Category: Somerville

Six weeks in

I think this is the end of the sixth week of social distancing / work from home / whatever this is. I’m starting to lose track. My last post was on Easter Sunday, two weeks ago, so I thought I should check in again. I don’t have much to report. I’m still employed and still healthy.

I’d mostly avoided take-out for the first four weeks of this thing, but I started getting more adventurous last week. After six weeks without pizza, I finally decided to just go ahead and order a whole 12″ pie last night. I only intended on eating half of it, but I wound up eating the whole thing. So I’m going to have to try to eat healthier today. I’ve been doing a pretty good job of sticking to routines, including staying with pretty much the same diet I was following before this started. But I’ve actually dropped a couple of pounds, so I think there’s room for an occasional pizza in there, as long as I don’t overdo it.

I’ve been going out for morning walks on most weekdays since this thing started. Generally, I go for a walk at the same time that I would normally leave for work. I try to take a photo or two on these walks. I’ve been writing short journal entries in Day One every day, and saving a photo with the entry. Today, I took a bunch of those photos and created an album on Flickr. You can find it here. They’re mostly just random photos of flowers and trees. But the routine of going for the walk, taking a photo or two, saving it to Day One, and writing a little journal entry is one of the things that’s helping me stay sane.

So, this hasn’t been much of an update. As usual, there’s a lot of news I could link to, but I’m not really in the mood to do that right now. I’ve gotten my laundry and grocery shopping done, and went for a nice walk, so now I just want to relax for a bit.

Somerset County changes

I don’t post a lot of political stuff on this blog, but here’s an article from the Courier News that contains a few items worth noting:

  • This is the first time since 1965 that Democrats have controlled the freeholder board in Somerset County.
  • “Since the Democrats last had control, Somerset County’s population has more than doubled and the non-white population has increased from 3.2 to 32 percent.”
  • “About 70 percent of the county’s population was not alive when the Democrats last held control.”

So that seems like a pretty big change. Somerset County has certainly changed quite a lot just in the last 25 years, which is about how long I’ve been living here. I don’t know if the change in the freeholder board will actually matter much, in the grand scheme of things. But it’s an interesting change and it’s worth noting.

On a national level, it’s also been interesting to keep an eye on our new local House rep, Tom Malinowski, over the last year. He’s the first Democratic House rep we’ve had since I moved to Somerset County. I’m trying to figure out when Somerville last had a Democratic House rep, and it’s a little confusing, since we switched districts at least once. We’ve been part of the 7th district since 2000, I think, and the 7th hasn’t had a Democratic rep since 1980. Prior to that, we were in the 11th, where Rodney Frelinghuysen was the rep from 1995-2018, and the last Democratic rep was a guy who served from 1963 to 1984.

Back when Frelinghuysen was our rep, it just seemed like a given that he’d get re-elected every two years, and that was never going to change. In 2000, Michael Moore ran a ficus against him in the primary, to make a point about how House incumbents often run unopposed in primaries and how often they get re-elected. Frelinghuysen was part of a political dynasty that stretched back to 1793. (Malinowski, in contrast, was born in Poland and came to the US as a child.)

Anyway, Malinowski has made national news a number of times since he was elected, and it’s mostly been for saying something reasonable or doing something useful, which is refreshing. This recent New Yorker article has a few quotes from him. And his Twitter feed is a breath of fresh air, compared to a lot of the political discourse that you see on Twitter.

This whole ramble started because I was curious to see if there was any mention in the news of an anti-war protest that happened yesterday here in Somerville. I didn’t find any, but I did find an article about a protest in Woodbridge related to the “SeaQuest petting zoo aquarium” in Woodbridge Center Mall. I have to admit that I had no idea that “petting zoo aquariums” were a thing, nor that there was one in Woodbridge Center Mall. I should really get off the internet now and start doing something useful with my Sunday.

hoping for a good Thanksgiving

I had some plans for Thanksgiving tomorrow, but they fell through, so now I’m looking at a nice unstructured day at home, maybe reading comics or binge-watching something or other on Netflix. I’m a little nervous tonight, though, remembering last year’s Christmas music debacle. They hadn’t started playing Christmas music on Main St this year, as of last night, so I was hopeful maybe they wouldn’t at all. But they’re playing something right now. Whatever it is, I hope they stop it by 10 PM.

