Category: NJ

The Morning After

I tried to be careful about how I was following election news last night. I watched the regular NJ Spotlight newscast at 5:30 PM, then some of their later election coverage, from about 9 to 9:30 PM. And I listened to a bit of WNYC, and checked Twitter a few times. I check Twitter only via Twitterrific, and I’m careful about who I follow, so my Twitter feed is relatively sane. So I managed to get a pretty good night’s sleep last night. (A little Yo-Yo Ma helped out too.)

This morning’s news is… pretty much what I expected. No conclusive winner in the presidential race. Cory Booker reelected to the Senate, and Tom Malinowski reelected to the House. The legal weed question passed, by a 2 to 1 margin. Overall, the Democrats will likely keep their House majority and probably won’t win a Senate majority.

The mainstream media (at least the sources I follow) seem to be dealing well with Trump’s FUD. The Washington Post has a headline that reads “Trump falsely asserts election fraud, claims a victory” and the NY Times has one that says “As America Awaits a Winner, Trump Falsely Claims He Prevailed.” So we’re getting that word “false” in there, at least.

I haven’t looked at Twitter or Facebook yet this morning, but I inevitably will at some point. I’m sure that a lot of people will have opinions about all this. Either way, I need to try to get through the rest of the work week without getting distracted by all this stuff too much. Hopefully, I can find some interesting work to occupy my mind.

Afternoon Walk

I’ve been going out for walks nearly every day since the pandemic began, and taking photos. I haven’t posted any of the photos to Flickr since May, though. So here are a few photos from a walk I went on this afternoon. It was a nice autumn afternoon walk. (I’m trying an embedded album below, which might or might not look OK here. If it isn’t working, try this link.)

I had my Airpods in, and was listening to Invisible Man, which I started in May, and still haven’t finished yet. (I’m just at the part where he realizes that he can be invisible, so I’m getting near the end.) I don’t usually listen to audiobooks while I’m walking. Usually I go with music or podcasts. But I really felt like making some progress with Invisible Man today, so I gave it a try. It worked out OK. I managed to give enough attention to the book, and also managed to not get hit by a truck while crossing any streets.

afternoon walk 10/24/2020

NYCC, masks, and other stuff

It’s almost time for NYCC, though this year it’s going to be a virtual event called Metaverse. I’ve gone to NYCC a bunch of times, and have been on a roll recently, going in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Alas, I’ll just be watching from home this year. I really wish we could have gotten this COVID thing under control by now, but nope. I haven’t looked closely at the panel schedule yet, but I’m taking off Thursday and Friday next week so I’ll be able to watch some stuff and simulate the con experience a bit, like I did for the San Diego con a few months back. This whole “staying home all the time” thing is starting to wear on me.

I know I still need to take COVID-19 seriously though. Our president’s inability to do so may have been the start of a super-spreader event here in Somerset County. That’s probably an exaggeration, but it’s still not good.

It’s been really hard to process news this year. And the news of Trump’s infection is particularly hard to process. It’s not surprising news, really, given his disdain for mask-wearing and all that. But it’s hard to fit all this stuff in your head and figure out how to react to it and how to deal with it. This column from Politico has a pretty good take on it all. And Nick Kristof’s column in the Times is useful too. (Reminder: wear a mask!)

…and now I’m starting to go down a rabbit hole, reading stories on the Politico and NY Times sites about Trump’s condition. I need to stop doing that, and maybe go out for a nice walk. Maybe ending up at the coffee shop where I can get a nice cappuccino and a pastry. (Which I will bring back to the apartment, of course, because actually eating/drinking at the shop is still too scary. Sigh.)

COVID Alert NJ

I installed the new COVID Alert NJ app on my iPhone today. It’s been more than six months since the pandemic started, but hey, better late than never, I guess. NJ.com and NJTV have articles about the app, and ABC 7 has a write-up on New York’s app, which is basically the same as the NJ app, but with a different color scheme (purple vs. blue). The first state to release an app using the new Apple/Google API was apparently Virginia, which released their app in early August.

NJ’s app was apparently created by an Irish company, because I guess they couldn’t find any competent software developers in NJ. (I kid. There are plenty of competent developers in NJ, but we’re slow and expensive.) The company is called NearForm. They started with the app for Ireland, I think, then started rebranding and customizing it for other countries and for several US states.

