Software and subscriptions and stuff

This is going to be a follow-up to my last two posts (here and here). Sorry. I have some interesting ideas in my head that I want to turn into blog posts, but I’m still plodding through a bunch of largely mundane stuff, trying to see if I can streamline or realign some stuff in my life. Anyway, here’s a brain dump of updates on stuff from those last two posts, plus some new stuff.

Cable TV: I got my February cable bill, with the new rates. My initial understanding of the rate increase was that my bill would go up by about $35. But it actually only went up by $14. The base rate for my cable package is now $85 (plus a bunch of fees) and my internet package is $90 (plus fees), but they’re applying a “special discount” of $42 so the total bill didn’t rise more than that $14. So I guess I’m sticking with my current plans. Any changes to the plans would probably invalidate the discount. So, while I could save a little by changing or dropping my cable plan, it’s not enough to make it worthwhile for me. (I’ll have to keep an eye on that discount and see if they phase it out over time. If they do, then I can think about a change again.)

Web hosting: I haven’t done any more with this. My new contract starts on Feb 12, so I’ll have to review it then. And I have plenty of time to drop my .org domains if I want to do that. They renew in May and August.

AmEx card: I haven’t done much with this either, though I did drop all recurring charges from the card. And I’m planning on using up my rewards points so I don’t lose those. That way, I can drop it cleanly and easily, if I decide to.

Westfield Comics: I did place a February order with them, but it was a small one. And I still haven’t talked myself into dropping Batman and Detective.

Flickr Pro: I took the deal to renew for two more years at the old price ($100 for two years), so now I don’t have to think about that again until 2023.

Quicken: Quicken switched to a subscription model a couple of years ago. I bought a 27-month sub from Amazon for $54 in November 2017, which was due to expire next month. The regular yearly rate to renew it directly with Quicken would have been $50/year, which seems a little steep to me. I found that I could buy a 14-month sub from Amazon for $30, so I did that, and now I’m good for another year. I took a quick look at a few alternatives, including Banktivity, Moneydance, and See Finance, but didn’t find any of them compelling enough to get me to switch.

H&R Block tax software: I’ve been buying their “Deluxe” package every year to do my taxes, for quite a long time, going back to when it was TaxCut. (I took a break for a few years and used an accountant instead, but she was a lot more expensive and not really any more convenient, really.) I generally buy it from Amazon, but this year, H&R Block had a “flash sale” where I could buy it from them for $30, so I did. So now I’m set to do my taxes, whenever I can find the mental energy to sit down and get it done.

Fantastical: I’ve been using Fantastical on my iPhone as my default calendar program for several years. I bought the iPad version a couple of years ago, and the Mac version just a few months ago. And now they’ve just released a new version and switched to a subscription model. (Sigh.) They’re being pretty good about existing users of the paid version, so I can use the new version, but not the new features. So that’s what I’m going to do. The new features are great if you’re really a calendar power-user, but I’m not. I just use my personal calendar to keep track of birthdays and medical appointments, mostly. The MacStories review of the new version is thorough and worth reading, if you’re the kind of person that needs a really powerful calendar management program.

Other stuff I’m subscribing to: This could be a long list, but I’ll limit it to apps and services I probably haven’t mentioned recently and that might be worth reconsidering: Instapaper ($30/year), 1Password ($30/year, with discount), Twitterific ($10/year), Sleep Cycle ($2/year).

Other stuff I’m not subscribing to: In a few cases where an app switched from paid to subscription, I’ve talked myself out of subscribing to it, and either stuck with the “free” version, or dropped the app entirely: TextExpander (dropped), Day One (still using free “Plus” version), Drafts (tried the “pro” version for a week; went back to the free one), Overcast (still using the free version, with some features unlocked from my original purchase).

I recently listened to an episode of Mac Power Users with Greg Pierce, the developer of Drafts. He seems like a good guy, and I do really appreciate the fact that subscriptions give small developers like him a steady revenue stream, and make software like Drafts possible. As a user, it’s frustrating to get pushed into all these subscriptions, and it’s often hard to justify the recurring expense for something that (for me) has limited utility. But I don’t agree with the idea that developers are getting “greedy,” which often crops up on places like Reddit or other online forums, when a developer switches to a subscription model. (On the other hand, I am kind of bothered when a large corporation like Apple or Amazon starts pushing subscription services. But that’s a subject for another day.)

