Category: music

AirPods Pro

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I just bought AirPods Pro for myself. I already have regular AirPods, bought in November 2019, and Beats Solo Pro, bought in February. So now I have three pairs of wireless headphones. I really resisted wireless headphones when they first became popular, preferring to stick with wired ones. And it bothered me greatly when Apple discontinued the headphone port on the iPhone. But now I guess I’m all in.

I use my old AirPods all the time, and I really like them. I mostly use them for audiobooks and podcasts, but music sounds fine with them too. I use them for TV watching too, via the Apple TV.

I bought the Beats Solo Pro because I wanted noise-cancelling on-ear headphones that would sound better than the AirPods. I don’t use them that often, but I do like them. The noise-cancelling is good, as is the sound quality. (I used them to drown out some noisy passengers on the train this weekend, and that was great!)

I’d resisted buying AirPods Pro up until now, since I’d tried them out in an Apple Store once and they didn’t seem to fit my ears well. But I figured I’d give them another shot. Costco had them on sale for $190, and it’s easy to return stuff to Costco, so I went ahead.

My initial impression is that they fit my ears well enough, but not perfectly. The left one is a little loose, but the right one is just about perfect. I guess I’m using the medium tips. (Whichever ones were on them out of the box.) The noise cancellation is OK, but not nearly as good as the Beats Solo Pro. The sound quality seems to be a bit better than the old AirPods, but probably not quite as good as the Beats. So that means that I should probably hang on to those too.

I’m not sure that there’s any point in hanging on to the old AirPods now. I’d thought that maybe I’d use those for podcasts and more casual listening, and use the AirPods Pro for music, but I guess they’re comfortable enough that I can just use them all the time and get rid of the old AirPods. Hopefully, I can find a new home for them. They’re still in good working condition, so I don’t want to just send them in for recycling if I can avoid it.

On a related note, I’ve been listening to some of the new Spatial Audio stuff in Apple Music recently. I think the hype around it is a bit overblown. But it’s interesting. I still haven’t found a song or album yet where the spatial audio stuff really blows me away. But there are a few I need to give a close listen to. Spatial Audio works on all three of my wireless headphones. It probably works best on the AirPods Pro, but I’m not really sure. I really don’t just stop and listen to music much anymore. I’m usually listening to it in the background while I work, or while I’m out for a walk. I really need to do some deep listening. I may write another blog post about Spatial Audio and the other stuff going on with Apple Music, but I’ll save that for another day.

post-vaccine blues

I felt pretty good after getting my second shot on Tuesday. But I started getting a headache and feeling tired yesterday. I stuck it out and tried having a normal workday, but I wasn’t having a productive day at all. So I gave up today and called in sick. I spent the morning playing solitaire on my iPad and reading some of Grant Morrison’s X-Men run. I feel pretty good now, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t feel so good if I’d tried having another “normal” workday.

It’s right around noon now, and I have the whole afternoon to kill, so I figured I’d waste some time writing a blog post. There are a few things I’ve been meaning to write about, but haven’t gotten around to. I don’t have the energy to write anything deep, but I’ll just touch on a few random items:

As I mentioned above, I’ve started reading Grant Morrison’s X-Men run recently. I’ve had the trade paperbacks in my “to be read” stack for quite some time. I finally finished reading the last of his Batman run over the weekend, so I decided to dive into his X-Men next. His Batman run is pretty wild, but it’s also somewhat less than satisfying, since it’s spread across multiple titles and had to work around/with other stuff going on in the DC Universe (including the New 52 launch). When his run started, back in 2006, I was still buying monthly books, so I read the beginning of his run back then, as it came out. Then, I took a break from buying new comics for a while. So I’ve read through the rest of his run via TPBs and Comixology. So, for me, it’s been spread out over 15 years. I should probably have gone back and reread the earlier stuff in TPB before finishing it, but I have so much stuff to read that I hardly ever go back and reread anything.

