I’ve been messing around with various prep materials for various Microsoft exams for a while now. I go back and forth, but I never seem to get far enough to actually take a test. The ground shifts under me, and I have to switch my focus to something else.
I’d been working towards taking the AZ-204 exam, starting in mid-2024, but I kept getting sidetracked. Well, I got serious about it again recently. But then I realized that there’s some overlap between AZ-204 and AZ-900, and I could probably prep for the AZ-900 in just a few days. I already know a lot of the material on AZ-900, so there wasn’t much extra stuff to learn.
So I spent some time last week studying, then got enough done over the weekend that I felt I could take the exam today. And with the online exams, you can generally get a same-day appointment. So I did that, and passed the exam today!
The process for the online, at-home, exam is pretty much the same as it was in 2023, when I passed the PL-900 exam. The one wrinkle I had this time was that I couldn’t get through the pre-exam system check. Long story short: I had to go into “Windows Features” on my laptop and disable anything related to Hyper-V. They don’t want you taking the exam on a VM, which I can kinda understand, but they also make it impossible to take the exam on a laptop that’s configured as a VM host, which is kinda silly. I also had an issue where the proctor made me wander around my table with my laptop, showing her my entire kitchen table via the webcam, to make sure the table surface was actually clear. And she had me take off my watch. So the prep was a bit of a pain, and took longer than the actual test. I don’t remember the proctor bothering me at all last time.
I paid for the exam myself, using a 50% discount that I can get through ESI (Enterprise Skills Initiative), so it was only $50. I might get reimbursed for it, or I might not. I decided to take this exam without running it by my boss first. I was afraid he might throw some obstacles in my way, and I just wanted to “strike while the iron was hot,” so to speak.
I’ve also rediscovered today that my “test anxiety” problem is still a thing. I’ve always had it. It peaked in high school, where I went through a phase where I would get physically sick when dealing with high-pressure tests (like finals or mid-terms). At some point, I realized what was happening, and got it under control. (There was really no guidance for mental health stuff for teenagers back then, so I’m not sure how I did it. I just figured it out on my own.) Anyway, even taking a dumb little Microsoft cert exam still makes me break out in a sweat, apparently.
I’m probably going to try for the AZ-204 later this year, if I can find the time to finish the prep.
OK, I guess I’m going to write two posts today. (See my previous one for details on why I’m home with nothing much to do this afternoon.)
GoComics announced a while back that they’d be doing a site redesign. It seems like, at some point in the distant past, an announcement of a site redesign on a website I use frequently might have been good news rather than “oh god, how much worse is it going to get?” news.
The last time GoComics did a site redesign, they dropped one of my favorite features, which let you create little collections of strips around various topics. So I had a “coffee” collection, for funny strips mentioning coffee, for instance, and a “tech” collection, for funny strips about tech stuff. They kept a single “favorites” collection, but dropped the ability to keep multiple named collections. This time, they dropped any ability to save a collection of strips. And they didn’t (as far as I can tell) mention that in advance, so I had no opportunity to save my favorites page out to a PDF file, or convert it into raindrop.io bookmarks or whatever. Oh well. I shouldn’t get too worked up about that. (Comic strips are supposed to be ephemeral, right?)
They’re also raising prices, from $20/year to $35/year, but I have the old price locked in for another year. I still want to support the comic strip business, and even $35/year isn’t much, but it’s annoying to lose features and have the price go up. I guess that’s about enough complaining about GoComics for today.
One thing they seem to have gotten right is that they haven’t messed up their URL scheme, so any links I’ve included on this blog should still work, and I can still find (for instance) the Peanuts strip from the day I was born pretty easily. (Which made me wonder if any other strips on their site go back that far… I tried a few, and no dice. Oh well, I’m too old, I guess.) On the other hand, while the links still work, you need to be a subscriber to see older strips now, so the links work for me, but probably won’t work for many other people. (I can’t really blame them for doing that. I’m sure they need the money.)