So that’s about it for now, I guess. The stand alert on my Apple Watch has gone off twice while writing this, so I’ve been at it for more than an hour. I have another post bouncing around in the back of my head, similar to this one, but just about music and podcasts. The way I pay for and consume music has gotten a little complicated, and seems to be worth reviewing again. And there’s probably a post about buying and reading comic books in there too.

more frog boiling

I’ve had a follow-up to my previous frog boiling post kicking around in the back of my head for the past couple of weeks, and I think maybe it’s time to write it up. This is liable to turn into a massive Old Man Yells at Cloud post. You’ve been warned.

First, to follow up on the last post, I still haven’t decided what to do with my cable TV service, though I’m leaning towards dropping back to the “Broadcast Basic” package. I’m not currently watching a lot of TV shows outside of the regular broadcast channels. The biggest one would probably be Doctor Who on BBC America, but I could just buy that from Apple. That’s what I did for the last few seasons, when BBCA wasn’t part of my cable package. (Side note: I didn’t much like the first two episodes of this season, but it’s really picked up steam since. The last two episodes, the ones with Tesla and the Judoon, where both a lot of fun.) Anyway, I’m going to wait for my next bill, see how much the prices actually go up, and them decide.

The next thing on my list is my web hosting plan with IONOS (aka 1&1). I’ve been with them since 2003. Their monthly cost went up to $11 in 2017. I got a notice earlier this month saying that it’ll be going up to $14 next month. I guess I’ll still be sticking with them. I could get cheaper hosting, if I wanted to, but it’d be a hassle to move, and I haven’t had any issues with IONOS recently. I did just move two of my six domains to the “included” domains that come with my package, so that’ll save me the renewal cost on them. I current have “andrewhuey” and “andyhuey” in the .org, .com, and .net TLDs. I really only need andrewhuey.com and andrewhuey.net. I’m not using the “andyhuey” domains, and I’m not using either .org domain. I’m a little worried that the yearly cost for the .org domains might go up if the .org sale goes through, so I should probably just drop those.

One more item is my AmEx card. I’ve had it since college, but they’re raising the annual fee on it to $150 this year, and that’s kind of crazy for a card that I use primarily as a backup card. I should really drop it and just get a random no-fee card to use as my backup. I have this weird sentimental attachment to it though. It doesn’t make any sense, I know, but I’ve had it for so long.

And of course I’m still considering dropping my monthly comic book order with Westfield Comics. But I can’t quite talk myself into that either. I did manage to drop one book last month (Nightwing). Maybe I’ll talk myself into dropping Batman and Detective this month. My backlog just keeps getting bigger.

Lastly, the price of Flickr Pro is going up. It was $100 for two years when I last renewed it. It’ll be going up to $118 for two years now. My subscription doesn’t renew until March 2021, so I don’t need to be in a hurry on this one. And there’s a deal where I can renew for another two years now at the old $100 rate. If I do that, I won’t have to think about it again until 2023. So I’ll probably do that. I don’t upload that much stuff to Flickr anymore, but I’ve got a bunch of stuff up there.

Well, I guess that’s all I had to get off my chest today. I thought this was going to wind up a lot longer, and possibly a bit angrier. In the end, I guess my attitude is more of a “meh, what are you gonna do?” kind of thing.

The boiling frog

I’ve been thinking about the boiling frog metaphor a lot lately, both with regards to small things and big things. This blog post is going to be about some (relatively) small things. (And also, a bit, about the sunk cost fallacy.)

