Category: books

War and Peace

I started reading War and Peace this month, as a group read for the Great American Read Goodreads group I’m in. I’ve also been running the group for the last month or two, since the original moderator took a break. So I’ve done a bit of internet research on the book, in preparation for reading it, and so I could share it with the group. So I might as well also share it here, and mark the point where I started reading. Then, assuming I finish, I can write another blog post at the end.

I’ve allocated two months for reading it (June and July), which is probably a bit optimistic. But that’s more about not tying up the Goodreads group for three or four months on one book than it is about how long it takes to read War and Peace. I imagine we’ll start a new group read in August, but I expect I’ll still be working on War and Peace through to Labor Day, at least.

I’m reading this Kindle version, which was free when I bought it, but now seems to be 99¢. It includes an excerpt from a book called Give War And Peace A Chance, which might be worth reading also. The translation is by Aylmer and Louise Maude, done in the 1920’s, I think. Comparing it to bits of other translations that I’ve looked at, I think it may be the most accessible to a casual American reader. And it’s apparently in the public domain, since it’s the version available at Project Gutenberg.

When I get into something like this, I often overdo the research, and sometimes go into a weird mode where I also start buying related stuff. In this case, I’ve also bought the BBC radio dramatization of the book from 2014 and the BBC TV miniseries, from 2016, both from Apple/iTunes. I thought that seeing/hearing the characters might help me keep them straight. I’ve started listening to the radio version, and it’s pretty good. The TV mini-series inspired a few good articles at The Guardian, such as this 10 things you need to know article and this could you read War and Peace in a week bit.

Hardware in, hardware out

OK, here’s one more Xbox follow-up post (previous). The vertical stand was delivered on Memorial Day. I was kind of surprised about that, since (1) it’s a holiday, and (2) all the streets around my apartment are closed off on Memorial Day for the big bike race. But, somehow, the Amazon delivery guy found somewhere to park, then schlepped a box full of packages down Main Street. He hit my apartment building right as I was about to go out and wander around a little. If he’d shown up five minutes later, I would have missed him. (It’s possible someone would have let him into the building though, since one of my neighbors was hanging out right in front of the building watching the race.) So, again, it would have been more convenient for everyone if Amazon just used the USPS, but it’s fine.

I promised myself several years ago that I wouldn’t bring in any new tech without getting rid of an equivalent amount of old tech. So I took some time today to get rid of a bunch of stuff. There’s a monthly electronics recycling drop-off for my county, in Hillsborough, so I went over there today with a bunch of stuff. I got rid of:

  • an old HP desktop PC (with the drives removed),
  • an old Toshiba HD-DVD player,
  • a very old VCR,
  • my Dad’s old Sony CD changer,
  • my old MacBook (with the drive removed),
  • an old Apple TV,
  • an old Roku box,
  • an old Samsung tablet,
  • and my old Automatic adapter.

So I guess I’m officially giving up on a few things, like ever watching a VHS video tape or an HD-DVD again. I think I really need to purge my CD collection soon too. I have way too many CDs, and they’re not organized really well. Honestly, I have a lot of stuff to purge, but I’ll save that for another post.

Back to the Xbox: After saying that I wasn’t going to sign up for any subscription services, I went ahead and signed up for a year of EA Access. It’s only $30. I will probably go in and turn off recurring billing on it, to force myself to make a decision about it in a year, rather than letting it auto-renew. I downloaded Mass Effect and Bejeweled 3, but that’s it so far.

Honestly, I’ve been playing Bejeweled more than anything else. I think I first played Bejeweled on my Toshiba e310, which would have been in 2002 or thereabouts. (I could be wrong; it might have been on one of my Palm units. Either way, I remember it being grayscale, and playing with a stylus.) It seems kind of silly to use an Xbox One for something that ran fine on a handheld in 2002, but, hey, I like playing it.

I’ve also started playing Stardew Valley. That’s interesting so far, but I’m not convinced it’s as great as a bunch of people seem to think. I may need to give it some time to grow on me.

I’ve also committed myself to reading War and Peace this summer, so that may cut into my video gaming a bit. Either way, I should have more than enough stuff to keep me busy this summer.