His New X-Men run is fun so far. I’m finding it to be more coherent and straightforward than his Batman run. (Of course, I should say “coherent and straightforward” relative to typical Grant Morrison work. So still less coherent/straightforward than most mainstream comics.)

Looking back at this post from about a month ago, I have a few follow-up notes.

  • I did order a new Apple TV. It should show up tomorrow or maybe early next week. I would have been nice to have it today, since setting up an Apple TV would have been a good sick day activity, I think. I’ll post more once I have it.
  • I’m still not really missing cable TV. I’m watching a lot of PBS lately. And of course there’s plenty to watch on Netflix, Amazon, and so on. My last cable bill was a little confusing, so I’m still not entirely sure how much money I’m saving. The next bill should be for a full month of Broadcast Basic, so that should tell me what my regular bill will look like going forward.
  • I’m taking some advantage of the various services included with Apple One now. Though maybe not enough to justify the cost. I’ve downloaded a few Apple Arcade games, but I’m mostly playing this solitaire game. It’s funny how they can put out amazing games like Fantasian, and I wind up playing a solitaire game that doesn’t look much different from the Windows 3.1 solitaire game.
  • I haven’t delved into Apple TV+ much yet, but I did binge-watch the first season of Central Park recently. I was in the mood for a nice light cartoon, and that really fit the bill. Season two should be coming out next month.
  • I’m getting a lot of use out of Apple Music, but I’m not that excited about the new spatial audio and lossless stuff. I’m not sure I can hear the difference between their normal streaming quality and “lossless” quality. And the “spatial audio” thing sounds like a marketing gimmick. Well, I’ll give both a try when they’re available, I guess.

OK, so that’s a nice long rambling blog post that took about an hour to write, on and off. Time to put the computer away and take a nap, I think.

Ghost in the Shell – Heart Grenade

I mentioned a while back about how I couldn’t locate the song “Heart Grenade” on Apple Music. I found it today, on a collection called Ghost In The Shell Superb Music, which was released in January. I’m going to try to embed the song below.

The full “Superb” collection seems to be a 5-CD set in a metal can. Pretty cool. The version in Apple Music is missing a bunch of tracks, but that’s fine. The part of my brain that was never going to be happy until “Heart Grenade” was in my iTunes library is now satisfied.

And all this reminds me that I still haven’t gotten around to watching the Netflix GITS show, Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. It’s gotten mixed reviews, but I liked the earlier SAC stuff, so I’ll probably like this one too.

Nor have I watched the 25th anniversary edition of the original Ghost in the Shell movie that I got on Blu-Ray a while back (SteelBook 4K Ultra HD version, of course).

(So much to watch and so little time…)

Apple One

My free six month trial of Apple Music is coming to an end soon, so I’ve been thinking about what to do next. I like Apple Music enough that I’d already decided to keep going with it after the trial was done. And since that means I’ll be giving Apple $10/month, that got me thinking about signing up for Apple One for $15/month, and getting Arcade, TV+, and 50 GB of iCloud too.

I’m still not happy about the number of subscriptions I’m paying for right now, but I guess I’m resigned to it. I could go down the hole of listing them all out again and thinking about whether I need them or not, and whether I’m getting enough use out of this one or that one, and what the alternatives are, but life’s too short and we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. Eventually, I’ll have to cull some of them, but for now, eh, I might as well give Apple $15/month so I can listen to music and watch Ted Lasso and play some games. So I signed up for Apple One today.

The first thing I’m doing with it is turning on iCloud Photos. Up until now, I’ve been syncing photos from my iPhone and iPad to my Mac the old-fashioned way, and using the photo library on my Mac as my master library. It’ll be nice to have that all happen automatically now, and have access to all my photos on all of my devices. Prior to turning on iCloud Photos, I had about 4500 photos, taking up about 12 GB, on my Mac. The library seems to be getting a bit bigger since I turned on syncing this morning. I guess that’s due to duplicates, which seem to be showing up on the Mac as the iPhone sync progresses. I turned on the “optimize Mac storage” setting in Photos when I turned on iCloud, so I might wind up with a smaller local library, eventually. I’m not sure how much total cloud space it’ll use up, but I’m sure it’ll be well within my 50 GB limit.

