Category: football

more about media consumption

I’ve been blogging recently about how I’m watching football this year, and stuff like that. I’m continuing to think about that, plus going beyond that to more about media consumption in general.

Right now, I’m watching NFL RedZone for my Sunday football fix. Later tonight, I’ll watch the Giants game on Sunday Night Football, via Peacock. That’ll actually be the first Giants game I’ve been able to watch on my TV this season. (I did watch a bit of last week’s game on my iPad, which I can do with my NFL+ subscription.) This is all fine for now. I’m getting my fill of football. Depending on how the Giants do, I may get either more interested or less interested in the weeks to come.

I briefly mentioned the Colbert thing a couple of weeks ago. Now we’ve got the Kimmel thing too. I haven’t canceled my Disney+ subscription, though I support anyone who’s doing that. I’ve been thinking about how I should react to this stuff, and have decided that maybe a positive reaction is a better choice for me.

For instance, I’ve been listening to The Bugle for years. It’s a great podcast, with some great political humor. So I went ahead and signed up for a £50/year subscription/donation. I probably should have done that a few years ago.

I’m also looking at revising the way I consume news a bit, and maybe supporting some publications/sites/podcasts that I haven’t been reading/supporting/whatever. Weirdly, I seem to keep coming back to the idea of signing up for Apple News+. A lot of the publications I’m considering supporting are available on News+. I know that giving Apple that money won’t result in very much of it making its way to whichever publication I’m reading, but it would be convenient. On the other hand, it’s not available on Windows, and I’m not sure it would fit well into my usual workflows for reading and bookmarking stuff.

I think maybe the way forward is to support independent media, whether it be news or comedy or whatever. Big business has consistently shown that it’s more interested in being on the government’s “good side” than it is in accuracy, morality, or freedom of expression.

NFL Sunday

So here’s some notes and thoughts about my experience trying to watch football today, the first Sunday of the football season.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I don’t have any “traditional” TV service this year, having discontinued YouTube TV. But I ponied up for NFL+ Premium and the new ESPN Unlimited service.

So, for pregame shows, I was switching between the NFL network pregame show and the ESPN one. Both are reasonably good. One thing I hadn’t considered about this setup is that I no longer have anything resembling a DVR; I can’t pause, fast-forward, or rewind any of this stuff. And it’s harder to switch between “channels”, since I’m now switching between apps.

For the actual games, I decided to try watching NFL RedZone. That was actually pretty cool; I’d never had access to it before. It’s a little too “busy” for me; I’d rather see more of each game and less switching back and forth. But it’s fun and really gives you a lot of coverage of all the games.

There was a lot of grumbling recently about the announcement that they’d have commercials during RedZone this year. What I saw wasn’t really a big deal though; I think there was one very short commercial during the whole first hour of RedZone.

Speaking of commercials: another thing I miss about not having any DVR ability is never being able to fast-forward through commercials. I was watching NFL Matchup on ESPN this morning, and, despite it being a show I was watching on-demand, there were commercials in it and no way to skip them. I may be misremembering, but I think, in previous years, whenever I’d watch NFL Matchup via ESPN+, it would be commercial-free.

The Giants and Jets have, of course, both lost their first game. I don’t think this is going to be a good year for the Giants, but hopefully it’ll be better than last year.

sports, eyesight, and other stuff

I’ve got a list of stuff I want to blog about. I’m not sure how far I’ll get, but I’m going to try to cover a bunch of stuff.

Sports & streaming

My last post, from two weeks ago, went into a lot of stuff around my plans for watching sports on TV this fall. Not much has changed there, except that I gave in and signed up for another one-year Paramount+ subscription, since they just started a 50% off deal. So now I can watch any of the CBS NFL games on Sunday, though that’ll mostly be the Jets rather than the Giants. And I can also watch the new season of Strange New Worlds.

I’m still not happy with Paramount, after the Colbert thing, and the more recent Bari Weiss thing, and… other stuff. But I guess my protest against them is only going as far as refusing to pay full price for a Paramount+ subscription.

I’m still holding out on Fox though. I haven’t even really been tempted to sign up for a Fox One subscription. That would be a step too far.

My plan for tomorrow, the first Sunday of NFL season, is to try to watch NFL RedZone (via NFL+) and see if I like it. (And, of course, annoyingly, this is the season when they’re going to start running ads on RedZone. Oh well.)

