New Year’s Day 2018

It’s New Year’s Day morning, and it’s 5 degrees out, with a wind chill making it feel a few degrees colder. So I guess it’s a good morning to stay inside and write my annual year in review / new year’s goals blog post. As I get older, I’m finding these little reviews to be pretty helpful.

Here are links to the last few:

2017 was a challenging year, on many fronts, most of them related (at least tangentially) to Donald Trump. Andy Zaltzman has a great 2017 year in review article up on the Guardian web site, and a very funny 2018 year in review article at iNews. It’s stuff like Zaltzman’s Bugle podcast that has kept me sane though the last year.

Weight and General Heath
Last year, I mentioned that I’d transitioned from losing weight to maintaining my weight. Well, I guess that’s not entirely correct, since I weighed 150 at the start of 2016, 146 at the  start of 2017, and 140 today. So I actually still seem to be losing around five pounds per year. It seems like I’m going to have to level off at some point and I honestly think that 140 is going to be it. I can’t see myself dropping to 135, but we’ll see. I’m still using LoseIt every day, and logging all my meals and snacks.

On the general health front, I had blood work done last month, and everything is looking pretty good. No major health crises in 2017, so that’s something, at least.

In terms of exercise, I’m doing pretty good. I got my Apple Watch in April 2016, and I’ve been wearing it every day. My move goal has been set at 400 calories for probably all of last year, and I’ll hit that 3-5 times a week on average, I think (more often when the weather’s nice, and less often when it’s ridiculously cold, like right now).

As to sleep, that’s been a mixed bag this year. I mentioned last year that I might toss my mattress and get a new one, despite the fact that it’s not really that old. I didn’t do that, but I might do it this year. I had a run going for a while where I would wake up at 2am or 4am every night, for no obvious reason. I think it was due to some noise outside or something like that. I’m still generally waking up at 4am or 5am for no reason, looking at my phone to see what time it is, then rolling over and going back to sleep. I blogged about sleep back in October. I’m still using the Sleep Cycle app.

Blogging and Journaling
I wanted to check and see how many blog posts I’d written this year, but then realized that I can’t figure out how to get that number easily. (It’s probably somewhere in the site stats, but I can’t find it.) So I just counted then up on the 2017 archive page, and it looks like about 128. (I could probably write a SQL query to get that number, but it’s not worth the time.)

I didn’t write a ton of programming-related blog posts in 2017, but I’m trying to correct that with my “12 Days of .NET” series of posts.

As to journaling, I finished a five-year journal in 2016, and used Day One exclusively in 2017. Day One is working out OK for me. From their Mac app, I can see that I’ve written 363 entries in 2017, which is almost one per day. Most entries are very short; I’m keeping track of things like books, comics, and movies that I’ve read/seen in Day One. (I might have more to write on that subject later.)

Professional / Education
I will be hitting my five-year mark at SHI this month. I don’t think that gets me an extra week of vacation in 2018; I think that comes in 2019, when I start the year with more than five years on the job. (I could be wrong though.) I’m a little jealous of my brother in this area: he gets a lot more vacation time than I do. (But I’m sure he gets paid a lot less, since he’s working for a non-profit.)

My year-end performance review was very good. Interestingly, my boss told me that I rated myself lower on my self-review than anyone else in the department. Part of that, I guess, is humility. Part of it is probably imposter syndrome. But most of it is that I rushed through my self-review without thinking about it too much and just hit “3” on a lot of stuff (on a scale of 1-5). I also got a slight promotion in July, so I’m now a “Senior Application Developer.” So overall I’m doing fine at work, from my boss’ point of view.

Near the end of 2017, I started a new project that’s allowed me to do a good amount of .NET programming, using modern tools and techniques (for the most part), so I’m happy about that. I still do a lot of Dynamics AX work, and I’m a little worried about that, since Microsoft has really been pushing people into the cloud version of AX. (Which is annoyingly now called Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise Edition. Seriously. I wrote a whole essay on how annoyed I am about that name, but didn’t post it. But I digress.) We’re not likely to upgrade our on-premise install of AX anytime soon, so I have a little bit of worry about becoming a “legacy system” programmer. But my boss is aware of that, and has gone out of her way to try to get me involved in general .NET projects, whenever possible.

On the education front, I’m still subscribing to Pluralsight, and watched a handful of courses in 2017. I have a blog post on that scheduled as part of my “12 Days of .NET,” so I won’t say any more here.