It looks like I’m going to need to run a cleanup to get rid of the duplicates. I have an old program that I used once to clean up dupes in my old iPhoto library, a long time ago (2014, I think), and it appears to still work. When I launch it, it “recommends” that I upgrade to a new program that costs $20, but the old version still seems to work fine. It found 168 dupes and put them in an album. From there, I could delete them via the Photos app. If I didn’t already own that program, I’d consider PhotoSweeper ($20) or PowerPhotos ($30), both of which I found via recommendations from the MPU forums.

Speaking of MPU, I’ve been thinking that I should take a look at David Sparks’ Photos Field Guide. I should learn more about taking, editing, and managing digital photos. Of course, I’ve been home alone for the past year, so all of my recent photos were taken within a one-mile radius of my apartment. I have so many photos of Van Fleet Gardens at this point that I could probably stitch them all together into a 3D model. But hey, someday we’ll be able to travel again, and I’ll go someplace interesting and take some cool photos.

unnecessary headphones

Over the course of this pandemic, I’ve tried hard to be mindful about not going overboard with random internet shopping. And I think I’ve done OK. In terms of major purchases, over the last year, I’ve bought a new laptop (replacing one that was ten years old) and a new Apple Watch 6 (replacing a Watch 3). I’ve signed up for Disney+, Hulu, and Apple Music. I’ve bought a handful of Blu-rays that I didn’t really need. But that’s about it.

All of which is preamble to admitting that I saw that Woot had the Beats Solo Pro headphones on sale for 50% off last week, so I went ahead and bought a pair. I can’t really make a great case for buying these, even at half-price, honestly. Since I’m stuck at home most of the time, I’ve been doing fine with my AirPods. But I’ve had the thought in my head for a while that I should pick up some noise-cancelling headphones. The idea was that they’d replace the old UrbanEars headphones that I keep in my backpack, and which are now in pretty bad shape. My main use case for them would have been on train rides into NYC and on airplanes, neither or which is going to happen any time soon. (Every time I think it might be safe to start visiting NYC again, there’s some bad news, like the new variants that are going around right now.)

So, anyway, I now have a new pair of headphones that I don’t really need. But it’s been fun playing with them. I’ve never tried noise-cancelling headphones before, so that’s been interesting. I’ve read up on what noise cancellation can and can’t do, so my expectations weren’t unrealistic. One day earlier this week, there was a lot of noise outside, as the town was working on removing some snow. I put the headphones on, and they completely removed the sound of the snow removal equipment, except for the back-up beeper. So that was cool. I’ve also found that they can remove the sound of my humidifier and my air cleaner entirely. The humidifier is pretty quiet, so that’s not a big deal, but the air cleaner is a bit noisy.

Having read some reviews of the Beats Solo Pro, I’d say that they pretty much correspond to what I expected of them. (Here’s a review from iMore, one from The Verge, and one from MKBHD, who doesn’t usually like Beats.) The sound is good, but not amazing. They’re a little uncomfortable, but not unbearably so. I’m not sure if I could wear them for an extended period. I’ve heard that they loosen up a bit after you’ve been using them for a while, so maybe that’ll help.

The H1 chip is probably the best reason to choose these over other wireless noise-cancelling headphones. (It’s the same chip that is in the AirPods.) They pair seamlessly with my iPhone and Apple TV (and probably with my iPad and Mac, though I haven’t bothered trying yet).

