Opening Day!

Opening Day! It's about time. Five months without baseball is five too many.

I know it's a common complaint that the baseball season is too long, but I miss it during the off-season. When you've had a game to follow (almost) every day for six months, seven if you're lucky and they're good enough for the playoffs, it leaves a hole when it ends.

My teams are the Chicago Cubs and Detroit Tigers. Mom and grandma made sure I was a Cubs fan from birth, and I adopted the Tigers when I moved to Michigan almost 20 years ago. Being in different leagues, they rarely meet head-to-head, so pulling for both is pretty easy. If they did end up playing one another for anything significant, I'd be ecstatic - good news for me no matter who wins!

This year feels a bit different than usual since the Cubs are actually favored to win. It's been a good long time since there's been significant hype in the pre-season for the small bears. The last few seasons, there's been a lot of talk about how the team is building and is "just a few years away." Well, now that time is here, and it's a nervous feeling for a Cubs fan. Disappointment is the one constant over the last 100+ years of Cubs history, but this could be the year to change it!

Things are not nearly as rosy on the other side of Lake Michigan. The Tigers had a few really good years recently, with four straight division titles and a World Series appearance. But it's been a downward spiral since, missing the playoffs last year and not looking particularly good for this season. Still, spring is all about hope in baseball, and anything can happen.

Play ball!

Happy PB&J Day

You can accidentally learn all sorts of things while poking around the Internet. On a totally unrelated search, I happened to stumble across the fact that April 2 is Peanut Butter and Jelly Day.

As I've mentioned previously, I like simple foods, and it doesn't get a lot simpler than the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I'll have at least a couple every week, often more. I've even been known to go out of my way in the Detroit airport to hit the PB&J shop there, although sadly I think it closed down last year.

I prefer the basic PB&J sandwich: smooth peanut butter, strawberry or grape jelly, sandwich bread. People will make all kinds of additions, though. Grilling, deep-frying, multiple types of peanut butter and/or jelly, interesting breads, bananas, potato chips, and so on. And it's not just sandwich day. I've seen recommendations for PB&J used with cupcakes, waffles, pancakes, crackers...all kinds of variations.

There are people who use peanut butter and jelly as more than just a food. The PB&J Campaign is a project within A Well-Fed World, a group concerned about providing food for the world in an environmentally-friendly manner. The campaign uses the PB&J sandwich as an example of how eating more food products from plants and fewer from animals is a smaller environmental impact. Environmental impact isn't my main reason for eating PB&J sandwiches, but it's a nice bonus.

It's not clear from my cursory Google searching where Peanut Butter and Jelly day started, but it sure seems to have caught on. Even has a Twitter account. Happy to do my part to celebrate.

Digital Backups

It's a really good idea to back up the data on your digital devices. There was even a World Backup Day recently, to remind people to keep copies of their data in case of catastrophe. Which is a good excuse to discuss what I do for backups, and why I recently cancelled my subscription to a backup service. (Yes, really; no April Fool's Day joke here.)

I've used more tape drives over the years than I like to admit, but they're no longer my backup solution.

There's two major reasons to have a backup of your digital assets. Either it's something you can't re-create, like photos or some kinds of important documents; or it's something that you'd have to spend a lot of effort (time, money, maybe both) to replace, like backing up your entire computer's hard drive. I find that I worry more about the former than the latter. I generally have the time I'd need to rebuild something if necessary, even if it's an inconvenience. And honestly, in the case where I was recovering an entire device, I'd usually rather have a fresh start anyway.

The vast majority of the data that I use day-to-day is somewhere in the cloud. My account data in LastPass, pictures on Google and Facebook, blog posts on Blogger, various types of documents in Google Drive or Dropbox, email in GMail, games on Steam, music on iTunes/Google Music/Amazon Music (not to mention Spotify). This certainly makes backups easy, since those services generally do it for me. Of course, I'm running a bit of a risk that they might lose my data (or sell it off to someone), but that's a risk I'm willing to take in exchange for the convenience factor.

For sensitive information that I really want to make sure are kept safe, I don't just trust the services...I keep multiple copies and encrypt them. For instance, tax documents. First, I encrypt the files to limit the danger that they might be stolen or otherwise misused - the simplest way is to use 7-Zip to bundle them all up and encrypt the archive. Then I put that archive in a few difference places: Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. When you need to update them, extract the files, make changes, then re-encrypt and distribute the updated archive. It's not the most efficient process, but that's not a big problem since those kinds of important documents don't change often - usually just a couple of times per year.

