Somerset Patriots season over

I purchased two seats for a 13-game “mini-plan” for Somerset Patriots games this year, as a sort of experiment. I first went to a Patriots game in 2014, and I’ve been going to more games over the last few years. Only a few games a year, but I’ve enjoyed them. For this year, they offered a 13-game mini-plan that got you some of the benefits of being a season ticket holder, but for just 13 games (for the cost of about 10 single tickets). The games were spread throughout the season. Some were pretty random weekday games, and some were weekend games with fireworks or giveaways. My (overly optimistic) plan was that I’d use one seat myself and give the other to a friend who I know is a big Patriots fan, but who can’t afford tickets that often. What actually happened was that my friend couldn’t make it to most of the games on the plan, so I traded in most of his tickets for other games, and never actually saw him this year. (And I think at least half of his tickets didn’t get used.) As to my own tickets, I only made it to seven or eight games. So I didn’t really come out ahead, financially, versus buying just individual tickets to the games.

One of the benefits of the plan was that it included free playoff tickets, if the Patriots made it to the playoffs. They did, and the “Liberty Division Championship Series” was this weekend. The first two games were in Long Island, and the LI Ducks won both of those. Games three through five were here in NJ and the Patriots, of course, would have to win all three. They did win games 3 and 4 (which I missed). I went to game 5 yesterday, but they lost. So their season is over. Thinking back on it, I’m glad I got out to more games this year than usual.

I don’t know if I’ll try for that 13-game plan again next year, but I might. It’s weird going to a baseball game alone, but not as weird as I thought it would be. And it’s nice to get out of the apartment and sit outside for a while on a summer day. The games are honestly not that exciting, generally, but it’s a chance to get some fresh air and relax, without thinking too much about work or politics or anything.

SSD upgrade, part two

I finished my SSD upgrade last week. (Here’s part one and part zero of the SSD saga.) The bracket showed up in the mail, so I opened the case up, took out the drive cage, screwed everything together, buttoned it all back up and… it all worked. It took me a while to figure out how to orient the bracket in the cage, but once I figured that out, it was easy enough.

The old spinning hard drive is now a secondary drive, and not giving me any problems. I’ll probably reformat it soon so I can use it as a backup drive. The new SSD is working great. The machine boots faster and loads programs a lot faster.

I’m not sure why I held off on doing the SSD upgrade for so long. I know my excuse is that I was waiting for prices to come down on 1 TB SSDs, but I could have done this a year ago, and they wouldn’t have been that much more expensive, really.

Oh well. I’m hoping this upgrade will help me keep this PC usable for a few more years. I don’t want to have to replace it any time soon.

Five years of losing it

I just realized today that I’ve recently hit the five-year mark since I decided to start losing weight. Here’s a blog post from five years ago today where I discuss my initial progress. (I didn’t mention my starting weight in that post, but it was 230 pounds.)

I’m still tracking all of my meals with Lose It, and I still subscribe to their premium version. I’m including a graph of my weight over the last five years here. So far this year, I’ve basically maintained my weight at 135 (+/- 2 pounds). I’m pretty comfortable at this weight, so that’s fine. (Though I’d kind of like to get down to 130, just so that I can say I lost an even 100 pounds. But that’s probably not a good idea.)

The green line on the graph is from the last time I set an actual goal weight in Lose It: 160 pounds. Once I hit that weight, I stopped actively trying to lose weight, and just kind of let things go until I bottomed out at a stable weight, which, for me, is apparently 135. I’m sticking with a goal of about 2100 calories per day, and I’m usually right around there (+/- 200).

I’ve also done well on the exercise front, at least in terms of step count. I almost always hit at least 7500 steps a day and often go over 10,000. I never really did adopt any other exercise habits though. I never joined a gym or anything like that.

I don’t really have any profound weight loss insights to share here. If you’re looking to lose weight, different things are going to work for different people. For me, I think this is the stuff that was key:

  • Tracking all of my calories. Anything less than that makes it too easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re doing well, when it fact you’re still eating way too much.
  • Packing my own lunch every day and not going out for lunch anymore. (I still go out occasionally, but maybe just once or twice a month.) It’s not hard to do, if you can figure out a few things you like to eat that stay within your calorie budget and aren’t hard to prepare and toss in a bag every day.
  • Drinking mostly water. I’ve just about stopped drinking juice, beer, soda, and sweetened iced tea. (I still drink a lot of coffee, but there aren’t many calories in that, if you don’t load it up with milk and sugar.)
  • In addition to the Lose It book I mentioned in the original post, this book on Volumetrics was pretty useful too.