Overall, I don’t think I’m going to get a ton of use out of them while I’m still in pandemic mode. For most of the use cases where I’m currently using my AirPods, I’ll likely keep using them. The AirPods are fine for podcasts and audiobooks. And they’re probably better for wearing outside, when I’m on a long walk, than the Beats would be. For listening to music, I generally use my Sonos speakers or regular stereo system (if I’m in the living room) or the speakers on my desktop PC (if I’m in my bedroom working). There are a few cases where I might want to listen to music with the Beats rather than over my speakers or with the AirPods. But the tradeoffs (comfort and convenience, mostly) will probably keep me using the AirPods and/or my various speakers most of the time.

So, yeah, I didn’t need these headphones. But for half-price, I don’t see them as a bad purchasing decision. I’ll get enough use out of them, I think, before the battery goes bad and/or they fall apart.

Heavy Metal

I discovered the Heavy Metal movie soundtrack on Apple Music recently. I had it on vinyl back in the early 80s, when I was in high school. I never bought it on CD, or from iTunes, because, for a long time, it just wasn’t available.

I’m not sure when I first actually saw the movie. It came out in 1981, but I don’t think I saw it until I was in college, so it would have been late 80s. And, likewise, I never got around to buying the movie on DVD or Blu-ray, though I’m pretty sure I had it on VHS at one point.

Anyway, I really listened to that soundtrack album a lot. Hearing it again is triggering long-dormant neurons in my brain. Now I guess I should buy the Blu-ray and see how many neurons get lit up by that.

I’ve been meaning to try an Apple Music embed on this blog, and it might as well be this. So here you go: the Heavy Metal soundtrack! It’s pretty corny and dated, but it’s one of my favorite albums from my misspent youth.

Sunday morning

I’m not sure I should really be writing a blog post right now, but I might as well give it a shot. I didn’t sleep well last night, and I’m still a little groggy. But I want to post a few links and get some stuff out of my head, so here goes.

First topic: Biden’s inauguration. A lot has already been written about that, and I don’t really have much to add, but I’d like to note one item of interest: Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem. Here’s an article from the NY TImes and one from NPR, both of which include video. I think it’s worth watching her read the whole thing. I’m not really a fan of this particular style of poetry, but I really think this was the right poem (and poet) for this particular moment in time. Here’s an interview with Gorman, again from NPR, from the day before the inauguration. And here’s something from Literary Hub, with every inaugural poem, ever. (There aren’t that many.)

Next (and completely different) topic: robocalls. I’ve been getting a lot of them lately. I can’t do much about those that come in on my home phone line. I get so few calls on that number that nearly all the calls I do get are robocalls (or unsolicited calls from actual humans). I’ve thought about dropping the line entirely, but I don’t really want to lose that phone number. Porting it over to a VOIP provider that does robocall screening is possible, I guess, but I don’t really want to mess with that right now.

For my cell phone, I’ve started looking at iOS call screening apps. I already have Verizon’s Call Filter app enabled on my phone, but it doesn’t do much. And I sometimes turn on the iOS silence unknown callers feature, but I can’t leave that on all the time. Here’s a Washington Post article from 2019 that I used as a good starting point for third-party apps. I’m worried about the privacy implications of some of them. For now, I’ve installed and enabled Nomorobo. The Sweet Setup, in this 2017 article, named Nomorobo as the best app for blocking robocalls. The guy who wrote that article shares a lot of the same privacy concerns that I have, and Nomorobo is just about the only app that doesn’t have some privacy issues. I’m on a two-week trial subscription. So far, I don’t think it’s successfully blocked any robocalls, so it’s not looking good. Since robocallers can basically just randomize their phone numbers, I’m not sure any call blocking solution is going to be really effective.

I’ll probably give up on the whole idea and just stick with the “silence unknown callers” method. That does mean that I’ll have to continue toggling it on and off, whenever I’m expecting a call from someone that’s not in my contacts (like a mechanic or doctor’s office that might not be calling from their main number). Here’s a blog post from someone comparing the utility of SUC vs DND (do not disturb). My thoughts on it are pretty similar to his. I think SUC would be a lot more useful if Apple would put a toggle for it in control center.

