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Sixty Minutes Hate

In the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we experience a “Two Minutes Hate” with Winston Smith. Two Minutes Hate is a daily ritual in Oceania, the fictitious totalitarian state in Orwell’s novel. Citizens assemble in public places, are shown video of Oceania’s enemies, usually Emmanuel Goldstein—the enemy of the state, and must publicly display their hatred for two minutes. Every time I read the book I find it a harrowing scene primarily because of one sentence:

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Christopher Walken Reads Edgar Allan Poe

2017 is gonna be weird. Let’s get started on the right foot, shall we? Poe is a favorite of mine, dating back to an assigned reading of The Telltale Heart in middle school. It’s easy to imagine Poe being read aloud with an accent, maybe a slightly British one, even though he is a distinctly American author. Or maybe that pompous twang that William F. Buckley had. He’s hip again, now that conservatives have gone extinct and been replaced with kleptocrats and whiny white bigots, hearing a New England snob reading some Poe might be comforting.

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Still The Best Star Wars Movie

The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the seven Star Wars movies so far, and probably forever, regardless of how many more Disney makes. This fan made trailer reinforces that, I believe. And his latest trailer makes an even stronger case. Why do I think it’s the best? I’ll let Dante tell you. He nails it: And he wasn’t even supposed to be there that day.

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Friday Music: Fab Faux

My wife and I saw the Fab Faux last weekend. If you’re not familiar with them, the Fab Faux are a Beatles tribute band that have been around for about twenty years. (Their website is here. It’s done completely in Flash and is incredibly annoying.) I can’t say enough about how talented and entertaining the band is. They sound very much like the Beatles, as you might expect, but they also have a deep love of the material and it shows in everything they do.

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Friday Music: Alex Trebek Raps

Alex tosses some rhymes. It’s probably even funnier if you know the songs. Have a good weekend.

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Any Country Of the World Today

The past few weeks have seen vandalism at Jewish cemeteries, bomb threats at Jewish community centers, and an administration that seemed to have problems remembering that the Holocaust involved killing Jews while also refusing to acknowledge the widespread increase of racially and religiously charged violence we have been experiencing since the election. If you’re not white, you need to be more careful than you were before November 8th. Are comparisons to post-World War I Germany off base, or are they appropriate?

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All Software Sucks, Eventually

My wife asked me to disable Amber Alerts on her phone. We get them very infrequently, and when we do, they’re always for something well outside of our area. I knew there was a setting for this because I had disabled it long ago on my phone. I also knew that it must have moved since Apple is always “improving” their software. So I used the search bar in settings.

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Appreciating Slow Consumption

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading the Monster manga series. (Affiliate link to volume 1.) It’s nine volumes (18 if you can find the older format) and would run around $125 to buy new. It’s not available on Kindle or any other electronic format. At least not legally. But my there’s a library in my local library system that has the whole set. I requested the volumes one at a time, read them, and then ordered the next.

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Black OR White

Ayn Rand’s name pops up in the political news at least a few times a year. Both Ron Paul and his son Rand have praised her philosophy and her books. House Speaker and Invertebrate-at-Large Paul Ryan has called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book, and it’s allegedly required reading for his staff. Swearing fealty to Ayn Rand is almost a prerequisite for elected office as a Republican. Outside of these circles, Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, has a reputation for being heartless and selfish.

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Bees!

My day job is literally in Times Square. The address is 3 Times Square. Despite the grand-sounding name, the building is only a little over 15 years old. Across the street, however, is a slice of history; One Times Square. What was, long ago, the New York Times Building. It doesn’t look like this anymore. Now it looks like a large place to attach billboards. Yes, there’s a building under there.

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Baby Driver

Most movies tend to include pretty terrible music. There have been some great soundtracks from composers like Henry Jackman, Hans Zimmer, and Howard Shore, but when it comes to pop and rock well, bleah. The Guardians of the Galaxy films have been a rare bright spot, and now we have Baby Driver, a movie named for a deep cut from Simon and Garfunkel, and that I may hit the theater more for the music than the film itself.

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Jeff Corey's Appearance on Babylon 5

Babylon 5 drew from many places for its guest stars. Genre stalwarts like Michael Ansara and Brad Dourif. TV regulars like William Sanderson, Melissa Gilbert, and Erica Gimpel. Special guest stars like Michael York and Robert Englund. Even fresh new faces like Bryan Cranston. But one of my favorite appearances, even though it was barely a cup of tea in length, was by Jeff Corey. You might know him from Little Big Man, where he gave an incredible performance as Will Bill Hickok.

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My Shoes Are Too Tight

“My shoes are too tight. But it doesn’t matter because I have forgotten how to dance.” I’m binge watching Babylon 5 on my commute, and this scene from the first season is one of the scenes that hooked me when the show first aired in 1994. Londo Mollari is the Centauri ambassador to Babylon 5, a space station that is a center for interplanetary trade and diplomacy. It was a series that broadcast at the cusp of TV’s renaissance, overlapping with Buffy the Vampire Slayer for two years, and The Sopranos for one.

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Bad Decisions and Flawed Characters

I just finished a fascinating book. It’s a book that was published this century —in 2005— and the lead character was a perfectly normal person. He found himself in a few difficult decisions. He made decisions; some good, some bad. He hit a couple of low points in the story and had to work hard to get out of them. But he wasn’t recovering from a traumatic past. He wasn’t too obsessed with his work.

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A Short Film Based on Yeats

When You Are Old When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, 5 And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

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While My Guitar Gently Weeps

This gentleman covered the entire Beatles catalog a couple of years ago. You can find him here. I am going to be away next week. Some posts may appear, but I will be even more slow than normal responding to comments. (And that’s slow!)

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Friday Music: Fab Faux

My wife and I saw the Fab Faux last weekend. If you’re not familiar with them, the Fab Faux are a Beatles tribute band that have been around for about twenty years. (Their website is here. It’s done completely in Flash and is incredibly annoying.) I can’t say enough about how talented and entertaining the band is. They sound very much like the Beatles, as you might expect, but they also have a deep love of the material and it shows in everything they do.

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Black OR White

Ayn Rand’s name pops up in the political news at least a few times a year. Both Ron Paul and his son Rand have praised her philosophy and her books. House Speaker and Invertebrate-at-Large Paul Ryan has called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book, and it’s allegedly required reading for his staff. Swearing fealty to Ayn Rand is almost a prerequisite for elected office as a Republican. Outside of these circles, Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, has a reputation for being heartless and selfish.

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Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Going forward I’ll be posting daily post on days that are mildly interesting for one reason or another, such as a bike ride. There as much for me as for you, and I won’t be blasting these out to subscribers. Today I got up a little early and took a ride over to Piermont, NY, one of mt favorite cycling destinations when I only have an hour or so to ride.

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The Customer Must Always Be Fleeced

Last week I went online and agreed to pay a little more for faster Internet. There are three adults in the house, and we all make pretty regular use of the ‘net for a variety of activities, so it seemed worth another $15 a month for a 50% faster connection. We don’t have cable TV. My connection from Verizon is an ethernet connection, not cable. So this should have consisted entirely of my checking a box indicating that I want to pay more, followed by something in one of their data centers telling something in my house to operate at a faster speed.

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How To Protect Yourself From the Next Cambridge Analytica (Maybe) Part Deux

I saw another article about locking down your privacy settings on Facebook. It was full of ads and written in the form of obnoxious slides, so I made my own version. This is the story that won’t go away, or at least it must feel that way if your name is Zuckerberg or Sandberg. One interesting twist is the “story” that much of the Fox News/Blame Obama wing of the media have jumped on.