I found a Guardian article from a few months ago indicating the the Ireland app had over a million installs at that time. NJ’s app is currently at just under 35,000 installs, according to the app itself. (I’m not sure if that’s just the iOS app or combined iOS/Android.)

The tech behind these apps is kind of interesting. Here’s a write-up on it, from Apple’s web site, and one from Google. This stuff is helpful, but only if they can get a lot of people to install the app and enable it. And, well, we know how much all the other stuff that only works if we all do it is working out here in the USA…

 

Weird Al on the presidential debate

I don’t usually post about politics, but I feel like I need to write something today, just to maybe mark a few odd items, for posterity:

  1. Weird Al’s reaction to last night’s presidential debate was silly and made me feel a little better about the whole thing. (Not a lot better, but a little.) The fact that it’s posted on the NY Times site makes it a little weirder, but somehow even better. It amuses me to think about the editorial process that led someone to decide that Weird Al was the right guy to go to for reaction to a presidential debate.
  2. In less amusing news, my House rep, Tom Malinowski, is getting death threats from QAnon, after a misleading press release and ad from Republicans. Here’s a Post story on the ad, and here’s an NJ.com opinion piece on his opponent’s refusal to address the issue at all. I’ve donated a few bucks to Malinowski’s campaign on a couple of occasions, and I really do think that he’s a good guy. I’m sure he’s not perfect, but he comes off as smart, serious, competent, and concerned about his constituents.

I thought I had an item #3 for that list, but I’m exhausted now, just thinking about the election.

NJ MVC, IFTTT, RSS, and other acronyms

This post may wind up covering a variety of barely-related topics. I have a bunch of stuff in my head today and I’m making connections between things that might not make much sense. Buy anyway…

I had to renew the registration for my car recently. I normally do that by mail, and I did that again this year, and got the registration card back, no problem. But then I got a letter saying that NJ MVC had undercharged me by $7 due to a computer glitch and I’d have to pay that. The letter didn’t really include any helpful information about how to submit that $7 to them. It wouldn’t let me do it online. And there was no indication that they’d accept it by mail. I definitely don’t want to go near an MVC office right now, since they’ve been mobbed ever since they reopened in July. (Apparently, the line at the Somerville MVC starts forming at 4 AM every day.) I really wasn’t sure what to do, but thankfully I found an article on nj.com today explaining the problem and indicating that it was OK to mail in the $7, and gave the address to send it to.

NJ.com has been reasonably useful throughout the pandemic. They’ve run a lot of good, useful, articles. (Mind you, they also run a lot of nonsense and clickbait.) They started asking people to pay $10/month to subscribe to the site at some point earlier this year, and I thought about doing it. But I couldn’t quite talk myself into it. First, there’s the aforementioned nonsense and clickbait. Then, there’s the worry that they won’t make it easy to cancel.

In the past, I’ve often used virtual credit card numbers when I’m subscribing to something that might be hard to cancel. Citi used to have a good program for virtual card numbers, including a Windows program that you could use to generate them on the fly and copy them into forms on web pages. But that program stopped working a while back. And the web-based version relied on Flash, and I don’t have any browsers left on any of machines that are still running Flash. So I kind of gave up on them.

I saw an announcement today from 1Password saying that they were going to start integrating with privacy.com to allow users to generate virtual card numbers right from 1Password. That sounded promising, but it draws from your bank account, and not from a real credit card. So it seems like there could be complications there. But that got me thinking about virtual card numbers again, so I checked Citi’s web site, and found that they’ve finally rewritten their virtual card functionality to work without Flash. (They’ve also eliminated the Windows program, which is a bummer, but I was expecting that.)

And I saw that NJ.com recently added an option to pay $100 for a full year, rather that $10/month. So I went ahead and paid for a year of NJ.com with a virtual card number. I figure their article explaining the $7 MVC mess was worth at least $20 to me. And somebody’s got to pay for all of their articles on pork roll sandwiches and ranked lists of 326 Bruce Springsteen songs, so it might as well be me. A year from now, I’ll figure out if I want to pay for another year.