Next topic (also completely different): Sátántangó. I mentioned about a month ago that I had pre-ordered the new Blu-ray release. It should have shown up this weekend, but apparently got lost somehow. So I guess I’m not going to spend the day watching a 7.5-hour, black & white, Hungarian film.

Last topic: Harold Budd. I was listening to a podcast this week and the host mentioned that Budd had passed away recently. I did a little searching and found obituaries from the Times and NPR. His death was apparently related to Covid-19, so that’s one more artist lost in 2020 to this pandemic. My favorite Harold Budd album is The Pearl, an album he recorded with Brian Eno in 1984. Today might actually be a good day to listen to some Harold Budd. Some nice slow ambient piano music might just help me get my brain back on track, after last night’s troubled sleep.

 

New Year’s Day 2021

I’ve been writing big New Year’s Day posts on this blog every year for the last several years. I might as well do one this year too. Obviously, last year was a doozy, and a lot of stuff has changed, and a lot is still in flux. I’m not even sure where to start. So I’ll start with links to the last few New Year’s posts:

And I guess I’ll follow a format not too different from previous years.

Health, Weight, and Sleep

My weight has been pretty steady at around 135 pounds this year. It dipped a bit in spring & summer, getting down to 130 briefly, but has rebounded back to 135. I dropped some weight at the beginning of the pandemic, probably because I wasn’t eating any take-out food. I’m still logging all of my meals with Lose It, which I’ve been using since 2013.

I’m also still using Sleep Cycle as an alarm clock and to log my sleep. I’ve been having some weird dreams this year, but apparently so has everyone else. My sleep quality has been mixed, I’d say. Some nights I’m fine, and some nights I’m not.

I was pretty good about exercise through the spring and summer. I did a lot of walking. I’ve cut back on the walks now, since it’s been getting colder. If I don’t go out for a morning walk now, I try to do ten minutes on my exercise bike instead. (I’m glad I didn’t get rid of that thing.) I need to be careful about not letting up too much through the rest of the winter.

On the meditation front, I’ve certainly done more meditation this year than I’d usually do. One of the reasons for that is that I’ve been working from home since March, so it’s easy to take a ten minute midday meditation break. Back when I was working in a cubicle, I was too self-conscious to meditate at work. (And, really, the office environment is too noisy for meditation anyway.) I was using Insight Timer for most of this year, but I switched to Calm in December, since I had a deal to get a free year of Calm Premium. I have enough opinions on meditation apps right now that I should probably hold them for another post. But overall, I’d say that meditation helped me get through this crazy year.

I did finally get my hearing checked this year, in March, just before the pandemic lockdown really kicked in. The results were pretty much what I expected: I’ve lost a lot of hearing in my left ear. My right ear is fine. The doctor said that I’m not really at the stage where a hearing aid would make sense. My hearing issues haven’t really much mattered this year, though. If I’m talking to anybody at work, it’s on my computer, and I can just turn up the volume as much as I need. And I’m never in a crowded restaurant with a lot of background noise, so that’s not a problem either.

Work and Professional Development

I’m feeling very lucky to have had a good, steady, job this year, and to be able to work from home. My performance review for 2020 was very good. I didn’t really expect a raise this year, given the general state of the economy, but I got one. So that’s all good. There are going to be a lot of challenges ahead, going into 2021. Again, that’s probably a whole blog post of its own though.

On the professional development front, one nice thing to come out of 2020 was a lot of free virtual conferences. I didn’t participate in as many of those as I would have liked, but I did manage to watch some content from Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite. Most of my efforts at learning new stuff this year were centered around SharePoint Framework (SPFx) and Microsoft’s Power Platform stuff. I wasn’t really successful in getting any projects done with any of this new stuff in 2020 though. I have a couple of big projects at work that will really need to get done in 2021. I’m still not even sure if I’ll be using SPFx or Power Platform or something else though.

