Author: Andrew Huey

random stuff

I noticed in my “On This Day” sidebar that I’ve written a lot of blog posts on January 20th. I’m not sure why, but I feel like I should keep up the trend and write one today too.

But I have nothing in particular to write about, so I’ll just dump some random stuff out of my head. Which will probably be helpful to me, but maybe not to anyone else.

First, I have a cold, I think. And, whatever it is, it’s been hanging in there since Christmas. I keep thinking it’s just about gone, then it comes back. I’m quite frequently sick at this time of the year, so I shouldn’t really be surprised. All this ridiculously cold weather this week isn’t helping either, and we’re getting ready for a possibly major snowstorm this weekend. I’d really like to take off for a week or three and go to Florida, or San Diego, or anyplace warm, really.

After several months of not touching any novels or non-fiction books, and reading only short form stuff and comics, I’m back on a long-form book kick. I’m currently reading Thunderer by Felix Gilman and First Things First by Stephen Covey. I’m enjoying the Gilman book enough that it’s putting me in the mood to read more stuff like it. Maybe some China Miéville or Paolo Bacigalupi. (I honestly don’t know enough about either of those guys to know if it actually makes sense to group them together with Gilman, but for some reason, I think it does.)

On an unrelated subject, I stumbled across a great article on MacDrifter today about Drafts. I’m using Drafts a lot now, much more than I used to, but I’m still not really using it to its full potential. Of course, I don’t really use my iPhone or iPad for writing much; I stick with a “real” computer for that. But Drafts is great for some stuff, including quickly dumping notes into Evernote. It’s just faster and easier than opening up the Evernote client itself, which is a great app, but kind of slow to start. Drafts opens quickly and lets you start typing right away.

I’ve also noticed that Things for Mac is on sale for $25 right now. I own the iOS version, which I bought a while back when it was on sale, and I tried the Mac version, but I couldn’t talk myself into using it regularly. I might go ahead and pay for the Mac version, and give it another try. I’m keeping track of stuff largely in Evernote these days, but it might be a good idea to use something more structured for some stuff.

Tomorrow will be my three-year anniversary at SHI. I don’t have too much to say about that, other than that it’s been a pretty stable job, without a lot of drama or stress, and I seem to be doing well there, based on my performance reviews. I’m occasionally tempted to shake things up and find something new and interesting, but for now, I’m content with what I’ve got.

David Bowie

I’m a little surprised at how much David Bowie’s death has affected me. I was always a fan of his, but I guess I took him for granted. The only CD of his that I own is Black Tie White Noise, which is kind of an oddball one. (I might have the first Tin Machine CD too, which is another oddball.)

I’m not going to try to write a eulogy for him; plenty of other people have done a really good job at that. But I’ve come across so many well-written and/or interesting pieces related to him that I thought I’d just post a list of links:

I picked up Nothing Has Changed on iTunes earlier this week, and I’ve been listening to it at work. There’s so much good stuff there. And I’ve been listening to Blackstar too, which is also really good.

Almost done setting up my new PC

I’m just about done with setting up my new PC. It’s close enough to done now that I’ve unplugged the old PC, and moved the new one to my computer desk. (So I can eat breakfast at my kitchen table tomorrow. Yay!)

Quicken 2016 is working (mostly) OK. It was slightly flaky at one point, but seems to have gotten better. At any rate, my checking and investment accounts are all up to date and all my bills are paid. I want to do some thinking about how I’m using Quicken, and what I might want to change, but I haven’t really thought it all through yet. I even thought about giving up on it and doing something entirely different, but I can’t quite bring myself to give up on Quicken yet.

I installed the software for my Canon PIXMA MX870 and that’s working fine. I’m actually pretty impressed with this printer. I bought it in 2010, when Windows 7 was the current OS, and Canon has maintained the software and drivers for it, so it continues to work in Windows 8 and 10. (And in Mac OS X El Capitan too.) And I’ve never had any mechanical issues with it.