If my condo was robbed or burned down or whatever, causing me to lose my various digital devices, I could recover anything important from what I have in the cloud. I'd have to get new hardware, and it might take a while to re-install the various applications I use, but the data would be there waiting for me to be back up and running.

All of which brings me to why I cancelled my subscription to Crashplan, a remote backup service. I just didn't need it any more. Nothing against Crashplan - they provided exactly what was advertised and I never had any significant issues with the service. It just seemed silly to pay for and use up resources on a service that was redundant.

Another Tweak to the Trakt.tv Add-On for Kodi

My additions to the Trakt.tv add-on for Kodi have been working fairly well, but every once in while it'll still have issues. I decided to tackle one of those issues - the problem of common episode titles.

To quickly recap, the idea here is to watch TV shows that are recorded on my MythTV DVR via Kodi on my Fire TV, and to have Trakt.tv automatically update what I've watched. All the pieces already exist to make this happen, but they don't quite fit together. Specifically, the information that the Trakt.tv add-on requires (show ID, season number, episode number) isn't available from Kodi when I'm watching a MythTV DVR recording. All that Kodi knows is the show name and episode title.

I got around this problem by using the Trakt.tv web API to search for the episode title. It often returns more than one result, so I verify it by matching the result's show name (to the show name that Kodi provides). If they match, I tell Trakt.tv that we've got the right episode. But what if I get back a bunch of results from that search, but none of them match the show name? That's the problem of common episode titles - lots of shows use the same episode titles, and so a simple search for that title won't always get the right result.

An alternative approach to find the right episode is to search first for the show, then go through all the episodes of that show until I find the right one. The Trakt.tv web API is capable of this, but there's no efficient way to do it. You've got to make a whole lot of API calls: use the show name to get the show ID; look up the first episode; if that doesn't match, get the next episode; repeat until you find the right one. Horribly inefficient and slow, which is why I didn't use this method in the first place. But it does work even if the episode title is a very common one, used by dozens of TV shows.

So now the modified Trakt.tv add-on code has both options. It tries the episode title search first. If that works, we're done...no need for anything further. But if it doesn't work, then it tries to look up the show by name. If that's found, then it loops through every episode of that show until finding the right one. This way, the least efficient option is used only if the more efficient choice doesn't work.

Ideally, a future version of Kodi or Trakt.tv will make this whole thing unnecessary. If Kodi and/or the MythTV add-on can provide the season and episode number, then there will be no need to use the episode title at all. Or if the Trakt.tv web API had a method that can search on both show name and episode title, instead of just one or the other, then common episode titles won't be an issue. Until one or the other changes, I'm stuck with the inefficient method...but it does work.

Osgood Brewing

Wednesdays are often beer night for me, usually in conjunction with card and board games. We're on a bit of a break on the gaming front, though, so today I met up with some other friends at a local brewery.

Osgood Brewing is over in Grandville, about a half hour's drive from home for me. This was my first trip there. It's a nice roomy place, with lots of space both at the bar and at tables. Lots of windows, too, which made it easy for us to watch the heavy rainstorm outside. Better than walking in it.

I was meeting some other Rose-Hulman graduates for one of our semi-regular get-togethers. There aren't a lot of us up in the Grand Rapids area, but we usually get 3-4 people for our gatherings. And occasionally someone from further afield who makes the trip. Just three of us locals at this one.

As far as beer goes, Osgood Brewing has a decent selection. Several of each major type, such as stouts and IPAs. I tried four of them: the Oakestown amber, Notely's porter, Sol Seeker wheat ale, and Big Springs stout.

The Oakestown was by far my favorite. Nicely balanced between a smooth and strong taste. The others were less impressive, especially the Notely's, which has a very strong bitter taste. The Sol Seeker was good, but the lighter ales aren't really my thing. And the Big Springs seemed a bit watery, although that might be just the after-effects of that Notely's affecting my perceptions.

Osgood Brewing has food, too. I only had a small appetizer as I wasn't all that hungry - pretzel bites, which were just fine. My friends had a pasta bowl and a sandwich, both of which they were happy with.

It was a good first visit to Osgood Brewing. I'll have to go back, to try some other beers that looked interesting, and give the food menu a real try.

