Author: Andrew Huey

more on long-term reminders

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about losing all of my long-term reminders. Since I wrote that post, I found out that I can use Microsoft To Do at work. I just can’t use the web-based version. And the desktop software had to be pushed down to my machine; it isn’t generally available unless you ask for it. So here’s my observations about using MS To Do in our environment.

When I first launched To Do, it prompted me to pull in my Planner tasks and my flagged emails. It did fine with the Planner tasks, so I guess I can now use Planner and To Do together, if I want. It did not actually pull in my flagged emails from Outlook though, probably because we’re still using on-prem Exchange. That’s a bummer, since I do use those flags a lot.

For tasks that I create directly in To Do, I can set up both due dates and reminders, and the reminders don’t have to be on the same day as the due date, so that’s nice. For my long-term tasks, I generally want to surface them a few days before I actually have to do them. So if an SSL cert expires on a Friday, I want to get the reminder about it on Monday, so I can do it at some point during the week. To Do also supports recurring items, which might be useful for me. I haven’t tried those yet though.

To Do and Planner both share one slightly annoying weakness: While both support a free-form notes field on a task, it’s only a plain text field. That might not seem like a big deal, but it makes it hard to, for instance, paste in a link to a OneNote item the same way you can in an Outlook task.

I’ve also noticed that To Do doesn’t have a calendar view, and doesn’t integrate with Outlook’s calendar. (Maybe it does, if you’re not using on-prem Exchange. I’m not sure.)

So, putting this all together, I guess I can decide to use either Planner or To Do, or use them in combination. I think Planner is really supposed to be a group project management tool, and To Do is supposed to be an individual task management tool, so I should probably just use To Do. (But of course I’ve already created my tasks in Planner, so I’d need to redo all that work in To Do, if I was going to abandon Planner.) Regardless of what I do there, I’m going to wind up with a more complicated system than I used to have, since it’ll now be a combination of Outlook (for calendar and flagged emails) and at least one other system, or both.

I kind of want to go rogue and find a third-party service or piece of software that’ll be better than Planner and/or To Do, but of course then I’d be risking the wrath of the security folks who don’t like that kind of thing. And I’m still entertaining the idea of going low-tech and just creating a 43-folders system in OneNote. I should probably spend less time thinking about this stuff and more time actually working, huh?

managing long-term reminders

At work, I need to keep track of a number of tasks that need to be done infrequently, such as replacing app secrets or renewing SSL certificates. Depending on the task, it might need to get done once every three months, once a year, or once every two years.

For the last few years, I’ve been using regular old Outlook tasks for this. That’s worked fine, up until today. We recently starting archiving our mail with Mimecast, which removes any mail items from Outlook if they’re more than a year old. And, as I realized today, that includes task entries too! And it goes based on creation date, not modify date, so even in cases where I’ve modified the task in the last year, if it was created more than a year ago, it’s gone now. Oh well. (The archived emails are searchable in Mimecast, but if the deleted tasks are in there somewhere, I haven’t been able to figure out how to surface them.)

So I spent a bunch of time today trying to recreate my long-term task list. I managed to get a screenshot of the tasks that were deleted by going into Outlook on a different computer, jumping right over to task list and taking a screenshot, before Outlook could fully update itself from the server. (The tasks disappeared just a few seconds after I took the screenshot, so I got lucky there.) Of course the screenshot only gave me the subject line for each task, and not the due dates or the notes that were inside each task item. But it was enough of a start.

At home, I use Evernote to track long-term reminders, and it’s always worked great for me. I get email notifications on the reminder due date. And I can easily go into Evernote and pull up a list of just the notes that have reminders on them, if I ever want to review them. It’s not perfect: There’s no calendar view, for instance, and there’s only the one date. (Other systems often have both a start date and due date.) But it’s good enough.

I can’t use Evernote at work though. (It’s blocked.) We don’t seem to have any approved apps for to-do’s or reminders in our Windows 10 app catalog. We do, of course, all have O365, so I should be able to use Microsoft To-Do. But it doesn’t work, for some reason. I do have access to Microsoft Planner though. Planner is kind of like Trello, which I’ve played around with a bit in the past. I’m not really a big fan of the kanban board thing, but a lot of people really like it. So, for now, I guess I’m using Planner.