Overall, I’ve been struggling with how to both consume and support local news during the pandemic. I generally watch NJTV News every night. Their newscast is pretty good and covers a lot of NJ news, but it’s mostly political state-level stuff. I don’t currently support NJTV or Thirteen, and I probably should. I watch enough stuff on PBS that I should toss them $5/month, at least.

I’ll also occasionally look at MyCentralJersey.com, which covers some local Somerset county news, but they’re hiding a lot of stuff behind a paywall now. They have a deal for $39 for one year, and I might go ahead and pay for that with a virtual card too.

I try to get a lot of my news through email and RSS. I use IFTTT to set up some email stuff, and The Old Reader to manage my RSS feeds (along with Reeder on iOS). IFTTT has recently introduced Pro subscriptions, and I would need to start paying for Pro to keep doing some of the stuff I’m currently doing with the service. I don’t really want to do that, so I’ve been looking at shifting more stuff into The Old Reader. But I hadn’t really looked too closely at IFTTT Pro. I just noticed a blog post from David Sparks that’s got me a little more interested in it. It sounds like they might be adding enough value to make it worth the minimum $2/month that you can pay for Pro under their current “set your own price” plan. It’s not quite clear, but maybe you can actually write code as part of Pro applets? That would be useful.

So, yeah, this is me going down a bunch of rabbit holes and thinking about spending a bunch of money. I should probably stop now.

physical media and lockdown anxiety

I’ve now reached the stage of the lockdown where spending $100 for four Avengers movies on Blu-ray seemed like a good idea. (I already have the first one on Blu-ray, but none of the others.) I’d been keeping an eye on iTunes and Vudu to see if maybe the digital versions would go on sale for $10 each or something like that, but yesterday, I decided that it was OK to just go ahead and get the fancy SteelBook box set.

I go back and forth with my thinking on digital vs physical media. On the one hand, my cable & internet went out last night, while I was watching a Blu-ray, so I patted myself on the back for still holding onto physical media there. On the other hand, I accidentally knocked over a big stack of DVDs this morning and had to pick them all up and get them back in order. You can’t knock over digital video. I guess I’ll still keep going back and forth on this for the foreseeable future. There’s an argument to made on both sides.

I have been feeling lately like the lockdown is starting to get to me. I’ve seen some articles about post-lockdown anxiety recently. I think my main problem is that I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t be talking about “post-lockdown” yet at all. I see a lot of people without masks wandering around downtown these days, and I keep reading about the pressure to open stuff back up. I think we need to be real careful about that, and I think we at least need to be wearing masks more often. As of today, NJ is requiring people to wear masks outdoors, so that’s good, though there’s really no enforcement mechanism for this.

And I’m pretty steamed about movie theater chains suing NJ. This really seems like the last thing they should be spending time and money on right now. I’m fairly sure I won’t be entering a theater any time before the end of this year. And I probably won’t want to go into one until next summer, at least. (Assuming there’s a vaccine and/or treatment for COVID-19 by then.)

Some of my anxiety and restlessness is no doubt coming from the simple fact that it’s summer, and I really can’t do most of the things I like to do in the summer. Like going out to see a movie. Or going into NYC and visiting the Met and MoMA. Or going to a comic con. To address that last one, I’m thinking about taking a few days off for Comic-Con@Home later this month. Just sitting around in my apartment and watching panels online won’t come near the experience of actually being in San Diego for the con, but at least it’ll get me away from work for a few days and maybe let me recharge my batteries a bit (so to speak).

They have the Wednesday panel schedule up now, and it’s mostly not that interesting to me. It’s mostly serious stuff related to education. Which is fine. I assume the nerdier fan stuff will be Thursday through Sunday. So maybe I’ll take Thursday and Friday off from work and just chill and watch panels and read comics for a couple of days. I’ve been thinking about other things I could do to make the experience feel more like actually being at the con. I could skip my usual meal habits and get take-out on those days. Maybe I could even find some local take-out that reminds me of the kind of stuff I like to eat in San Diego, like fish tacos. I could sleep a little late and stay up a little late. (Or I could even try to switch to PDT for a few days.) Maybe I could try to ignore “regular” news for a few days and just read con-related news only. (That might be kind of hard to manage.) I guess that’s about it though. I can’t dress any more casually than I’m already dressing. I can do an excessive amount of walking, I guess, but just wandering around Somerville isn’t the same as wandering around downtown San Diego and the convention center.