I still don’t have Outlook working, so I’m going to want to fix that. But it’s not that big a deal, since I don’t really use Outlook. I have it set to access my GMail account, but I really just use it as a backup, in case something catastrophic happens and Google loses all my old mail, or they delete my account for some reason, or something like that.

And I spent some time cleaning up my drive, getting rid of the SD versions of some TV shows that I had in both HD & SD, in iTunes. So now I’ve got about 200 GB free on my 1 TB drive. (I think I could free up another 100 GB if I really had to, but I should be fine for now.)

Overall, I think the XPS 8900 was a good choice. It’s a pretty standard machine, so I can do some upgrades later if I want to. It’s got a few big fans in it, but it’s very quiet. And it’s faster than the old machine, of course.

paying for news

I’ve been thinking about the ways in which I consume news lately. I read The NY Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, and The Guardian, with varying degrees of frequency, online (obviously), and I haven’t been paying for any of them. I’ve had print subscriptions to each of them (except The Guardian) in the past. I probably read the NY Times more often than any of the others.

This past week’s junk mail included offers to subscribe (in print) to the New Yorker and Economist at discount rates. I was somewhat tempted to do that, but I still have a small pile of unread New Yorker issues from my previous print subscription, in 2013. (I’m still working my way through them, and enjoying a lot of the articles, even if they’re a bit out of date.)

I’ve thought about signing up for a digital subscription to the Times on a number of occasions, but it’s always seemed a bit too expensive. And they’ve had this weird tiered system, where you pay one rate for a web & iPhone subscription, a higher rate for web & iPad, and an even higher rate for “all-digital access”. Well, I noticed today that they seem to have given up on that and set the all-digital rate to the old web & iPhone rate of $3.75 a week. And they had an offer for 30% off for the first year. So that’s a little over $10/month, which isn’t bad. I’ll have to review it next year when it goes up to $15/month.

So now I can read as many Times articles as I want, on any device I want, without jumping through any hoops to get around the 10 article per month limit on freeloaders. I also want to think about better ways to find and read articles from the Times that would be interesting and/or useful to me. I already subscribe to a couple of Times newsletters, and have one IFTTT recipe set up, using the NY Times channel. I could probably set up a few more. I also follow a few Times feeds on Twitter, but I’ve noticed that those usually only promote a certain kind of content, and don’t really help with the stuff that’s buried a bit deeper in the paper.

Long ago, when I had a print subscription to the Times, I actually went through the whole paper (or at least a good chunk of it) every day, skimming through all the headlines and reading at least a half-dozen articles every day. And I’d spend at least a couple of hours on the Sunday paper each week. (Heck, on a rainy day like today, I could spend nearly the whole day reading the paper.) I’d like to get back into the habit of reading and keeping up with the news at a bit of a deeper level this year. I’m never going to go back to reading the Times “dead tree” edition on a daily basis, but hopefully I can come up with a system for surfacing and reading the stuff that’s interesting to me in a way that’s convenient and useful.

setting up the new Dell

I started setting up my new Dell XPS 8900 last night. I have it hooked up on my kitchen table right now, using an old monitor that has been sitting on my floor since 2010. (Surprisingly, it still worked, after cleaning it up a bit.)

Initial setup was quick and easy. I then got a few essential programs installed via Ninite — Firefox, Evernote, and some others. Then, I set up PCMover Express and started transferring stuff from my old HP desktop. I have almost 750GB to transfer. Overnight, it got about halfway through, so I’m expecting it to finish up at some point tonight. I have both machines connected to my router via wired Ethernet. I probably should have pulled the drive from the old computer, mounted it in the new one, and copied stuff that way, but I was too lazy to do that. And I think it’s safer this way. Opening up a computer and removing the drive always comes with some risk of damaging the drive, which is a lesson I learned the hard way once, a long time ago, and haven’t forgotten!

I wasn’t sure about using the Laplink PCMover Express software, but it seems to be working well. Sometimes “express” software like this is dumbed down too much, and doesn’t let you adjust what’s being copied, but this program lets you pick and choose which folders to copy, without having to jump through too many hoops.

