Year: 2020

distractions

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking about signing up for Disney+. Well, I did that, and have now watched most of the first season of The Mandalorian. It’s a pretty good show. It’s basically just silly Star Wars escapism. (And silly escapism is something I need right now.) I’ll definitely be keeping Disney+ through to the end of the year at least, so I can also watch season two, and Soul. Since Soul is being released on Christmas day, maybe I’ll actually watch it on Christmas. (I won’t have much else to do…)

I feel kind of bad about giving Disney any money right now, especially given the recent news about how they’ve been treating Alan Dean Foster, but I know that one random nerd boycotting Disney+ isn’t going to get them to pay Foster his royalties.

And, as I’ve probably mentioned before, the pressure to sign up for even more streaming services is increasing. It was just announced that the new Wonder Woman movie will be going straight to HBO Max on Christmas day, so that’s two big movies I could watch at home, assuming I can talk myself into paying $15/month for HBO Max. And the new Animaniacs on Hulu premieres tomorrow, I think, so that’s another thing I’d like to watch.

The return on investment for my traditional cable subscription seems to be shrinking, so I am once again considering dropping it. I still watch some news and a few late-night shows, but I could probably get enough of that online if I dropped cable. Most of the drama shows I would have been watching in the fall never started up, and, for a few, I’m not sure if I’m really interested in them anymore. NCIS and NCIS: New Orleans both just started new seasons, and I’m really not that interested in them. Those kind of shows have always been kind of a guilty pleasure for me, but, in the wake of the pandemic and some of the other stuff that’s gone on this year, they seem kind of pointless now. Unless they can find a way to reinvent their formula to work under current conditions, I think maybe it would be better to just take a break for a couple of years on the whole “police procedural” genre. NCIS is side-stepping the pandemic for now, by setting the current season in 2019 (at least to start). NCIS: NOLA set their first two episodes in March 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, and they’re trying to address it, but I’m just not that into it. So, dropping the “police procedural” shows, that leaves maybe the CW DC Arrowverse shows, which should start back up in January and February. But that’s not really enough to keep me paying for cable. (And I’m not sure if I’m all that excited about those shows either, to be honest.)

One related item that I’ve discovered recently, while watching The Mandalorian: The best way for me to watch stuff like that is on my Apple TV, with my AirPods. The AirPods can pair with the Apple TV box directly, bypassing the actual TV entirely. And the Apple TV setting to reduce the loudness of music and sound effects really helps even things out so that I can understand dialog better, I think.

the rest of the year

I still seem to be dealing with a lingering cold that I picked up last weekend. So this weekend has been pretty quiet. I finished reading The Outsiders, finished watching Young Wallander, and started watching Giri/Haji. I did my laundry yesterday, but that was it for productive work, really. I had my groceries delivered from Whole Foods, so I didn’t even get out to the grocery store. And I’ve mostly been living off leftovers from some takeout barbecue I got on Friday night.

Last week, I attended a remote workshop for Microsoft’s CSP program, and this week, I’m supposed to be attending a week-long class on Microsoft’s Power Platform. Last week’s workshop took up only about 3 hours each day, but this week’s class is supposed to run from 9:30 to 3:30 each day, so that’s going to take up most of the day. Normally, this would be an in-person class, but of course now it’s going to be delivered remotely. The CSP workshop was done over Teams and went pretty smoothly, but it wasn’t very interactive. I’m wondering about how the Power Platform class will go. I assume it’ll have to be more interactive than the CSP thing was. And I think it’s being done over Zoom, rather than Teams. For various reasons, I’m going to need to do the class directly on my work laptop, using only the laptop screen and keyboard. So it might get a little tough to follow along with the instructor while also working through examples on my own in a separate window. I wish I could get a multi-monitor setup going for that, but there’s no practical way to do that right now. So, anyway, it’s going to be an interesting week, trying to get through the class while also keeping up with anything else that comes up at work. (And, again, I’m very grateful to have a job right now, never mind a job that’s letting me work remotely, and paying for me to attend workshops and classes and whatnot. I’m very lucky.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the rest of the year is going to go. Thinking back to the summer, I guess I was vaguely aware that we might be going through a second wave at the end of the year, but it’s looking now like it’s going to be a doozy. I’ve been spending maybe too much time doomscrolling on Twitter, but there are a lot of reasonable people talking about how bad it can get if people aren’t careful around Thanksgiving and Christmas. So I’m trying to get into the proper lockdown mindset.