My eyesight

I had a little incident about a week ago, where I got a new floater showing up in my left eye, and that brought on a migraine. I wasn’t sure if this was the return of my migraines from ten years ago, or something else. Long story short, I saw my eye doctor and she sent me to a retina specialist, to see if I needed laser surgery. And that specialist poked and prodded my eye and decided I don’t need surgery. Which is good, I guess, but it also means that I’m stuck with the floater, which hasn’t quite gone away. I don’t notice it most of the time, but it’s somewhat noticeable when I’m working on a computer (and unfortunately, I make my living sitting in front of a computer). So we’ll see how things go. Maybe it’ll go away?

Switching cell phone service providers

I’ve been a Verizon customer since I got my first apartment after college. Back then, it was Bell Atlantic, and it was for a POTS line. And when I got my first cell phone, it was on Bell Atlantic Mobile. That all got smushed together into Verizon at some point. So, basically, I’ve been paying a Verizon bill every month since 1989 or thereabouts.

So there’s a lot of inertia there, and it wasn’t easy for me to talk myself into considering switching to another provider. But there have been some issues that had been pushing me in that direction for a while now.

First, they cut the copper to my apartment building (in 2018) and cut off the POTS service. After that I switched to a home cell service thing, but cancelled that last year, and “parked” my home number with Park My Phone, forwarding it to my cell #.

Then there was the issue we had in the office, starting about a year ago, where Verizon cell service deteriorated to the point of being essentially unusable. (It’s gotten better since, but still isn’t great.)

And also, I’ve found out that the Verizon discount I get through work is limited to my old “legacy” plan and doesn’t apply if I switch to a new plan, with a higher data cap (or unlimited data).

So, after a lot of hemming and hawing, I finally decided to switch to Consumer Cellular. They’re an MVNO for AT&T, and I knew from coworkers that AT&T service in our building is fine, so that was one selling point. (I have, in fact, found out that it’s not just “fine”, but significantly faster than even my home internet service.) And it’s a lot cheaper, even with a bigger data plan. With Verizon, I was paying about $65/month for 5 GB. With Consumer Cellular, I’m paying $35/month for 10 GB. There doesn’t seem to be any downside, as far as I can tell.

Well, that’s about half of the stuff I wanted to blog about. Maybe I’ll write more tomorrow, if the football is boring, and if my left eye isn’t bothering me too much.

more nonsense about sports and streaming

This is the third post I’ve written about sports and streaming this month. (See here and here for the previous ones.) Sorry. I guess I’ve been retreating into watching (and reading about) sports because the “serious” news is too stressful right now.

I mentioned the new ESPN streaming thing in one of my previous posts. I gave in and signed up for it yesterday. My previous Disney+ bundle was the “legacy” one that included ad-free Disney+ and ad-supported Hulu. That was $22/month. There’s no equivalent bundle with the new ESPN service. The bundle with ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu is $30/month. The bundle with ad-free Disney+ and Hulu is $39/month. So I went ahead and signed up for that. It’s probably too expensive, and I don’t know if I’ll stick with it. And that $39/month rate is a promo; after a year, it goes to $45/month.

It just seems like all of this stuff is getting too expensive and too complicated. I’m still pretty happy with my MLB.TV subscription, which lets me watch most of the Phillies games. (I wish I could watch all of them, but I guess it’s good enough.)

I’m still not sure if I’m going to be happy with my NFL situation this season. I’m still planning on watching RedZone on Sundays (via NFL+) and hoping that’ll scratch my football itch. And I can watch Thursday Night Football on Amazon, Sunday Night Football on Peacock, and Monday Night Football via my new ESPN subscription. So that should be enough.

I’m also trying to see if I can get into Premier League Soccer. I was randomly clicking around in the Peacock app last Saturday, and happened to notice that it was week one of their season. And Peacock has a whip-around show (similar to RedZone I guess) called Goal Rush, so I can watch that for a couple of hours on Saturday and see bits and pieces of a few different games. So now it’s week two, and I’ve watched a bit of this stuff, and it’s kind of fun, though I’m mostly treating it as background noise. I haven’t developed any real interest in it yet.

And I briefly thought about giving up on the NFL and following the CFL instead. That thought came from the storyline that ran in the Crankshaft comic strip recently, where the main character went to Winnipeg to see a Blue Bombers game. It turns out that streaming rights for the CFL in the US aren’t terribly complicated, but they’re not terribly convenient for me either. Some games run on CBS Sports Network, which I’d probably have if I still had YouTube TV, and which might be included with Paramount+, though I’m not sure. The rest of the games can be watched on CFL+, which is a free streaming service. So that sounds good! It’s free! But there’s no Apple TV app. I’d have to pull up the website on my laptop and then AirPlay it to the Apple TV. That’s too much work.

