Author: Andrew Huey

Some photos of Patrick

Here are some photos of Patrick that I used to have in a gallery on my old Blogger site, but which got lost when I switched to WordPress. I thought I’d just re-upload them, and put them in a new post.

I honestly don’t remember if I scanned them in myself from prints, but that’s probably what I did. The original post was from 2004, so these predate all the ScanCafe scanning I did a few years back. And I don’t think I had a very good scanner in 2004. I should probably figure out where the originals are for these, and re-scan them.

(Note the awesome “Return of the Jedi” T-shirt he’s wearing in a few of these!)

Patrick

Today is the 12th anniversary of my brother Patrick’s death. Here’s a photo from his birthday party, long ago. I’m not entirely sure which birthday it was. I notice that he (and a couple of other kids) seem to be drinking out of Star Wars glasses, so that’s a clue, but not much of one, since we were all probably drinking out of Star Wars glasses, on and off, from 1977-1985.

Oh, and if it’s not obvious, Pat is the one in the Roselle Park shirt, with the big smile on his face.

00056_n_10af4mlhmv0046

RIP Abe Vigoda

I’ll miss Abe Vigoda. Barney Miller was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid, and I remember being excited about the Fish spin-off show too. (And I was bummed that it only lasted one season.) I even remember buying a novel featuring Fish, though I can’t find any trace now that it ever existed, so maybe I’m mis-remembering that.

I also remember, when I was a kid, seeing a doctor about my (mild) kyphosis. He explained the effect of kyphosis to me by telling me that I’d be hunched over “like Abe Vigoda” when I was older. I remember thinking that I really didn’t want to be hunched over like that, but Abe Vigoda seemed like a pretty good guy, so I could probably deal with it.

more WordPress updates

After updating my 1&1 environment from PHP 5.4 to 5.6 this morning, I decided to check for WordPress plugin & theme updates tonight. I had a few plugin updates, plus a surprise theme update. The base theme for this site is Stargazer, from Justin Tadlock. There hasn’t been an update to it for a while. (Which is fine; it’s quite stable and I haven’t had any problems with it.) But I see he released version 2.0 recently, so I went ahead and updated it. As far as I can tell, nothing is broken. Theme updates can sometimes be tricky, especially if you’re updating the base theme for a child theme that you’ve hacked together yourself. But everything looks OK, so far.

I’m way too tired to look into what’s been changed in Stargazer 2.0, but hopefully I can check on that at some point. I haven’t done anything at all with this site’s theme lately, so maybe it’s time to mess around with it a bit!

PHP 5.6

I got an email from 1&1 this morning, telling me that if I didn’t switch from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.6, I’d be subject to a $7.19 monthly “extended support” charge for using an old version of PHP. Fair enough, I suppose, though I didn’t even realize I was still on PHP 5.4.

I remember at some point in the past either updating it, or trying to update it and failing, but that was probably a long time ago. Maybe that was from 5.2 to 5.4 or something like that.

Either way, this site should now be on PHP 5.6. This post is basically just a test to see if the site still works. I don’t think I have any WordPress plugins that won’t work under 5.6, but I guess I’ll find out soon.

Snow photos

Here are a few photos I took, near the Somerville courthouse.

Main St is pretty well cleared, and traffic is moving. Some businesses are open, but many aren’t. Starbucks, ShopRite, and Central Pizza are all open, and that’s probably all I really need. My car and my parking spot are pretty well clear of snow now, after about two hours total work.

Chris Christie has gone back to New Hampshire, so I guess he thinks his job is done for the day. (And kudos to the Star-Ledger for the brutal headline and snarky article!)

I guess I’m going to have to drive in to work tomorrow, as usual. Hopefully the roads will be reasonably clear. And maybe we’ll at least have a delayed opening.

 

 

Blizzard 2016

Well, we got 27.4 inches of snow here in Somerville yesterday, according to the local news. It’s calmed down today, and everybody is digging out. I spent about 30 minutes digging my car out this morning, then another hour just before lunch. I’m actually kind of surprised I lasted that long. I’m still fighting a cold, and I’m still not sure I’d say I was 100% after my hernia surgery three months ago.

So now I’m trying to rest up a bit, watching TV and drinking coffee. (Starbucks is open!) I’m hopeful that I can work from home tomorrow, but we’ll see what they say about that.

Here’s an article on the storm from the NY Times that I’ll probably read later, after my head has stopped throbbing so much.

No More Ziegfeld

I’m really disappointed to hear (from this NY Times article) that the Ziegfeld Theater is closing. I haven’t been there in a while, but it’s a great theater and I’ve seen some great movies there, including Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm.

As this post on Cinema Treasures points out, this leaves only one single-screen movie theater left in Manhattan, the Paris. I’ve seen a few good films there too, including Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which was quite an experience.

It’s sad to see so few big movie theaters left, since the experience of seeing a good film on a big screen is so much different from seeing it on a smaller screen in a multiplex, or on a TV screen at home.

As much as I appreciate venues like Film Forum or the theaters used by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, they just don’t compare to big old theaters like the Ziegfeld.

NY Times pricing

When I subscribed to the NY Times a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that they had recently dropped their prices. I had gone looking for any articles that might mention when and why they had done that, but didn’t find any. (For some reason, I’m interested in the economics of pricing on digital vs physical goods, like ebooks, music, and newspaper subscriptions. In addition to just wanting to get a good deal for myself.)

There’s an article on Mashable today noting the new pricing, as available in the iOS apps. The article says that it’s an “iOS only offer”, but I know that I saw pretty much the same rates on the web when I subscribed, with the addition of the extra 30% off for the first year. And it seems like the offer showed up in the app only within the last few days, but I know that I saw it in the app at least three weeks ago. And I just checked now, and if I open a new private browsing window in Firefox and look at the Times subscription page, it shows the old tiered rates ($3.75, $5, and $8.75 a week, for phone, tablet, and all-digital tiers).

So, basically, I think the Times is messing around with targeted pricing for different people on different platforms. They probably had data on me that showed me using the iPhone and iPad apps occasionally, and the web frequently, and saw that I’d been looking at the subscription page on and off but never actually subscribing. So they tossed different offers at me until I went ahead and subscribed. Even though I block a lot of tracking stuff with Privacy Badger, I had generally been leaving myself logged in to the NY Times site (and apps), even before I had a paid subscription. So I’m sure they have data on my usage of their site and apps.

And I guess they decided to throw the cheaper all-digital rate at all iOS app users and see what happens. I know that the Times has a lot more paid digital subscribers than most other papers, and they’ve been fairly successful at getting people to pay for their content. It will be interesting to see how this stuff plays out over the next few years.