On another subject, I was looking at my “on this day” widget, and see that I came back from WonderCon on this day in 2019. And I had a nice day out in NYC on this day in 2017. I haven’t been on a plane since that trip to WonderCon in 2019. And I haven’t been in to NYC in quite a while now. This year’s WonderCon just wrapped up, and the reports I’ve seen make it sound like it was a good one. (See here for Mark Evanier’s write-up.) But, at this point, I don’t think I’m getting on a plane any time soon, without a really good reason for doing so. Even getting on a train to NYC is going to require a very good reason. I just get sick way too easily these days.
I took a half-day today, because I was supposed to be going over to Costco to pick up my new hearing aid. But the hearing aid hasn’t arrived yet, and they didn’t call me to tell me that until after I’d already driven home, so now I have a half-day to relax, catch up on some reading, and maybe write a pointless blog post.
To back up a bit: I got my hearing tested in 2020 and 2021. In 2020, I went to an ENT, and he determined that (1) there was nothing wrong with my ears that required surgery or that I should be excessively worried about, and (2) that I was on the verge of needing a hearing aid for my left ear, but I could probably hold off. In 2021, I went to an audiologist who said that I should really get that hearing aid, and was going to follow up with a price, but then I never heard from her again. (And I never followed up myself.)
Now, in 2025, I finally decided that my hearing had gotten bad enough that I should try again. This time, I decided to try Costco. I was motivated to do this mostly from having watched this Adam Savage video. At some point in the video, he says something about how no one who has ever gotten hearing aids has ever later said “that was a bad idea.” So that got me to get off my butt and call the Costco hearing aid center.
You can get some details about Costco’s hearing aids here. Their appointment system is kind of low-tech. You need to call your local Costco to make an appointment. And there’s a PDF intake form that you can fill out and print, prior to your first visit. There’s no online system at all; it’s all over the phone and in person.
I can’t say that things went entirely smoothly for me. My first appointment was canceled and rescheduled, because the audio tech called in sick or something. (And the rescheduled appointment coincided with the Somerville St Patrick’s Day parade, so that made getting to Costco challenging…) For that appointment, they did a hearing test, asked a few questions, then set up a sample hearing aid for me, and let me try it out, by wandering around the store for a few minutes. I think it helped, but I wasn’t sure, so I told them I’d think it over.
Long story short, I made up my mind to go ahead with it and called them back a week or two later. So I had to make a second appointment to come back into the store and buy the hearing aid. (There was really nothing to do in that visit other than pick a color and hand over my debit card. I feel like they should have been able to do that over the phone, but whatever.)
And today’s appointment was to pick up the hearing aid. But they called around noon to tell me that it hadn’t come in yet, so we rescheduled for Sunday. So, you can see, it hasn’t been entirely smooth.
I’ll blog more about the hearing aid once I actually get it and have a chance to use it for a few days. I’m getting the Philips HearLink 9050, which is costing me around $850. (A pair would be $1600, but I only need one.)
And to back up a bit again, in between my first and second visits, I ordered a paid of AirPods Pro 2 from Costco, for $200, to see how they would work as hearing aids. I’d been curious about that, but didn’t want to buy new AirPods, since my old AirPods Pro (first gen) were still working fine. (I bought them in 2021, so they were four years old, admittedly, but there was nothing wrong with them…) Overall, I think I could get away with using them occasionally as hearing aids, but not as an all day, every day, kind of thing. And they’re not as good as the actual Philips hearing aid that I tried at Costco. (There are a few other enhancements between the first gen Pros and the second gen that I guess I don’t feel like I’ve wasted the $200 on the upgrade.)
So, anyway, that’s my pointless blog post for today. I’m hoping that the hearing aid will help me hear better when I’m in the office, and in other environments where I’m often saying “what?” or “huh?” or just entirely missing something someone was trying to tell me.
I’ve been reflecting a lot this month on the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 outbreak. I’m one of only a few people in the office who still wear a mask on a regular basis. And recently, for the first time, someone actually asked me about it. It wasn’t ill-intentioned or confrontational. It was just someone who didn’t understand why an otherwise healthy person would be wearing a mask in a meeting. So, from my perspective at least, I feel like we’ve hit a milestone, where wearing a mask in public has gone from “normal” (but uncommon) back to “unusual” and “worthy of comment.”
