Month: January 2014

Anime watching

It’s been so cold out, I decided to just cocoon myself in my apartment this weekend and watch anime. I haven’t actually done that in quite a while. It was kind of fun. I watched the first twelve episodes of Gatchaman, and the first season of Big O. Looking back at some old posts on this blog, I see that I’ve had the Big O DVDs sitting around since 2006. The Gatchaman DVDs are probably almost as old.

Gatchaman was fun to watch, and very campy (as I expected it would be). I don’t think I’m interested in watching any more of it though. It was fun, and nostalgic, but repetitive. I have only vague memories of watching Battle of the Planets as a kid, but they’re good memories, and it was fun to see what the original source material was like.

Big O was quite good. Kind of ridiculous, but the visual style of it is really great. It’s clearly referencing a number of disparate influences, such as the old Bruce Timm Batman animated series. The first season ends on a cliffhanger, so now I’m wishing I’d bought the second season when I bought the first.

I haven’t been closely following anime news for the past couple of years, so I’m just noticing now that a number of the companies that were issuing DVDs a few years ago are out of business now, and used copies of some DVDs are going for pretty high prices. It looks like a new company has picked up the Big O license, so they may re-issue the DVDs. Here’s hoping!

If this cold spell keeps going, I may be watching my Samurai 7 box set next weekend.

Automation

I don’t think I’ve ever linked to an XKCD comic on this blog before, but (of course) I read it regularly. This one made me chuckle, thinking about a project I’m currently working on. I have a task that involves generating output files and sending them to a few other companies via SFTP, weekly. For “phase one,” I was going to manually run my program to generate the files, then send them out with WinSCP. Then, once that was running smoothly, I was going to add SFTP capability to the program, using SSH.NET.
This is kind of a long story, but to make it short, let’s just say that I’ve spent more time than is really reasonable taking care of the SFTP automation, and have yet to put it into production. Meanwhile, I just keep sending out the files every week, manually.
I’ve actually learned a lot about a couple of things in the process of working on this automation, but the amount of effort that’s gone into the automation, vs. the five minutes it takes to send the files off manually once a week is a bit silly.

Happy New Year

I thought I would write up a quick New Year’s post today, with a few status updates. I mostly write this kind of post for my own future reference, just to see where I’ve been, and what progress (if any) I’ve made in certain areas.

First, I’m happy to say that I stepped on the scale this morning, and it read 200 pounds. I started my diet around Sept 1, at 230 lbs, with the goal of losing a pound a week, until I hit 200. So I hit my goal, and I hit it earlier than expected. I guess my next goal will be to get down to 180, again at one pound per week. We’ll see if I can manage that. I’m still logging all my calories with the Lose It app on my phone. I think that’s really been the key factor in being successful. I’m not sure when I was last under 200 lbs. Maybe back in college?

On another front, I haven’t done quite so good. I blogged, back in November, about Coursera. I had enrolled in two courses, Algorithms, Parts I and II. Part I was technically done before I enrolled, and Part II was just starting up. My plan was to breeze through the first part, then catch up with the second. I was doing OK up through the end of November, and gotten through about 80% of the material in Part I, but then I got busy with other stuff in December, and never went back to it. Meanwhile, Part II wrapped up, so here it is, 2014, and I haven’t done anything on Coursera in a month. It looks like I can still watch the lectures, and even submit the programming assignments for auto-grading, so I may just pick it up again this month, and finish Part I. Or I may wait until it “officially” starts up again, on January 30, and try to take it in “real-time”. Then, I can take Part II in real-time, when it’s next offered in March. Or maybe I’ll just try something different this year, either from Coursera or EdX.

Professionally, I started my job at SHI in January 2013, so I’m at just about the one year mark there. I had my performance review with my boss yesterday, and it went pretty well. I’ll likely stick with SHI for another year. Given that I’m doing almost 100% Dynamics AX work though, I want to see about doing more web stuff on the side this year. Last year, I did a project for my former employer, Electric Vine, that allowed me to exercise my ASP.NET and JavaScript skills a bit, but I don’t have any consulting work planned for 2014. I should really find some, or maybe get involved in an open source project, or something like that.