Happy Dishwasher Day

We had a new dishwasher installed today. I am in the office so I have only seen pictures so far. I want to take it for a spin when I get home. I’ll dirty up some dishes if I need to.

I was in the office yesterday. I’ll be in the office tomorrow. Then I am at home on Friday, which is good because a plumber is coming on Friday. It never ends, kids. It never ends. Totally worth it though.

Change of subject: I watched 3 Body Problem on Netflix. I enjoyed it. I was warned that episode five was a mind blower and sure enough it was. I wonder if people who read the original books enjoyed it too. It read somewhere that it was considered to be an un-adaptable book and the fear was that people who read the book would hate the show. I wonder if that’s true. I wonder how moving much of the focus away from China would affect people’s opinions. I don’t know that I am curious enough to try and read the book, but maybe. I feel the same way about Foundation on AppleTV+. I enjoyed the show, but did I enjoy it enough to give the Azimov books a go? I don’t know.

Change of subject: This coming Sunday is Easter. Easter doesn’t have any real meaning for me anymore. Sorry, not sorry. We’ll have dinner with my father. The rest of my focus this weekend will hopefully be music. I have two songs for the March edition of Record Every Month to finish and there is a lot left to do on both of them. Here’s hoping I’ll get everything done. I won’t be distracted by the start of the Red Sox season though. Some moron decided to have Boston start the season on the West coast with all of the games being night games. That means the first handful of games this season won’t start until 10pm for Red Sox fans. Screw that.

Okay, here’s today’s bad photo a day challenge picture. No reason, just cause.

209/365
209/365

I’ll be in the office tomorrow too so expect number 210 of 365 to be another thoughtless picture of whatever I happen to see in the cellar while doing my daily exercise at 5:00am.

AppleTV+ Was Messing With Me

There are so many good Science Fiction shows on AppleTV+. It’s a little crazy. Severance, For All Mankind, Silo, Foundation, Invasion. They are all killer shows. The latest is Constellation, which is weirding me out like mad. There will be eight episodes in this first season. Episode Seven was released today.

So there I was, trying to watch the new episode while sitting up in bed. Suddenly, without warning or provocation, the video started lagging. It went from, huh? to bad to worse quickly. I closed the app and opened it again. When it launched the episode it crashed. I tried again. It wouldn’t launch the episode at all.

I did what The IT Crowd always said to do, I turned my computer off and on again. Reboot city, population me. Did it work? Nope. When the episode tried to launch, the AppleTV+ app crashed. Over and over again.

Shit.

I tried to outsmart it. I know, thought me, I’ll watch something else on another app for a while. That will make AppleTV+ jealous so that it will work for me the next time I try it.

Success. Five minutes or so of Penny Dreadful season two episode five was all it took to guilt AppleTV+ into working again. I was able to finish the new episode of Constellation.

Don’t be a jerk, AppleTV+. I needs me my Sci Fi.

TV

Doctor Who is gonna be jealous.

I’ve been binge watching the two Doctor Who shows with a vengeance. Last night I made the mistake of getting distracted by other shows. Season two of Foundation started a few weeks ago. I know Azimov readers hate it and all, but I am not an Azimov reader and I enjoyed season one. I watched the first episode of season two last night. When I was fishing through the Apple video app looking for it I saw a link for Silo and, well… I had to start that too. Now on top of that, season two of Good Omens comes out today so I have to watch that one too.

Doctor Who is still the TV priority, apart from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which I watch as soon as the new episodes are released, but I am going to have to share TV time with some other shows as well. I also want to get back to Severance and Party Down and Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and The X-Files.

Our television cup runneth over, right? Sheesh!

Do Something

It’s 9:30pm. I’m sitting at my desk on a Windows machine (why?) watching last Friday’s That Pedal Show (finally) and thinking that I should post something without having any clue what to post.

TV? I finished Foundation last night. Two thumbs up, says the guy who never read the Azimov books. I watched both Walking Dead spin offs today. World Beyond was good. Fear wasn’t. At least I don’t think it was. I have to fess up that it was so boring I was barely paying attention to any of it.

That Pedal Show has an old SR&D Rockman headphone amp on the board. I haven’t gotten far enough into the episode for them to use it, but it did send me on a hunt. I used to own a Rockman headphone amp. Which model was it? Ebay and Reverb searches make me think that it was a Soloist. The original Rockmans apparently had a little gain control on the back. Mine didn’t. I know it wasn’t an X100 because my memory seems to think that the X100 was the latest and greatest model when I bought mine and I didn’t want to pay the full price so I bought an older model used. I used to use it to record a direct line into Mike’s Fostex cassette 4-track recorder. Larry had a couple of the rack units. The Sustainer, the Stereo Chorus and the Delay… was it called the Stereo Delay? I can’t remember. I do know the Sustainer was awesome as a direct signal into the 4-track. I would think about buying a Soloist for the nostalgia value, but I don’t want to spend $100. I need them to be cheaper than that.

