U2 in Newark

I went to see U2 at the Prudential Center in Newark last night. I’ve been a fan of them for a long time, but had never seen them live. It was a little weird, since the friend I was supposed to go with couldn’t make it, so I went by myself. My seat was in the very last row of one of the “nosebleed” sections, basically as far from the stage as you can get. I’m glad I went though. It was a very theatrical show, with a lot of video stuff and big ideas and a loose narrative of sorts. (Maybe a bit of a muddy narrative, but still, points for effort.) Here a link to the set list. Lots of stuff from the new album, and a handful of “greatest hits.” That worked for me: I like the last two albums a lot. And I don’t mind hearing them play the older stuff either.

There’s some stuff in the show that could induce a little eye-rolling, but if you check your cynicism at the door and give them the benefit of the doubt, you can come out of the show feeling pretty good about things. It’s a been a rough week, news-wise, and U2 doesn’t shy away from addressing that in their shows, but it all ends in hope and catharsis, if you let it.

I do feel like this is probably the only time I’m going to see U2. I’m getting old enough that going to a show like this takes a lot out of me. I limited myself to water (no beer), left early so I could catch the 11pm train, and used earplugs, and I’m still feeling a bit messed up today.

Harlan Ellison, RIP

I was sad to hear of Harlan Ellison’s passing today. Here’s an obituary from the AP (via the NYT) and another one from the Chicago Tribune. (I haven’t seen an official NYT obituary yet.)

I loved Harlan Ellison’s stuff when I was younger. I distinctly remember reading “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” when I was way too young to read something like that. And buying a hardcover of Shatterday from the Science Fiction Book Club. (I really liked “Jeffty is Five” from that one.) And buying Dangerous Visions at a used book store in Cranford. And of course everyone loves his Star Trek episode, The City on the Edge of Forever. He was really one of my favorite SF authors when I was a teenager.

I haven’t read much of anything by him lately though. I picked up a copy of the 1000+ page doorstop The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective back in 2000, but have barely put a dent in it. It’s too big and heavy to carry around, so it mostly just sits on the shelf. I occasionally grab it and read a story, but it’s been a while. (I wish they’d publish a Kindle version.)

Best quote from the AP obituary:

When a publisher broke a contract by allowing a cigarette ad in one of Ellison’s books, the writer mailed him dozens of bricks and, finally, a ripe, dead gopher.

Library Book Sale

I went to the Somerville Library Book Sale after work today and picked up a few things. It was a pretty good deal: four Rick Geary books and two lemon bars for $3! I’m a big fan of Rick Geary. I used to make a point of visiting his table at SDCC every year, back when I was going to SDCC every year. (Those were the days…) He’s a good guy, and his “true crime” books are really good.

I also got a chance to see a few of the books I donated last week one last time. I hope someone picks them up and enjoys them. And I saw a few things that made me realize that I could have donated even more stuff: they had a good number of old CDs and DVDs (and even cassettes and VHS tapes), so I really could have gotten rid of some old CDs and DVDs at least. I do feel a little bad that I didn’t pick up any regular (non-graphic) novels, but they didn’t have anything I really needed or wanted.

NYCC 2018

After waiting an hour in the “virtual queue”, and spending an ungodly amount of money, I now have tickets for all four days of NYCC 2018. I had a good time last year, but only managed to get tickets for two days. This year, I’ll try to survive the full four-day con experience. When I was younger, I could get through a full four-day San Diego con with no problem, but as I get older, it’s hard to sustain my energy through four days of walking around a lot while carrying a backpack. We’ll see how it goes.

By a weird coincidence, I saw in my “On This Day” sidebar a post from 2005 referencing the announcement of the very first NYCC. (The link from that post is dead, but you can read it via archive.org here.) It’s been a highly successful con, overall. It’s hard to run a large con in New York, and other cons have failed. There have been some bumps in the road; for a few years, they didn’t seem to be managing the con well, and there were a lot of complaints about overcrowding. But last year wasn’t bad and they seem to have figured out crowd control, for the most part. So kudos to them for sticking it out and surviving!

The Great American Read

I enjoyed watching The Great American Read launch special on PBS a couple of weeks ago. The idea is to present a list of 100 (fiction) books as American’s most-loved books, then let people vote, and pick a winner. The show then returns to PBS in September with an eight-part series, leading up to the announcement of the winning book in October. (This article at thirteen.org explains the concept better than I just did.)

I’m a sucker for book lists and reading challenges, so I’m getting into this thing a bit. (Mind you, I was also enthusiastic about the Now Read This book club that PBS NewsHour and the New York Times started in January, and I haven’t read any of those books yet.)

