Author: Andrew Huey

Frustration

I have a bunch of stuff on my mind, and a few topics for blog posts I want to write. But I’m going to start with a little decompression about my work week. (I should first say that I need to be careful about this, since our policy on blogging about work has been tightened up recently. But none of this will come anywhere near to violating it, I think.)

We’re working on an upgrade to our AX environment right now, and we started some testing in a new test environment this sprint. This includes (for me) getting some web services working on the new test server, and getting them to point at the new AX test env. So a lot of my time this week has been spent whacking away at web services with a hammer, trying to get them to work. That’s always frustrating. It always seems like I need to try six different things until I finally hit on the one that actually fixes the issue. And I always feel like an idiot for not being able to get there faster.

I’ve been thinking about why this kind of work is frustrating, and I think a big part of it is having no clue how long it’s going to take, or how close you are to solving it. With certain kinds of work, you can break a problem down into parts, and work through them, so you know when you’re 10% done, or 30% done, or 80% done. But with this kind of troubleshooting, you don’t know if you’re going to need to try 5 things or 10 things or 20 things before you find the right thing. And you don’t always know if there’s one thing wrong, or two things, or ten things.

I won’t get into details on the actual issues I hit, but I will say that one of them was basically a new permutation of this issue I hit back in 2011, so it was fun to see that again! And another one was related to the topic of this post from 2020.

I’ve been using AI tools to help me with this work, and I’m not sure if they’re any more useful than just plain old internet searching. Sometimes it seems like they are; I can get a lot of seemingly-useful ideas from a chat with Copilot. But then the real answer comes from a simple search that leads to a Stack Overflow question/answer, or a GitHub issue. (For instance, one big problem I had this week was solved by reading through this GitHub issue from Microsoft’s WCF repo.)

My big project for this afternoon was working on a side-project for a little competition we’re having at work. (It’s one of those things where small project teams propose something, do a little work on it, then present it to the CIO. And then I guess the winning project actually gets green-lit.) That project is turning out to be a bit frustrating too. (It was supposed to be a nice break from the frustrating stuff!) First, I needed to get myself set up under our corporate developer account with one of the big package carriers, which we only managed to get done yesterday. And I’m still not completely set up, to where I can do what I actually need to do. But I can start testing, so I started work on that.

The project involves using the carrier’s webhook API for package tracking. My idea was to start out with a simple Azure function that I could point the webhook at. Then, to start, I’d just log the info I got from the carrier. The next step would be to hook that Azure function up to some kind of queue in Azure. Then, after that, writing another Azure function that would pick stuff out of the queue and send out notification emails. Basically, I was going to put my AZ-204 skills to work on a real project! (Well, not entirely real, but a POC at least.)

It took me the whole afternoon to get a simple Azure Function set up. I started out trying to use Copilot chat with GPT-5, which they rolled out yesterday, to help me out. That looked really impressive, showing me status info about what it was doing, and generating a lot of text with pretty specific instructions. But it seemed to be giving me quantity over quality. I turned GPT-5 off, and then managed to get a lot farther.

My initial idea was to just enter the C# code for the function directly in the Azure portal, but I set it up in isolated mode, which apparently doesn’t let you edit code directly in the portal. So then I tried using Visual Studio Code, which is supposed to be an easy way to quickly develop and deploy Azure Functions. That led me down a path of installing a bunch of stuff locally. I was initially doing this on my laptop, so I had to install .NET SDK 8, plus a bunch of VS Code extensions. At some point, I got nervous about how much stuff I was installing on my laptop, and switched over to my regular dev VM, which is where I’m supposed to do development. So then I had to install all that stuff there too, since I’d never installed the .NET 8 SDK there, or set up VS Code for Azure dev. So I probably killed an hour just getting my environment set up.

And then, once I had everything set up, I started hitting a bunch of weird little snags with editing, compiling, and running the function. I eventually gave up, and with some help from Copilot, set up the simplest Azure Function project I could, entirely from the command line, then got it running and uploaded to Azure. So that probably took another hour, and the end result was just something that would print “Welcome to Azure Functions!” when you hit the URL for the function.

