Year: 2022

COVID, and NYCC, and iPhones, and other stuff

It’s been about a month since I’ve last posted here, and I have a backlog of stuff in my head that I’ve been meaning to post about. And a number of things came up today that seem like they might be worth mentioning.

Also, I might be a little jumpy from my afternoon cappuccino, so this post might go all over the place…

NYCC announced their mask policy for this year today. In short, they’re requiring masks, but not vaccination. The con is happening in about a month (October 6-9) and I still haven’t decided if I’m going or not. I’ve been keeping an eye on the news, with regard to whether or not there will be a fall surge, and how bad it might be. I just don’t know… I know they mailed out badges this week, so I’ll have those soon. If I decide not to use them, then that’s OK.

I listened to a bit of Andy Ihnatko’s Material podcast today, and he started it out with a bit of a “sermon” on masking and COVID. He mentioned something in there about his own decision-making regarding an upcoming comic con in his area (Boston?), and his thinking seems to be pretty much the same as mine.

I was sick all of Labor Day weekend. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t COVID, and I’m not sure where I picked up… whatever it was. At work, I’m one of a very few people who are still wearing a mask around the office. I did go to a couple of large in-person meetings recently, so maybe I picked something up in one of those. But I also went out for a beer and a burger with an old friend Friday night, so maybe that’s where it came from. (Though we were sitting outside for that, so there should have been less chance of picking up anything airborne, vs. being indoors.)

I honestly think I’m getting sick more often lately. The prevailing wisdom on that seems to be that spending too much time alone, indoors, has left my immune system unprepared for normal levels of airborne… stuff. Maybe that’s true. Maybe I need to spend more time with other people?

On another matter entirely, I paid some attention to Apple’s iPhone event today, though I was too busy at work to catch everything. My iPhone XR is now over three years old, so it’s probably time to replace it. The iPhone 14 looks… fine. If I stick with the standard iPhone 14, then I don’t think it’ll be that much different from my XR. It’s the same form factor (I think) and still has the notch. It seems to have a much better camera though, which is nice, I guess. The iPhone 14 Pro has some snazzy features, though I don’t think I really need them enough to spend $200 more than for the regular 14. (Yeah, that “Dynamic Island” thing is cute, but I don’t need it.)

I also have a bunch of work stuff I want to blog about, but I really need to organize that all first. So I guess this will just be an NYCC / COVID / iPhone post.

Phish in Atlantic City

I found myself on a bit of a Phish kick last week. It started out as a Grateful Dead kick, listening to Crimson White & Indigo, the live album from their July 1989 concert at JFK Stadium in Philly. That led to me spelunking through my (relatively) small collection of live Phish stuff. Which led to me noticing that Phish were playing this weekend in Atlantic City, for three nights.

I had a brief mental flirtation with the idea of actually driving down to AC for one of the shows. Then I remembered that I’m 55 years old, we’re in the middle of a heat wave, and hanging out on the beach for three hours with 30,000 other people probably isn’t a good idea for me. I also looked at the FAQ for the event and noticed all the rules & regulations, including a notice that attendees would be subject to a “thorough TSA-style pat-down search,” which made the whole thing sound a lot less fun and more like a trip to Newark Airport.

I’ve also considered buying one or more of the shows from LivePhish.com. The set of three is $35 in FLAC or ALAC, so that’s not bad. Certainly cheaper and more convenient that driving to AC, enduring a TSA-style pat-down, then trying to get through a three-hour show with no actual seats, surrounded by 30,000 other Phish fans. (On the other hand, there’s plenty of live Phish stuff already available on Apple Music, and I’m not enough of a fan to really need more than that.)

This recap of the first show actually makes it sound like it was quite a good show. Phish.net is a fun site to browse. There’s so much meticulously cross-referenced detail, and so much nuance that just goes over the head of a more “casual” fan like me. It’s fun when a band (or a writer, or artist, or whatever) inspires the kind of devotion that results in this kind of work. Sometimes, that kind of thing gets toxic and insular, but other times, it’s a lot of fun.

