October 31,

vacation clean-up

So we’ve got water back, though the water pressure is a little weird, and we have a boil water advisory. Meanwhile, I’m trying to check a few things off my to-do list today.

A few days ago, I finally wiped my TiVo, unhooked it from the TV, and boxed it up for recycling. I got it in 2015, so it had a good run. Almost ten years.

That made me look at the situation under my TV a bit closer, and convinced me to see whether or not it was worth keeping my PS3. I got that in 2008, so it’s even older than the TiVo. I’d unplugged the HDMI cable on it at some point, for some reason. I plugged it back in today and turned it on, and surprisingly, it worked.

It wasn’t hooked up to my current WiFi network, which means it’s been at least two years since I’ve turned it on, since I bought that router in 2022. It took a bit of work to get it going. I had to reset my PSN account password, then generate a new device setup password, and get it entered on the dumb on-screen keyboard on the PS3. But it’s working now.

The PlayStation store for PS3 was discontinued in 2021. And I’m not sure if the Blu-Ray player works. So I’m not sure if it’s at all useful. I should probably talk myself into resetting it to factory defaults and recycling it. One thing at a time though.

My other big cleanup thing today was to put together a pile of old tech books and dump them in a book donation bin. (I know tech books usually don’t have much resale value, but this bin specifically says that it’s OK, as long as they have UPC codes. They might just toss them, but I’m fine either way.)

It took some effort to convince myself to dump them. I know they were all out of date, and I can access most of them through O’Reilly Learning if I need them, but it was still hard, for some reason. Most of them were from the stack of books I used to keep at my desk at work, before they moved us to our new smaller cubicles, which don’t have any space for books.

I guess I still have trouble letting go of old stuff, in general. Part of me still thinks I’m going to finish reading that book about SharePoint 2010 development, or playing Final Fantasy VIII, or watching all the Svengoolie episodes on my TiVo. But I need to let go of some of this stuff and move forward.

Halloween Blues

I’ve been feeling sick since Wednesday afternoon. I’m pretty sure I caught a cold Wednesday morning, probably when I brought my car in for an oil change. That’s pretty much the only time I was out of the apartment and around other people since last weekend. This is the second cold I’ve gotten this autumn. The last one was only about two weeks ago, and this feels pretty much the same. This time, I took a whole day off from work, on Friday. So, between that and the general situation, I’m not really in a festive Halloween mood.

I ordered my groceries from Whole Foods last night, since I didn’t want to have to go to ShopRite today if I was still feeling sick. I usually select the 8-10 AM delivery window when I order from them, but they only showed the 6-8 AM window as open, so I picked that, and hoped the guy wouldn’t show up right at 6. Well, he did actually show up exactly at 6:01 AM. Luckily, I’d gotten out of bed at 5:30 AM and had just gotten out of the shower when he called to get buzzed in to the building. So that worked out well. I opened my apartment door at 6:05 to see five bags of groceries right outside. I’ve had mixed success with delivery from Whole Foods, but this time it worked out reasonably well. They only had to make one substitution, and they didn’t skip any items at all. And nothing was messed up. The eggs are all whole, the bread wasn’t squashed, and all the produce looks OK. I don’t think I want to go with that 6 AM delivery option again though. That’s just too early.

So now it’s 9 AM, and my laundry and grocery shopping are all done, and I can probably just spend the rest of the day reading comics and napping. I might as well add a few random items to this blog post before I give up and take a nap.

I’ve mentioned Evernote a few times recently here. Since the last time I mentioned it, I’ve upgraded to the new client on my main desktop PC, but not yet on my Mac. So I’ve got the new client everywhere but the Mac. I’ve hit a few bugs and annoyances, but they’re pushing out new versions frequently, and at least one or two of my issues have already been fixed. So, as of now, I still plan on sticking with Evernote.

I did take a look at Notion recently though. I hadn’t previously considered that as an Evernote replacement, largely because I didn’t know that they had a Windows version. Their home page only shows screenshots from iOS and macOS, but if you dig a bit, there is a mention of a Windows client. Their desktop app is definitely an Electron app (as is Evernote’s new app), so switching to Notion wouldn’t resolve any issues/annoyances that are due to Electron. Still, I might sign up for a free account and mess around with it a bit, if I have time.

I’m still having fun with Apple Music. I’ve been listening to some jazz and classical this week, including Louis Armstrong’s Satch Plays Fats and Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suites. So, yeah, I guess I’ve finally given in and accepted that streaming music services are fine, and I’ll be paying for one. Once my six-month free period is over, I might even go ahead and sign up for the individual Apple One bundle.

 

thoughts on iOS8, iDevices, and Yosemite

I have some random Apple-related thoughts that I wanted to jot down, so I’m putting them all into a catch-all blog post. Enjoy. (Or Ignore. Or roll your eyes. Or whatever.)

I’ve upgraded both my iPhone 5s and iPad 2 to iOS 8.1. I’m not having any serious issues with the iPhone, and I’m liking some of the changes. But the iPad 2, which was already showing its age, has gotten quite slow and unstable since upgrading it to iOS 8. I had hoped that 8.1 would help, and it did, but not quite enough. So I decided it was time to get a new iPad. I couldn’t quite justify the cost of a brand new iPad Air 2, so I bought a used iPad Air 1 from someone on eBay.

Meanwhile, I took this opportunity to get rid of my old iPhone 4, which had been gathering dust for the last year. I traded that off via Apple’s trade-in/recycling program with Brightstar. I got a $35 Apple gift card out of the deal, which I guess is better than nothing. And as for the old iPad 2, I’ve arranged to sell that to Gazelle for $100. (Brightstar offered a bit less than that, so I went with Gazelle.)

And on my MacBook, which is only a bit more than a year old, I am now running Yosemite. It’s working OK, but with a few minor quirks. The most annoying was having a Java warning box pop up randomly. The annoying part is that it really wasn’t obvious which software was triggering the warning. It would come up randomly, and I couldn’t nail it down to any particular program. (I really wish Apple would include that information in the popup, but I guess that’s too much to ask.) I had already installed the newest Java JRE straight from Oracle, but apparently that’s not what the mystery program was looking for. So now I’ve also installed Java from Apple’s 2014-001 installer. I haven’t gotten the popup since then, but it hasn’t been long enough that I’m going to declare victory. And it rubs me the wrong way that I still don’t know which program is using Java, and why it doesn’t work with Oracle’s version.

I’m actually thinking about doing a backup of my MacBook, then wiping it out and doing a fresh Yosemite install, then moving just the programs and data I need back onto the hard drive. This MacBook has been running slower than I’d like for some time now. I’ve thought about replacing the hard drive with an SSD, and I may still do that at some point, but I’d kind of like to just clear out all the cruft first, and see if that helps.

more SQL silliness

Well, after thinking I had my SQL problem licked, it came back. I finally got a callback from a support guy at Microsoft, and he had me update statistics on all the tables involved. That fixed things, and everything has been working now for the last couple of days. I’m pretty sure I’d updated statistics on all these tables at least once since the original problem occurred, but maybe I didn’t, or maybe I just needed to do it two or three times to get everything back to normal.

I’ve always had a maintenance plan that updates statistics on all my tables once a week, and I don’t think I’ve ever had problems with statistics before.

I’ve been reading up on this whole statistics thing now, which I admit I hadn’t paid much attention to, until this little debacle. Here’s a blog entry by Kim Tripp that explains a few things about the auto-update mechanism, and another one by someone at Microsoft that explains a good bit about the way statistics work in SQL 2005.