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Sometimes, Good Things Come Out of Not-So-Good Situations

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In my post-high school/pre-career years, I used to hang out at a pool hall. I've mentioned it at other times on this blog. One night, while hanging out in the arcade section, watching Jen Monti play Hard Drivin' , I turned to find that the girlfriend who had broken up with me a few months back was standing there. She used to hang at a pool hall too, a different one, and what I learned later was that there was some sort of issue that had caused her crew to not want to go to that one anymore, so the fallback was the one where I hung out. It was awkward. I couldn't look at her, a point she noticed and mentioned later to a mutual friend. It's not that I harbored any ill will, I just didn't know what to say. At that age, I was doing the best I could, and I’ll admit that, often, it wasn't good enough. That was the case that night. At 21, we don’t always handle things the best way. But as the days and weeks went on, I didn't want that awkwardness to continue, so I ...
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Revisiting "Classic Queen"

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I have an older cousin who, when I was a teenager, gifted me her old turntable (which was outdated at the time, but has somehow made a comeback), complete with built-in 8-track player (a technology I am sure  is never coming back). Along with it were a handful of 8-track tapes, most of which I had no interest in, but one of them was Queen's The Game , which included a song I'd at least heard  of, "Another One Bites the Dust". So I listened to that one. It was my first exposure to Queen, and I remember really liking some of that album over the summer I listened to it. In particular, the songs "Need Your Loving Tonight" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" were favorites of mine. One of the songs got chopped off halfway through due to the 8-track format, ending on one track and resuming on the next. Very awkward. Despite liking some of this album, I didn't really become a fan of Queen until I saw Wayne's World . I'd heard "Bohemian R...
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250

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"A republic, if you can keep it." -- Benjamin Franklin  
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The Music Man

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In my senior year of high school, I started hanging out with this guy named Mike. For the life of me, I can't remember how it started, because Mike and I weren't in any of the same classes, and now that I think of it, I have to wonder if it was through a mutual friend, Chuck. But I'm only a few sentences into this and already rambling. Mike's older brother was in a band, and Mike and I auditioned to join. This sounds fancier than it was. I played bass, Mike played drums. It was through Mike's brother and his band that I met Bill, the topic of this blog post. Bill was the singer in the band. Just a few years older than Mike and I, Bill had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, specifically hard rock and heavy metal. His enthusiasm and love for it was contagious, and I always enjoyed talking music with him. He seemed to know everything about every hard rock or metal album from the 1970s to the current day. I always thought he should've written for a rock magazine. N...
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Mocking httpResource in Angular

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httpResource  is still experimental in Angular, and I've begun playing around with it. Once I got a working implementation on a simple form, I wanted to update my tests. This was challenging. I did some searching and found a couple of posts about using HttpTestingController  and mocking a response, but I wanted to retain the service-level abstraction in my component unit tests, which know nothing about HTTP, only that services are used, and one of them now returns an HttpResourceRef in place of an Observable. Here's the mock implementation I wrote. I'm using Vitest now in this project instead of Jasmine, but the syntax should hopefully still make sense. class ExerciseServiceMock {   get = vi . fn (). mockImplementation (() => {       const paginatedResults = new PaginatedResults < ExerciseDTO >();       paginatedResults . totalCount = 0 ;       paginatedResults . results = new Array < ExerciseDTO >(...
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The 10 Lowest Rated Movies on My NAS

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One of my hobbies for a long time now has been the building of a digital library of movies and TV shows. I originally undertook this using media stored on a combination of USB drives and a DLNA server, but just over a year ago purchased a NAS and hosted an instance of Jellyfin . Jellyfin is amazing and I plan to write a separate entry about that later. Today, out of curiosity, I decided to see if it were possible to sort my media in order of how well it was rated (community rating/general consensus), and yes, Jellyfin provides this. And once I'd sorted my movies in order of community rating, I just had to know: What's the worst rated stuff I have here? What follows is that list, in descending order -- my "Bottom 10 Movies", so to speak. #10 - Can't Stop The Music Starring Steve Guttenberg and The Village People Is It Really That Bad?  Yes Okay, okay, I need to make something clear at the outset: I love bad movies. And this one is...woof. Bad. It's bad. It...
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Roku OS 15.0.4 Breaks HEVC Decoding

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One of my hobbies is building my own streaming video library. I've been meaning to blog about it for awhile. Unfortunately, my intro to doing so is this . Last week, Roku OS 15.0.4 found its way onto my Roku TV and Roku Ultra 4800R. And while the TV took it fine, the Ultra did not . Playback of HEVC video is now hampered by pixelation and freezing. I wasn't sure if the Roku OS update was the culprit, or if it was the Jellyfin client for Roku that I use to stream videos from my Jellyfin server. But putting one of the (now) problematic videos onto a USB drive and playing it via Roku's own Media Player resulted in the same problem. I found my way to the Roku community forums where the most recently updated post was about this happening when using the Plex  app. As of today, that post is 17 days old. The response from Roku support has been...lacking. Very lacking. "It's under investigation." I left a comment mentioning this was unrelated to Plex and relayed my USB...
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