June 12,

a day off

I took today as a PTO day. I had a dentist’s appointment in the morning. Normally, I would just start work late after that, but I realized that the year is almost half over and I’d only taken one PTO day so far. And (again) normally, when I take a Friday off during the summer, I generally go into Manhattan and spend the day checking out museums and walking around parks and stuff like that. That’s all off the table now, obviously. I really had no plans today beyond the dentist’s appointment.

After going for a walk and killing some time poking around at stuff on my laptop, I decided to try giving blood. I haven’t given in a while, and I know the blood supply is low right now, since they can’t really do blood drives as usual. So I made an appointment and drove over to the New Brunswick donor center. I’d never been there before. It’s just a nondescript building on a side-street downtown. They were following reasonable precautions, checking temperature before entering and stuff like that. Before you can donate, you need to fill out a questionnaire on a laptop. I’m hoping that they were wiping those down between uses, though I didn’t actually see anybody doing that. Anyway, I got through the first step but got turned away because my blood pressure was too low. So that was kind of a waste of time, but it got me out of the apartment for a while at least.

Between the dentist’s appointment and the blood center, I had more human contact today that I’ve had since the lockdown started. A lot more really, since the main room of the blood center is basically one big open room, and there were about a dozen people in it. Most were wearing masks, but the three or four people who had finished donating and were at the snack tables had their masks off so they could eat and drink.

I’m seeing some posts on Facebook from local restaurants that are going to start doing outdoor dining on Monday the 15th. And “personal care” businesses are set to start reopening next Monday, the 22nd. Murphy’s stay-at-home order was lifted earlier this week too. (That was largely symbolic, but still worth noting.) I’m not sure how good an idea any of this is, but nobody’s asking my opinion.

I have a bunch of other stuff I want to blog about, but maybe I should stop for now. I also have a bunch of stuff I wanted to get done today, and it’s now 2 PM and I haven’t really done much of it.

Mixtapes

I Made You A Mixtape — An interesting article by Federico Viticci about the evolution of the ways in which he acquires and listens to music. This is a subject I also think about a lot (probably too much).

I’ve seen Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist mentioned a few times recently, including in Federico’s article. I’m getting to the point where I’ve almost convinced myself to stop paying for Slacker and switch to Spotify, but I’m not quite there yet.

I miss mix tapes and mix CDs. In particular, I miss Joshua Benton’s old “CD Mix of the Month Club”. There was something about getting a CD in the mail from a complete stranger every month that was pretty cool. (And, likewise, in creating a CD to send off to a complete stranger.)

One of my friends from college used to send out a daily “track of the day” email to a small group. (He’d send out an email with an MP3 file attached.) That was a lot of fun too. He had pretty eclectic taste, and would send out some really interesting stuff.

I’ve been enjoying the Insomnia Radio Daily Dose podcast feed since I decided to subscribe to it a couple of months ago. That’s the closest thing to an old-fashioned mixtape for me right now. Nearly all of the music on the feed is from artists I’ve never heard of, and nearly all of it is good.

Monet’s Water Lilies at MoMA

I don’t watch NYC-ARTS on channel 13 regularly, but I catch a bit of it here and there. There was a short segment on tonight’s episode about the Monet Water Lilies triptych that is on display at MoMA. I’ve been to MoMA a few times this year, but I don’t remember seeing this, and I really love Monet. (I’ve mostly been heading straight for whatever special exhibits pique my interest, and maybe stopping to look at Starry Night or some Jackson Pollock.)

I have actually been seeking out the Monet stuff at the Met, the last couple of times I’ve been there, so I don’t know why it hasn’t occured to me to seek him out at MoMA. I need to make a point of looking for Monet the next time I go! (Which might be this weekend or next.)

1&1 back to normal?

It appears that 1&1 is back to normal. Everything seems reasonably responsive, both on the front-end and in the admin. There’s been no explanation posted to the Twitter feed or on their status page, so I don’t really know what went wrong, or if it’s really fixed. That’s a little frustrating.

I started looking into the possibility of switching hosts today. Depending on how well 1&1 holds up, I may consider that. I’m paid up through November, so maybe I’ll revisit things in the fall.

1&1 woes

Well, it appears that the reason my site has been really slow for a couple of days is due to a problem at 1&1. They acknowledged the issue on Twitter yesterday:

Hopefully, they can get it resolved soon. Meanwhile, I guess I should take a break from messing with this site, and maybe go outside and get some exercise! (Too bad it’s been raining all week.)

MGS 4

So I broke down and ordered the PlayStation 3 80GB Limited Edition Metal Gear Solid 4 Pack from Wal-Mart this morning. It looks like it’s sold out now, so I guess it’s good that I ordered it in the morning instead of waiting until I got home from work. I probably won’t get it for a couple of weeks, but that’s fine. I’m still really not that excited about the PS3, or MGS4 in particular, but it ought be fun to play around with. MGS has always been kind of a weird franchise, and I do enjoy the distinctly Japanese oddness to be found in MGS. And of course I’l use the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, though I’ll always be a little bitter about Blu-Ray beating out HD-DVD.

Dynamically Created Controls in ASP.NET

I was working on a project last week that involved dynamically creating a bunch of controls on an ASP.NET page, then trying to, um, do stuff with them. (For lack of a better explanation…)

This article does a good job of explaining something that I’d kind of missed at first: dynamically-created controls don’t stay on a page after postback, normally. The “Page” class is stateless, destroyed after rendering the page. I didn’t wind up using this guy’s solution; I actually realized that I didn’t need to be dynamically creating the controls at all. I’d copied my page from another page that *did* need to create controls dynamically, but after I looked at my own page, I realized I just didn’t need to do things that way.

I’ve been doing more ASP.NET programming than usual lately, because I’m trying to finish up a project for a big client at work, and it’s kind of tricky and time-sensitive. Because of that, I’m just doing it (mostly) myself instead of farming it out to one of the other programmers. I’m having some fun with it. Aside from the dynamically created controls, I’m also playing around with generics a bit. This article by Jesse Liberty was helpful for setting up a simple collection using generics.

12 Byzantine Rulers

For some reason, I was thinking today about an article I read some time ago, about a series of pocasts on some area of history. After a bunch of searching, I think this was the article. It’s about a podcast on the history of the Byzantine Empire. This series has been mentioned in a few different places, so the Times article may or may not be where I heard of it. Either way, it’s something different to listen to, whenever I get tired of tech and comic book podcasts.

I was looking around a bit today at the stuff on iTunesU, and some of that might be interesting too. I listened to parts of a few random lectures; most of them sound like… college lectures. I suppose that’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s not compelling “daily commute” listening. I’m tempted to listen to this Data Structures course from Berkeley, just to refresh my memory on this stuff. Maybe I can find a class on design patterns. I’m too old to have learned that stuff in college; design patterns didn’t really take off until about five years after I graduated. (Gotta keep learnin’!)