Month: January 2022

Killing Time

All through the pandemic, I’ve often had the feeling that I’m just killing time. I’m not really trying to do anything useful or fun or important. I’m just trying to get through the day, getting my work done, staying healthy, distracting myself, and doing no harm to myself or anyone else. I’m feeling that pretty strongly this weekend. We had a fair amount of snow Friday night, and very cold temperatures yesterday and today. So I haven’t been able to go out and take any long walks. And I haven’t wanted to dig my car out and drive anywhere. I don’t want to push myself too hard, because I know how easy it is for me to get sick in this kind of weather. I have a dentist’s appointment tomorrow morning, which was rescheduled from December, so I really want to be healthy enough to go to that. I’ve been sick a lot over the last few months, but I’ve been in pretty good shape for the last couple of weeks, and I’d like to stay that way.

So, anyway, I’ve been trying to strike a balance this weekend, where I’m getting important stuff done, and enjoying myself a bit, and not going stir crazy. I got my laundry and grocery shopping done yesterday, so that covered the really important stuff that I needed to do. I kind of punted on lunch and dinner yesterday, though, just eating pizza for both meals. And I spent about five hours yesterday catching up on Legends of Tomorrow. (It’s a pretty dumb show, but it’s fun, and occasionally clever.) I managed to clean the snow off my car, and clear some of the snow around it too.

Today, I managed to prepare reasonably healthy meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so I’m considering that a win. I did a fair bit of reading today. I finished one short ebook, read two more short ebooks, then started two more slightly longer ebooks. All of them are short story collections. I’ve been trying to put a dent in my backlog of old Kindle books, and have mostly been reading stuff that I bought (or got for free) about a decade ago. I haven’t really wanted to start a new novel, so I’m sticking with short stories for now.

Meanwhile, I’ve started listening to the Dresden Files audiobooks that I bought a couple of years ago. The set I bought has the first four books, all of which I read, in paperback, quite some time ago. They’re fun books, and they’re read by James Marsters, who does a great job with them. They work well in audio format, since they use first-person narration, and since they’re fairly linear and easy to follow. So that’s what I’ve been doing with my evenings, when I’m just trying to kill time until it’s time for bed.  (I generally try to stay awake until 10 PM, but last night, I gave up at 9 PM and just went to bed early.)

I also wasted a bit of time today by deciding to make a “comics” shelf in Goodreads and start applying it to the comics and graphic novels in my library. I don’t have a great reason for doing that, and I don’t think it’s going to terribly useful. But it kept me busy for a while and gave me a sense of accomplishment.

Despite the weather, I even managed to go for a 20 minute walk today. I waited until the warmest point in the day, around 4 PM. Even then, it was only 25º. So it wasn’t the most pleasant walk, but it felt good.

It’s now Sunday night, and I’m returning to one of my traditional ways of killing time: watching football. I’d pretty much given up on football several years ago, but I occasionally try to get back into it. Usually, I can’t manage much enthusiasm. But the playoff games this year have been pretty fun. The AFC and NFC championships are today. The AFC one just ended, in overtime. I’m going to try to watch the beginning, at least, of the NFC game too. I may give up on it at some point and switch over to my Dresden Files audiobook.

Well, this has been a rambling post. But that’s OK. I needed to get some of these thoughts out of my head. Sometimes I think I should just write posts like this in Day One, where no one else can read them, but I guess there’s no harm in posting them here. Maybe someone will find something here amusing. You never know!

LoTR, and Neil Gaiman, and life in 2001

I’m currently reading Neil Gaiman’s Adventures in the Dream Trade, which is a collection of miscellaneous stuff, including introductions he’s written for other people’s books, some poetry and song lyrics, and a bunch of his blog entries from 2001, right after he had finished writing American Gods and was beginning the process of promoting it. I’m in that section now, and have made it through to mid-2001, when he had wrapped up his US book tour and just started his UK tour. I’m wondering how far into 2001 this goes, and whether or not we get as far as September 11, and what his thoughts might be on that.

I’ve also been rewatching the Lord of the Rings movies, including listening to some of the commentaries, and also listening to the Ringheads podcast, which has been discussing the movies at length (about 10 hour-long episodes per movie). The Fellowship of the Ring was released in 2001, with Two Towers coming out in 2002 and Return of the King in 2003. I’d gone into NYC to see a presentation on the first movie in September 2001, just a couple of days before 9/11.