Sandman

My Twitter feed has been full of Sandman TV news for the last month or two, mostly due to Neil Gaiman relentlessly tweeting about it. Sometimes, when a writer goes into “relentless promotion mode” on Twitter, I unfollow them, at least for a while. (I don’t hold it against them; it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, given the way Twitter works for most people and the general difficulty in rising above the noise.) But Gaiman is so genial about it that it doesn’t bother me the same way it does when, say, Kevin Smith does it. (Again, I love Kevin Smith too. I just get tired of him sometimes.) There was a lot of promotional stuff about the show at SDCC too. I watched a bit of that on YouTube.

Sandman was one of my favorite comics. I haven’t gone back and reread any of it in a long time, but I bought it issue by issue when it was first coming out, and also bought the first few graphic novel collections. It was first published at a time when I was buying a fair number of old-fashioned “floppy” comics every month, and it was always one of the best.

So I’ve been looking forward to the Netflix TV adaptation. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be any good, but I was at least cautiously optimistic. It was released on Friday, and I wound up watching the first few episodes yesterday. So far, I like it a lot. It seems to me that it’s always just on the verge of tipping over into unintentional camp, but it’s done so well that it just carries you along. Maybe if you haven’t read the comics, it would be harder to “buy in” to it, and you’d just find it silly. But, for me, it’s just right. There’s some humor, but none of the winking self-aware stuff that you see in some other comics adaptations.

A lot of folks have had good things to say about the casting for this show. While I think that it all works, some of it seems just on the verge of not working, in the same way that the whole show almost doesn’t work. For instance, I love Patton Oswalt, but he’s almost a bit too snarky. And Gwendoline Christie is almost too weird to be Lucifer, but she pulls it off. (The whole scene between Morpheus and Lucifer is a bit over the top, really. I think a more cautious adaptation would have toned that down, or made it more conventional, but then it just wouldn’t have been as effective.)

Anyway, my plan for this post was just to link to a couple of interesting reviews of the show, but then the preamble got a little out of control… The reviews in question are this one from the Ebert site, and this one from NPR. They’re almost diametrically opposed. The former seems to think it’s a little too faithful to the comics. The latter think that it’s changed just enough to address some of the shortcomings in the original. I guess I’m more on the side of the NPR one.

And, just for yuks, here’s a link to a Gaiman interview in the NY Times, which I haven’t read yet, and to the NY Times review of the show (which I also still haven’t read).

another weird week

Well, it’s the end of another weird week. July is almost over. It’s been hot all week, and it’s going to be even hotter this weekend. I just saw a notice that Duke Farms is going to be closed over the weekend due to the heat, including the Sunday farmer’s market, so I guess I’m going to have to buy all my food from Shop-Rite tomorrow, assuming I can survive the three-minute walk from my apartment (and back).

Our July 4th security incident at work has basically turned July into a “lost month” for all of us. We’re coming out of it, but we’re still not at 100%. My development VM is still in pretty bad shape, since all outgoing internet access from it has been locked down, and most of my firewall requests don’t seem to have gone through yet.

I’d hoped for a quiet day today, working from home, but my internet was down, so I had to drive in to the office and work from there. It was still a quiet day, with very few people in the office, and the A/C in the office is better than my apartment A/C, so there’s that.

I was wondering if it would be hot enough tonight to discourage people from showing up for the usual Somerville Friday classic car thing. Looking out my window now, it appears to be a little less crowded than usual, but not by much. Personally, you couldn’t pay me enough to hang around outside tonight looking at cars. I was thinking about watching “The Gray Man”  on Netflix tonight, but the reviews aren’t great, so maybe I should find something a little lighter.

I had planned on blogging a bit about day two of SDCC, but I couldn’t find any news that I thought was interesting enough to blog about. I watched a few trailers and a bit of live coverage from Marvel and IGN, but it was all pretty meh. Dungeons and Dragons movie? Meh. Amazon “Rings of Power” series? Meh. I kind of wish I could watch some stuff along of lines of Mark Evanier’s panels, but nobody’s livestreaming that kind of stuff.

not at SDCC, day one

Wow, today is the first full day of SDCC. I’ve been so busy this month, since the July 4th incident, that it kind of snuck up on me. I had, at one point, though about taking a few vacation days to coincide with SDCC, and just spend a few days decompressing, reading comics, and absorbing whatever interesting news comes out of the con. But I didn’t do that. And, at this point, if I tried to take a vacation day, I’d probably get laughed at. I’ll try to take a few days next month, maybe.