A few random thoughts:

  • I mentioned back in September that I was a little sad that the Paris Theater in NYC was shutting down. Well, Netflix just signed a long-term lease for it, so I guess it will be sticking around for a while longer. It’s a little unclear as to whether or not they’ll keep operating it like a regular movie theater, full-time, or not. But it’s cool that it’s not going to get turned into a Starbucks or something.
  • I’ve been thinking a bit about what I might do for Christmas this year. I noticed today that Lincoln Center is showing Sátántangó on Christmas day, starting at noon. So now I’m giving some consideration to the idea of spending most of Christmas day watching a 7.5 hour black & white Hungarian film in NYC. I mean, I’m almost definitely not going to do that. But it’s an entertaining thought. And I really wonder what kind of people I’d see at that showing.
  • Following up on my music post from over the weekend, I still haven’t signed up for a new streaming service, but I did spend $20 at Bandcamp on twelve hours of music from Motion Sickness of Time Travel. I’ve been listening to it at work today and yesterday, and it’s good stuff.
  • I’m also kind of amused by Lifehacker’s article about Spotify being “the Best Life Hack of the Decade”. Seems kind of overblown, but I guess I could see where on-demand access to (almost) any music you’d ever want could be kind of a big thing for some folks.

Climate Strike, Batman Day, NYCC and more

Happy Batman Day! I’m a big Batman fan, but yesterday’s climate strike is probably a bigger deal than Batman Day. (Also bigger than Talk Like A Pirate Day, which was two days ago. Or the reopening of the Fifth Ave Apple Store, which was also yesterday. Or the reopening of my local Apple Store, which also reopened yesterday.)

Today in Somerville we have the Village Brewing Oktoberfest, not to be confused with the Tapastre-sponsored Oktoberfest, which is next Saturday.

It’s all very confusing, especially since I got no sleep last night, due to the music on Main St playing until 1 or 2 AM last night again. I have a bunch of stuff bookmarked that I’ve been meaning to write thoughtful and/or entertaining blog posts about, but I just haven’t gotten around to it, and now my brain is kind of fried, so… you get this post. Sorry.

New York Comic Con is just about two weeks away, so I’m looking forward to that. Warren Ellis is going to be there, which is kind of a big deal, since he doesn’t really do conventions anymore, and definitely not conventions in the US. He’s only coming to NYCC to promote the Castlevania Netflix show, so I probably won’t get to hear him talk about his comics work, but I will definitely go to that Castlevania panel. There’s also an Adam Savage talk that will probably be good, but costs $75 to attend. (He also has a regular panel during the con that doesn’t cost extra, so I’ll probably try to go to that one.)

There’s a lot of serious stuff going on in the world right now, and I’m trying to balance concern/involvement in the serious stuff vs. staying sane with Batman and NYCC and Castlevania and what-not.

no more iTunes and too much Main St music

Somebody thought it would be a good idea to start playing music here on Main St again, for the summer, and again it’s gone horribly wrong. Well, maybe not horribly wrong, but I woke up to bad jazz coming in through my window at 4 AM this morning, so pretty wrong. I stayed in bed until about 4:30, when the switch from bad jazz to yacht rock occurred, at which point I gave up and got out of bed. So now I’ve got an extra hour or so to kill before I have to go to work, so I might as well do some blogging.

I’ve been running across a lot of articles this week about the end of iTunes. Some of them are quite overblown and even misleading. Here’s one that isn’t. Key line: “For the most part, the end of iTunes seems to be an end in name only: key features will be retained in the Music app.” (And iTunes for Windows is sticking around for now too.) Here’s a FAQ-style article from CNET that’s also fairly useful and not misleading.