My cable bill this month had a notice of a rate increase, starting next month. It’s a pretty big increase, both on my TV service and my internet service. But there’s also a note that says that existing customers won’t see their rate increase by more than $14.50. The wording on this was a bit hard to parse. It said “rate” and not “bill” so it wasn’t clear if it meant that no individual charge would go up by more than $14.50, or if the total increase wouldn’t be more than $14.50. I called to ask about it, and of course it’s the former. So it should be two $14.50 increases, plus a handful of fee increases, mostly in the $1 to $2 range. So my overall bill should go up by maybe $35. If they’d actually done the full rate increase all at once, my bill would be going up by more than $60, and that would likely have moved me to (finally) drop my cable TV subscription. But the $35 increase isn’t necessarily going to push me to do anything rash. Every time I think about dropping cable, I remember that I’ve got a TiVo which would become useless if I drop cable. But I bought that back in 2015, so I’ve certainly got my money’s worth out of it, and I shouldn’t worry about that particular sunk cost.

There’s some talk about the new rates on the DSLReports forums. Nobody’s happy about it, but for folks like me that only have one option for internet and TV, there’s not much you can do about it. I have no other option for internet, so I just have to pay whatever they charge and live with it. And I don’t think I’m ready to drop cable TV entirely, but I’m considering dropping back to Optimum’s “Broadcast Basic” package which is $25/month and just gets you the broadcast channels and a few others.

I did briefly consider dropping cable entirely and recycling the TiVo, but I still can’t talk myself into it. And, heck, I should really stop watching television entirely, since it’s probably going to give me Alzheimer’s. (I may be oversimplifying those study results. Still, it’s probably not good for me.)

Relating to boiling the frog, but not to anything else above: Boil the Frog is a neat service that generates a Spotify playlist linking any two artists together, in a (nearly) seamless way. I tried some random artists and got some interesting lists. The one linking Jimi Hendrix to Boards of Canada is nice.

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.

New Year’s Day 2020

It’s almost 8 AM on New Year’s Day, so it’s time for my annual New Year’s self-review post. This has become a tradition for me; here’s a link to last year’s post, which includes links to a few previous years. This year is also the start of a new decade. I had a few thoughts on the past decade that I posted on Christmas, so I won’t rehash all of that here.

Health, Weight, and Sleep

I’ve got a bit of a headache this morning, and I’ve been fighting a cold (or something) since Thanksgiving. So I don’t feel very healthy. I have an appointment with my doctor on Friday, so hopefully he can let me know if I’ve got a big problem or just a stubborn cold. Looking back at last year’s post, I see that very little has changed. My average weight may have gone up by a pound or two. I’m usually coming in at 136 or 137 now, rather than 135, but that’s fine. My doctor would actually like to see me put on a few more pounds.

I’m continuing to track my weight and diet with Lose It every day. And I’m continuing to use my Apple Watch to track my exercise. I manage to fill my exercise ring on most days, and I generally fill my move ring about five days per week, on average. My move goal is currently at 500.

I’m still using Sleep Cycle to track my sleep. I guess I’m doing OK with sleep, but I do have some rough nights. I bought a bottle of melatonin gummies on Amazon a year ago, and I take two before bed occasionally. I think it helps. I don’t use it too often. Taking melatonin is probably safe, in moderation. I thought about getting a new mattress last year, but I’ve held off. I might go ahead with that this year.

I mentioned last year that I’d gotten a prescription for progressive lenses from my eye doctor. I did get that filled and I’ve been wearing those new glasses all year. Honestly, they haven’t helped much. I had my yearly checkup a few weeks back, and he suggested maybe trying computer bifocals, but I didn’t want to have to pay for another pair of glasses so soon, so we decided to wait and maybe try that next year.

I also mentioned last year that I should go get my hearing checked, and I never did that, so that should probably be near the top of my to-do list for this year.

Work and Professional Development

There’s not much to report on this. I’m doing fine at work. I got a very good performance review for 2019. I did a fair bit of work in Azure over the last year, so that was interesting.

Here’s a list of tech books that I read last year, from my Goodreads history:

  • ASP.NET Web API Security Essentials
  • Beginning Azure Functions: Building Scalable and Serverless Apps
  • C# and XML Primer
  • Instant Nancy Web Development
  • Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches
  • Take Control of Catalina
  • Take Control of Photos
  • Take Control of Upgrading to Catalina
  • Take Control of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13
  • The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

That’s a pretty random list, but there were a few good ones in there. I think that I read all of those via my O’Reilly subscription that I get through my ACM membership, so I’m getting some value out of that.