NJ Spotlight News did a report this week, looking back at the last five years. Here’s a link to the video, and here’s the original article. The summary for our current status is “manageable,” which I guess is fair.
I’m a little worried though. There’s another article on the site about how things are going with measles, and it ain’t great. If we can’t handle measles, I’m not sure how the current (federal) administration is going to do with COVID, going forward. Am I even going to be able to get a booster shot this year?
Here’s a link to a post from the end of March, 2020. Looking back at how things were going then, I guess we’re doing better. I’m not sure I’m doing better though. Here’s a chart of my weight, over the last five years, for instance:
My weight March 2020-2025
I’m honestly not doing that bad, and my current weight is (relatively) healthy. Still, it feels like I’ve gotten a lot older in the last five years. I’m still getting a decent amount of exercise, but I’ve had days where I get really tired by the end of the day. I rarely have the energy to go out and do anything interesting or adventurous. I’m feeling a lot more general aches and pains. My allergies are worse.
Hmm, now I feel like I need to find a way to end this on a positive note! …and, OK, I just spent 15 minutes trying to find a positive news article to link to, and didn’t find one. Instead, I keep stumbling across stuff like this and this. So I’m going to link to a mildly funny comic panel instead.
I’ve been wanting to write a blog post on the stuff that’s been going on with Amazon and Kindle lately, and it seems like more stuff keeps happening, and I never get around to writing that post. So now here I am, writing a post about a bunch of semi-related stuff.
I’ll start with the news that Dark Horse Digital is shutting down. I’ve actually been expecting them to shut down DHD at some point, ever since they started making their books available through Comixology, which happened back in 2015. I had hoped that, when they did it, they’d strike a deal with Amazon/Comixology to transfer their user’s libraries over to Amazon. Or, for certain books, make them available as DRM-free downloads. (I can understand where they wouldn’t be able to make some of their old stuff available DRM-free, due to licensing issues, but they should be able to make stuff like Hellboy and BPRD available, since those have already been sold DRM-free through Humble.) Well, they didn’t do any of that.
I had around 300 books in my DHD library, with about half of them unread. Some of those books were single-issue comics, and some were 400-page omnibus volumes, so it was really all over the place. I found a TamperMonkey script that let me download the books as DRM-free CBZs from the DHD web site, so I went ahead and used it to download most of my library. You need to download the books one at a time, so it was time-consuming. Initially, I was going to limit myself to downloading just my unread books, but at some point, my OCD kicked in, and I decided to download almost everything. I managed to stop myself from downloading various random freebie issues, but I grabbed nearly everything else, including stuff that I’m pretty sure I have from Humble bundles. So that’s taking up a little more than 20 GB. I actually feel pretty good about this now; I have a bunch of good DRM-free books that I can read in Panels, which probably works better than the old DHD iPad app anyhow.
This process triggered something else I’ve been putting off: figuring out what to do about the growing library of DRM-free comics and other stuff that’s filling up my PC hard drive. I’ve got it all in OneDrive, but I’ve always had OneDrive configured to keep all my stuff local (on my desktop PC). But space on my PC has been getting a little tight. I have a 1 TB SSD in there, and I’ve been dropping below 100 GB free. Which seems like plenty, but I want to keep at least 10% free. So I finally bit the bullet and turned on the files on-demand feature in OneDrive. Then, I let it offload some of my bigger CBZ files, and got myself back to 150 GB free.
I also set up my backup program to skip trying to backup offline files, otherwise it would have tried to pull them back down every time I ran a backup. That was another mental hurdle to get past. Now, I won’t necessarily have a local backup of some files either. But, hey, I trust OneDrive, I guess. Oh, and I still have plenty of space in OneDrive itself. I’m using around 370 GB of my 1 TB, so that’s about 35%.
On a related topic, there’s been a lot going on around Amazon and Kindle lately. First, there has been a lot of talk on Mastodon and Reddit around people wanting to drop out of the Amazon ecosystem, due to Jeff Bezos cozying up to Trump. That’s been going on for a while now, and I’m not happy about it, but I’m not ready to set fire to my Kindle just yet.
