Ten years of losing it

I was taking a break this morning and updating my WordPress install (as one does), and noticed a couple of posts in my “on this day” sidebar: Losing It and Five years of losing it. So, if my math is right, that means it’s been about ten years since I started trying to lose weight.

I started out (in 2013) at around 230 pounds. And, as of five years ago, I had hit 135. Somewhere during 2020, I started going back up again, and I’m now around 155. I’ve been trying to stop going up and maybe course-correct to get myself back down to 150. And then I want to see if I can stay there. I think that would be a nice healthy weight.

But I’ve been having some trouble with discipline. I’ve been snacking a lot, often on stuff that I know has more calories than I want to acknowledge. (For instance, the nice peanut butter cookies from the coffee shop across the street from my apartment…)

I may continue to have trouble with snacking, given that there’s a fancy French bakery opening up on just downstairs from my apartment soon. But maybe being back in the office three days a week will help me out. There’s no good coffee shop or bakery near enough to the office to tempt me, so my afternoon snack when I’m in the office is usually just an office coffee and a granola bar.

Well, either way, here’s my weight graph over the last ten years. If nothing else, I’ve stayed consistent about weighing myself every day and recording all of my meals and snacks.

a graph of my weight over the last ten years
a graph of my weight over the last ten years

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

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

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

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

NFL

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

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

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

Kung Fu, and more water boiling

So, since Friday, we’ve got water service back, but with low pressure, and we still have a boil water advisory. The most recent update from the water company indicates that they’ve replaced the pipe, so that’s good.

My system, for now, is to use boiled water for cleaning my toothbrush and stuff like that, bottled water for drinking, and paper/plastic cups, plates, and forks/spoons/etc, so I don’t have to wash dishes. ShopRite had plenty of bottled water today and yesterday. I bought a gallon of Poland Spring yesterday, and another gallon today. They’re limiting sales to two gallons per customer per visit. If the advisory isn’t lifted, I’ll probably need to go back for another gallon or two at some point.

I did risk making myself eggs and toast this morning, which required washing some dishes afterward. I went ahead and used tap water for that, and I’ll just live with the risk, I guess. And I ate a couple of slices of pizza from the pizzeria across the street last night. I’m going with the theory that pizza is cooked at a high enough temperature to kill anything that might have lingered from using tap water anywhere in the process. That may be wishful thinking, but I guess I’m OK with it.

It’s been interesting to see which businesses on Main St were closed yesterday and today, and which ones weren’t. Both Starbucks and my favorite local coffee shop have been closed, but Dunkin Donuts has been open. There’s a local bakery that was open, but they posted on Facebook that their stuff is actually prepared offsite, in a “ghost kitchen” that’s in an area not covered by the boil water advisory.

Meanwhile, I’ve been on a Kung Fu binge this weekend. I watched Ip Man yesterday, and that reminded me that I’ve had a DVD set of Kung Fu Master sitting on my shelf since 2007 or so, unwatched, so I dusted that off and watched it too. Today, I’m watching the Ric Meyers commentary track for that. It’s bringing back pleasant memories of Meyers’ “Kung Fu Superhero Extravaganza” panels at San Diego cons, back when I was going to SDCC every year. (I’m fairly certain the reason I bought the Kung Fu Master DVD set is because Meyers showed some clips from it at one of those panels.) And some internet searching around Donnie Yen has reminded me that there are a bunch of his movies that I haven’t watched yet. And I have a box set of all of the Once Upon A Time In China movies, so maybe I should hold off on buying any more Kung Fu DVDs or Blu-rays until I’ve watched those

rough day

Today did not start off well. There was some (presumably) emergency construction going on, right outside my window, from around 9 PM last night until 4 AM this morning. A good bit of jackhammer noise early on, then a whole bunch of back-up beeping throughout the night. (I understand that back-up beepers are well-intentioned, but are they really necessary in the middle of the night, on a street that’s been closed off to all traffic?)

