I also had some ideas in my head about making myself a fancy breakfast, but I didn’t want to do that without running water, so I had a bowl of Cheerios instead, with some instant coffee made with bottled water.

So now I’m not sure what I should do with myself today. I have a few little chores I could do. And maybe I could find a park that’s in the other direction from 206 to go for a walk. Or I could just sit around and continue reading Towers of Midnight. Yeah, I think I’m probably going to do that.

subscriptions

I seem to have a lot of yearly subscriptions coming up for renewal soon, and I’m spending a little time thinking about them today. So I thought I’d write up some notes.

    • Instapaper is $60/year now, having doubled from the old price of $30/year. I’ve thought about switching to Pocket, which would be $45/year. But I’m used to Instapaper, and it works fine, and I can afford the $60. The weird thing, though, is that it should have renewed several days ago, but hasn’t yet. Every time I check my account page, it says that my renewal date is “today”. I don’t know. I guess I’ll let it go and see what happens.
    • I just got a renewal notice for my AAA membership, which expires at the end of the year. I don’t have that on auto-renew. I thought about canceling it last year, since I never really use it, and I can get roadside assistance through my regular auto insurance. Maybe I’ll finally drop it this year. I’ve been a member since I got my license and first car in the early 90s, but it doesn’t really seem useful anymore.
    • My Costco membership is up for renewal too. This is another one that might go into the same category as AAA. I’ve had it for years, but I really don’t go to the local Costco anymore, since COVID, and I haven’t ordered anything from their website lately either. I might let it expire, and just re-up it later if I need it.
    • My GoComics subscription renews soon. That one’s a no-brainer, at $20/year for my daily comic strip fix. I occasionally consider also subscribing to Comics Kingdom, which is $30/year, but I don’t really need it.
    • My ACM membership is coming due soon. That one’s also a no-brainer. I get a fair bit of use out of the O’Reilly Learning access that I get through ACM, so it’s worth it just for that. I’ve fallen way behind on reading my ACM newsletters and the CACM magazine though. And in fact, I just checked, and it seems like I turned off emails on some of the ACM stuff a while ago, so I’m not getting notices when new CACM issues come out, so I guess I should fix that.
    • And I guess the last thing would be my Poe subscription. I have really mixed feelings about that. It’s $200/year, which is a lot. I’ve gotten a good bit of use out of it, but it’s annoying that it’s blocked on my work computer, which is where I need it most. (At work, I’m stuck using Copilot and/or our own internal AI chatbot.) I originally signed up for it because ChatGPT Plus signups were on hold, so Poe was an alternative. I might cancel the Poe sub and switch to the $20/month ChatGPT sub. Really, I don’t know if I need a “pro” AI chatbot service. A year ago, I was trying to learn this stuff, figure out what it was good for, and get some experience with it. Now I think I know where it’s useful and where it’s not. And I’m not too interested in doing any API stuff with it right now.

waiting for my Kindle

My new Kindle still hasn’t shown up yet. It’s due on Nov 4, which is fine, but a little inconvenient, since I’m on vacation next week, and it would have been nice to have a new Kindle to play with.

I’ve already sent my old Kindle back for trade-in, and it’s been accepted, with no issues. But now I’m not sure I should have traded it in. It looks like the new Kindles don’t allow the download and transfer option like the old ones did. And that’s the way I generally get Kindle ebooks over to my Kobo; by downloading them, pulling them into Calibre, letting it convert them, then copying them to the Kobo.

So, since I now have no older devices registered to my Amazon account, I can’t download books anymore. I probably should have kept the old Kindle, just so I could keep that ability.

Mind you, Amazon has said nothing about this, so no one is sure if this is just a temporary thing, or a change in policy going forward. Either way, I probably shouldn’t worry about it. The main point of buying a new Kindle is so that I can use it to read my Kindle books. And it should be at least as good as the Kobo.

My old 2018 Paperwhite wasn’t quite as good as the Kobo, so I’d been copying all of my Wheel of Time books over to the Kobo and reading them on it. But now, I’ll want to go back to the Kindle anyway, I think.