Second, there’s a lot of anger around Amazon’s recent decision to discontinue the “download and transfer” option for Kindle books. I already faced that issue when I traded in my Paperwhite for a Colorsoft, since download & transfer never worked for the newest Kindles. If I still had the old Paperwhite, I probably would have spent some time this week downloading a bunch of my Kindle books, removing the DRM, and pulling them into Calibre, for safekeeping. But I didn’t really have any good options for that this week.
Just out of curiosity, I tried copying a few books directly from my Colorsoft into Calibre, to see if I could strip the DRM that way, but it didn’t work. I think there may be a way for me to get around that, but it’s probably not worth the effort.
So, for now, I’m still “all in” on the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem, for better or worse. I have a ton of books and comics in my library there, and no obvious way of getting them back out. Which is fine. I like the Colorsoft a lot, and reading my comics via the Kindle app on my iPad is a pretty good experience too. And I don’t expect Amazon to shut any of this down any time soon. So hopefully I’m good there.
I have been thinking a bit about how I should approach new book purchases though. I still need to stick with ebooks, for the most part, due to my failing eyesight. I can buy stuff for the Kobo instead of the Kindle, and that at least takes a few dollars away from Amazon and gives them to somebody else. Mind you, I have no idea who the CEO of Kobo is, or what their political leanings are. (And now that I’ve written that, I’ve realized that I can probably find out… OK, so it’s this guy apparently. Seems like a decent guy? And he’s Canadian, so that helps…)
I did buy one book for Kobo recently, and thought about buying some more, but then I realized that I’m going to have to overhaul my system for tracking my wishlist and my list of purchased books if I move away from Amazon. And I have some thoughts on that. (Which should probably be in their own blog post, but I’m on a roll now…)
My current system is all-Amazon, basically. I have a Kindle wishlist in Amazon. If I’m interested in a book, I add it to that wishlist. If I decide to buy it, I do it on Amazon, and it gets removed from my wishlist automatically. Then, I add it to Goodreads from the handy “Amazon book purchases” screen there. And, if I ever forget I own it and try to buy it again, there will be a banner on the Amazon page saying “you bought this book already dummy” or words to that effect.
So that got me thinking about alternate wishlist and book-tracking systems. For my wishlist, Bookbub might work. The main purpose of it is to let you know about deals on books you want, but it seems like it could work as a general wishlist tool. And it links to both the Kindle and Kobo stores, so that’s good. For replacing the Amazon-owned Goodreads, a lot of people seem to be going to StoryGraph. It looks like it could work well as a Goodreads replacement. Of course, if I do any of this, my life inevitably gets more complicated. Honestly, right now, I think I’m going to keep one foot in the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem and one foot in the Kobo/etc world.
I could keep going on this stuff, but I just noticed that the sun has gone down, and it’s time to eat dinner. So I’ll stop here.
I looked at Facebook this morning, which is now something I only do once or twice a week. (I almost always check it on Sundays.) There was a post from an old high school acquaintance announcing his intention to leave Facebook, and essentially all social media. There was a point, I can’t remember exactly when, where a lot of my old high school acquaintances got on Facebook and started sending friend requests to each other. I went from not having any contact with anyone I knew in high school to suddenly being able to chat with 20 or 30 of them, and having a bit of a view into their current lives. It was fun and interesting. It only led to two real-world meetups, I think, but those were both nice, and wouldn’t have happened without Facebook.
Anyway, that friend’s post, and the presidential inauguration tomorrow, got me thinking again about how I’m engaging with social media and consuming general media, and what changes I should make, if any. So this post is going to be a (probably lengthy) rumination on that. I’ll try to make it a bulleted list, and see how that goes.
Facebook: I’d like to delete my Facebook account, but there’s still enough useful and fun stuff there that I feel like I shouldn’t. I only check it occasionally, at this point, and I try to stick to the reverse chronological feed, which they’ve made harder to access, but it’s still there. I don’t use the iOS app at all (which is one of the reasons I don’t check it often). I only use it from Firefox, with maximum ad-blocking.
Twitter/X: I still have an account there, but I’ve set it to private and don’t post there anymore. I still need to look at stuff there occasionally, if there’s a person or company that still has an account there, and they use it to post product updates or stuff like that.
