🎵 Today’s listen: To Venus and Back by Tori Amos. I haven’t listened to this album in many years, but I remember liking it in 1999 and 2000. I remember Tori Amos being very divisive when I was in high school (in the mid 1990s); I can’t remember why.

📺 I finished watching His Dark Materials season 3 last night. I found the last season to be a letdown in many ways, especially the last few episodes. I think an adaptation of The Amber Spyglass that I would like would be twice as long and cost a hundred times as much.

If you stop doing something, you get worse at it. Last fall, I stopped writing for myself every day. I’m tring to get back to it now. I’m finding it harder to stich together thoughts and sentences. Typing—outside the context of my day job—feels weird. My writing has lost its voice—at least for now.

One thing that has been making me happy lately is Radio Paradise, which is an Internet radio station. Several things about it make it special:

1. It is completely ad-free. It runs on the public radio model, in that it is listener-supported. A DJ breaks in between songs a couple times an hour to say hello and remind listeners that they can donate. These breaks never annoy me.

2. Its “Main Mix” is the best eclectic rock radio station I have ever listened to. The songs played on this station range from huge hits to album tracks I have never heard of. It has no pretentious or underground vibe: whatever is playing is always interesting, musical, and accessible.

3. It streams high quality audio. I listen to its AAC 320 Kbps stream, because my Apple devices support it. There is also a lossless FLAC stream, if your hardware can play it. Most Internet radio I listen has much worse audio quality, like 64 Kbps or (if you’re lucky) 128 Kbps MP3.

4. Its web player is great, it has apps for many platforms if you want them, and it can be streamed from third-party Internet radio apps as well.

I highly recommend giving it a try.

I have been playing more chess lately, and I have never played worse, I think. It is a humbling game sometimes, especially if you are not a visual thinker.

Currently reading: American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales 📚

Currently reading: Fairy Tale by Stephen King 📚

I’m happy Tapbots’s Ivory Mastodon client is out. My love for its predecessor, Tweetbot, far exceeded any feelings I had for Twitter. I installed it and am trying it out. At present, however, I’m not that interested in Mastodon, and I don’t think Ivory will change that. It was hard to kick my addiction to Twitter and I don’t think I need to replace it with something that is almost exactly the same.

I have been happy to sit out the whole Twitter implosion, though I am beyond tired of hearing about it all the time on the podcasts I listen to. I still have an account over there, mostly to be able to read tweetstorms (that really should be blog posts) that other people link to. I haven’t posted anywhere in a while. I’ve been busy reading and working and haven’t had much to say.

📺 I have been watching Obi-Wan while at the gym because it is relatively mindless. And wow is it mindless! Seeing more Darth Vader and Obi-Wan is fun, but boy does everybody suck at their jobs on that show. 😀

HBOmax keeps canceling shows and, in unprecedented fashion, wiping them from its catalog. It’s unbelievable and petty. From the outside, it just seems stupid. How can the company that made them lose money by streaming them? Im glad I’m not a subscriber right now.

Hades II is in development! This is unexpectedly good news. (It feels wrong to use a Roman numeral after a Greek god’s name.)

The New York Times iPad app got a dark mode recently (I noticed it yesterday), after a million years of not having one. The iPhone app, however, still does not have a dark mode. What is the big deal with the Times about reversing black and white in their app?

We plan to visit my mom for Christmas again this year. It has been several years since we could, due to the pandemic or us being sick. We are all feeling happy about it. I just hope we can stay healthy that week, because it has been a very rough autumn for us, illness-wise.

Today I’m taking my family to Boston for a short trip. We are excited. My wife and I went to college near Boston and have fond memories of the city.

My son and I are sick for the second time since school started. No one liked wearing a facemask last year but I didn’t catch a cold or COVID until my son stopped wearing his.

For the first time in about 15 years I am no long a customer of Verizon Wireless. My family is living the MVNO life. I hope it works out, but I get the impression that, because eSims make switching quick and easy, we can always switch carriers again if we need to.

Upgrade+ from Best Buy sounds incredible. It is tempting me to buy a MacBook that I really can’t afford right now—but could easily afford if paid for over the next three years. 😅 That’s dangerous.

I have been looking forward to the Python 3.11 release all month and it is finally here. It wasn’t released early enough for me to install it at work this morning, though. I’m eager to see how much performance has improved. I’m also looking forward to better error messages and the Self type hint for class factory methods.

Tonight I signed up for wireless service through Tello. I will test it alongside Verizon Wireless (via my iPhone’s eSim) for a short time and see how well it goes. I wanted to try Mint, but I need monthly billing for expense reimbursement through work. I almost signed up for Visible but their poor customer service scares me.

🎵 Taylor Swift Releases 7 New Songs Just Hours After New Album Midnights: Listen. Taylor Swift is crazy, y’all.

Here’s a game for a Big Data nerd like me: Is it Pokemon or Big Data?. Very (ok, somewhat) funny and informative.

I received a small windfall today in the form of a prepaid virtual prepaid card, which is quite difficult to spend vs., say, money in my bank account. My office offers the same thing for spot rewards, and even the U.S. government used this scheme for one of the COVID payments last year.

I wasted an hour trying to get it added to my Apple Wallet so I could actually spend it, before I gave up (because it would not work) and requested a plastic card, for a small fee, to be mailed to me weeks from now. The whole thing seems like a scam. How hard is it to send people checks?

I hate it how I can no longer call a doctor’s office and get ahold of a person. The online MyChart sites that all my doctors have are not a good enough replacement for a person who answers the phone.

🎵 Who else is looking forward to Taylor Swift’s new album? My daughter and I are anxiously awaiting its release tomorrow.