NYCC 2018 – one month away

New York Comic Con is just about a month away. I bought my tickets back in June, and got tickets for all four days this year. (Last year, I only went on two days.)

I also bought a ticket for the Harry Potter: A History of Magic exhibit at the New York Historical Society, for Friday of the con. This isn’t related to the con, but just happens to open on the same weekend. There may be a few other related (or not exactly related) events that I’ll try to get to during the con.

I dithered a lot on whether or not I should book a hotel room. I’d pretty much decided against it, and was going to just take the train in each day, but then changed my mind this weekend. So now I’ve booked a room for Thursday through Sunday. That’s a bit of a compromise, since I was initially looking to get a room from Wednesday night through Monday, so I’d have the room for all four days of the con. But hotel rooms in Manhattan are expensive, and three nights is easier to justify than five nights. So the plan now is to take the train in on Thursday morning, drop my stuff off at the hotel, go to the con, then come back and check in later in the day. Then, I’ll check out Sunday morning and leave my bags at the hotel, go to the con, then pick them up later and take the train home Sunday night. Here’s hoping that all works out and doesn’t backfire in some way.

The excuse I used to talk myself into paying for the hotel is basically that I haven’t taken any other significant vacation this year, and the year is almost over now. I did stay in NYC for two nights in March, when I went to see Cursed Child, but that’s about it. So three nights in October won’t kill my checking account, and it’ll be a nice break.

I’ve started looking at the panel schedule for the con. There’s a lot going on! I kind of wish they had a downloadable PDF of the schedule. The interface they have for browsing it isn’t great, and their site is pretty slow. (The auto-playing video in the page header isn’t helping.) I do like that you can add panels to a personal schedule, and then print it out later. (I may have spoken too soon on that… I remember being able to print out the schedule last year, but I just checked and I don’t see any easy way to do it now. So I may be adding a bunch of stuff to a schedule that I can only view online. Ugh.) Well, either way, there’s plenty of interesting stuff going on, so I should be able to have a pretty good time.

SSD upgrade, part one

Amazon’s same-day delivery got me my new Crucial MX500 SSD at around 6pm yesterday. It came in minimal packaging: no screws or cables or anything useful, just a 7mm to 9.5mm spacer (which I don’t think I’ll need). I found a spare SATA cable in my random cable box. And I managed to figure out a somewhat questionable way to mount it in my PC case with a single screw, temporarily. If it was actually an old-fashioned spinning hard drive, this would be a risky way to do it, but for an SSD, it should be fine.

The PC recognized the drive with no issues. I then installed the Acronis software from Crucial and cloned my old drive to the SSD. That took about two hours. (I’d assumed it would take much longer. And it probably would have, if I’d hooked up the drive via USB instead of mounting it internally.)

After that, I opened the PC case back up, unplugged the old drive, and plugged the new drive into the SATA 0 port on the motherboard. After that, I buttoned it back up and booted it. Surprisingly, everything worked. I’m really suspicious about that, since these things rarely go without a hitch. But hey, maybe I got lucky, just this once…

The next task is going to be mounting the drive correctly, with the bracket I ordered yesterday. So I’ll probably do that Monday night, or at some point during the week. And after that, I’ll hook the old drive back up, reformat it, and start using it as an internal backup disk. I’m hoping to do that next weekend.

So far, the drive seems to have done what I’d hoped for: The machine boots faster and everything loads much faster. If I don’t hit any snags, I may actually allow myself a moment of satisfaction and perhaps even happiness! (Well, maybe not happiness.) I’m hoping that this upgrade allows me to hold onto this PC for a couple of more years. I’d like to see it last until 2020 or 2021 maybe.

Finally upgrading to an SSD

I’ve been thinking about replacing the old hard drive in my desktop PC with an SSD for quite some time. I bought the PC in 2016, from Costco. It’s a Dell XPS 8900, with a 1TB 7200RPM SATA drive in it. Other than the old-fashioned spinning hard drive, it’s a reasonably powerful machine. But I think the hard drive is really slowing it down.

Until recently, 1 TB SSDs seemed a bit too expensive, so I thought about sticking a 500 GB SSD in it, using that as a boot drive, and keeping the old 1 TB drive for “miscellaneous data” (photos, music, video files, etc). But thinking about all the grief involved in doing a clean install of Windows 10 on the 500 GB drive, then reinstalling apps and moving stuff around, sounded like too much work.

