The first time I heard the term “NFT” was yesterday, and I’m already sick of it.

I am grateful I received my COVID vaccine, but yesterday’s second dose has really knocked me for a loop today. 🤒

Sam Schechner and Keach Hagey report in The Wall Street Journal:

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry.

I don’t even know what to make of this, unless it is a flex of Google’s monopoly power in search, maps, and video (YouTube). Who needs to track users across websites when every browser tab starts at or ends at a Google-owned website?

Ella Nilson at vox.com reports:

But much of Tanden’s résumé was overshadowed by her proliferous online posting — at least 1,000 tweets raking both Republicans and leftist Democrats over the coals — that Tanden quietly started deleting in November 2020.

I haven’t been following this story, but my interest was piqued when I learned that Neera Tanden’s nomination chances were in jeopardy because of her tweets from the past. People keep getting in trouble for what they post to Twitter. (“Social media” in these cases always is Twitter, too. That is probably just because it is public facing, though it is also a popular place for broadcasting, calling out, and grandstanding.)

It will soon be the conventional wisdom that those who seek high offices—in public service or in private industry—should have no public social media presence, no blog—certainly no Twitter account—maybe no public online presence at all. That bothers me because I think there is value in publishing one’s thoughts to the world, in a blog, vlog, podcast, or whatever other medium I can’t even conceive of yet. People have an urge to share and should not feel that they will be punished for it, especially years after they tap the “post” button.

I understand that some people are deliberately awful on social media, and that is a problem, but isn’t it also a problem that “the Internet never forgets?” The right to be forgotten is at both ridiculous to ask for and essential for people to get along with each other after a certain point. How should we evaluate a person based on what she posted online? Does it matter how long ago a thought was posted? What is fair? I think we are at a cultural crossroads regarding these questions, and may be stuck at that crossroads for a long, long time.

Today i will receive my second COVID-19 vaccine. I am excited to be so close to finished with the process.

I just looked at the latest release notes (see picture). So that’s why I couldn’t save my files to OneDrive this week. 🤦‍♂️ I figured out a workaround, but was bamboozled for days why something that once worked now did not. OneDrive’s iOS Files integration was always pretty unreliable. Maybe after this feature pull Microsoft will finally fix it.

Having tons of meetings all the time is kind of killing my impulse to micro-blog. Perhaps it is because of all the social interaction I am getting at work, that I usually don’t.

Programming has got me pulling my hair out today. There seems to be no good way to do the simple things I want to do. I’ll have to pick a bad way and just deal with it.

Spotify’s new lossless tier isn’t enough to make me switch, but I would pay Apple more for lossless tracks on Apple Music. That makes me sound like a fanboy, but I was a Spotify subscriber before and like Apple Music more.

I have come to the conclusion that the best way to automate moving data around in Excel and formatting it, via Automation Anywhere, is by simulating keyboard shortcuts and putting delays in between them. I wish there was a slicker way, because it sure is fiddly.

The “projects” listed on my Hugo-based website are hyperlinks when I run it via hugo server but are not when I publish the site. Sadly, I have no idea how to fix it. Perhaps I have to try another theme.

I updated my home page/landing page using Hugo: mjdescy.me.

I definitely don’t have the hang of using Hugo yet, but I’m learning. One thing that made me feel stupid is that I don’t know how to get rid of the “Blog” section that the template I’m using wants to include. In the interest of getting something that is not bare HTML published, I created some meaningless blog posts.

The last time I used a static website publisher, I had to create my own themes from scratch. The hard part with that was in creating something that looked halfway decent on various screen sizes. With Hugo, there are a ton of great themes available, but they all have constraints about what content the site must contain. That is tough for me right now because I don’t know how to change those settings, and I mostly want to create very simple sites.

📺 My wife and i accidentally found the Mo Willems special, “Mo Willems and The Storytime All-Stars Present: Don’t Let The Pigeon Do Storytime!”, on HBO Max earlier this week. We watched it with our kids this afternoon, and we all loved it. It is so joyous and nutty and fun that we got sucked into it right away. Mo Willems is a treasure.

🎬 I enjoyed Pixar’s Soul quite a bit.

I installed Hugo a fifth time tonight. (Is this a record?) My network is being stupidly slow, and having all these little website files bouncing between three computers is causing latency problems in my text editor. Hugo is running on my mac Mini, and I found a way to do it that does not require homebrew to be installed.

It’s amazing how little I paid attention to the lyrics of OK Computer in the 1990s. It is way more depressing—and poetically expressive about it—than I knew back then. I will blame not having decent enough speakers or headphones to make them out clearly.

Apple reportedly plans March 16 event with new iPad Pro, iPad mini and AirTags. This is just a rumor at this point. The only Apple thing left for me to buy this year is AirTags—if they ever get released. I actually have been waiting for them eagerly. I want to get rid of my Tiles, mostly because their app got annoying, and partly because I bet Apple’s version would work better.

As if I didn’t already have enough to worry about, my county—which administered my first COVID-19 vaccine about two weeks ago—ran out of COVID vaccines due to delivery delays, and canceled almost a week’s worth of appointments. I hope my appointment early next month does not get canceled. I guess a lot depends on the weather.

This week, I have been watching educational videos on YouTube about Excel Power Query. My wife thinks it is insanely boring, but I am learning things that are going to be very useful at work.

Power Query is a feature of Excel I have used sporadically for the last five years to pull data in from SQL Server. I recently discovered that I barely scratched the surface of what it can do. It could probably save me a ton of time on some of my data analysis projects.

What’s funny to me is that I didn’t even know these functionalities were where, hiding in the Data tab behind some boring-looking buttons.

I think we got a foot of snow today! It’s not as fun for us, though, now that school is virtual. The local schools used up all their planned snow days, so they just do online learning (and teaching) when it snows.

I’m a lapsed fan of RPGs in general. I wish I had time to play them. The demo of Bravely Default II is waiting for me on my Switch, and may be waiting for me forever.

I migrated from LastPass to Bitwarden’s $10/year plan last night. Bitwarden is equally unpolished as LastPass on the Mac, and seems on par with it, in the good way, on iOS. The switch gave me a good excuse to update my master password and to organize my mess of passwords into folders.

I don’t want this, but it does resemble my first (or maybe second) PC keyboard. I didn’t know how good I had it back then. Clicky mechanical keyboards are the best.

I have been writing good meeting agendas for work lately so I don’t have to think so hard at meetings anymore. I hope it is appreciated.

Sennheiser says it’s open to selling its consumer audio business. This could be bad news for headphone audiophiles like me. Sennheiser sets the standard in many ways.