After that, I got the thing working in VS Code, and managed to change the function from a GET to a POST function. And I thought I had gotten far enough with it that I could hit it from the carrier’s test page, but all I can get back from that is an error, with no details giving me any clue what’s wrong. And that’s pretty much where I ended my week.

I don’t really drink anymore, but I think I kinda want a beer right now. Or maybe just a bowl of ice cream.

reading comics, and (maybe) done with COVID

I took my last dose of Paxlovid today, and got a negative result on a COVID test this morning, so I think I’m over COVID. (Unless the Paxlovid rebound thing hits me, like it did in 2023.) I think I’m probably OK to go over to the farmers market a little later, which will be the first time I’ve mingled with other people in a week. We’ll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, I read a lot of comics this week. I didn’t have enough energy, initially, to read prose, so I stuck with comics. Then, I got on a kick, and kept going. I read a really random assortment of stuff, mostly from old Humble bundles, but from other sources as well.

Here’s a list of most of the stuff I read:

  • American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
  • Superman: Earth One, Vol. 1-3 (JMS)
  • Vampirella Masters Series Vol. 4: Visionaries
  • Mind the Gap, vol 1-3
  • Angel Omnibus
  • Alex + Ada: The Complete Collection
  • C.O.W.L. Vol. 1
  • Detective Comics 471-476 (Englehart/Rogers)
  • Velvet, Vol. 1-3 (Brubaker/Epting)

All of it was quite good.

I also just bought yet another Humble bundle, this one containing a bunch of stuff from James Tynion IV. Most of the stuff in the bundle is DRM-free PDFs, but there are a couple of oddball items in it.

One book is redeemable only through DSTLRY, which is a company I’d heard of before, but hadn’t really investigated. And another two are redeemable through Neon Ichiban, which I hadn’t heard of, and isn’t live yet. They seem to be related to each other, and are both founded by a couple of ex-Comixology guys. I guess DSTLRY is more of a “publisher” and Neon Ichiban is more of “platform”. Here’s an article from Comics Beat about Neon Ichiban. So now I’ve signed up for a DSTLRY account, and put myself on the Neon Ichiban waitlist, though I’m not really enthusiastic about jumping on any new bandwagons.

Right now, I read all of my DRM-free books with Panels, which has evolved into a really nice app, and seems to be under continued active development. I read all of my Comixology books with the Kindle app, of course. And that’s about it.

I did also use the Comics Plus app this past week to read a book. That app is tied to my library card, and lets you read a fairly impressive catalog of comics, for free. I’m not really sure how the licensing works, but it’s different from Overdrive/Libby. With Overdrive, your library “owns” a set number of digital copies of a book, and you may have to get on a waitlist before you can read something. With Comics Plus, there are no limits. If it’s in their catalog, you can read it. So that’s great. Unfortunately, the user interface for the app is pretty bad. It froze up on me a number of times, and I couldn’t move from page to page without force quitting and going back in. And it doesn’t have good functionality for zooming in, which is something I need.

Somewhere along the line this week, I also started looking at Global Comix, which has been around for a couple of years. I’m pretty sure I’d heard of it before, but hadn’t looked into it. Here’s an article on them from Comics Beat. I’m definitely leery of getting too involved with any digital comics platform other than Amazon/Comixology, as it doesn’t seem like any of them are likely to be around for the long term. I notice that Omnibus shut down last year. They only lasted a year or two, so I’m glad I didn’t get too involved with them. And of course Dark Horse Digital shutting down was a big pain for me.

Well, regardless of all that, I have quite a lot of comics to read. Certainly enough, at this point, that I won’t run out before I die, even if I don’t ever buy any more. It’s interesting (if a little morbid) to start thinking about things from that perspective.

Well, that’s probably enough pointless rumination for today. Here’s hoping I have a nice COVID-free week.

COVID again

I felt like I was getting a cold last weekend, on Saturday. It got worse on Sunday. Long story short, I got COVID again. I took off from work Monday through Thursday. I started Paxlovid on Tuesday. I went back to work today (Friday), working from home. I’m feeling a bit better, but very tired.