Looking at my Goodreads history, I see that I managed to read several programming-related books this past year, including:

So I’ve really got nothing to be ashamed of there. A bunch of these were read via the Safari subscription that I get via ACM. That’s turned out to be a really useful benefit. I have a bunch of books in my queue there, and I hope I’ll be able to read a few of them in 2018.

Organization / Finance
Not much to say here. I’m still using Evernote for nearly all of my personal organizational needs. And I’m still on their premium plan, which should renew in about a week at $70/year. For me, it’s worth it. It’s still my best option for an organizational tool that works well across Windows, Mac, and iOS.

On the Finance front, I did a quick year-end review yesterday, and I’m looking pretty good. The stock market has been crazy this year. I’ve done well, but I’m a little worried about the possibility of a crash in 2018. I haven’t really done much in the way of review this year; I’ve mostly just kept everything where it is and let it ride. I feel like maybe I should move some money out of stocks this year and into bonds.

And I still have to figure out what to do about the fiduciary duty rule. I have a document from Merrill somewhere listing the options I have on my various retirement accounts. But I’m not sure where any of this stuff even stands now, since this is one of many things that Trump and the Republicans want to roll back. There was a lot of talk about it back in February (see here and here), and a little in May (here), but I haven’t heard much lately. The whole thing is giving me a headache.

Comics and Books
I set a fifty-book goal in Goodreads for 2017, and read 115 books total, according to my year in review page. Some of those are short stories, and a lot of them are graphic novels, so that’s a highly-exaggerated number, but I still feel like I got a lot of reading done this past year. Highlights would probably include finishing Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, re-reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and reading Seveneves by Neal Stephenson.

On the comic book front, I’m still visiting my local comic book store once a week and picking up a handful of new comics. I started doing that in mid-2016, when DC’s Rebirth started. I’m still reading a number of the titles that started up then, though I’ve dropped a few. And I’m not really reading any Marvel books right now, though I picked up Ed Piskor’s X-Men: Grand Design, which looks really amazing. (Marvel has had a pretty bad year, overall.)

I’ll probably keep going into the comic shop every week, if DC keeps publishing a few good books. But if they go off the rails at some point this year, then I’ll probably stop and go back to just reading an occasional trade paperback and random stuff from Comixology.

Art and Entertainment
I’ve gotten a good bit of use out of my Met and MoMA memberships in 2017. But I haven’t been to either in a while, largely due to the cold weather.  I did see the Rodin exhibit at the Met, but I haven’t seen the Hockney, Munch, Michelangelo, or Leonardo to Matisse exhibits. I’d like to go next weekend, but it looks like we’ll have a high of 11 on Saturday and 21 on Sunday, so that’s not looking too good. There’s less going on at MoMA; I’d like to get in and see The Long Run, but that’s going to be there until November, so I’ve got plenty of time.

I got out and saw a few good concerts in 2017, including Paul McCartney in Newark. I went to NYCC. And I went to the Star Trek set tour in Ticonderoga with a couple of friends!

I have a pretty full schedule for 2018 already, including U2, Weird Al, the Harry Potter Cursed Child play, and a repeat visit to the Star Trek tour (with a William Shatner appearance). I’m actually wondering if I’m going to make it to all of these. I hope my health holds up, but I do have a tendency to get sick at the most inopportune times. (I’m still mad that I had to miss the Spinal Tap Unwigged concert back in 2009.)

Summary
I started writing this post just after breakfast, and now it’s almost lunch time. And the word count on this post is almost at 2000, which is pretty darn lengthy, for a self-indulgent year-in-review post. But I think these posts are really helpful for me, and if they’re interesting to anybody else, great. (If not, I’m not forcing anybody else to read them.) The temperature outside is crawling upward, and is now at 14 degrees. That’s better than the 5 degree reading when I started writing, but still not warm enough for me to want to go out for a walk or anything like that. (And I’d really like to be able to go out for a walk right now. I may bundle up and force myself to. At least as far as Starbucks and back.)

Twelve Days of .NET: Day 3: Logging

This post is part of my 12 Days of .NET series. This is a (not terribly ambitious) series of posts on .NET topics that came up while I was working on a recent C# Web API project.