This whole thing got me to thinking about what exactly it is I was trying to do, at a high level, and I realized that I was basically looking for a good 43 folders / tickler file system. It occurs to me that I could just create that in OneNote, with a single tab with 43 notes under it. It would be a bit of a kludge, but I could definitely make it work. Or heck, I could just do a 12 folder system (one for each month), and create short-term Outlook tasks for all of a given month’s to-do items on the first of the month. Either of those ideas is probably more manual labor that I want to do though.

I’m not entirely happy using Planner, since it’s not integrated with Outlook or OneNote at all, and there’s no desktop app for it, so I need to use the web site to manage tasks. That’s not a bad thing, per se, but, for long-term tasks, it means that I need to trust that the email reminders are getting sent out, since I won’t actually ever see the task list unless I purposely go looking for it. So I’m still going to think about this a bit more, but Planner is probably my best option for now.

sick again

So in yesterday’s post, where I was talking about all the stuff I did on Saturday, I said “I’m hoping that doesn’t result in me getting another cold, or even worse.” Well… I started feeling like I was getting a sore throat last night, and this morning I had all my usual cold symptoms: sore throat, headache, and low energy. This is, I guess, the third cold I’ve had so far this season. It seems like any time I leave my bubble for any activities that involve moderate human contact, I get sick. I got sick pretty frequently before the pandemic, but I was kind of hoping that all of the mask wearing and social distancing would keep me healthier this year. I guess it did, up to a point, but now, it seems like I’m getting sick every other week. Oh well.

Back on the subject of my new Apple Watch: I’m fairly disappointed with the handwashing feature. I had it enabled over the weekend, but I’ve turned it off now. It had a tendency to get activated every time I was washing dishes in my kitchen, but only sporadically when I was actually washing my hands in the bathroom. I think that might be due to the noise from my bathroom fan. It’s pretty noisy, and I can’t turn it off without also turning off the light. And I guess there’s no easy way for the watch to distinguish between washing out a coffee mug and washing my hands. (I guess I could also commit to always washing my coffee cup for at least 20 seconds.) Other than that, it’s a great watch and I like it a lot.

I have a few random articles bookmarked that I kind of wanted to link to and blog about, but I’m too tired now to do that. I’m hoping I can get through this cold without taking yet another day off from work, but I will if I have to. I still have a few days to burn before the end of the year.

A Weird Week

Well, that was a weird week, wasn’t it? In addition to the election, I was supposed to go back into the office last week, on Thursday. The plan was for normal employees to start coming back one day a week. But we had a couple of COVID cases at the office, plus with New Jersey’s increasing number of cases overall, that plan got altered, so now I can continue working from home for the foreseeable future. So that’s good, I guess. (I mean, it would better if we didn’t have any cases at the office, and if NJ overall was doing better, but given the circumstances, I’m glad the company adjusted the plan.)

The big news this week of course is Biden being declared the winner over Trump, finally, yesterday. A lot of people were very happy about that, judging by my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and also judging by some of the activity out on Main St yesterday. I’m glad, and relieved, but only just barely optimistic. (I could probably write at length about that, but I probably shouldn’t. Let’s just say that a lot can still go wrong, and that a lot needs to be done before we can get back to anything resembling normal.)

It was a beautiful day yesterday, which probably helped everyone’s mood. A lot of people were out on Main St., and there was a lot of music and noise on and off throughout the day. (The annoying guy who plays saxophone outside my apartment was back yesterday, and played until after 10 PM, so that kind of sucked, but I guess I can’t blame him for trying to make some money while the weather was nice and everyone was happy.)

My friend Paul stopped by yesterday, and we went out for dinner, eating outside at a Korean restaurant on Main St. That was the first time I’ve eaten at a restaurant since the pandemic began. It was pretty weird, but it felt really good to do it.

