It’s been a couple of months since I wrote a post here. As usual, I’ve got a bunch of stuff on my mind. Let’s see how much of it makes it out and into this post!
I’m thinking about this weekend as being the start of autumn, though I know that was a couple of weeks ago. It doesn’t entirely feel like fall outside (or inside, since my A/C is currently running, so I can keep it under 80° in here), but it’s getting there. And it’s starting to look like fall, at least. The leaves are changing color and falling from the trees. And the Halloween decorations are showing up around town.
Baseball
The Phillies lost game 3 of their wild card series, so I’m mostly done with baseball for now. But I think I may keep watching the playoffs this year. I subscribed to Molly Knight’s The Long Game newsletter earlier this year, and I’ve been paying a little more attention to baseball in general this season, so I might as well keep watching. (I kind of like the community around The Long Game; it’s fun.)
I ordered a copy of the Ken Burns Baseball documentary series today on DVD, after hearing an interview with him on the Joy of Baseball podcast recently. (This may be another one of those DVD sets that just sits in a pile and gathers dust. I’m in the mood for it right now, but, by the time it arrives, I’ll probably have moved on to something else. But it was only $20.)
Football
I was pretty optimistic about the NY Giants season, up until Jaxson Dart got knocked out for the season in the second game. I don’t know; I still hold out some hope. As I did last year, I signed up for NFL+ Premium, so I can watch RedZone. If the Giants are terrible again, I will at least have something to keep me busy & entertained on Sunday afternoons.
TV
TV is complicated these days. I’d been thinking about re-subscribing to YouTube TV for the football season. I think that, if the Phillies had gotten past the wild card series, and the Giants hadn’t lost Dart, I would have gone with YouTube TV, no question, to continue following the Phillies and to watch the local NY Giants games. But now I don’t know. I convinced myself to look at YouTube TV again today, and noticed that I could get a $50/month promo rate for the “news + sports” package for five months. So I went with that. That’ll give me local CBS & Fox for the Sunday Giants games, and it’ll give me TBS and Fox/FS1 for the MLB playoffs & World Series.
To offset that, I dropped my Disney+ bundle down from the full Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle to just Disney/Hulu, since YTTV gets me ESPN. That drops the bundle price from around $48/month to $24/month (total w/tax).
And, let’s see, what else…
- I dropped Netflix in June, but then resubscribed in August, because I wanted to watch the Phillies in the “Field of Dreams” game. But I resubscribed to the ad-supported plan, so I’m paying $9/month instead of $20/month now. And I don’t think I’ve watched anything on Netflix other than the Field of Dreams game, so I should probably drop that again.
- I let my Paramount+ yearly subscription expire in August, since it would have renewed at $140/year, which is… a bit much. And the whole David Ellison thing is annoying. I never got around to finishing Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3, and I didn’t start watching the Starfleet Academy show at all. So there’s a little bit of Star Trek there that I might want to watch eventually. If there’s a Black Friday deal or something, maybe I’ll sign up for another year then.
- I still have Peacock, which I renewed for only $40/year recently.
- And I have Frndly TV, which I got for $96/year in March, largely so I could watch Svengoolie. I’m not sure that’s worth almost $100/year though. Lately, I’ve been using it mostly to binge old episodes of Diagnosis: Murder.
Work
Work is a challenge lately. Next week is when we officially need to start logging our hours. I blogged about that in May, when it was first announced. I’ve just about finished the Mini ETP notebook I bought back then. I’ve got another one one order, to get me through the rest of the year. And I’ve got a 2027 LOTR Moleskine planner to use for next year.
So at least I’m ahead of the curve, since I’ve been writing down my hours in a notebook for the last few months. Figuring out the somewhat arcane system of buckets we’ll be using to log stuff might be a little annoying. We’ll see how that goes.
I got my mid-year performance review recently, and that was underwhelming. It’s kind of a mini-review, so there’s just one rating, and it was “meets expectations”, but I was told that pretty much everyone got that. My boss listed four bullet points to call out my accomplishments, but only two of the four were actually mine. Apparently, he put that together using AI to pull info from Jira, and it got some stuff scrambled up. It’s a little disheartening to realize that your work isn’t really recognized, and that management is just pulling scrambled info from Jira with AI and then not really reviewing it. But I guess that’s where we are now.
We finished our Dynamics AX CU13 upgrade. And boy, was that… bumpy. I have a lot I could say about that, but I probably shouldn’t. I want to say that I’m glad it’s over, but we’re still seeing some lingering post-upgrade issues. This week’s fun issues were: (1) Somebody accidentally decommissioning a live server that they thought was no longer in use. (2) Discovery of a weird CU13 bug that causes the same SQL to randomly return slightly different results. I think I’ve fixed the code there, by changing the way I’m doing things to route around the bug. Since the behavior is inconsistent, I won’t be really sure I’ve fixed it until it’s in production, but I think I have.
I don’t mean for this to seem too mopey. I’m still in a pretty good situation, work-wise, and I’m still having some fun. I may blog later about more specific stuff at work, in terms of my current use of AI / Copilot, but I’m running out of steam here, so I’ll save that for another time.