lots of comics

I’ve been reading a lot of comic books lately. (I’ve noticed that I go through phases with my reading; sometimes it’s a lot of comics, sometimes mystery novels, sometimes New Yorker articles, and so on. Right now it’s comics. But I digress.)

Marvel and Comixology ran a promotion a few years ago where they gave away a whole bunch of #1 issues, and I snagged about 200 individual issues from that. I’ve dipped into them occasionally, but recently I’ve been reading a lot of them. (For a while, it was hard to keep track of which of these I’d read and which I hadn’t, but I’m now using the new “archive” feature in Comixology to remove the ones I’ve read from my library.) Most recently, I read quite a few X-Men issues. It’s a weird experience, just reading a bunch of #1 issues from various X-Men series and mini-series, outside of any particular context. My main takeaway from that is that X-Men continuity is so convoluted that there’s really no point in paying attention to it at all. You really need to not think about it, and just take any individual story on its own merits.

This article about Brian Bendis’ All-New X-Men title is a great example of how insane it is to try to make sense of X-Men continuity. This is the series where Bendis brought the original young X-Men from the past into the present, where they (apparently) coexist with their present-day selves. (My head hurts.)

DC isn’t much better, of course. I recently read the new Rebirth Special, and, while it’s pretty well done, I think it would be impenetrable to someone who hasn’t followed DC continuity for years. I also recently read Ambush Bug: Year None, which (though it’s almost a decade old now) works surprisingly well as a companion to the Rebirth Special. (And makes almost as much sense as some of DC’s and Marvel’s recent output…)

I also have a few issues of Convergence in my reading pile, which was one of last year’s big “event” comics from DC. I picked them up on a whim, and they’ve just sat in the pile for the last year. I may move them to the top of the pile, since I seem to be in the right mood for this kind of story right now. If they’re any good, I suppose I’ll pick up the trade so I can read the rest of the story.

And I also intend on reading Grant Morrison’s Multiversity at some point, but I think that one’s going to be a doozy, so I’m not in any hurry to pick that up.

I will also admit to being curious about Civil War II. I picked up issues zero and one at the comics shop, and I’ll probably read them soon. I don’t know if I’ll convince myself to pick up the remaining issues as they come out, but if it’s good, I’ll at least pick up the trade when it’s released.

Whew. I can already see the point, two or three months from now, where I get tired of reading about guys in spandex hitting each other and switch back to reading Agatha Christie novels or something like that.

A Busy Saturday

I bought a new mattress from Macy’s last week, and it was delivered today. My old mattress was about ten years old, so it was time for a new one. And my back has been hurting more than usual lately, so I’m hoping this will help.

After looking at some fancy new internet mattresses, I decided to stick with a traditional mattress from a plain old “bricks and mortar” retailer. I went with a pretty middle-of-the-road mattress; nothing too crazy. I did a fairly ridiculous amount of internet research before finally giving up and just buying something that Macy’s had on sale for Memorial Day, and that wasn’t too expensive, and that felt right when I tried it out.

I also had to go to the dentist this morning to get a filling replaced. (I was originally supposed to get that done last week, but he had an equipment malfunction, so we had to reschedule it.)

So I’ve got my new mattress, a fixed-up tooth, and my laundry is all done. And the novocaine is wearing off now. So I’m going to amuse myself with comic books for a while, then maybe think about doing something else useful, like grocery shopping.

WordPress backup

Not long after I first moved this blog to WordPress, I installed the UpdraftPlus plugin for site backups. I’ve been using the free version for the last couple of years, and it works fine. I have it configured to simply back up to local storage on my web host, and I hadn’t really thought about it much since I set it up. But of course backing up files to the same place that’s hosting them isn’t a great system. It’ll protect me against some possible issues, but it won’t be much help if something happens with my web host and I lose access to my account, or if someone breaks in to my account and deletes or scrambles all my files.

UpdraftPlus supports copying its backup files to DropBox, Google Drive, or several other possible offsite destinations. I don’t know why I’d never set this up, but I decided that it was past time I did that, so I started messing around. I found that the DropBox support was easy to set up, but just didn’t work for me. It would partially copy the backup to DropBox, then it would get stuck and never finish. This has got to be some kind of configuration issue on my host; Updraft is a pretty mature plugin and it gets updated frequently, so if there was some general issue with Updraft’s DropBox support, they would have fixed it.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out the DropBox issue, so I thought I’d just try Google Drive instead. The Google Drive support requires getting an API key from Google. Updraft’s documentation has a good write-up on how to do that, but Google has changed their interface for doing that, so the write-up didn’t quite match the interface. I probably could have stumbled my way through it, but I decided to punt on that too, since there was a good chance that whatever issue was causing the DropBox backup to be so slow would affect Google Drive too.

