High Sierra and other updates

I updated my iPhone and iPad to iOS 11 some time ago, with no issues. There’s really nothing much in iOS 11 that I’m terribly enthusiastic about, but also nothing that bothers me. I do like the new screenshot stuff, so that’s cool.

And my watch is running watchOS 4 now. I was initially somewhat concerned that it would slow down my “Series 0” watch too much, or have a negative effect on battery life, but it’s not bad at all. I’m not really using any of the new features. I’ve settled on the “modular” watch face with a few useful complications, and I’m happy with that. And I continue to use the activity app to motivate me and keep track of my meager attempts at exercise. (For today, so far: move ring at 45%, exercise ring at 66% and stand ring at 33%. Step count at 4,474. Pretty good for 10:30am on a Saturday.) I was kind of hoping that the “auto-launch audio app” feature would be useful for me, but it’s an annoyance more frequently than it’s a help, so far. It tends to stay up after I’ve already stopped listening to music, and it sometimes appears for no discernible reason at all. Maybe it works better on newer watches.

On the Windows side of things, my desktop PC decided to apply the Fall Creators Update last weekend. I’m still kind of grouchy about the idea that I have little control over when major updates like this happen on Windows 10, and also about the crazy naming shenanigans. The update appears on the PC with an entirely nondescript name that doesn’t really let you know that it’s a major update (just “version 1709,” basically), while most articles about it use the “Fall Creators Update” name. I wish we could go back to the days when we just called these things “SP1,” “SP2,” and so on. Anyway, there’s not much there that’s of interest to me. The update installed with no glitches, and there haven’t been any issues post-install. I’m not really interested in any of the MR, VR, AR, and/or 3D stuff. I should probably look into the new stuff related to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and I am genuinely interested in that, but I don’t have much practical use for it right now.

Back in the Apple world, I tried installing High Sierra on my MacBook last weekend, but hit a snag. I got an error related to firmware, the same one described here. It sounds like this is common for people with third-party SSDs. One of the answers in the thread suggested running “diskutil repairdisk disk0” in the rescue mode terminal.  I was a little afraid to try that last weekend, in case things went wrong, so I put it off. I did it this morning, and it fixed everything, and the upgrade ran fine. I wasn’t sure if my disk would be coverted to APFS, since it’s not an official Apple SSD, but it was converted, and it’s working fine so far. I should probably review this document before I try my next Carbon Copy Cloner backup. And maybe I should just remove Disk Warrior, since I don’t really use it anyway.

I guess the last big update I’ll need to do this year is getting the Fall Creators Update on my ThinkPad. That machine is old enough that Windows 10 updates can be a little dicey, but it’s been fine so far.

I used to be a lot more excited about OS updates than I am today. I still remember the thrill of installing the Windows 95 Preview from floppy diskettes. (Raymond Chen says it was 13 disks for the release version. I remember the preview version being more than that, but I could be wrong.) I guess I’m getting old and jaded. I’m just glad everything’s working, I haven’t bricked any machines, lost any data, or set anything on fire.

Moustache on the Orient Express

From Film Comment’s review of Murder on the Orient Express:

Poirot’s whiskers are more like a moustache within a moustache, or one set of whiskers grafted onto another. It could almost have been designed by H.R. Giger, if he did facial hair. The thing is so huge, and the corridor of the Orient Express so narrow, that it’s a wonder that Poirot doesn’t carve deep grooves along its exquisitely lacquered wooden walls as he passes.

I kind of want to see this movie, since I love both Agatha Christie and Kenneth Branagh, but I’m not sure I can take two hours of that mustache. I want to have an open mind, but it’s not easy for me to accept anyone but David Suchet (and his nice little mustache) as Poirot.

The Ever-Expanding Backlog

After being somewhat industrious last weekend, I’m spending this weekend largely resting and reading comic books. I intended on putting a dent in my backlog of unread books, but it didn’t really work out that way.

Last summer, I picked up several of the books that Marvel put out under their Timely Comics banner, which were all $3 books reprinting the first three issues of one of their then-current ongoing titles. I wasn’t reading any Marvel books at the time, and I was just getting back into buying monthly books again, after an almost ten-year break, so it seemed like a good idea to pick some of those up and see if anything caught my fancy.