So overall, my plan for distracting myself with sports for the next few months is approximately as follows:

  • Phillies games on weeknights, via MLB.TV.
  • Some other random baseball games on ESPN and Apple TV+.
  • NFL games on Sunday via RedZone on NFL+.
  • Thursday, Sunday, and Monday night football via Amazon, Peacock, and ESPN.
  • Maybe Premier League soccer on Peacock on Saturdays.

This will probably all fall apart at some point. If the Giants are as bad as they were last year, I may lose interest in the NFL. Or, conversely, if they do well, I might get frustrated about not being able to watch all of the games.

And I don’t even want to think about how complicated watching the MLB and NFL playoffs will be. Well, that’s a problem for another day.

playing with AI and enjoying sports

OK, so that’s two completely different topics, but I’m going to throw them together in one post. I’ll start with AI.

At work, I’m still very limited in the AI tools I can use: basically, just Copilot and our own internal chatbot. (And it’s just the plain Copilot chat that I can use, not GitHub Copilot.) I’ve been wanting to experiment with some of the coding tools that are out there, so I decided to try some stuff out on my (personal) laptop. I was going to try Claude Code first, but I decided that GitHub Copilot would be easier for me to set up.

I started by enabling it in my personal GitHub account, and setting up the extension in Visual Studio Code. Then I tried something simple: asking it to write a “hello world” console app in C#. It did that successfully, but of course that’s a pretty low bar. I then tried to get it to help me create a git repo for the project. That worked, but it didn’t create a .gitignore file , so all of the binary output files got added to the repo. When I pointed that out, it apologized and created a .gitignore file, but it didn’t really offer me any help with cleaning up the mess it created. And, while the .gitignore file it created was “good enough”, it was a little questionable.

So I stepped back a bit, deleted the git repo and the .gitignore file, and tried again in Visual Studio 2022. I went through the usual steps in VS 2022 to initialize a git repo, and that created the usual VS .gitignore, so that was a lot cleaner than what Copilot did. Then, I set up Copilot in VS 2022. It probably works a bit better in VS 2022 over VS Code, at least for me.

I had Copilot in VS 2022 make a few little changes to the program to see how it worked. I had it add a line to output the current date and time, and that was simple enough. I then had it add some code to show the operating system and version, and that was a bit dicier. I had to coach it through making changes so that the program would actually output “Windows 11 Pro” instead of Windows NT or Windows 10.

So my opinion on this stuff hasn’t changed much. It’s interesting, and can be useful, but it’s wrong about half the time, and it’s often no more efficient than just doing an internet search and copying something from Stack Overflow. I kind of want to try it on something bigger, but I’m not sure what I should try.

On the sports topic: as per my last post, I signed up for NFL+ Premium recently, and have been watching some preseason football. The annual Jets/Giants preseason game is tomorrow night. That’s usually fun.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do about the new ESPN service. I’ll have to look at the price for switching my Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle to include the full ESPN.

And I’m still planning on skipping the new Fox service, on general principle. Which is a bit tough, since the first two regular season Giants games are on Fox, so I won’t be able to watch them. My plan, for now, is to watch NFL RedZone (via NFL+) on Sundays and see if that’s good enough to keep me entertained and show me enough of the Giants game.

I’ve been looking into RedZone a bit; it’s interesting. It seems to be quite popular. I’d been aware of it previously, but have never watched it or really learned anything about it. There’s been some concern about what will happen to it after the NFL/ESPN deal goes through (assuming it does). That shouldn’t affect anything this season; it should be at least a year before that’s finalized.

Meanwhile, I’ve watched a lot of Phillies baseball this week. I’ve just been in the mood for baseball instead of, really, anything else. They’ve lost their last three games, so that’s disappointing, but I still like watching them.

Streaming Chaos

Preseason football has started up, so that’s got me thinking about how I might be watching (or not watching) football this year. Last year, I had YouTube TV, and the year before that, I still had the broadcast basic package from my cable company. So this is the first time I won’t have any way to watch regular old broadcast TV during football season. (I could still break down and re-subscribe to YouTube TV, but I’m not planning on doing that.)