Roddy McDowall Reads H. P. Lovecraft

Of all the people you could choose to read H. P. Lovecraft stories, how did somebody decide to choose Roddy McDowall? I listened to about a minute of this, and it’s just too creepy. (I guess maybe that’s the point.) It turns out that David McCallum has also read some Lovecraft stories. Also pretty creepy! (Though his voice seems more suited to this kind of thing.)

There’s a page listing various Lovecraft readings at hplovecraft.com. I probably shouldn’t start listening to Lovecraft audiobooks. I have enough nightmares already…

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.

Spring Cleaning

Inspired a bit by Marie Kondo, perhaps, I’ve been doing some spring cleaning this weekend. I haven’t actually watched her Netflix show or read her book, but it’s hard not to run into references to her work lately. I caught her appearance on Colbert, for instance, and listened to a Pop Culture Happy Hour episode about the show recently. And I’ve gotten a kick out of some of the anti-Kondo backlash that’s been showing up on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet. I know that it’s all exaggeration and/or misperception, but some of it is entertaining. This Washington Post article is a good example.

Anyway, it’s a three-day weekend (for me), so I’ve got some extra time. I thought I might get an “easy win” by going through a box of old college papers and throwing most of them away. I assumed the box was mostly full of notebooks from my RPI days; I don’t really have any sentimental attachment to old differential equations notes, so those could be easily discarded. Alas, the top few inches of papers were actually from my K-12 days, including stuff from grammar school, middle school, and high school. Most of my old notebooks from those days had already been discarded, so this was stuff that I’d previously decided to keep.

I managed to talk myself into throwing most of this stuff away, after scanning it in. So that slowed things down a lot. I only got through maybe the top inch of stuff in the box between today and yesterday. (And the box is about 12 inches tall.) So, visually, it doesn’t look like I’ve put much of a dent in things.

Since having to reinstall Windows 10 a while back, I’ve been trying to come up with a good solution for scanning. I couldn’t quite manage to reinstall the old Canon software that came with my printer/scanner, and that I’d been previously been using. For now, I’ve settled on using the Microsoft Windows Scan app for scanning to JPG/PNG format, and the freeware NAPS2 for scanning to PDF. I’m not completely happy with either, but they’re actually a little better than the old Canon software in some ways.

Anyway, I’ve been scanning old photos and single-page documents to PNG, and multi-page documents to PDF, for the most part. I’ve come up with a naming convention that starts with the year, so my First Communion certificate is named “1975-first-communion.png,” for example. (And the actual certificate is now in a garbage bag in the dumpster behind my apartment building. Sigh.) I’ve been putting them all into a folder in OneDrive named “Andy-childhood”. My intention to to stick anything up to my high school graduation in there. Having the file name start with the year will make the files appear roughly chronologically.

Spending time on all this seems a bit self-indulgent, but I’m ok with that. It’s not like I spend a lot of time rummaging through old grade-school report cards, in general. I don’t think I’ve looked at the stuff in that box in twenty years.

I’ve come across some pretty funny stuff in that box, including a short story I wrote, titled “An Interstellar Christmas,” which is all about Santa making an appearance on an interstellar spacecraft on Christmas Eve. I didn’t put a date on it, but it looks like it’s probably from 1979, when I was 12.

I also found an issue of my middle school “newspaper,” also from 1979, that had a page devoted to a creative writing assignment that included submissions from three students, including me. The assignment, I guess, was to write something resembling a haiku about several people we though were interesting. (It wasn’t really haiku, but I think it was supposed to follow some kind of pattern.) My entry covered Aesop, Ben Franklin, Agatha Christie, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Francis Scott Key, Charles Schultz, and Lou Ferrigno. (Another kid covered Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, Muhammed Ali, James Bond, and Dracula. I’m not sure if the exercise was supposed to include fictional characters, or if this student just thought James Bond and Dracula were real…)

My best find, though, was in yet another box (which I started to poke around in, and quickly gave up on after realizing it also wasn’t going to be an “easy win”). It was a notebook from my senior year high school English class. It was a journal that we were supposed to keep over the course of the year, and hand in for grading occasionally (probably once a month). So it had entries from September through June of my senior year. This was really a goldmine of oddball stuff. Early in the year, the teacher had us write about specific reading assignments, so there are some one-page reports on essays by folks like J.B. Priestly, Winston Churchill, and Virginia Woolf. Stuff like that. Later, he gave us looser themes, so there are little essays on Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Will Eisner, and my feelings about the college application process. Very late in the year, I wrote some fairly personal stuff relating to how I felt about leaving home and going away to college. Since we were handing this book in to the teacher regularly, and getting it back, there are notes from him throughout, such as “you, without doubt, are an interesting person!” and a scribble asking if he could borrow the Harlan Ellison book I was writing about in one entry. (I don’t remember if I ever lent it to him, but if I did, he gave it back, since I still have it.)

