New Year’s Day 2025

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 chart
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
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.

Okay, back to fun stuff. Here’s my 2024 year in film, from Letterboxd. I watched a little over 100 movies this year. I started and ended the year with After the Thin Man. My five-star ratings for the year went to The Thin Man, Casablanca, When Marnie Was There, and 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki. The only film on that list that was new to me was When Marnie Was There.

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).

cleaning up my bookmarks

I’m still doing the thing where I’m going through my old unread Pinboard bookmarks, figuring out what to do with them, then updating or deleting them in Raindrop. It’s pointless, but fun, and occasionally interesting.

Today, I stumbled across this link from November 2016. Very weird to look back on that, and how we were all feeling and how it all went. In about a month from now, we’ll all be going through… hopefully not the same thing. But maybe the same thing. Only worse. Well, it’s a nice quiet Sunday morning, so maybe let’s not think about that right now.

Meanwhile, I also found this amazing video from OK Go which I bookmarked almost exactly ten years ago and never watched. (At least I think I never watched it… I have no recollection of it, and it seems like the kind of thing I’d remember. But of course a lot has happened in the last ten years.)

Books

On an unrelated subject, I finished The Gathering Storm yesterday, and Thinking in Systems on Friday. I really enjoyed both of those books.

I’ve got only two more books to read in the Wheel of Time series. And I’m almost caught up to The Wheel Weaves podcast. If I do catch up, I’m not sure what I’ll want to do about that. It would be cool to follow along with the podcast in real time, but, on the other hand, they only read a chapter or two per week, so if I kept current with them, I’d slow myself down a lot. I could take a break and read a few non-WOT books until they’re sufficiently ahead of me. Or I could keep reading at my current pace and let myself get past them. Well, I’m not sure which way I’m going to go yet. Maybe I should take a break and read some comics for the next week or two.

TiVo & YouTube TV

There’s been some talk on Reddit over the last week about Optimum discontinuing CableCARD support. I returned my CableCARD to Optimum in March, and switched to YouTube TV, so this doesn’t affect me. (And I’m not sure if Optimum has really discontinued all CableCARD support, or if this is just support for a specific type of card in a specific service area. You know how these things go on Reddit…)

My yearly TiVo service would normally be renewing this month; I canceled it in August, so I should be good there. But I still haven’t wiped and recycled my TiVo yet. I need to do that… There were a few things on there I wanted to watch, and I did watch some of them, but there’s a point where I’ll need to just give up and admit that I’m not going to go back and watch those last few Svengoolie movies. (Though it’s Halloween this month, so maybe now is a good time to do that…)

Anyway, I guess I’m keeping YouTube TV at least through football season. I’m getting my money’s worth out of it right now, between the NFL and the MLB playoffs.

 

Brian Eno

I’ve been a fan of Brian Eno for a long time. There’s a new movie out about him, and it looks interesting. It’s a “generative” film: different every time it’s shown. Here’s some explanation for that from the NY Times review:

The word “generative” has become associated with artificial intelligence, but that’s not what’s going on with “Eno.” Instead, the film runs on a code-based decision tree that forks every so often in a new path, created for software named Brain One (an anagram for Brian Eno). Brain One, programmed by the artist Brendan Dawes, generates a new version of the film on the fly every time the algorithm is run.

Hmm. If it was anyone else, I’d say it’s a dumb gimmick, but since it’s Brian Eno, I’m curious. I assume some version of it will make it to streaming and/or Blu-ray at some point, but I wonder what they’ll do with that. I imagine they’ll have to create a single standard version of it at that point, but it would be cool if they found a way to keep some randomness in it.

I was listening to the soundtrack from the film yesterday on Apple Music, and I like it, but the version on Apple Music doesn’t have all the tracks. So that sent me down a rabbit hole trying to decide if I should buy the CD or maybe the digital download. You can buy the CD direct from Eno, or from Amazon, or a number of other places. I could only find the digital version here. I wound up buying that.

