Mitch's Blog

I know a surprising amount about men’s style for someone who goes around wearing cargo pants and food-stained T-shirts 97% of the time.

I’m looking for recommendations for a good spam-blocker for text messages that works across the iPhone, iPad and Mac. In addition to general spam-blocking, I want to block all messages containing a specific string of text — I get a lot of spam messages from Democrats seeking political donations, and virtually all of them have links to actblue.

When Julie is out of town and I’m at home, I rewatch the tv show MASH. It holds up pretty well, although I wish there was some way to watch on streaming without a laugh track. You can find MASH without the laugh track on DVDs, but I don’t want to go to the hassle and expense.

I am amazed that for much of my life we watched comedies with a laugh track. I have lost the skill to tune the laugh track out.

I started traveling for business 37 years ago and during that time electronics has of course gotten exponentially lighter and more powerful. So why has my day bag gotten heavier? Am I carrying anvils around?

The refrigerator repair guys have come and gone and it turns out they did not have all the parts needed to repair the refrigerator after all! They replaced the compressor and motherboard, plugged it in and sparks flew, which is (they explained to Julie, who explained it to me) bad.

Recapping: This morning our main refrigerator was not working. Now it’s not working and there’s solder powder all over the kitchen, which Julie, bless her, is cleaning up.

James Herriot’s Son on the Real Stories Behind All Creatures Great and Small

Boston startup IO River seeks CDN shakeup. The Beantown business provides a vendor-neutral platform that orchestrates multiple edge networks to eliminate vendor lock-in and boost reliability. My latest on Fierce Network.

I switched to ebooks-only in 2010, when the Kindle app for iPad came out.

However, yesterday I decided I wanted to reread “Funny Papers,” by Tom De Haven (I discussed that here yesterday) and I could not find an ebook version of the novel. I do have a paperback copy at home so now I’m rereading that.

I like it. I can’t say I have any interesting new insights about ebooks vs. paper, but maybe I will after I’ve read more of the book.

Last night, when I was reading in bed, Julie said, “Oh, wow, the sound of a turning page. We haven’t heard that in a while.” Julie reads ebooks too, when she reads books — lately she’s been doing crossword puzzles.

Since I made the switch to ebooks, society’s views toward digital vs. analog has changed, and we’re rediscovering the benefits of analog technology. But I like ebooks. I like my Kobo.

One of my main reasons for switching to ebooks is that paper books take up so. much. space. That hasn’t changed.

We are scheduled to get our fourth visit from a refrigerator repair guy this morning, and this time they plan to actually bring the part they need to repair the fridge. The fridge broke down Nov. 30 — we bought a smaller fridge after about 10 days when we could see this was going to go on for a while and I was feeling like I was getting too close of a personal relationship with the guys at the liquor store where I was buying ice.

I am grateful to the missus for many things but particularly for working with the buffoons at the refrigerator repair company on this, and also for shopping for and buying the Emergency Auxiliary Backup Refrigerator.