I’m also still paying for a Pluralsight subscription. Checking my history there, it looks like I’m getting some value out of that too. Here’s the list of courses I watched in 2019:

  • IIS Administration Fundamentals
  • Microsoft Azure Developer: Create Serverless Functions
  • Getting Started with OAuth 2.0
  • Implementing and Managing Microsoft Azure Multi-factor Authentication
  • Microsoft Azure Developer: Securing Data
  • Fiddler
  • Microsoft Azure Developer: Implementing Application Logging with Diagnostic Logs
  • Instrument Application with Azure Monitor Application Insights
  • Microsoft Azure Developer: Monitoring Performance
  • Play by Play: Care and Maintenance of Development VMs
  • Beginning PowerShell Scripting for Developers
  • Managing Azure AD
  • Play by Play: Azure Beyond Websites
  • Play By Play: Azure Deployment with Scott Hanselman

Again, kind of a random list, but I learned some stuff.

For 2020, I’d like to learn a new programming language, but I’m not sure about which one. I’ve considered trying to learn Rust, but I’m not too enthusiastic about it. Maybe I should try to learn Swift? I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.

Finance

I did a year-end financial review last weekend, and I’m in pretty good shape. I still kind of want to do a one-time sanity check with a good financial advisor, but I didn’t get around to that in 2019, so I should really try again in 2020. I also see in last year’s post that I wanted to read this book last year, and didn’t get around to it. So I should probably do that.

Reading

I wrote up a post just a few days ago on my reading plans for 2020, so I won’t rehash that. But I’ll go ahead and post a few book lists that I culled from my Goodreads year in books. I read 115 books this year, according to that. Most of them were comics / graphic novels.

Here’s a list of the stuff I read from The Great American Read list last year:

  • Catch-22
  • Gilead
  • Looking for Alaska
  • Pride and Prejudice
  • The Help
  • The Intuitionist
  • To Kill A Mockingbird
  • War and Peace

War and Peace took a lot of time to get through, so that was really my main reading accomplishment for 2019. I only read a few fiction books that weren’t related to my TGAR group:

  • Angels and Visitations
  • Pump Six and Other Stories
  • Zoo City

Of those, only Zoo City is actually a novel. So War and Peace, and the other TGAR books, really swallowed up a lot of my reading time. For non-fiction, I did get around to reading 10% Happier and Search Inside Yourself, both of which I’d mentioned in last year’s post as wanting to read. (I can’t say that I really stuck with my meditation practice in 2019 though. That’s something I may want to try again in 2020.)

Hardware

I got an iPhone XR about a year ago, along with a new Apple Watch. And my MacBook Air is only about a year and a half old. I bought a pair of AirPods in November, and they’re working fine. So I’m pretty well set for Apple gear. I’m not planning on giving Apple any more money in 2020, at least for hardware.

And I talked myself into buying an Xbox One back in May. At this point, I’m mostly just using it as a DVD and Blu-ray player. When I bought it, I kind of knew that I was going to be playing games on it for a couple of months, then lose interest, and that’s pretty much what happened. But it’s a decent Blu-ray player, so it’s not like it’s just gathering dust; it’s getting some use.

A friend bought me a new TV for Christmas, so I now have a new 43″ LG TV. That spurred a couple of related purchases, including a stand and a DAC so that I can route the digital audio output to my old analog receiver. It might spur one more purchase: a 4K Apple TV box. My current Apple TV box is the older one, that only outputs 1080p. (It looks like they still sell that one, as the Apple TV HD.) So maybe my earlier statement about not giving Apple any more money for hardware this year isn’t quite correct.

Summary

I have a bunch more stuff I’m thinking about, and that I could include here, but it’s now almost 10 AM. So I should wrap this up and maybe go out for a walk and get a cappuccino and a croissant from Starbucks or something like that.