So I was pretty out of it this morning. I was working from home, and it was a fairly quiet day at work, so I got some work done on a big project that I’ve been working on for weeks. So that was good. But lack of sleep, plus some other stuff, made me a little paranoid about some work stuff. It’s always a bit weird when you’re working from home, and you’ve got no meetings with anyone, and you’re not getting much email, and you notice a couple of weird things, and then your imagination starts going… Anyway, I think everything is (mostly) fine, but I guess I’ll find out next week.

And then, around 3:45 PM, I noticed that my water was out. I did some checking, and it looks like there was a big water main break, and most of the town is out. And tonight is “cruise night,” when downtown is overrun with classic cars, and various folks looking at classic cars. So that’s going to be a huge problem, if nobody’s toilet is working…

Meanwhile, it’s been another “air quality alert” day, with the AQI above 150, well into the “unhealthy” range. I guess the plan for tonight is to stay home, with the air conditioning on, drink beer, pee in a bucket, and go to bed early.

well-being day

I’ve had a few things on my mind this week that I wanted to blog about, but I just haven’t had the time and/or energy. I think I’ve finally gotten to a point now where I can sit down and ruminate a bit. It’s Saturday, and my chores are all done, and I’m not so tired that I need a nap yet.

Last Sunday was the Somerville St. Patrick’s Day parade. A lot of people came out for it. I watched parts of it out of my window, but I didn’t really pay too much attention. I spent most of the day reading comics and watching TV.

And Monday was my birthday. It was definitely a low-key birthday. I got a lot of “happy birthday” messages on Facebook, as usual, but I didn’t do anything to celebrate. It was a normal work day. I’ve realized that I’m now closer to 60 than 50, which is a bit alarming, but I guess it’s OK.

Friday was St. Patrick’s Day, and I took that day off as a “well-being” day. That’s a new thing we have at work this year. We can take two days off as well-being days. There’s a whole different workflow for requesting a well-being day, vs a regular vacation or sick day, for some reason. We’re supposed to use these days for “mental health” or charity/volunteering work. And we have to select which one we’re using it for. I put down “mental health.” I had some ideas about stuff I could do with the day, but most of those got tossed out the window. I got up late. I walked to the mall, ordered a new pair of glasses at LensCrafters, and walked back. That pretty much killed the morning. All I did in the afternoon was watch TV and take a nap. I guess that qualifies as useful to my mental health.

Ordering new glasses turned out to be surprisingly difficult. For the frames, I just asked LensCrafters to get me the same ones I have now. I’m not sure if we found the exact same frames, but they’re close enough. But the salesperson couldn’t figure out how to order my prescription in those frames. It kept coming back as impossible. Now, my new prescription isn’t that different from my previous one. But I guess it was different enough to cause a problem. So, after nearly an hour of futzing around, involving both the salesperson and an optician, we settled on plastic lenses that are cheaper than the ones we were trying to order, which were the same material as I have now. I’m honestly not sure if they’ll be better or worse than my current glasses, but there’s a 30-day guarantee, so I guess I can return them if they’re no good.

I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with my vision lately. I guess I’m still not anywhere near the “legally blind” stage, but I’m definitely having some problems. The next thing to tackle is my hearing. I’m overdue for another visit to the audiologist. I last went in March 2021, and should have gone again in March 2022, but never got around to it. So now it’s two years, and I should really get back there, and see about maybe finally getting a hearing aid.

Another topic I wanted to mention in passing is the third anniversary of the start of the pandemic. My company is still letting us work from home three days a week, which is good, but there’s some talk that they might want to get people to come back into the office more often. I’m honestly having some trouble with the current schedule, mostly because I don’t always have enough energy to deal with commuting and working in a cubicle anymore. By the time I get home after a day in the office, I’m often quite exhausted. I’m not sure how I used to commute into the office five days a week. And I’m not sure if something is wrong with me, or if this is just how I’m supposed to feel at 56 years old.

