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.
I took my last dose of Paxlovid today, and got a negative result on a COVID test this morning, so I think I’m over COVID. (Unless the Paxlovid rebound thing hits me, like it did in 2023.) I think I’m probably OK to go over to the farmers market a little later, which will be the first time I’ve mingled with other people in a week. We’ll see how that goes.
Meanwhile, I read a lot of comics this week. I didn’t have enough energy, initially, to read prose, so I stuck with comics. Then, I got on a kick, and kept going. I read a really random assortment of stuff, mostly from old Humble bundles, but from other sources as well.
Here’s a list of most of the stuff I read:
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
Superman: Earth One, Vol. 1-3 (JMS)
Vampirella Masters Series Vol. 4: Visionaries
Mind the Gap, vol 1-3
Angel Omnibus
Alex + Ada: The Complete Collection
C.O.W.L. Vol. 1
Detective Comics 471-476 (Englehart/Rogers)
Velvet, Vol. 1-3 (Brubaker/Epting)
All of it was quite good.
I also just bought yet another Humble bundle, this one containing a bunch of stuff from James Tynion IV. Most of the stuff in the bundle is DRM-free PDFs, but there are a couple of oddball items in it.
One book is redeemable only through DSTLRY, which is a company I’d heard of before, but hadn’t really investigated. And another two are redeemable through Neon Ichiban, which I hadn’t heard of, and isn’t live yet. They seem to be related to each other, and are both founded by a couple of ex-Comixology guys. I guess DSTLRY is more of a “publisher” and Neon Ichiban is more of “platform”. Here’s an article from Comics Beat about Neon Ichiban. So now I’ve signed up for a DSTLRY account, and put myself on the Neon Ichiban waitlist, though I’m not really enthusiastic about jumping on any new bandwagons.
Right now, I read all of my DRM-free books with Panels, which has evolved into a really nice app, and seems to be under continued active development. I read all of my Comixology books with the Kindle app, of course. And that’s about it.
I did also use the Comics Plus app this past week to read a book. That app is tied to my library card, and lets you read a fairly impressive catalog of comics, for free. I’m not really sure how the licensing works, but it’s different from Overdrive/Libby. With Overdrive, your library “owns” a set number of digital copies of a book, and you may have to get on a waitlist before you can read something. With Comics Plus, there are no limits. If it’s in their catalog, you can read it. So that’s great. Unfortunately, the user interface for the app is pretty bad. It froze up on me a number of times, and I couldn’t move from page to page without force quitting and going back in. And it doesn’t have good functionality for zooming in, which is something I need.
Somewhere along the line this week, I also started looking at Global Comix, which has been around for a couple of years. I’m pretty sure I’d heard of it before, but hadn’t looked into it. Here’s an article on them from Comics Beat. I’m definitely leery of getting too involved with any digital comics platform other than Amazon/Comixology, as it doesn’t seem like any of them are likely to be around for the long term. I notice that Omnibus shut down last year. They only lasted a year or two, so I’m glad I didn’t get too involved with them. And of course Dark Horse Digital shutting down was a big pain for me.
Well, regardless of all that, I have quite a lot of comics to read. Certainly enough, at this point, that I won’t run out before I die, even if I don’t ever buy any more. It’s interesting (if a little morbid) to start thinking about things from that perspective.
Well, that’s probably enough pointless rumination for today. Here’s hoping I have a nice COVID-free week.
I felt like I was getting a cold last weekend, on Saturday. It got worse on Sunday. Long story short, I got COVID again. I took off from work Monday through Thursday. I started Paxlovid on Tuesday. I went back to work today (Friday), working from home. I’m feeling a bit better, but very tired.
My last bout of COVID was in 2023. I’m hoping this one is pretty much done now. I’ll be taking the Paxlovid until Sunday, then I hope I’ll be all better. I’d like to have a “normal” week at work next week. I’ll test myself again on Sunday or Monday. If I’m still positive, then I’ll try to at least work from home next week.