So far, I’ve joined the official Facebook group for The Great American Read, and an unofficial Goodreads group. The Facebook group is currently very active, while the Goodreads group has less than two dozen members, with only a few people posting. The Goodreads group is planning to read one or two books a month, selected by a poll of the members. For June, we’re reading Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut. That works for me, since I’ve had a copy of Sirens of Titan sitting on my bookshelf for at least ten years, unread. I’ve read a few Vonnegut books over the years, including of course Slaughterhouse-Five, but I’ve never read this one. (Speaking of which, the selection of Sirens of Titans rather than Slaughterhouse-Five for the Great American Reads list is curious. But it works for me, since it gives me an excuse to read it!)

Because I love lists, here’s a list of the books from the Great American Reads list that I’ve already read:

  1. 1984 – George Orwell
  2. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
  3. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
  4. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D Salinger
  5. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
  6. Dune – Frank Herbert
  7. Foundation (series) – Isaac Asimov
  8. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  9. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
  10. Harry Potter (series) – J.K. Rowling
  11. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
  12. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
  13. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  14. The Lord of the Rings (series) – J.R.R. Tolkien
  15. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
  16. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
  17. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

The “rules” for the Great American Read list allow for a whole series of books to count as one entry, so Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter books can be on the list rather than just one book from the series. For each series that I’ve read, I’ve read all of it. (Though maybe not for the Foundation series, depending on whether or not you count the books that came after the original trilogy.) And it’s interesting to see that they included Dune and Hitchhiker’s Guide as individual books and not the whole series. That makes a lot of sense with Dune, since the book stands alone well, and (from what I understand) some of the later books aren’t that great.

So, anyway, I’m looking forward to reading some more books from the list. There are a few on the list that have been on my mental “want to read” shelf for quite some time, including classics like Catch-22 and more recent books like Ready Player One and The Martian.

There’s so much stuff I want to read right now. I’m thinking about adopting Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50. I rarely abandon books; maybe I should do that more often.

WWDC round-up

Here’s a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post, based on what I picked up from the WWDC keynote today:

  1. No new hardware announcements. So I don’t feel like an idiot for buying a MacBook Air right before WWDC.
  2. iOS 12 will run on everything that runs iOS 11, so my iPhone SE should be able to run it, as well as my iPad Air. (Mind you, there’s not much in iOS 12 that I’m terribly excited about.)
  3. macOS Mojave will run on my new MacBook Air (of course) and would likely have run on my old MacBook, though I think it was the oldest supported model, if I read the compatibility note correctly. It looks like there will be a few nifty things in Mojave, but nothing earth-shattering.
  4. watchOS 5 is not compatible with my “Series 0” watch. So if I really want to keep current with watchOS, I’ll have to get a new watch. I’ve been thinking about doing that anyway, even though I’m not actually having any problems with my Series 0 watch.

I’ve been getting interested in doing more automation stuff on my Mac (and maybe on iOS too). I started reading Joe Kissel’s Take Control of Automating Your Mac today, and I’m hoping to get some ideas from that. This article on Sal Soghoian from Wired is pretty interesting. He’s the guy who used to be in charge of automation at Apple, until his position was eliminated a while back. They didn’t talk much about automation at the WWDC keynote, though the new Siri Shortcuts feature is somewhat promising. I guess it’s what they’ve had the Workflow team working on since they acquired Workflow. Meanwhile, on the Mac, they’re still supporting Automator and AppleScript, as far as I can tell, though they don’t talk about them much.

MacBook Air and WWDC

Here’s one more post on my new MacBook Air and other Apple-related thoughts.

When the old MacBook went south, I was initially considering dropping macOS entirely, just getting a new Windows laptop, and simplifying my life a bit. I opted not to do that for a few reasons, including my realization of how hard it would be to switch away from macOS without a working macOS computer. I would have wanted to copy some files from the old MacBook to my Windows machine. I had an external Time Machine backup, and an SSD in the old MacBook that might or might not have been damaged. The external drive was probably formatted with HFS+, while the internal drive would have been APFS, encrypted.

There are Windows tools that let you read HFS+ drives, like Paragon’s HFS+ for Windows and Mediafour’s MacDrive. Both of those tools are adding APFS support, but it looks like they’re both in preview/beta right now. And it looks like neither would be able to read a FileVault encrypted drive. As for Time Machine, Paragon doesn’t support it, but MacDrive says it does. So, overall, I think that getting files off the Time Machine backup and/or the internal SSD might have been a little dicey, if it was even possible.