I also came across a reference to the old Fahrenheit 451 video game that I’d been playing around that time. That sent me off on a little side quest, since I had really fond memories of that game. The game is playable from this page at archive.org, if you want to try it out. It’s also playable and downloadable at myabandonware.com. The description there makes it sound like it’s probably not as good a game as I remember, though.

So, anyway, I had a lot of fun reading that notebook. I went as far as scanning the whole thing in. It was 70 pages, so it took a while, but I was listening to an audiobook while I was doing it, so I was using the time wisely.

I also managed to shred some of my parents’ old bills while I was doing all this stuff, so, between the old school paperwork, the shredded bills, and a bunch of other ephemera, I managed to fill two garbage bags.

New Year’s Day 2019

It’s 7am on New Year’s Day, and I don’t have anything big planned today, so I might as well get started on my traditional New Year’s Day blog post. I’ve been doing this for several years now. Here are some links to the last few posts:

Weight, Sleep, and General Health

My general health was been OK this year. I had blood work done a few weeks ago, and it looks very similar to 2017’s blood work.

My weight has been pretty steady for the last few months. I was 140 on New Year’s Day last year, and I’m 135 now. I’ve been steady at 135 for a while now, +/-2. Last year, I wrote “I can’t see myself dropping to 135, but we’ll see.” Well, I did drop to 135. This year, I’ll say that I can’t see myself dropping to 130. If I do, then that might actually indicate a problem. My doctor this year actually asked me if I wanted to put on a little weight, or if I was OK as-is. I think I’m fine, but if I drop another 5 pounds in 2019, that might be a problem.

I’m still using Lose It every day, and recently paid for a lifetime subscription.

I’ve been doing OK with exercise, relying on the Apple Watch to keep track of things and give me a little nudge now and then. I got a new Series 3 Watch for Christmas, so I’ll likely be sticking with that. My move goal was 440 for a while earlier in the year, but has been adjusted down to 390. I generally hit that goal 5 or 6 days per week.

Sleep is still an occasional problem. I did OK (but not great) last night, and I’ve had a few bad nights recently. I still use Sleep Cycle to track my sleep. I’ve cut back on caffeine a bit, but probably not nearly enough.

I’ve been meditating on and off this year. I had a little streak going back in October, but I stopped again and haven’t started back up. When I do meditate, I’m using Insight Timer. I’ll likely stick with that. I want to get back to meditating regularly. If Bill Gates can find time to meditate for 10 minutes a few times a week, so can I.

My vision is continuing to go downhill, though I haven’t had anything really bad happen yet. (Given my family history, I’m kind of expecting that I’ll be legally blind at some point in my 60s, though maybe I can avoid that.) I went to my eye doctor earlier this month and got a prescription for progressives, so I’ll get that filled at some point this month and see if I can get used to those, and if they help me with computer work and reading. We have a vision plan at work now, starting in 2019, so I can at least get those at a discount.

My hearing is also going downhill. I haven’t seen a hearing doctor yet, though I plan to do that in 2019. I’ve been following advances in hearing aid tech, so I hope that, if I need a hearing aid, I can at least get a good one that works with my iPhone and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

I signed up for AARP last year too. I’m hoping I can get some useful information out of that in 2019. I’m trying to be proactive about aging, from both a health and finance standpoint.

Work

I hit the five-year mark at SHI in January 2018. I spent a lot of time this year working on a project related to Microsoft’s Partner Center, so I got to do a good bit of C# programming this year, and got to play with a few things in Azure, so that was good. This year, we should be opening a new warehouse, so that’s going to keep us busy, with related projects.

