probably still not buying an Xbox

I’m probably still not buying an Xbox, but I’ve been paying more attention to Xbox-related news this week than usual.

  • The Microsoft/Sony deal is kind of interesting, though it might not mean much. I assume they’re still both working on their own next-gen consoles, and will continue to compete with each other.
  • This blog post from Microsoft’s “Head of Xbox” is also kind of interesting. He’s saying all the right things, though maybe it’s a little disheartening that some of them even need to be said.
  • And this article about the current pricing on the new all-digital Xbox vs the older version with the Blu-Ray drive has got me thinking again about picking up an Xbox One S with a Blu-Ray drive in it, while I can still get one for less than $250. Maybe I should keep an eye out and see if there are any really good Memorial Day sales.

As mentioned in my previous post, I did indeed pick up the Enhanced Edition of Neverwinter Nights from Steam for $4. It occurs to me that this means that I now own four copies of NWN. I have:

  1. the original PC version on CD (inherited from my brother a long time ago),
  2. a Mac version, also on CD, from the pre-OSX days,
  3. the GOG “Diamond” edition, which came out a few years ago,
  4. and now the Beamdog “Enhanced Edition” from Steam.

I didn’t pay much money for any of these. The GOG Diamond one was $10, The new one was $4, and the PC version was a hand-me-down. The Mac one was actually bought new, in a box, from an actual brick-and-mortar computer store (probably J&R), so that might have been $20 or $30. Anyway, I should install that new enhanced version and see about moving my saved game over from the old GOG Diamond edition. Maybe NWN can keep me busy and out of trouble for a bit.

Not buying an Xbox

Yesterday, my brain decided to go down a path where buying an Xbox One started to seem like a good idea. I had nearly convinced myself to buy an Xbox One S from Walmart. I occasionally get the urge to play console video games. I still have my PlayStation 3 for that, but I bought it back in 2008, so it’s pretty old. But I have plenty of unfinished (and even un-started) games for it. So that should really be enough for me.

Anyway, I’d started thinking about Stardew Valley again for some reason. I could, of course, just buy that on Steam or GOG and play it on my PC or Mac, but it seems like the kind of thing that would work best on a console. It’s available for all three of the major (current) consoles: Switch, Xbox, and PS4. I’ve mostly been brand-loyal to Sony over the years, having owned the PlayStation 1, 2, and 3, and a PSP, but I haven’t been able to get too excited about the PS4. And I’ve never had any version of the Xbox. So that seemed like maybe something to try out.

Of course, then I started thinking about all the unfinished games I have, and all the clutter in my apartment, and mostly talked myself out of it. That got me started on a little kick to locate all of those games and the various game guides I’d bought for them. And that got me to realize how much clutter has been piling up in here. So the whole thing turned into a mini-cleanup project. I managed to sort out a bunch of stuff from past San Diego comic cons, and get that all together in a basket. And a bunch of old Metropolitan Museum bulletins, which I managed to get into a neat stack. And I eventually found all (I think) of the video game guides that I own. I have guides for Final Fantasy 8, 9, and 10. I made it about a third of the way through FF8, and still haven’t (technically) given up. I decide to give it a shot once in a while, make no progress, then give up again. I never started 9 or 10. I also have a nice hardcover guide for Metal Gear Solid 4, which is the game that came with my PS3. I never started that either. And I have two copies of the guide for Neverwinter Nights, for some reason. Speaking of NWN, the Enhanced Edition of that is marked down to $4 on Steam right now, so I should probably grab that while it’s on sale. The version I have now is the old GOG version, which kind of works OK on Windows 10, but kinda doesn’t.

Or I should go outside and take a walk. It’s a nice day out!

Roddy McDowall Reads H. P. Lovecraft

Of all the people you could choose to read H. P. Lovecraft stories, how did somebody decide to choose Roddy McDowall? I listened to about a minute of this, and it’s just too creepy. (I guess maybe that’s the point.) It turns out that David McCallum has also read some Lovecraft stories. Also pretty creepy! (Though his voice seems more suited to this kind of thing.)