I’m fairly exhausted right now. I had to stay up for an after-hours deployment today, which is now done. So I can go to bed. Of course, it’s Friday night in Somerville, so Main St. is pretty noisy. Maybe I’ll try to watch the rest of the Phillies game before bed.
I wanted to come up with a more imaginative title for this post, but I think I’m going to stick with “status update.” Once again, I’ve got a bunch of thoughts in my head, so I’m going to try to get some of them out of there and onto “paper.”
First item: I fell down last Sunday, while out for a walk, during the Somerville street fair. It was bad enough that I had to let the rescue squad take me to the emergency room. Short version: I got three stitches in my forehead. I had those taken out on Friday, by my regular doctor. I still have a black eye, and both of knees are still bruised up. Getting old sucks. I can’t even trip and fall down without it becoming a major life event.
The most expensive part of this accident is probably going to be replacing the lenses in my glasses, which got scratched up a bit when I fell. That’s going to cost me about $900.
I’m trying not to let this accident scare me too much. I’ve been going out for my usual walks almost every day since the accident, and I’m doing fine there. But I’m trying to be more careful, and keep an eye out for cracks in the sidewalk and stuff like that.
Second item: I’m watching the men’s final from Roland-Garros this morning. I’ve been enjoying following the tournament, on and off, this year, via both my HBO Max subscription, and via Radio Roland-Garros, which is really great.
I’ve been curious about the poster for this year’s RG, which was done by a comic book artist, Marc-Antoine Mathieu. The French love their comics, of course, so it’s cool that they did a comics-adjacent poster for this. I thought about buying the poster from the RG store, and it’s only €10, but shipping would be a lot, and I’m not sure if I’d wind up having to pay extra for tariff surcharges. So I decided that wasn’t worth the grief. Then I thought about trying to buy it from eBay, and I did find several sellers offering the poster, but it looks like they’re offering US-printed copies of the poster, so I’m not sure what the quality would be there, or if they’ve actually licensed the image or not. So maybe I should give up on buying the poster.
Then I thought I should look into Marc-Antoine Mathieu, and see if any of his work was available in English, from a US publisher. It turns out, not much of it is, and it seems to be mostly out of print. Some of it looks interesting, though. Here’s an interview with him that I haven’t read yet, but it looks cool. And an article from Paul Gravett’s website.
Last topic: I wasn’t feeling too well yesterday, and it was raining out, so I watched a bunch of TV. (It looks like I’ll be doing the same thing today.) One of the random things I watched was the first of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. I feel compelled to blog about it a little, since I’ve mentioned Evangelion on this blog before, a few times, first in 2003, and more recently in 2019. I’ve been meaning to watch these movies, ever since they were added to Amazon Prime Video back in 2021 (I think). Watching that first film is bringing back some strong memories. I’ve realizing that I’m a different person than I was back when I watched the original series twenty-plus years ago, but I’m still probably suffering from the Hedgehog’s Dilemma.
I last posted about my hearing aid about a month ago, so it’s time for a follow-up post. Since then, I have actually picked up my hearing aid and used it for awhile. I even went back for a follow-up and changed something. So I’ve got some stuff to blog about.
When I first got the hearing aid, they gave me a small dome. That seemed fine to me, though I was getting a little feedback from time to time. When I went back for my follow-up visit, they switched me to a large dome. That solved the feedback problem, but I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the large dome. I might see if I can try out the medium size. (Here’s a page with some info about domes.) I’ve figured out that I can order domes from Amazon, or I can just stop by the hearing aid center at Costco and get them to give me one for free. So I may do one or the other of those things.
In terms of overall performance of the hearing aid, I’m pretty happy. Short version: It helps me hear better. (Duh.) Longer version: It doesn’t solve all of my problems. I still have issues with speech comprehension in noisy environments. Maybe that’ll get better as I get used to the thing. I sometimes feel like my brain is still catching up and isn’t used to it yet.