So I went looking for another alternative. Updraft supports several other services, including OneDrive, which would have been my preferred alternative anyway. But OneDrive support isn’t included in the free version, and I didn’t want to pay for it, only to find out that it had the same problem as DropBox.

In the end, I decided to continue letting Updraft back up only to local storage, and then copy the backups to my Mac with a script that I could run locally. After flailing around a bit with a few options, I settled on using rsync. I’ve always connected to my web host with SSH, and rsync uses SSH to connect, so that worked fine.

One other related thing that I had never gotten around to setting up is key-based auth for SSH. I’d simply been connecting to my host with my user name and password. And, embarrassingly, I’d actually had a pretty simple password on my account until recently. I set a more complex password recently, so getting the public/private key auth working was something I really needed to do too. Well, it turns out that wasn’t nearly as complicated as I (for some reason) thought it would be. I just had to generate a key on my Mac, and then copy it into an authorized_keys file on my host.

I have Updraft configured to send me an email every time it finishes a backup. (I do weekly backups.) So now, every time I get that email, I just need to run a shell script that runs rsync and copies the backup down to my Mac. Easy enough. A fully-automated solution would be better, and maybe someday I’ll talk myself into paying for UpdraftVault or VaultPress, but I should be fine for now.

Memorial Day

I usually wind up writing a blog post on Memorial Day, even if it’s just a short one, since Memorial Day is kind of an enforced holiday for me. The Tour of Somerville route completely encircles my apartment building, so my choices on Memorial Day are limited. I can’t get in my car and go anywhere, so I generally choose to stay home and enjoy the race. (Though sometimes I’ll hop on a train and go into New York or something like that.) For a number of years, I was really into the race, and had a lot of fun with it. For the last few years, though, I’ve been somewhat jaded about it, opting to get out of Somerville more often than I used to.

I’m kind of enthusiastic about it again this year though. I wore my 2001 race t-shirt yesterday, and I’m wearing my 2004 t-shirt today. (I was looking to link the “2001” text to a blog post, but I only started blogging in June 2001, so I guess that t-shirt is older than this blog, which is really saying something.) I haven’t bought a race t-shirt in years, but I’m going to look for one today. I guess part of the reason I haven’t been buying them is that, in recent years, I would have needed an XXL. But I’m now safely back in the XL range, and could probably even fit into a regular L, assuming they haven’t switched to American Apparel shirts or some other weirdly-sized hipster brand.

They canceled the Memorial Day parade this morning, due to the rain, so it’s still really quiet out. But the race is still on, so things should start picking up in an hour or two. Meanwhile, I’m reading Matt Fraction’s Defenders run, which is fun (though I’m not sure I like his take on Doctor Strange).

Spoiler Alert

When I was a kid, the thought that, someday, plot developments in Marvel and DC comics would be discussed in the New York Times would have seemed completely ludicrous. Yet here we are. Not only do we have a Times article discussing two comic books that were released just yesterday, but it’s also giving away major plot points that I’d rather not have known until I had a chance to read the comics in question.

Reddit’s /r/comicbooks is trying not to give anything away to anyone that hasn’t read the books yet. I’m used to being careful on Reddit (and CBR and Newsarama and Bleeding Cool and so on), but do I really need to avoid reading the NY Times right after a big Marvel or DC event comic comes out? (And apparently I need to avoid the WSJ too!)

I wasn’t planning on picking up the new Captain America series anyway, so I’m not really bothered by the spoiler on that one. In fact, it’s made me even less likely to pick it up, so I’m kind of glad about that.

But I was actually planning on picking up Rebirth. I still will, of course. I’m not sure if I’m really in favor of the particular plot development in question, but it’s interesting enough that I’d like to read the book. (Note that I mentioned the plot point here without actually spoiling it…)

Office 365 Home

Some time ago, I broke down and paid for an Office 365 Home subscription. I paid for my first year with a card I bought from eBay, and my second year with a card I bought from Costco. Well, I was in Costco today and saw that they had two-packs of one-year Office 365 subscriptions on sale for $140. So I picked one up, and now my Office 365 subscription is good through December 2018. Overkill, I guess, but at least I don’t have to worry about it for a while now. And $70/year is a good price, since it’s $100/year if you buy it from Microsoft.