I never seriously considered actually going to the con this year. I assumed it would be near impossible to get tickets (as it usually is), plus I’m still not comfortable in large crowds, nor am I enthusiastic about cross-continental air travel right now. The con is requiring folks to be both masked and vax’ed, so that’s good. But this BA.5 thing is scary, even with full vaccination. My feelings about COVID-19 at this point are mostly in line with this Jigsaw video from today.

Anyway, we’ve got record heat going on here in NJ right now. San Diego sure would be a nice place to be. Looks like it’ll be mid-70s there all weekend, while we might hit 100 here on Sunday. Maybe I’ll have time to watch a few panels over the weekend, or maybe read the program book PDF. Sigh.

Some software notes

Two weeks in, and we’re still cleaning up after the security incident at work over the July 4th weekend. I’ve gone into the office most days since then, and I think all that extra exposure to other humans has gotten me sick. I’ve been mostly useless since Friday. I’m hoping I can go back to my usual schedule this week (M/W/F at home, Tue/Thu in the office). Or maybe work from home all this week, if I don’t start feeling better by Tuesday.

Anyway, all the security shake-ups over the last two weeks have gotten me thinking about some of my software choices, and I thought I’d write up some notes on that.

LastPass vs 1Password

I’ve been using 1Password for my personal password storage since 2014, and I’m still happy with it. But I just (finally) got added to our company’s corporate LastPass account, so I can use that for work. And that comes with a free personal LastPass Families account, so I went ahead and signed up for one.

Short version: I don’t think I’ll be using it for anything. I think it’s probably fine for casual users who need a simple password management solution, but it’s not nearly as good as 1Password. I guess my biggest gripe with it is that it’s very much oriented towards in-browser use. There’s a native Windows 10 client, but it’s very limited and just not very good at all. Again, I think it’s probably fine for a lot of people, but it’s just not good enough for a power-user like me.

LINQPad

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking about upgrading my LINQPad Pro license. I went ahead and did that, and upgraded to the “Premium” version. The NuGet integration works well.  Access to NuGet is still blocked from my developer VM, so I can’t use it there yet, but I can use it on my desktop PC, where I’ve also installed it. I haven’t tried the debugger yet, but I’m curious to see how well that works.

And the dev VM is still so locked down that I couldn’t actually activate the new license over the internet, but the developer provides a way to get around that, so that was appreciated.

TextExpander vs AutoHotKey

On Windows, I generally use AutoHotKey for my keyboard macros and text expansions. I’ve been using it since 2007. I don’t have the actual AHK product installed on any of my work machines, but I have a compiled script that I do run on my work machines. It was starting to look like that might be an issue last week, due to some new security software they were running on our machines. It now looks like it’s OK, but that got me briefly looking at other solutions that might work, and which I might be able to get whitelisted at work.

So I went back to TextExpander, which I used to use on my Mac, circa 2014–2016. I stopped using TextExpander when they went to a subscription model, since I was having some trouble with it anyway, and it didn’t seem to be worth the money. But that was a while ago, and they now have a Windows client too, so it seemed to be worth looking into it again.

I signed up for a 30-day trial and installed it on my personal desktop PC and MacBook. It works fine, and does some interesting stuff, but it still has some of the same issues with secure input fields that it had when I last used it. That’s not really TextExpander’s fault, but it does limit its usefulness on the Mac. On Windows, it seems to work well, but it’s not nearly as powerful as AutoHotKey. (Or at least it doesn’t seem to be.)

On the Mac side, this has got me thinking again that I should really try Keyboard Maestro. It looks to me like it’s closer to what I want than TextExpander is, and it’s a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. Maybe when things have settled down a bit, and I’m feeling better, I’ll finally give it a try.

I still have some time on the 30-day TextExpander trial, so I’m going to continue messing around with it. Maybe I’ll figure out how to do some fancier stuff with it, and/or how to work around some of its limitations. I really like the idea of having a single macro program that works across Mac and Windows, so that’s a motivation not to give up on it yet.

 

Visual Studio extensions and alternatives

Another (relatively) quick post for today: It just occurred to me that, since my work VM has been restored from an older backup, the changes I made to Visual Studio a week ago are all gone. And that’s fine. I wasn’t entirely convinced that CodeRush was something I wanted to stick with anyway.