My last bout of COVID was in 2023. I’m hoping this one is pretty much done now. I’ll be taking the Paxlovid until Sunday, then I hope I’ll be all better. I’d like to have a “normal” week at work next week. I’ll test myself again on Sunday or Monday. If I’m still positive, then I’ll try to at least work from home next week.

I’m fairly exhausted right now. I had to stay up for an after-hours deployment today, which is now done. So I can go to bed. Of course, it’s Friday night in Somerville, so Main St. is pretty noisy. Maybe I’ll try to watch the rest of the Phillies game before bed.

my new (working) HP Mini

The replacement for my DOA HP Mini PC arrived today. I originally ordered the PC on June 30, and had hoped to set it up over the July 4 weekend, but now I guess I’m setting it up this weekend. (It does, at least, boot up, so that’s good.)

I think there’s going to be some bureaucratic back and forth on it, in terms of the warranty and registration. My HP account now shows the old broken PC under my name, but not the new one. And the serial number on the new one is not recognized. I had the same problem with the serial # on the previous PC. I get the feeling that HP has some weird cobbled-together system, where the serial # on a new PC doesn’t show in their online systems until a few days (or weeks) after it has shipped. So I think I’ll let it sit, then come back and check again in a week or so.

I may also need to straighten out the three-year extended warranty that I bought with the PC. I never got an email acknowledgement about that, and I don’t know if it’ll automatically attach itself to the new PC, or what. So I’m going to give that a week or so too, then follow up.

Here are some random notes about the basic setup and features on it:

  • It works fine with the IOGear KVM that I bought for it.
  • It appears to have an internal speaker, so I don’t need to worry about hooking up external speakers yet. The internal speaker is obviously not very good, but it’s enough so that I can hear basic audio for now.
  • I bought an external DVD burner to use with it, but haven’t tried it out yet.
  • From the specs, I wasn’t sure if it had Bluetooth or not. It does. So I might pair my AirPods with it, at some point.
  • I also wasn’t sure if it had WiFi or not; it does. I’m planning on sticking with a wired connection, but it’s good to know I can use WiFi if I have to.
  • The initial setup wasn’t too bad. It’s been a while since I’ve set up a PC from scratch. It’s definitely smoother than it used to be. Windows pulled over most of my preferences, settings, and even some installed software from my old desktop. So there’s less stuff to configure and install than there used to be.
  • It came with something called HP Wolf Security, which is probably useless, but I guess I’ll leave it installed. I think it might be a subscription thing that expires after a year. I’ll worry about it then, I guess.
  • I’m starting with OneDrive set to download files on-demand, so my 400 GB worth of files are all still in the cloud and the 1 TB drive is mostly empty. I’ve been slowly getting more comfortable with relying on the cloud; I used to have my desktop PC set to keep all of my files local, so I could back them up. But I turned that setting off a while ago, and have been clicking the “free up space” option on some folders here and there, when I start to run low on disk space. So I guess now I’m just going to let that go entirely and trust the cloud. (Maybe I should shop around for some service that backs up OneDrive to somewhere else…)

Overall, I got a bunch of the basics done today, in the background, while I was working from home. I’ll try to get some of the harder stuff done tomorrow.

I’m not sure when I’m going to switch over and consider it my “main machine.” I guess the most critical piece of software I have now that isn’t largely cloud-based is Quicken. So there’s going to have to be a point where I stop using Quicken on my old PC and start using it on my new one.

And I also need to figure out what I’m going to do with my music library. I still have 100 GB worth of MP3 files on my old PC. It’s all basically synced up to Apple Music at this point, so I could just install Apple Music on the new PC and trust that my library is safe in Apple’s hands.

DOA new PC

The new PC I ordered earlier this week arrived yesterday. I was pretty enthusiastic about getting to spend the three-day weekend getting it all set up. (Yes, I know, I’m a nerd.) But, alas, it arrived DOA.

When I hooked it up, it emitted a series of beeps that, according to this article, means that the computer could not detect its CPU. (Which is of course very bad…) I initially tried to contact tech support, but the support page wouldn’t recognize my serial number. I tried figuring out if there was a different way to get through to support, but there really isn’t.