On past .NET projects, I’ve generally used log4net to handle logging. I like the rolling file appender and generally use that. For this project, I decided to look at what else was out there. I found Serilog, and decided to give that a try. It worked out really well. I think I’ve found my new default .NET logging library. It has a rolling file sink similar to log4net. And it’s very flexible and configurable.

Twelve Days of .NET: Day 2: Dependency Injection / IoC

This post is part of my 12 Days of .NET series. This is a (not terribly ambitious) series of posts on .NET topics that came up while I was working on a recent C# Web API project.

One of the first things I wanted to figure out on this project was how to make use of Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control. I’d read about it before, but never really quite figured it out. The original source for the DI/IoC concept is from a Martin Fowler blog post from 2004.

I evaluated a few options for my project, and settled on using Autofac, which is a well-documented IoC container that works well with Web API. This video from Channel 9 helped me figure out how to get started with Autofac and DI in general.

I also considered Ninject and StructureMap. I don’t have much to say about those, since I didn’t wind up using them.

The end result of all this is that I think I finally have a decent working understanding of DI/IoC.

Twelve Days of .NET: Day 1: Web API

This post is part of my 12 Days of .NET series. This is a (not terribly ambitious) series of posts on .NET topics that came up while I was working on a recent C# Web API project.

For the .NET project that I’ve been working on recently, I’ve had to play a bit of “catch-up,” since I haven’t been doing too much .NET/C# development recently. My part of the project was to create a middleware API (for lack of a better term) that would provide a simplified internal interface to a more complicated external REST API. I decided to make my API a REST API also, since that’s pretty much the standard at this point. I’d done a lot of work with SOAP APIs in the past. And I’d created a REST API in .NET at least once before, using WCF. Back then, I probably started out by reading something like this article from 2008.

The way to do this stuff now is Web API. The most up-to-date way would be to do this in .NET Core. I couldn’t do that, for reasons that are kind of complicated and not worth going into. (Actually, at some point, I figured out that I probably could do it with .NET Core, but by that point I was too far along to go back.)

I used a few resources to get started. I watched a couple of video courses on Pluralsight: Jon Flanders’ Intro to ASP.NET Web API and Shawn Wildermuth’s Implementing an API in ASP.NET Web API. I also read the book ASP.NET MVC 4 In Action. This was somewhat out of date (last revised in 2012), but was still useful.

So let’s call that my day one post: I started a Web API project, using VS 2017, and the standard .NET Framework.

Twelve Days of .NET

Back around Thanksgiving, I got interested in stuff like the F# Advent Calendar, the C# Advent Calendar, and Advent of Code. I’ve been working on a pretty cool .NET project at work recently, and I got the idea that maybe I’d do a series of blog posts about various tools and techniques that I’d come across while working on this project. I haven’t written a lot of programming-related blog posts lately, so I though this would be a fun way to get some programming content back on the blog.

I originally thought I’d try to follow the Advent Calendar model, and do one post a day for 25 days, starting on 12/1. Then, when I didn’t get around to starting that, I thought maybe I’d do a Twelve Days of Christmas thing, and do twelve posts from 12/13-24. Now that it’s past Christmas, I’ve decided to just do twelve posts and skip the whole Advent/Christmas connection. I’ll just call it “12 Days of .NET”.

I’m not going to be too ambitious about this. Most of the posts will probably be short, and I’m not going to post a lot of code. Mostly just links to stuff that I found useful. I’ve got most of the posts written already (at least in rough form), so I’m going to set them up in advance to auto-post every day for the next twelve days.

Shin Godzilla

I finally got around to watching Shin Godzilla today. It’s a weird film, but it’s definitely worth watching. I started hearing interesting stuff about it last year, including good reviews from RogerEbert.com and Ars Technica.

It’s not a movie that I think mainstream American audiences would ever enjoy or understand. There are a lot of scenes of politicians and/or scientists sitting around conference room tables, talking. These scenes are well-done, and not at all boring, if you can keep up with the subtitles. (They’re talking really fast, so you do have to pay attention to keep up.)

The CGI effects are good, but not quite up to typical modern “Hollywood blockbuster” standards. Godzilla’s initial form is pretty weird-looking, but the creature evolves into something more closely resembling the typical Godzilla fairly quickly. Overall, I found the “Godzilla destroying Japan” scenes to be well-done and engaging (though occasionally funnier than they were probably supposed to be).