It looks like 1 TB SSDs have finally come down to a price that seems reasonable to me, so I went ahead and ordered one today. I got a Crucial MX500 from Amazon for $189. I’d looked at it earlier this year, and it was $250 then. I thought about it at that price, but didn’t talk myself into it. I guess $189 is finally low enough to push me over the edge and get past my indecision. I also ordered this mounting bracket, though I’m not sure I need it. And the drive was eligible for free same-day shipping, so I should have it today. (The bracket won’t show up until Monday though.)

So my plan is to hook it up tomorrow and image the old drive to the new one. I figure that should take all day. I’ll use the version of Acronis True Image that Crucial includes with the drive. I have an external dock I can use to hook it up via USB, or I can try to mount it internally, if that’s possible without the bracket. Then, maybe Monday night, I’ll try to boot from it, with the old drive unplugged. If that works, then I’ll give it a couple of weeks and see how it goes. If everything is OK, I’ll plug the old drive back it, format it, and use it as a backup drive.

I’m wondering if Windows 10 is going to give me any grief about having moved to a new drive. I’ve occasionally heard tales of people having issues when they try to transfer an OEM copy of Windows 10 to a new drive, even if they’re using it in the same PC. If I do, I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Verizon confusion

I’ve been on a 3GB data plan with Verizon for a while now. I often get pretty close to that limit, but I haven’t gone over it, so I’ve just stuck with it. This month, though, I got the notice that I only had 10% left, and there are still 9 days left in my billing cycle, so I decided to look into upgrading to a plan with more data. (Going over would have cost me $15 for one additional GB.)

Well, it turns out that Verizon has a plan that gives me 5GB of data for about $5 less than I’m paying now. And I can chop another $5 off if I switch my account to auto-pay. (And there’s rollover data too.) When I saw this, I was almost certain that there had to be a catch, but as far as I can tell, there isn’t one. I was just on an older, more expensive, plan, and I guess Verizon saw no reason to let me know about the cheaper one. (And, in fact, if I’d taken the easiest path to upgrading, it would have been to another old plan that would have gotten me to just 4GB for $5 more a month.)

So if this all works out, I’ll have enough data to do a little music streaming at work maybe. That’s a nice thing. I still think there’s probably a catch somewhere in the fine print…

comic book indecision

I feel like I should be posting about something other than comic books, since that’s just about all I’ve posted about lately, but honestly I’m not really moved to post about anything else right now. I have a couple of ideas for programming-related posts, but it’s Saturday and I’m not thinking about work today. So, more comic book stuff.

Since my last post, I’ve gotten my first shipment from Westfield. I didn’t really expect to get anything until the end of this month (August), but I ordered two comics that shipped in July, so I got a July shipment. I’d rather they held those two books though, since it cost $7.80 for shipping, and the two comics only cost $6.53 total. But, oh well, the next shipment will have a better comics/shipping cost ratio.

Also since my last post, I found out that my local comics shop has started using ManageComics.com to manage their pull lists. If they’d had that in place a month ago, I might not have jumped back to Westfield. They used to use Comixology’s pull list service, until it was discontinued earlier this year. And I had been kind of hoping that they’d use Diamond’s Pullbox service when it becomes available, since that sounded like it would probably be a pretty smooth way to handle things. Well, if things don’t work out with Westfield, I’ll probably go back to the local shop and give the ManageComics thing a try.

I just placed my August Westfield order (for comics shipping in October). I ordered all of my usual books, but then had to decide on whether or not to order any of the new Sandman Universe books. I read Sandman: Overture last weekend, so I’m experiencing a little bit of Sandman nostalgia right now. So I picked up the Sandman Universe one-shot at the comics shop this week and read it. I think I’m a little bit interested in The Dreaming, but not the other three titles. All four books look good, honestly, and if I had a lot more spare time and money, I’d pick them all up. In the end, I decided not to pre-order The Dreaming. When it comes out, I’ll check the reviews, and maybe pick up the first couple of issues at the comics shop before committing to it.