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How To Protect Yourself From the Next Cambridge Analytica (Maybe)

So how about that Facebook thing, huh? How can you protect yourself? There are a couple of things you can do to prevent, or at least hamper, the next Cambridge Analytica. (Of course, the next 10 or 13 Cambridge Analyticas have already struck and already have your stuff, but you know what I mean.) Before I give you specific instructions, let’s go over a few points. Stop Calling It a “Breach” When this story broke Sunday (even though it’s really old news, but I digress) new readers repeatedly called it a “data breach,” while techie folks and most of the techie press kept correcting them.

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Caveman Politics

This video describes Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and how it relates to his theories of government and his Theory of Forms. It’s also a video with TED Talk branding that doesn’t have a twentysomething single hipster telling you that you should quit your day job and follow your dreams because it worked for him, which is odd, but I digress. Plato’s Cave can also be used as a metaphor for a debate that has gripped our nation for years: media bias.

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Being Like Fezziwig

It’s a couple of days after the Fourth of July, so what better time for a post I wrote last and saved for later? Last year, during the holiday break, I watched A Christmas Carol starring Patrick Stewart and then, within a couple of days, listened to Neil Gaiman’s reading of the original text. The Gaiman reading, by the way, really is the original text. He read from a copy of the book that Dickens himself used when he did performances here in New York City.

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Being Like Fezziwig

It’s a couple of days after the Fourth of July, so what better time for a post I wrote last and saved for later? Last year, during the holiday break, I watched A Christmas Carol starring Patrick Stewart and then, within a couple of days, listened to Neil Gaiman’s reading of the original text. The Gaiman reading, by the way, really is the original text. He read from a copy of the book that Dickens himself used when he did performances here in New York City.

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Shepard Tones

Dunkirk has received mixed reviews. I’m still hoping to make it to the theater to see it, but I may end up waiting for home release. Christopher Nolan’s movies have always been a treat. He’s a master of atmosphere and is adept at choosing worlds and themes that match his style. His treatment of Batman is probably as good as a live-action version of the character can be. The Prestige will always be on of my favorite movies of all time.

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War Of The Worlds Flash Fiction

This week’s flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig is about Right vs. Wrong. I decided to kill two birds with one heat ray and made it a brief glimpse in the War of the Worlds-verse that I have been playing around with in a short story and a novel. In this world, the Martian attack in H.G. Wells’ landmark novel happened as he described it. But they didn’t just attack England, and as you might expect, the attacks change the course of history just a wee bit, so things are different when the Martians return to attack again.

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Not Today, Satan

This piece started out as an experiment in writing in the second person, and then sat in virtual mothballs until Chick Wendig posted his latest Flash Fiction contest. One of the titles seemed to fit after I edited it down a bit. It’s rough, but it helped me get back into fiction. I hope you enjoy! Not Today, Satan What was that sound? It sounded like someone in the kitchen. You lie still, afraid to move.

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Your Personal Data Will Be Sold

(assuming it isn’t being sold already) Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that makes it possible for your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to save your Internet usage history and sell it or mine it for data to use for advertisements. By the time you read this, the President may have already signed it into law. There are a few aspects to this bill and the debate surrounding it that I find deeply upsetting.

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Friday Tunes: St. Cajetan by Cracker

I’ve decided Fridays will be for music videos. Since it’s my blog, that’s how it will be. This is one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands. The sound quality is a little low, but it’s worth it to hear to a live version. Cracker is a country band that was lumped into grunge and “post-punk” in the early 90s, partly because of their link to Camper Van Beethoven and partly because the people that used to control music publishing like to put things into neat little containers.

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Feb 24 2020

“Were you an athlete?” That’s not a question I ever wanted to hear, but I did. I went to the DEXA Scan today knowing that I’m in bad shape. The idea was to get an idea of how much. I also wanted to know, once and for all, if there was a reason why I’ve never been able to get what the averages say is a “healthy” weight. The scan itself is pretty easy.

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Sixty Minutes Hate

In the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we experience a “Two Minutes Hate” with Winston Smith. Two Minutes Hate is a daily ritual in Oceania, the fictitious totalitarian state in Orwell’s novel. Citizens assemble in public places, are shown video of Oceania’s enemies, usually Emmanuel Goldstein—the enemy of the state, and must publicly display their hatred for two minutes. Every time I read the book I find it a harrowing scene primarily because of one sentence:

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Darwin's Unfinished Symphony

It’s hard to argue with the idea that our complex cultures set us apart from the rest of the animal world. As Diana Gitig put it in her review of Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony : Other species are indisputably smart; they can learn by example, they can communicate, they can innovate to solve problems, they can use tools, they may even have distinct cultures. But humans are clearly different. Other species don’t listen to Baroque concerti or read classical philosophy hundreds of years after the scores were composed or the treatises written.

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While My Guitar Gently Weeps

This gentleman covered the entire Beatles catalog a couple of years ago. You can find him here. I am going to be away next week. Some posts may appear, but I will be even more slow than normal responding to comments. (And that’s slow!)

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Still Catching Up

Still catching up from being away a little over a week. Not coming back seems like a better option with each passing minute. But it is a Friday, which should mean good music. Enjoy some Dead Weather.

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Still The Best Star Wars Movie

The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the seven Star Wars movies so far, and probably forever, regardless of how many more Disney makes. This fan made trailer reinforces that, I believe. And his latest trailer makes an even stronger case. Why do I think it’s the best? I’ll let Dante tell you. He nails it: And he wasn’t even supposed to be there that day.

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Black OR White

Ayn Rand’s name pops up in the political news at least a few times a year. Both Ron Paul and his son Rand have praised her philosophy and her books. House Speaker and Invertebrate-at-Large Paul Ryan has called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book, and it’s allegedly required reading for his staff. Swearing fealty to Ayn Rand is almost a prerequisite for elected office as a Republican. Outside of these circles, Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, has a reputation for being heartless and selfish.

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Don't Play Their Game

Two weeks ago I wrote about how being blinded by hate can keep you from achieving your goals and help your opponent. Last week I wrote about the folly of extreme ideology. And then a few hours after I hit publish on the second post, I came across this. It’s about a successful outrage-driven publicity campaign for Tucker Max that’s been reused several times, including for liberal media punching bag (and asshole), Milo Yiannopoulos.

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Shepard Tones

Dunkirk has received mixed reviews. I’m still hoping to make it to the theater to see it, but I may end up waiting for home release. Christopher Nolan’s movies have always been a treat. He’s a master of atmosphere and is adept at choosing worlds and themes that match his style. His treatment of Batman is probably as good as a live-action version of the character can be. The Prestige will always be on of my favorite movies of all time.

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Friday Music - Easy Target

John Mellencamp has a new album coming out in April. He released this track last month. I’ll let it speak for itself.

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How Little Caesar Gave Us Caesar

So I am watching an episode of the 1960’s Batman series that I recorded with my over-the-air DVR, and this pops up: It took me a moment to realize that that’s Edward G. Robinson! He was an art collector. Sadly, he was forced to liquidate an amazing collection in the 1950’s to pay for a divorce settlement and because his career suffered in the 1950’s when he made enemies during the McCarthy hearings.

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Stabs In the Back and Big Lies

By the end of September 1918, the Germans were beaten. Earlier that year Chief-of-Staff Erich Ludendorff commanded the “Kaiserschlacht” offensive that briefly seemed to turn the tide, but the Germans lacked the resources to support the effort. Ludendorff himself told the Kaiser and Germany’s Chancellor to ask for a ceasefire on September 29th. But the myth that Germany’s civilian leaders betrayed their military started to spread before the Treaty of Versailles was completed.