Threads: I was curious about whether or not Threads would become a serious Twitter replacement at one point, and it was an interesting service at the start, but I’m not finding much use for it now. Most of the folks who went from Twitter to Threads, back when Bluesky was invitation-only, have now moved to Bluesky. So I still have an account, but I’m not using it much.
Instagram: I’ve had an Instagram account for a long time, but never really used it much. I’m actually checking it more often now, and have followed a bunch of accounts there. But it’s still mostly useless. It’s just that are some people/businesses who only post on Instagram, or primarily there, so I feel like I need to keep an account. And it’s a good place to get some random comics stuff, like the New Yorker cartoons.
Meta in general: Zuckerburg is not a good guy, so yeah, I’d like to drop off of Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. But they have just enough utility that I feel like I need to stay on them, to some extent.
Bluesky: I wish I could have gotten on Bluesky earlier, but I had to wait for the invitation-only period to end. If I could have gotten on earlier, I (and I suspect a lot of other folks) would have skipped Threads and some of the other niche platforms that were out there, and the mass Twitter exodus would have been bigger and more orderly. Well, anyway, at this point, Bluesky is a pretty OK place to be. I check it daily, I guess, and post there occasionally. I don’t have a lot of “real” friends there, but a lot of the people and companies I used to follow on Twitter are on Bluesky now. I’m a little worried about what the long-term plan is for Bluesky though. Right now, it’s ad-free and the default timeline is reverse chronological, but they’re going to have to find a way to make money, eventually.
Mastodon: I really wish more folks had come over to Mastodon. I still love it, and there are some great people there. But there aren’t a lot of mainstream folks or companies that have active accounts there. For an iOS client, I’m still using Toot!, though I feel like it’s probably time to check out some others. At some point, I’m hoping someone will create a good client that aggregates Mastodon, Bluesky, and maybe general RSS. I think there are probably folks working on that, and maybe there’s already a good one out there, but I haven’t found it yet.
RSS: Every once in a while, I try to embrace RSS. I stick with it for a while, then drift away. I’m still paying for an account with The Old Reader, and using that as my main RSS back-end. And I use it as the front-end when I’m checking RSS via the web. On iOS, I use Reeder as a front-end. I’m still using the previous version of Reeder. The newest version seems to be trying for that consolidated view that I’d like, if it could include RSS, Mastodon, and Bluesky, at least. But I’d also want it to have web-based view, and not just iOS and macOS apps, so I could use it on PC.
Well, that was an excessively long and rambling list of social media thoughts. Now let’s move on to more general media.
Newspapers: I still pay for the New York Times and the Washington Post, though I did the little dance a while ago where I threatened to cancel and they gave me lower rates for a year. So I’ll reevaluate those after those discounts expire. Both papers have their problems, but they’re both still better than most of the alternatives.
PBS: I still get my NJ news from our local NJ PBS station and their NJ Spotlight News program. And I support them with a monthly donation, though it’s honestly a small one. The donation gets me access to PBS Passport, which I use frequently to watch various shows, usually in the mystery or police procedural genre, and usually British.
NPR: I listen to WNYC in New York and WXPN in Philly. I don’t currently give to either of them, but I’m thinking about it. (I’ve given them both one-time donations in the past, multiple times, but not recently.) The NPR Plus thing might be worth doing. I should consider getting more of my news from NPR, I think.
YouTube TV: I’m still paying for YouTube TV, though I’m struggling with that. It’s useful for watching local news, baseball, football, and stuff like that. But I kinda lost interest in football this year, since the Giants did so poorly. At this point, I’m mostly using it to watch TCM, which is great, but maybe not worth $83/month, which is what they just raised the price to. (And of course it bothers me that $1 or $2 of that $83 is going to support Fox News.)
Whew. I could go on, but I’m pretty sure nobody wants me to. The world is full of billionaires who, more and more, exert control and influence on social media, news media, and entertainment media. It’s worth spending some time evaluating how you use this stuff, how you engage with it, and how you pay for it. I want to be an informed and responsible citizen. I want to keep in touch with friends and relatives. And I want to do so without funneling too much money into the pockets of certain billionaires. I hope I’m striking a reasonable balance here, without agonizing too much about it all.