This does leave me wondering what I’ll do with the Kobo. Of course, I have plenty of DRM-free ebooks that I can read on either device, easily. And I have a bundle of Terry Pratchett ebooks that I got through Kobo, so there’s those too.

Kindle Colorsoft

When the new Kindles were announced this week, I pretty much jumped right in and ordered a Kindle Colorsoft. I used to be a lot more cautious/frugal about ordering new bits of hardware, but I seem to have decided that “you only live once”, as the kids say, so now I have a fancy new color Kindle on its way to me. It should be here on Nov 4. I traded in my old Kindle Paperwhite, so the total cost after trade-in discount is around $233. I got the Paperwhite in 2018, so I was due for a new Kindle.

Of course, I also bought a Kobo Libra Colour just a few months ago. So now I’ll have two color e-readers to choose from. Part of me feels ashamed for my flagrant consumerism here. I feel like I should have held out and waited for the new Kindles, instead of buying the Kobo. Or decided to stick with the Kobo and give up on the Kindle. But, eh… you only live once.

I’m using the Kobo to read my Wheel of Time books right now, despite having bought them through Amazon. Once I get the Kindle, I’ll probably switch back to it, and see if the screen is as good as (or better than) the Kobo. (The Kobo screen is definitely better than my 2018 Paperwhite, but that’s to be expected.)

If I like the new Kindle better than the Kobo, then I guess the Kobo will become a secondary device. I’m pretty sure I’ll hold on to it, either way.

WordPress, business books, and some health stuff

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve made it through another week. I’m going to start writing this post as a stream of consciousness thing, and see where it goes. I have a bunch of thoughts in my head, as usual. Maybe this will come together into something coherent. Maybe not.

WordPress

There is a bunch of crazy stuff going on right now between WordPress / Matt Mullenweg and WPEngine. I’m not going to try to summarize it or link to any of the many articles and blog posts about it. I went down a hole this morning reading some of them, and I don’t think I came out of it with any useful knowledge about which side I should take (if any) and what (if anything) I should be doing. I guess I’ll be sticking with WordPress for the time being. This doesn’t seem to have devolved into something like the Twitter situation, where the whole thing has been turned into a nazi bar, and the only option was bailing out.

Maybe I should think about switching to Drupal! I haven’t touched Drupal in more than a decade, but it’s probably still fine, right? I haven’t read anything about Dries Buytaert going off the deep end. (Though, now that I’m looking at his Wikipedia page, I’m reminded of the Larry Garfield thing from several years back. Again, no clue who’s right and who’s wrong on that… Sigh.)

Business Books

In between Wheel of Time books, I’ve been reading a few relatively short business books. I mentioned Thinking in Systems a couple of weeks ago. I’ve since also read a couple of books from Seth Godin’s Domino Project, from several years back. Honestly, I don’t remember why I was engaging with that stuff back when it was first coming out. I guess I had some kind of self-improvement thing going… maybe this was concurrent with my David Allen / GTD thing? I don’t know. Anyway, I have several of those books in my Kindle library but never got around to reading them.

I read Do the Work By Steven Pressfield last week, and I’m most of the way through Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli. Neither or these really seems like something I needed to read right now. I was hoping the latter book might help me figure out how to deal with the barrage of meetings I’ve been dealing with recently, but it wasn’t that helpful.

I’m not happy with the number of meetings I have to attend at work these days, and sometimes it seems almost comic (like the one meeting on Thursday that required two separate prep meetings for it, on Tuesday and Wednesday). But there’s not much I can do about any of that other than grin and bear it.

To get back to my reading, I guess I’m about done with business books for now. I should probably start reading Towers of Midnight today, and see if I can get through the prologue. Reading these books is bringing me so much joy. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, given that I kind of looked down on them for so many years.