I could also have cut down that 750 GB to about 500 GB if I’d really wanted to. And I should probably delete a bunch of the stuff that I’m copying over later, since I really have a lot of stuff on my drive that I don’t need. I probably have some old ISOs for software that I’m never going to need again, like old versions of Ubuntu or stuff from back when I had an MSDN subscription.

And I have a lot of video files in iTunes that I don’t really need. It used to be that Apple would only let you download purchases once, and wasn’t set up for streaming video at all. Now, you can download old purchases whenever you want, and you can stream video to Apple TV without ever having downloaded it at all. So I could really afford to delete all those old Castle and NCIS episodes. (Yes, I was on an NCIS kick at one point and bought several old seasons from iTunes.)

So anyway, at the rate things are going, I should be able to do some more software installs on the new computer tomorrow. I’m hoping I can get far enough with it that I’ll be able to unplug my old computer by the end of the day tomorrow, and move the new one over to my desk. Then I can clean up the mess on my kitchen table and use it for breakfast on Monday morning.

Dell XPS 8900

I’ve been thinking about buying a new desktop PC for quite a while now. I bought the old one in 2010, and it’s really starting to show its age. I managed to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 about a year ago, but I haven’t been able to get it upgraded to Windows 10. It’s been running really slowly, even after doing the Win 8.1 upgrade as a fresh install, and it just seemed like it was time for a new one.

So I picked up a Dell XPS 8900 from Costco tonight. It’s got a Core i7, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive. I like buying stuff like this from Costco, since they have their concierge service, which gives you tech support through Costco, and a 2nd year on the warranty. And Costco has a pretty good return policy. So it’s just safer to buy from Costco than most other places.

I haven’t done anything with it yet, other than taking it out of the box and looking at it. The process of getting it set up and getting all of my data from the old PC to the new one is going to take some time, and I’m not sure how I’m going to approach it yet. Apparently, Microsoft’s old “Easy Transfer” tool for this has been discontinued, and they now just point you to Laplink’s PCMover Express. So maybe I’ll give that a try. Or maybe I’ll skip that and just copy data over the old-fashioned way.

logging comics on Goodreads

How Do You Count Comics on Goodreads?

Glad to see I’m not the only one who’s a little obsessive about logging stuff on Goodreads. If I’m reading individual issues, I try to find the corresponding trade paperback collection and log it as though I read the trade. (And I put in a note to myself that I read the individual issues, so I don’t wonder why I can’t find the trade on my bookshelf, at some point in the future.)

Oh, and I just counted, and 71 out of 96 books I logged this year were comics. So 25 non-comics books, which isn’t too bad. Some of those were novels, some were programming books, and a few were other non-fiction books.

Happy New Year 2016

The last couple of years, I’ve been writing year-in-review/goals posts on New Year’s Day, and I’m going to continue with that this year. For reference, here are links to the 2015 and 2014 posts.

Weight & Health
This category is pretty simple, so I’ll start here. I was at 200 pounds on New Year’s Day in 2014, and 165 on 1/1/2015. Today, I’m at 150. I had set a goal at 160, and got there, then everything past that just happened very gradually. I’ve been between 150 and 155 for the last few months, and I’m comfortable with that. So, for 2016, I’m just going to try and maintain my weight, within that range. Using the Lose It app has become enough of a habit now that it would seem weird not to log all my calories and weigh myself (almost) every day, so I’m going to keep doing that.

On the fitness front, I haven’t made much progress, though I’ve kept up with my habit of doing as much walking as I can. I haven’t started doing any other kind of exercise, and any thoughts I had about that were put aside when I had my hernia surgery a few months ago. I think I’ve healed up enough now that I could consider some new exercise ideas, and I might do something about that in 2016, though I’m not sure what.

My neck and back continue to bother me a bit, and I’m still not sure what, if anything, I’m going to do about it. I will likely buy a new mattress in 2016, which should help, since my current mattress is ten years old.