I also ordered a new Apple Watch this week, and picked it up at the Apple Store at the local mall yesterday. I’d been thinking about getting one, and finally talked myself into it. I bought a new Series 6, to replace my Series 3. I got the Series 3 a little less than two years ago, for Christmas in 2018. So I feel a little bad about replacing it when it’s less than two years old. But, still, I’ve skipped the 4 and 5, so it’s a big enough jump that I don’t feel too bad about it. I’ll probably post more about the Watch later, after I’ve had it on my wrist for long enough to form some opinions.

Overall, yesterday turned out to be a fairly hectic day, with much more time spent outside the apartment than usual, and a lot more human contact than usual. I’m hoping that doesn’t result in me getting another cold, or even worse. We’ll see. My plans for today are not terribly ambitious. It looks like it’ll be another nice day, so I will probably go for a walk after I’m done with this blog post. Then maybe I’ll just relax and do some reading, and maybe watch a movie.

Stuck In The Mud With SPFx

I’ve been trying to make some progress with SharePoint Framework (SPFx) lately, but I keep getting stuck in the mud, so to speak. I started working on learning SPFx some time ago, but I had to put it aside due to other projects. But now, I have a little spare time to get back to it.

I set aside a few hours one day last week to work on it. But since I last worked on it, I’ve moved most of my work to a new dev VM. So step one was moving all of my SPFx projects over to the new VM. That shouldn’t have been a big deal. But of course each SPFx project has a node_modules folder of about 725 MB, across more than 100,000 files. So just copying everything over wasn’t going to work. So step 0.1 (let’s say) would be to delete the node_modules folders. Since I had less than a dozen work projects, I thought I’d use brute force for that, and just click each node_modules folder in Explorer and hit the delete key on my keyboard. Of course I then realized that asking Windows Explorer to move 100,000+ files to the recycle bin is a bad idea. So I started looking into writing a script to do it.

I found something called npkill that looked like it would do the trick without me even having to write a script, but I couldn’t get it working in Windows. (It’s probably possible to get it working in Windows, but I hit a snag and decided not to spend too much time on it.)

So I was back to writing a script. I started putting something together in PowerShell, but then I found rimraf, which looked promising and (according to at least one blog post I read) would be faster than doing the equivalent recursive delete natively in PowerShell. So I wrote a PowerShell script using rimraf. I wound up with this simple one-liner:

gci -name | % { echo "cleaning $_\node_modules..."; rimraf $_\node_modules }

I’m not sure if rimraf was actually faster than just using a native PowerShell command, but it worked. So that got me down to a manageable set of files that I could zip up and move to the new VM. (There was actually some trouble with that too, but I won’t get into that.) And that pretty much killed the time I’d put aside to work on SPFx for day one. Sigh.

For day two, I wanted to get back to a simple project that would just call a web service and return the result. I’d previously stubbed out the project with the Yeoman generator on my old VM, so now I just had to do “npm install” to get the node_modules folder back. Long story short, I got some unexpected errors on that which led me down some rabbit holes, chasing after some missing dependencies. That got me messing around with using yarn instead of npm, which someone had recommended to me. That didn’t really help, but after a bunch of messing around, I think I figured out that the missing dependencies weren’t really a problem. So just messing around with npm and yarn, and getting the project into a git repo, killed the time I’d set aside on day two.

For day three, I actually went into the project and added a web service call, to a local service I wrote, but immediately hit an error with the SPFx HttpClient not liking the SSL certificate on that web service. So that got me trying to figure out if you can bypass SSL certificate checking in the JavaScript HttpClient the same way you can in the .NET HttpClient. I got nowhere with that, but it did set me down the path of looking into that SSL cert, and realizing that it’s due to expire in January, but I didn’t have a reminder to renew it in Outlook. Which got me going through all of my SSL certs and Outlook reminders and trying to make sure I had everything covered for anything that might expire soon. And that sent me down a couple of other administrative side-paths that used up all the time I’d set aside on day three.

So after three days, I basically just had a sample SPFx project that makes one simple web service call, which fails. Sigh. I picked it back up today, trying to fix the call. I got past the SSL issue. But that led me down a couple of more rabbit holes, mostly regarding CORS. So, good news: I now understand CORS a lot better than I did this morning. Bad news: I spent most of the morning on this and can’t really spend most of the afternoon on it.