And in terms of how it’s fitting in to my life, and how convenient / inconvenient it is:
With the small dome, I was getting to the point where I didn’t notice it was there, and it wasn’t causing any irritation. With the large dome, I find myself fiddling with it a bit, and trying to push it into my ear so it’ll stay in place. (Hence, I think I need to try the medium dome.)
While I can pipe audio to it from my iPhone, that doesn’t work really well. So when I want to listen to music or podcasts, I’m always swapping out the hearing aid and swapping in the AirPods. That’s a bit annoying, but it’s not that bad. I’ll get used to it.
At work, I use a regular old USB headset for Teams calls. I can use that with my hearing aid still in, but it’s not a great experience. The big issue is that the mic for the hearing aid is behind my ear, so outside the headphone cup. But the speaker of course is in my ear, so I’m getting the outside sound amplified and the sound from the headset blocked by the hearing aid dome. So I generally have to pull out my hearing aid when I’m in a Teams meeting or on a call. I might look into getting a fancier headset where the ear cup fits over the whole ear, so the mic and speaker are both under the cup. But I don’t know if that’s a good idea. For now, I’m just going to be taking the hearing aid in and out for calls.
It turns out that I now have too many things behind my left ear. At nearly all times, I have my glasses on and my hearing aid in, so that’s two things fighting for space back there. And I’m still one of those weirdos who is wearing a mask in certain places. So then I have the mask string back there too. And that tends to get tangled up with the hearing aid wire. And I’ve found this week that adding a baseball cap to the mix makes things even more complicated. So I’m getting used to all that and figuring it out.
Overall, the small annoyances aren’t enough to get me to give up on it and demand a refund. I’ll get used to it, I think.
I took a half-day today, because I was supposed to be going over to Costco to pick up my new hearing aid. But the hearing aid hasn’t arrived yet, and they didn’t call me to tell me that until after I’d already driven home, so now I have a half-day to relax, catch up on some reading, and maybe write a pointless blog post.
To back up a bit: I got my hearing tested in 2020 and 2021. In 2020, I went to an ENT, and he determined that (1) there was nothing wrong with my ears that required surgery or that I should be excessively worried about, and (2) that I was on the verge of needing a hearing aid for my left ear, but I could probably hold off. In 2021, I went to an audiologist who said that I should really get that hearing aid, and was going to follow up with a price, but then I never heard from her again. (And I never followed up myself.)
Now, in 2025, I finally decided that my hearing had gotten bad enough that I should try again. This time, I decided to try Costco. I was motivated to do this mostly from having watched this Adam Savage video. At some point in the video, he says something about how no one who has ever gotten hearing aids has ever later said “that was a bad idea.” So that got me to get off my butt and call the Costco hearing aid center.
You can get some details about Costco’s hearing aids here. Their appointment system is kind of low-tech. You need to call your local Costco to make an appointment. And there’s a PDF intake form that you can fill out and print, prior to your first visit. There’s no online system at all; it’s all over the phone and in person.
I can’t say that things went entirely smoothly for me. My first appointment was canceled and rescheduled, because the audio tech called in sick or something. (And the rescheduled appointment coincided with the Somerville St Patrick’s Day parade, so that made getting to Costco challenging…) For that appointment, they did a hearing test, asked a few questions, then set up a sample hearing aid for me, and let me try it out, by wandering around the store for a few minutes. I think it helped, but I wasn’t sure, so I told them I’d think it over.
Long story short, I made up my mind to go ahead with it and called them back a week or two later. So I had to make a second appointment to come back into the store and buy the hearing aid. (There was really nothing to do in that visit other than pick a color and hand over my debit card. I feel like they should have been able to do that over the phone, but whatever.)
And today’s appointment was to pick up the hearing aid. But they called around noon to tell me that it hadn’t come in yet, so we rescheduled for Sunday. So, you can see, it hasn’t been entirely smooth.
