Category: football

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…

back to the office (more often) and other autumn stuff

Next week, we go from two days a week in the office to three days. The old way was that half the employees came in on Mon/Wed and the other half on Tue/Thu. (I was in the Tue/Thu group.) The new plan is for everyone to come in Tue/Wed/Thu, with Monday and Friday being work from home days for everyone.

I’m not looking forward to it. I think I get a lot more work done from home, and I’m a lot more comfortable. In the office, even with only half the folks there, it can get pretty noisy, since almost all of our meetings are on Teams now. I generally need to keep my AirPods in with some music playing to drown out everyone else’s Teams calls and concentrate on my own work. And I’m not a big fan of driving 20 minutes each way just to sit in a cubicle for eight hours. I’ve probably made these complaints on this blog already at some point, but it always makes me feel a little better to vent about it.

I’m also a little worried about my own stamina. I’ve been finding that my in-office days are kinda exhausting, sometimes. Maybe I have some kind of medical problem, or maybe I’m just getting too old for this stuff. I don’t know. I guess we’ll see if I can manage three days in a row or not.

NFL

On a different subject, today is the first Sunday of the NFL season. So that’s cool. The Giants are on the Sunday night game and the Jets are on Monday night, so there are no local afternoon games. I’m pretty sure I’ll turn on whatever games are on, and just let them play in the background today. It’s a rainy day and I don’t have much else to do.

I spent a little time this morning trying to figure out what NFL-related content I can watch on my streaming services this season. I can still watch NFL Matchup on ESPN+, it seems. And NFL Primetime too. Apparently, Inside the NFL has moved from Paramount+ to the CW, which is a bit weird. I guess I can watch that on my TiVo then, if I can figure out when it airs. And I guess I can watch PFT Live on Peacock, if I need more football news.

I’ve been getting into sports enough recently that I’ve been flirting with the idea of signing up for cable again, or one of the cable-like streaming services that includes ESPN. But any of those would cost me way too much money, and the prices are going up on some of them soon too. So I’m trying to stick with just what I have now. That means I can’t watch stuff like the US Open men’s final today, which is only on ESPN, but I guess I can live with that.

Time Marches On

So it’s Sunday morning again, and I’m futzing around on my laptop, aimlessly, as is my wont.

I thought I should mention Twitterrific again, as it now seems to be 100% officially dead. So I guess I should remove it from my iPhone and iPad and give up on Twitter completely now. I’d been holding out some hope that Elon would reverse course and turn the API access back on, but I guess not. Sigh.

I was also looking around at the “on this day” links on the sidebar of my blog, and noticed this one, originally linking to the website that my brother Pat and his wife Heather set up. Heather gave up the domain name for that, heatherandpatrick.com, a long time ago, after Patrick passed away. But, just for yuks, I decided to see what, if anything was at that domain now. Turns out that another Heather and Patrick are using it as a website for their upcoming wedding! That’s kind of nice. (Certainly better than the domain squatters who had been sitting on it every other time I’ve gotten curious about it over the years.) Anyway, they seem like a lovely couple, and I hope they have a great wedding!

On a completely different subject, I just got a notification that TiVo is turning off their suggestions feature. Kind of sad to see this going away, though I hadn’t used it much since I dropped back to the Broadcast Basic cable plan. This news got me curious about what alternative are out there to watch broadcast TV, rather than cable + TiVo, for me. First, it looks like I would still have no luck with an antenna. AntennaWeb still indicates that I’d need a major-league outdoor antenna to pick up anything from here. So that’s out. And some of the streaming services like Hulu + Live TV include the major broadcast networks, but that costs $70/month, which is way more than Broadcast Basic is costing me. So I guess I’m sticking with minimal cable + TiVo for now, even though TiVo seems to be in a slow death spiral, and my cable provider’s support for CableCARD is probably dicey at this point.