At some point, I’ll get over all these initial speed bumps and actually start doing productive work with SPFx. Maybe.

The Morning After

I tried to be careful about how I was following election news last night. I watched the regular NJ Spotlight newscast at 5:30 PM, then some of their later election coverage, from about 9 to 9:30 PM. And I listened to a bit of WNYC, and checked Twitter a few times. I check Twitter only via Twitterrific, and I’m careful about who I follow, so my Twitter feed is relatively sane. So I managed to get a pretty good night’s sleep last night. (A little Yo-Yo Ma helped out too.)

This morning’s news is… pretty much what I expected. No conclusive winner in the presidential race. Cory Booker reelected to the Senate, and Tom Malinowski reelected to the House. The legal weed question passed, by a 2 to 1 margin. Overall, the Democrats will likely keep their House majority and probably won’t win a Senate majority.

The mainstream media (at least the sources I follow) seem to be dealing well with Trump’s FUD. The Washington Post has a headline that reads “Trump falsely asserts election fraud, claims a victory” and the NY Times has one that says “As America Awaits a Winner, Trump Falsely Claims He Prevailed.” So we’re getting that word “false” in there, at least.

I haven’t looked at Twitter or Facebook yet this morning, but I inevitably will at some point. I’m sure that a lot of people will have opinions about all this. Either way, I need to try to get through the rest of the work week without getting distracted by all this stuff too much. Hopefully, I can find some interesting work to occupy my mind.

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.

 

Splendid isolation

Sometimes, I take a little time and go through my unread Pinboard links, and try to clean them up a bit, deleting some if they’re no longer applicable, and maybe reading a few random articles that I’d bookmarked long ago. Today, I stumbled across this one: Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours, a fairly long article from The Guardian that I’d bookmarked back in January.

I know the phrase Splendid isolation as the title of a Warren Zevon song, but apparently it’s a term “used to describe the 19th-century British diplomatic practice of avoiding permanent alliances,” according to Wikipedia. (And I see I’ve referenced the song previously on this blog.)

Anyway, that article from January predates the pandemic, of course. The concept of “isolation” in general has cropped up a lot this year. I’ve been following Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals, for instance, though I’ve fallen behind in reading those emails, so they’re piling up in my “read/review” folder, along with a bunch of other stuff.

Isolation has come up in some music I’ve listened to this year, including this Music For Isolation project and this Isolate With compilation. I’m also kind of interested in Ulrich Schnauss’ ‎A Strangely Isolated Place. It’s an older album, but I’ve only started to listen to Schnauss recently. I don’t suppose there’s much point in just linking to a bunch of music with the word “isolation” in the title, but it amused me for a few minutes, and it’s all good music.

Anyway, the article I started this blog post with is a pretty good one and has got me thinking about my relationship to time right now. It definitely changes, when you’re home all day and the lines between home and office pretty much disappear. I find myself getting distracted a lot and then feeling guilty for not getting enough work done. And I’m trying to impose some discipline on my “free time” also, feeling guilty if I don’t make some progress in a book I’m reading, or fall too far behind on a TV show I’m watching, or whatever. I feel that I need to try to maintain a certain schedule and a certain amount of discipline to keep myself sane and on track, but it’s starting to wear me down.

I have several vacation days left that I have to use up before the end of the year. I’ve scheduled a full week off in early December. In any other year, I’d have plenty of interesting things to do with a week off. But this year, a lot of my usual options are either closed off or a bit too risky for me right now. I kind of like the idea of disappearing into the woods for a day and just sitting in a circle and doing nothing for 24 hours. But that’s maybe a little too extreme for me. Maybe just having a full week where I don’t have to get through work every day will be enough to let me hit the reset button on my anxiety, at least a bit. Maybe I can relax into some unstructured randomness. (Though I suspect the results of the election will affect my anxiety level, for better or worse, more than any amount of vacation time will.)