So I eventually gave up and called order support and arranged to return it. I’ve got that all arranged now, but of course everything is closed today, so I can’t drop it off until tomorrow. And they won’t ship the replacement PC out until they get the broken one back, so it’ll be another week, I’d guess, before I can try this again.

One of the reasons I decided to buy a new PC direct from HP is that a lot of the other options I looked at seemed a bit iffy. (Third party sellers on Amazon and eBay, mostly.) I thought I’d be less likely to get a dud if I bought direct from one of the big PC makers. And I thought support would be smoother too. Oh well.

So now I guess I’m mostly going to be watching Wimbledon this weekend. And maybe doing some reading. So that’s not so bad.

I ordered a new PC

After going around in circles for a while (see yesterday’s post), I actually made a decision and ordered a new PC this morning. It’s an “HP Elite Mini 800 G9”, ordered direct from HP. Total cost was just under $1000.

The MSRP on it is nearly $3500, so it looks like I saved almost $2500. But of course $3500 is a pretty ridiculous price for a mini PC, even if it’s a pretty good one. I don’t really understand the pricing on any of this stuff anymore.

My initial thought was to get a refurbished PC, and spend around $500. But then I decided that I could afford to get a new one, if I could keep the cost around $1000. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to keep this one as long as I’ve kept my current PC (almost ten years). And if that’s the case, then it might be the last desktop PC I ever buy! It’s weird thinking about that, but it’s possible.

I also ordered a couple of accessories from Amazon: An HDMI to DVI cable, so I can use it with my old monitor, and an HDMI KVM, so I can have both my old and new PCs hooked up at the same time. I almost made a mistake on the KVM. I was going to buy a DVI KVM, thinking that I needed DVI input for my old desktop. In that case, I’d use the HDMI/DVI cable to connect the new PC to the KVM. But then I realized that my old desktop PC actually has an HDMI output port! So I can instead hook both the old and new PCs to the KVM via HDMI, then use the HDMI/DVI cable to go from the KVM to the monitor. Overall, that should be easier to manage (I think), and should leave me in a good place if I decide to replace my monitor. (The monitor, by the way, is even older than the PC; I think I bought it in 2010. So I probably should replace it.)

I’m hopeful that things will work out OK with the KVM. I knew a fair bit about KVMs back around, say, 2000-2010. But I haven’t used one in 15 years. My knowledge on a lot of this hardware stuff is out of date.

I’m hopeful that the new PC shows up before the end of the week. If it does, then I can set it up over the three-day July 4th weekend.

going down a mini PC rabbit hole

All the talk about the end of support for Windows 10 has got me looking at new PCs. My current PC is a Dell XPS 8900, bought from Costco in 2016.

I ruminated about this in a blog post from about a month ago, and I still haven’t quite decided what to do.

Part of me really doesn’t want to give up on my ten-year-old Dell. It still works! I replaced the hard drive with an SSD quite some time ago, so that’s not an issue. It’s got a CD/DVD drive, which I like. And I have no particular problems with Windows 10 that would be solved by upgrading to Windows 11.

I’ve gone back and forth with a lot of ideas:

  • Simple: replace my Windows 10 tower PC with a new Windows 11 tower PC.
  • Complex (and probably a bad idea): Keep using my current PC, but wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu on it. Move away from Windows, and become a “Linux person”.
  • Kicking the can down the road: Keep using my current PC, and keep using Windows 10. Pay for security updates from either MS or a third party.
  • Get a Mac Mini, and gradually transition to using that as my primary desktop PC. Eventually, wipe and recycle the Dell.
  • Get a new mini PC, running Windows 11. Move my stuff over to that. Wipe and recycle the Dell. Remain a “Windows person” but stop being a “tower PC” person.

So it’s that mini PC track I’ve been on this weekend. I’ve learned a few things. First: new PCs, even mini PCs, are often very expensive these days. I’m looking at stuff from Dell and HP, and it’s $2000 or $3000, if I want 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. I don’t know if that’s tariffs or what.