Welp, I saw the There Is No Safe Word article on the Vulture web site on Monday, and I guess I’m still processing it. To be clear, I didn’t read the whole thing. I skimmed a good bit of it, then gave up once it was clear that there was enough bad stuff in it that I didn’t need to read anymore to decide how I felt about it. Having seen some further discussion of it on social media, I’m glad I didn’t read all of the details and will not be going back and doing so.
I’ve been a fan of Neil Gaiman since the early days of Sandman, which started up in 1988, so that’s a long time. I knew about the earlier article/podcast from Tortoise, about six months ago, but I guess I was kinda hoping it was an exaggeration? I don’t know. Anyway, I guess the Vulture / New York Magazine article pretty much confirms that, yep, there’s a big problem here, and Gaiman isn’t the guy so many of us thought he was. It’s heartbreaking.
I took a look at my Goodreads account today, and I see that I have around 35 Gaiman books/comics on it, with about 6 of them unread. I probably have several other unread Gaiman books/comics/audiobooks, both physical and digital, that I haven’t added to Goodreads. So let’s say a dozen or maybe twenty items.
It’s hard to figure how I should feel about his work now. Do I still want to read the stuff that I have? I picked up my copy of The Graveyard Book graphic novel this afternoon, and stared at it for a bit. I bought it in 2016, and still haven’t read it. The art is by P. Craig Russell, who is maybe my very favorite comic book artist. So I’m not going to toss that one. On the other hand, I’ve got some random Gaiman stuff from an old Humble Bundle that I’m probably not going to bother reading now.
I also went through my Amazon wish list, and my Overdrive wish list, and purged most of the Gaiman stuff off of them. I don’t really need to buy any more of his stuff. (I left a couple of American Gods graphic novels on there, since Russell is involved with those, so I might decide that it’s OK to buy them to support Russell’s work. I don’t know.)
Gaiman has posted a statement on his blog, basically refuting all of the allegations. I’d love to be able to believe him, but at this point, I don’t think I can.
In terms of figuring out how to engage with work you love that was created by a guy who turns out to be a monster: I’ve seen a couple of good takes on this on social media, but I didn’t bookmark them, and can’t find them now. It comes down to deciding that, if you love a certain work, and it inspired you, or just made you happy, the guy who created it doesn’t get to take that away from you. If the work still makes you happy, that’s fine. I’m probably not expressing that too well. Here’s an article from The Paris Review that covers this kind of thing pretty thoroughly.
I finished reading A Memory of Light today, so I’m finally finished reading The Wheel of Time! I started almost two years ago, in March 2023. I’d set myself a goal of finishing it by year-end 2024, so I missed that, but only by a few days.
Overall, I’m really glad I read the series. Most of it was very enjoyable, a nice escape from the real world, and something to keep me occupied on Sunday mornings and weekday lunch breaks. And I’ve enjoyed some of the associated media I’ve dipped into, like The Wheel Weaves podcast, or the tor.com articles, or some of the other online fan stuff. Of course, I’ve avoided a lot of it too, in fear of spoilers. Now, I can dig into the spoiler-laden stuff too, if I want to.
But I think I’m going to take a break from WoT and delve into some other stuff. (Except maybe The Wheel Weaves podcast. They’re on the next-to-last book now, so I might as well keep up with that to the end. It’s fun.)
I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to start next. Maybe some shorter stuff, or some comics, as a palate-cleanser? Maybe some non-fiction? My Goodreads TBR list has… 653 books on it, so I’ve got plenty to choose from!
Well, I made it through another year, I guess, so here’s my usual New Year’s Day blog post! I went to bed around 9:30 PM last night, after watching the first two Thin Man movies on TCM. I got out of bed around 6:15 AM this morning. My days of staying up late on New Year’s Eve are pretty much done, apparently.
WordPress stats
I like to use these posts for both useful self-reflection and pointless (but fun) stats. I’m going to start with some pointless stats related to this blog. I ran a quick SQL statement to get my posts per year, over the life of this blog, and got the following:
blog posts per year
So that’s 49 posts in 2024. My most active year was 2005, with over 200 posts. The least active full year was 2013, with 33 posts. I don’t know if any of that is super-interesting to anyone but me, but there it is.