 

Migrating from Mercurial to Git

Since Bitbucket announced back in August that they would be discontinuing support for Mercurial in 2020, I’ve had an item on my to-do list to convert all of my old Bitbucket Mercurial repos over to Git and move them to GitHub. Bitbucket did not provide any automated way to do this, so I’ve spent some time researching the possibilities and trying out different methods. I hit a few dead ends, but eventually found a way that worked for me. So I might as well share that here, for the benefit of anyone else who’s trying to do this.

A few preliminary notes:

  • I’m primarily a Windows user. I also have a MacBook, but I do most of my programming under Windows. So I wanted a method that would work under Windows.
  • My Mercurial repos are all pretty simple: multiple check-ins, but all in a single branch. (These are personal repos, not company repos where multiple programmers were working on them.)
  • My method was pretty similar to the one described in this blog post, from 2014, so I should give credit for that.

First, a few installs:

  1. Install Git for Windows. Any recent version should be fine. Be sure to install the bash shell.
  2. Install TortoiseHg. The most recent version should be fine. You don’t really need all the fancy Tortoise stuff here, but it’s the easiest way to get a good Mercurial install on Windows.
  3. Install Python 2.7. This probably won’t work with Python 3.x, so just install the latest version of 2.7.x. Make sure you add it to your path.

Now, from the git bash shell, run the following:

$ mkdir hg2git-work
$ cd hg2git-work
$ python -m pip install mercurial
$ git clone https://github.com/frej/fast-export.git

This will install Mercurial support for Python, then pull down hg-fast-export. That’s all the initial setup, really. The trick, I found, is using the git bash shell, which is close enough to a real bash shell for the rest of this stuff to work.

The next thing to do, which might or might not be necessary, is the create an “authors.txt” file to map your name/email from the old hg repo to the new git one. In my case, I created one with two lines that looks kind of like this:

"Andrew Huey <me@domain.com>"="Andrew Huey <me@users.noreply.github.com>"
"Andrew Huey <me@another-domain.com>"="Andrew Huey <me@users.noreply.github.com>"

This way, I’m mapping my real email addresses from Bitbucket to my private GitHub address. (My old Bitbucket repos were mostly private, but I’m making the new GitHub ones public.)

Let’s say you have a Mercurial repo in Bitbucket named “euler”. (That’s one of my repos, tracking my Project Euler work.) Now, do the following:

$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/yourname/euler
$ mkdir euler-git
$ cd euler-git
$ git init
$ ../fast-export/hg-fast-export.sh -r ../euler --force -A ../authors.txt
$ git checkout HEAD

If all goes well, this should leave you with a nice new git repo, matching your hg repo. If you do not already have your GitHub credentials stored in your global Git config, you might now need to add them, either globally or locally. I won’t go into detail on that.

Next, you need rename or copy your .hgignore file to .gitignore. Both systems use pretty much the same format for ignore files, so you probably don’t need to edit it at all.

$ cp .hgignore .gitignore
$ git add .gitignore
$ git commit -m ".hgignore copied to .gitignore"

Now, you can just create a new target repo at GitHub, and push it up. Let’s assume your new repo is named “euler”.

$ git remote add origin https://github.com/username/euler.git
$ git push -u origin master

There are definitely other ways to do this, but this is the way that worked for me.

Reading plans for 2020

I’ve been thinking about changes I could make in my life and habits for 2020 lately. Nothing major, though. I’m mostly thinking about what I want to read, watch, and listen to next year. I briefly thought about designating 2020 as a “catch-up year,” where I resolve not to buy any new books, comics, or DVDs and just try to catch up on stuff I already own. My Goodreads want to read list currently has 348 books on it. The way I use Goodreads, this is a list of books that I already own but haven’t read yet. They’re mostly ebooks, and a bunch of them were free ebooks, so many of those may never actually get read, which is fine. But a lot of them are books that I actually paid money for, and really do want to read.