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Liedolsheim Evangelical Church

For just about my entire life there’s been a picture of the church in Liedolsheim somewhere in the background. At our house, my grandparent’s, and both my aunt’s and uncle’s houses, and now mine: the picture above is in our living room, along with another I’m saving for a future post. As children we were all told about the Bible in the church that contained a record of the births of all of our family members, from when the French burnt the church down right up to my father, the last one born before the family emigrated to the U.

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Research on Liedolsheim

My grandfather’s story starts in his home town, Liedolsheim, moves to France for World War I, and then returns to Liedolsheim until he is forced to leave before members of the NSDAP (Nazis) try to kill him. Again. So of course, writing about this involves a lot of research about Liedolsheim. Liedolsheim has always been present: pictures of the Village Church were always visible in my grandparent’s home, and I heard the name many times in my childhood.

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On Not Being Funny Anymore

In case you’ve been under a rock for the past 36 hours or so, Donald Trump has won his second primary. This blog is not about politics. It’s supposed to be about my writing. But current events have taken an eerie, and actually quite frightening, parallel trajectory to my most important writing project. When I was very young my father told me a story about my grandfather. In the late 1920’s, before he brought his family to the United States, my grandfather opposed the NSDAP (the Nazi party) in an election.

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On Use of the Word "Nazi"

Writing my grandfather’s story is going to mean writing about the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920’s. The word “Nazi” is loaded — for good reason. It’s what call the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP.) The Nazis are responsible for the murder of over 6 million Jews, a war that killed another 50 to 80 million people, and shaped the world in ways that still affect us today.

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The Capture of Montauban

If you look back at the picture of grandfather in my post in December you can see the “109” on his helmet. He was the in the 109th Reserve Regiment, part of the 28th Reserve Infantry Division. (You can a listing of military units at the Somme here.) Unlike the United States, which entered the war much later, both Britain and Germany built units from communities. (I am not sure if France and Canada did the same.

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The Battle of the Somme - Starting My Research

I wrote a few weeks back about my grandfather and his experience in World War I on the Somme. There’s more to my grandfather’s story: quite a bit more. I’ve been engaged in quite a bit of research and plan on writing a book. I’ll be posting bits and pieces here as I go along. This week is a couple of Youtube videos with footage from the Somme. It’s not much.

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The Customer Must Always Be Fleeced

Last week I went online and agreed to pay a little more for faster Internet. There are three adults in the house, and we all make pretty regular use of the ‘net for a variety of activities, so it seemed worth another $15 a month for a 50% faster connection. We don’t have cable TV. My connection from Verizon is an ethernet connection, not cable. So this should have consisted entirely of my checking a box indicating that I want to pay more, followed by something in one of their data centers telling something in my house to operate at a faster speed.

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Your Personal Data Will Be Sold

(assuming it isn’t being sold already) Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that makes it possible for your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to save your Internet usage history and sell it or mine it for data to use for advertisements. By the time you read this, the President may have already signed it into law. There are a few aspects to this bill and the debate surrounding it that I find deeply upsetting.

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Friday Music: Fab Faux

My wife and I saw the Fab Faux last weekend. If you’re not familiar with them, the Fab Faux are a Beatles tribute band that have been around for about twenty years. (Their website is here. It’s done completely in Flash and is incredibly annoying.) I can’t say enough about how talented and entertaining the band is. They sound very much like the Beatles, as you might expect, but they also have a deep love of the material and it shows in everything they do.

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A Note About Privacy

It’s been a few years since I quit Facebook. I wasn’t alone. Many people left the site around the same time, and many more have left since. Quitting Facebook is cool now, which is a good thing. While many people have quit or cut back their social media use in order to improve their mental health, privacy was my primary reason. I feel that if the implicit bargain people make when they use Facebook as well as many other “free” services, was made explicit, folks would reject it.

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Why I Left Facebook

On April 11 I deleted my Facebook account. Well, I asked Facebook to delete my account. I think they have since it’s been 14 days. Of course, if I try to log in to make sure and they haven’t yet, it will reactivate my account. We have to request to have our data deleted. This is where we are. This is the position we have allowed ourselves to be put in.

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How To Protect Yourself From the Next Cambridge Analytica (Maybe) Part Deux

I saw another article about locking down your privacy settings on Facebook. It was full of ads and written in the form of obnoxious slides, so I made my own version. This is the story that won’t go away, or at least it must feel that way if your name is Zuckerberg or Sandberg. One interesting twist is the “story” that much of the Fox News/Blame Obama wing of the media have jumped on.

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How To Protect Yourself From the Next Cambridge Analytica (Maybe)

So how about that Facebook thing, huh? How can you protect yourself? There are a couple of things you can do to prevent, or at least hamper, the next Cambridge Analytica. (Of course, the next 10 or 13 Cambridge Analyticas have already struck and already have your stuff, but you know what I mean.) Before I give you specific instructions, let’s go over a few points. Stop Calling It a “Breach” When this story broke Sunday (even though it’s really old news, but I digress) new readers repeatedly called it a “data breach,” while techie folks and most of the techie press kept correcting them.

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The Culture of Interruption

You’re finally making some progress on that thing that you owe that person on that date. Maybe you’ve got headphones on with music that helps you focus, or maybe you prefer to work in total silence. You’ve been putting off this particularly complicated part of the thing, but now you’ve got a handle on it. And then your phone beeps with a text message. Or Facebook message. (Or facebook ‘like’ if you’re masochistic enough to let them notify you of those.

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Giving It All Away

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” – Eric Schmidt I finished Deep Work by Cal Newport last week and started The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains by Nick Carr over the weekend, so I’ve got the hows, whys, and wherefores of Facebook and Twitter on my mind. There’s a good chance I will be inflictingsharing some of these thoughts with you over the next few weeks.

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Please Awesome This and Share

How has Facebook’s “like” button changed the world? Is it responsible for the spread of inaccurate news and that thing that happened in November? Has it become so far detached from the simple concept of “liking” something that it’s become downright counterproductive and maybe even dangerous? Leah Pearlman is one of the people that came up the idea behind the button (which she called the “awesome button” for awhile.) She’s since left the company and makes excellent webcomics.

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Sixty Minutes Hate

In the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we experience a “Two Minutes Hate” with Winston Smith. Two Minutes Hate is a daily ritual in Oceania, the fictitious totalitarian state in Orwell’s novel. Citizens assemble in public places, are shown video of Oceania’s enemies, usually Emmanuel Goldstein—the enemy of the state, and must publicly display their hatred for two minutes. Every time I read the book I find it a harrowing scene primarily because of one sentence:

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Facebook, Trust, and the Clueless Engineer

I do this research every day. So I’m guessing you’ve heard about this. tl;dr : Scientists at Facebook manipulated the posts they showed certain users and then evaluated the posts the people being manipulated made. Then they published a study on the results. A lot of people are reacting very strongly to this news. Some people are pissed at the idea of being manipulated. While I empathize and agree, I think a lot of their anger is based on a contract with Facebook that Facebook abandoned a long time ago.

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Being Like Fezziwig

It’s a couple of days after the Fourth of July, so what better time for a post I wrote last and saved for later? Last year, during the holiday break, I watched A Christmas Carol starring Patrick Stewart and then, within a couple of days, listened to Neil Gaiman’s reading of the original text. The Gaiman reading, by the way, really is the original text. He read from a copy of the book that Dickens himself used when he did performances here in New York City.