I was trying to think of why 2013 would be a low point, and I guess it probably had something to do with starting a new job that year. And that’s still my current job (SHI), almost 12 years later. (More about that later.)
I also looked at traffic stats on the blog. Nothing interesting to report there, except that December 2024 was my most active month ever, by a long shot, with more than 3000 views. All of that traffic was on one day though: December 9. And I’m pretty sure it was all search bots or AI training bots or whatever.
Health
I’ve been fighting a low-level cold since Thanksgiving (or thereabouts), so my health situation is pretty much business as usual. I remember having a pretty good run of “not being sick” at some point this year though. Maybe in the spring? I thought I’d made a note of it in Day One or somewhere, but I can’t quite pinpoint when it was or how long it was.
As for my weight: I started 2024 at around 160, and ended it at 165. I’ve been fairly stable at 165, plus or minus two, for the last three months. So I’m hoping that I’ve stopped gaining weight and have hit a stable point. (In 2023, I went from 150 to 160, so my gain this year was half of last year’s gain.) And I’m still logging all of my meals/snacks with LoseIt, as I have been doing since 2013.
I think I still need to do some work on getting my snacking under control. I need to cut down on cookies and pastries form the various bakeries and coffee shops here in town. (Having a good French bakery almost directly below my apartment, in the same building, has turned out to be a bit of a problem…)
On the exercise front, I’m doing good. I was going to look for some summary stats to support that, but I’ve just realized that Apple’s Fitness app doesn’t have any kind of “year in review” thing, similar to Apple Music Replay or any of the other end-of-year things that have gotten big over the last few years. Odd, since that would likely be really popular. You can get some yearly graphs in the Health app though. So, from that, I see that I’ve averaged about 45 minutes per day exercise and 550 calories per day on the “move” ring. That’s pretty good, and I see that it’s been pretty consistent over the whole year.
And, having written all this, I realized that I hadn’t gone for a walk yet, so I did that just now. Here’s a photo!
New Year’s Day morning walk
Work
Wow, I could write a lot about work this year. My old boss retired at the end of 2023, so I’ve just finished out my first year under the new boss. I had a pretty solid relationship with the old boss, but I’m still working on building one with the new guy.
I had gotten used to near-perfect performance reviews from the old boss, so I was a bit surprised to get an average review from the new one. (Basically, a rating of 3 out of 5 on everything, and a lower raise than I usually get.) I have a feeling that he didn’t put that much thought into the review, since he doesn’t actually know that much about me or what I do. So I’m not too worried about him just clicking “3” down the row of questions on the review form; it’s not that I did anything wrong, he just doesn’t have much to go on. But I think I do need to try to build up some kind of relationship with him in 2025, if I can. It’s hard, since he’s in Texas and I’m in NJ, and since he has a fairly large number of direct reports, and responsibility for three main groups (AX, CRM, and ServiceNow). So I guess I need to just keep trying to be a good employee and make sure to do the stuff he wants me to do.
In terms of systems and projects this year: We’re still on AX 2012, and haven’t made any real progress towards moving to D365 F&O. Maybe that’s too simplistic a view. Some stuff is going on behind the scenes, I guess, but there’s really no concrete progress on the real work of moving off AX 2012 and getting to F&O. For 2025, we’re planning on upgrading our SQL environment and getting on the latest CU for AX, so that’s something, and likely a necessary start. At the start of 2024, we were saying that getting to F&O was a three-year project. I think it’s still at least a three-year project, and I’m not sure if 2025 is going to count as year one, or if 2025 will be more like “year zero” with the real project starting in 2026.
We’ve been going through what they call an “agile transition” over the last year. We’ve been using something like scrum since 2022, but the new boss (and new IT management in general) has been trying to really formalize that. We now have a scrum master, daily stand-ups, and multiple standard meetings (the usual stuff). And our group has been broken up into two separate “feature teams.” Also, we’ve stopped doing weekly deployments, and now only do one deployment per sprint (every two weeks). So that’s been a lot to get used to. And for 2025, we’re switching from using Azure DevOps to Jira for our agile/scrum management. So, just when things are getting smooth, we’re going to upend it all again.