And, on the comic book side, I have almost 200 comics in my Comixology account that I haven’t read yet. Some of those are individual issues, but many are graphic novels. And I’ve got about a two-foot high stack of physical comic book issues, mostly from my Westfield orders. I had pretty much made up my mind to at least stop ordering new books from Westfield in 2020, but there’s still a bunch of good stuff coming out that I want to read. I’m not going crazy with Westfield; I only have 11 items in my January order and I may drop a few. (I’m starting to feel a little burnt out on Batman-related books, so I may drop those.) But if I start ordering less than a dozen books a month, then Westfield isn’t really a good deal, since the shipping costs outweigh the discounts. So I guess I still haven’t made up my mind on Westfield.

Getting back to “regular” books: I’m still the main moderator for a Goodreads group related to The Great American Read, a series that aired on PBS back in 2018. I had been planning to put the group in “maintenance mode” in 2020, discontinuing group reads and just leaving it open for miscellaneous discussion. But another member volunteered to be a co-moderator with me, and I ran a poll to see if people wanted to keep the group reads going, and of course they did, so I’m going to be doing that in 2020 too. We just did our polls for January, and we’ll be reading The Handmaid’s Tale as our standalone group read for January, and Ken Follet’s Kingsbridge series as our series read. The Follett books are all very long, so I’m allocating two months for each of those, so that’ll stretch out from January to June, for the three books.

I’ve already read The Handmaid’s Tale, back in college, so I don’t think I’ll try to read it again. (The Kindle ebook is available for free under the Prime Reading program right now, by the way.) I may read the graphic novel version though. And I’d really like to read The Pillars of the Earth, the first book in the Kingsbridge series. The Kindle version was available for $1.99 last week, as a “deal of the day”, so I went ahead and bought it. (Those $1.99 deals are how a bunch of Kindle ebooks got on my “want to read” list. It’s hard to resist those…) Meanwhile, I’m only about 25% of the way through Gone with the Wind. And 5% through The Stand, which I want to get back to after I finish Gone with the Wind. Sigh. I need to keep reminding myself that having too many good books to read is a good thing!

The Rise of Skywalker

I took the day off from work today, and went out to see the new Star Wars movie. I don’t go out to see many movies in theaters anymore, but I’ve seen most of the other Star Wars movies in a theater, so seeing this last one seemed like kind of an obligation. I’m still a bit sick, but I’m not doing too bad. I went to a 9 AM showing and made it through the film with the aid of a cup of coffee, two cough drops, and a few tissues. And one bathroom break. (I think I am now officially too old to make it through a 2.5 hour movie without a break.) Oh, and one call from my boss. (I considered ignoring it and calling back after the movie, but I thought it might be important. It wasn’t, really, but that’s ok.)

As a movie, it’s pretty much what I expected. There’s not really too much room for surprises and creativity in a movie like this. It needs to tie up everything from the prior two movies, sprinkle in some nostalgia from the original trilogy, add in some cute new characters for merchandising, and (maybe) set up some stuff for spin-off Disney+ shows. Overall, it was fun, and I’m probably going to want to see it again, if for no other reason than to the catch the parts I missed during my phone call and bathroom breaks. I may wait until it’s out on Blu-ray to see it again though.

The NY Times has a good review roundup for Rise of Skywalker. It’s (mostly) spoiler-free, as is their own review here. Their review calls it “one of the best. Also one of the worst. Perfectly middling. It all amounts to the same thing.” It’s kind of like there’s no real point in reviewing the movie, but it has to be done, I guess? Their take on The Mandalorian, Baby Yoda Is Your God Now, is also kind of weird and maybe a bit nihilistic.

I’ve been thinking back on my experiences of seeing previous Star Wars movies. I remember being pretty excited about The Phantom Menace, back in 1999, and actually going to a midnight showing for that one. I can’t imagine doing that now. For Revenge of the Sith, in 2005, I went into NYC and saw it at the Ziegfeld. (The Ziegfeld, of course, isn’t a movie theater anymore, so that option wouldn’t have been open this time around.) And for Last Jedi, the previous installment, I was also kind of sick, and also (eventually) saw it in Manville, on a weekday morning.