So reading Gaiman’s blog entries, and watching the LOTR movies, has got me living in the past a bit this weekend, for better or worse. Gaiman’s blog was, at the time, done with Blogger, which I was also using at that time. (I started this blog in June 2001.) So reading about his struggles with Blogger brings back some memories. And he writes about buying a Japanese laptop from Dynamism, which is a company that used to import nifty laptops from Japan. (I’d never bought anything from them, but I know at least one person who did, and I was a bit jealous of his nifty Japanese laptop.) And there are mentions of early e-readers, and other fun esoteric stuff.

There are links in many of those blog entries, some of which still work and some of which don’t. It’s been interesting to follow some of them, and get sucked back into the web circa 2001. The review of American Gods from sfsite.com is still up, but the site itself seems to be pretty much dead, having gone on hiatus in 2018. SciFi’s Seeing Ear Theatre is long gone, but there’s a good list of the stuff they did here, with some of it still available for download from various places. (I could go on with more of this, but you get the idea.)

This has all got me thinking about big events, and how we see things differently before and after them, and how there are weird unintended resonances in fiction sometimes. (I have more to say about that, but I’m struggling to get it into words properly, so I’m just going to leave it at that for now.) So, some good memories, and some mixed feelings, and some amusement at old forgotten tech.

 

iOS notification issues and MS Authenticator issues

This is going to be a bit of a gripe post, but there might be some useful stuff in it. Or not. But it’s one of those things where writing it up might help me feel better about it, and might also come in handy later if someone has a similar problem. (Or if I have the same problem again and can’t remember some details.)

So this all started, I think, after I spent some time messing around with the new iOS 15 focus modes. I’d played around with them a bit when iOS 15 first came out, but something made me decide to mess around with them some more. To make a long story short, I tried out the “sleep” focus mode for a day or two, then decided that it wasn’t for me and went back to just using the “do not disturb” mode, scheduled to turn on at 10 PM and off at 5 AM every day.

After that, some of my notifications stopped working. I’m not sure that messing with focus is what broke notifications, but I’ve read up on the issue a bit, and it seems like that’s the most likely culprit. It seems like there’s a bug in iOS 15.2 that messes up notifications in some cases, often after you’ve messed with the focus setup. I’m pretty sure these were all notifications that would fall under the “push” category. So I wasn’t getting notifications on new emails from my Fastmail app, which was annoying but not a big deal. But I also wasn’t getting notifications on MS Authenticator, which is kind of a big problem for me.

I have more than a dozen accounts set up in MS Authenticator, mostly for CSP-related accounts. They all require MFA, so when I log into one of those accounts, it sends a push notification to my phone that I need to approve. And that wasn’t working. There’s a fallback, where I can get a six-digit code from the app and type that into the web browser. That’s what I’d been doing for a few days, but I really wanted to fix that.

I’d seen some advice online about fixing the notification issue by removing any app that wasn’t working, and reinstalling it. That worked for the Fastmail app, so I thought I’d try it for the Authenticator app too. Now, the Authenticator app has an option to back up its configuration to iCloud. And I had that turned on, so I thought I would safely be able to pull it back in after reinstalling the app. Well, it turns out that it’s not that simple. I did manage to pull in the backup, but for most accounts, you have to go back and redo the setup on the account anyway. You’re just pulling in a placeholder from iCloud. That was a pain, but not a huge problem, for accounts where I had my cell phone number set up as a backup. But for some of the oldest accounts, I either don’t have a backup, or I have my work desk phone set as the back up. And I’m working from home and don’t have a way to get to my desk phone. So that’s a problem.

Tomorrow, I’m going to try to find someone else with admin rights who can go in to Azure AD and set my cell phone # as my backup auth method so I can finish the setup on these accounts. I’m a little worried that I may have to bug someone at a fairly high level to do this, which could be a little embarrassing. But hey, we all screw up now and then. And this is more Apple and Microsoft’s fault than mine. (Apple’s fault for screwing up notifications in iOS 15.2, and Microsoft’s for not making it clear that the MS Authenticator iCloud backup isn’t really much of a backup.)