Since my VM is a little messed up now, I’ve been thrashing around a bit the last few days trying alternate ways to test some stuff out. I have some PowerShell scripts that I usually run on my VM, and I thought it would be fairly easy to copy them over to my laptop or desktop and run them there. But the specific set of modules I need is apparently a little complicated, and I haven’t been able to exactly recreate my environment. I’m sure I could, given time, but oh well.

Then I came up with the idea of installing LINQPad on my desktop and running some stuff there. That wasn’t terribly hard to do, but I’m referencing some DLLs in those that aren’t on my desktop, and, again, recreating the specific environment I needed got a bit too complicated and I gave up. That did get me thinking about upgrading my Pro license to a Developer license, so I’d have nuget support. I might still do that, but not right away.

And, finally, I have been looking at JetBrains Rider a bit lately. I noticed last week that their prices have gone up. Rider is still pretty affordable though. The old price was $139 for the first year (for personal use); the new price is $149. As a subscription product, that’s still enough that it’s not an impulse buy for me. I’d have to know that I was actually going to use it consistently, outside work. But lately I’m not doing enough programming outside work to justify it.

troubleshooting MSAL

This is just a quick one: in the aftermath of last weekend’s thing at work, they’re now blocking all outbound web traffic from my development VM. Which is kind of a problem when you’re trying to test out some web services on some restored servers, and you need to authenticate with MSAL. While trying to figure out exactly which addresses I needed to have whitelisted, I stumbled across an article on logging errors in MSAL.NET. This is a good example of something I needed, but didn’t know I needed until I stumbled across it, while looking for something else!

For now, I’ve just implemented this in my test program with the simple logging code included in the code sample, but, when things settle down, I might try to add MSAL logging into one or more of my programs as an option that I can turn on or off in the config, and log through Serilog (my current favorite logging library).

The end of a weird week

As I alluded to on Tuesday, we had a security incident at work over the July Fourth weekend, so we’ve been spending all week cleaning up after that. There’s a statement about it on my company’s blog. I won’t link to it here, since I don’t necessarily want this post to show up in searches or referral logs related to it. (I’m not going to post anything I shouldn’t be posting, and I don’t know enough about the details to say much anyway, but just in case…)

On Tuesday, we were told to just stay home and chill, basically. They didn’t give us any real info on what happened, so that was basically just a “snow day,” as I mentioned in my last post. On Wednesday, they had made enough progress with the initial mitigation that we could start working on our disaster recovery. So, since then, it’s been a lot of “hurry up and wait” work, where servers are getting restored or rebuilt, scanned, released, and then we can do final setup and testing. I’ve been in the office Wednesday and Thursday, but I’m hoping I can get away with working from home today.

There are a lot of people working very hard on this. For me, I’m primarily a programmer, with only limited admin responsibilities. There are only two servers that I’m “officially” responsible for (out of hundreds total across the company), so mostly I’m just waiting on other stuff, answering questions, and helping out where I can. I feel a little guilty, knowing that some people are sleeping in their offices while I’m going home and sleeping in my own bed, but of course there’s not much I can do to help those folks, other than to stay out of their way.

I had a bunch of other stuff to say about this, but I think I’ll just say that I think we’re doing a pretty good job of handling this thing. Everyone has been calm and professional through it all, at least from my limited vantage point. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re making steady progress.

Purely by coincidence, I read an article in Communications of the ACM last week that talked about the best way to handle outages in IT. The article is more about unintentional errors that cause outages, rather than security incidents, but there’s a lot in common. I like the idea that “DevOps celebrates mistakes.” I hope that, when we’re back up & running, we’ll get a good postmortem on this that we can learn from.

some downtime

It looks like I unexpectedly have the morning off from work. Or maybe all day. I’m not sure yet. Anyway, this means I can waste time on the internet and nobody can stop me and I don’t have to feel guilty about it. Anyway, I noticed this old post from 2006 in my “on this day” sidebar this morning, and I clicked through on the link, expecting it to be dead. But it’s not! And, weirdly, there’s a new Jigsaw video out! With the first appearance of Dr. Kranium since 2011! And it’s a really funny video too! I’d completely forgotten about Jigsaw, and would likely never have stumbled across this video if I hadn’t been pointlessly clicking around on my own blog. So the lesson here is, I guess, that blogging links to dumb puppet videos sometimes pays off 10+ years later.