I’ll blog more about the hearing aid once I actually get it and have a chance to use it for a few days. I’m getting the Philips HearLink 9050, which is costing me around $850. (A pair would be $1600, but I only need one.)
And to back up a bit again, in between my first and second visits, I ordered a paid of AirPods Pro 2 from Costco, for $200, to see how they would work as hearing aids. I’d been curious about that, but didn’t want to buy new AirPods, since my old AirPods Pro (first gen) were still working fine. (I bought them in 2021, so they were four years old, admittedly, but there was nothing wrong with them…) Overall, I think I could get away with using them occasionally as hearing aids, but not as an all day, every day, kind of thing. And they’re not as good as the actual Philips hearing aid that I tried at Costco. (There are a few other enhancements between the first gen Pros and the second gen that I guess I don’t feel like I’ve wasted the $200 on the upgrade.)
So, anyway, that’s my pointless blog post for today. I’m hoping that the hearing aid will help me hear better when I’m in the office, and in other environments where I’m often saying “what?” or “huh?” or just entirely missing something someone was trying to tell me.
I’ve been reflecting a lot this month on the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 outbreak. I’m one of only a few people in the office who still wear a mask on a regular basis. And recently, for the first time, someone actually asked me about it. It wasn’t ill-intentioned or confrontational. It was just someone who didn’t understand why an otherwise healthy person would be wearing a mask in a meeting. So, from my perspective at least, I feel like we’ve hit a milestone, where wearing a mask in public has gone from “normal” (but uncommon) back to “unusual” and “worthy of comment.”
NJ Spotlight News did a report this week, looking back at the last five years. Here’s a link to the video, and here’s the original article. The summary for our current status is “manageable,” which I guess is fair.
I’m a little worried though. There’s another article on the site about how things are going with measles, and it ain’t great. If we can’t handle measles, I’m not sure how the current (federal) administration is going to do with COVID, going forward. Am I even going to be able to get a booster shot this year?
Here’s a link to a post from the end of March, 2020. Looking back at how things were going then, I guess we’re doing better. I’m not sure I’m doing better though. Here’s a chart of my weight, over the last five years, for instance:
My weight March 2020-2025
I’m honestly not doing that bad, and my current weight is (relatively) healthy. Still, it feels like I’ve gotten a lot older in the last five years. I’m still getting a decent amount of exercise, but I’ve had days where I get really tired by the end of the day. I rarely have the energy to go out and do anything interesting or adventurous. I’m feeling a lot more general aches and pains. My allergies are worse.
Hmm, now I feel like I need to find a way to end this on a positive note! …and, OK, I just spent 15 minutes trying to find a positive news article to link to, and didn’t find one. Instead, I keep stumbling across stuff like this and this. So I’m going to link to a mildly funny comic panel instead.
Well, I made it through another year, I guess, so here’s my usual New Year’s Day blog post! I went to bed around 9:30 PM last night, after watching the first two Thin Man movies on TCM. I got out of bed around 6:15 AM this morning. My days of staying up late on New Year’s Eve are pretty much done, apparently.
WordPress stats
I like to use these posts for both useful self-reflection and pointless (but fun) stats. I’m going to start with some pointless stats related to this blog. I ran a quick SQL statement to get my posts per year, over the life of this blog, and got the following:
blog posts per year
So that’s 49 posts in 2024. My most active year was 2005, with over 200 posts. The least active full year was 2013, with 33 posts. I don’t know if any of that is super-interesting to anyone but me, but there it is.
I was trying to think of why 2013 would be a low point, and I guess it probably had something to do with starting a new job that year. And that’s still my current job (SHI), almost 12 years later. (More about that later.)
I also looked at traffic stats on the blog. Nothing interesting to report there, except that December 2024 was my most active month ever, by a long shot, with more than 3000 views. All of that traffic was on one day though: December 9. And I’m pretty sure it was all search bots or AI training bots or whatever.