I also read the first arc of B.P.R.D Hell on Earth last weekend. Back before I stopped buying comics regularly in 2009, I was a regular reader of all the Hellboy and B.P.R.D. comics. I’ve since filled in some of the stuff I’ve missed via Dark Horse Digital, and read a little bit of it. I really wasn’t sure if I wanted to jump into Hell on Earth. It’s a long story, and it looks to be fairly bleak. But I liked that first arc, so now I’ve ordered the first two hardcover collections, (Volumes One and Two). I don’t think I’m going to start buying any current B.P.R.D. comics though. I’m going to try to stick with trades/digital/hardcovers/whatever. I’m not sure if buying the hardcovers was a good idea, really. I probably should have waited for the next big sale at Dark Horse Digital. But hey, I got both hardcovers at a good discount.

Speaking of nostalgia for stuff I was reading 20+ years ago, I see there’s a Cerebus comic in the catalog this month too. It’s a one-shot, apparently, and looks like it might be funny, but I’m not ordering it. I’m definitely not ready to jump back into the Cerebus vortex! This is an example, though, of some of the difficulties with trying to buy comics these days. I would never have seen this at my local comics store. And, even with Westfield, it wasn’t in their printed catalog. I only stumbled across it because I noticed Aardvark-Vanaheim in the publisher list on the web site.

Beau Smith has a column up at the Westfield site that’s kind of relevant to all this indecision of mine regarding comic book buying. Relevant quote:

Be conscious and particular of where you are tossing your money. Make sure you throw it at what YOU want to read about. Make purposeful choices. Be entertained and informed.

I’m going to try to remember that. I should wrap this thing up and get back to actually reading comics now.

buying comic books is complicated

For the last couple of years, I’ve been visiting my local comic book store once a week and picking up a few books. I started doing this around the same time DC’s Rebirth started, in 2016. I was originally looking at it as an experiment to see if I could get back into buying and reading regular superhero comics again, after a fairly long break. Well, I found a few books I liked and I stuck with it for quite a while. A few things happened recently that got me thinking about whether or not I wanted to stick with it though. Some changes in creative teams on the books and stuff like that.

I thought about jumping off the “weekly comic store visit” bandwagon in January 2017, and wrote a lengthy blog post about that, but I decided to keep going to the local store, and I stuck with most of the books I was reading. Well, I’ve now somehow managed to talk myself into switching back to getting my comics from Westfield Comics again. I placed an order with them today, for comics coming out in August and September. Maybe switching to Westfield will cause me to spend more money on comics, or maybe it’ll be less money. (Placing just one order per month, and seeing the total for the month all at once, might lead me to manage my comic book budget a little better.)

My plan is to stick with Westfield until the end of the year, then reevaluate. I might then give up entirely on monthly books again, or switch to just getting stuff digitally from Comixology, or go back to the local store. I don’t know. The thing I need to watch out for is my tendency to build up a ridiculous backlog. I think I should set a rule that if the pile of unread comics gets taller than me again, I need to stop buying them altogether.

SDCC day one

As I said in yesterday’s post, I am not at SDCC. But I am following the news. Or at least some of the news. So here’s a post with links to a few things I found interesting today.

Spotlight on Maggie Thompson panel: The panel I would most like to have attended today. I was a long-time subscriber and reader of CBG, and it’s nice to see Maggie get a spotlight panel. I learned a lot about comics (and a bunch of other stuff) from Maggie and Don Thompson, and I really miss CBG. (The linked article from The Beat is a little… off. I get the feeling that maybe it was written in a rush, at the back of the panel room, and uploaded to the site without any editing. Oh well. This is one of the reasons I miss CBG so much: well-written and well-edited articles!)

The Comics Journal returns to print: Not exactly SDCC news, but related, and probably timed to coincide with SDCC. I never subscribed to The Comics Journal, but I did pick up a number of issues, back when it was a regular monthly magazine. TCJ always seemed a little too self-important and serious to me, but they ran some great interviews and articles. The new print magazine will only be coming out twice a year, though, so it’s not going to be quite the same as it was in its heyday. But it’s still a welcome return.

Doctor Who Series 11 Trailer: Yeah, I’m looking forward to this! The Doctor Who panel today would be my second choice for “panel I would most like to have attended.”

DC Universe streaming service: I’m curious about this, but not sure I want to pay $8 per month for it. The Titans trailer is… interesting. I’m not sure what to think about it really. It could be a great show or it could be a train wreck. Hard to tell. You can pre-order a one-year membership for $75 right now, but I’m not sure I’d do that without having more of a clue about the new shows.

Grant Morrison on Green Lantern: This is a book I’m going to want to read.