Anyway, at least I appear to have gotten through the last three years without contracting COVID at any point. (Or, if I did, it was post-vaccination and mild enough that I assumed it was a cold.) I’m still masking up at the grocery store. And I still wear a mask at work, but only when I’m moving around the office. I’m one of only a few folks who still do that. I’ve slacked off a lot with regard to masking when I’m going out to pick up take-out food or coffee. I used to wear a mask all the time for that, but now I’ll skip it sometimes, if I know I’m going into a place that won’t be crowded, and where I know I’ll be in and out quickly. I actually haven’t gotten sick in a while, at least by my standards, so that’s good. (I was a bit sick on Presidents Day, so it’s been almost a month. And I wasn’t that sick, then.)

Reading this post back, it sounds a bit bleak. But I didn’t intend it to sound that way, and I’m actually doing pretty good, all things considered. Maybe I should write another post later, talking about all the cool stuff I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching. Oh, and I have another post to write about Microsoft certification, and probably some other tech stuff, so that’ll be more fun than this one.

Ten years at SHI

I happened to notice my five year work anniversary post earlier this week, and thought I should write a ten year anniversary post. I hit my ten year anniversary about a week ago. I guess it’s kind of a big deal, since this is only the second job I’ve had that’s lasted this long. The previous one was NMS, where I worked for around 13 years (1996-2009). I probably would have hit 15 years there, if the company hadn’t got out of business.

A lot has changed at SHI since that five-year mark. A lot of those changes happened in 2022. I switched to a new boss, then back to the old boss. There have been a lot of management changes within IT in 2022. And I got promoted to “IT Solutions Manager,” whatever that means. I now have three direct reports, all CRM developers (which is kind of awkward, since I don’t really know our CRM system).

I’m doing less AX 2012 development, and am gradually moving into more Dynamics 365 development. We’re just in the planning stages of moving off of on-prem AX 2012 to Dynamics 365 F&O. And, since the CRM devs have been moved into our group and now report to me, I’m learning about our Dynamics 365 CRM environment. It’s all going pretty slowly, but we’re a big company and there’s a lot going on. (And yes, I know that F&O apparently isn’t called F&O anymore and CRM isn’t called CRM anymore. I can’t keep up with Microsoft’s crazy product naming shenanigans…)

I think there’s a good chance I’ll still be with SHI in five years. (Though I worry that saying that out loud will jinx it…) There have been a lot of layoffs at tech companies recently, but I don’t think SHI is planning any. And it seems like there’s a lot of opportunity there to do interesting work.

I’m realizing now that I’ll be 60 years old in five years, and 65 in ten years. I don’t know if there’s any point in thinking that far ahead, but it seems to me like there’s a real chance I could finish out my working years at SHI.

There’s a lot more I could say about my job right now, but there wouldn’t be much of a point to it. I’m relatively content where I am. There’s a lot of uncertainty, but there’s uncertainty everywhere. I think I have some good coworkers, and I think I’m in a pretty good situation.

Time Marches On

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Year’s Day 2023

It’s 8 AM on New Year’s Day, and here I am again writing my traditional New Year’s Day post. I have a bit of a headache today, not because I was up late partying, but because I had trouble sleeping. I went to bed at 9:30 last night, and slept reasonably well until around 11, when nasal congestion and random noise from outside woke me up and pretty much ruined my sleep until around 4 AM, when everything quieted down and my nose cleared up, and I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep. I got out of bed at 7. I guess I have enough coffee in me now that I can get through the day, but I think I’ll need at least one nap today, and I’ll probably need to go to bed early again.

I’ll start this post out with links to some previous posts:

  • Last year, I blogged on Jan 2.
  • And here’s 2021, 2020, and 2019.
  • And probably my earliest New Year’s Day overview post, from 2008.

And I’ll break this post down into sections, since it might get a bit lengthy.

Health, Weight, and Sleep

I started seeing a new doctor this year, and she wasn’t interested in seeing me more than once this year, so I only had a single doctor’s visit in 2022, in May. My blood work was fine, and I guess my general health is fine.

I got two COVID booster shots this year, in April and September. The second one was the bivalent booster. As far as I know, I still haven’t gotten COVID. I might have gotten a mild case once or twice; I’ve certainly been sick a few times. But never bad enough to see a doctor. (And I usually test myself for COVID if I’m sick, and I’ve never had a positive test.)