The packaging on the thing I got from Costco was a little silly. It’s two shrink-wrapped one-year Office 365 boxes, inside a bigger box, which is itself shrink-wrapped. All for two product keys. Oh well. Now I need to resist the urge to buy any more of these, if I see them on sale again. It’s probably not a good idea to extend one of these subscriptions too far into the future.

too many (digital) comics

I’ve been trying to be careful about buying too many comics from Comixology and via Humble bundles lately, but it hasn’t been easy. At this point, I have enough digital comics that I could really stop buying them altogether and still have enough stuff to read for the next ten years, I think.

But I gave in and bought the Garth Ennis bundle from Humble today. I have mixed feelings about Ennis. Some of his stuff is a bit too violent for me, and honestly The Boys may well fall under that category. But Battlefields looks interesting. The Beat just posted an interesting article about the way Dynamite has been using bundles. They’ve been more active than any other publisher with them, and I guess the economics work out well for them. I’ve bought a few of the past Dynamite bundles; some of their stuff is great, but I think a lot of it is mediocre and/or just not interesting to me. But with the bundle pricing, even if half of it is crap, it’s still a good deal.

Meanwhile, Comixology just introduced a subscription service called Comixology Unlimited. You can read as much as you want for $6/month, but it looks like the selection is somewhat limited. I think I’ll stick to buying single issues from them when they have a good sale. I don’t think the $6/month option would work well for me.

I’ve occasionally thought about signing up for Marvel Unlimited, but at this point I have so many unread comics (both physical and digital) that paying for a monthly subscription service just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

To Write Better Code, Read Virginia Woolf

There’s some truth to this article. But you do really need to understand those algorithms too…

I’ve worked in software for years and, time and again, I’ve seen someone apply the arts to solve a problem of systems. The reason for this is simple. As a practice, software development is far more creative than algorithmic.

Source: To Write Better Code, Read Virginia Woolf

Warby Parker

Interesting story in the NY Times on Warby Parker vs. two of the older eyewear stores in Manhattan, Moscot and Cohen’s. I bought a pair of Warby Parkers about a year ago, but I stopped wearing them after a couple of weeks and just use them as a back-up pair now. The Safilo frames that I bought more than ten years ago at Rowden here in Somerville are still in great shape, and much more comfortable that the Warby Parker frames.

I’m not sure that I care much about the “narrative” of the stores in which I shop, and I think this article stretches its point a bit too far. As an unfashionable 40-something guy from New Jersey, I didn’t feel particularly “excluded” at Warby Parker. If I do ever need a new pair of glasses, though, I’m going to go back to my local optician.

On a related topic, though, I think it might be time to make a return visit to that neighborhood in New York and check out the Whitney and the High Line again. Maybe not today though; it looks like it’s going to rain.

File History on Windows and photos in OneDrive

In addition to the backups I did last weekend, I also turned on File History on my desktop PC. This is kind of like Time Machine for Windows. I’m using a separate external drive for this, so now I have one external drive with my Macrium image backup, and one being used for File History.

I also decided to move all my photos into OneDrive. Previously, I had a big folder of old photos on my desktop PC, containing digital photos from my pre-iPhone days, and scanned photos from ScanCafe. That folder had about 12 GB of stuff in it. Most of that space is used up by the full-resolution ScanCafe photos. I just moved that folder so it’s now under the OneDrive hierarchy. It took a while to upload, but it’s all in OneDrive now.

On the Mac, all my iPhone photos are in the Apple Photos app. I don’t want to try to move that library into OneDrive, since it’s not a normal folder. (And, by the way, it would be so much more convenient if it was a normal folder, but that’s a rant for another day.) Instead, I copied the photos from ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Masters into OneDrive, which should be all the original full-resolution photos from my iPhone. That’s about 2 GB worth of photos. I’ll need to remember to do that occasionally to keep the copy in OneDrive up to date. I should probably write a script for that.

So now I have all of my photos in the cloud, which is probably something I should have done quite some time ago. And I think I’ve got myself covered pretty well on backups, on both the Mac and PC.