So the lesson here is that, before wiping out MS Authenticator, go into all of your accounts and make sure you have a good phone # and/or email address set under your backup authentication methods.

Once this is all straightened out, I need to write up a good procedure for transferring my MS Authenticator setup from one phone to another. My current iPhone just hit its three-year anniversary, so it’s time for me to start thinking about a new one. Setting up a new iPhone generally isn’t that hard these days, since you can just restore from an iCloud backup and most of your stuff will work. But there’s always some odd bits, like MS Authenticator, that trip you up. Even with all of my accounts set up correctly with backup auth methods, it’ll still take me an hour to get them all done. For each one, I basically need to open a new private browsing window, log in (using the SMS message backup option), then go to my account profile, delete the old MS Auth setup, add a new one, scan the QR code, wait for it to send a test push notification, approve that, and then finish the setup. That can take five minutes per account. I’m wondering if there’s a better way to handle this. Probably not. Most people don’t have Azure AD accounts in a dozen different domains, all requiring MFA, so my situation is not exactly a common use case that MS would have designed for.

Another New Year

I missed my usual New Year’s Day post yesterday. There are a few reasons for that, one being that New Year’s Day fell on a Saturday this year, and I decided to treat it like a normal Saturday (mostly) and started the day with my usual Saturday chores and errands (laundry and grocery shopping), then proceeded to spend a bunch of time in front of the computer paying bills and organizing paperwork and stuff. So it was a pretty industrious morning, but after that, I took a nap, and then spent the afternoon in front of the TV, watching Godzilla movies. I didn’t really have the energy left for anything more ambitious.

So today, I’m going to try to spend some time writing a blog post. It’s Sunday morning, I just had a pork roll, egg, and cheese sandwich and a strong cup of coffee, and now I’m ready to sit around and ruminate on the year for a bit.

I usually start these posts with links to the last few New Year’s posts, so here are a few:

This past year has certainly been a doozy. It got off to a rough start with the Capitol insurrection and resulting turmoil, which was the subject for my second post of the year. On the bright side, the vaccines arrived, and I got my first shot in April, my second in May, and my booster shot in December. After that second shot, I started feeling better about things and actually made a trip into NYC in June to go to the Met and MoMA. Then, I went in twice in October, once for NYCC, and once to go to the Met and MoMA again. And that was about it for travel. The Omicron variant started showing up around Thanksgiving, and going out started to seem a lot less safe again. Contrast NYCC in October, which felt pretty safe to me, with Anime NYC in November, where one of the earliest cases of Omicron in NYC was identified. So any thoughts I had of going into New York for another Met/MoMA trip went out the window.

At work, we went through a bunch of different “Return To Office” plans through 2021. They kept setting dates and then pushing them back. In the end, we returned to the office on a one day per week schedule in October. My first day back was October 14. My last trip to the office was December 9. I was sick the week after that, and then we were allowed to work from home for the last two weeks of the year. For 2022, we were supposed to move to two days per week in January, but the Omicron variant has put that on hold. Now, we’re allowed to work from home until mid-January. Then, it’s back to 1 day per week for the last two weeks of January, then 2 days per week starting in February. We’ll see if we actually stick to that, or if things get worse and they have to back off again. I’m thankful that I work for a company that’s been more flexible about “work from home” than a lot of other companies. But I’m a little disappointed that they haven’t been more flexible, especially for workers like me who really aren’t any more effective in the office vs. working from home. At this point, I feel like they should just allow folks like me to go 100% remote if we want and give up our cubicles in the office. It would just make things simpler and safer for everybody.

But enough about that. I usually include a section on my general health in these posts, so I’m going to do that now. I started the year at around 135 pounds. I’ve gradually gained some weight this year, ending up at around 140. I’m trying to hold the line there. I set 140 as my goal weight in Lose It, so any time I go over it, my calorie budget is adjusted down a bit and I eat a bit less until I’m back under. I’d dropped down to 130 pounds briefly in 2020, without actually trying. Since then, it’s just been going up though. I guess it’s mostly due to my habit of going out for a cappuccino and a cookie in the afternoon on most weekdays. There are now three good places to get cookies here in downtown Somerville: Lucid Coffee, Blue Sheep Bake Shop, and Epic Cookies. So that’s kind of a problem. But it’s not a huge one. I’m managing to hold the line at 140. And even if I let myself go to 150, that would still leave me with a healthy BMI.