I think this is the first time I’ve bought a digital album in quite a while. I’ve really just been relying on Apple Music. And if the whole Eno soundtrack was on it, it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to search out the MP3 or CD versions. Well, anyway, I’m having a fairly nice Sunday listening to Brian Eno now!

audio stuff (mostly)

In my last post, I made mention of an audio issue with my home desktop PC. It was bugging me again, so I decided to take a stab at solving it, and I think I have. (At least for now.) My old speakers where hand-me-downs from my brother, and were at least 20 years old. I remembered that I also had a pair of speakers from my Dad’s old computer. Those are at least ten years old, but they’re probably a little newer than the other speakers. They’re also taller than the other speakers, so I can’t put them on my desk surface like those, since they don’t fit under the hutch. So I put them on the hutch, behind the monitor. (There isn’t enough room to put them on either side of the monitor, so they have to sit mostly behind it.) That’s not perfect, but it works, and I’m not getting any interference now. I’m not sure if that’s because the speakers are better shielded, or just because they’re a little further from the router, but I’ll take it.

The old speakers came with a subwoofer that I kept under my desk, and that really improved the overall sound. These speakers are just a basic stereo pair, but they’re pretty good. And I don’t really need great sound quality at my PC. It just needs to be good enough for some background music while I’m working.

On a semi-related topic, I ordered a pair of Beats Studio Pro from Costco last night. They’re on sale for almost 50% off at a bunch of places right now, so I decided that $180 was a reasonable price to play for a set of headphones that will get some use, but probably not as much as my AirPod Pros, which I use nearly every day.

I bought a set of Beats Solo Pro headphones in 2021, and I only use them occasionally. The Studio Pros should be, hopefully, a noticeable improvement on the Solo Pros. I feel a little bad about buying these, when the Solo Pros aren’t quite three years old yet, but hey, at least I’m (still) not buying the $550 AirPods Max.

So I now have my old AirPods (bought in 2019), the Solo Pros (2021), and those 20+ year-old PC speakers to get rid of. I guess I should just recycle the old PC speakers. They’re probably still fine, if you’re using them in an environment without any wifi interference, but I’m not likely to find anyone looking to buy them. And the AirPods and Beats both still work (and hold a charge, though probably not as good as they were when new). I’m not sure if I want to go through the hassle of selling them on eBay though. Maybe I should see if Goodwill accepts old headphones. I know a lot of people don’t like the idea of used AirPods, but if you clean them up a bit, they should be fine.

We’re having some kind of Christmas Jubilee here in Somerville tonight, and they’re already playing Christmas music outside. I just looked at the schedule, and it looks like it’ll be going on until 9:30 PM. And I’m guessing the noise level will get louder once the main part of the event starts up. So I guess it’s going to be another night of drowning out Christmas music with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and other loud TV shows. (Maybe the new season of Reacher? That’s loud, right?)

I’ve found one new Christmas album that I really like this year: The Frostbound Wood: Music for Christmas by Peter Warlock. (It’s not really new, of course, just new to me.) It’s nice and calm.

Software changes – Edge, Apple Music, Windows 11

I thought I’d post a follow-up today on a couple of software items I’ve blogged about recently, plus one new one.

Microsoft Edge

First: my switch from Firefox to Edge at work. I’m not having any real problems with Edge, though I’m missing a few things I had in Firefox. And I’m experimenting with some Edge features that look interesting. One thing I tried to figure out today is the difference between tab groups, collections, and workspaces. (And whether or not it was worth using any of them.) In Firefox, I used to use the OneTab extension to take groups of tabs and save them off to the side. That extension is available for Edge too, though it’s not on our “officially approved” list. So I thought I’d see if I could just use a built-in Edge feature for that. Here’s what I figured out:

  • Tab groups are a simple way to group a bunch of tabs together. You can’t really do much with them other than group them together. Tab groups seem to survive closing and reopening Edge. I’m not sure if they’ll sync between my laptop and desktop, but I suspect they will.
  • Collections are a little more flexible than tab groups. You can add open tabs to a collection, and you can also add text notes and images apparently (though I haven’t tried). Collections definitely survive closing and reopening Edge, and I’m pretty sure they sync. You can dump a collection out to a new OneNote page too, so that’s potentially useful. And you can copy all of the URLs in a collection to the clipboard, which is similar to something I used to do in Firefox with a specific extension. (I can’t remember the name on that one, but OneTab replaced it, really.)
  • Workspaces looked promising, at first, but I think they’re mostly useful for sharing a group of tabs/pages with a group. There are limitations on using them that, I think, make them less useful than tab groups or collections for my purposes.

So, in a nutshell, I think I’m going to start using collections for the stuff I used to use OneTab for.