Streaming is getting even more complicated this year, it seems. Here’s a fun article about how to watch football this year. ESPN has a new streaming service starting up soon. If I understand things correctly, my ESPN+ sub will become an ESPN Select sub, so no big change there. I guess I could switch to the “full” ESPN service, and then I’d be able to watch… whatever games are on ESPN/ABC but not ESPN+. I’m honestly not sure what those will be. Monday Night Football might be ESPN/ABC only, or might also be on ESPN+. Who knows?

For Sunday night games, I should be OK. I still have a Peacock subscription. I don’t have any way to watch Sunday day games right now though. I canceled my Paramount+ sub, so no CBS games. Fox has a new streaming service starting up, which should carry their Sunday games, but that service also includes Fox News, and I’m dead set against supporting that stuff, so I guess I’m going to go without.

I did just pay for a year of NFL+ Premium. That gives me NFL Network and NFL RedZone, so that’s something. I’ve never actually had RedZone before; maybe I can just watch that on Sunday? The NFL+ sub should let me watch all the Giants games on my iPhone or iPad, I think, just not on TV. So maybe I’ll just watch football on my iPad from now on.

Here’s an interesting article on the new ESPN/NFL “mega-deal.” I’m not sure I even understand what’s going on with football right now.

And, of course, I could just give up on football. I’ve done it before. I’ve gone back and forth on it, over the last decade. Some years, I’m enthusiastic about it, and some years I’m not. (Often, that has to do with how well the Giants are doing that year…)

Meanwhile, I’m still enjoying baseball. I watch the Phillies on MLB.TV a few times a week. I’m always a little annoyed if a game is blacked out because they’re playing the Mets (or Yankees), or because it’s on ESPN or wherever. But there are so many games in a baseball season, it doesn’t bother me that much if I miss a few.

Of course, if the Phillies get into the post-season, that becomes a problem, as those games aren’t on MLB.TV. Sigh.

Windows 11, and more audio stuff

I feel like I’m blogging too much lately, but I also feel like I have a lot of stuff rattling around in my head, and I need to get it out.

I’ve mentioned in a recent post that we’re in the middle of a company-wide Windows 11 upgrade at work. They finally got around to pushing it out to my desktop on Wednesday and my laptop on Thursday. The desktop upgrade broke networking, which was a bit of an issue. I won’t get into the details, but I had to unplug the PC and walk it over to our help desk so they could get it working again. That cost me a couple of hours, between the upgrade and all the troubleshooting and back and forth.

The laptop upgrade was easier. I had a similar networking issue, but I knew how to fix it now, and could do that myself, in that instance. Also, I could continue working on the desktop while the laptop was updating itself. (With the desktop, I hadn’t brought in the laptop that day, so I was stuck fooling around on my phone while the upgrade was running, and while I was waiting on the help desk…)

Windows 11 hasn’t broken any of the tools I rely on for work. It’s made one or two things slightly harder to do. I don’t think it’s made anything easier. (I’ve probably said this before, but my criteria for OS upgrade success these days isn’t “does it make things better?” but rather “does it break anything important?” and “how much more of a pain is it vs. the old version?”)

I’ve been toying with the idea of upgrading my home desktop PC to Windows 11, despite the fact that it’s not really supported. (The CPU is too old.) I set a registry value that is supposed to bypass the CPU check. But that still wouldn’t allow me to run the installation assistant. So, then, I made a bootable installer on a USB stick, but that won’t let me upgrade, just do a clean install. So, anyway, that was all a waste of time.

Back on the audio stuff: There were three football games airing exclusively on the NFL Network yesterday, and I wanted to watch them. (Maybe not all of them, but I wanted to kill a little time with football playing in the background.) My NFL+ subscription lets me do that, but I couldn’t get the audio working in the NFL app on my Apple TV. This is one of those things that should just be a minor irritation, but I was in enough of a mood when this happened that I got really frustrated with it. I actually could get sound, weirdly, if I switched from my TV speakers to AirPlay output to my Sonos speakers. (I’m using a Sonos soundbar as my TV speaker anyway, but I have it directly hooked up to the TV, so the Apple TV isn’t normally aware that it’s even using the Sonos.) I’m definitely not the only person to have this issue with the NFL app. I’ve found references to it on Reddit and the Apple forums. And the NFL+ site has an article about troubleshooting audio problems, but it’s typically generic and useless.

The frustration was mostly around how complex something as simple as watching TV has gotten… It used to be that you could just turn on your TV, and, you know, watch a football game. Now I have to turn on the TV, switch the HDMI input to the Apple TV, turn on the Apple TV, launch the app, watch it lock up, force quit the app, relaunch the app, wait for it to load, find the right button to press to get into the right feed… Yeah, I know I’m an old man. I should be happy I have so many options for quality entertainment.