I do feel like I got sick more often than I’d like last year. I’ve noticed that doing pretty much anything that involves being out in a crowd for a nontrivial amount of time results in me getting sick the next day. I’ve always been like that, to some extent, but I think it’s getting worse.

My sleep has been good and bad this past year. In the last couple of weeks, it’s been more bad than good. but for a few weeks prior to that, I’d been sleeping quite well. So I’m not sure what’s going on there. I think that a lot of it is sinus problems.

My weight has gone up a bit this year. I started 2022 at 140 pounds, and I’m now at 150. I’d intended on drawing the line at 140, but I’ve just crept up to 150, and I haven’t really cared enough to commit to getting it back down. I’m not sure if I need to, really, if I can actually draw the line at 150. I think that’s a reasonably healthy weight for me. My problem over the last year is that I’ve been eating a lot of cookies, to be honest.

I’ve done well with exercise this year, I think. I’ve been pretty consistent about getting a lot of walking done. In fact, it’s nice enough out that I should probably take a break from this blog post and go out for a walk right now.

Work

…and now I’m back from my walk and it’s a little after 9 AM. So my next section is going to be about work. I’m still working for SHI, and I’ll hit my ten-year mark this month. My longest time at one job was NMS, where I worked for around 13 years. So SHI is in second place, and may surpass NMS, if I manage to stick around for a few more years.

After being in pretty much the same position, with the same manager, for most of my time at SHI, there were a lot of changes in 2022. In April, there was a bit of a shake-up, and my group got moved under a different manager, in a different group. Then, in July, we had the data breach. And in August, there was another management shake-up, and I got moved back under my old manager. And in November, I was promoted to “IT Solutions Manager” and am now responsible for managing three programmers. Additionally, these programmers work on our CRM system, so I’m (gradually) moving from working primarily on AX to working on CRM.

And that’s a simplified timeline. There’s a lot more going on than what I described there. I guess it’s mostly good, and we’re on a good path for growth in 2023? I’m not really high-level enough to have a good picture of the company’s overall health, and whether or not we’re on the right path. I guess I’ll stick with “cautious optimism.” I’ve updated my resume, but I’m hopeful that I won’t need it in 2023.

In terms of professional development, it’s good that I’ve been promoted into management, I guess. I’m still basically a hands-on programmer, and my three reports are doing their own thing, for the most part. I may take more of an active hand in 2023, but that’ll depend on how things shake out.

Looking at the books I’ve read and courses I’ve taken in 2022, I put a fair bit of effort into learning scrum earlier in 2022. There was a big push for scrum that went along with the April management changes. That kind of fizzled out after the data breach and the August management changes, but we’re still (kinda) doing scrum. I also put some effort into working on programming fundamentals, reading a few books related to “Clean Code” and refactoring. And, for specific technologies, I’ve been trying to learn a bunch of random stuff that’s all directly related to projects I’m working on. I could get into all that, but then this post would get way too long.

The New Normal

…for lack of a better title. COVID is still a thing, regardless of whether or not people want it to be. SHI has us working in the office two days a week now. For me, that’s Tuesday and Thursday. It’s not too bad, I guess. I wear a mask when I’m not at my desk. There aren’t too many other people who still do, but there are a few.

They might let us keep to the two day schedule through 2023, but they also might try to get us to come back full-time, or maybe four days a week. I’m not sure. I’m really hoping they stick with the two day per week plan. I’m not ready to go back to the office full-time.

I don’t go out nearly as often as I used to. My only trip to NYC this year was in March, when I took the train to Albany for a funeral. (I switched from NJ Transit to Amtrak in NYC, so it was just a brief visit.) And that trip was really my only trip out of NJ. I almost had my E-ZPass canceled this year, because I haven’t used it since 2019. I got them to keep it active for another year, but I should probably give it up. Similarly, I should probably give up on my memberships to the Met and MoMA. I haven’t used either this year.

