grab bag

OK, I haven’t written a blog post in a while, so this one is going to be a bit of a grab bag.

First, on the weight loss front, I’m down 15 pounds so far, over about eight weeks, so I’m losing almost two pounds a week. My plan was to shoot for one lb per week, so I’m doing fine on that. I’m also getting in maybe five or six hours of walking a week, which is pretty reasonable. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do when it gets too cold to walk outside though.

On the tech front, I picked up a new iPhone 5s a couple of weeks ago. My previous phone was an iPhone 4, so there’s a good bit of new stuff for me in the 5s, including Siri.

  • I’m finding that I’m not using Siri much, though it’s kind of fun and does seem to work well.
  • The fingerprint sensor works quite well, and I’m using that to unlock the phone most of the time now.
  • Overall, I’ve found that the speed of the phone is greatly improved over the iPhone 4, especially for certain things, like using the camera.
  • The battery life is pretty bad. I’m usually at 50% by the end of the day, and I really don’t think I do anything that crazy with it.
  • The iPhone 4, on Verizon was 3G. The 5s is LTE. I haven’t seen much of a difference in speed, in everyday use. But I haven’t really done much that would stress the network connection. In general, anything that relies on the internet connection over LTE has worked well.

I went to NYCC this year. I didn’t go to San Diego this year, nor did I go to any other conventions, so this was my one and only convention for the year. The con was very well managed, and very crowded. Getting in could take a while, but once you were in, it wasn’t that much of a hassle to move around. The exhibit hall was quite crowded, but navigable. There were a few interesting panels, but nothing quite like you get in San Diego. I bought only a handful of books, mostly discounted hardcovers and trade paperbacks. (I realized at one point that I still have stuff I bought at NYCC 2011 that I haven’t read yet.) I’m not sure if I’ll bother going next year. Maybe I’ll just go in for one day. It’s fun, but there’s not really enough interesting stuff to keep me occupied for all four days. (In fact, I wound up skipping Sunday and going to the Met and MoMA instead. The Magritte exhibit at MoMA is pretty good, by the way.)