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Fluency

Fluency in writing has been elusive for me, while when it comes to coding I’ve had it for a long time. I define fluency as being able to translate something from my mind to screen as quickly as I can type. There may be a more scientific definition somewhere, but I don’t care right now. When I figure out I need a programmatic thingie that can do this or that, it’s usually written before I start typing.

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Still Catching Up

Still catching up from being away a little over a week. Not coming back seems like a better option with each passing minute. But it is a Friday, which should mean good music. Enjoy some Dead Weather.

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Friday Music - Easy Target

John Mellencamp has a new album coming out in April. He released this track last month. I’ll let it speak for itself.

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Friday Tunes: St. Cajetan by Cracker

I’ve decided Fridays will be for music videos. Since it’s my blog, that’s how it will be. This is one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands. The sound quality is a little low, but it’s worth it to hear to a live version. Cracker is a country band that was lumped into grunge and “post-punk” in the early 90s, partly because of their link to Camper Van Beethoven and partly because the people that used to control music publishing like to put things into neat little containers.

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Raspberry Pi: Programming the GPIO

So far, you’ve unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car. Then, you set it up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub so you could write Python code to control it via a web browser. Just before the holidays, I dug up my old post about reading a USB game controller and refreshed it, so you can use a gamepad to control the car after I go over how to control the motors.

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While My Guitar Gently Weeps

This gentleman covered the entire Beatles catalog a couple of years ago. You can find him here. I am going to be away next week. Some posts may appear, but I will be even more slow than normal responding to comments. (And that’s slow!)

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Read Some History and Call Me in the Morning

The party out of power tends to run on the idea that things are terrible. The party in power tends to run on the idea that things are fine and only going to get better. These statements make sense. “Vote for me because I want the job” and “Vote for me because I want to keep the job” are not compelling campaign slogans. We’re at a strange place in history right now.

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Voter Intimidation Then and Now

According to Donald Trump, if he loses the Presidential election it will be because of a rigged election. The New York Times has called these statements hedging. Most credible polls show Clinton with leads that indicate a shellacking in November. Claiming that the fix is in seems like a very Trumpian thing to do. On the other hand, this looks like the beginnings of something much darker: voter intimidation. Consider what Trump said in Pennsylvania.

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Stabs In the Back and Big Lies

By the end of September 1918, the Germans were beaten. Earlier that year Chief-of-Staff Erich Ludendorff commanded the “Kaiserschlacht” offensive that briefly seemed to turn the tide, but the Germans lacked the resources to support the effort. Ludendorff himself told the Kaiser and Germany’s Chancellor to ask for a ceasefire on September 29th. But the myth that Germany’s civilian leaders betrayed their military started to spread before the Treaty of Versailles was completed.

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Research on Liedolsheim

My grandfather’s story starts in his home town, Liedolsheim, moves to France for World War I, and then returns to Liedolsheim until he is forced to leave before members of the NSDAP (Nazis) try to kill him. Again. So of course, writing about this involves a lot of research about Liedolsheim. Liedolsheim has always been present: pictures of the Village Church were always visible in my grandparent’s home, and I heard the name many times in my childhood.

Post

Darwin's Unfinished Symphony

It’s hard to argue with the idea that our complex cultures set us apart from the rest of the animal world. As Diana Gitig put it in her review of Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony : Other species are indisputably smart; they can learn by example, they can communicate, they can innovate to solve problems, they can use tools, they may even have distinct cultures. But humans are clearly different. Other species don’t listen to Baroque concerti or read classical philosophy hundreds of years after the scores were composed or the treatises written.

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It's Like Grand Central Station in Here

Busy this week. Look at this picture and pretend I wrote something entertaining.

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Baby Driver

Most movies tend to include pretty terrible music. There have been some great soundtracks from composers like Henry Jackman, Hans Zimmer, and Howard Shore, but when it comes to pop and rock well, bleah. The Guardians of the Galaxy films have been a rare bright spot, and now we have Baby Driver, a movie named for a deep cut from Simon and Garfunkel, and that I may hit the theater more for the music than the film itself.

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Baby Driver

Most movies tend to include pretty terrible music. There have been some great soundtracks from composers like Henry Jackman, Hans Zimmer, and Howard Shore, but when it comes to pop and rock well, bleah. The Guardians of the Galaxy films have been a rare bright spot, and now we have Baby Driver, a movie named for a deep cut from Simon and Garfunkel, and that I may hit the theater more for the music than the film itself.

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Don't Play Their Game

Two weeks ago I wrote about how being blinded by hate can keep you from achieving your goals and help your opponent. Last week I wrote about the folly of extreme ideology. And then a few hours after I hit publish on the second post, I came across this. It’s about a successful outrage-driven publicity campaign for Tucker Max that’s been reused several times, including for liberal media punching bag (and asshole), Milo Yiannopoulos.

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Baby Driver

Most movies tend to include pretty terrible music. There have been some great soundtracks from composers like Henry Jackman, Hans Zimmer, and Howard Shore, but when it comes to pop and rock well, bleah. The Guardians of the Galaxy films have been a rare bright spot, and now we have Baby Driver, a movie named for a deep cut from Simon and Garfunkel, and that I may hit the theater more for the music than the film itself.

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Friday Music: Iceland Hymn

H/T to Open Culture for this beautiful find.

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Friday Music: Alex Trebek Raps

Alex tosses some rhymes. It’s probably even funnier if you know the songs. Have a good weekend.

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Friday Music: Iceland Hymn

H/T to Open Culture for this beautiful find.

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How To Be Indispensable

I just finished Seth Godin’s Book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? It’s a book that I will need to read at least two more times to fully digest. It’s also a book I think everyone should read. If you haven’t heard of Seth Godin, look here. I’m not even going to try to cover his accomplishments in a blog post that I already know is going to be longer than I want.

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Your Personal Data Will Be Sold

(assuming it isn’t being sold already) Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that makes it possible for your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to save your Internet usage history and sell it or mine it for data to use for advertisements. By the time you read this, the President may have already signed it into law. There are a few aspects to this bill and the debate surrounding it that I find deeply upsetting.

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Any Country Of the World Today

The past few weeks have seen vandalism at Jewish cemeteries, bomb threats at Jewish community centers, and an administration that seemed to have problems remembering that the Holocaust involved killing Jews while also refusing to acknowledge the widespread increase of racially and religiously charged violence we have been experiencing since the election. If you’re not white, you need to be more careful than you were before November 8th. Are comparisons to post-World War I Germany off base, or are they appropriate?

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It's Monday, and I'm Tired

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f62Z8Ev9OXA Get it? Nudge, nudge. Worth watching for the last tire.

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Jeff Corey's Appearance on Babylon 5

Babylon 5 drew from many places for its guest stars. Genre stalwarts like Michael Ansara and Brad Dourif. TV regulars like William Sanderson, Melissa Gilbert, and Erica Gimpel. Special guest stars like Michael York and Robert Englund. Even fresh new faces like Bryan Cranston. But one of my favorite appearances, even though it was barely a cup of tea in length, was by Jeff Corey. You might know him from Little Big Man, where he gave an incredible performance as Will Bill Hickok.

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Friday Music: Alex Trebek Raps

Alex tosses some rhymes. It’s probably even funnier if you know the songs. Have a good weekend.

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Black OR White

Ayn Rand’s name pops up in the political news at least a few times a year. Both Ron Paul and his son Rand have praised her philosophy and her books. House Speaker and Invertebrate-at-Large Paul Ryan has called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book, and it’s allegedly required reading for his staff. Swearing fealty to Ayn Rand is almost a prerequisite for elected office as a Republican. Outside of these circles, Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, has a reputation for being heartless and selfish.

