April 27,

Ghost in the Shell – Heart Grenade

I mentioned a while back about how I couldn’t locate the song “Heart Grenade” on Apple Music. I found it today, on a collection called Ghost In The Shell Superb Music, which was released in January. I’m going to try to embed the song below.

The full “Superb” collection seems to be a 5-CD set in a metal can. Pretty cool. The version in Apple Music is missing a bunch of tracks, but that’s fine. The part of my brain that was never going to be happy until “Heart Grenade” was in my iTunes library is now satisfied.

And all this reminds me that I still haven’t gotten around to watching the Netflix GITS show, Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. It’s gotten mixed reviews, but I liked the earlier SAC stuff, so I’ll probably like this one too.

Nor have I watched the 25th anniversary edition of the original Ghost in the Shell movie that I got on Blu-Ray a while back (SteelBook 4K Ultra HD version, of course).

(So much to watch and so little time…)

Global Azure Bootcamp and Pragmatic Programming

I’ve been doing a bunch of work related to Azure recently. It’s mostly not around actually using Azure, but rather managing Azure and billing for Azure. I’m in the middle of something right now that’s honestly driving me to distraction and making me want to take a month or two off and maybe traipse around Europe or something. Anyway, today is Global Azure Bootcamp. There’s an event here in NJ, at Microsoft’s office in Iselin, but I was too late to register for it, and it’s full up now.

There’s also a lot of online stuff going on, though. It should all get posted to this YouTube channel. I can see a bunch of stuff up there already, and it’s only 8am Eastern time. (The Auckland event is already over. I guess because it’s midnight there right now, so today is already over. Funny how that works…)

Anyway, I really want to watch a bunch of this stuff, but it’s Saturday, and the weather should be pretty nice, and yesterday’s rained out Somerset Patriots game has been rescheduled to today, and I’ve got finish my laundry, and do my grocery shopping, and so on and so forth.

Looking at what’s already on YouTube, I’m kind of interested in two of the videos from the Perth/Beijing cycle:

  1. Understanding The New Azure Role-Based Certifications – I probably don’t have the spare time to study for and pass any Azure certification exams, but a guy can dream, right?
  2. Mission: Azure Kubernetes Service – Because some other folks I’m working with have been talking about Kubernetes, and I know almost nothing about it.

I’m going to the Microsoft offices in Redmond next week for a workshop related to the specific project I’m working on, so that should be useful. But sometimes I feel like I’m really falling behind with all this Azure and AWS stuff. I’ve been reading The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master in my spare time recently. It’s a classic, but it’s 20 years old, so there are a lot of dated references in it. It’s actually been kind of comforting to read it. I guess I’m more at home with references to 56k modems than references to Kubernetes clusters. There’s actually a 20th anniversary version of the book coming out soon, so maybe I should give up on the old version and wait for the new one.

unroll.me and email privacy

The recent mess with unroll.me selling user data to Uber has got me thinking about email privacy again. I’m still using OtherInbox Organizer with my Gmail account, and I still think their privacy policy isn’t unreasonable, but I am also thinking about the fact that it would probably let them do the same thing thing unroll.me did. Mind you, I also don’t think that selling anonymized data to a third-party is a big deal, assuming the data is truly anonymized. And I’m quite surprised about the level of vitriol about the unroll.me thing; I didn’t realize how many people were clueless about how services like that make their money.

I’ve also continued to experiment with ProtonMail. I haven’t had any real problems with either the web interface or the mobile app, so that’s good. I looked into their IMAP plans a bit more too. It looks like their plan for that is to have a “bridge” program that can run on your PC, which will encrypt/decrypt emails on the fly and interface with your desktop email program (Outlook or whatever). That’s good, I guess, but it would mean that you still wouldn’t be able to use IMAP on iOS, if I understand it correctly. I guess there’s no easy solution to that, given the way that their service is set up.

FastMail still seems like the most reasonable alternative to Gmail, and should be relatively secure. I still haven’t talked myself into switching away from Gmail yet though.

trying a vertical mouse

I’ve been using a trackball, left-handed, at work for the last few weeks. I’ve found that it helped with my shoulder problems a bit, and it wasn’t that hard to use. But I never got really good at precise positioning with it. So now I’m trying a vertical mouse (right-handed). I’m using this cheap one from Anker. A friend recommended an Evoluent VerticalMouse, but that’s $90, compared to less than $20 for the Anker, so I decided to give the cheap one a try first. It’s working OK so far, though I’ve noticed that double-clicking is more trouble than with a regular mouse, since clicking the button tends to move the mouse a little, and if it moves between clicks, it doesn’t register as a double-click. So I’m getting used to that.

I may try to switch back and forth between the trackball and the mouse occasionally, just to keep myself from relying on one hand or the other for too long. And I think I might try a trackpad at some point too.

Backup Script

In my last post, I mentioned that I was going to write up some of the utility scripts I have on my VM. The first one is pretty simple. It’s a little PowerShell script to zip up the My Documents folder on the VM, and copy it to the physical machine. (I’m using 7-Zip.)

There are a few things in this script that are pretty common tasks that I need to do when using PowerShell, so this is a good thing to put up on the blog for reference. Just to point out those things:

  1. Creating a file name that contains the current date.
  2. Running a command that’s in a string variable.
  3. Prompting to “press any key” when done, so the user can see error messages, if the script is being run from a desktop icon.
  4. Giving an option to skip the “press any key” prompt, when the command is run unattended from task scheduler.
# https://gist.github.com/andyhuey/5466524
param(
     [switch]$quiet
)
$zipExe = "C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe"
$dateStr = '{0:yyyy-MM-dd}' -f (Get-Date)
$buFileName = "\\my-machine\c$\Users\me\Documents\backup\VM_MyDocBU_" + $dateStr + ".7z"
$myDocs = "C:\Users\me\Documents"
pushd
cd $myDocs
& $zipExe a -r $buFileName $myDocs
popd
if (!$quiet)
{
     Write-Host "Press any key to continue ..."
     $x = $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown")
}

color printer

I’ve been using the same old b&w HP DeskJet 520 for the last 10 or 15 years. It’s always worked fine, and I’ve never really had a truly pressing need to print in color. I’ve had a Dell 720 color inkjet in a box gathering dust for the last year, though. It came free with my Dad’s computer, and he didn’t need a printer at the time, so I took it home. I finally decided to take it out of the box tonight and hook it up. It works OK, but it’s not astounding. If I’d paid money for it, I might be disappointed. I think I need to try and print something on good photo paper, and see how that looks. I don’t have much room on my computer desk, so I’m just sitting it on top of the DeskJet for now. Hopefully, that won’t be a problem.

Tommy Keene – Crashing The Ether

New Tommy Keene CD! This is a good thing indeed. It’s been a while since his last. I remember having the “Places That Are Gone” EP on vinyl long ago, and just wearing it out. The new CD is available on emusic, so it’s almost free if you’re a subscriber. Otherwise, $10 on iTunes, $14.50 from notlame, or $16.98 from Amazon.