(Don’t) Go Solo

I watched Solo tonight on Netflix so you don’t have to.

Haha, no. It wasn’t that bad. But it really wasn’t very good, either. Here are my thoughts in list form:

  • I’m glad I didn’t pay full price to see this in a theater
  • Aiden Ehrenreich was okay, but really didn’t have much to work with, and didn’t feel at all like the same character Harrison Ford played
  • Not enough Lando
  • Lando’s emotional attachment to L3 (a droid) was kind of weird
  • Never have a character talk about how predictable everyone is in a movie that is predictable
  • Competent special effects but few that had any real “wow” factor
  • The fan service bits weren’t as overbearing as in the prequels, but they were still bad
  • We get it, any band in a Star Wars movie needs to be really weird and alien
  • The movie started out slow, almost dull
  • Han is supposed to be a great pilot, but we are literally never shown this until he is suddenly forced to fly the Falcon
  • The tone was way too dark for a character who is a lovable rogue
  • We don’t need a backstory on the name Solo
  • Bring back the opening title crawl
  • If they still go ahead and make a Boba Fett movie, I will be very cross
  • It ends hinting at a sequel. Ha, fat chance.

Slow-burning ADHD

I not infrequently fall down the rabbit hole when I sit at the computer. What happens is I’ll read something (The original iPod Shuffle came out 14 years ago), then see something specific to latch onto (a mention of a SanDisk MP3 player, of which I bought one some years back when I first started running), which further prompts me to investigate further (looking at current SanDisk offerings, then what Sony and other companies are offering for MP3 players) and in the course of this, moving onto other things that pop into my head and checking them out.

Hours pass and I look back and I don’t regret the time spent, per se, but it does seem a bit of a waste in that I’ve not accomplished anything other than scratching a faint nostalgic urge (I never had a Shuffle, though I still have two iPod nanos) and confirming things I already knew (the current MP3 player market is pretty bad, filled with brands you’ve never heard of selling products that look suspiciously like Apple’s discontinued designs).

Somehow tonight I ended up on the Wacom site, looking at their Intuos tablets (I have one). And I was thinking, I should draw more. I could draw here at the computer using the Intuos, but I’d have to dig it out of a drawer, plug it in and neither requires any great or special effort, but I just can’t be bothered. So I see on their site that there is a model that uses Bluetooth, so you don’t need to plug it in. That takes away a step, making it 50% easier to use! Is it enough for me to go for it? I think and honestly, it would probably make no difference. I don’t need more convenience, I need more discipline.

Which gets me back to the rabbit hole. I am distracted and allow myself to get pulled into these little online expeditions too easily. I don’t think I have ADHD, though my brain does perhaps spin a little faster than I’d like (this is where learning meditation might be handy), but maybe I have some low-grade variety of it, where I don’t flit from one thing to another, I just flit from something and in the end have little to show for the time spent having flitted.

Anyway, that’s enough pop pysch self-analysis for tonight. But hey, I wrote again.

I want a tiny computer

If I thought I wouldn’t game at all, I’m pretty sure my next PC would be a NUC, simply because they are so small and adorable. And you can get a full PC without any real compromises–you can have fast storage, lots of memory, a good port selection. And it can sit silently and adorably on the desk, where those ports are easy to get to.

I will likely build a new, bigger PC with a full-size video card in the near-future to replace my current, aging machine. But I might go ahead and then build a NUC as a secondary/experimental PC. I might even try a zany Hackintosh build, so I can have that Mac experience, but with a good keyboard.

Treadmill run 2019

Well, the first one of 2019, anyway. I’ll run outside one of these days (but maybe not tomorrow, as they are forecasting winds gusting up to 70-90 km/h).

I spent about five minutes out of the 30 doing a fast walk, with the pace set to 4.0 on the machine, which is…I’m not sure. I don’t really know what the numbers represent, exactly. The rest was jogging at a pace set to 6.5, which is a bit slower than an outdoor jog, based on heartrate and just generally how it feels. I’m more comfortable pushing myself outside because I don’t have to worry about flying off a fast-moving mat below my feet.