Since I’ve spent so little money this year on travel and other stuff like that, and since I’m going to be stuck inside a lot, I’m thinking that maybe I should pop for Disney+. It’s only $7 a month, and I keep hearing good things about The Mandalorian. Plus, the next Pixar film, Soul, is going straight to Disney+. (And it won’t cost $30 extra, like Mulan did, which is nice.) Disney+ has been around for just about a year now, and seems to be doing really well. So I guess I should give in and sign up. Eventually, I might even talk myself into canceling cable TV. But maybe I’ll keep that going until the end of the year, since (again) I’m going to be spending a lot of time indoors and I have enough disposable income to pay for both cable TV and streaming right now.

The second wave, and other bad news

We’re definitely seeing a big second wave of coronavirus cases here in NJ. I’m glad I’m still able to work from home, and I guess I’ll be doing that through to the end of the year, at least.

Meanwhile, my local House rep, Tom Malinowski, who seemed to have won reelection, has seen his lead shrink as more votes are counted. (No shenanigans here; it just seems like more Democrats voted early and more Republicans voted late.) I hope he hangs on to his lead; he seems like a good guy. (While his opponent seems like kind of a jerk, to be honest.)

And also meanwhile, there has been another wave of layoffs at DC Comics. I think I’m actually going to give up on buying new DC books in 2021. I opted out of ordering any of the Future State books on this month’s Westfield order form, so I only wound up ordering 3 books total (one DC and two Dark Horse). And that might be my last Westfield order, unless I can talk myself into adding some more books from smaller publishers, like Dark Horse and Image. It’s not worth paying the shipping charges for just 3 or 4 books a month. And I’m far enough behind in reading that I should probably take a break anyway. I’m a little worried about the health of the market for regular old monthly comic books at this point. (But I need to keep reminding myself that it’s not my job to prop it up by buying a bunch of books that I don’t have time to read or room to store.) I might sign up for Comixology Unlimited at some point next year, but I have enough books piled up to keep me busy for quite some time, even without that, so I should probably hold off until I’ve put a dent in the backlog.

So that’s my bad news overview for the day, I guess. Obviously, the coronavirus stuff is the most important of these three items. I’ve been trying to get my head straight and prepare myself for the rest of the year, assuming I’ll just be working from home, and celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year alone in my apartment. (I might have been doing that anyway this year, even without the pandemic, but it would have been nice to have some options.) I’m realizing now that 2020 is going to be a full year without an in-person comic con, a trip to the Met, or MoMA, or… anywhere, really. I have a week’s vacation scheduled for early in December, and I guess I’ll just be sitting around in my apartment for the week, catching up on my reading. That’s not such a bad thing, I guess. I’ve got a job, and an apartment, and my health isn’t too bad, and that’s more than a lot of folks can say.

more on long-term reminders

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about losing all of my long-term reminders. Since I wrote that post, I found out that I can use Microsoft To Do at work. I just can’t use the web-based version. And the desktop software had to be pushed down to my machine; it isn’t generally available unless you ask for it. So here’s my observations about using MS To Do in our environment.

When I first launched To Do, it prompted me to pull in my Planner tasks and my flagged emails. It did fine with the Planner tasks, so I guess I can now use Planner and To Do together, if I want. It did not actually pull in my flagged emails from Outlook though, probably because we’re still using on-prem Exchange. That’s a bummer, since I do use those flags a lot.