The Giants lost to the Eagles last night, so my interest in football for this year is mostly done, though I might watch the rest of the playoffs and the SuperBowl anyway. I really got interested in football this season, and that was kind of a surprise to me, since I’ve been losing interest gradually for quite some time now. I guess it was mostly the Giants doing well that kept me interested? Maybe also that, this season, football seemed to be just about football. There was almost no talk about politics or racism or COVID or brain injuries or anything. I realize that all those things are still going on, but I could watch a football game and pretend that it wasn’t for a few hours? Or at least not think about any of it? It was a nice escape. (And yes, the Damar Hamlin thing was a sudden jolt of reality, but he seems to be doing reasonably well, so that’s good.)

Speaking of escapism, I started watching Star Trek: Discovery season 4 yesterday. I signed up for Paramount+ a little more than six months ago, largely so I could watch all the new Star Trek shows, and I still haven’t watched a lot of it. I’ve mostly just been using Paramount+ to watch Inside the NFL lately. I need to catch up on both Discovery and Picard. Maybe now that the Giants are out of the playoffs, I can catch up on all my sci-fi TV.

Old Habits, follow-up

This post is a follow-up to yesterday’s Old Habits post.

On the E-ZPass thing: I’d posted a request on the E-ZPass website, asking them to keep the account open, and surprisingly, they responded, and told me that they’d keep it open for another year, but would close it in a year if there’s still no activity. So now I guess I have a year to drive through a toll plaza at least once. I guess if I go another year without driving on the Parkway or Turnpike, then I should just admit that I’m not the kind of person who drives on the Parkway or Turnpike anymore.

On NYCC: I activated my badge today. It was less annoying this year than in previous years, since I only had the one 4-day badge, rather than 4 one-day badges. Badge activation is still a pain though. (See this post from 2017 for the full rant. Most of the stuff in that post is still true.)

On football: The Giants won! And it was a pretty exciting game. So, yeah, I guess I’m going to be watching football this year, at least for a while. If the Giants collapse and wind up on a six-game losing streak or something like that, they I’ll probably stop.

Watching the NFL is a little more complicated than it used to be, but most games are still on regular broadcast TV, so I shouldn’t have any trouble watching them. Thursday night games are now on Amazon Prime, which I do have, so I can watch those too. Monday Night games are mostly on ESPN, which I don’t have, but some of them (including tonight’s game) are on ABC, so I can watch those. This article has some details on the schedule. (Of course, I may just stick with the Giants games, and skip all the random Thursday night, Sunday night, and Monday night games.)

I’ve noticed that there a lot of clickbait articles out there with titles like “How to Watch X Without Cable”, where X is baseball, or football, or tennis, or whatever. And they’re all basically just trying to drive traffic through affiliate links to DirecTV, Hulu, and other services that offer cable channels over the internet. There must be a lot of money in those affiliate links, since so many people are posting these articles. And very few of them actually have any useful info in them. They mostly just seem to be copy & paste from a template, then tweak for a particular sport or event. Oh well. I guess that’s how folks running web sites make money these days. Can’t blame them for doing that.

Old Habits

I’ve been thinking lately about old habits, and inertia, and what I should be examining and rethinking. A lot of this is due to the change in seasons.

And a little is due to a letter I got in the mail from E-ZPass last week. Apparently, I haven’t used my E-ZPass since 2019, so they’re going to close out my account. I was a little surprised by this, but when I stopped and thought about it, I realized that it’s true. The last time I drove on the Parkway or Turnpike was June 22, 2019, according to my E-ZPass history. Looking at my Day One journal, I see that I’d gone down to Whiting on that day, to visit my old friend Gloria’s family, and to visit the cemetery. And I haven’t been down there since. I’ve thought about visiting the cemetery on multiple occasions over the last few years, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

I guess I can keep my E-ZPass account active if I use it within the next couple of weeks. So maybe I should drive down to the cemetery and say hello to my parents. Or I could just give up on E-ZPass and return it.