My Health

I had a move streak going on my Apple Watch for quite some time. I gave up on it this week. It lasted for 52 days, which is pretty good. And the most interesting thing about it, to me, is that this means I haven’t been sick for almost two whole months! I even went to see a movie a couple of weeks back, and didn’t get sick. (Though this was a niche Paul McCartney movie, and there were maybe a dozen people in the theater, so not a typical crowded theater thing.) I need to watch myself though: I just noticed that it’s the one year anniversary of my bout with COVID last year. So I’m still going to play it safe and skip NYCC next weekend.

cleaning up my bookmarks

I’m still doing the thing where I’m going through my old unread Pinboard bookmarks, figuring out what to do with them, then updating or deleting them in Raindrop. It’s pointless, but fun, and occasionally interesting.

Today, I stumbled across this link from November 2016. Very weird to look back on that, and how we were all feeling and how it all went. In about a month from now, we’ll all be going through… hopefully not the same thing. But maybe the same thing. Only worse. Well, it’s a nice quiet Sunday morning, so maybe let’s not think about that right now.

Meanwhile, I also found this amazing video from OK Go which I bookmarked almost exactly ten years ago and never watched. (At least I think I never watched it… I have no recollection of it, and it seems like the kind of thing I’d remember. But of course a lot has happened in the last ten years.)

Books

On an unrelated subject, I finished The Gathering Storm yesterday, and Thinking in Systems on Friday. I really enjoyed both of those books.

I’ve got only two more books to read in the Wheel of Time series. And I’m almost caught up to The Wheel Weaves podcast. If I do catch up, I’m not sure what I’ll want to do about that. It would be cool to follow along with the podcast in real time, but, on the other hand, they only read a chapter or two per week, so if I kept current with them, I’d slow myself down a lot. I could take a break and read a few non-WOT books until they’re sufficiently ahead of me. Or I could keep reading at my current pace and let myself get past them. Well, I’m not sure which way I’m going to go yet. Maybe I should take a break and read some comics for the next week or two.

TiVo & YouTube TV

There’s been some talk on Reddit over the last week about Optimum discontinuing CableCARD support. I returned my CableCARD to Optimum in March, and switched to YouTube TV, so this doesn’t affect me. (And I’m not sure if Optimum has really discontinued all CableCARD support, or if this is just support for a specific type of card in a specific service area. You know how these things go on Reddit…)

My yearly TiVo service would normally be renewing this month; I canceled it in August, so I should be good there. But I still haven’t wiped and recycled my TiVo yet. I need to do that… There were a few things on there I wanted to watch, and I did watch some of them, but there’s a point where I’ll need to just give up and admit that I’m not going to go back and watch those last few Svengoolie movies. (Though it’s Halloween this month, so maybe now is a good time to do that…)

Anyway, I guess I’m keeping YouTube TV at least through football season. I’m getting my money’s worth out of it right now, between the NFL and the MLB playoffs.

 

Systems Thinking

Our scrum master at work suggested this week that we look into design thinking and systems thinking. I guess there’s some application of both to scrum, though I haven’t done much work on it yet, so I don’t really know what that is. But I like researching stuff and wasting time on the internet, so I did some reading and found some resources. I’ve found two books on design thinking and two books on systems thinking that are often recommended.

For design thinking:

For systems thinking:

Full disclosure: I got these recommendations from an AI chatbot. But, in looking into them, they do all seem to be popular choices. (And they’re all real books, and not hallucinations, which is more than I can say for the list I got out of a chatbot when I asked it to recommend some books I could give to a friend for his 65th birthday last week. But I digress.)

I also looked at some LinkedIn Learning videos to try to figure out some basics. My initial takeaway is that I’m not really interested in reading about design thinking right now. I might come back to it later, but systems thinking makes more sense to me at present.

So I went ahead and bought the Kindle versions of the two systems thinking books above. I started reading Thinking in Systems today. It might actually be a good book. (Too early to tell, but I’m optimistic.) The author passed away some time ago, but there’s a good website devoted to her work here.

Of course, I’m still in the middle of The Gathering Storm. And I’m enjoying it quite a lot. The series is really ramping up here, with only two more books to go. So I’m going to try and go back and forth between the two books and see how that goes, but I’m probably going to be a lot more interested in the Wheel of Time rather than the Systems Thinking stuff.