And a little more on my new Beats Studio Pro headphones: I found a good video review of them from MKBHD. And I used them last night to watch 65 on Netflix. “Loud dinosaur movie” was a good choice for checking them out. They worked well for that, and successfully drowned out the Christmas music outside.

I’ve been awake today since 5:30 AM. It’s almost noon now. I haven’t done much useful, but I made myself a nice breakfast, went for two walks, listened to some music, read some comics, and had a croissant for a snack, so life is good, I guess.

A rambling Sunday post

OK, so having gotten the previous Grammarly post out of my system, and having gone for a walk, I’m now watching the early-morning Frankfurt game on NFL+, and ready to write the long, rambling post I mentioned in the Grammarly post. (Side note: I like this short ESPN article about Belichick’s experience in Germany. I almost feel bad for Belichick this season, but not really. I mean, well, he’s still Belichick.)

Ever since I got COVID, things have been a little shaky for me. I keep getting a little sick, then a little better, then a little sick. I don’t think I’ve gotten COVID again (since that first rebound), so that’s good. I was fighting these low-level cold symptoms this past week, culminating with enough nasal congestion on Friday that I risked taking pseudoephedrine. I say “risked” because I often get some side effects from that. It definitely helped me get through the day Friday, but then I had some trouble sleeping. I was OK on Saturday morning, and got through my usual Saturday morning tasks: laundry and grocery shopping. But, after that was done, I sat down at my computer to pay some bills, and started getting a migraine aura.

I haven’t had serious migraine problems since 2016, but I’ve gotten a couple of mild ones this year. Looking at my notes in Day One, I see that I had one on June 1, and might have had one in May too.  (Day One is great for logging this kind of stuff so you can identify patterns.) This one was bad enough that I had to give up on the computer and lie down. I had planned to spend some time Saturday finishing up a LinkedIn course on more AI stuff, and to maybe finish watching season five of Dragon Prince, but that all went out the window. Instead, I listened to some podcasts and audiobooks. I listened to a bit more of the Locke & Key audio drama that I’ve been listening to on & off for about a year now. (I can never get myself to stick with it and finish it. Maybe I’ll get it done before the end of this year…) And I started listening to Neil Gaiman’s Warning: Contains Language, which I got as part of a Humble Bundle about ten years ago.

Eventually, I got to the point where I could sit up and watch TV. But I didn’t feel like I could deal with anything too challenging, so I settled on college football, which I haven’t watched at all in the last several years. I watched most of the Florida State vs Miami U game. That was the kind of game that could have been a blowout, but was actually a pretty close game and kind of fun to watch. (I’m still a little iffy on the whole Seminoles thing, but apparently the actual Seminole tribe is OK with it, so who am I to argue?) I don’t know that I’m going to get back into watching a lot of college football now, but maybe it’s an option for Saturdays when my brain isn’t working well enough for anything else.

Anyway, I managed to get a good night’s sleep last night, and feel like I could handle something more challenging than football today if I had to. But I’ve gotten used to spending Sundays watching NFL football this year, and I’m enjoying that, so I think that’s what I’m going to be doing today. I probably won’t be paying a lot of attention though. The Giants are playing at 4, and the Jets are on the Sunday night game. The Giants are terrible right now and they’re playing Dallas, so that game should be a blowout. The Jets are playing the Raiders, and both of those teams are mediocre, so that game might be competitive, but not that interesting. So I’ll probably go with having football on in the background all day while I do other things that don’t require too much concentration. So: writing rambling blog posts, catching up on email newsletters, and that kind of stuff. Maybe I’ll mute one of the games and finish that LinkedIn course I mentioned above.

NYCC, football, booster shots, and other stuff

It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve got a bunch of assorted thoughts kicking around in my head, so I’m going to try to write a rambling blog post, and see what shakes out.

NYCC

NYCC is next weekend. I’m not going this year. And I’m not even enthusiastic about watching any panels from home, really. I looked at the schedule of what would be streaming via Popverse, and there’s not much that looks interesting to me. I’m pretty sure that NYCC 2021 was the last time I went into NYC for anything. (Leaving out the time in 2022 when I passed through on my way to Albany.)

It’s also occurred to me that I haven’t really taken a vacation this year, and we’re getting near the end of the year. I’ve used up a fair bit of my PTO time this year on sick days, but I could still take a few days. I should probably do that. I don’t need to have a plan to do anything specific, but it would probably be good for my mental health to check out from work for a bit and go for some long walks or something.