Another thing I’m thinking about, and this one is definitely related to the change in seasons, is football. I haven’t paid much attention to the NFL the last few years, but I’m going to give it a try again this year. Today is the first Sunday of the season, and I’m currently watching the Jets game. I’ll watch the Giants game at 4 PM too, and maybe the Sunday night game on NBC after that. Or maybe not. I’m not paying a lot of attention to the Jets game right now, but I’m getting a nice feeling of comfort and familiarity from it. Just the sound of the game in the background is kind of nice, especially on a rainy Sunday in September.

I just googled “comfort of the familiar” and found some interesting stuff. It can be a good thing and a bad thing. I don’t think there’s any harm in getting some comfort from the sounds of a football game. But if I find that it’s not doing much for me, there’s also no harm in turning it off and reading a book.

On another subject, I just got my badge for NYCC in the mail. I still have plenty of time to decide if I’m actually going or not. I haven’t made a hotel reservation. If I go, I guess I’ll just take the train in each day. And if I don’t go, I’m out $210, unless I can resell my badge to someone else, but that’s not a big deal if that’s the way it goes. I’m fine either way.

I just looking at Evernote and Day One, trying to figure out when the last time I’d been in NYC was. When I went up to Albany in March, I spent an hour or so in NYC, to switch trains. But the last time I really did anything in NYC was October 2021, for last year’s NYCC. I’d thought about going in for some museum visits on various weekends this summer, but just never got around to it. So I’m wondering if I should keep paying for my Met and MoMA memberships, or let them expire.

I’m starting to wonder if my life is ever going to get back to what it used to be, pre-COVID. And I’m wondering if I actually want it to, or need it to. Part of me is fine with my “new normal” of spending a lot more time in my apartment, and a lot more time closer to home, in general. I need to think about what I should hold on to, and what I should let go of.

Are you ready for some football?

With the Super Bowl coming up tomorrow, now seems like a good time to talk about football for a bit. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before on the blog, but I completely lost interest in football this season. I haven’t watched a single game. My interest has been waning for the last several years, but this year, I just couldn’t muster any interest.

I read a good article yesterday about cultivated disinterest in professional sports, and I can say that’s not the case for me. I’ve always been genuinely interested in football, at least, if not any other pro sports. I’m a nerd, but I’m not a snob. (At least in this area.) But the article reminded me of some of the benefits of keeping up with football. In particular, having something to talk to other people about! I’ve been at my current job for two years now, and I really haven’t done a great job of making friends with the people there. That’s maybe a subject for another blog post, but let’s just say that maybe wearing a Giants shirt to work occasionally might have helped start a few conversations.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to watch the Super Bowl tomorrow or not. I don’t have much invested in it, obviously, since I haven’t followed the game this season, but I still dislike Bill Belichick and would enjoy watching him lose. And it’s pretty easy to think of Pete Carroll as a good guy, and root for him. (Though things probably aren’t that black and white.) So, I could probably watch the game with at least a modicum of emotional investment.

I’m also thinking about my Mom and my brother Pat this weekend, too, since Feb 1 is the day Mom died, and Feb 2 is the day Pat died. I know that I tend to get depressed on these two days, so I had a rough plan for this weekend in place. I’m taking Monday off, and I was going to head into NYC on Sunday and/or Monday and do some museum-hopping, which usually acts as a good distraction for me when I’m feeling down. But now it’s looking like snow Sunday night into Monday, and maybe a lot of it. So I’m thinking it might be better to stay home and watch some football on Sunday.

Giants 17, Patriots 14

Okay, color me impressed. And a little surprised. I never really doubted that we could win the SuperBowl, but I didn’t really think we would win the SuperBowl.

In the weeks leading up to the big game, by the way, I enjoyed following the blogs at the NY Times and Wall Street Journal. The WSJ blog doesn’t actually have a lot of stuff about football on it, but it’s still fun to read. The Times “Fifth Down” blog is much more focused on the actual football. The live blog entry they did during the game is pretty neat.