Anyway, I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. I’m still a fan, but I think maybe I need a break. Hmm, Sátántangó is still playing at Lincoln Center. That would be a good palate cleanser. If I could get in by 3 PM, I could even see it today. (Too late for that, though, really.)

Merry Christmas, and goodbye to the 2010s

This is going to be one of those blog posts that could turn into a real monster if I’m not careful. I’ve got no particular plans for today, and a lot of thoughts swirling around in my head. I’ve started seeing a lot of “top 10 (whatever) of the 2010s” articles on the web lately, and that’s gotten me thinking about this last decade. Honestly, if not for all the click-bait articles, I don’t know if I’d even have noticed that a decade was ending. It’s been kind of a blur. Now that I’m thinking back on it, though, there were a lot of changes in my life, and maybe a few things worth commenting on. This might make more sense as a New Year’s Day post rather than a Christmas post, but, well, I’m thinking about it today, so it’s getting written today.

The end of the previous decade was pretty eventful for me, with my Dad passing away in 2009, my Mom passing away early in 2010, and the company I’d worked for through that whole decade going out of business in December 2009. So I started the 2010s in rough shape, without my parents, and looking for a new job. I don’t have a lot of Christmas day blog posts, but this one from 2009 is a little glimpse into how I was doing ten years ago.

I started using Day One in 2014, though I didn’t start using it regularly until 2016. Prior to that, I was using five-year journals, having started one in 2007 and another in 2012. So I’m looking at those, and Day One, and this blog, to try to piece together a bit of my progress over the decade. My initial impression when I started thinking about this decade was something along the lines of Comic Book Guy’s reaction in this Simpson’s clip: “Oh, I’ve wasted my life.” But then I started thinking, and realized that I’ve actually made some progress over the last ten years, and, in some ways at least, I’m in a pretty good place. So here’s a couple of personal highlights from the 2010s:

  • At the beginning of this decade, I wasn’t paying too much attention to my general health or weight. But I had started logging my weight on New Year’s Day in my five-year journal, and I see that on January 1, 2010, I was 223 pounds. I was in the 220s or 230s through to January 1, 2013. I started my diet in September 2013, and got down to 200 pounds by 1/1/2014. I was down to 150 by 1/1/2015, and I’m now maintaining my weight in the 135-140 range.
  • I started the decade working on a time-limited consulting job for the company that bought up the remnants of NMS, the company I’d worked for though the 2000s. That ended in March 2010. I spent April looking for a job and started a new one, with Electric Vine, in May. I took a significant pay cut for that, but it was fun and challenging. I stuck with EVI through to January 2013, when I accepted a job at SHI. I’m still at that job, in pretty much the same position. I’ve been doing pretty well, and I’ve managed to get back to a pretty good salary level. I have a good relationship with my boss, and I think I’m generally doing a good job. I have some concerns about the dangers of professional stagnation, but I’m doing enough interesting work that I’m not too worried about that yet.

In looking through my old paper journals and in Day One, I see some other positive trends over the last decade, but nothing else that I really want to blog about in detail. My personal relationships have changed a lot over the course of the decade, mostly due to people passing away, including my parents and my friend Gloria. The fact that I’m spending Christmas alone in my apartment, writing a blog post, should probably be a warning sign or something, but really I could be spending time with other humans if I wanted to. I’ve just been fighting a bad cold on and off since Thanksgiving and I’m probably better off taking it easy today.

Anyway, that’s about 5% of the thoughts that are rolling around in my head right now. Sorry for writing a self-indulgent and maudlin post on Christmas, but I needed to get some stuff out of my head.

I’m thinking about going out to see the new Star Wars movie today, though I’m not sure that’s a good idea, since I’m still coughing and blowing my nose a lot, and maybe staying home and resting would be better for me. I watched the first two Harry Potter movies last night, with RiffTrax commentary, and that was fun, so I’m thinking about watching some more RiffTrax stuff today, and/or reading some comic books. I’m not planning on doing anything fancy for food today, though I might indulge in some Chinese food for dinner later. So that’s what a sick, single, 50-something nerd does on Christmas, for anyone who was wondering.

