Month: July 2024

Not at SDCC, 2024 edition, and WordPress issues

It’s become kind of a thing for me to write a “not at SDCC” post every year, during SDCC. I’m probably not going back to SDCC ever again, honestly. The pandemic really created a “hard stop” for me on a bunch of stuff, and I’m thinking now that I’m not likely to go back, ever, on a lot of that stuff.

I haven’t been following the news out of the con too closely. Most of it isn’t that interesting to me, honestly. I haven’t read a lot of comics lately, since I’ve been concentrating on getting through the Wheel Of Time books. And I’m not too interested in any of the upcoming nerd-related TV or movie stuff. I still haven’t watched the latest Star Wars, Marvel, or Star Trek streaming shows. And I only just watched Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, since it just came out on Netflix. I might go see Deadpool & Wolverine in a theater, but probably not. So all this talk about the next big thing doesn’t matter to me, when I still haven’t seen the last big thing.

Anyway, I wanted to see if I could recapture some of the old “con spirit” this weekend, so I decided to watch Alan Tudyk’s Con Man series yesterday. I watched the whole first season. (Which isn’t hard, since the episodes are just 10 minutes long.) I watched some of those previously, when they were on Comic-Con HQ, which I subscribed to, during its brief existence. The show is now available on Amazon Prime, so that’s convenient. I laughed out loud a few times, which is pretty rare for me, these days.

On an unrelated topic: My blog has been kind of flaky this week. I got notices that it was up and down all last night. That doesn’t really matter much, of course, since nobody really reads this blog, and there’s nothing much important on it. But it annoys me. So it sent me down a rabbit hole of WordPress troubleshooting. I don’t think I have much to say about that, though. No big revelations that would be worth sharing, or documenting so I remember them next time. Just a bunch of stabs in the dark, then a shrug, and an “eh, good enough for now.” Everything is working, but still kind of slow, so I’ll just have to see if it gets better on Monday.

I haven’t been sleeping well the past few days, so my energy level is pretty low. I got some exercise this morning, and now I’m likely to spend the rest of the day reading, watching random bits of the Olympics, and maybe watching Con Man season two later.

CrowdStrike, Pluralsight, agile, anime

Today’s another day where I feel like I have a bunch of stuff to blog about, and it’s all pretty random. So I’ll break it up with some sub-headings.

CrowdStrike

I woke up this morning to news about this issue, via my Mastodon feed, which I always check first thing in the morning. It didn’t hit my company, thankfully. But it does seem to have caused a lot of chaos. I almost kind of hoped it would hit us, since it would have been nice to have a day off. (Not really though.)

Pluralsight

I’ve had a Pluralsight account since 2016. At some point, my company got a corporate account, and I got myself added to it, so I don’t have to pay for it anymore, which is nice. Recently, my company has decided to go all-in on Pluralsight, and they’ve given everyone in the IT department an account. (Previously, it was just a select few.) They’ve also put some structure around it, asking us all to do three skill assessments, then pick one of them to try to get better at. I’m going to try to improve my score on “C# Coding Practices.” I’m currently “above average”, so I guess I’m shooting for “expert” now.

I’m a little puzzled about why they seem to have put so much effort and expense into this one particular thing, but I guess I’m glad they have.

Agile/Scrum

My group within the IT department is currently going through an “Agile transformation.” I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. Things are going… OK, I guess. We’re in our first official sprint right now. I think we’re on the right track. We have a scrum master who seems to know what he’s doing.

We’ve divided the group into two “feature teams”, which is kind of weird, since it seems to be a fairly random split. I guess I understand why they did it; scrum teams aren’t supposed to be too big. They also want us to come up with names for the teams. That’s one of those things that initially made me groan, since the only acceptable corporate team names are all going to be terrible. I’ve accepted the inevitable now, though. I was pushing for a Harry Potter house name for the team, maybe Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw. Consensus seems to be on “Scrumbags” which I also kind of like.

Anime

I finally finished watching all of my Master Keaton DVDs this week. I bought most of them in 2006, and I think I’ve finally watched all of the stuff I bought from Right Stuf back then.

I still have a couple of DVD sets from long ago that I need to watch. I think I might start Devil Lady soon. I bought that from Overstock.com in 2005, so that’s been collecting dust on my shelf for even longer than the other stuff. And I have a set of Excel Saga which I got in 2007. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why I bought either of those. But hey, they should both be fun to watch.

Rambling and Links

I’ve been meaning to write a post here for awhile, but just haven’t gotten around to it. (And I feel like I’ve probably started more than one post with that sentence already, but hey, I’m going to repeat myself occasionally here. I’ve been doing this on and off for 20+ years…)

The plan for today is pretty simple: Watching the Wimbledon men’s final at 9, going over to the farmers market around 10, then checking out the Somerville street fair (now called the “Somerville Market” for some reason) at some point after lunch. It’s too hot to do much else.

I’m not exactly thriving in the heat wave we’ve been dealing with over the last few weeks. I guess it’s not technically all one big heat wave, but it feels like one. I guess it’s a new one kicking off today, really. Either way, I’m too old for this.

I just finished reading New Spring, the Wheel of Time prequel novel, and I want to start reading Knife of Dreams today. I think I’m on-track to finish WoT this year, maybe. I’m pretty sure the prologue for KoD is a typically long WoT prologue, so it may take me a while just to get through that. (The WoT podcast I listen to takes 3 episodes to cover the prologue, so I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a lot.)

There are a few things I’ve seen on the internet recently that I thought I should mention here, so in no particular order, and with no particular relation to each other:

  1. I’ve been reading Jonathan Clements’ Humble Dollar blog on and off for several years, though I haven’t looked at it recently. Apparently Clements has cancer and likely less than a year to live. He’s only a few years older than me, so that’s… sobering.
  2. Here’s a behind-the-scenes article about the folks who change the light bulbs at the Met. (OK, there’s more to it than just changing light bulbs, but it’s still mostly about light bulbs.) This is the kind of thing I really like getting some insight into. I haven’t been back to the Met in a long time. And, honestly, I may never make it back; I just get sick too easily these days, so it’s always a risk, dealing with public transit and the crowds in NYC.
  3. I’m pretty sure I had at least one other thing to mention here, but now I can’t remember what it was, and I’m too tired to figure it out. So never mind!