For tasks that I create directly in To Do, I can set up both due dates and reminders, and the reminders don’t have to be on the same day as the due date, so that’s nice. For my long-term tasks, I generally want to surface them a few days before I actually have to do them. So if an SSL cert expires on a Friday, I want to get the reminder about it on Monday, so I can do it at some point during the week. To Do also supports recurring items, which might be useful for me. I haven’t tried those yet though.

To Do and Planner both share one slightly annoying weakness: While both support a free-form notes field on a task, it’s only a plain text field. That might not seem like a big deal, but it makes it hard to, for instance, paste in a link to a OneNote item the same way you can in an Outlook task.

I’ve also noticed that To Do doesn’t have a calendar view, and doesn’t integrate with Outlook’s calendar. (Maybe it does, if you’re not using on-prem Exchange. I’m not sure.)

So, putting this all together, I guess I can decide to use either Planner or To Do, or use them in combination. I think Planner is really supposed to be a group project management tool, and To Do is supposed to be an individual task management tool, so I should probably just use To Do. (But of course I’ve already created my tasks in Planner, so I’d need to redo all that work in To Do, if I was going to abandon Planner.) Regardless of what I do there, I’m going to wind up with a more complicated system than I used to have, since it’ll now be a combination of Outlook (for calendar and flagged emails) and at least one other system, or both.

I kind of want to go rogue and find a third-party service or piece of software that’ll be better than Planner and/or To Do, but of course then I’d be risking the wrath of the security folks who don’t like that kind of thing. And I’m still entertaining the idea of going low-tech and just creating a 43-folders system in OneNote. I should probably spend less time thinking about this stuff and more time actually working, huh?

managing long-term reminders

At work, I need to keep track of a number of tasks that need to be done infrequently, such as replacing app secrets or renewing SSL certificates. Depending on the task, it might need to get done once every three months, once a year, or once every two years.

For the last few years, I’ve been using regular old Outlook tasks for this. That’s worked fine, up until today. We recently starting archiving our mail with Mimecast, which removes any mail items from Outlook if they’re more than a year old. And, as I realized today, that includes task entries too! And it goes based on creation date, not modify date, so even in cases where I’ve modified the task in the last year, if it was created more than a year ago, it’s gone now. Oh well. (The archived emails are searchable in Mimecast, but if the deleted tasks are in there somewhere, I haven’t been able to figure out how to surface them.)

So I spent a bunch of time today trying to recreate my long-term task list. I managed to get a screenshot of the tasks that were deleted by going into Outlook on a different computer, jumping right over to task list and taking a screenshot, before Outlook could fully update itself from the server. (The tasks disappeared just a few seconds after I took the screenshot, so I got lucky there.) Of course the screenshot only gave me the subject line for each task, and not the due dates or the notes that were inside each task item. But it was enough of a start.

At home, I use Evernote to track long-term reminders, and it’s always worked great for me. I get email notifications on the reminder due date. And I can easily go into Evernote and pull up a list of just the notes that have reminders on them, if I ever want to review them. It’s not perfect: There’s no calendar view, for instance, and there’s only the one date. (Other systems often have both a start date and due date.) But it’s good enough.

I can’t use Evernote at work though. (It’s blocked.) We don’t seem to have any approved apps for to-do’s or reminders in our Windows 10 app catalog. We do, of course, all have O365, so I should be able to use Microsoft To-Do. But it doesn’t work, for some reason. I do have access to Microsoft Planner though. Planner is kind of like Trello, which I’ve played around with a bit in the past. I’m not really a big fan of the kanban board thing, but a lot of people really like it. So, for now, I guess I’m using Planner.

This whole thing got me to thinking about what exactly it is I was trying to do, at a high level, and I realized that I was basically looking for a good 43 folders / tickler file system. It occurs to me that I could just create that in OneNote, with a single tab with 43 notes under it. It would be a bit of a kludge, but I could definitely make it work. Or heck, I could just do a 12 folder system (one for each month), and create short-term Outlook tasks for all of a given month’s to-do items on the first of the month. Either of those ideas is probably more manual labor that I want to do though.