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Friday Music - Easy Target

John Mellencamp has a new album coming out in April. He released this track last month. I’ll let it speak for itself.

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Heroes, Actions, and Consequences

This is a long video. With today’s online audience, a 12 minute YouTube might as well be 90 minutes. But it’s worth watching; especially if you are a storyteller. I have a problem with my NaNoWriMo project, and this video is helping me figure out a solution. One that I think will improve the novel. My heroes have secrets. These secrets are unveiled as the story progresses, which makes my heroes poor choices for my point-of-view (POV) characters.

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Fluency

Fluency in writing has been elusive for me, while when it comes to coding I’ve had it for a long time. I define fluency as being able to translate something from my mind to screen as quickly as I can type. There may be a more scientific definition somewhere, but I don’t care right now. When I figure out I need a programmatic thingie that can do this or that, it’s usually written before I start typing.

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Black OR White

Ayn Rand’s name pops up in the political news at least a few times a year. Both Ron Paul and his son Rand have praised her philosophy and her books. House Speaker and Invertebrate-at-Large Paul Ryan has called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book, and it’s allegedly required reading for his staff. Swearing fealty to Ayn Rand is almost a prerequisite for elected office as a Republican. Outside of these circles, Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, has a reputation for being heartless and selfish.

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Black OR White

Ayn Rand’s name pops up in the political news at least a few times a year. Both Ron Paul and his son Rand have praised her philosophy and her books. House Speaker and Invertebrate-at-Large Paul Ryan has called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book, and it’s allegedly required reading for his staff. Swearing fealty to Ayn Rand is almost a prerequisite for elected office as a Republican. Outside of these circles, Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, has a reputation for being heartless and selfish.

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Amazing Library in China

There are few things writers and readers love more than libraries.I have fond memories of bicycling to and from the library when I was growing up in Ridgewood, NJ, and I also have spent plenty of quality time at events and doing research at the New York Public Library. But feast your eyes on this amazing place in Yangzhou, China. The image above is the entrance, which uses a black mirrored finish on the floor and distinct rounded shelving to create a stunning effect.

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How To Be Indispensable

I just finished Seth Godin’s Book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? It’s a book that I will need to read at least two more times to fully digest. It’s also a book I think everyone should read. If you haven’t heard of Seth Godin, look here. I’m not even going to try to cover his accomplishments in a blog post that I already know is going to be longer than I want.

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My Shoes Are Too Tight

“My shoes are too tight. But it doesn’t matter because I have forgotten how to dance.” I’m binge watching Babylon 5 on my commute, and this scene from the first season is one of the scenes that hooked me when the show first aired in 1994. Londo Mollari is the Centauri ambassador to Babylon 5, a space station that is a center for interplanetary trade and diplomacy. It was a series that broadcast at the cusp of TV’s renaissance, overlapping with Buffy the Vampire Slayer for two years, and The Sopranos for one.

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Friday Music: The Lumineers

The Lumineers tend to put me in a good mood, regardless of what’s going on. There’s an awful lot of over-produced music around, and that’s coming from a guy who listens to prog bands like Genesis, Rush, Yes, and Pink Floyd. The Lumineers sound like a bunch of folks that are having a good time. And: It’s better to feel pain, than nothing at all The opposite of love’s indifference

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Facebook, Trust, and the Clueless Engineer

I do this research every day. So I’m guessing you’ve heard about this. tl;dr : Scientists at Facebook manipulated the posts they showed certain users and then evaluated the posts the people being manipulated made. Then they published a study on the results. A lot of people are reacting very strongly to this news. Some people are pissed at the idea of being manipulated. While I empathize and agree, I think a lot of their anger is based on a contract with Facebook that Facebook abandoned a long time ago.

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Don't Play Their Game

Two weeks ago I wrote about how being blinded by hate can keep you from achieving your goals and help your opponent. Last week I wrote about the folly of extreme ideology. And then a few hours after I hit publish on the second post, I came across this. It’s about a successful outrage-driven publicity campaign for Tucker Max that’s been reused several times, including for liberal media punching bag (and asshole), Milo Yiannopoulos.

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Appreciating Slow Consumption

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading the Monster manga series. (Affiliate link to volume 1.) It’s nine volumes (18 if you can find the older format) and would run around $125 to buy new. It’s not available on Kindle or any other electronic format. At least not legally. But my there’s a library in my local library system that has the whole set. I requested the volumes one at a time, read them, and then ordered the next.

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Friday Music: Fab Faux

My wife and I saw the Fab Faux last weekend. If you’re not familiar with them, the Fab Faux are a Beatles tribute band that have been around for about twenty years. (Their website is here. It’s done completely in Flash and is incredibly annoying.) I can’t say enough about how talented and entertaining the band is. They sound very much like the Beatles, as you might expect, but they also have a deep love of the material and it shows in everything they do.

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My Shoes Are Too Tight

“My shoes are too tight. But it doesn’t matter because I have forgotten how to dance.” I’m binge watching Babylon 5 on my commute, and this scene from the first season is one of the scenes that hooked me when the show first aired in 1994. Londo Mollari is the Centauri ambassador to Babylon 5, a space station that is a center for interplanetary trade and diplomacy. It was a series that broadcast at the cusp of TV’s renaissance, overlapping with Buffy the Vampire Slayer for two years, and The Sopranos for one.

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Voter Intimidation Then and Now

According to Donald Trump, if he loses the Presidential election it will be because of a rigged election. The New York Times has called these statements hedging. Most credible polls show Clinton with leads that indicate a shellacking in November. Claiming that the fix is in seems like a very Trumpian thing to do. On the other hand, this looks like the beginnings of something much darker: voter intimidation. Consider what Trump said in Pennsylvania.

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Short Story: Mixed Results

This is a story I submitted for a contest at thefirstline.com. It was rejected. With the research and writing I have been involved in for my first novel, this topic jumped right out at me when I read the first line, for obvious reasons. “Unfortunately, there is no mistake,” she said, closing the file. “You have the rest of the day to gather your things Dr. Pflaum.” Johann was stunned.

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Darwin's Unfinished Symphony

It’s hard to argue with the idea that our complex cultures set us apart from the rest of the animal world. As Diana Gitig put it in her review of Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony : Other species are indisputably smart; they can learn by example, they can communicate, they can innovate to solve problems, they can use tools, they may even have distinct cultures. But humans are clearly different. Other species don’t listen to Baroque concerti or read classical philosophy hundreds of years after the scores were composed or the treatises written.

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Amazing Library in China

There are few things writers and readers love more than libraries.I have fond memories of bicycling to and from the library when I was growing up in Ridgewood, NJ, and I also have spent plenty of quality time at events and doing research at the New York Public Library. But feast your eyes on this amazing place in Yangzhou, China. The image above is the entrance, which uses a black mirrored finish on the floor and distinct rounded shelving to create a stunning effect.

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Sixty Minutes Hate

In the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we experience a “Two Minutes Hate” with Winston Smith. Two Minutes Hate is a daily ritual in Oceania, the fictitious totalitarian state in Orwell’s novel. Citizens assemble in public places, are shown video of Oceania’s enemies, usually Emmanuel Goldstein—the enemy of the state, and must publicly display their hatred for two minutes. Every time I read the book I find it a harrowing scene primarily because of one sentence:

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Catch the Book Train

The New York Public Library has installed a “book train” system for delivering books to patrons. This replaces an older system in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building (the one with the lions) that consisted of boxes placed on a conveyor belt. I have a ticket for a event in October where they will unveil the new reading room. Hopefully I get to see this in action too!