Well, long story short, they mostly went into my to-be-read box and have sat there ever since. (And I’m still not buying any Marvel books on a regular basis.) I did read the Doctor Strange one some time ago, which led to me picking up some of the Jason Aaron Doctor Strange run. (I liked what I’ve read of it, but I still haven’t read all of what I bought yet.)

Yesterday, I decided that I wanted to read something that was vaguely Halloween-related, so I picked the Scarlet Witch book out of the pile. Well, that was good enough that I decided to look into picking up more of it. The series lasted for 15 issues, and has been collected into 3 volumes, all of which are on sale at Amazon for $4.50 each (for the Kindle version). So picking those up was a pretty easy decision. I just finished the third volume. For what it’s worth, I thought it was a pretty good series. (I posted reviews on Goodreads.)

The point I’m trying to get to is that I’ve read a fair number of comics this weekend, but I’m really no further into my backlog. It seems that every time I read something, it leads me down a path where I buy even more stuff.

I had been thinking about maybe reading some Locke & Key this weekend, since that seems kind of Halloween-appropriate, and I have six volumes of that to read, from a Humble Bundle I bought back in 2015. But now it’s Sunday afternoon, and it’s too late to start into something new.

And I probably shouldn’t have bought the random DC Rebirth books that I picked up at last weekend’s comic book show, since now I’m probably going to want to add at least one of those titles to my regular pull list.

But hey, having too much stuff to read is a good problem to have. I just googled “too much to read” and found this interesting short article from Carve magazine on the subject. That guy is reading Shakespeare and Melville and I’m reading comic books, but the problem is similar. (Oh, and I also have way too many programming books to read, but that’s a subject for another post entirely.) By the way, Carve magazine looks like something I’d really be interested in subscribing to, if I didn’t already have way too much to read!

A nice apartment

From An Eye-Popping Mid-Century Apartment Filled With Pollocks, Klines, and de Koonings:

Ben Heller bought Jackson Pollock’s One, Number 31, 1950, when he lived in an apartment with lower ceilings. When he and Pollock installed the painting, it was too tall for the room; Pollock shrugged and stapled the top few inches of the canvas to the ceiling.

I have one Pollock print in my apartment. Imagine having three Pollock originals in your apartment.

Quicken switching to subscription model

I guess this was inevitable: Quicken has switched to a subscription model. They’re charging $45/year for Deluxe, which is the version I use. Here’s an article about it, from MacRumors. (Weirdly, I found several articles about the change on Mac web sites, but none on Windows sites. The change applies to both Mac & Windows, and the pricing is pretty much the same for both.) You can currently buy a 2-year subscription from Amazon for $90, which isn’t really saving you any money, but they include an additional three months, so I guess that helps.

Lately, I’ve been upgrading Quicken every year anyway, but I think I’ve usually only paid about $30 for it, getting it from Costco or Amazon. So this change looks like it would make it a bit more expensive for me. (And I’d lose the option of skipping a year, if I didn’t want to upgrade that year.) So that’s something to think about.

I’ve been using Quicken for a long time. The first version I used would have been under MS-DOS, back in the early nineties, I think. Switching to something else would be a big change for me. And there’s not much else out there that compares well to Quicken. Moneydance, maybe. That’s a one-time $50 purchase (though I could probably get a discount on that). I’m not sure how often they release new versions or what their upgrade pricing is, but it would probably work out to being a little cheaper than Quicken.

I’ll probably bite the bullet and buy that 2-year Quicken subscription from Amazon. I’ll wait a bit, though, until I get a chance to run out to Costco and see if they’ve got it cheaper. (I’ve been paying for Office 365 by getting it from Costco, and that’s saved me a few bucks over buying it directly from Microsoft, so maybe they’ll have something for Quicken too.)

Flemington comic book show

I went to a small comic book show in Flemington today. I haven’t been to a really small local con in a while. This one was pretty cool. They had a few artists as guests, including Darren Auck, who I chatted with for a bit, and bought a sketch from.