I’m not entirely happy using Planner, since it’s not integrated with Outlook or OneNote at all, and there’s no desktop app for it, so I need to use the web site to manage tasks. That’s not a bad thing, per se, but, for long-term tasks, it means that I need to trust that the email reminders are getting sent out, since I won’t actually ever see the task list unless I purposely go looking for it. So I’m still going to think about this a bit more, but Planner is probably my best option for now.

sick again

So in yesterday’s post, where I was talking about all the stuff I did on Saturday, I said “I’m hoping that doesn’t result in me getting another cold, or even worse.” Well… I started feeling like I was getting a sore throat last night, and this morning I had all my usual cold symptoms: sore throat, headache, and low energy. This is, I guess, the third cold I’ve had so far this season. It seems like any time I leave my bubble for any activities that involve moderate human contact, I get sick. I got sick pretty frequently before the pandemic, but I was kind of hoping that all of the mask wearing and social distancing would keep me healthier this year. I guess it did, up to a point, but now, it seems like I’m getting sick every other week. Oh well.

Back on the subject of my new Apple Watch: I’m fairly disappointed with the handwashing feature. I had it enabled over the weekend, but I’ve turned it off now. It had a tendency to get activated every time I was washing dishes in my kitchen, but only sporadically when I was actually washing my hands in the bathroom. I think that might be due to the noise from my bathroom fan. It’s pretty noisy, and I can’t turn it off without also turning off the light. And I guess there’s no easy way for the watch to distinguish between washing out a coffee mug and washing my hands. (I guess I could also commit to always washing my coffee cup for at least 20 seconds.) Other than that, it’s a great watch and I like it a lot.

I have a few random articles bookmarked that I kind of wanted to link to and blog about, but I’m too tired now to do that. I’m hoping I can get through this cold without taking yet another day off from work, but I will if I have to. I still have a few days to burn before the end of the year.

A Weird Week

Well, that was a weird week, wasn’t it? In addition to the election, I was supposed to go back into the office last week, on Thursday. The plan was for normal employees to start coming back one day a week. But we had a couple of COVID cases at the office, plus with New Jersey’s increasing number of cases overall, that plan got altered, so now I can continue working from home for the foreseeable future. So that’s good, I guess. (I mean, it would better if we didn’t have any cases at the office, and if NJ overall was doing better, but given the circumstances, I’m glad the company adjusted the plan.)

The big news this week of course is Biden being declared the winner over Trump, finally, yesterday. A lot of people were very happy about that, judging by my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and also judging by some of the activity out on Main St yesterday. I’m glad, and relieved, but only just barely optimistic. (I could probably write at length about that, but I probably shouldn’t. Let’s just say that a lot can still go wrong, and that a lot needs to be done before we can get back to anything resembling normal.)

It was a beautiful day yesterday, which probably helped everyone’s mood. A lot of people were out on Main St., and there was a lot of music and noise on and off throughout the day. (The annoying guy who plays saxophone outside my apartment was back yesterday, and played until after 10 PM, so that kind of sucked, but I guess I can’t blame him for trying to make some money while the weather was nice and everyone was happy.)

My friend Paul stopped by yesterday, and we went out for dinner, eating outside at a Korean restaurant on Main St. That was the first time I’ve eaten at a restaurant since the pandemic began. It was pretty weird, but it felt really good to do it.

I also ordered a new Apple Watch this week, and picked it up at the Apple Store at the local mall yesterday. I’d been thinking about getting one, and finally talked myself into it. I bought a new Series 6, to replace my Series 3. I got the Series 3 a little less than two years ago, for Christmas in 2018. So I feel a little bad about replacing it when it’s less than two years old. But, still, I’ve skipped the 4 and 5, so it’s a big enough jump that I don’t feel too bad about it. I’ll probably post more about the Watch later, after I’ve had it on my wrist for long enough to form some opinions.