I had bought a badge for NYCC in October, but I decided to skip it and got a refund. I’m pretty sure that was a good idea, and that I would have gotten horribly sick if I’d gone. I may be done with comic conventions entirely now. I’m really not sure.

Books, Movies, TV, Music, Etc.

So this is the fun part of the post. (Maybe.) I’ll start with a link to my Goodreads Year In Books for 2022. I read 76 books this year. A lot of them weren’t really books, per se. I started the year with a bunch of Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas, for instance. Looking at the list, I think I read around 20 actual novels in 2022.

I gave up on trying to read any classics in 2022. Instead, I put some effort into putting a dent in my backlog of random Kindle books, reading stuff that I got from old Humble bundles and stuff like that. There was some good stuff in there, but also some stuff that was OK but forgettable. I also got back into a couple of my favorite book series, The Dresden Files and The Laundry Files. I’d last read a Dresden book in 2015, and a Laundry book in 2017. I didn’t read a lot of comics in 2022. Probably my favorites were the two Hilda books I read.

For movies: I still haven’t been back to a theater, since 2019. So I only watched movies at home. From my Letterboxd stats page, I can see that I watched 84 films in 2022. That’s less than 2021, when I watched more than 100 films. My highest-rated films from 2022 were My Father’s Dragon, Turning Red, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. My highest-rated re-watches were Howl’s Moving Castle and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, both of which I bought on Blu-ray in 2022.

For music: I mostly listened to music via Apple Music this year, so (in theory) my Apple Music Replay ’22 page should be pretty accurate. In practice, it’s a little weird. My top track for the year is the first track on Max Richter’s Sleep, which is probably because I put it on sometimes when I’m taking a nap on my sofa. My second most-listened track is Heavy Heart, by Bartees Strange, which makes sense, I guess. I do like that song.

Beyond that, I’ve listened to a lot of Bombay Bicycle Club, Bibio, and a few others. If I was going to pick my favorite album from 2022, it would probably be Bibio’s BIB10. Replay doesn’t tell you how many albums you’ve added to your library during the year, but I keep a list of those in Evernote, and I see I added over 50 albums in 2022. So I’m definitely listening to a lot of new stuff. (And old stuff too.) I guess I’m getting my money’s worth out of Apple Music.

For TV: I don’t keep track of the stuff I watch on TV the way I do with books and movies. I’ve definitely watched a lot of TV in 2022, but I can’t think of anything in particular that stands out. I’m still subscribing to Netflix, Disney+, and Paramount+. I switched to the Disney Bundle in 2022, so I get Hulu and ESPN+ too now. I’m not particularly proud of the amount of TV I watch these days, but there are times when I’m just too tired to do much else.

Summary

I feel like there’s more I wanted to write about here, but it’s almost 11 AM now, and I’m running out of steam. I should wrap this up, and maybe go out for another walk. I’m not making any resolutions for 2023. I’m planning on just playing it by ear. If I can manage to lose a few pounds, that’d be nice. If I can move forward on some professional stuff, that’d be good too.

Merry Christmas, I guess.

It’s Christmas morning. I’ve been fighting a cold for the last few weeks, on and off. Today’s status is “kind of congested, scratchy throat, and not enough energy for anything even vaguely challenging.” It was 5º yesterday morning, and 14º this morning, so it’s been a very cold couple of days. My heat has been working reasonably well, so that’s good.

I spent Christmas Eve watching football, mostly. A friend dropped by for a few hours and hung out. He gave me an A500 Mini for Christmas, which was pretty cool. I haven’t tried to hook it up yet. (See “not enough energy…” above.) The Giants lost, but they’re not out of playoff contention, so that’s good. And it was a fun game to watch.

I’m listening to Jon Solomon’s holiday marathon on WPRB right now. He’s currently playing Snaildartha, which is a nice thing to listen to when you’re trying to get through Christmas morning with a bit of a headache and not much energy.