I’ve been doing OK on exercise. I take a walk outside almost every day. I started doing some yoga recently too, though I haven’t stuck with it. I’ve just been doing it on mornings when it’s too cold out for a walk. According to the iOS Health app, I’ve averaged 49 minutes of exercise per day over the last year, and 491 calories on my “move” ring. My move goal was 500 over the summer, when I was doing a lot of walking, and it’s 450 now. I generally hit my exercise goal most days, and the move goal 4 or 5 days each week.

I’ve continued meditating on a fairly regular basis. I’ve been using Calm all year, and generally do one of their 10 minute meditations every weekday, alternating between their two regular features, the Daily Calm and the Daily Trip. I signed up for a lifetime sub with them during their Black Friday sale, as I’ve mentioned previously. I’ve occasionally tried to get a streak going, meditating every day. The longest I’ve managed is 40 days, from November 1 to December 10. I’m not overly concerned with getting to a point where I meditate every single day, as long as I’m doing it more often than not, but it’s fun to try to see how long I can keep a streak going.

Looking at my history on this blog, I can see that I was posting a lot earlier in the year (7 posts in January and 11 in February), but less later in the year (only one post in December). I don’t know if that means anything, really. I still like using the blog as an aid to organizing my thoughts and reflecting on my life and my choices. A lot of my posts last year were all about entertainment though: comics, movies, TV, podcasts, music, and so on. I think I indulged in a lot of escapism in 2021. I do that every year, of course, but more than average in 2021, I think. It was a rough year. I spent a lot of time alone in my apartment. I don’t really feel bad about that. I’m still very engaged in my work, and I keep up with news and politics and make informed decisions about all that stuff.

And on that “escapism” front, I always like to look back at the books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched and so on and so forth in these posts. My Goodreads history last year is mostly comics. I set my goal at 100 books and read 79. I have a few serious books in there, like Americanah and The Picture of Dorian Gray, but it’s mostly comics and Doctor Who audio dramas. A few highlights would be reading through Grant Morrison’s X-Men run, discovering the Hilda books by Luke Pearson, and finally finishing Brian K. Vaughan’s Ex Machina.

I watched quite a few movies this year too, though I never did make it into a theater. (The Spider-Man movie is really tempting, but I’m probably going to wait for that one to hit Blu-ray or Disney+, like I’ve done with all the other Marvel, Disney, or Pixar stuff since the pandemic started.) My Letterboxd stats show that I’ve watched 108 movies in 2021. I started and ended the year with Thin Man movies, which makes me happy. I love those movies. At the start of the year, I would have been watching them on my TiVo from TCM’s New Year’s Eve marathon. I gave up on premium cable in 2021, so for this New Year, I bought a DVD set from Amazon with the first four movies. I watched the third and fourth ones on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

Still looking at my Letterboxd stats, I see that Spirited Away is the only movie I gave five stars to in 2021. That was obviously a rewatch for me, part of an effort to watch a bunch of Ghibli films, then listen to the corresponding Ghibliotheque podcast episode. I still have a bunch of movies to go on that front, and I should get back to that effort at some point soon. My other big watch/rewatch project in 2021 was to work my way through the Criterion Godzilla box set, which I wrote about in my last post.

I usually cover “professional development” in these posts, but I’m going to gloss over that this time. I did learn some new stuff last year, and I could list some nice work accomplishments, but honestly I haven’t been terribly ambitious about that stuff lately. This has largely been a “let’s just get through this” kind of year. And I think 2022 will be more of the same. I discontinued my Pluralsight subscription yesterday, since I haven’t been using it much lately. I still have access to LinkedIn Learning through work and O’Reilly through the ACM, and I think that’s more than enough for now.

There’s a lot more I could write here, but I’m going to try to wrap things up. I started writing this around 8 AM, and it’s now 11 AM. I took a half-hour walk at 9 AM, but I’ve just been sitting here ruminating and writing for most of that time. So it’s about time to stop and maybe go out for another walk. It’s 55º out right now, so I should take advantage of that while I can. I know it’s going to start getting cold again later this week.