Health
I’ve been fighting a low-level cold since Thanksgiving (or thereabouts), so my health situation is pretty much business as usual. I remember having a pretty good run of “not being sick” at some point this year though. Maybe in the spring? I thought I’d made a note of it in Day One or somewhere, but I can’t quite pinpoint when it was or how long it was.
As for my weight: I started 2024 at around 160, and ended it at 165. I’ve been fairly stable at 165, plus or minus two, for the last three months. So I’m hoping that I’ve stopped gaining weight and have hit a stable point. (In 2023, I went from 150 to 160, so my gain this year was half of last year’s gain.) And I’m still logging all of my meals/snacks with LoseIt, as I have been doing since 2013.
I think I still need to do some work on getting my snacking under control. I need to cut down on cookies and pastries form the various bakeries and coffee shops here in town. (Having a good French bakery almost directly below my apartment, in the same building, has turned out to be a bit of a problem…)
On the exercise front, I’m doing good. I was going to look for some summary stats to support that, but I’ve just realized that Apple’s Fitness app doesn’t have any kind of “year in review” thing, similar to Apple Music Replay or any of the other end-of-year things that have gotten big over the last few years. Odd, since that would likely be really popular. You can get some yearly graphs in the Health app though. So, from that, I see that I’ve averaged about 45 minutes per day exercise and 550 calories per day on the “move” ring. That’s pretty good, and I see that it’s been pretty consistent over the whole year.
And, having written all this, I realized that I hadn’t gone for a walk yet, so I did that just now. Here’s a photo!
New Year’s Day morning walk
Work
Wow, I could write a lot about work this year. My old boss retired at the end of 2023, so I’ve just finished out my first year under the new boss. I had a pretty solid relationship with the old boss, but I’m still working on building one with the new guy.
I had gotten used to near-perfect performance reviews from the old boss, so I was a bit surprised to get an average review from the new one. (Basically, a rating of 3 out of 5 on everything, and a lower raise than I usually get.) I have a feeling that he didn’t put that much thought into the review, since he doesn’t actually know that much about me or what I do. So I’m not too worried about him just clicking “3” down the row of questions on the review form; it’s not that I did anything wrong, he just doesn’t have much to go on. But I think I do need to try to build up some kind of relationship with him in 2025, if I can. It’s hard, since he’s in Texas and I’m in NJ, and since he has a fairly large number of direct reports, and responsibility for three main groups (AX, CRM, and ServiceNow). So I guess I need to just keep trying to be a good employee and make sure to do the stuff he wants me to do.
In terms of systems and projects this year: We’re still on AX 2012, and haven’t made any real progress towards moving to D365 F&O. Maybe that’s too simplistic a view. Some stuff is going on behind the scenes, I guess, but there’s really no concrete progress on the real work of moving off AX 2012 and getting to F&O. For 2025, we’re planning on upgrading our SQL environment and getting on the latest CU for AX, so that’s something, and likely a necessary start. At the start of 2024, we were saying that getting to F&O was a three-year project. I think it’s still at least a three-year project, and I’m not sure if 2025 is going to count as year one, or if 2025 will be more like “year zero” with the real project starting in 2026.
We’ve been going through what they call an “agile transition” over the last year. We’ve been using something like scrum since 2022, but the new boss (and new IT management in general) has been trying to really formalize that. We now have a scrum master, daily stand-ups, and multiple standard meetings (the usual stuff). And our group has been broken up into two separate “feature teams.” Also, we’ve stopped doing weekly deployments, and now only do one deployment per sprint (every two weeks). So that’s been a lot to get used to. And for 2025, we’re switching from using Azure DevOps to Jira for our agile/scrum management. So, just when things are getting smooth, we’re going to upend it all again.