protests in Somerville

There were a few Black Lives Matter protests here in Somerville over the weekend. I didn’t go out much at all myself this weekend, so I was mostly aware of them only from the perspective of seeing them from my apartment window. I was sick on Saturday, so going out then seemed like a bad idea. On Sunday, I was feeling better, and did go out for a couple of walks, but going outside during the protests still seemed like a bad idea, just from the perspective of the possible COVID-19 exposure. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I’m an old man with some health issues, so… maybe I’m not paranoid.

Anyway, judging purely from what I could see from my window, it seemed like there were just a handful of kids, mostly white, protesting on Saturday. I think that might have been just a group of well-meaning local high school students or something. That was a little amusing, but still nice to see.

Early afternoon on Sunday, there was a much larger group, still mostly young, but much more mixed, that marched up and down Main St several times. This group stuck to the sidewalks. I’d estimate 100 to 200 people total. They were probably marching for an hour or so, and I’m guessing they were going back and forth from the courthouse to town hall, based on the timing of when they were passing by outside.

A couple of hours later, a much larger group came by, this time marching right down the middle of the road, stopping traffic. There must have been hundreds of people, but I can’t say how many. They were quite loud and there were a lot of them. The group was definitely mixed: young and old, adults and children, white and black. Everything I saw was entirely peaceful, and I didn’t see any police presence at all.

This article from MyCentralJersey seems to be covering the earlier Sunday protest. It mentions “hundreds” of protestors, and has a bunch of photos, but they only show people on the sidewalks. This one from TapInto seems to be covering both the earlier and later protests. It mentions “1000+” protestors, and has some photos of people marching in the street. And here’s an article from Patch briefly covering protests in Somerville, Manville, and Franklin.

Apparently, there were some organized speeches and activity on the courthouse lawn prior to the marches on Sunday. It would have been cool to have been able to go down and check some of that out. But I didn’t know about any of this prior to seeing it pass by my window. And, if I did, I still would not have felt safe mixing with such a large crowd.

I don’t have anything really useful to add to any of the discussion on these issues, other than to say that it’s inspiring to see how many people seem to be engaged and concerned about this stuff now. I don’t know how many of these folks are going to vote in November. I don’t know how many of them are going to remain engaged, once this stuff fades from the news. I remember the shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999. We all hoped things would change after that, and, well, that was twenty years ago. But I don’t remember anybody protesting in Somerville in 1999. So maybe there’s finally enough momentum now to change things. We’ll see.

Another week down

This is undoubtedly going to be another rambling hodgepodge post. It’s Saturday morning and I didn’t get much sleep last night. You’ve been warned.

In last Saturday’s post, I mentioned that my employer might have people start coming back to work in June. At that point, they hadn’t actually announced anything, but now they have. The details of the plan can be found here. It all seems pretty reasonable, I guess, but I’m still a bit worried about it. I might be able to opt out of the August A/B plan and continue working from home. I need to talk to my doctor. (Speaking of which, I haven’t seen my doctor since before this thing started. I hope he’s OK.)

I have an appointment with my dentist for a regular cleaning coming up in mid-June. I’d been assuming I’d have to reschedule it, but my dentist has reopened his office and called to confirm the appointment yesterday. He is spacing appointments out a bit more, so multiple patients aren’t in the office at the same time, so he changed the time of the appointment, but it’s still on the same day. And I assume he and the hygienist will be using a lot more PPE than usual. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.

Looking back at previous blog entries in the “on this day” column for today, I saw one about the Big Bambu exhibit at the Met from ten years ago. That was probably my all-time favorite roof garden installation. In a normal year, I would have been up there by now, maybe more than once. They are still planning on going ahead with this year’s exhibit, but we’ll see what happens with that. It was originally scheduled to run from April 21 through October 25.