There’s a page listing various Lovecraft readings at hplovecraft.com. I probably shouldn’t start listening to Lovecraft audiobooks. I have enough nightmares already…

JoCo Cruise

What Happens When You Put 2,000 Nerds on a Boat? – from the NY Times

I keep thinking I should go on the JoCo cruise one of these years. The 2020 cruise is March 7-14, and my birthday is near the end of that date range, so that might give me an excuse. The cruise is already 90% sold out, and the only rooms still available are in the $5000 range. That’s a bit much for me. Maybe I’ll stick with comic conventions for now. Just as nerdy and a lot cheaper!

Good line from the article above:

Mr. Sabourin and I met to talk in the ship’s casino, a place we knew would be quiet. In a lounge across the way, the JoCo planners set up more than 40 vintage video game consoles, which drew a crowd day and night. On the casino side, the dealers had nothing to do. “Everybody here actually understands probability,” Mr. Sabourin joked.

Microsoft Build

I wish I could have stayed in the Seattle area for MS Build, instead of coming back to NJ on Saturday. There have been some interesting announcements, including a new Windows terminal program, WSL 2, and .NET 5. At work, I’m still stuck using Windows 7 on my desktop and laptop, so I can’t use WSL, but I’d really like to. (At home, I have Windows 10 on my desktop and laptop, so I can use WSL at home, but I don’t have much need for it there.) Anyway, here’s hoping I can get one or both of my work machines upgraded or replaced at some point this year.

Microsoft, as expected, is pushing a lot of Azure stuff at Build. I should probably watch some videos from Build this week, but I don’t know when I can find the time for much of that. I’m already behind at work just from being away for three days last week. Maybe I can squeeze in the “All the Developer Things” clip from Scott Hanselman at some point today.

back home and (slightly) broken

I’m back home today, after spending a few days in Redmond, WA for a two-day workshop on the Microsoft Partner Center SDK. This particular API/SDK is esoteric enough that it’s not worth blogging about much, though it’s been taking up a lot of my time over the last year or so. And the actual workshop contents are under NDA anyway. For what it’s worth, it was a good workshop and I learned some new stuff. I also got clarification that something I’ve been trying to do for the last month or two, and completely failing at, is indeed currently impossible. So that, on its own, made the trip worthwhile. It turns out I’m not an idiot who can’t program his way out of a paper bag. (Rather, I’m an idiot who couldn’t realize that he’s inside a concrete bunker and not a paper bag. Maybe I’m stretching that metaphor a little too far…)

I wanted to mention the trip partly to give me an opportunity to mention that I completely missed Free Comic Book Day, since I spent nearly the entire day yesterday traveling. The Beat has a lot of coverage of FCBD; there were some some interesting books available. Maybe I could go over to my local store today, and see if they’ve got anything good left.

I also wanted to mention that I’m not missing the pre-sale for NYCC 2019, since that’s happening today at 10 AM. I had a good time at last year’s con, so I’d like to go again. A four-day pass is almost $200, so it’s not cheap, but heck, if I don’t spend my money on comic conventions, what am I going to spend it on? (Food? Rent? Nah.)

And I also wanted to check in on the subject of how broken I am after traveling to the west coast and back. I started thinking about this stuff after last year’s workshop, and tweaked some stuff in my routine when I went to WonderCon last month. I think I probably need to tweak some more stuff for the next time I have a long trip, but maybe I’m on the right path. One thing I learned after last year’s workshop is that, if I’m traveling to Redmond in the spring, I need to bring my allergy medicine. So I did that this year. I’ve also figured out that my body doesn’t adjust to time zone changes as easily as it used to. So I’m taking melatonin gummies when I travel now. (That helps a bit, but not as much as I’d like.) And I also figured out, after my WonderCon trip, that it was really time for me to give up on the L.L. Bean duffel bag that I’ve been using for luggage the past few years and get one of those ubiquitous carry-on bags with wheels and a telescoping handle. (I definitely pulled/strained/broke something from carrying that duffel around, coming home from WonderCon.) I think I’ve also broken my long aversion to taking a bag on the airplane with me, rather than checking it. Bag check now costs $30 each way, and it seems like everyone else brings a bag on the plane, so I guess I can too. And if that bag has wheels and a handle on it, it’s less of a pain to carry it through the terminal (and on the monorail, etc).