Learning and other fun Stuff
OK, that’s enough of the serious stuff. Now let’s go through some more fun stuff. Let’s start with my Goodreads year in books. Just 27 books for 2024, though some of the Wheel of Time books were pretty long (Lord of Chaos was 1049 pages.) I had set a goal for myself of finishing the WOT series in 2024, but I’m not quite done with the final book. So maybe I’ll finish it by the end of January 2025. I’m not quite sure what I’ll tackle next; WOT has been eating up a lot of my reading time. I have a bunch of Dresden Files and Laundry Files books in my TBR pile, so maybe some of those. Or Discworld? And I have so many comics piled up too!
In terms of professional learning, I only see three books on my list that count towards that, and they’re all fairly general books. I don’t seem to have learned any new programming languages in 2024, or anything else big.
Looking at my Pluralsight history, I see that I completed around 15 courses there in 2024. Some of those were work-specific, as part of Pluralsight “challenges.” Some were just stuff I wanted to learn on my own. So there’s a mix of agile/scrum stuff, C# stuff, AI stuff, and miscellaneous “soft skill” stuff.
At some point during the year, I started looking at maybe getting an AZ-204 certification. But I didn’t get very far with that, and I’ve pretty much dropped the idea now. Back in 2013, I also started thinking about a D365 F&O certification of some kind, but I’m not going forward with that either, at least not yet.
During my performance review, my boss said that he wants me to pursue a SAFe certification for 2025, so I’m starting to work on that. Honestly, I’m not too enthusiastic about it, but it’ll probably help my career, and I’m open-minded enough to give it a try, I guess. I’ve started a leaning path in Pluralsight, and a video series on O’Reilly. I might also try to read the SAFe Distilled book at some point too. I don’t know. This plan may fizzle out, honestly, but I’m going to give it a try.
My Apple Music Replay is kind of weird. My top song for the year is Hell of a Ride, by Nourished by Time. My top album is Songs of Surrender, by U2. And my top artist is Bombay Bicycle Club. I guess those all kinda make sense, though they’re all a little surprising. I guess the U2 album being on the top is mostly because it’s a four-disc set, and I added it in January. Looking at albums that I added to my library this year, none of them really stand out. There are some really good ones, but nothing that really stuck enough for me to listen to a lot, or that really blew my mind. At the moment, I’m pretty enthusiastic about the new Joan Armatrading album.
Ten Years Ago
I’ve been doing this so long that I can now look at my post from ten years ago (and even twenty years ago) and try to think about some big picture stuff. (The post from 20 years ago is just a one-liner about a song, so that one’s not too valuable.)
So, ten years ago:
I noted that I’d gone from 200 pounds to 165 over the course of 2014. So I’m starting 2025 at the same weight at which I started 2015. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but it is what it is!
2014 was my first full year at SHI. I’ve been there since, so overall that’s gone well, I think.
I talked a little about consulting and volunteering in that post. I haven’t done any consulting in a long time, and I’m not planning to. I think those days are done, unless I decide to do that part-time after I’m retired. And I haven’t done any volunteering either. I’d like to do some of that, but I’m getting to the point where I’m too tired to do much of anything outside of my normal salaried work. (And I’m OK with that.)
I finished 30 books in 2014, so that’s pretty similar to this year’s total.
I moved this blog to WordPress in 2014, so I guess I should have celebrated my ten-year WordPress anniversary in 2024. I’m still OK with WordPress (even with Matt Mullenweg’s shenanigans).
So I guess my vacation is just about done. Looking back over the week, I’m curious to see what I’ve accomplished, what I didn’t, and how I feel about it.
The boil water advisory was lifted last night, and water pressure seems to be back to normal, so I guess that’s over.
I mentioned in my last post that I’d wiped my TiVo. Today was the first Saturday of the month, which is when they accept electronics for recycling at our local recycling center, so I took care of that today. I got rid of both the TiVo, and my old answering machine (which I unhooked back in June when I parked my old home number).
On the way back from the recycling center, I tried to stop off at Duke Farms, which I’d wanted to do earlier in the week, but couldn’t because of the water main break. Alas, it turns out that this is the last weekend of the year where they require a parking pass to be reserved, rather than the first weekend when they don’t, as I’d thought. So they turned me away. I guess I can try again next Saturday.