 

sick day

Back in November, I realized that I had two PTO days that I had to use by the end of the year, so I took today and next Friday off. I kind of thought I might use today to go see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. But I got very sick over this past weekend, and have been struggling through the week. I’ve actually burned an extra day and a half, by taking Monday off and a half-day Wednesday. So I’m feeling a little better today, but not “go out to see a two and a half hour Star Wars movie” better. More like “sit on the couch and binge-watch the original trilogy” better.

Anyway, I’m well enough to kill some time writing a blog post. And I have a bunch of random thoughts I’d been meaning to organize, so I’m going to make this a bit of a catch-up/catch-all post.

First, some post Catalina upgrade thoughts: As I mentioned previously, I don’t have any major issues with the new Music app. I’m a little disappointed in the TV app though. While there is still a list view, there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn on the old column browser for it. So if I want to filter it down to show just, say, my Doctor Who season 10 episodes, there’s no quick way to do that. It’s also gotten the seasons and episodes of Doctor Who quite mixed up at this point. (That may have been the case previously, but I hadn’t noticed it.) See the screenshot below for an example of how a bunch of random stuff has all ended up under “season 1, episode 1.” Doctor Who is maybe an edge case, since I’ve purchased several different seasons and collections, and there are a bunch of odds and ends, like Christmas specials and stuff like that. But there should be a better way to organize it all.

I’m also a little disappointed in the new Finder interface for syncing my iPhone and iPad. It’s mostly fine, but they’ve lost the old status display that used to show at the top of the iTunes window. Now, you just get a tiny circle in the Finder sidebar, so you can’t really tell what it’s doing. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a pain, and there’s no reason they couldn’t fix that. I guess we’ve gotten to the point now where syncing an iDevice to a Mac is the exception rather than the rule. I assume most people either sync to iCloud directly, or don’t sync at all.

Next topic: VPNs. There’s been a bit more news about PIA since I last mentioned them in my blog. Here’s an interview with the COO of the combined KAPE/PIA company. And here’s a recent blog post from PIA. They’re saying a lot of the right things, and it’s cool that they’re open-sourcing their desktop client. On the more general privacy today, the NY Times is running a series on the smartphone tracking industry that looks interesting. There really wasn’t anything in the first part that I didn’t already know. The second part has a fairly simple guide to what you can do on your phone to limit tracking. Again, not much that I didn’t already know, but useful for a more general audience. I found it interesting that they recommended a specific VPN app, Privacy Pro SmartVPN. I wasn’t familiar with that particular app/service, but it’s worth looking into. The third part talks about national security implications, which is pretty important, though again, there was nothing in there that surprised me. The series is still ongoing, and it might be worth reading the rest of it.

Last topic (probably): music. I enjoyed reading The Catastrophist’s 2019 Tech Gift Guide in the NY Times this morning. I wouldn’t give any of these items as a gift, and the only item on the list that I own are the AirPods. And, even on those, I kind of agree with their observations about disposability and the darker side of Apple’s ecosystem. (Though maybe “Your nephew dies alone.” is a bit of a stretch.) And I’m still thinking about streaming music services, though I still can’t quite talk myself into signing up for one. On a practical level, I think either Spotify or Apple Music would make the most sense for me. Spotify is the most popular and has a lot of interesting public playlists available. Apple Music is less popular, but would work better in terms of syncing my existing library to the cloud. And it has a 100,000 track limit, vs Spotify’s 10,000 track limit. (This article is a couple of years old, but as far as I can tell, that’s still the case.) And even if the track limit was higher, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get my iTunes library into Spotify without third-party software. So, I’d probably opt for Apple Music if someone held a gun to my head and told me I had to sign up for a streaming music service today. Of course, nobody’s holding a gun to my head. But every time I look at an artist’s web page and see links to their music on Spotify and Apple Music but no obvious link to buy it in MP3 format, I get nudged a little closer to signing up.

I still have a few thoughts rolling around in my head, but it’s time to give up on this blog post and go do something else. Maybe start into that Star Wars binge I mentioned at the top.

 

macOS TV app