I have a bit of a residual headache this morning, and I didn’t sleep well last night, so the answer to “how broken am I?” is: Not as broken as I could be, but still more broken that I’d like.

I have enough stuff to do today that I should probably stop blogging and start doing stuff. In addition to the NYCC pre-sale, I also need to do grocery shopping, pay some bills, and scan in the receipts from my trip. So that’s it for now.

Azure and baseball and comics

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, I did manage to watch a few of the Global Azure Bootcamp videos, yesterday and this morning. I didn’t really find any videos that directly applied to the projects that I’m currently working on, but I did pick up some good pointers and some useful background information. It was mentioned on Twitter that the videos are only staying up until Monday, so I guess that if I want to watch any more of them, I should do that today.

I also managed to get out and see a bit of the Somerset Patriots season-opening double-header yesterday too. I arrived about halfway through the first game, and went home just before the second game started, though. I intended on staying through at least the first few innings of the second game, but it was getting too cold. (The final score in the second game was 14-2, Patriots, so that would have been fun to watch.)

I did not get out to see Avengers: Endgame yesterday, and it looks like I’m not even going to try today. I checked a 9am showing this morning, and it wasn’t sold out, but there was only one seat available, and it wasn’t a good one. I assume the later showings are going to be sold out. I’m not sure I can sit through a three-hour superhero movie anyway. (I like Warren Ellis’ reference to the movie as “AVENGERS: SATANTANGO or whatever this bladder test is called.” I don’t think I could sit through the actual Sátántangó either.) This may be the kind of thing where I need to wait for it to come out on Blu-ray, so I can use a pause button as needed.

I did manage to finish up a Batman graphic novel this morning, and I may start on another after lunch, so I am getting some comic book reading done this weekend too.

Meanwhile, I should probably also be doing some prep work for my trip to Redmond at the end of the week for the Partner Center workshop. I think I have everything up-to-date on my laptop, and my laundry is done, so there’s not really much more to do, though.

Global Azure Bootcamp and Pragmatic Programming

I’ve been doing a bunch of work related to Azure recently. It’s mostly not around actually using Azure, but rather managing Azure and billing for Azure. I’m in the middle of something right now that’s honestly driving me to distraction and making me want to take a month or two off and maybe traipse around Europe or something. Anyway, today is Global Azure Bootcamp. There’s an event here in NJ, at Microsoft’s office in Iselin, but I was too late to register for it, and it’s full up now.

There’s also a lot of online stuff going on, though. It should all get posted to this YouTube channel. I can see a bunch of stuff up there already, and it’s only 8am Eastern time. (The Auckland event is already over. I guess because it’s midnight there right now, so today is already over. Funny how that works…)

Anyway, I really want to watch a bunch of this stuff, but it’s Saturday, and the weather should be pretty nice, and yesterday’s rained out Somerset Patriots game has been rescheduled to today, and I’ve got finish my laundry, and do my grocery shopping, and so on and so forth.

Looking at what’s already on YouTube, I’m kind of interested in two of the videos from the Perth/Beijing cycle:

  1. Understanding The New Azure Role-Based Certifications – I probably don’t have the spare time to study for and pass any Azure certification exams, but a guy can dream, right?
  2. Mission: Azure Kubernetes Service – Because some other folks I’m working with have been talking about Kubernetes, and I know almost nothing about it.

I’m going to the Microsoft offices in Redmond next week for a workshop related to the specific project I’m working on, so that should be useful. But sometimes I feel like I’m really falling behind with all this Azure and AWS stuff. I’ve been reading The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master in my spare time recently. It’s a classic, but it’s 20 years old, so there are a lot of dated references in it. It’s actually been kind of comforting to read it. I guess I’m more at home with references to 56k modems than references to Kubernetes clusters. There’s actually a 20th anniversary version of the book coming out soon, so maybe I should give up on the old version and wait for the new one.

more Amazon stuff

I didn’t really intend to write two posts about Amazon in a row (previous post here), but two things caught my attention today:

  1. Amazon is going to try to switch their Prime shipping “guarantee” from two days to one day. That’s interesting, and maybe some of the issues I had with my last order were related to the changes they’re trying to make to get to one-day shipping. Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary. Two-day shipping is fine for me. (But I’m old. I grew up having to wait 4-6 weeks for anything I ordered through the mail. Two days is amazing!)
  2. I just tried to watch something on Prime video, only to see that it was “unavailable”. Then I poked around a bit, and everything on Prime video seems to be unavailable. So I went to my Amazon account to see if somehow I’d gotten dropped from Prime altogether. Right now, any attempt to navigate to the “your Prime account” section of Amazon’s site results in an error. I checked Twitter, and I’m not the only one getting errors on that right now. So that’s kind of interesting. My best guess would be that they’re rolling out some back-end changes related to Prime, and they screwed something up.

So my plan to kill the rest of the day watching an episode or two of Bosch on Amazon Prime Video has been torpedoed. I guess I’ll have to watch Netflix instead. (To be clear, I’m not complaining about any of this. Any time I start getting cranky because of something like this, I re-watch Weird Al’s First World Problems video.)

Amazon delivery shenanigans

I’ve been getting curious lately about some of the stuff that Amazon seems to be doing around package delivery. Like many people, I’m an Amazon Prime customer and I order a bunch of stuff from them. Generally, they’ve been using the US Postal Service for Prime deliveries (at least for me), which has always worked out fine. But lately, they seem to be doing more deliveries themselves. They seem to be setting up an interesting system for that, but they clearly haven’t worked out all the kinks yet.

I ordered a few small items on Friday of last week, and would have been fine with the usual two-day shipping, or even longer. I didn’t have an immediate need for any of the stuff I ordered. But they said the stuff would be delivered on Saturday. So, hey, one-day shipping. Cool.

The package didn’t show up with my normal mail on Saturday, but at some point Saturday evening, I got a notification on my phone that the package was “nine stops away” (or something like that), and gave me an estimated delivery time, and even the ability to see where the delivery driver was on a map. That last part was a little creepy, but OK. Anyway, about an hour later, I got a notification that the package had been delivered. So I went downstairs and looked for it, but it wasn’t there. Kind of weird to have such specific information about the driver’s route and the delivery time, but no actual package.

I checked to see what I was supposed to do to report a missing package, and they ask you to wait 36 hours before doing so. That kind of makes sense, if they’ve handed the package off to USPS, but if they’re delivering it themselves, and they’re apparently tracking the driver in real-time, that doesn’t make much sense. But I waited, and reported it missing on Monday night. They were cool about it, and refunded one of the items and sent me a replacement delivery for the other two.

So, guess what? Now it’s Tuesday, and the original package from Saturday shows up. Again, with the excessive level of tracking detail, where I can follow the driver around and all that. And this time, when the package is delivered, I also get a photo of it, sitting in the foyer of my apartment building.

And, of course, I also get the replacement package today too. Also from an Amazon delivery driver, with a photo of the package in the foyer. Though this one seems to be from a different driver, since it arrived a few hours after the first one. I guess this is good for me, since I now have extra stuff that I didn’t pay for. All things considered though, I’d rather have just gotten the original package in with my mail on Monday, without all this extra nonsense.

So it seems like they’re tracking their drivers all over the place, making them take photos of delivered packages, and also making them take photos of themselves now. Yet somehow, a package can still disappear into a black hole for three days. I don’t know, I can’t decide if this is a utopia or a dystopia we’re headed towards. (Maybe a little of both.)

Here’s an article from Vox, talking about the economics of Amazon’s two-day shipping. It’s pretty interesting. It’s also interesting to think about Amazon’s carbon footprint. They’re so big now, they can probably have a meaningful affect on that just by making small changes. (Though it can’t possibly be efficient for them to have two different drivers deliver something to my apartment building on the same day, just a few hours apart, can it?) I’m also kind of curious about the new Amazon Day thing, where you can choose to get all your packages on a specific day of the week. That could help cut down on excess packaging and multiple deliveries, so that’s a good thing.