Speaking of mattresses, I’ve started using Sleep Cycle on my iPhone to track my sleep. I’m still not sure if it’s really that helpful, but it’s at least a little better than my old alarm clock, so I’m going to stick with it in 2016. I used to go to bed around 11pm most nights, but I’ve gotten into the habit of going to bed at 10pm lately. I get up at 6am, so that’s giving me eight hours in bed rather than seven, which is probably a bit healthier. And I’ve started setting my alarm on weekends also, so my time in bed is a bit more consistent now, from day to day. I still have trouble sleeping on some nights, and I’m not sure why. I know that afternoon coffee drinking definitely affects me, but I can have trouble sleeping even when I’m not drinking much coffee. So I’m going to keep thinking about this, and see what else I can do to improve my sleep.

Education / Programming
I didn’t do much in this area this year. I did learn a lot about SharePoint development, for a project at work that never really came to fruition. And I spent some time learning Ruby (and Ruby On Rails). I took Michael Uslan’s Rise of Superheroes course on EdX, but didn’t take any programming courses on EdX or Coursera. And I spent some more time on F#, starting a new book, Real World Functional Programming. I haven’t looked at it in a couple of weeks, but I want to pick it back up this month and get through it. Aside from that, I’m not really sure what I want to do in 2016. My day job is still going to be mostly Dynamics AX work, and I don’t have any consulting work coming up. So I’d like to continue with F#, and Ruby, and maybe more iOS development, but I don’t have any concrete projects that I’m working on or particularly interested in right now. So that’s something to think about.

Work
I’ve been at SHI since January 2013, so I’m just coming up on my three-year anniversary. SHI does performance reviews at year-end, so I just had mine recently, and it went well. I’m reasonably content with my day job, and I’ll likely stick with it through 2016. Since I’m only doing Dynamics AX work there, though, I should really try to get involved in some other projects, outside of work. I didn’t do any of that in 2015.

GTD / organization
I did pretty good on this front in 2015. I’ve kept up on my bills and paperwork, for the most part, and have finally switched over my Merrill statements to paperless. (I blogged about this last month.) I’m got things pretty well-organized in OneDrive now, and I’ve making effective use of my Evernote account. I had started consolidating all my personal notes into Evernote back in November 2014, and I’m pretty happy with the way that’s worked out, enough so that I recently paid for another year of Evernote Premium.

Comics and Books
I donated most of my comic book collection to Superheroes for Hospice early last year, and successfully avoided buying them all back. I have been on a bit of a tear with Comixology and Humble Bundle sales recently, but that’s all digital so none of that stuff is cluttering up the apartment the way 25 long boxes of comics did.

For reading, I’d set myself a goal of 50 books in the Goodreads reading challenge for 2015. I came in at 96, so that’s good, but many of those were comic book TPBs, so it’s not as impressive a number as it could be. In fact, I see that the last prose novel I finished was a Dresden Files paperback, in August. So I should probably start reading a new novel soon, just so I don’t forget how to read the darn things. I’ve done a fair bit of non-fiction reading this year too, long form (but not book-length), mostly New Yorker articles that I read either in the printed magazine or that I’d saved in Instapaper. (I kind of wish that Instapaper had a statistics page I could look at to see what I’ve read recently, but if they do, they’ve hidden it well.) And hey, this article on good news from 2015 looks like one I should save and read!

Life-logging, journaling, and blogging
I’m not sure if I’m using the right terms here, but I’ve definitely been doing more and more of this “quantified self” stuff over the last few years. And also more of the “qualitative” stuff via blogging and journaling. It looks like I wrote a little over 100 posts on this blog in 2015. That’s a pretty respectable number, and some of them took a bit of work and thought to put together. Overall, I think blogging has helped me work through problems, set goals, and keep track of them. (And I occasionally write a post that might actually be useful to someone else, though not as often as I’d like.)

Via my iPhone, I’m now tracking everything I eat, my weight, my sleep, and my daily step count, and I’m actually paying attention to all of those things. I’m not sure how much good it’s doing me, except in the weight loss area, where it has definitely made a huge difference over the last few years. So I’m going to keep doing all that in 2016.