I bought a handful of recent DC Rebirth back issues from a guy who was selling them for cover price, buy 2 get 1 free. And a few other older random comics, including an obscure Matt Howarth comic that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. I actually spent more (on comics) at this show than I did at NYCC (though I still didn’t spend very much).

And they gave out a goodie back at the door with quite a few random items in it, including some X-Men back issues and other random comics. Overall, it was a nice little show. Everyone was cool and friendly. There weren’t too many people there when I arrived, but I went early, so maybe it got busier in the afternoon.

Not a bad way to spend an hour or so on a Sunday.

The Secrets of Sleep

I often bookmark articles on sleep, like this recent one from the New Yorker, which is a review of a book called The Mystery of Sleep. (Sometimes I actually read the articles, but mostly I just bookmark them…) I’ve been having some trouble sleeping again recently, though I’m not sure there’s much I can do about it, without making some pretty major life changes. (For instance, last night, there was somebody outside playing music at 3am. Not much I can do about that.)

I’m still using the Sleep Cycle app on my iPhone to track my sleep and act as an alarm clock. They added the ability to track snoring a while back, and that confirms that I do, in fact, snore. (And also that listening to recordings of yourself snoring is kind of horrifying.)

I’ve thought about buying a new mattress (though my current one is only a few years old). I was looking around at internet mattress companies, but after reading about all the shenanigans involved in that industry, I’m a little less interested in that. (Though maybe my takeaway from that should be that they’re all just selling slabs of foam, and they’re all pretty much the same, so I should just pick one and buy it and not worry too much about which one.)

Here’s another article, this one from NPR, with Terry Gross interviewing a scientist who wrote a book called Why We Sleep. In this case, I can skip the article and listen to the audio, so maybe I’ll do that. (Not that I’m likely to learn anything I haven’t already heard, but you never know.)

Trying to catch up with .NET

I’ve really fallen behind with recent developments in the .NET ecosystem. At work, I spend most of my time in Dynamics AX, so I don’t get to work on a lot of pure .NET stuff. I’ve been trying to get current, but it’s really an uphill battle. Stuff changes faster than I can keep up!

I just finished a book on ASP.NET Core, ASP.Net Core Application Development: Building an Application in Four Sprints. (Even just reading the title on that book is exhausting!) I posted a review on Goodreads, so I won’t repeat myself here.

I have a little extra respect for the book, because it includes a quote from Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts:

Try and leave this world a little better than you found it and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best. ‘Be Prepared’ in this way, to live happy and to die happy — stick to your Scout Promise always — even after you have ceased to be a boy — and God help you to do it.

I think this was in the chapter on refactoring code. So with respect to programming, I guess it means I can die happy if I’ve done my best to refactor poorly-written legacy code, renaming obscurely-named variables, reducing cyclomatic complexity, and all that good stuff.

Anyway, while I got a lot out of that book, I didn’t really come out with what I’d call an actual working understanding of ASP.NET MVC. I mean, I understand the basics, but I’ve got a long way to go. And there’s so much related stuff to learn too. One thing I’ll say is that this book had the first explanation of dependency injection that actually made sense to me. (I’d heard it described in podcasts before, and had probably read a few blog posts about it. But I don’t think I really got it until the explanation in this book.)

I’m also trying to read ASP.NET MVC 4 in Action right now. This one dates back to 2012, so it’s a little frustrating trying to reconcile stuff in this book vs. the way ASP.NET Core 2 works now. But it seems like a good book so far.

ASP.NET Core 2 is pretty recent of course. Here’s a What’s New in ASP.NET Core 2.0 post from July and an Announcing ASP.NET Core 2 post from August. (The new Razor Pages feature is pretty interesting, by the way. I listened to a podcast about it last week.)

The two ASP.NET books mentioned above are both available via my ACM Safari subscription, so that’s how I’ve been reading them. There’s a lot of good stuff there. I’m also getting a little bit of use out of my Pluralsight subscription, but probably not enough to justify the cost. It was really useful for the SharePoint stuff I watched on it a while back, but for general .NET stuff, there’s plenty of free video training out there, through Channel 9 and other sites.

