old Kindle

When looking back at some old blog posts today, I realized that my Kindle is five years old. I’m still using it regularly, and it’s still working fine. (I just finished reading The City & The City, and just started reading The Windup Girl. Both books are highly recommended.) After five years, you’d think the battery would be dead, but nope, it still holds a charge. (Probably not as much of a charge as when it was new, but still enough to get by.)

Amazon has the Paperwhite on sale today, for $20 off. I’m occasionally tempted to buy one of those, but as long as the old one is working well, I don’t see much point.

 

struggling with Radiohead

Radiohead is one of those bands that I never really got into, but I kept hearing good things about them. Eventually, the “good things” reached a critical mass, where so many intelligent people were so passionate about them that I figured I really needed to give them a try. I think I missed the boat on Radiohead largely because I really dislike “Creep”, their first (and, I guess, only) hit single. But that song isn’t really representative of their work, especially their later work.

So, anyway, I’ve been listening to some of their stuff at random on Slacker lately, and enjoying it. I also realized that I had an MP3 copy of their album “In Rainbows” that I’d never really listened to. So I gave that a listen this week, and liked it a lot.

Today, I bought a set of their first five albums from Amazon. So now I have a big chunk of Radiohead to listen to. I’ll probably copy all of them to my iPhone at some point this weekend, and listen to them at work next week. (Skipping past “Creep”, of course.)

Buying that set from Amazon was a bit of a hassle though. First, it wouldn’t let me use the one-click checkout, for no obvious reason. I had to add them to my cart and go through the multi-step checkout. Then, to download them, Amazon encourages you to first download their Amazon Music software, and download the songs using that. So I installed the Amazon Music program, but (again) for no obvious reason, it couldn’t authenticate my account, and wouldn’t let me download anything. So I had to fall back to downloading them the old-fashioned way, which (luckily) they still support. That gave me a big zip file (almost 500 MB), which I managed to import into iTunes. The metadata for the MP3s grouped them all into one 5-disc album, so I did a little work in iTunes to break them up and rename them, so they appear as five individual albums. Tomorrow, I’ll copy them all from my PC to my Mac, then (at some point) sync them down to my iPhone. So, a bunch of busy work, but the end result is a bunch of new music to listen to.

By the way, I still haven’t bought into the idea that I should give up on buying music and just pay $10 a month to stream anything and everything from Apple Music or Spotify or Slacker. (I do pay Slacker $4 a month for their “Slacker Radio Plus” plan, but that mostly just eliminates ads, and lets you cache stations for offline listening. It doesn’t let you listen to whole albums or anything like that.) I don’t buy a lot of music these days (CDs or MP3s), but I do buy a few albums here and there, and I’d rather do that, and “own” my music than just “rent” it from Apple (or Spotify or whoever).

Also, I mostly agree with this blog post: the Amazon Music iOS app is surprisingly good, while the Apple Music iOS app has gotten worse over the years, and is kind of annoying at this point. (But I still sync music down to my phone with iTunes and listen to it with the Apple app. It isn’t so bad that I won’t use it. I just use it and grumble about it.)

Outlook and Gmvault

My new PC is working reasonably well, though there are still a few things I haven’t bothered to deal with yet. When I first set it up, Outlook wasn’t quite working. I spent a little time on that last night, and I made some progress, but it’s still not working exactly right with my Gmail account. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that. I might just give up on using Outlook with Gmail at all, though I like the idea of having a local database of my Gmail messages, as a backup in case of disaster.

I have also, in the past, used Gmvault to back up my Gmail messages. I had a problem with it at some point last year, and gave up on it. But today I installed the newest version on my PC and gave it another try. It worked fine, pulling in all the new messages since I last did a full sync (which was almost exactly a year ago: Feb 2, 2015).