Overall, yesterday turned out to be a fairly hectic day, with much more time spent outside the apartment than usual, and a lot more human contact than usual. I’m hoping that doesn’t result in me getting another cold, or even worse. We’ll see. My plans for today are not terribly ambitious. It looks like it’ll be another nice day, so I will probably go for a walk after I’m done with this blog post. Then maybe I’ll just relax and do some reading, and maybe watch a movie.

Stuck In The Mud With SPFx

I’ve been trying to make some progress with SharePoint Framework (SPFx) lately, but I keep getting stuck in the mud, so to speak. I started working on learning SPFx some time ago, but I had to put it aside due to other projects. But now, I have a little spare time to get back to it.

I set aside a few hours one day last week to work on it. But since I last worked on it, I’ve moved most of my work to a new dev VM. So step one was moving all of my SPFx projects over to the new VM. That shouldn’t have been a big deal. But of course each SPFx project has a node_modules folder of about 725 MB, across more than 100,000 files. So just copying everything over wasn’t going to work. So step 0.1 (let’s say) would be to delete the node_modules folders. Since I had less than a dozen work projects, I thought I’d use brute force for that, and just click each node_modules folder in Explorer and hit the delete key on my keyboard. Of course I then realized that asking Windows Explorer to move 100,000+ files to the recycle bin is a bad idea. So I started looking into writing a script to do it.

I found something called npkill that looked like it would do the trick without me even having to write a script, but I couldn’t get it working in Windows. (It’s probably possible to get it working in Windows, but I hit a snag and decided not to spend too much time on it.)

So I was back to writing a script. I started putting something together in PowerShell, but then I found rimraf, which looked promising and (according to at least one blog post I read) would be faster than doing the equivalent recursive delete natively in PowerShell. So I wrote a PowerShell script using rimraf. I wound up with this simple one-liner:

gci -name | % { echo "cleaning $_\node_modules..."; rimraf $_\node_modules }

I’m not sure if rimraf was actually faster than just using a native PowerShell command, but it worked. So that got me down to a manageable set of files that I could zip up and move to the new VM. (There was actually some trouble with that too, but I won’t get into that.) And that pretty much killed the time I’d put aside to work on SPFx for day one. Sigh.

For day two, I wanted to get back to a simple project that would just call a web service and return the result. I’d previously stubbed out the project with the Yeoman generator on my old VM, so now I just had to do “npm install” to get the node_modules folder back. Long story short, I got some unexpected errors on that which led me down some rabbit holes, chasing after some missing dependencies. That got me messing around with using yarn instead of npm, which someone had recommended to me. That didn’t really help, but after a bunch of messing around, I think I figured out that the missing dependencies weren’t really a problem. So just messing around with npm and yarn, and getting the project into a git repo, killed the time I’d set aside on day two.

For day three, I actually went into the project and added a web service call, to a local service I wrote, but immediately hit an error with the SPFx HttpClient not liking the SSL certificate on that web service. So that got me trying to figure out if you can bypass SSL certificate checking in the JavaScript HttpClient the same way you can in the .NET HttpClient. I got nowhere with that, but it did set me down the path of looking into that SSL cert, and realizing that it’s due to expire in January, but I didn’t have a reminder to renew it in Outlook. Which got me going through all of my SSL certs and Outlook reminders and trying to make sure I had everything covered for anything that might expire soon. And that sent me down a couple of other administrative side-paths that used up all the time I’d set aside on day three.

So after three days, I basically just had a sample SPFx project that makes one simple web service call, which fails. Sigh. I picked it back up today, trying to fix the call. I got past the SSL issue. But that led me down a couple of more rabbit holes, mostly regarding CORS. So, good news: I now understand CORS a lot better than I did this morning. Bad news: I spent most of the morning on this and can’t really spend most of the afternoon on it.

At some point, I’ll get over all these initial speed bumps and actually start doing productive work with SPFx. Maybe.