Erased

Erased tells the story of Satoru Fujinuma, a manga artist who occasionally has involuntary "revival" episodes where he repeats short periods of time. During those episodes, he can take action to avoid minor or major disasters. Then his most significant "revival" ever pushes him back eighteen years, with a chance to stop a string of serial murders at his elementary school. (Warning: Some spoilers below.)

That's a pretty interesting premise. I usually don't like time travel, because it's so easy to end up with a story that makes no logical sense, given the huge power that a time travel character has to work with. In this case, the involuntary nature of the "revival" power prevents that from being a significant factor. It's a little too convenient that Satoru ends up getting multiple chances to change the past, but that's a fairly minor quibble.

The story is largely a mystery-thriller, with Satoru working against an unknown killer to save the children that his future-informed-self knows are being targeted. Knowledge from the future only goes so far, though, as events change each time he does something different. Most of the series deals with his efforts to save Kayo, a girl who is isolated due to her abusive family situation and thus a prime target. Two (or three, depending on who you count) other victims are also saved, though that part goes by awfully fast compared to the time spent with Kayo.

Then things change entirely in the last two-and-a-half episodes, as Satoru meets the killer directly and changes the future significantly. There's one massive hole in the plot that was never explained to my satisfaction. This fifth-grade boy has discovered and thwarted a serial killer. The killer has the boy at his mercy, and appears to fully intend to kill him. We see the boy drowning with no one but the killer anywhere nearby. But somehow he survives (though in a coma), and we're never shown how it happens. The only explanation is that somehow the killer feels it's necessary that the boy lives, possibly because of a final shouted "I know your future" line as the water closes in. That just doesn't make any sense to me, even if you accept the "I need him alive" killer psychosis. Who cares about a dead kid knowing the future? He's out of the way now. Why the drowning in the first place, if the killer already knows he wants the boy alive? Why not lock him up in a basement or something? This sort of thing happens all the time in the sillier kinds of stories, I know. This one is supposed to be a mystery that makes you think, though, so it stands out as being poorly written.

That ridiculous bit aside, the wrap-up of the series isn't too bad. Everything turns out more or less for the best, with no one dead and the bad guy caught. The changed timeline is pretty rough on Satoru and his mother, but at least they stay alive and out of jail. It feels like a bit of a cop-out, though, with Satoru's miraculous survival. I think the ending would have felt much more complete as a story of sacrifice, where Satoru didn't escape, but the original victims were saved by his actions.

It's nice to watch a series that pretty much entirely avoids the most annoying anime stereotypes. There's no scantily clad girls, harem relationships, over-the-top emotional expressions, and so on. Big eyes are only for kids. In his adult time period, Satoru doesn't pursue the high school girl that he works with (despite multiple opportunities) until the very end when she's four years older. I appreciate not having to sit through all that.

Erased is a decent mystery story, despite the sub-par bits near the end. The characters are nicely developed, for the most part, and the production values are just fine. I think it's still worth watching, even if the ending isn't everything it could have been.

Spaghetti

When I ran in the Irish Jig this year, one of the things that came in the participant's goodie bag was spaghetti. Carb loading is a thing for serious runners (which is not a set of which I consider myself a member), but it still surprised me that they'd hand out boxes of uncooked spaghetti. Anyway, once I had it, I had to decide what to make with it.

The obvious thing to do is cook up the spaghetti and sauce it, and this I did. Got some Ragu Homestyle meat sauce, which worked nicely.

Seems kind of silly to cook less than half a pound of the spaghetti at a time, so I had basically an entire day of eating nothing else. Wouldn't do it every day, but it's fine as a change of pace. Probably get some meatballs to add in next time, too.

The other half-pound of spaghetti from that box went toward trying out spaghetti au gratin. The recipe was on the box, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It contains large amounts of pasta and cheese, which is highly relevant to my interests. Took about an hour of preparation and cooking time.

The pan I had available was a little larger than recommended, so the result was thinner and crunchier than I'd like. Nothing wrong with the taste, though. Just fine when refrigerated and then warmed up, too, which is important since that pan is about 2 days worth of food for me. Not bad for a first attempt.

All that, and I still have another box of spaghetti to use up. Think I'll wait a couple of weeks before doing something like this again. Much as I like my pasta, several days of basically nothing but spaghetti is a bit of an overload.