Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

I’m going to go see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in NYC in a few weeks, so I thought it might be fun to reread the script book. I read it when it first came out, back in 2016. And I’ve almost completely forgotten the plot, I’m embarrassed to say. I mean, I remember that there was a curse, and a child, I think. But not much more than that. So I could reread it, to refresh my memory, or I could skip it and go into the play not remembering anything, and be surprised.

I just realized that the version I have is the Special Rehearsal Edition, which is no longer available. There’s a new version, published in 2017, with the final script. (Or at least the script they were using at that time. Maybe they’re tweaking it again for the New York run.) So now I need to decide if I want to reread the version I already own, or spend $9 on the new version. I did a little research, and it sounds like there’s not much new in the final edition. So I might as well stick with the one I already own.

I’m really looking forward to the play. Here’s an article from the NY Times about the NYC production. It’s interesting, the scale of it, and the amount of money and effort that goes into something like this. Here’s hoping it does well.

Weird Al in Tarrytown

I went to see Weird Al in Tarrytown on Thursday night. This is probably the third or fourth time I’ve seen Weird Al in concert. (I’m not even sure.) Tarrytown would not have been my first choice of venue, but his show at the Apollo was sold out, and he’s only playing relatively small venues on this tour, so it was the closest we could get. (It would have been cool if he’d played the State Theatre in New Brunswick, but no such luck!)

This tour is a little different from Al’s usual. He’s calling it his “ill-advised vanity tour.” He’s playing mostly original songs (not parodies) and he’s just sitting on a stool throughout the show, no funny costumes or sets or anything. Rolling Stone has an interview with him about it. The set list was varied and had a lot of fun stuff in it.

I’m getting too old to drive as far as Tarrytown on a weeknight, so I turned the concert into a two-day vacation, with an overnight stay in Manhattan. I took NJ Transit into NYC on Thursday afternoon and checked into my hotel. I did some random wandering around in NYC, then took a nap in my hotel room, then took the Metro North train to Tarrytown. It was a great show, and everything worked out pretty well. I caught a train back to NYC at around 11:20pm, getting into Grand Central just after midnight. By then, it had started raining, though not as bad as it would get on Friday. I checked out of the hotel Friday morning and went straight home. I had wanted to hang out in Manhattan a bit on Friday, but the rain was getting bad. I’m glad I didn’t stick around, because apparently the rush hour commute home on NJ Transit got VERY bad.

NJ Transit has been getting pretty bad, in general, lately. The trip into the city on Thursday hit a snag, due to a disabled train in the tunnel into Manhattan. That caused a delay of about 30 minutes. That kind of thing is getting to be “the new normal,” it seems. You just have to build an extra hour into your schedule, in case anything happens on the train. I’m hoping that Phil Murphy manages to find some way to spend some money on transportation infrastructure, but I’m not optimistic. He’s at least trying though.

Anyway, this was supposed to be a post about a great Weird Al concert, not a post about how much trouble NJ Transit is in. Weird Al also has a new single out: The Hamilton Polka! I’ve never seen Hamilton, or even heard much of the music from it, but this is a typical Weird Al polka medley. It’s pretty funny, and probably much funnier if you’re familiar with the source material.

 

Generation Grumpy

From the NY Times: Generation Grumpy: Why You May Be Unhappy if You’re Around 50

The generation of people born 1962 to 1971, now in what are typically peak earning years, are finding they are not doing as well as they might have expected.

As a fifty-year-old, I can attest that I am indeed grumpy! (Though not necessarily for the reasons outlined in this article.)

Stop and Shop is gone

I guess I don’t get out much these days. I decided to go to the Raritan Shop and Shop yesterday to dump some old coins in their CoinStar machine, and when I got there, it was closed down. Apparently, it closed back in November 2017.

Since there’s a ShopRite practically across the street from my apartment, I haven’t bothered to go anywhere else for groceries in quite some time. Back during the years after PathMark had closed and before ShopRite opened, I used to go to Stop and Shop almost every week. (Occasionally, I went to Wegman’s.)

I should probably get out more and check out some other supermarkets occasionally. There’s a Whole Foods opening in Bridgewater in March. That could be interesting. The idea of an Amazon-owned grocery store makes me a little uncomfortable though.