TV and TiVo

I see from my “On This Day” widget that I bought my TiVo eight years ago. I keep thinking about finally getting rid of it and pulling the plug on cable TV entirely, but I’m still hanging on to it. I only get the basic broadcast channels through cable now, but that’s still useful for stuff, including football, news, and a handful of shows.

Meanwhile, I talked myself into signing up for NFL+ yesterday, mostly because it was 50% off, and because I kinda wanted to watch the Jaguars/Bills game from London this morning at 9:30, and it’s only on NFL Network. So now I’ve got subscriptions to both MLB.TV and NFL+. At some point, I’m going to have to cull some of these subscriptions. I’ve got Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, and the Disney+ bundle, plus Apple TV+ from my Apple One bundle, and Amazon Prime Video.

The Giants are doing pretty bad this year, by the way, and I usually lose interest in football if the Giants aren’t doing well, but I still haven’t given up hope this year just yet.

COVID and flu shots

I got my COVID booster and flu shot yesterday, COVID in the left arm and flu in the right. My right arm is fine today, but the left arm hurts a lot. It was bad enough overnight that I couldn’t put any weight on it, so every time I rolled left, I got a stab of pain. That made for a rough night.

I’ve noticed that all of the “ceremony” around COVID shots is basically gone now. The person who gave me the shots didn’t ask for my vaccination card or ask me to sit around CVS for 15 minutes afterward. And the old CDC V-safe program was shut down earlier this year, so I won’t get all of those fun text messages this time. So I guess we’re in the phase now where we’ll just be getting a yearly flu shot and COVID shot together every year, and it’ll be no big deal. Oh well.

Social media

Like most sane people, I’ve almost entirely given up on Twitter now. I’m mostly using Mastodon and Threads. I’d hoped that most of the people I followed on Twitter would move over to Mastodon, but that didn’t happen. A bunch of the tech folks moved to Mastodon, but most non-tech folks (and news orgs) have moved to Threads instead. That’s not great, since Threads doesn’t have any third-party clients, and will probably eventually have ads and a bunch of other dumb cruft, but it’s good enough for now, I guess.

Right now, I’m listening to Sleepy Hollow on XPN, and Julian Booker, who used to post the playlist to Twitter, is posting it to Threads. So it’s that kinda stuff that’s probably going to wind up on something like Threads rather than Mastodon, and I guess I need to deal with that.

In theory, Threads is eventually going to support ActivityPub, so there will probably be a way to consolidate my Mastodon and Threads browsing into a single third-party client at some point. (Assuming Meta isn’t pulling a Lucy/football thing and lying to us about ActivityPub support…)

Speaking of Lucy/football stuff, here are a couple of fun takes on that from today’s Foxtrot and an older Off The Mark. And, while I’m posting comic strip links, I liked today’s Cul De Sac too!

first week back

Well, it’s the end of my first week back in the office on the new schedule. Short version: I survived working in the office for three days in a row. Longer version: I don’t like the “everyone is in the office at the same time” deal. It’s too crowded and too loud. If you go back to before the pandemic, the norm was to have meetings in person, in meeting rooms. Now, they’re all on Teams. So everyone is at their desk all day, and a lot of people are in a lot of meetings. So it makes it hard for a programmer to concentrate when I’m hearing bits and pieces of other people’s meetings all day. My AirPods Pro are a necessary tool at this point. I’ve been listening to The Pretenders a lot this week.

Going back to the football part of my previous post: Ugh. The Giants lost to the Cowboys, 40-0. That’s about the worst start they’ve ever had, at least in my memory. The Jets won, but Aaron Rodgers is done for the season. The Eagles won last night, and are now 2-0, so maybe I switch my allegiance to Philly!

And some notes on some tech stuff I’ve been working on: I started trying to learn Jenkins this week. I haven’t gotten too far yet. I keep getting interrupted. Reading up on installing Jenkins send me down a side trip to also consider installing WSL 2 and maybe Docker Desktop for Windows. I got as far as installing WSL 2 on my work desktop, and on my personal Windows 10 desktop and Windows 11 laptop. (I’d been meaning to do that anyway.) But no further. I got caught up in a support issue this afternoon, and never got back to any of my other work.

Next week could be interesting. In addition to having to go into the office Tuesday through Thursday, I might have jury duty starting Friday. I won’t know for sure on that until Thursday night. I could actually use a break from work, so I wouldn’t mind it if I get put on a jury and can miss a few days of work…