In addition to this blog, I’ve also been keeping a five-year journal for the last nine years. (I’m just starting the last year on the second book.) It’s somewhat useful, but there’s not much room to write anything beyond a few lines, and of course it’s old-fashioned paper, so it’s not searchable. I’ll keep up with it this year, but I’m not sure if I’ll start a new one next year.

I bought Day One for iOS about a year ago, when it was on sale for a buck, but didn’t really start using it. I bought the Mac app last month, when it was on sale for $7, and I want to start using it this year, to supplement the stuff that I post publicly on this blog, and the stuff that I scribble in my five-year journal. If using it becomes a habit, I’ll probably drop the five-year journal in 2017. The guys from The Sweet Setup wrote an ebook on Day One that looks interesting. I may pick that up, and see if it gives me any good ideas.

Hardware and Software
I didn’t do too much with major hardware or software purchases in 2015. I didn’t buy a new desktop or laptop computer. I didn’t buy a new iPhone or iPad. I did buy a $35 Kindle Fire, but that’s a pretty minor purchase. My biggest purchase of the year would be the TiVo Bolt, which is working well for me. I replaced a hard drive cable in my MacBook and the speaker in my iPhone, so I could squeeze a bit more life out of those.

I think there’s a good chance I’ll buy an iPhone 6c in 2016, if such a thing is actually released. My iPhone 5s is working fine, except that the battery is clearly on its last legs, so I’m going to need to replace either the battery or the phone before 2016 is over.

I’m almost definitely going to buy a new desktop computer soon. My current machine was purchased in 2010, so it’s about time for a new one. I’d rather just upgrade some parts in it, but it’s old enough that it’s not going to be able to run Windows 10 without replacing the motherboard, and I don’t want to do that. (And I’m not even sure if I can, and don’t want to waste a lot of time trying to figure that out.)

For software, I’m going to keep up my Office 365 subscription. Even though I’m not doing much with Office itself, the subscription is worth it for the OneDrive space. And I’ll keep using a lot of the applications I’ve been using, like Evernote and 1Password.

Summary
Well, this has turned into a long post, much like last year’s one. I started writing this around 10am, and it’s now 11:45, so I should really wrap this up and start thinking about lunch. It’s nice to have nothing important to do on New Year’s Day. It’s been quiet outside on Main Street all morning, and pretty quiet here in my apartment building. I’d like to go out for a walk, but it’s a bit cold out there today. Maybe after lunch it’ll be warm enough for a quick walk around the block.

Apple TV follow-up

I used my new Apple TV to watch a few older Doctor Who Christmas specials last night, and to watch the new one today, so I thought I’d post a follow-up to my last post about it. I have to say that finding individual episodes of Doctor Who through the Apple TV interface is pretty frustrating. I had hoped that Siri would help, but asking for “Doctor Who Christmas episodes” just gets me the standard “I don’t understand” answer. And even giving the specific episode title doesn’t help. It just doesn’t seem to be very good at exactly the one thing it should be really good at: finding already-purchased iTunes video content in the user’s library.  It can tell me the weather, or what time it is, which is nice, but I could just look at my phone for that. Well, anyway the new Doctor Who special was pretty good, and certainly worth the $5 I paid for it.

Oh, and I’ve stumbled across one interesting app: Pluto TV. It’s a service airing a number of channels, including one that’s showing MST3K 24/7, apparently.

Merry Christmas

Looking at the “On This Day” sidebar on my blog, I see that I don’t normally write a blog post on Christmas day. But, well, I don’t have much to do today, and I woke up at 5:45am, so I might as well write one now and kill some time. So, Merry Christmas!

Due to circumstances beyond my control (as the saying goes), I’ve found myself on my own with no particular plans today. So this is, I think, going to be my first “free-form” Christmas, with no obligations or expectations.

It should be in the low 60s today, and cloudy (but hopefully not raining), for most of the day. So maybe I’ll go out for a walk or two. I’m thinking about hopping on a train into New York, but I’m not sure what I could do in NYC on Christmas day on my own, aside from just wandering around aimlessly.

I think maybe sitting around at home and watching old Doctor Who Christmas specials might be a good way to spend the day.