I did go to Wal-Mart today in Manville, to use their CoinStar, but I didn’t buy anything. I hadn’t been there in a long time either; they seems to have expanded the store and added a full grocery section since I was last there.

Anyway, I’m glad I have a ShopRite in walking distance. I like being able to do all my grocery shopping without ever needing to get in a car. That’s something I take for granted, and I really shoudn’t.

The ThinkPad Lives Again

After seeing yesterday’s post, a friend recommended that I pull the battery from my ThinkPad, hold the power button down for a few seconds, then put the battery back and see what happens. Well, that turns out to have fixed it. I’d never heard of that trick (or if I had, I’d forgotten about it). I searched to see if I could find any reference to it, and I found this SuperUser question. There’s not much information there, but heck, if it works, it works. So that’s one less thing I need to worry about today. Thanks!

The ThinkPad Might Be Dead

My ThinkPad locked up today, and, when I rebooted, it didn’t think it had a hard drive. So either the hard drive is dead or something is wrong with the ThinkPad, and it’s no longer recognizing the drive. I wasn’t really in the mood to spend a lot of time troubleshooting today, but I went as far as pulling and re-seating the drive. That didn’t help. If I have some ambition tomorrow, I’ll remove it and try to mount it externally, maybe connected to my desktop or my MacBook.

I’m not too worried about this, since the ThinkPad has basically become my “third choice” computer. I use my MacBook the most (every day), my Dell desktop PC second most (generally for more “serious” stuff), and the ThinkPad gets booted up maybe once a month. I also don’t have anything really important on the hard drive. Everything important is in OneDrive or Evernote. If the drive is dead, I probably lost my saved game of Neverwinter Nights, but I’d pretty much given up on that anyway.

I bought the ThinkPad in 2011, and replaced the original hard drive with an SSD in 2014. So the laptop is more than six years old and the drive is a bit more than three years old. If the machine is dead, well, it was probably time. If the drive is dead, then I’m a little disappointed with that, since I think an SSD ought to last at least five years.

I’d like to get the machine working again, if I can, but if I can’t, that’s fine. It’s a pretty old machine and it might be time for a new one. Or maybe it’s time to give up on the idea of owning three computers. The desktop and the MacBook are good enough, especially when you add in the iPad, the iPhone, the work laptop, the work iPad, and all the other random computing devices in my apartment. Maybe it’s time to downsize a bit!

Reason To Be Hopeful

After reading Bill Gates’ thoughts on Steven Pinker’s new book, I added it to my Amazon wish list, along with the dozens of other books I really want to read (but probably won’t ever get around to). Here’s a little video of Paul Solman interviewing Pinker, from PBS NewsHour.

 

Once in a Lifetime

I mentioned yesterday that I missed out on the big Michelangelo exhibit at the Met, which closed a few days ago. I’d only gotten around to reading the NY Times review of the show (from November) yesterday. I was reading another old email from November this morning, and saw a mention of the JoCo Cruise for 2018. I’ve always heard good things about past JoCo cruises, so I thought I’d check the website and see when this year’s cruise was going to be. Well, it’s February 18 to 25. So it’s too late for that too.

The Michelangelo exhibit was likely a “once in a lifetime” thing; JoCo Cruise is once a year. But there’s one other story from November that I just read that, sadly, keeps coming up over and over again: mass shootings. I was reading some comics from The Nib from back in November about shootings and the lack of any reasonable gun control in the US.

I did a little searching to see if I could figure out which mass shooting had happened in mid-November 2017, and I actually found two. On November 15, 2017, a man went on a shooting rampage in California (including going through an elementary school, which was thankfully on lockdown when he got there). On November 5, a man attacked a Texas church, killing more than 25 people.

And two days ago, we had another school shooting in Florida. So the cartoons from The Nib about the political inaction on gun control are just as current today as they were in November. In fact, I also came across a piece in the Times by Nicholas Kristof about how to reduce shootings that was written in November, but has just been updated. (It’s a very good article, by the way. Well-written and well-reasoned. And, sadly, I doubt it required much updating since November, since little has changed, except for more shootings.)