Looking at last year’s post, I see I was talking about trying to learn maybe Rust or Swift in 2020. I definitely didn’t do that. The one new general thing I tried to learn in 2020 was React. And that was mostly because I needed to learn it for SPFx.

Finance

I’m in pretty good shape, financially. Certainly better than most people, given the state of things. I’ve actually seen my checking account balance grow this year, presumably because I didn’t spend any money on travel, or on day trips to NYC, or even on a lot of little things like restaurant meals and gas for my car and Starbucks coffee. I expect 2021 will be similar. Given how little interest I make on my checking account, I really need to shunt some money over into my Merrill account and buy some more shares in an S&P 500 fund. The stock market (after a brief crash back in March) has done surprisingly well this year. And I probably need to sit down with a financial advisor at some point in 2021 and move some money around. There’s some stuff I want to do to simplify my finances a bit, but I can’t do it without figuring out the tax implications.

I opened two new credit card accounts this year, which is pretty unusual for me. I traded in the AmEx Green card I’d had since college for an AmEx EveryDay card. That was done mostly because the fee on the Green card had gone up to $150, so I wanted to replace it with a fee-free card. And I finally gave in and got an Apple Card. I’ve only used the Apple Card to buy my new Apple Watch, in November. I don’t really anticipate using it for anything other than Apple Store purchases.

I’ve also been thinking about getting an Amazon Prime credit card. I spent nearly $2000 at Amazon this year, so the 5% back could be as much as $100 for me. There’s really no reason for me not to get it, other than not wanting to add yet another card to my wallet.

Subscriptions

I’m always obsessing over subscriptions. The pandemic has caused me to pull the trigger on a few subscriptions that I’ve been holding out on for years. Partially because I have some extra money to spend (as noted above), and partially because I have some extra time to kill at home. So I might as well spend some money and time on nice stuff that’ll distract me from the horrible state of the world right now.

I finally subscribed to Apple Music. I signed up for a six-month free trial in October, so I don’t need to start paying for it until April. But I will likely keep it going when that happens. After years of trying to resist switching from CDs & MP3s to a subscription service, I’ve finally given in and embraced the new way of doing things.

I’ve also signed up for Disney+ and Hulu. I wanted Disney+ for The Mandalorian and Soul. And Hulu had a Black Friday deal where you could get the ad-supported tier for $2/month for a year, so that seemed worthwhile. I’m still resisting HBO Max, but I might give in on that one too eventually. If Wonder Woman 1984 had gotten better reviews, I’d probably have done it by now.

I might also sign up for the Apple One subscription bundle at some point in 2021. I don’t really need Apple TV+ or Apple Arcade, but if the pandemic keeps going, I’ll probably give in on that.

Books and Comics

According to Goodreads, I read 86 books in 2020. I’d set a goal of 100 books, and I didn’t reach it, but I’m OK with that. Most of those were comics, but (again) I’m fine with that.

For my Great American Read group, I didn’t really get through much, but I did finish Gone With The Wind in March, so that was a big one. I also read White Teeth, Invisible Man, and The Outsiders from the TGAR list. I’m still an admin in that group, and we’re still posting monthly group reads, but I’m not sure why I’m still bothering with that. The other admin is doing about half the work, so that’s good. I feel like we’re going to have to wind that group down in 2021, but I’m not in a hurry to do so.

My favorite comics of the year were probably the Resident Alien collections that I read back in May. And the Locke & Key series was also surprisingly good.

I’m still ordering a few titles from Westfield every month, but I think I’m going to wind that down over the next few months. I haven’t gotten on board with DC’s Future State thing, and I’m not reading any Marvel books. So that just leaves a few books from smaller publishers, and it’s probably best if I just switch to digital and/or trades for those. Also, my Comixology backlog is nearly 200 books (mostly collections, not single issues), so just working through that could take me a few years.