I decided to take another shot at getting my groceries delivered from Whole Foods this week. This time, I put in the order on Friday night for Saturday delivery, in the 8-10 AM window. I’m tempted to write in way too much detail about this week’s order, but I’ll boil it down to a few points. They were out of stock on four items, and offered substitutions for all four. Only two of those were reasonable substitutions though. (Example: seltzer water is not a good substitution for iced coffee!) So, again, I had to make a supplemental trip to ShopRite to pick up some stuff. And their prices are, in general, higher than ShopRite’s. (There’s a reason why their nickname is “Whole Paycheck.”) Things went pretty smoothly though. The delivery guy showed up at around 8:30 AM and brought the bags all the way up to my door. Everything was well-packed and nothing was missing. So, while it’s convenient, I don’t think it’s going to become a regular thing.

My plan for this afternoon involves maybe watching a meditation-related talk at 1 PM and the SpaceX Demo-2 launch at around 3 PM. There’s also been quite a bit of WonderCon from Home content posted recently. There are at least a few panels in there that I’d like to watch. So life is (relatively) good. I’ve still got a job, I’ve got groceries, and I’ve got plenty of content to keep me entertained and/or distracted.

Memorial Day Weekend

I think this is the end of week ten since I started working from home. It’s probably time to stop keeping track of which week it is. This is just the way it is now. My employer is starting to talk about reopening our offices, slowly, but they haven’t officially announced anything yet. Right now, the official word is that we’re all still working from home through June 1. I’m fairly certain I’ll still be working from home through June. I might have to start going back into the office on a limited basis in July. We’ll see. It would be nice to have more certainty, but, as Nicholas Kristof points out in his column this week, “Let’s Remember That the Coronavirus Is Still a Mystery.” I’m trying to accept, with humility, the uncertainty that there is around this thing and take things day by day.

NJ’s COVID-19 dashboard shows that we’re now over 150,000 cases, 10,000 deaths, and 500,000 tests here in NJ. Gov. Murphy has been gradually loosening restrictions. The maximum size of a “gathering” has been increased from 10 to 25. Beaches are open this weekend, with some restrictions.

I’m definitely not going anywhere this weekend though. I’ll be staying in, reading comics, maybe playing some video games, and just generally puttering around the apartment. I generally spend Memorial Day at home, watching the Tour of Somerville. The tour has, of course, been canceled this year, for the first time since World War II. So it’ll be quiet in Somerville on Monday.

I had wanted to “attend” a number of the sessions from Microsoft Build this past week, but we had a bit of an emergency at work that took up most of my time, so I pretty much missed it all. I did have some time Friday afternoon, so I went back and watched some of the stuff that’s available on-demand. I have a few more sessions bookmarked, and I’d like to watch those this weekend.

I got an email from the Metropolitan Museum this week saying that my membership would be extended for however long the museum is closed. I was expecting that, and I suspect that MoMA will do the same. (MoMA had extended all memberships when they had closed for renovations last year, so they’ll probably do the same for this situation.) The Met is now tentatively planning to reopen in August. I think that may be a little optimistic, but it’ll be great if they can. I haven’t heard anything about MoMA or any other museums in NYC making plans to reopen yet. Museums elsewhere in the country are starting to reopen, but of course no other city has been as hard-hit as NYC. I don’t think I’ll feel comfortable going into New York for museum trips (or anything else) until we’ve got a vaccine and/or an effective treatment for COVID-19.

When this thing started, I, like many other people, started looking into the possibility of getting groceries delivered, or at least just doing grocery pickup. At that time, all of the various options for grocery delivery were overwhelmed, so I just kept making my weekly trips to ShopRite as usual. This morning, it was raining pretty hard and I decided to check and see if grocery delivery was possible. Surprisingly, it was. ShopRite had delivery slots open, but not until the middle of the week. Whole Foods, on the other hand, had same-day slots open. So I went ahead and placed an order. I put in the order at 8 AM, for delivery between 10 AM and noon. It’s 11 AM now, and the order just arrived. The process was pretty smooth. They were out of stock on one item, though, so I guess I’m going to run over to ShopRite today anyway, at least for a quick trip. I don’t think I’ll switch over to delivery on a regular basis, but it’s nice to know that it’s an option.

This was a pretty random post, but it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve blogged, so I thought I should gather my thoughts and write something. I may write some more later this weekend, if I get bored and/or feel the urge.