I, once again, got a very good performance review from my boss this year. I’m not going to get too specific, in case any coworkers stumble across this post, but I’m doing well.

Professional Development

I didn’t do any structured professional development this year, really. I watched a few Pluralsight courses, mostly related to specific stuff I needed to learn for work. Looking at my Goodreads history, I see that I read a handful of programming-related books this year:

Wow, that’s actually a longer list than I thought it was going to be. Some of those aren’t really programming books, like “Hit Refresh,” Satya Nadella’s book, and some are just short ebooks, but it’s still enough that I feel like I put some effort into keeping my skills sharp and staying current.

Finance

I did a quick year-end finance review over the weekend, and it’s a bit depressing. Any gains I had for the year were soundly wiped out by the recent stock market plummet. But, ignoring that, I can at least say that I have things in order. I did a little bit of reorganization in 2018, including moving some money from my legacy Merrill CMA account to a new CMA Edge account, where I can do my own trading online. I invested some money there into a couple of Vanguard index funds. I read John Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing in May, and I’ve tried to reorient my finances in a more “Boglehead” direction, though I still have a lot of old-style mutual funds. I also made an attempt to book a session with an independent financial advisor, but failed to find someone who looked good and was willing to take on a new client. I should probably try again in 2019, since I really should have someone else look at things, given my age and the somewhat haphazard state of my portfolio.

Reading

According to my Year In Books on Goodreads, I read 106 books this year. A lot of those are actually short stories, short ebooks, and comic books, but I did read a fair number of novels this year too. I participated in a Great American Read group on Goodreads, and read a number of books that were outside my comfort zone. I posted about that in November. I’ve finished a few more TGAR books since then (Lonesome Dove, The Lovely Bones, and Lu), and started To Kill A Mockingbird, which was the winner of the TGAR poll.

I should note that I used my local library system a lot more this year than I have in previous years. I’ve used it for physical books, ebooks, and audiobooks. I’ve visited both my local branch, and the larger Bridgewater branch multiple times. So I’m thankful that we have such a good library system here in Somerset County.

As to comic books, I posted in December about my current indecision about sticking with Westfield for buying new comics, or maybe just giving up on buying new monthly books for awhile. I think I’m probably going to stick with Westfield for a few more months, at least, but I’m not sure. The reading pile is getting too big again. I’m pretty sure that I’ll stop buying monthly comics at some point this year though.

Looking at my Goodreads 2018 list again, I see a lot of Batman and Batman-adjacent stuff this year. Probably my favorite comic book read of the year would be Warren Ellis’ The Wild Storm series.

In terms of general reading goals for 2019, I want to (finally) read a couple of books on meditation that I bought early last year, Search Inside Yourself and 10% Happier. I also want to read this book on “finances after fifty” that I bought last year. I don’t have any specific goals related to fiction reading. I have a bunch of books piled up that I’d like to read, that I didn’t get to last year, including Ready Player One, and several other science fiction novels. I put off some of my genre reading in favor of TGAR books last year. I’m glad I did that, but I’d really like to get back to some SF. My “want to read” list in Goodreads has 308 books on it right now, so I’ve got plenty to choose from.

Summary

I’m skipping over a few things I could include here, but it’s now almost 10am, and I have a few things I want to do today, since it’s stopped raining and it’s reasonably warm out. So this post will be a little shorter than last year’s. Maybe I’ll write some follow-up posts over the next few weeks.

Illegitimi non carborundum

Here’s an oddball digression for a rainy Sunday morning: Somehow or other, the phrase “don’t let the bastards get you down” came into my head this morning. I vaguely remember my dad using it in a letter he wrote me when I was in college. Or possibly seeing it used in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Anyway, in the old days, this would have been a passing thought, but the internet exists now, so a passing thought can become an hour-long trip down the internet rabbit hole…

I first found a song titled Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down by Kris Kristofferson. That’s clearly not where I first heard it, but it’s not a bad little song. Then I found a reference to Illegitimi non carborundum, a “mock Latin” phrase that’s meant to mean “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” I remember seeing that Latin phrase before, probably in a book, though I still can’t find a reference to it in a Vonnegut book. (And reading the Wikipedia page for it, I see that John Boehner is apparently fond of the phrase, so that’s kind of disappointing.)