And if I was giving up on macOS, I’d really need to give up on Day One, since there’s no Windows client for that, and it wouldn’t be worth it to me if I could only use it on iOS. If I did that, I’d want to migrate my old journal entries into Evernote, but it would be hard to do that without a Mac.

Likewise, migrating my contacts and calendar data to a new solution without a Mac would probably have been possible but annoying. So I guess the lesson here is that, if I decide to give up on macOS, I should do it while I have a working Mac and not when I don’t.

On a related topic, WWDC is next week. A number of people have chided me for buying a new MacBook Air when there’s probably new hardware announcements coming at WWDC. My response has generally been that (1) I’m not sure that’s true, (2) even if there is new hardware, it probably won’t be available until fall, and I can’t wait that long, and (3) given the direction Apple has been going in, I’m probably better off with the older MacBook Air than any newer hardware.

This article from Ars Technica indicates that there probably won’t be any big MacBook-related hardware announcements next week. And this article from The Verge questions whether or not Apple might address their MacBook keyboard issues at WWDC. (Answer: probably not.) So I think I’m still better off with this old-style MacBook Air, with it’s familiar and usable keyboard, it’s two USB ports, one SDXC port, and good old MagSafe power connector. (And a Thunderbolt 2 port, but I probably won’t have much use for that.)

Library book sale

My local library is having a book sale soon, so I’m spending some time this morning gathering up some dusty old paperbacks to get rid of. This turned into more of a project than I thought it would be, since it got me thinking about a bunch of book series that I started but never finished, and whether or not I actually want to finish them. (And if I do want to finish them, do I want to hang on to the dusty old paperbacks, or just get the Kindle version whenever I’m actually ready to read them?) I thought this might make a semi-interesting blog post, so here are some thoughts on all that.

Myth Adventures

This is a fun series that I started reading a long time ago. I’ve read (and own) the first seven books, and have the next three in paperback, but never got around to reading them. For this one, I’m definitely donating the old paperbacks, and keeping the unread ones. I look forward into jumping back into this at some point; it’s a lot of fun. (wikipedia / goodreads)

Ender’s Game

I read the first two books in this series a long time ago, in paperback. I liked both, and bought the next four. This one gets a little confusing, since I think that what I actually have is the first four books of “The Ender Quintet” and the first two of the “Ender’s Shadow” series. I considered just donating all of these, including the unread ones, since Orson Scott Card’s political/moral views don’t quite match up to mine. But he’s not (as far as I know) so horrible that I shouldn’t read his work at all.  So I’m hanging on to the unread paperbacks, and I might (or might not) read them. I can always donate them next time (or just toss them in the recycle bin). (wikipedia / goodreads)

Nero Wolfe

I started haphazardly picking up and reading Nero Wolfe paperbacks a few years ago. I haven’t read one in a while, but I do love them. Both the characters and the setting are really “my thing,” for lack of a better term. I really like reading about New York City in the 30s for some reason. Nero Wolfe stories, of course, can be read in any order, so I’m not making any attempt to read them chronologically. I’m going to donate the few paperbacks I have; I’ve got them all recorded in Goodreads, so I don’t have to worry about accidentally re-purchasing ones I’ve already read. (wikipedia / goodreads)

The Dark Tower

I bought the first four books in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series several years ago. I had never read any Stephen King, but I’d heard so much about this series, I thought I should give it a try. I found the first book, The Gunslinger, almost unreadable. I put it aside after reading about half of it, then picked it up and finished it a year or two later. Then, I started the second book. I didn’t make it very far into that one before putting it back down. For a while, I held onto the idea that I’d give it a try again at some point, but I think it’s finally time to admit defeat. This series just isn’t for me. I’m donating all of my Dark Tower books, including the unread ones. (And I haven’t seen the movie either. That got pretty bad reviews, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like it.) If I ever change my mind, these books are easy enough to find. (wikipedia / goodreads)

Other Stuff

I also donated some Spenser books and Adam Dalgliesh books. I don’t have much to say about those though. I liked reading them, but I don’t remember much about them. I’m sure I’ll read more Robert Parker and P. D. James at some point.

And I looked at my stack of Dresden Files paperbacks, but decided to hold onto them for a while longer. I don’t have a good reason for that. I’m probably not going to re-read them any time soon. I do like the series a lot. I’ve read the first eleven books, and plan on reading the rest. (At least the main novels. I’m not sure I want to worry about the various short stories, comics, and stuff.) I think I might stop buying them in paperback though, and switch to buying the Kindle versions.