And every time this happens, The Onion re-posts a slightly modified version of their story ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

Good Old Email

I’m a big fan of email. Say what you will, it’s still pretty darn useful. There was news this week about Google wanting to use AMP with email. I ignored this, since I don’t use Gmail anymore, and it didn’t seem like a big thing, on the surface. But there’s a post on the FastMail blog today titled Email is your electronic memory that’s pretty interesting. (FastMail is my current email provider.) They talk about how email should be “immutable.” (Apparently, the AMP thing is more about making email interactive rather than making it faster.) I haven’t thought about it too much, but the immutable nature of email is one of the most useful things about it. The web, in general, is very mutable. Web sites and web pages come and go. URLs change. But, if I’ve got an email in my mailbox, then the text (at least) of that email is fixed. I can search for it and find it and do stuff with it.

I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters. One of the things I notice in these newsletters is whether they contain actual content, or just links to content. In general, newsletters that actually contain content are more useful than those that are just link collections. Warren Ellis’ newsletter is a good example. He includes a lot of text content within the body of the newsletter. He also includes links out to other stuff, which is unavoidable, but the main content of the newsletter is actually in the newsletter, as text. The newsletter for Tor.com goes the other way. It’s mostly just a list of recent articles on the site, with short text summaries and links out to the articles. The annoying thing about that newsletter is that the links expire. They use a link redirection service that, I assume, gives them analytics about how many times the links are clicked and stuff like that. But the links expire after a month or two. And I’m usually a month or two behind in reading those emails. So, if I click any of the links, they just go to an error page. To find the article I wanted to read, I have to search for it. That actually discourages me from reading most of the articles. I have to really want to read it to bother copying and pasting the title into DuckDuckGo or Google.

I also subscribe to a bunch of newsletters from the NY Times. Those are somewhere in between; there’s usually some content right in the newsletter, but also short article summaries and links out to the Times site for the full articles. One of the best newsletters they have is the one for The Interpreter. It generally contains a good well-written article in the body of the email, plus links out to related articles at the Times site and other sites.

And I use an alert service from the Times to get email notifications when new articles are published on certain subjects that I’m interested in. I have alerts set up for articles about comic books, sci-fi books & movies, and a couple of my favorite museums. These are really useful, since they frequently surface articles that I wouldn’t have stumbled across otherwise. But I was disappointed to see today that they have apparently discontinued that service. I haven’t seen an announcement about it, but there’s no longer a link to the alerts page from the account settings, and if you go directly to the alerts page, it’s now a static page that says “The New York Times has discontinued the My Alerts feature.” So that sucks.

Prior to setting up the alerts through the NY Times site itself, I had them set up through IFTTT. They were useful, but sometimes they’d stop working for no discernible reason, and they weren’t nearly as good as the official NY Times alerts at finding relevant articles. But I guess I might have to go back to IFTTT now. We’ll see. There’s probably some other fancy way for me to get alerts about NY Times articles, through a different third-party service, but I haven’t done any research into that yet.

Anyway, this was originally going to be a short post about how I need to catch up with my newsletters and news alerts, since I’m three or four months behind now. I only just read an article about how great the Michelangelo exhibit at the Met is, and it ended two days ago, and I didn’t get a chance to see it. Oh well.

HomePod reviews

I’ve been reading a bunch of HomePod reviews. Even though I’d already decided not to buy one, I guess I’m still kind of curious about it. Since I bought a Sonos One, I am of course looking to confirm that buying that was the right decision, so I’m paying more attention to negative HomePod reviews than positive ones.

Consumer Reports did some testing, and thinks that Sonos One sounds better. They’re pretty much the only ones though. Every other review thinks HomePod has better sound.

Gizmodo, for what its worth, thinks HomePod is only a little better than Sonos One. And they’ve got issues with the Apple-centric nature of the HomePod. (That complaint is pretty common among the other reviews too.)

I got some use out of my Sonos One over the weekend, since it was a rainy weekend, and I spent a good amount of time sitting in my recliner, reading comics. I was mostly just listening to WQXR, for background music. It works reasonably well for that kind of thing.