Blog

April was a busy month. It seemed like every weekend something was going on. It wasn't necessarily bad, just felt like I hardly got time to rest. The weather has also been all sorts of crazy jumping between freezing and almost 90ºF. Where's my spring weather where I can sit out on the porch in the evening.

Baseball is in an interesting place right now. The changes they've implemented over the last few years to speed up the game and produce more offense have been generally successful. Games don't feel like quite the slog they used to and viewership is back on the rise. My team, the Philadelphia Phillies have been competitive. We've been to the playoffs the last 4 seasons, were in the 2022 World Series and are back-to-back NL East champs. This season however, while still early, is looking, well, to put it charitably, not looking good.

This is going to be a little rant-y, but I want to try to explain why I feel this way. I don't have a Facebook or an Instagram account. On principle, I refuse to have an account on any platform Meta controls. I don't like their handle on privacy and I don't like how Mark Zuckerberg runs the company. Normally this would not be a big deal, except for the fact that businesses are now putting their updates on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta more often than not blocks me from viewing posts unless I'm logged in. You can see the problem.

If you've ever noticed my bookshelf page, you'd make a guess I enjoy reading. You'd be right too. I very much enjoy reading and generally spend the last hour before bed every night with a book in my hand. The one thing I kind of wish I could do was join book clubs.

I recently read a great piece on the Verge about the new Harry Potter series. The premise is that there is no ethical way to watch the new HBO Harry Potter series. I agree with it as well as any money spent to watch it goes into J.K. Rowling's pockets which will only be used to attack the trans community.

I got an email yesterday saying that Amazon is going to completely stop supporting my Kindle Paperwhite. This means no more downloading books, no more borrowing books from the library...all of it.

I still can't believe it's already April. The year has been flying by. I'm not sure how to feel about that part, but I am glad the weather is beginning to turn nicer.

I recently read a post by Geoff Graham about things he's not planning on replacing. I rather liked the post and the thought, so I figured I'd copy the idea and share some things I have that I probably won't replace.

I'm currently reading Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. It's been an interesting read so far talking about how so many bands and artists live and die by inclusion or exclusion from Spotify's generated playlists. How inclusion can be a boon to an artist, but for smaller or independent artists, there's so much going against them in streaming between the big labels putting their thumb on the scale or Spotify going with "ghost artists" to save on royalties. So that's why I'm asking for recommendations.

I'm a .NET developer who outside of work, seldom uses Windows. My primary machine has been a MacBook Pro for around twenty years. I've lately been slowly migrating to Linux, but that's also not Windows. Now that Microsoft made .NET cross-platform, it's great, I can develop on MacOS, Linux, Windows, whatever I want. It's great for everyone in my opinion. The one thing that hasn't been made cross platform is SQL Server and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).

One of, if not my favorite movie is Apollo 13, a 1995 blockbuster film telling the story of what was supposed to be NASA's third mission to land on the moon, but turned into a heroic effort to bring the three astronauts home after an explosion aboard the spacecraft. Needless to say, I'm kind of a space nerd following along with what NASA has done with the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), its various missions around the solar system, and more. Artemis II is preparing to launch. This is the first manned mission of the Artemis program, and they're going to the moon. They won't be landing, but this is kind of a big mission. Yet, for some strange reason I just haven't been as excited about it as I would've expected.

I mentioned in my latest week note that I got my iPod Classic back up and running. Sadly, the battery seems to be having a hard time keeping a charge.