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Sixty Minutes Hate

In the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we experience a “Two Minutes Hate” with Winston Smith. Two Minutes Hate is a daily ritual in Oceania, the fictitious totalitarian state in Orwell’s novel. Citizens assemble in public places, are shown video of Oceania’s enemies, usually Emmanuel Goldstein—the enemy of the state, and must publicly display their hatred for two minutes. Every time I read the book I find it a harrowing scene primarily because of one sentence:

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Not Today, Satan

This piece started out as an experiment in writing in the second person, and then sat in virtual mothballs until Chick Wendig posted his latest Flash Fiction contest. One of the titles seemed to fit after I edited it down a bit. It’s rough, but it helped me get back into fiction. I hope you enjoy! Not Today, Satan What was that sound? It sounded like someone in the kitchen. You lie still, afraid to move.

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Any Country Of the World Today

The past few weeks have seen vandalism at Jewish cemeteries, bomb threats at Jewish community centers, and an administration that seemed to have problems remembering that the Holocaust involved killing Jews while also refusing to acknowledge the widespread increase of racially and religiously charged violence we have been experiencing since the election. If you’re not white, you need to be more careful than you were before November 8th. Are comparisons to post-World War I Germany off base, or are they appropriate?

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Black OR White

Ayn Rand’s name pops up in the political news at least a few times a year. Both Ron Paul and his son Rand have praised her philosophy and her books. House Speaker and Invertebrate-at-Large Paul Ryan has called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book, and it’s allegedly required reading for his staff. Swearing fealty to Ayn Rand is almost a prerequisite for elected office as a Republican. Outside of these circles, Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, has a reputation for being heartless and selfish.

Post

Appreciating Slow Consumption

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading the Monster manga series. (Affiliate link to volume 1.) It’s nine volumes (18 if you can find the older format) and would run around $125 to buy new. It’s not available on Kindle or any other electronic format. At least not legally. But my there’s a library in my local library system that has the whole set. I requested the volumes one at a time, read them, and then ordered the next.

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Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Going forward I’ll be posting daily post on days that are mildly interesting for one reason or another, such as a bike ride. There as much for me as for you, and I won’t be blasting these out to subscribers. Today I got up a little early and took a ride over to Piermont, NY, one of mt favorite cycling destinations when I only have an hour or so to ride.

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How Little Caesar Gave Us Caesar

So I am watching an episode of the 1960’s Batman series that I recorded with my over-the-air DVR, and this pops up: It took me a moment to realize that that’s Edward G. Robinson! He was an art collector. Sadly, he was forced to liquidate an amazing collection in the 1950’s to pay for a divorce settlement and because his career suffered in the 1950’s when he made enemies during the McCarthy hearings.

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Caveman Politics

This video describes Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and how it relates to his theories of government and his Theory of Forms. It’s also a video with TED Talk branding that doesn’t have a twentysomething single hipster telling you that you should quit your day job and follow your dreams because it worked for him, which is odd, but I digress. Plato’s Cave can also be used as a metaphor for a debate that has gripped our nation for years: media bias.

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Please Awesome This and Share

How has Facebook’s “like” button changed the world? Is it responsible for the spread of inaccurate news and that thing that happened in November? Has it become so far detached from the simple concept of “liking” something that it’s become downright counterproductive and maybe even dangerous? Leah Pearlman is one of the people that came up the idea behind the button (which she called the “awesome button” for awhile.) She’s since left the company and makes excellent webcomics.

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Emergency Puppy Day Post

Subject says it all. This is Freya.

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Friday Music: Alex Trebek Raps

Alex tosses some rhymes. It’s probably even funnier if you know the songs. Have a good weekend.

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Raspberry Pi: Programming the GPIO

So far, you’ve unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car. Then, you set it up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub so you could write Python code to control it via a web browser. Just before the holidays, I dug up my old post about reading a USB game controller and refreshed it, so you can use a gamepad to control the car after I go over how to control the motors.

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 1: Reading the Device

Last week I wrote up how to prepare the UCTRONICS robot I’ve been playing with for hacking.. This week, I’m taking a break to update an old tutorial from five years ago: how to use a gamepad to control a Raspberry Pi. This post has been around a few years, and I just found out that a bunch of images broke, so it’s time to update with a new Pi and easier-to-follow instructions.

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Hacking the UCTRONICS Robot Car: Prepping for Hacks

Last week I assembled a Raspberry Pi-based car kit. I bought the kit from Amazon. (Affiliate link.) The car has a live video camera, a sonic collision sensor, and a line-following sensor. You’ll need a Raspberry Pi to go with it. I recommend a 3 B+. The car works with an Android or iOS app, and the apps are functional enough, but where’s the fun in simply relying on them?

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 3: Adding a Gun Turret

Subtitling this one “Adding a Gun Turret” seems almost like click bait, doesn’t it? But yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing. One of Dexter Industries’ sample projects is attaching the Dream Cheeky Thunder Cannon to the GoPiGo. I’m going to show you how to control it with the same gamepad that also controls the robot’s movement. In part two of this series we connected the gamepad events to the GoPiGo movement commands.

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 2: Controlling the GoPiGo

Welcome to part 2 of my series on working with programming the GoPiGo and a Gamepad controller with Python. In part 1 I talked about what a gamepad “looks” like to a Raspberry Pi and how the excellent evdev package makes it easy to read and process information from it. I finished the post with a script that reads buttons on the gamepad and prints the direction it would send the GoPiGo in.

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Science!

This is just cool. That is all.

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How To Be Indispensable

I just finished Seth Godin’s Book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? It’s a book that I will need to read at least two more times to fully digest. It’s also a book I think everyone should read. If you haven’t heard of Seth Godin, look here. I’m not even going to try to cover his accomplishments in a blog post that I already know is going to be longer than I want.

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Heroes, Actions, and Consequences

This is a long video. With today’s online audience, a 12 minute YouTube might as well be 90 minutes. But it’s worth watching; especially if you are a storyteller. I have a problem with my NaNoWriMo project, and this video is helping me figure out a solution. One that I think will improve the novel. My heroes have secrets. These secrets are unveiled as the story progresses, which makes my heroes poor choices for my point-of-view (POV) characters.

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Sixty Minutes Hate

In the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we experience a “Two Minutes Hate” with Winston Smith. Two Minutes Hate is a daily ritual in Oceania, the fictitious totalitarian state in Orwell’s novel. Citizens assemble in public places, are shown video of Oceania’s enemies, usually Emmanuel Goldstein—the enemy of the state, and must publicly display their hatred for two minutes. Every time I read the book I find it a harrowing scene primarily because of one sentence:

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Slow TV

It’s impossible for me to overstate how much I enjoy having this on in the background when I am working, whether it’s writing or coding. Pluto TV has a Slow TV channel, which I run on my Roku. It runs train rides 24×7 (as near as I can tell) with some fantastic cuts, such as seasonal transitions as the train moves and the occasional picture-in-picture, with drone footage, interviews, or historical footage.

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The Capture of Montauban

If you look back at the picture of grandfather in my post in December you can see the “109” on his helmet. He was the in the 109th Reserve Regiment, part of the 28th Reserve Infantry Division. (You can a listing of military units at the Somme here.) Unlike the United States, which entered the war much later, both Britain and Germany built units from communities. (I am not sure if France and Canada did the same.

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The Battle of the Somme - Starting My Research

I wrote a few weeks back about my grandfather and his experience in World War I on the Somme. There’s more to my grandfather’s story: quite a bit more. I’ve been engaged in quite a bit of research and plan on writing a book. I’ll be posting bits and pieces here as I go along. This week is a couple of Youtube videos with footage from the Somme. It’s not much.

