Month: March 2024

baseball, and various office complaints

Baseball season started yesterday, so I thought I’d write up a few thoughts. I paid for MLB.TV this year, at the full price of $150. (That’s after paying just $50 last year, since the season was half-over when I signed up.) Hopefully, I’ll watch enough baseball to justify that price. I still can’t watch many Mets or Yankees games, since YouTube TV doesn’t include Yes or SNY. But at least now I can watch the random games that show up on ESPN and other basic-cable channels too. Anyway, I guess I’ll try to be a Phillies fan again this year, since I can watch all (or most) of their games on MLB.TV.

Today, I listened to a bit of the 1 PM Mets game radio stream, and am now watching the 3 PM Phillies game, both via MLB.TV on my computer, while I am (ostensibly) working. Later, I’ll watch at least some of the 8 PM Yankees game that’ll be on Apple TV+. So, plenty of baseball.

And as a follow-up to my moving day post from a couple of weeks ago: We are now in our new temporary space. The cubicles are the same style as the ones we had in our old space, but unfortunately they’re the “low wall” version, so we’re all essentially in an open-plan office now (or very close to it). I can’t say I’m happy about it, but it hasn’t been too bad so far. Most of the folks in my group are pretty quiet. And I’m not sure if I’m more likely to catch COVID (or whatever) in this space vs. the old one, but it’s probably not that much of a difference.

One weird thing about these cubicles is that they only have a single network port. That seems crazy to me, but I guess it was fine for whoever was previously in these cubicles. I scrounged a four-port switch from someone else, and have been using that, but it’s been iffy and I’ve lost my network connection a few times. I opened a support ticket to see if I could get a new switch, but that’s mostly led me into some bureaucracy, so now I need to decide if I want to keep pushing on that, or give up and just buy a $15 switch from Amazon.

My other dumb problem at work over the last few weeks is that, for some reason, the Verizon cell signal has been really bad, at certain times and in certain places. It seems to be fine early in the morning, then gets worse as the day goes on. And it’s worst, for some reason, when I’m sitting in my car at lunch time. So my habit of streaming a 10-minute meditation on Calm or Insight Timer in my car after lunch isn’t working out so well. (And that meditation time is even more important, when I have no privacy at all when I’m at my desk.) So I need to plan around that. I can still use the plain vanilla timer and do a silent meditation, but the guided meditations usually work better for me.

Oh, and I can’t do an advance order with Starbucks or Dunkin for my post-lunch coffee either, on some days, and that’s a big inconvenience. (I joke, kinda, but waiting in line to order coffee is a pain in the butt.)

moving day

My company has been gradually remodeling our office building, and the remodel has finally hit my group. The plan is to move us to a temporary space, on the other side of the building, for a couple of months, then move us back when our space is done.

Today was our final day in the old space. We all had to pack up our stuff and label our computer equipment and chairs. And hopefully it’ll all be on the other side of the building when we’re next in the office, on Tuesday. I’ve been with the company for more than ten years, working in the same cubicle, so, theoretically, I should probably have accumulated a lot of crap. In reality, I managed to fit nearly all of my stuff into one plastic crate. The stuff that didn’t fit was: (1) my Batman statue, and (2) my modest collection of programming books.

I’ve been mentally comparing this to the last big office move I had to make, at NMS, in November 2007. That one was a doozy! (Probably best not to get too deep into reminiscing about that. I could really find myself in a spiral if I go down that road…) Anyway, I had a ton of stuff to move back then. Now, it’s mostly just a bit of hardware, and cables, and some stuff I need to keep myself from falling apart (tissues, cough drops, aspirin, etc.).

I only have about a half-dozen printed computer books now, in the office. And I don’t really use them. They’re mostly on old tech that I needed to learn to do some maintenance programming, like SharePoint 2013, and VSTO, and other random stuff. I thought about throwing them all out. For now, they’re in a box in the back of my car. Maybe I’ll get up the nerve to move them from the car to the dumpster over the weekend.