Learning and other fun Stuff
OK, that’s enough of the serious stuff. Now let’s go through some more fun stuff. Let’s start with my Goodreads year in books. Just 27 books for 2024, though some of the Wheel of Time books were pretty long (Lord of Chaos was 1049 pages.) I had set a goal for myself of finishing the WOT series in 2024, but I’m not quite done with the final book. So maybe I’ll finish it by the end of January 2025. I’m not quite sure what I’ll tackle next; WOT has been eating up a lot of my reading time. I have a bunch of Dresden Files and Laundry Files books in my TBR pile, so maybe some of those. Or Discworld? And I have so many comics piled up too!
In terms of professional learning, I only see three books on my list that count towards that, and they’re all fairly general books. I don’t seem to have learned any new programming languages in 2024, or anything else big.
Looking at my Pluralsight history, I see that I completed around 15 courses there in 2024. Some of those were work-specific, as part of Pluralsight “challenges.” Some were just stuff I wanted to learn on my own. So there’s a mix of agile/scrum stuff, C# stuff, AI stuff, and miscellaneous “soft skill” stuff.
At some point during the year, I started looking at maybe getting an AZ-204 certification. But I didn’t get very far with that, and I’ve pretty much dropped the idea now. Back in 2013, I also started thinking about a D365 F&O certification of some kind, but I’m not going forward with that either, at least not yet.
During my performance review, my boss said that he wants me to pursue a SAFe certification for 2025, so I’m starting to work on that. Honestly, I’m not too enthusiastic about it, but it’ll probably help my career, and I’m open-minded enough to give it a try, I guess. I’ve started a leaning path in Pluralsight, and a video series on O’Reilly. I might also try to read the SAFe Distilled book at some point too. I don’t know. This plan may fizzle out, honestly, but I’m going to give it a try.
My Apple Music Replay is kind of weird. My top song for the year is Hell of a Ride, by Nourished by Time. My top album is Songs of Surrender, by U2. And my top artist is Bombay Bicycle Club. I guess those all kinda make sense, though they’re all a little surprising. I guess the U2 album being on the top is mostly because it’s a four-disc set, and I added it in January. Looking at albums that I added to my library this year, none of them really stand out. There are some really good ones, but nothing that really stuck enough for me to listen to a lot, or that really blew my mind. At the moment, I’m pretty enthusiastic about the new Joan Armatrading album.
Ten Years Ago
I’ve been doing this so long that I can now look at my post from ten years ago (and even twenty years ago) and try to think about some big picture stuff. (The post from 20 years ago is just a one-liner about a song, so that one’s not too valuable.)
So, ten years ago:
I noted that I’d gone from 200 pounds to 165 over the course of 2014. So I’m starting 2025 at the same weight at which I started 2015. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but it is what it is!
2014 was my first full year at SHI. I’ve been there since, so overall that’s gone well, I think.
I talked a little about consulting and volunteering in that post. I haven’t done any consulting in a long time, and I’m not planning to. I think those days are done, unless I decide to do that part-time after I’m retired. And I haven’t done any volunteering either. I’d like to do some of that, but I’m getting to the point where I’m too tired to do much of anything outside of my normal salaried work. (And I’m OK with that.)
I finished 30 books in 2014, so that’s pretty similar to this year’s total.
I moved this blog to WordPress in 2014, so I guess I should have celebrated my ten-year WordPress anniversary in 2024. I’m still OK with WordPress (even with Matt Mullenweg’s shenanigans).
I was hoping to finish A Memory of Light, the last Wheel of Time book, before the end of this year. But there are only a few days left in the year, and I’m at about the 75% mark, so it’s not looking likely.
I’m currently reading chapter 37, “The Last Battle”, which is a ridiculously long chapter. Most WoT chapters take 15-30 minutes for me to read. This one showed as 5.5 hrs when I started reading it on my Kindle. And I’ve since learned that it’s a 9 hour chapter in the audiobook. So I’m not too sure when I’m even going to finish just this chapter.
I see that, on this day last year, I was just starting Lord of Chaos, which is book 6. (A Memory of Light is book 14.) So I have definitely made a lot of progress!