The Levitz Paradigm

I woke up early this morning, and I don’t have much to do today, so I’m going to do some pointless blogging. (You’ve been warned.) I stumbled across a reference to the “Levitz Grid” this morning, with respect to Warren Ellis’ writing on The Wild Storm. That led me down a somewhat interesting path. The Levitz Grid / Levitz Paradigm is a system Paul Levitz devised when he was writing Legion of Super-Heroes back in the 80s. Gene Ha wrote it about it on a Google+ post a few years back. The grid has apparently also been used by Jonathan Hickman, for his Fantastic Four run, and Alan Moore, for Big Numbers. There’s a little bit more about the Levitz Paradigm at the Forbidden Planet blog. And a short write-up from Paul Levitz himself at his site.

I was a big fan of the Legion in the 80s. Back when I was buying comics with the money I was making at my minimum wage McDonald’s job, it was one of only a few books I was buying every month. I spent some time last summer reading a big stack of Legion comics, and wrote about that here and here. I saw Paul Levitz last week at NYCC, at the Will Eisner panel, and he seems to be doing well. (Speaking of which, I should really read his book on Eisner.)

The kind of plotting described by the Levitz Paradigm is, in some ways, very popular today, though usually in a more compressed form than Levitz used on Legion. Writers rarely have the space to let plots play out over multiple years, the way they could in the 80s, when nobody thought about trade paperback collections or six-issue arcs. Now that I think of it, the reason I’m enjoying a few of the books I’m currently reading probably has a lot to do with the fact that the writers have been allowed to stretch out a bit. Ellis’ Wild Storm is planned out as a 24-issue series. Though he’s writing it in six-issue arcs, they’re not really stand-alone stories. I think you’ll need to read all 24 issues to get the whole story. A number of the DC Rebirth titles fit this mold too, helped along by the biweekly schedule. I’d put Batman, Detective, and most notably Deathstroke in the “extended Levitz Paradigm” category (for lack of a better name). These three titles have all lasted for more than 24 issues, all without switching writers. And, while they’ve all been structured with discrete named arcs (as is common today), they’ve also had undercurrents and subplots that have crossed arcs.

I haven’t been reading much from Marvel lately, but it seems like they’ve been sticking more with a paradigm based on big events like Civil War II, Inhumans vs X-Men, and Secret Empire. I am curious about what’s going to come out of Marvel Legacy, but I’m not too optimistic about that. It doesn’t seem like they’re leaving much room for subtlety or long-term character development. Maybe I’m wrong though. I’ll keep an eye on reviews, and if anything seems promising, maybe I’ll look into it.

Star Trek novels and random web comics

I love Ty Templeton. I keep forgetting about his Bun Toons webcomic. (I should really set up an organized collection of webcomics in an RSS reader of some sort so I can read them regularly.)

Here’s a link to a recent Bun Toons that is “relevant to my interests” as the kids say. In particular, my interest in Star Trek novels, walking for exercise, and the inevitable slow decline into old age and decrepitude. I wish I had a thrift store near me with a good supply of Star Trek paperbacks. There used to be multiple used book stores here in Somerville, but they’re all gone. I had a nice walk this morning, but I only got as far as the bakery, and I came home with a granola muffin, so I think that cancels out the walk.

I’m currently reading the second Rise of the Federation novel, which is quite fun if you’re a huge Star Trek nerd who liked the Enterprise series. (If you’re not, though, I wouldn’t recommend it.) Once I’m through that series, I may go back to Ty’s post and look into some of the books he mentioned. I don’t think I’ve previously read any of them, and they do all look good!

Bleeding Cool has a good roundup of NYCC news stories up today. (And that’s how I got to Bun Toons, by the way.) I don’t recommend visiting BC without your ad-blocker set to maximum, but they do have links to a lot of the major DC & Marvel news from the con. The Beat has a lot of con coverage up now too, including an account of the Jack Kirby panel that I missed in favor of the Eisner one. (I really wish I could have gone to both of those!)