There are a lot of think pieces out there that are mostly following the same narrative. Here’s one from The Verge. The general structure of most of these goes through the rise of iPods, ripping CDs, pirating music through Napster, and buying 99¢ songs through iTunes, then the decline of that model and the rise of streaming music. I can’t argue with any of that, though I’m still not that keen on switching over to a $10/month streaming service.

Depending on how usable the new Apple Music app actually is, I may need to go back to my search for a good alternative music management system. Back in 2017, I had an issue that prompted me to look around. I tried Swinsian on my Mac and MediaMonkey on my PC, but wasn’t happy enough with either of them to stick with them. The issue I had with iTunes eventually got fixed, so I stuck with iTunes.

I’m actually getting a lot of my music these days from podcasts and streaming radio. I’m listening to Monday Graveyard and Future Astronauts regularly, and enjoying both. (And supporting both on Patreon, though for only a buck a month.) And right at this moment, I’m listening to some nice stuff on NTS. (The description of the show I’m listening to right now starts with “Exploring long-form structures and expressive micro-tuning systems…”, so yeah, it’s that kind of music! It’s these guys, apparently.)

I occasionally consider signing up for a streaming music service, though I still can’t talk myself into it. Amazon Music Unlimited would probably be the cheapest, at $8/month for Prime members. (I’m wondering about that price now though, since the page linked above currently shows two “Try It” buttons, one of which says $7.99/month under it, while the other says $9.99/month. And I saw an even higher price in a popup in the iOS app yesterday. So I don’t know what’s going on there.) Anyway, my taste is weird enough right now that I’m probably better off sticking with oddball podcasts, streaming radio stations, and an occasional Bandcamp purchase.

Well, it’s around 6:45 AM now, so it’s still a bit too early to go to work. Maybe I should go for a walk.

 

Easter walk and Flickr problems

It’s Easter, it’s nice out, and I’ve got nothing much to do today. So I went out for a walk and took some pictures. I uploaded them to Flickr here, if you’re curious.

I hadn’t uploaded anything to Flickr in quite a while. My last uploaded photos were from September 2018. I had a lot of trouble getting these ones uploaded. First, I tried to see if I could upload them from the Photos app on my Mac. That used to be supported, and pretty easy to do, but Apple removed that functionality at some point. So then I tried just using Flickr’s upload page. Long story there, but that doesn’t work at all reliably on the Mac right now. This may just be a temporary problem, since there’s a thread complaining about it on the forums from today with a bunch of responses. After a bunch of frustration on my Mac, I gave up and did it on my PC (after copying the photos to OneDrive to get them from Mac to PC). That worked, but still timed out a bunch of times. I just kept hitting “retry” until all the photos were up. So I probably wasted an hour of a perfectly good Easter Sunday just trying to get past that. Anyway, that’s all soured me on Flickr a bit. But if it’s just a temporary problem that’s not getting fixed today because it’s Easter and nobody’s available to fix it, then that’s fine I guess.

I only just recently let my Flickr Pro account renew for another two years, for $100. (It used to be only $45 if you renewed for 2 years, but I guess not anymore.) Now i’m wondering if that was a mistake. I had high hopes for the service after it was acquired by SmugMug, but they haven’t done much with it. They did finally start the process of moving off of Yahoo’s login system, so that’s a relief. Maybe I can finally nuke my old Yahoo account now.

Back to today’s photos: there are couple of photos in there of the Seward Johnson sculptures that are currently scattered throughout downtown Somerville. I’m not sure how I feel about these things. I’m all for art, in general, but these seem a little creepy.

