down at the end of the street i could see a line forming outside of petsi's pie. this is their busiest time of the year. the line was so long it reached miller street. i sent LSH some photos to show him just how popular those pies he bought for his wife back in germany.
since i'd already been outside and it wasn't that cold (30's but sunny), i decided i'd work in a tuesday morning run. i had on a pair of black jogging pants and a long-sleeved pullover, wore some gloves too. i left by 10:30am. it was cold in the shadows but pleasant out in the sun, which wasn't until i got to the river. i kept my plodding pace, i had enough endurance that i could've actually ran the entire route without stopping. i really should think about upping my game, either run longer, or run farther. yet at the same time i don't know if i want to push myself: i'm already running in cold weather, something i didn't think i'd be able to do, so that in itself is a victory.
i bumped into bruce coming back on garden street. i asked if he and jack would be interested in some thanksgiving flan. i continued on my way and even started running a little bit as i was perpetually in the shadows and it was still a cold day. i didn't get back home until 11:40am.
i heated up a spicy jamaican beef patty, forgetting that i had leftover smoked ham and bagels i had to finish. i promised myself i'd make a bagel sandwich for dinner. i have to eat all that stuff because come thursday i'll be feasting on leftover turkey for the next week.
i walked down to star market to pick up some mandarin oranges on sale. there was also a sale on sweet potatoes (45¢/lbs.), i bought some to make some potential sweet potato fries. a talkative elderly chinese woman who spoke to me in english was telling me what a good deal these sweet potatoes were. "much cheaper than even market basket," so informed me. it was one of those rare times that the parking lot was full, but i think a good chunk of that parking was people waiting in line at petsi's because it didn't seem all that crowded inside the supermarket. i clipped the digital coupon but when i went to go pay, it rang up the full price. i ended up having to return everything, clip the coupons again, and then buy everything a second time.
i was at home for just a little bit before i went out again, this time to market basket, to pick up any additional last item thanksgiving grocery items. i got some cream cheese for a japanese cheesecake recipe.2 bags of cape cod mussels ($6/bag). and 4 bags of bean sprouts for my mother's fried spring rolls. but the most important thing was actually at market basket, but rather the indian grocery store right next store, where they sold beers. originally i was going to get a 12-pack of lord hobo IPA sampler, but i thought too much IPA would be kind of boring, so i got a 12-pack variety of zero gravity beers ($20), the same brand i got last thanksgiving. this case had green state lager, cone head haze, powder jones IPA, and juice. i also got a 12-pack of angr orchard crisp apple hard cider for myself ($20).
when i got home i put the mussels on ice in a lasagna dish and covered them up with some wet paper towels. hopefully this will keep them alive for the next 48 hours, until thursday thanksgiving. and thank god for the new fridge, i don't think my old fridge would've been able to store everything: 2 trays of flan, a dish of raw mussels, and two pans of eggs. there's no room for the beers and the hard ciders, i'll put them out on my backyard porch tomorrow night (after the rain) to chill them down to around 40 degres.
the only time i turn on the heat in my house is in the morning for an hour right when i wake up. otherwise the heat is only set to 60 degrees throughout the day until evening when i turn the heat back up to 65 degrees. this meant that today was especially cold inside the house, cold enough that i had to put on my wool socks.
i use torguard as my VPN, but i'm looking to switch. over two dozen film studios have sued the company - which is based in the US - seeking damages for users using their VPN to download movies illegally. as a result of the lawsuits, 
torguard was forced to block torrent traffic on all its US-based VPN servers. it only started happening back in july. the workaround was to use a non-US-based server, so i started using their toronto server, which still worked. but this caused issues when i surfed the web with the VPN turned on. for one thing, it thought i was in canada so i'd target me with canadian specific content. certain sites also wouldn't work, like youtube tv (which apparently doesn't exist in canada).
so i vowed come the end of november - when my annual torguard subscription is due - i'd find a new VPN provider. not sure how i came across it, but somehow i found windscribe, which i'd never heard of before. there were many things about it i liked, from their robust platform support (PC, mac, android, ios), unlimited bandwidth, no IP logging, to being torrent friendly. they also had a free plan where you had a limit of 10GB but enough to test drive their VPN. best part is it costs the same as torguard - $30/year.
so i created an account and gave windscribe a try. the first thing i tried was a speedtest. on my xfinity internet without VPN, i get speeds of 460/16 Mbps download/upload. the first time i ran windscribe, i wasn't impressed, with speeds of only 38/13 Mbps. compare that to torguard, where i achieved speeds of 300/19 Mbps. but subsequent windscribe's speedtests i got as fast as 350/17 Mbps.
another thing i noticed was i couldn't get wireguard to work on windscribe, only IPsec IKEv2. i read both are fast protocols, but wireguard is newer and open source. wireguard is what i use with torguard. it doesn't really matter all that much, since i can still get very fast speeds.
i tried downloading a few torrents with windscribe. worked without issues, just as fast as torguard (maybe even faster judging from the speedtests). i also browsed a few websites using windscribe. because i was using their NY-based server, i didn't have any foreign content issues. since i was testing with the free account, i only had access to a few servers. with the paid version i can even use boston-based servers.
one thing i really liked about torguard is the ability to have a kill switch that force quits apps when it loses VPN connection. that way i can immediately quit my torrent client if i'm not connected to the VPN anymore. windscribe does it different, uses a firewall system. if for any reason the VPN disconnects, it will cut off all internet traffic, until you close the firewall. i don't know how well it performs, but it's a very rare occurence anyway.
windscribe can also do split tunneling. i tried it but it didn't really work, only allowed me to input IPs and hostnames, not set app tunneling. i read somewhere that split tunneling doesn't work correctly on the mac because of the way the macOS is written.
so after my testing, i think i will switch to windscribe once my torguard subscription expires. it seems to work just as well as torguard, and has a few features that torguard doesn't have. windscribe is also based on canada, so they don't face the same kind of copyright scrutiny that a US-based VPN company would face.
for dinner i made a bagel sandwich, washed it down with some chocolate milk. my upstairs neighbors were blaring their tv noises again (after blaring their stereo in the early afternoon), so i turned on my bluetooth soundcore motion+ speaker set on top of my bookcase, a taste of their own medicine. at first i was getting audio delays (streaming via toslink digital optical using a bluetooth transmitter), and it seemed like it was a video issue as well since the basketball game i was watching appeared to be skipping. i read online that restarting the app (inside of my android-based mi streaming box) fixes the problem. so i did that and sure enough, both video and audio were buttery smooth. my laptop was somehow paired with the speaker as well, and whenever my computer made any sort of sound, it would pause youtube tv and play out the audio. i fixed that problem by turning off bluetooth on my mac. all and all i'm pretty happy with my wireless audio setup.
the game i was watching was caveliers vs 76ers. philadelphia lost (10-4), sending them down a full game behind the celtics (11-3), same standings as the bucks (10-4). celtics' game against the bucks tomorrow will have immediate implications for top standings: boston lose and they tie with the bucks, but if they win they'll be 2 games ahead of milwaukee.
the new season (5th) of fargo premiered tonight. it started late - 10pm - with 2 episodes no less. the first episode was already long at 1-1/2 hours (maybe with commercial interruptions), i only watched a bit of the second episode. i don't like john hamm playing a villain even though he makes a menacing one. juno temple plays a housewife with a mysterious past and amazing survival skills, seemingly inured to the violence that unexpectedly descended upon her PTA mom life. she's so good on the show, it's an emmy nomination for sure. i still don't know what's going on with the story, but the quirky midwestern characters have already got me hooked, can't wait to see the rest of the episodes.