January 28,

First museum trip of 2018

I haven’t been to the Met or MoMA in some time. Between bad weather and bad health, I just haven’t been able to get into New York. I finally talked myself into it today, despite today being a fairly grey and rainy day. I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to check off my wish list.

First, I wanted to see at least one of Ai Weiwei’s Good Fences Make Good Neighbors things. So I saw the “Gilded Cage” at the south end of Central Park. (That was kind of accidental. I had some transportation difficulties that left me at Columbus Circle, so I walked over from there.) I’m glad I saw it, but there’s really not much to it. I understand the point of it, but it didn’t really do anything for me.

Then, from there, I decided to walk up to the Met Breuer. They only have two exhibitions running right now, but one of them is the Edvard Munch exhibit, which I really wanted to see. I really liked that one. I’d never really seen much of his work before, so a lot of it was new to me, and unexpected.

After that, I walked up to the Met (5th Ave), wandered around, and saw a few exhibits, including the David Hockney exhibit, which I’ve been wanting to see since Thanksgiving. That was really good, but very crowded. (They had members early hours on that yesterday and Friday, but I didn’t want to take the day off Friday, and I didn’t want to go in so early yesterday.)

From there, I took a cab down to MoMA. There wasn’t much going on there that I was interested in, but it was fun to wander around a bit. And I had an idea that I’d get lunch near there, at Xi’an Famous Foods. But it was way too crowded in there, so I gave up on that. (Getting some cumin lamb noodles was definitely on my wish list for today. Maybe next time.)

I put a few random photos from the trip up on Flickr. Nothing impressive; I just snapped a few things for the hell of it.

Oh, and I didn’t realize until I got home, but today is Jackson Pollock’s birthday. I did manage to see my favorite Pollock paintings at both the Met and MoMA during this trip, so that’s cool.

I really needed to get out of my apartment and spend the day looking at art. This coming week is going to be rough. The State of the Union speech is on Tuesday. I’ve told myself that I’m not going to watch it, but I know I’m going to read about it, and it’s probably going to anger, depress, and/or annoy me. Then, I have the anniversary of my Mom’s death on Thursday and the anniversary of my brother’s death on Friday. So it’s going to be one of those weeks. I think I’m going to need art, and comics, and music, and maybe a little booze, to get through this week!

Data Privacy Day

So I’ve been told that today is Data Privacy Day. In honor of that, I… got a haircut and cleaned my bathtub today. Seriously, I’ve had a lot of fairly mundane things to take care of today. But I did also want to do some computer maintenance, so I thought I’d try to continue with my effort to encrypt the hard drives on all my computers.

A few weeks ago, I turned on FileVault on my MacBook. That’s working well. It hasn’t noticeably slowed it down, nor has it gone horribly wrong and destroyed all my data.

So I thought that today, maybe I’d try to enable BitLocker on my ThinkPad. I didn’t get too far with that. Apparently, you need a TPM chip to use BitLocker, and I don’t have one of those. I did a little research, and you can enable it on a computer without TPM, but you need to store an encryption key on a flash drive, and insert it every time you boot up the computer. I don’t think I want to do that. It seems pretty risky and inconvenient. So I guess I’m going to put that idea aside until my next laptop.

I’ve also thought about enabling BitLocker on my desktop PC. That’s new enough that it probably has a TPM chip. But it also has a regular hard drive (not an SSD), and it’s a desktop PC. So there’s not as much risk of the drive being stolen, and there’s more of an issue with performance. So maybe I’ll put that idea aside too, at least until I replace the drive with an SSD (which I’m probably going to do at some point this year).

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about anti-virus software a bit more. Both of my PCs are now running with just Windows Defender. I’m a little uncomfortable with that. It’s still kind of hard for me to accept that I probably don’t need third-party anti-virus software anymore. One thing that’s made it a little easier to accept is this blog post from a former Firefox developer, and some discussion about it on Slashdot and Hacker News. It’s really sounding like the consensus is that the MS anti-virus software is not only “good enough,” but probably better in many ways than the third-party options.

Computer Books

After finishing the Drupal 7 book I bought a few weeks ago, I decided, for some reason, to get back to a book that I bought back in April 2010 — Dino Esposito’s “Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX.” I started reading it not long after I bought it, but I put it down after reading the first few chapters and just never got back to it. It’s somewhat out of date now, but it’s still got some useful info in it.

I just finished the chapter on the Ajax Control Toolkit. Now, I’ve been using the ACT a lot at my current job, but it turns out there are several controls and extenders in there that could be pretty useful, and of which I was completely unaware. I’ve tended towards doing client-side stuff with jQuery, like pretty much every other web developer on the planet, but there are times where I think the ACT could have made things easier.

O’Reilly books

I now have three O’Reilly books on .Net that I need to read:

.NET Framework Essentials,

Programming C#, and

ASP.NET in a Nutshell.

Hopefully, I can make it through enough of this stuff to get to the point that I can do some useful work with C# and ASP.NET!