Anyway, now it’s 1 PM and I feel like I’ve wasted too much of the day. I’ve walked three miles today, so that’s good. And I’ve read a few Batman comics. But I feel like I could have done more with today. Well, there’s still plenty of time left. I should get back to my Batman comics…

Black Friday

There was no repeat of the Christmas music incident last night, so I got a good night’s sleep (or at least as good as I can manage these days). So I may actually be in shape to do a few of the things that I was too frazzled to do yesterday. However, it’s still very cold out: 12° this morning. And Raritan Valley trains are running about 30 minutes behind schedule right now. So, combining those two factors, going into NYC today might be a bad idea. I’m not going to completely rule it out, but I’m definitely not heading out to the train station right now to stand outside in the cold for a half-hour, hoping the train eventually shows up. If I see the trains get back to normal, and if it gets up into the twenties, maybe I’ll go in later.

I started my online Black Friday shopping yesterday, and I think it might be amusing to list out some of the stuff I bought, yesterday and today.

  • I picked up some random comics on Comixology, from DC’s big Black Friday sale. I got Batman: White Knight, which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. And Tales of the Batman: Gene Colan Vol. 2. I really liked Colan’s run on Batman, back in the 80s, after he left Marvel for DC. And I got Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I generally like anything Morrison does, so I’m pretty sure I’ll like these. (These were $5 each.)
  • I bought Blade Runner 2049 and Isle of Dogs from Vudu. I hadn’t previously bought any digital movies from Vudu, but with the whole Movies Anywhere thing, I can buy from Apple, Amazon, or Vudu and the movies show up in all three libraries, so it makes sense to buy from whichever service is cheapest. (I was originally thinking about going out to see a movie today, but I think that, instead, I’ll likely stay in and watch one or both of those.)
  • I picked up Fantastical 2 for iPad for $3. (It’s regularly $10.) I’ve been using the iPhone version for years, but never got around to picking up the iPad version.
  • I bought a $100 iTunes gift card for $80 from Costco. It seemed like a good deal.
  • This morning, when I went into Lose It to log my breakfast, I got a popup offering a deal on a lifetime subscription. I’m always a bit leery of lifetime subscription deals, but I’ve been using Lose It for five years, and renewing my premium subscription every year, so I went ahead and paid $75 for a lifetime sub. Since I did that in-app, that came out of my iTunes account, nicely using up most of that gift card I bought last night. (Maybe I’ll pick up another $100 card today.)

And here are some things I’m looking at today:

  • Pluralsight has their usual Black Friday sale going on, where you can renew your subscription for $200 instead of $300. I’ll probably do that again this year. I don’t get a ton of use out of Pluralsight, but I guess I get enough that it’s worth the $200.
  • Jetpack has a 30% discount off all plans for Black Friday. I’m currently only using the free Jetpack services on this blog, but I could step up to their “personal” plan. About all that really gets me, beyond what’s in the free plan, is site backups, but that could be useful.
  • Apple’s Black Friday weekend event has started. As usual with Apple, it’s not that compelling. But it might be worthwhile for me, since I was looking at getting some new Apple stuff anyway. On the iPhone front, they only have deals on iPhone 7 & 8, and I was thinking about the XR, so I’ll probably skip those. Their Apple Watch deal is for a $50 Apple Store Gift Card when you buy a Series 3. That’s not much, but might be a good deal for me. My current watch is a “Series 0,” so a Series 3 would be a good step up. I can use the $50 towards my eventual iPhone purchase.
  • I’m thinking about picking up a second Sonos One speaker, either from Sonos directly, or from Amazon or Costco. I get a fair bit of use out of the one I bought earlier this year, and it would nice to have two, for stereo. I don’t know if I really need that, though.
  • It’s not exactly a Black Friday thing, but a friend of mine has a story in this anthology about… cannibalism. On the one hand, I’d like to support him, on the other hand, I don’t much like reading about cannibalism. But hey, it’s only $4 for Kindle.

Since I started writing this blog post, I see that the NJ Transit delays are now at almost an hour, so things on that front are definitely going in the wrong direction. And the temperature is up to 22°, so that’s going in the right direction, but maybe not far enough to motivate me to spend much time outdoors today.