Apple Music

I mentioned last week that I’d installed the Apple Music Preview on my PC. It’s working out OK, I guess, but I had been assuming that I could switch back and forth between Apple Music and iTunes. That turns out to be incorrect. If I launch iTunes now, it shows me a message saying that it can only be used to manage podcasts and audiobooks now. Once you install Apple Music, you can’t use iTunes for music anymore. And, on top of that, you need to install Apple TV Preview if you want to manage your movies and TV shows. So I went ahead and did that too.

If I knew that there was no going back to iTunes, I don’t think I would have installed Apple Music. But now I guess I have to get used to it.

Windows 11

I got an email today saying that my work machines would be upgraded to Windows 11 soon. (I have a laptop and a desktop, both on Windows 10 right now.) They’re going to push the upgrade out through Windows Update. I’m a little unclear on timing, but I think they might be pushing it out over the Thanksgiving weekend.

It occurs to me that I’ve never actually done a Windows 11 upgrade. At home, I have a Windows 10 desktop and a Windows 11 laptop. The desktop can’t be upgraded to Windows 11, unfortunately. It meets all of my needs, otherwise, so I’ve just stuck with it. But if my work machines are all going to be running Windows 11, I probably need to ditch the old desktop at home and buy a new one that can handle Windows 11, so I’m running it everywhere.  And if I do that, it’s going to push me into a bunch of other upgrades, I think. Like maybe getting a new monitor that actually uses HDMI instead of whatever old standard my current monitor uses. And probably buying an external DVD burner, since new machines don’t ever seem to come with built-in optical drives anymore. Oh well. I got this old PC in 2016, and I’m not sure how old the monitor is. So it’s probably time for some new hardware.

Apple Music annoyances

I’ve posted about my issues with using Apple Music on my PC before, back in June. Since then, I’ve just been living with the fact that iTunes occasionally locks up and I have to kill it in Task Manager. (And, after the first lockup, it’ll keep locking up until I reboot.) Sometimes, I switch over to Cider, and that works, but today, Cider was acting up too.

So I decided to finally go ahead and install the Apple Music Preview for Windows. The preview version was released way back in January, but it’s still labelled as a “preview” and I haven’t seen any word about a final release. It works well enough, I guess. My main problem with it, so far, is that I can’t figure out how to turn on the column browser. The column browser had disappeared in earlier versions of the Mac Apple Music client, so maybe it’s just something they haven’t added to the Windows client yet. It’s hard to tell. The help link in Apple Music goes to a page that doesn’t exist. And searching for help on this topic is mostly fruitless. I did find the official Apple Music for Windows discussion board, and posted a question there. But I don’t have much hope of getting it answered.

Yes, I know I’m really picky about my music software. But I’m old nerd, and I have a big library, and I like to be able to navigate my way through it effectively.

It occurs to me that the Apple Music client probably doesn’t have the ability to rip or burn CDs, which is something iTunes can still do. I really don’t need to burn music CDs anymore, but I do still need to rip them occasionally. I guess I’ll have to find a new way to do that, eventually.

Mildly amusing side note: I was listening to a podcast earlier this week that included this radio spot, for the Beatles’ movie Help. It starts with the line “attention adults”, which immediately tickled something in the back of my brain. I knew that line from somewhere, but I couldn’t figure out where. Eventually, I figured out that it was sampled in the Pizzicato Five song Baby Love Child, which is semi-famous for it’s use in a very good episode of Futurama. I actually mentioned the song on this blog, back in 2008. I hadn’t listened to it in a long time. So now I’ve listened to it about a dozen times this week. Interestingly, the song doesn’t seem to be available on Apple Music at all, and the Pizzicato Five YouTube page doesn’t seem to have an official video for it. (Mind you, all the song titles there are in Japanese, so maybe I just missed it.) But there are plenty of unofficial versions on YouTube, including a good live one from a performance at KCRW. The version in my own music library is an MP3 that I probably bought from eMusic, back when that was my primary way of acquiring music.

The Beatles

I was poking around on my iPhone after lunch today, looking for something to listen to, and noticed that Apple Music Radio was running a Beatles “top 100” show from 2 PM to 7:15 PM today. And it was just a little past 2, so I got in at #97 or thereabouts. I listened to an hour or two of it at my desk, and really enjoyed it. It was cool to just discover this randomly, but it would have been cool if there’d been a way to know about it beforehand. Maybe there’s an Apple Music newsletter or something, and I’m just not subscribed to it. I get weekly emails about Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, and other random Apple stuff, but I never seem to get any emails about Apple Music. Oh well.