I got some dental work done on Friday, and I’m still recovering from that. I’m glad I had that whole day off. I was supposed to have one follow-up visit after that, but now it’s two follow-ups, because there was an issue, and the dentist couldn’t finish up on Friday. So, one visit in mid-November and one in early December. Sigh. These things never seem to end.
Ditto for the car work I did on Monday. I was hoping to get everything done, but, for one problem, they just did a bit more diagnostic work and gave me a price for it, rather than just going ahead and doing it. So I’m going to have to bring the car back again at some point.
So am I ready to go back to work? I guess so. I’m very tired today, due to a lack of sleep last night (which I think is partially due to a lingering headache from the dental work, and partially due to some noisy folks outside at 1 AM last night). If I can get a good night’s sleep tonight, and have a good trouble-free day tomorrow, I should be good for work on Monday. But did I really succeed in de-stressing at all? Eh, a little, I guess. It was nice not to think (too much) about work for a week, and have some space to just hang out and get some stuff done.
It’s Sunday morning. I’ve made it through another week. I’m going to start writing this post as a stream of consciousness thing, and see where it goes. I have a bunch of thoughts in my head, as usual. Maybe this will come together into something coherent. Maybe not.
WordPress
There is a bunch of crazy stuff going on right now between WordPress / Matt Mullenweg and WPEngine. I’m not going to try to summarize it or link to any of the many articles and blog posts about it. I went down a hole this morning reading some of them, and I don’t think I came out of it with any useful knowledge about which side I should take (if any) and what (if anything) I should be doing. I guess I’ll be sticking with WordPress for the time being. This doesn’t seem to have devolved into something like the Twitter situation, where the whole thing has been turned into a nazi bar, and the only option was bailing out.
Maybe I should think about switching to Drupal! I haven’t touched Drupal in more than a decade, but it’s probably still fine, right? I haven’t read anything about Dries Buytaert going off the deep end. (Though, now that I’m looking at his Wikipedia page, I’m reminded of the Larry Garfield thing from several years back. Again, no clue who’s right and who’s wrong on that… Sigh.)
Business Books
In between Wheel of Time books, I’ve been reading a few relatively short business books. I mentionedThinking in Systems a couple of weeks ago. I’ve since also read a couple of books from Seth Godin’s Domino Project, from several years back. Honestly, I don’t remember why I was engaging with that stuff back when it was first coming out. I guess I had some kind of self-improvement thing going… maybe this was concurrent with my David Allen / GTD thing? I don’t know. Anyway, I have several of those books in my Kindle library but never got around to reading them.
I read Do the Work By Steven Pressfield last week, and I’m most of the way through Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli. Neither or these really seems like something I needed to read right now. I was hoping the latter book might help me figure out how to deal with the barrage of meetings I’ve been dealing with recently, but it wasn’t that helpful.
I’m not happy with the number of meetings I have to attend at work these days, and sometimes it seems almost comic (like the one meeting on Thursday that required two separate prep meetings for it, on Tuesday and Wednesday). But there’s not much I can do about any of that other than grin and bear it.
To get back to my reading, I guess I’m about done with business books for now. I should probably start reading Towers of Midnight today, and see if I can get through the prologue. Reading these books is bringing me so much joy. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, given that I kind of looked down on them for so many years.
My Health
I had a move streak going on my Apple Watch for quite some time. I gave up on it this week. It lasted for 52 days, which is pretty good. And the most interesting thing about it, to me, is that this means I haven’t been sick for almost two whole months! I even went to see a movie a couple of weeks back, and didn’t get sick. (Though this was a niche Paul McCartney movie, and there were maybe a dozen people in the theater, so not a typical crowded theater thing.) I need to watch myself though: I just noticed that it’s the one year anniversary of my bout with COVID last year. So I’m still going to play it safe and skip NYCC next weekend.
