Blog

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.

It's been a month. The first half of the month was frigid, we got some warmer weather mixed in along with several significant snowfalls. Tess loved the snow, but I'm glad to have some milder weather coming.

There's a lot of talk going on around AI and how it's things become faster and easier to create and build. Now instead of spending the countless hours at the keyboard typing out the next great American novel, you can open up ChatGPT. Digital art more your thing? Don't worry it can do that too, and if you're lucky, any humans will have 5 fingers. It's depressing, really. So much AI slop is now out there, everyone is trying to sift through all the junk to find the real stuff, the stuff we want to read, want to look at, want to admire. And none of this even begins to factor in the environmental costs to all of it. Well I have one thing to say to everyone grumbling about that, keep doing your thing, keep creating.

If you go to my bookshelf, movies, TV, or video game pages, you'll notice I'll use a five star rating system. I thought I'd share what I generally mean when I use each rating to make it a little more understandable.