There’s a lot of stuff in the movie related to Japanese politics, particularly post-Fukushima. A lot of the political stuff reminds me of a manga I read years ago, the name of which I can’t remember right now. At any rate, it’s a lot more ambitious thematically than a typical monster movie.

I bought the movie on Blu-ray; I could really have gotten away with just renting it though. I may watch it again at some point, but really seeing it once was enough for me.

Eighties Nostalgia and weird Christmas stuff

The new Netflix series The Toys That Made Us looks like it should be fun. It looks like it’s concentrating mostly on toys from the 80s. I’m old enough that I was pretty much done with toys by 1980, but I did (of course) have some Star Wars toys. (Though maybe those were my younger brother’s toys, technically. Either way, they were pretty cool.)

My old friend Mike Pajaro is a guest on a recent episode of an 80s-themed podcast called Stuck in the 80s. The two regular hosts and Mike each pick a Christmas special from the 80s to talk about. Mike, of course, talks about the Alf Christmas Special. I was never a big fan of Alf, and have never seen this special, but it sounds like it’s a doozy. (If you’d rather read an amusing text summary of the special, rather than listen to my friend Mike describe it, read this.) The podcast is pretty funny. The other two Christmas specials they talk about are the Pee-Wee Herman special and the He-Man special.

Which reminds me that I added the Pee-Wee special to my Netflix queue when they added it a few years ago, but never watched it. I may have seen it when it originally aired, but I’m not sure. Either way, I should watch it this year. I haven’t really been in the mood for Christmas stuff this year, but I think I’d enjoy the Pee-Wee special.

And speaking of oddball Christmas stuff, I could really use a new Christmas-themed Radio Rashy episode, but I guess they stopped doing Radio Rashy, since there haven’t been any new episodes since 2015 or so. Maybe I’ll go back and listen to the Santa Claus is a Bitch episode, one of the last ones they did. (I’d love to grab one of their old Christmas Jukebox episodes, but I don’t think any of those are still available. I should have saved those mp3s.)

The Last Jedi and the tired old nerd

I really want to see Last Jedi this weekend, but I’m kind of sick, so I don’t want to sit through a loud, two and a half hour movie. (Also, it’s snowing out and very cold.) I checked Amazon to see if they had the novelization, thinking that maybe reading that would be a good substitute, but it’s not coming out until March 2018! That seems kind of crazy to me. I know most movies don’t even get novelizations anymore, but if you’re going to do one, it should come out at the same time as the movie.

When I was a kid, I didn’t get out to see a lot of movies, so my first exposure to many popular movies of my youth was through either the novelization, the comic book adaptation, or the Mad magazine parody. You don’t see a lot of novelizations or comic book movie adaptations anymore. (And Mad is only published bimonthly now.) I also remember that my first exposure to the plot of the original Star Wars movie was through an article in Famous Monsters magazine. I remember it being just basically a plot summary, with a bunch of stills from the movie. (They apparently published a Star Wars Spectacular in 1977, which may have been what I read, but I’m not sure.)

Anyway, I feel like I need an illustrated plot summary or a comic book version or something for the new Star Wars movie. The reviews have all been very good, including the NY Times review. (Though I haven’t read it all the way through yet.)

I also noticed that a graphic novel adaptation of the last Star Wars movie, Rogue One, came out just this week. It looks kind of weird. I think it’s supposed to be a “YA” version or something? I guess if I decide that I really need to read a Star Wars comic this weekend, I could buy that one.

SDCC Open Registration

Today is the day for open registration for San Diego Comic-Con. It’s a good day for it: it’s snowing outside, I have a cold, and there was a derailment on the Raritan Valley tracks yesterday. So going into NYC would have been difficult even if it wasn’t snowing and I didn’t have a cold.

I turned on my desktop computer early this morning and made sure it was current with Windows updates, Firefox updates, and any other updates I could think of, so hopefully nothing will get in the way of working through the registration process. I also am all stocked up on ramen noodles, herbal tea, and cough medicine.

I’ve completely failed to get tickets for the last few years, and I’ll probably fail again this year, but hey, I have to try!

Morrissey: Spent the Day in Bed

One more song for today. I’m not usually a big fan of Morrissey’s solo work, but I kind of like this one.  Of course, when I searched for it, I found this link too… so, yeah, he’s still an idiot. But he occasionally writes a pretty good song.