So I can at least say that I’ve got a full Gmail backup now, though it’s not an easily searchable backup. I’ve thought about setting up MailStore Home and creating a nice searchable archive of all my mail. But I never get around to it. I think that’s going to remain a rainy day project for now. (But maybe there will be a nice rainy day at some point this year, and I’ll give it a try.)

Some photos of Patrick

Here are some photos of Patrick that I used to have in a gallery on my old Blogger site, but which got lost when I switched to WordPress. I thought I’d just re-upload them, and put them in a new post.

I honestly don’t remember if I scanned them in myself from prints, but that’s probably what I did. The original post was from 2004, so these predate all the ScanCafe scanning I did a few years back. And I don’t think I had a very good scanner in 2004. I should probably figure out where the originals are for these, and re-scan them.

(Note the awesome “Return of the Jedi” T-shirt he’s wearing in a few of these!)

Patrick

Today is the 12th anniversary of my brother Patrick’s death. Here’s a photo from his birthday party, long ago. I’m not entirely sure which birthday it was. I notice that he (and a couple of other kids) seem to be drinking out of Star Wars glasses, so that’s a clue, but not much of one, since we were all probably drinking out of Star Wars glasses, on and off, from 1977-1985.

Oh, and if it’s not obvious, Pat is the one in the Roselle Park shirt, with the big smile on his face.

00056_n_10af4mlhmv0046

RIP Abe Vigoda

I’ll miss Abe Vigoda. Barney Miller was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid, and I remember being excited about the Fish spin-off show too. (And I was bummed that it only lasted one season.) I even remember buying a novel featuring Fish, though I can’t find any trace now that it ever existed, so maybe I’m mis-remembering that.

I also remember, when I was a kid, seeing a doctor about my (mild) kyphosis. He explained the effect of kyphosis to me by telling me that I’d be hunched over “like Abe Vigoda” when I was older. I remember thinking that I really didn’t want to be hunched over like that, but Abe Vigoda seemed like a pretty good guy, so I could probably deal with it.

more WordPress updates

After updating my 1&1 environment from PHP 5.4 to 5.6 this morning, I decided to check for WordPress plugin & theme updates tonight. I had a few plugin updates, plus a surprise theme update. The base theme for this site is Stargazer, from Justin Tadlock. There hasn’t been an update to it for a while. (Which is fine; it’s quite stable and I haven’t had any problems with it.) But I see he released version 2.0 recently, so I went ahead and updated it. As far as I can tell, nothing is broken. Theme updates can sometimes be tricky, especially if you’re updating the base theme for a child theme that you’ve hacked together yourself. But everything looks OK, so far.

I’m way too tired to look into what’s been changed in Stargazer 2.0, but hopefully I can check on that at some point. I haven’t done anything at all with this site’s theme lately, so maybe it’s time to mess around with it a bit!

PHP 5.6

I got an email from 1&1 this morning, telling me that if I didn’t switch from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.6, I’d be subject to a $7.19 monthly “extended support” charge for using an old version of PHP. Fair enough, I suppose, though I didn’t even realize I was still on PHP 5.4.

I remember at some point in the past either updating it, or trying to update it and failing, but that was probably a long time ago. Maybe that was from 5.2 to 5.4 or something like that.

Either way, this site should now be on PHP 5.6. This post is basically just a test to see if the site still works. I don’t think I have any WordPress plugins that won’t work under 5.6, but I guess I’ll find out soon.

Snow photos

Here are a few photos I took, near the Somerville courthouse.

Main St is pretty well cleared, and traffic is moving. Some businesses are open, but many aren’t. Starbucks, ShopRite, and Central Pizza are all open, and that’s probably all I really need. My car and my parking spot are pretty well clear of snow now, after about two hours total work.

Chris Christie has gone back to New Hampshire, so I guess he thinks his job is done for the day. (And kudos to the Star-Ledger for the brutal headline and snarky article!)

I guess I’m going to have to drive in to work tomorrow, as usual. Hopefully the roads will be reasonably clear. And maybe we’ll at least have a delayed opening.