Afternoon Walk

I’ve been going out for walks nearly every day since the pandemic began, and taking photos. I haven’t posted any of the photos to Flickr since May, though. So here are a few photos from a walk I went on this afternoon. It was a nice autumn afternoon walk. (I’m trying an embedded album below, which might or might not look OK here. If it isn’t working, try this link.)

I had my Airpods in, and was listening to Invisible Man, which I started in May, and still haven’t finished yet. (I’m just at the part where he realizes that he can be invisible, so I’m getting near the end.) I don’t usually listen to audiobooks while I’m walking. Usually I go with music or podcasts. But I really felt like making some progress with Invisible Man today, so I gave it a try. It worked out OK. I managed to give enough attention to the book, and also managed to not get hit by a truck while crossing any streets.

afternoon walk 10/24/2020

Evernote, and Apple, and other stuff

In my last post, I mentioned that I had not yet upgraded to the new version of Evernote on iOS, Windows, or Mac, nor had I been prompted to upgrade. Yesterday, the iOS client got pushed down to my iPhone. And I was prompted on my PC to upgrade to the new Windows client. (I skipped that and stuck with the old version for now.)

The iOS client is fine. I don’t have any issues with it. It looks good, and it’s no less functional than the old client, as far as I can tell. It’s not particularly fast, but neither was the old iOS client. So I went ahead and updated it on my iPad too. It works fine there. So no problems with iOS.

For Windows, I decided to upgrade it on my Lenovo laptop and play with it a bit. I’ve honestly barely used that laptop since I bought it back in June. So it seemed like a good place to try out the Windows client without having to worry about messing up my regular setup. The new client works fine, and I think I like a few things about it more than the old client, but I’d need to work with it some more to be sure. It seems to be a little slower than the old Windows client. And the font looks a little weird, but that might just be that I need to tweak the display settings on the laptop. There’s a dark mode, and I’ve found that it works better for me than the light mode. Overall, it definitely seems to be less configurable than the old version, but there’s nothing in particular that I want to change, and can’t.

On another subject: I’ve upgraded both my iPhone and iPad to iOS 14. I waited for 14.1 to come out before upgrading. I’ve had no issues on either the iPhone or iPad. I’ve messed around with widgets a bit, but I haven’t gone nuts with them. For now, I’m just leaving them on their own screen. There’s not much else in iOS 14 that I’m really interested in, but I do want to try out the “headphone accommodations” feature at some point, given that I’m partially deaf in my left ear, but have (fairly) normal hearing in my right ear. Maybe it’ll help.

Upgrading the iPhone triggered the notice to upgrade my Watch to watchOS 7. That turned out to be quite a problem. The update needed 3.1 GB of free space, and I didn’t have that much. In the past, rebooting the watch would often clear enough space to run an update, but this time I had to go as far as un-pairing and re-pairing it. That basically wipes it and leaves you with a fresh OS install, so I then had to go back and reinstall apps and redo my watch face customizations and reset all my preferred options. And it turns out that watchOS 7 doesn’t really do much for you if you have a Series 3 watch, like I do. I was hoping for at least the handwashing timer, but you need a Series 4 for that.

So that’s got me thinking about picking up a new watch. And, of course, with the iPhone 12 out, I’m a little tempted to trade in my phone too. Both my phone and watch are a little less than two years old, and I like to hold on to these things for three years minimum, if I can. So I probably shouldn’t be thinking about buying new Apple gear. But, hey, in a year when I couldn’t travel at all and haven’t had to spend hardly any money on gas or car maintenance, why not blow a few bucks on unnecessary Apple hardware?

And on one last Apple-related note: I got a lot of enjoyment out of my Apple Music subscription today. The new Bruce Springsteen album came out, and I listened to that twice. And there’s a video interview with Bruce that I watched. (Or mostly just listened to, since I was working at the time.) And a new Jeff Tweedy album came out today, so I listened to that too. And I discovered the “My New Music” mix today. Apple already knows enough about my musical taste to put together a pretty good mix, including new AC/DC, Elvis Costello, John Cale, Pixies, and Bob Mould. So I’m feeling pretty good about Apple Music right now.