Movies

As I mentioned recently, I watched a lot of movies in 2020. Looking at Letterboxd, I see that I watched a total of 73. Probably my favorite film of the year (that actually came out in 2020) was Soul. My second favorite would have been Onward, so the year for me was bookended with solid Pixar films. I did a rewatch of all four Avengers films early in the year, and a rewatch of all the Daniel Craig Bond films just recently. Those were both fun distractions. I also tried to watch a bunch of Kurosawa films, but I only got through four. For 2021, I want to watch some more Kurosawa, and maybe rewatch a bunch of Miyazaki films. (I bought several of them on Blu-ray earlier this year, and haven’t watched any of those discs yet.)

Summary

I am kind of proud of myself for getting through 2020 in one piece, not too much worse for wear. I managed to avoid putting on weight, picking up a drinking habit, getting COVID, and losing my job. I think my mental health is reasonably OK, all things considered. I’m trying not to stress about things I didn’t do. I’d like to have spent more time on “enriching” activities and less on pure distraction, but I’m mostly OK with having watched 73 movies and lots of TV, and having read a lot more comics this year than novels or non-fiction books.

I’m expecting the first couple of months of 2021 to be pretty rough. I think the vaccine rollout will be slow. I don’t expect a change in the status quo on mask wearing and social distancing and working from home. Winter will probably still be in full force through to early March, so we’re not going to be able to do much outdoors. I think the current surge of COVID cases will continue through February, and not start to let up until March. I don’t see us all being able to return to anything like normality until very late in 2021, if at all. But, hopefully, by summer, we’ll have enough folks vaccinated and the political situation will have stabilized enough that we’ll start on the road to “normal.”

I’m thinking a lot about short-term strategies for getting through winter. Things like getting my groceries delivered, watching a lot more “comfort” TV, reading a lot of comics, working out on the exercise bike, meditating, blogging, journaling, whatever helps. I’m not making any resolutions for 2021. I’m going to take it day by day, and I think that’s what we’re all going to have to do.

 

end of vacation, end of year

So it’s back to work tomorrow, after my week-long vacation. Looking at my “things to do on vacation” list, I didn’t do any of them. Which is fine. I did a few things, including updating my MacBook to Big Sur, sending out my Christmas cards, reading the entire Locke & Key comic book series, and, um… replacing the battery in my smoke detector. Yeah, I know those aren’t big accomplishments, but hey, it was supposed to be a vacation, right?

I’ve also been doing a lot of end-of-year thinking and planning. I got a few end-of-year things done this week, and there are a bunch more that I’m still working on. One thing, of course, is figuring out which services/subscriptions to keep and which to cancel, and whether or not I should be signing up for anything new right now. So the rest of this post is going to turn into yet another rumination about all that stuff.

For video, I added Disney+ recently, and also Hulu, via their $2/month Black Friday deal. So now I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Hulu for video services. I’ve been thinking about canceling my traditional cable subscription, but I still haven’t done that. It’s looking like my cable bill might go up by $20/month in January, so that’s pushing me more in that direction. I’ve been experimenting with using my Apple TV more and my TiVo less, and figuring out how to get some of the stuff I like on regular TV without a cable subscription. I can get most (or all) of the PBS content I want from the PBS Apple TV app. And I can watch clips of the late-night shows on YouTube. So that’s probably fine.

For music, I’ll probably let my Apple Music free trial turn into a paid subscription when the trial is up. I’m actually using it a lot.

For comics, I do intend on dropping my Westfield subscriptions at some point, but I haven’t done it yet. For December, I would have had just three comics on my order, but I added a couple of graphic novels. That might be my last order, or I might hang in there for two more months. I have a couple of series I’d like to complete before giving up on print comics.