I guess this Beatles thing is related to the release of the new Now and Then single that’s coming out tomorrow. I’m looking forward to hearing it, though I don’t want to get my hopes up too much. (Tying in with my recent obsession with ChatGPT, AI was apparently used to help clean up and finish the song.)

By the way, I’m still listening to the top 100, and they just got to #1, which is… “Here Comes the Sun”.  Not what I’d expect, but I’m not going to argue with Apple’s metrics.

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…

buggy iTunes on Windows, and alternatives

Part of my normal work-from-home routine is to fire up iTunes on my personal desktop PC and play music throughout the day. (On and off, depending on what I’m doing, of course.)

My desktop is a Windows 10 box, so I’m still stuck with iTunes. There’s a preview version of the new Apple Music client available in the Windows Store, but I’ve been leery about trying it. I’m afraid it might do something horrible to my local library, which is almost 18,000 songs, and around 125 GB, at this point. I’d prefer to wait until a 1.0 release.

But iTunes has been locking up on me a lot recently. So I got a bit fed up today and decided to give an alternative client a try. I’d previously tried Cider, but didn’t like it enough to keep it. That was a while ago, though, so I decided to give it another try. It used to be an open-source project, and you can still download that, but the new version is (I guess) closed source, and costs $4 in the Windows Store. I went ahead and bought it and tried it out today, so I thought I’d post some notes on it.

First, it’s mostly just a shell around the web interface for Apple Music. So if you go to music.apple.com and sign in to your account, that’s basically what you’re getting, with some added bells & whistles. It doesn’t deal with your local library at all. (I don’t mean to belittle it here; the bells & whistles might be really handy for some people.)

My major issue with it right now is that it’s got a “dark mode” interface, and no way to switch to a light mode. And I find that hard to deal with. So it’s definitely not something I’m really happy with. But it has done what I needed it to do today: let me stream music to my PC without locking up, like iTunes was doing.

It has occurred to me that another solution would be to stream Apple Music from my iPhone to my desktop via AirPlay. I have something called AirServer on my PC, and it works pretty well for streaming audio from my phone to my PC. Though that, also, is not a great solution.

Or I could go back to CDs! I do still have a CD player in my PC. I could just play CDs via VLC or Windows Media Player or something like that…

Oh well, I’m starting to overthink this stuff again. Time to get back to work…

more MusicBox

Since my previous post on MusicBox, I’ve been putting a lot more stuff into it. Today’s project was to go through my main Amazon wishlist, and move all of the albums I had in there over to MusicBox. That has resulted in about another 150 albums added, so I now have almost 400 albums in there, total. So I could probably stop looking for new music to listen to, and just work my way through the stuff in MusicBox, and I wouldn’t run out of new stuff for a few years, at least.

I had stuff in that wishlist going back to 2005. Lots of albums I’d run across at some point, and thought “I should buy that,” and then never did. (Which is fine. The purpose of my Amazon wishlist, over time, has largely been to keep me from making impulse purchases that I don’t really need…)

A pleasant surprise during this exercise was finding that ‎I Advance Masked by Andy Summers & Robert Fripp is now available on Apple Music. This is an album that I bought on vinyl when it first came out, in 1982. And it has, for some reason, gone out of print and hasn’t been available on CD or digitally. So I haven’t heard it in quite a while. I had the CD version on my wish list, but I didn’t want to pay the inflated prices it was fetching. Well, now it seems to have finally gotten released digitally. So I’m going to have to listen to that soon, and see if it’s as good as I remember.

I spent around two hours today working on this, with the Bills game on in the background. This was a pretty good activity for me right now, since my brain is acting a little funny. I’ve had a bad cold for several days. I’m mostly over it now, I think, but I was having a bunch of trouble with nasal congestion last night and this morning. So I took a pseudoephedrine, which tends to make me a bit jumpy. So I’d be too fidgety if I tried to sit still and just watch the game. But if I tried anything more mentally taxing than this exercise in copying & pasting, I’d probably screw it up. I’m hoping I’ll be back to “normal” tomorrow, so I can actually be somewhat productive at work.