Okay. So I am going to get into bed and maybe watch a little more That Pedal Show, or maybe go look for a new TV show, or maybe just watch a random Futurama, or maybe just go to sleep. As mentioned in a previous post, I am so freakin’ tired.

Until next time, good night everyone.

Wasting Away

The last week or so… what a waste.

Have I given up on the November Music thing? A few days ago I would have said no, but over the last couple of days I have had a ton of time to work on things but instead I just sat on my ever expanding ass, eating junk food and watching TV (Foundation on Apple TV+). Literally the only thing I have accomplished this week is gaining weight. The last two nights I’ve gotten to bed time, right around now, and realized that I still have exercise to do to close my Activity rings. Instead of going to bed and getting a good night’s sleep I am about to march around trying to close the rings. About two minutes in my back is going to start screaming at me. I don’t know if I can keep it up with things hurting as much as they are. Failure, thy name is Robert. Crud.

How do I motivate myself again? I don’t know. Was I ever honestly motivated or was I just fooling myself somehow. I hate feeling like this!

On the upside, having never read Foundation I can say that I am enjoying the show. From what I’ve heard, the TV show has absolutely nothing to do with the book apart from a few character names. So I guess that’s a thing.

Ugh… what the hell is wrong with me?

Sunday Night Stuff

I’m watching the Bruins play the Canadiens right now. We are down 1-0, six minutes into the second period. This needs to change immediately. The Canadiens, despite their playoff success last year, or maybe because of it, are awful right now. The Bruins haven’t exactly been stellar, but they are good enough that they should murderize Montreal. Gentlemen, let’s pick it up, shall we?

So I put together the mini-shed thing, and played some guitar, and wrote some music. I have not made Bellana’s bed, after washing her sheets yesterday. I still need to do that, but she won’t be here until Friday, so I have time.

I watched more Futurama. Lots of it. Not as much as yesterday, but still lots of it. Take it as given that it is one of the best shows ever. Is it better than The Simpsons? I think it might be. I don’t know.

I also started watching Foundation. When we were kids, Mike the Bass Player used to push me to read two books. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Foundation. I was in my 30’s before I finally got to Hitchhiker’s Guide and holy crap was Mike right. I still haven’t read Foundation. One review of the TV show that I heard was that if you read the book you’ll hate the show, but if you haven’t read the book you’ll love it. Okay, that works in my favor. Another review, from someone who loved the books, was that if you pretend the name of the show is something other than Foundation it is okay. I’ll take that.

Sticking with the TV theme, it’s Sunday and that means it’s Walking Dead spin off night. World Beyond is still kinda bland but mostly okay. There are only four episodes left (I think) and then the series comes to an end. It certainly doesn’t feel like a show that’s four episodes away from ending. (The Bruins just tied the game, 1-1 with 11 minutes or so left in the second) As for Fear the Walking Dead… the hate watch will continue. It has to be the worst show on television. I can’t imagine anything worse than this getting the green light to air. It’s atrocious and last week’s episode was so bad it was actually insulting. Two people having a conversation 10 feet away from a leaking, unexploded nuclear warhead without suffering any radiation issues. They are both twins. Sort of. One of them admits that she’s not really a twin. She and her brother were born on the same day but she’s adopted (hey show runners, I saw This is Us too!). The other guy hears this story but then tells her that because she’s a twin she has super powers and can tell when her twin is in trouble… but she LITERALLY just told the guy she’s not actually a twin. I mean… I usually don’t really proof read my blog posts, but I would still expect someone to proof read the scripts for a major television show, right? Plot holes and continuity errors (and leaking, unexploded nuclear warheads) are things to be avoided, right?

Changing the subject. I still have 17 minutes of exercise left to do. I don’t think I’ll finish before Fear starts, but I think I’ll stand up and pick off a few minutes right now. A perfect week is at stake!

What to Watch

We are done with Ted Lasso, I think. I’m caught up on Archer and Titans and What We Do in the Shadows and The Walking Dead, though all of their seasons are still going. I’m a couple of weeks behind on Supergirl which has improved a little after their mid-season break (so far at least).

Star Wars Visions is out, and Foundation has just started. I want to see both of those. We had started Invincible before Bellana left and I want to finish that. We haven’t finished the last season of Mrs Maisel (sp?). Maybe I can finish that for completeness sake. I haven’t seen Doom Patrol though I’ve heard that’s pretty good.

Is there anything else? I’m just wondering because a little part of me wants to restart The Walking Dead from episode one and re-binge the shit out of all of it again before it ends. That might be happening…. And it might be happening tonight. Well… starting tonight. It’s been so long since Shane has asked me if he can ask me something, or tell me something, and Carl hasn’t been told to stay in the house for ages, and there’s all the things and stuff Rick has been doing.

Yeah, that might be happening.

ADDENDUM: We are not done with Ted Lasso. We thought season two was going to be 10 episodes long. It’s actually 12. We have two more weeks to go. Happiness.