So I’m looking at refurbished stuff. There seems to be a pretty big ecosystem around selling and buying refurbished Mini PCs. I guess they’re mostly units that were used by large companies, and were dumped at end of lease. And it seems like a lot of the ones being sold on Amazon and eBay are not just refurbished, but have also had the original parts (SSD and RAM) replaced. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that looks pretty good, on paper, but might be a little iffy, and it’s hard to compare one guy’s mini PC to another guy’s, even if they appear to be the same model. I guess I should just “spin the wheel” and pick one. For my purposes, anything with enough RAM and a 1 TB SSD should be fine.

Since my current PC and monitor are so old, I’m thinking a bit about the extra complications I’m going to have when I switch to a new PC.

  • My monitor has one DVI port and one old analog VGA port. Any new PC is going to have either DisplayPort or HDMI out, so I’m going to need a DP/HDMI to DVI cable.
  • These mini PCs generally only have headphone ports for audio output. Audio is yet another rabbit hole here. I think the default setup now is to route the audio through the HDMI output, with the video, then have a soundbar under your monitor. But of course that won’t work for me. I may need to buy USB speakers.
  • If I want to keep using a CD/DVD drive, I’m going to need to buy an external USB one.
  • I actually have two 1 TB drives in my current PC: the SSD that I use as the main boot drive, and the original hard drive, which I now use for File History backups. I also have a 2 TB external USB drive that I use for backups (via Bvckup Pro). I’ll keep using the 2TB external, but I’ll need to think about whether or not I want to set up a second external drive for the File History backups.
  • And, if I’m going to keep both PCs going for awhile, I might want to get a KVM, so I can switch between them. The “M” part of that gets a little complicated. Do I want to get a DVI KVM? Am I going to keep the old DVI monitor for long, or should I punt and just get a new HDMI monitor?

As usual, I’m really spinning my wheels on all this stuff. I’m also starting to consider that maybe my end-state will be a mini PC running Windows 11, and a Mac Mini, stacked on top of each other, both connected to a KVM.

passed the AZ-204 exam

I’ve posted a few times recently about my efforts to study for the AZ-204 exam. TL;DR: I passed the exam today!

I’d scheduled it for today, back in May, using a free voucher that expires on June 30. So I had to schedule it before then.  I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be ready for it, so the plan was to take the test today, fail it, and then use the score report to figure out where my strengths and weaknesses were, then come back and take it again in a month or two, after doing some targeted studying.

But I managed to eke out a passing score: 707 (where 700 is passing). So, just barely, but good enough.

These tests always take a lot out of me. I’m not sure why. I’ve always been like this. I used to get physically sick before big tests, back in high school. I managed to figure out how not to do that, or I never would have made it through college. But even, oh… 40 years later, I still get stressed before a big test. These days, of course, I don’t need to take very many tests.

I’m not really sure where I’m going to go next, in terms of learning and certifications. I was really assuming I’d need to keep working on the AZ-204 material for the next couple of months. Maybe I’ll just take a break and watch a lot of TV and read a lot of comics over the summer. Then get serious again in September!

rough weekend

I’m supposed to be taking the AZ-204 test next Friday, so I had planned to do some studying this weekend. I had Friday off (for Juneteenth), and no other specific plans, so I figured I could do a bit of studying and maybe catch up with the Cloud Academy videos I’ve been watching.

Instead, I woke up with a cold on Thursday, and had to call in sick. I was pretty useless that day, not even having enough energy to read anything challenging, so I found myself reading The Flintstones at the New York World’s Fair, a comic published in 1964 or 65 to promote the NY World’s Fair. It was dumb, but a good thing to read when you barely have enough energy to stay awake.

I then read Keif Llama: Mindset, a self-published comic from Matt Howarth. That was a bit more of a challenge than the Flintstones comic, but was still a very light read. (Side note: I couldn’t find that in Goodreads, since it’s self-published, and since it doesn’t have an ISBN number, I couldn’t add it to Goodreads either. You used to be able to add pretty much anything to Goodreads, which is probably why that random Flintstones comic was in there, but not any more. This bothered me a lot, but I got over it, I guess. End side note.)

I felt a little better on Friday, and did manage to leave the apartment, albeit only to go to the optician a few doors down from my apartment and get the lenses in my glasses replaced. (They got scratched up after my fall on June 1.) Just replacing the lenses (no new frames) cost me $900. So, yeah, I’ve got bad eyesight.