I’ve also been thinking about some financial stuff. Specifically, I’ve been assessing my credit card situation. I signed up for the Apple Card recently, as I’ve probably mentioned here before. I don’t like some things about that card, but the cash back for Apple Store purchases makes it worthwhile. Now that I’ve had it for awhile, I think I’m a little more OK with it than I initially was. Even though I can’t download transactions from it directly into Quicken, the process for saving a QFX file and importing it into Quicken isn’t that bad. And the Apple Card is better about privacy than most other cards, so maybe I should consider using it for more stuff.

Meanwhile, I switched my AmEx card from the Green card to the EveryDay card earlier this year. That was a good decision, since the Green card annual fee was going up to $150/year, and had mostly travel-related bonuses. The EveryDay card has no fee and has extra bonuses for everyday stuff like groceries. So it’s almost like I knew the pandemic was coming, when I switched back in February. I’ve certainly spent a lot more money on groceries this year than I have on travel.

I’ve been spending a heck of a lot of money at Amazon this year too, so that’s got me thinking about signing up for the Amazon Prime credit card. That gives you 5% cash back on Amazon purchases, which would have gotten me as much as $100 this year, depending on which purchases are eligible. But if I get that card, then I’ll have a total of five cards (Citi MC, AmEx, Macy’s, Apple, and Amazon), which might be too many cards. Maybe I should drop the Macy’s card. I’ve ordered a few things from them online this year, but not nearly as much stuff as I’ve ordered from Amazon.

I’m a little worried about how opening multiple new credit cards in one year might affect my credit score. But, then again, I’m not planning on borrowing any money any time soon, so I probably shouldn’t care about that. I don’t know. I guess it’s good to have enough free time and enough money to mess around with all this stuff.

Splendid isolation

Sometimes, I take a little time and go through my unread Pinboard links, and try to clean them up a bit, deleting some if they’re no longer applicable, and maybe reading a few random articles that I’d bookmarked long ago. Today, I stumbled across this one: Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours, a fairly long article from The Guardian that I’d bookmarked back in January.

I know the phrase Splendid isolation as the title of a Warren Zevon song, but apparently it’s a term “used to describe the 19th-century British diplomatic practice of avoiding permanent alliances,” according to Wikipedia. (And I see I’ve referenced the song previously on this blog.)

Anyway, that article from January predates the pandemic, of course. The concept of “isolation” in general has cropped up a lot this year. I’ve been following Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals, for instance, though I’ve fallen behind in reading those emails, so they’re piling up in my “read/review” folder, along with a bunch of other stuff.

Isolation has come up in some music I’ve listened to this year, including this Music For Isolation project and this Isolate With compilation. I’m also kind of interested in Ulrich Schnauss’ ‎A Strangely Isolated Place. It’s an older album, but I’ve only started to listen to Schnauss recently. I don’t suppose there’s much point in just linking to a bunch of music with the word “isolation” in the title, but it amused me for a few minutes, and it’s all good music.

Anyway, the article I started this blog post with is a pretty good one and has got me thinking about my relationship to time right now. It definitely changes, when you’re home all day and the lines between home and office pretty much disappear. I find myself getting distracted a lot and then feeling guilty for not getting enough work done. And I’m trying to impose some discipline on my “free time” also, feeling guilty if I don’t make some progress in a book I’m reading, or fall too far behind on a TV show I’m watching, or whatever. I feel that I need to try to maintain a certain schedule and a certain amount of discipline to keep myself sane and on track, but it’s starting to wear me down.

I have several vacation days left that I have to use up before the end of the year. I’ve scheduled a full week off in early December. In any other year, I’d have plenty of interesting things to do with a week off. But this year, a lot of my usual options are either closed off or a bit too risky for me right now. I kind of like the idea of disappearing into the woods for a day and just sitting in a circle and doing nothing for 24 hours. But that’s maybe a little too extreme for me. Maybe just having a full week where I don’t have to get through work every day will be enough to let me hit the reset button on my anxiety, at least a bit. Maybe I can relax into some unstructured randomness. (Though I suspect the results of the election will affect my anxiety level, for better or worse, more than any amount of vacation time will.)