The Morning After

I tried to be careful about how I was following election news last night. I watched the regular NJ Spotlight newscast at 5:30 PM, then some of their later election coverage, from about 9 to 9:30 PM. And I listened to a bit of WNYC, and checked Twitter a few times. I check Twitter only via Twitterrific, and I’m careful about who I follow, so my Twitter feed is relatively sane. So I managed to get a pretty good night’s sleep last night. (A little Yo-Yo Ma helped out too.)

This morning’s news is… pretty much what I expected. No conclusive winner in the presidential race. Cory Booker reelected to the Senate, and Tom Malinowski reelected to the House. The legal weed question passed, by a 2 to 1 margin. Overall, the Democrats will likely keep their House majority and probably won’t win a Senate majority.

The mainstream media (at least the sources I follow) seem to be dealing well with Trump’s FUD. The Washington Post has a headline that reads “Trump falsely asserts election fraud, claims a victory” and the NY Times has one that says “As America Awaits a Winner, Trump Falsely Claims He Prevailed.” So we’re getting that word “false” in there, at least.

I haven’t looked at Twitter or Facebook yet this morning, but I inevitably will at some point. I’m sure that a lot of people will have opinions about all this. Either way, I need to try to get through the rest of the work week without getting distracted by all this stuff too much. Hopefully, I can find some interesting work to occupy my mind.

Halloween Blues

I’ve been feeling sick since Wednesday afternoon. I’m pretty sure I caught a cold Wednesday morning, probably when I brought my car in for an oil change. That’s pretty much the only time I was out of the apartment and around other people since last weekend. This is the second cold I’ve gotten this autumn. The last one was only about two weeks ago, and this feels pretty much the same. This time, I took a whole day off from work, on Friday. So, between that and the general situation, I’m not really in a festive Halloween mood.

I ordered my groceries from Whole Foods last night, since I didn’t want to have to go to ShopRite today if I was still feeling sick. I usually select the 8-10 AM delivery window when I order from them, but they only showed the 6-8 AM window as open, so I picked that, and hoped the guy wouldn’t show up right at 6. Well, he did actually show up exactly at 6:01 AM. Luckily, I’d gotten out of bed at 5:30 AM and had just gotten out of the shower when he called to get buzzed in to the building. So that worked out well. I opened my apartment door at 6:05 to see five bags of groceries right outside. I’ve had mixed success with delivery from Whole Foods, but this time it worked out reasonably well. They only had to make one substitution, and they didn’t skip any items at all. And nothing was messed up. The eggs are all whole, the bread wasn’t squashed, and all the produce looks OK. I don’t think I want to go with that 6 AM delivery option again though. That’s just too early.

So now it’s 9 AM, and my laundry and grocery shopping are all done, and I can probably just spend the rest of the day reading comics and napping. I might as well add a few random items to this blog post before I give up and take a nap.

I’ve mentioned Evernote a few times recently here. Since the last time I mentioned it, I’ve upgraded to the new client on my main desktop PC, but not yet on my Mac. So I’ve got the new client everywhere but the Mac. I’ve hit a few bugs and annoyances, but they’re pushing out new versions frequently, and at least one or two of my issues have already been fixed. So, as of now, I still plan on sticking with Evernote.

I did take a look at Notion recently though. I hadn’t previously considered that as an Evernote replacement, largely because I didn’t know that they had a Windows version. Their home page only shows screenshots from iOS and macOS, but if you dig a bit, there is a mention of a Windows client. Their desktop app is definitely an Electron app (as is Evernote’s new app), so switching to Notion wouldn’t resolve any issues/annoyances that are due to Electron. Still, I might sign up for a free account and mess around with it a bit, if I have time.

I’m still having fun with Apple Music. I’ve been listening to some jazz and classical this week, including Louis Armstrong’s Satch Plays Fats and Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suites. So, yeah, I guess I’ve finally given in and accepted that streaming music services are fine, and I’ll be paying for one. Once my six-month free period is over, I might even go ahead and sign up for the individual Apple One bundle.