I felt, again, a bit better on Saturday, but still not enough for anything challenging. So, again, I mostly just watched TV and read comics.

Today, I felt a lot better, and even got out for a 25 minute walk this morning. I got through one module in the Cloud Academy series I’m working on, and did the compatibility test on my laptop for the exam, so I can say I did at least a little prep work. But I’m nowhere near ready for the exam, to be honest.

I finished reading Maggie the Mechanic on Friday, read Project Superpowers on Saturday, and then Legenderry today, so I got through some pretty weird and random comics this weekend. So that’s something. And I binge watched Dept. Q and AARO on Netflix, so I got through some pretty weird and random TV too.

I feel a little bad about not getting much useful work done, but I know my own limitations. When I’m sick, I can push myself if I really need to, but then I have to pay for it later. Better to take it easy for a few days, then start the next week fresh.

I guess I’m ready to start a regular work week tomorrow. I hope I can hold myself together. It’s going to be very hot, and I’m not really equipped for 100° weather. I may need to look into rescheduling my exam. I’m pretty sure I need to do that at least 24 hours before the scheduled time, so I should decide on that by Wednesday night. The main reason I scheduled it for June 27 is that the voucher I had expires at the end of June. I’m pretty sure that the voucher expiration date doesn’t prevent me from rescheduling the exam for July. I don’t know. I might just take the exam for the experience, and consider it a kind of “live fire” practice run.

status update

I wanted to come up with a more imaginative title for this post, but I think I’m going to stick with “status update.” Once again, I’ve got a bunch of thoughts in my head, so I’m going to try to get some of them out of there and onto “paper.”

First item: I fell down last Sunday, while out for a walk, during the Somerville street fair. It was bad enough that I had to let the rescue squad take me to the emergency room. Short version: I got three stitches in my forehead. I had those taken out on Friday, by my regular doctor. I still have a black eye, and both of knees are still bruised up. Getting old sucks. I can’t even trip and fall down without it becoming a major life event.

The most expensive part of this accident is probably going to be replacing the lenses in my glasses, which got scratched up a bit when I fell. That’s going to cost me about $900.

I’m trying not to let this accident scare me too much. I’ve been going out for my usual walks almost every day since the accident, and I’m doing fine there. But I’m trying to be more careful, and keep an eye out for cracks in the sidewalk and stuff like that.

Second item: I’m watching the men’s final from Roland-Garros this morning. I’ve been enjoying following the tournament, on and off, this year, via both my HBO Max subscription, and via Radio Roland-Garros, which is really great.

I’ve been curious about the poster for this year’s RG, which was done by a comic book artist, Marc-Antoine Mathieu. The French love their comics, of course, so it’s cool that they did a comics-adjacent poster for this. I thought about buying the poster from the RG store, and it’s only €10, but shipping would be a lot, and I’m not sure if I’d wind up having to pay extra for tariff surcharges. So I decided that wasn’t worth the grief. Then I thought about trying to buy it from eBay, and I did find several sellers offering the poster, but it looks like they’re offering US-printed copies of the poster, so I’m not sure what the quality would be there, or if they’ve actually licensed the image or not. So maybe I should give up on buying the poster.

Then I thought I should look into Marc-Antoine Mathieu, and see if any of his work was available in English, from a US publisher. It turns out, not much of it is, and it seems to be mostly out of print. Some of it looks interesting, though. Here’s an interview with him that I haven’t read yet, but it looks cool. And an article from Paul Gravett’s website.

Last topic: I wasn’t feeling too well yesterday, and it was raining out, so I watched a bunch of TV. (It looks like I’ll be doing the same thing today.) One of the random things I watched was the first of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. I feel compelled to blog about it a little, since I’ve mentioned Evangelion on this blog before, a few times, first in 2003, and more recently in 2019. I’ve been meaning to watch these movies, ever since they were added to Amazon Prime Video back in 2021 (I think). Watching that first film is bringing back some strong memories. I’ve realizing that I’m a different person than I was back when I watched the original series twenty-plus years ago, but I’m still probably suffering from the Hedgehog’s Dilemma.