I’m pretty sure our temp space is going to look like our current space, with similar size cubicles. I guess I’ll find out next week. When they move us back, into the remodeled space, I’m a little worried that we’re going to have smaller cubicles, with lower walls. That seems to be the way they’re going with the other remodeled spaces I’ve seen. Or maybe they’ll take into account that we’re programmers, and we need a bit of peace and quiet to get out work done, and give us higher-walled cubicles. (Probably not, but I can hope…)

I’ve still got a chip on my  shoulder about the whole “return to office” thing. There’s a reasonable amount of evidence that office mandates don’t help companies make more money, and they certainly don’t make employees happier or more productive. Oh well. At least I still get to work from home on Mondays and Fridays!

no more cable TV

After plenty of dithering back & forth (see here and here), I finally went ahead and canceled my cable TV service today. And returned my cable card to Optimum, so there’s no going back now.

My TiVo still works, without the cable card, so I can at least finish watching the backlog of stuff I have on there. But eventually, I’ll have to cancel the TiVo service (which renews in October), wipe the TiVo, and recycle it. (Or find somebody to buy it, which seems unlikely.)

Canceling cable was a bit of a pain, but not as bad as I’d thought it would be. The phone call took about 15 minutes. The rep made one attempt to get me to stick with the service, by offering me $25 off for three months. If she’d made it $25 off for a whole year, I might would have accepted that and canceled YouTube TV instead. But I don’t really want to just kick the can down the road by three months.

Returning the cable card was pretty easy too. It turns out that Optimum now has a store quite close to me, in a strip mall on the Somerville Circle.  There was no one else in the store when I got there, so I got in and out pretty quick. There was a half-hearted attempt to get me to upgrade my internet connection while I was there, but I said I was fine, and they said OK.

(And then I stopped at Steck’s and got a corned beef Reuben to take home for lunch. I hadn’t been to Steck’s in a long time, but they’re in the same strip mall, and it’s almost St. Patrick’s Day, so it seemed appropriate.)

So, that’s that. I’m not 100% satisfied with YouTube TV, but it’s good enough for now. I think I’ve decided to stick with YTTV for three months, at least, since it’s $10 off for the first three months. After that, I’ll decide if I’m sticking with it, switching to Hulu + Live TV, or giving up on “regular” TV altogether.

Some follow-up, on a nice Sunday

I haven’t blogged in almost a month, and I have a few things I want to write about, so this is going to be a multi-topic catch-up post. And hopefully it won’t be too long, or take me too long to write. But we’ll see how that goes.

Taxes

I filed my taxes today. I used the H&R Block software that I’ve been using (on and off) since (at least) 1997. (I just poked around on my hard drive to try to find the earliest docs from TaxCut, and I found an installer for the 1997 version. At some point, they dropped the “TaxCut” name, and now it’s just H&R Block.) I owed less than I usually have, in recent years. I’m not sure why. And I seem to have reached the point in my life where I’m not obsessing too much about the tax rules and whether or not I’m fully in compliance with them. There were a few things on both the Federal and NJ returns that I wasn’t 100% sure about, but I didn’t spend a lot of time researching them and double-checking them. Maybe I overpaid a little, or maybe I underpaid a little. Life is too short to worry about it too much.

The Wheel of Time

I finished reading A Crown of Swords on Friday. And I’m likely to start The Path of Daggers today. A Crown of Swords was book 7, and there are 14 books in the series, so I’m now halfway done! (Unless you count New Spring, the prequel novel, which I’m sure I’ll slot in somewhere, so maybe I’m not quite halfway through the whole thing, but I’m halfway through the main series.)

I’ve been listening to The Wheel Weaves podcast as I’ve been reading ACoS, and I’ve enjoyed it enough that I signed up for their Patreon (though only at the $3/month level). It’s a fun podcast to listen to, and it’s nice when they point out stuff that I missed, or have an interpretation of something that’s different from my own.

I finished ACoS in just over a month, so it’s starting to look like I might be able to finish the whole series by the end of this year, if I can keep up this pace. I know that’s not likely, and that life will probably get in the way at some point, or I’ll get tired of the series and switch to something else for a while. But right now, I’m perfectly happy just reading the books back to back.

Streaming Services

I signed up for YouTube TV about a week ago. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it, but I’m starting to get more comfortable with the idea of giving up on my TiVo Bolt and what’s left of my cable TV service. (Which is just the broadcast channels, for $50/month, per my previous post.)