My best km, which did not include any walking intervals, was 5:58, which is actually pretty decent. The knees were again not an issue and my stamina is perhaps a very tiny bit improved.

The overall stats:

Distance: 4.62 km
Time: 30:03
Average pace: 6:30/km
BPM: 153
Calories: 336

This is slower than the previous run, but I spent a bit more time walking, especially during the 5-minute cooldown period when the machine automatically drops the speed to 3.9 (I raised it back to 6.5 for a few minutes of the cooldown, as I’m a rebel).

Here is the previous treadmill run for comparison:

Distance: 4.31 km
Time: 27.03
Average pace: 6:16/km
BPM: 157
Calories: 354

December 2018 weight loss report: Up 3.1 pounds

These results are not unexpected. December is never a good weight loss month.

And still I’m disappointed, as the last week of the month saw me go from holding steady to holding fat.

My 2018 goal of getting to 150 pounds meant I needed to lose 12.3 pounds this year. Instead, I gained 5.8 pounds. Now I need to lose 18.1 pounds. This is like math gone wrong.

Yet I remain cautiously optimistic and even feel bold enough to make a prediction: My weight will be down in January. January 2019, that is. Like, the month that starts in less than two hours

But in the meantime,. here are the grisly stats for December and the year to date. I blame the December results on the following:

  • Ferraro Rocher
  • Ritter Sport bars
  • Breaking the “no snacks after dinner” rule about five thousand times

December 1: 165 pounds
December 31: 168.1 pounds (up 3.1 pounds)

Year to date: From 162.3 to 168.1 pounds (up 5.8 pounds)

And the body fat:

January 1: 18.5% (30.2 pounds of fat)
December 31: 19.2% (32.3 pounds of fat) (up 2.1 pounds)

Book review: You’re Saying It Wrong

You're Saying It Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words--And Their Tangled Histories of Misuse

You’re Saying It Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words–And Their Tangled Histories of Misuse by Ross Petras

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is good fun for word and language nerds. The title is a bit misleading as the authors dig up some fairly obscure stuff to hit that 150 total, but there are plenty of expected words, too.

(I was expecting to see “halcyon” on the list, but apparently I’m one of the few that gets tongue-tied over it.)

The authors also cheat a little by including a few phrases or misunderstood words, but a little cheating is fine when it’s in service of showing how “would of” is wrong and stop writing it!

As you read through the entries it becomes clear that most of the pronunciation trouble arises from a word’s origin in another language, most often French, at least as far as this list is concerned, though Latin and other languages come get called out, too.

And then there are the recurring nautical words that make no sense at all because of drunk sailors slurring everything they say. None of these words come close to being pronounced the way they look–gunwale, boatswain and so on.

I will also happily own up to mispronouncing more than a few words covered here. In my defense, as is the case for most people, I never hear the words spoken, so I am always making a best guess and my guesses seem to line up with everyone else’s, as no one ever corrects me. Or maybe everyone is just too polite to say something.

The book ends abruptly after “zydeco”–there are some endnotes, but it would have been nice to have a brief wrap-up. I also think less-is-more would have worked here, by culling out some of the more obscure words and perhaps expanding on the number of phrases. Overall, though, a neat little book that will make you feel a bit smarter–or dumber.

View all my reviews

Tube-widening

Or how I got faster internet on Christmas Eve.

It started a few days ago when I went online to check how my monthly internet/TV bill was divided between the internet and TV parts, as I am looking into the possibility of cutting the proverbial cord. As it turns out, the TV part is about $60 per month. I then drifted over to looking at the various internet plans to compare to what I have now, and discovered my current plan no longer existed, but a new plan that was both faster and cheaper, was available.

My ISP had not notified me of this. IMAGINE THAT.

I called and a tech came out today for her last appointment before heading off to spend Christmas with the family or whatnot.

Here are the results of the initial internet connection in 2011 and the results of the speed test today, post-upgrade.

2011:

2018:

Sadly, Telus’s star rating has not similarly improved over the last seven years. But now I can reap the benefits of getting exposed to horrible social media even faster than before. Onward to the future, what little we have. Hooray!