Happy Thanksgiving

My Thanksgiving day this year is off to a rough start. They play Christmas music on Main St here in Somerville now, normally from noon to 8pm, but something threw off the timer a couple of weeks ago, so we’ve had a few instances of overnight Christmas music recently. And last night, it played all night.

It all started after the big snowstorm a week ago. (You might say that it wasn’t that much of a snowstorm, but as the linked article points out, it was “the biggest one-day November snowfall in 136 years.”) That night, the music didn’t end at 8pm, and kept playing until around midnight. My guess is there was a brief power interruption that screwed up the timer. So that wasn’t too bad. Either the timer stopped it at midnight or someone managed to turn it off.

Then, Saturday night, the music started at midnight, and stopped around 2am. My guess on that is that someone screwed up the AM/PM setting on it. (And I guess someone managed to shut it off after a couple of hours.)

I thought we were over all of that, since it’s been fine the last few days. But last night, again, it started at midnight. And never stopped. The last time this happened was back in 2012. That time, I called the police, but there was nothing they could do about it. And I sent an email to the group that’s responsible for the music, and they apologized, which is nice, but none of that gets me back a lost night of sleep. My best guess as to what happened this time is that somebody tried to change the schedule for Thanksgiving and screwed up the AM/PM setting again.

So I got out of bed at 5am this morning and I’m now eating breakfast and listening to some quiet music by Hugar, just loud enough to drown out the Christmas music. (Which is still playing.) It’s looking to be the coldest Thanksgiving since 1871, according to the NY Times. (It’s 20° right now, with a “feels like” temp of 11°, here in Somerville.) I’ve been trying to talk myself into going into New York today, and the continuing Christmas music assault might be enough to force me out of my apartment, even in 20° weather. I don’t really know what I’d do in NYC today; all the museums are closed. I’d probably go see a few movies, I guess.

I did put earplugs in last night, but they didn’t help much. On one of the previous nights, I also turned on my air cleaner, hoping the white noise would help. (It turns out that the earplugs do a good job of filtering out the air cleaner noise, but don’t help much with the music.)

So now I’m thinking about options for better earplugs, noise cancelling earphones, white noise generators, and stuff like that. Here’s a thread from Hacker News from earlier this week, about brain.fm and similar products/services. I’ve been wondering if I could actually use Max Richter’s eight-hour work Sleep to get through the night. I think I also need to look at some of the stuff in this NY Times article from 2011. Bose makes something called Noise-Masking Sleepbuds that might be good, though they cost $250. That got me thinking about whether or not I could sleep with AirPods in. That led me to a reddit thread; results on that seem to be mixed. (And battery life on the AirPods is only five hours, so they wouldn’t last all night.) I’m not at all sure what will work best. I may go on a bit of an Amazon binge today, ordering a bunch of random earplugs and stuff.

Now, it’s almost 7am, and I’ve moved from Hugar to Relaxation Tape for Solo Space Travel by The National Pool (which is quite good). There’s a lot of good ambient music on Bandcamp, but that’s a subject for another day.

This blog post is probably a bit scattershot, since it’s being written on zero sleep, but writing it has helped me get through breakfast and lower my stress level a bit, so that’s something. I’m hoping the Christmas music will stop at 8am, assuming my theory about the AM/PM screw-up is correct. If that happens, I may just go back to bed. (Though the three cups of coffee I just had might get in the way of that.)

Tom Malinowski

I just watched a segment from Amanpour & Co with Tom Malinowski, my newly-elected congressperson. My local House district has been in Republican hands for as long as I’ve lived here, so it’s kind of a big deal that a Democrat got elected. I actually didn’t see much of Malinowski in the news during the campaign, and I have to admit that I didn’t know that much about him. I never really bothered to do much research. I knew the basics: he worked in the State Department under the Obama administration, and had previously worked for Human Rights Watch. I don’t think I’d ever even seen him speak during the campaign. He seems to be a soft-spoken, reasonable, guy. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years, with the House back under Democratic control. I don’t want to go too far down the politics rabbit-hole, so I’ll leave it there.