There are good and bad points to YouTube TV, vs cable/TiVo. On the bad side, the DVR interface isn’t nearly as nice as TiVo’s. Nor is the program guide. I guess I’ve been spoiled by TiVo’s great user interface (even though I’ve complained about it at times).

The DVR lets you add a series, but has no configuration beyond that. So I added NCIS, so I could get the new episodes, but now it’s also recording every other single episode of NCIS that airs on any channel, at any time. And since NCIS has been on for 21 seasons and almost 500 episodes, that’s a lot. But DVR space is unlimited, and in the cloud, so I don’t really have to worry about that. And I just pulled up the DVR interface, to see if it could tell me how many episodes of NCIS it’s recorded in the last week, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to see that. So that’s another annoyance with the DVR.

And for the program guide and the live channel interface, you can mark certain channels as favorites, so they’ll show at the top of the list, so that’s nice. But that’s about the only good thing about the interface. It’s hard to jump forward in time, compared to TiVo. You can go forward a page at a time, but it’s slow, and there’s no way to jump ahead a full day, like there is on TiVo. In fact, I think you can only go forward by 24 hours, total.

Also, fast-forwarding to skip commercials on DVR recordings is a lot less convenient than on TiVo. Of course, there’s no auto-skip, like there is on TiVo, but that doesn’t always work on TiVo anyway, so I’m OK with that. And there’s no full-screen fast-forward either; you can only see a thumbnail of the content as you’re fast-forwarding through it.

In terms of the actual channel line-up, it’s interesting to have the usual basic cable channels back again, after having dropped them a couple of years ago. My first impression is that cable has gotten even worse since then. About the only channel that seems to be sticking to it’s original mission is TCM. They still seem to be showing classic movies, and just classic movies. And I assume they’re still commercial-free, though I haven’t checked that yet.

Looking at some other channels, IFC is currently showing an Ace Ventura movie. (Definitely not fitting into their original prestige “independent film” category.) And Sundance TV, which should also be showing quality independent films, is running Andy Griffith and NCIS reruns. So it seems like a lot of the channels on cable are just showing miscellaneous reruns of random old TV shows.

In terms of interesting stuff that I wasn’t getting from Optimum, there’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart has recently returned to hosting, though only one day a week. And I could watch that on Paramount+ anyway. And I can catch up on Rick & Morty now, but, now that I’m checking, I guess I can watch that on Hulu. So I’m not sure there’s anything that I really need the cable channels for.

I still kind of want access to broadcast channels, though, for news and sports. I should mention that there’s a lot of sports available on YouTube TV, mostly basketball and hockey right now. I have no particular interest in either of those sports though. I might find access to sports stuff handy once baseball season starts up. (Though for that, I did just let my MLB.TV subscription renew. And the only regular games I can’t watch through that are Mets and Yankees, and YouTube TV doesn’t have either the Mets’ SportsNet NY channel or the Yankees YES channel for the Yankees, so there might not be much baseball to watch on YouTube TV, really.)

There are two channels I’m currently getting through Optimum that I don’t get from YouTube TV: News 12 and MeTV. I don’t watch a lot of MeTV, but I do like Svengoolie, so I’ll miss that, but it’s not a deal-breaker. And I like having a 24/7 local NJ news network, but I can probably live without it.

So, overall, I’m not super-satisfied with the value I’m getting out of YouTube TV, but it’s probably better than the value I’m getting out of my $50/month Optimum basic service. Optimum bills on the calendar month, so I’ve already paid for March. So I might call to cancel at some point before the end of this month, and give it up then.

After that, I’m not sure if I’ll stick with YouTube TV, or eventually wean myself off of the whole idea of live broadcast TV. I’ve spent some time thinking about it, and I can really follow everything I need without it. I can get the local NJ PBS news through the PBS app and/or on YouTube. And I can still get local NY news through various other means. (I’m pretty sure I can watch the local ABC news on Hulu and the local CBS news on Paramount+.)

So, wow, that was a lot of rambling on about TV. I didn’t really intend to write so much. (Sorry.) It’s a nice day out, and I’ve gone out for two walks already, and I even have a window open for the first time in a while. It’s getting close to lunch time, so I should start thinking about that, and maybe another walk, this time with a light coat! (It’s 60° out!)