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Black OR White

Ayn Rand’s name pops up in the political news at least a few times a year. Both Ron Paul and his son Rand have praised her philosophy and her books. House Speaker and Invertebrate-at-Large Paul Ryan has called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book, and it’s allegedly required reading for his staff. Swearing fealty to Ayn Rand is almost a prerequisite for elected office as a Republican. Outside of these circles, Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, has a reputation for being heartless and selfish.

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Friday Tunes: St. Cajetan by Cracker

I’ve decided Fridays will be for music videos. Since it’s my blog, that’s how it will be. This is one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands. The sound quality is a little low, but it’s worth it to hear to a live version. Cracker is a country band that was lumped into grunge and “post-punk” in the early 90s, partly because of their link to Camper Van Beethoven and partly because the people that used to control music publishing like to put things into neat little containers.

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My Shoes Are Too Tight

“My shoes are too tight. But it doesn’t matter because I have forgotten how to dance.” I’m binge watching Babylon 5 on my commute, and this scene from the first season is one of the scenes that hooked me when the show first aired in 1994. Londo Mollari is the Centauri ambassador to Babylon 5, a space station that is a center for interplanetary trade and diplomacy. It was a series that broadcast at the cusp of TV’s renaissance, overlapping with Buffy the Vampire Slayer for two years, and The Sopranos for one.

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Still The Best Star Wars Movie

The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the seven Star Wars movies so far, and probably forever, regardless of how many more Disney makes. This fan made trailer reinforces that, I believe. And his latest trailer makes an even stronger case. Why do I think it’s the best? I’ll let Dante tell you. He nails it: And he wasn’t even supposed to be there that day.

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Ate My Homework

Ever lose a really critical document? If you’ve ever used Word, the answer is probably yes. Especially if you’ve used Word on the Mac. I haven’t ever lost a document because I am pretty compulsive when it comes to backing documents up. My use of computers predates the availability of hard drives for home use, so a lack of trust in computers is pretty well-ingrained with me. I still managed to lose an extensive collection of movies and scanned comic book collection to a thunderstorm once, when the power outage destroyed a system that had “mirrored” hard drives.

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Friday Music: The Lumineers

The Lumineers tend to put me in a good mood, regardless of what’s going on. There’s an awful lot of over-produced music around, and that’s coming from a guy who listens to prog bands like Genesis, Rush, Yes, and Pink Floyd. The Lumineers sound like a bunch of folks that are having a good time. And: It’s better to feel pain, than nothing at all The opposite of love’s indifference

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How Steely Dan Wrote “Deacon Blues,” the Song Audiophiles Use to Test High-End Stereos

A fascinating look into one of my favorite songs. Every Steely Dan fan remembers the first time they listened to their music — not just heard it, but listened to it, actively taking notice of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s complexly anachronistic lyrics (long scrutinized by the band’s exegetes), jazz-and-rock-spanning compositional technique, ultra-discerning selection of session musicians, and immaculate studio craft which, by the standards of the 1970s, raised popular music’s bar through the ceiling.

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Mesmerizing Animation, Made of Photos from Early-1900s America, Lets You Travel in a Steampunk Time Machine

Very cool! Surely you remember Cheers, if only from the sitcom’s syndicated reruns ceaselessly aired around the world. And if you remember Cheers, you’ll remember no part of it more vividly than its opening credits sequence, which broke from the well-established tradition of showing the faces of the series’ cast members. Instead, writes Stephen Cole at Fonts in Use, the studio charged with creating the sequence “collected archival illustrations and photographs of bar life, culled from books, private collections, and historical societies.

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Friday Music: The American Dollar

The American Dollar has great tracks for writing and for just listening. Spacious, meditative, and colorful, music. Another discovery made via Spotify, which continues to impress with its recommendations.

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Still The Best Star Wars Movie

The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the seven Star Wars movies so far, and probably forever, regardless of how many more Disney makes. This fan made trailer reinforces that, I believe. And his latest trailer makes an even stronger case. Why do I think it’s the best? I’ll let Dante tell you. He nails it: And he wasn’t even supposed to be there that day.

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The Power of White Noise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpW7iYfuGDU I have a lot of writing to do. When I need to buckle down and focus, the music is shut off, and I switch over to white noise/ ambient sounds. Which means I am using top-of-the-line noise-cancelling headphones to listen to background noise. Isn’t the 21st Century wonderful? The video above is one of my favorites. It’s part of the Relax Sleep ASMR channel. .This is another favorite, from someone who seems to share my taste in movies and SciFi based on their Youtube username.

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Shepard Tones

Dunkirk has received mixed reviews. I’m still hoping to make it to the theater to see it, but I may end up waiting for home release. Christopher Nolan’s movies have always been a treat. He’s a master of atmosphere and is adept at choosing worlds and themes that match his style. His treatment of Batman is probably as good as a live-action version of the character can be. The Prestige will always be on of my favorite movies of all time.

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The United States of Wabi-Sabi

I spent three days in Washington DC last week. It was only my second visit, and the first was so brief and condensed that it barely counts. DC is a suitable capital city for the United States. It’s broad, diverse, beautiful, ugly, deeply symbolic, and crassly commercial. The parks and monuments around the national mall are a gorgeous natural oasis surrounded by an urban hellscape. As my wife and I walked from our hotel past luxury apartments and 5-star restaurants, we encountered more panhandlers that I see in a couple of weeks in NYC.

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Thinking is Hard

Veritasium is another favorite Youtube channel of mine. Check this out. It’s long but well worth 12 minutes if you ever find yourself needing to use your brain for something more than a place to rest your hat. “You have to be willing to be uncomfortable,” Muller says. So what sounds like a quote from a self-help book has some scientific reasoning to it. The very act of slowing things down and focusing on them, makes our brain process them differently.

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Still The Best Star Wars Movie

The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the seven Star Wars movies so far, and probably forever, regardless of how many more Disney makes. This fan made trailer reinforces that, I believe. And his latest trailer makes an even stronger case. Why do I think it’s the best? I’ll let Dante tell you. He nails it: And he wasn’t even supposed to be there that day.

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How To Protect Yourself From the Next Cambridge Analytica (Maybe) Part Deux

I saw another article about locking down your privacy settings on Facebook. It was full of ads and written in the form of obnoxious slides, so I made my own version. This is the story that won’t go away, or at least it must feel that way if your name is Zuckerberg or Sandberg. One interesting twist is the “story” that much of the Fox News/Blame Obama wing of the media have jumped on.

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Don't Play Their Game

Two weeks ago I wrote about how being blinded by hate can keep you from achieving your goals and help your opponent. Last week I wrote about the folly of extreme ideology. And then a few hours after I hit publish on the second post, I came across this. It’s about a successful outrage-driven publicity campaign for Tucker Max that’s been reused several times, including for liberal media punching bag (and asshole), Milo Yiannopoulos.

Post

Sixty Minutes Hate

In the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we experience a “Two Minutes Hate” with Winston Smith. Two Minutes Hate is a daily ritual in Oceania, the fictitious totalitarian state in Orwell’s novel. Citizens assemble in public places, are shown video of Oceania’s enemies, usually Emmanuel Goldstein—the enemy of the state, and must publicly display their hatred for two minutes. Every time I read the book I find it a harrowing scene primarily because of one sentence:

Post

Raspberry Pi: Programming the GPIO

So far, you’ve unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car. Then, you set it up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub so you could write Python code to control it via a web browser. Just before the holidays, I dug up my old post about reading a USB game controller and refreshed it, so you can use a gamepad to control the car after I go over how to control the motors.