Searching further, I found a song by The Toasters called Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down, which is very different from the aforementioned Kris Kristofferson song, but still a pretty good song, if you like late-90s ska. And also definitely not where I first encountered the phrase.

And after even more searching, I found a reference to Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum, which is apparently an alternate version of the phrase, used in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I did read that book in college, so I might remember it from there. And the phrase is used prominently in the season 2 finale of The Handmaid’s Tale TV show, so that explains it’s recent popularity as a tattoo. I haven’t watched that show, and I’m so far behind with TV that I probably won’t be watching it any time soon, but I’m curious about it.

So anyway, that was my internet digression for this morning. I’m not sure I learned anything useful, but it was kind of fun. The sun is up now, so I should probably brush my teeth and find something useful to do.

The Great American Read results

The Great American Read PBS series wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, with To Kill A Mockingbird as the number one book on the list. Here’s a link to the results page for the full list. When the series started, with a special back in June, I joined a Goodreads group related to it, and set myself a challenge to read 13 books from the list, before the show ended. I didn’t quite meet that challenge, but I managed to read 12 books from the list.

Here’s a list of the books I read during the challenge:

  1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  2. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
  3. The Martian by Andy Weir
  4. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  5. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  6. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  7. Ghost,
  8. Patina,
  9. and Sunny, all by Jason Reynolds
  10. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
  11. 1984 by George Orwell
  12. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

So that’s not bad, for my summer reading this year. Several of those books are pretty short, but there are a few longer ones in there too. And a few of them were re-reads. (And I’m not sure if the whole Track series by Jason Reynolds counts as “on the list”, or just the first one, Ghost, but I’m counting them all.) I would have hit my 13-book goal if I hadn’t decided to read Lonesome Dove with the Goodreads group. That’s 900 pages long. (I’m about two-thirds of the way through that.) And I’ve been slowly working my way through Catch-22 at the same time. (I’m about a quarter of the way through that one.)

The Goodreads groups is continuing, and will be reading The Lovely Bones this month and To Kill A Mockingbird next month. I’ve purchased copies of both of those, and plan to read them with the group, though I really want to finish either Lonesome Dove or Catch-22 before starting a new book.

And since I’m posting lists, here’s a list of books from the main 100-book list that I’d like to read, but still haven’t read yet:

  1. Great Expectations
  2. Frankenstein
  3. Game of Thrones (series)
  4. The Picture of Dorian Gray
  5. Invisible Man
  6. Gulliver’s Travels
  7. Ready Player One
  8. The Intuitionist

There are others that I’d probably find interesting, but this is the short list I came up with, after watching the series and reviewing the list again.

Lately, I’ve been going back and forth between reading physical books and ebooks, and between buying books and getting them from the library. All other things being equal, I’d almost always prefer to read the Kindle version for most novels, but I balk at paying the prices that they charge for some Kindle books, especially for older book that (in my mind at least) shouldn’t be priced as high as new books. In cases where I can get the ebook from the library, that’s always the best option. I get the benefits of reading on my Kindle, for free. When I can’t, I’ll often buy a used copy from eBay or Amazon for $4.

Harlan Ellison, RIP

I was sad to hear of Harlan Ellison’s passing today. Here’s an obituary from the AP (via the NYT) and another one from the Chicago Tribune. (I haven’t seen an official NYT obituary yet.)

I loved Harlan Ellison’s stuff when I was younger. I distinctly remember reading “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” when I was way too young to read something like that. And buying a hardcover of Shatterday from the Science Fiction Book Club. (I really liked “Jeffty is Five” from that one.) And buying Dangerous Visions at a used book store in Cranford. And of course everyone loves his Star Trek episode, The City on the Edge of Forever. He was really one of my favorite SF authors when I was a teenager.

I haven’t read much of anything by him lately though. I picked up a copy of the 1000+ page doorstop The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective back in 2000, but have barely put a dent in it. It’s too big and heavy to carry around, so it mostly just sits on the shelf. I occasionally grab it and read a story, but it’s been a while. (I wish they’d publish a Kindle version.)

Best quote from the AP obituary:

When a publisher broke a contract by allowing a cigarette ad in one of Ellison’s books, the writer mailed him dozens of bricks and, finally, a ripe, dead gopher.