And it’s working well as background music while I change the passwords on all the personal accounts I had stored in LastPass. The information that’s come out recently about their breach is a bit alarming. I don’t really use LastPass for personal use; I have a 1Password account for that. But we use it at work, and I have a linked personal LastPass account in which I’ve stored passwords for a few accounts that I occasionally need to use at work, like Pluralsight, StackOverflow, ACM, and stuff like that. I’ve done some background reading on the breach, and it sounds like it’s unlikely that anyone would ever bother trying to crack my password vault. But it’s possible that they could, and the accounts I had in there are ones where I had some questionable passwords anyway, so I went ahead and changed them.

I’m not sure what our InfoSec people are going to recommend we do with business passwords in LastPass. They’ve already forced us to reset our LastPass master passwords, but that’s useless if the hackers already have a copy of our data (which I guess they do). The official LastPass blog post says “…it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology”, so I guess we’re safe. Oof. I shouldn’t be thinking/blogging about password breaches on Christmas Day, but here we are.

I’m trying to figure out what I want to do with the rest of the day now. There’s football to watch, which could keep me busy from around noon until I go to bed. I’ve also considered binge-watching one of the many TV shows that came out this year that I haven’t watched yet, like Andor on Disney+, or one of the Star Trek shows that I haven’t caught up with yet.

Maybe I could watch something Christmas-related. I watched the 1984 version of A Christmas Carol, with George C. Scott, last night, and that was good. And I re-watched Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas on Netflix. Also good.

And, since Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, I have tomorrow off from work too. So maybe I can watch football today and Andor tomorrow. I’m not sure if Andor is in any way Christmas-y, but it seems to have a character who looks a little like Santa, based on the main image that goes with this article.

Mastodon

OK, so I finally gave in and signed up for a Mastodon account. You can find me at @andyhuey@mastodon.social. I spent too much time, initially, stressing about which instance to sign up at, then gave up and just used mastodon.social, which is what pretty much everyone else uses. (I really wanted to pick a “cool” instance that would mark me as one of the “cool kids,” but then I remembered that I’m a 55 year old nerd.)

I also have CounterSocial, Hive, and Post accounts, but honestly I think Mastodon is “winning” the war for Twitter refugees. I used Fedifinder to get a list of my Twitter “friends” and follow them on Mastodon. It found 35. Apparently, I’m following 380 accounts on Twitter, which is more than I would have guessed. (A lot of those are probably inactive, but still, that’s a lot.) So I guess around 10% of the accounts I follow on Twitter are on Mastodon. I guess that’s a good start.

Jeff Jarvis has a good write-up on Mastodon here (and a video too). I used his write-up to get myself started.

I searched my Pinboard account for references to Mastodon, and found one from 2017, so I’ve at least been aware of Mastodon for several years now. I probably should have signed up for an account back then, so I’d be able to say that I was into Mastodon before it was popular. Really, I guess I’m at the point in my life where I’m not usually an early adopter anymore. I’m too old to get excited about messing around with half-baked projects that might or might not go anywhere. At least I can say that I got my preferred “andyhuey” username on all of the new services I signed up for, so that’s something. (Though, with Mastodon, there are multiple instances, so there could be other andyhuey’s on other servers.)

I haven’t tried the official Mastodon iOS client yet, but I’m going to do that today. I might also try one of the third-party ones. I do wish that the folks who make Twitterrific would make a Mastodon client. i really like Twitterrific, and would love to have a similar app for Mastodon.

I’d also like to see WordPress add Mastodon support to their social sharing tool. Right now, I’m auto-sharing my blog posts to Twitter. They also support Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr, but not Mastodon yet. There’s at least one third-party plugin for Mastodon posting, but I don’t know if I want to mess around with it yet.

Anyway, I’m going to see if I can switch some of my social media time over from Twitter and Facebook to Mastodon this week. The problem, I think, is that there isn’t a lot of mainstream media presence on Mastodon yet. A lot of my time on Twitter and Facebook is spent clicking on links to news articles from the NY Times account, Washington Post account, and so on. Really, I should try to switch over to my RSS reader for that kind of stuff. So maybe, between RSS and Mastodon, I can wean myself off Twitter and/or Facebook. We’ll see how far I get with that.