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 1: Reading the Device

Last week I wrote up how to prepare the UCTRONICS robot I’ve been playing with for hacking.. This week, I’m taking a break to update an old tutorial from five years ago: how to use a gamepad to control a Raspberry Pi. This post has been around a few years, and I just found out that a bunch of images broke, so it’s time to update with a new Pi and easier-to-follow instructions.

Post

Hacking the UCTRONICS Robot Car: Prepping for Hacks

Last week I assembled a Raspberry Pi-based car kit. I bought the kit from Amazon. (Affiliate link.) The car has a live video camera, a sonic collision sensor, and a line-following sensor. You’ll need a Raspberry Pi to go with it. I recommend a 3 B+. The car works with an Android or iOS app, and the apps are functional enough, but where’s the fun in simply relying on them?

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 3: Adding a Gun Turret

Subtitling this one “Adding a Gun Turret” seems almost like click bait, doesn’t it? But yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing. One of Dexter Industries’ sample projects is attaching the Dream Cheeky Thunder Cannon to the GoPiGo. I’m going to show you how to control it with the same gamepad that also controls the robot’s movement. In part two of this series we connected the gamepad events to the GoPiGo movement commands.

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 2: Controlling the GoPiGo

Welcome to part 2 of my series on working with programming the GoPiGo and a Gamepad controller with Python. In part 1 I talked about what a gamepad “looks” like to a Raspberry Pi and how the excellent evdev package makes it easy to read and process information from it. I finished the post with a script that reads buttons on the gamepad and prints the direction it would send the GoPiGo in.

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Stabs In the Back and Big Lies

By the end of September 1918, the Germans were beaten. Earlier that year Chief-of-Staff Erich Ludendorff commanded the “Kaiserschlacht” offensive that briefly seemed to turn the tide, but the Germans lacked the resources to support the effort. Ludendorff himself told the Kaiser and Germany’s Chancellor to ask for a ceasefire on September 29th. But the myth that Germany’s civilian leaders betrayed their military started to spread before the Treaty of Versailles was completed.

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Research on Liedolsheim

My grandfather’s story starts in his home town, Liedolsheim, moves to France for World War I, and then returns to Liedolsheim until he is forced to leave before members of the NSDAP (Nazis) try to kill him. Again. So of course, writing about this involves a lot of research about Liedolsheim. Liedolsheim has always been present: pictures of the Village Church were always visible in my grandparent’s home, and I heard the name many times in my childhood.

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On Not Being Funny Anymore

In case you’ve been under a rock for the past 36 hours or so, Donald Trump has won his second primary. This blog is not about politics. It’s supposed to be about my writing. But current events have taken an eerie, and actually quite frightening, parallel trajectory to my most important writing project. When I was very young my father told me a story about my grandfather. In the late 1920’s, before he brought his family to the United States, my grandfather opposed the NSDAP (the Nazi party) in an election.

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On Use of the Word "Nazi"

Writing my grandfather’s story is going to mean writing about the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920’s. The word “Nazi” is loaded — for good reason. It’s what call the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP.) The Nazis are responsible for the murder of over 6 million Jews, a war that killed another 50 to 80 million people, and shaped the world in ways that still affect us today.

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The Capture of Montauban

If you look back at the picture of grandfather in my post in December you can see the “109” on his helmet. He was the in the 109th Reserve Regiment, part of the 28th Reserve Infantry Division. (You can a listing of military units at the Somme here.) Unlike the United States, which entered the war much later, both Britain and Germany built units from communities. (I am not sure if France and Canada did the same.

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The Battle of the Somme - Starting My Research

I wrote a few weeks back about my grandfather and his experience in World War I on the Somme. There’s more to my grandfather’s story: quite a bit more. I’ve been engaged in quite a bit of research and plan on writing a book. I’ll be posting bits and pieces here as I go along. This week is a couple of Youtube videos with footage from the Somme. It’s not much.

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Friday Music: Fab Faux

My wife and I saw the Fab Faux last weekend. If you’re not familiar with them, the Fab Faux are a Beatles tribute band that have been around for about twenty years. (Their website is here. It’s done completely in Flash and is incredibly annoying.) I can’t say enough about how talented and entertaining the band is. They sound very much like the Beatles, as you might expect, but they also have a deep love of the material and it shows in everything they do.

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A Short Film Based on Yeats

When You Are Old When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, 5 And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

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While My Guitar Gently Weeps

This gentleman covered the entire Beatles catalog a couple of years ago. You can find him here. I am going to be away next week. Some posts may appear, but I will be even more slow than normal responding to comments. (And that’s slow!)

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Amazing Library in China

There are few things writers and readers love more than libraries.I have fond memories of bicycling to and from the library when I was growing up in Ridgewood, NJ, and I also have spent plenty of quality time at events and doing research at the New York Public Library. But feast your eyes on this amazing place in Yangzhou, China. The image above is the entrance, which uses a black mirrored finish on the floor and distinct rounded shelving to create a stunning effect.

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Amazing Library in China

There are few things writers and readers love more than libraries.I have fond memories of bicycling to and from the library when I was growing up in Ridgewood, NJ, and I also have spent plenty of quality time at events and doing research at the New York Public Library. But feast your eyes on this amazing place in Yangzhou, China. The image above is the entrance, which uses a black mirrored finish on the floor and distinct rounded shelving to create a stunning effect.

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A Short Film Based on Yeats

When You Are Old When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, 5 And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

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Your Personal Data Will Be Sold

(assuming it isn’t being sold already) Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that makes it possible for your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to save your Internet usage history and sell it or mine it for data to use for advertisements. By the time you read this, the President may have already signed it into law. There are a few aspects to this bill and the debate surrounding it that I find deeply upsetting.

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A Visit to Ellis Island

A few weeks ago, Jürgen, a cousin from Germany, visited the U.S. with his wife, Annette. They were making their second extended visit to various Goebelbecker families around the country, that Jürgen found while he was researching his family tree. Jürgen is a research librarian at the University of Karlsruhe, a few kilometers from Liedolsheim. While he stayed with us we made a visit to Ellis Island. This was my first ever visit to the island.

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We Are Not Alone

The questions of whether or not other animals are sentient, and what “sentience” really means, have been with us for a long time. I spent a lot of time reading studying animal behavior, via independent reading, online courses, and classes. Most of this information doesn’t cross over into what consciousness is. When you focus on behavior, then you pretty much stick with inputs, outputs, and consequences. This constraint is a best practice; a critical technique when it comes to solving problems.

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Ansible Tutorial

More Ansible! I wrote this one for Cprime last year, around the same time as the other Ansible post. Enjoy! Ansible is an automation tool for cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and other IT operations. You can use it for simple tasks, like deploying and configuring software releases, or for managing complicated multi-tier environments. Ansible doesn’t need agents and works with existing security infrastructure, so it’s easy to integrate into an existing network.

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Crosspost: Using Ansible for Configuration Management

I wrote this for Sensu last year. I had just finished a very large project with Ansible and loved working with it. So naturally the next gig required Salt…. Ansible is a powerful configuration management tool for deploying software and administering remote systems that you can integrate into any existing architecture. It relies on industry-standard security mechanisms and takes full advantage of existing operating system utilities. Ansible uses no agents and works with your existing security infrastructure.

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The Power of White Noise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpW7iYfuGDU I have a lot of writing to do. When I need to buckle down and focus, the music is shut off, and I switch over to white noise/ ambient sounds. Which means I am using top-of-the-line noise-cancelling headphones to listen to background noise. Isn’t the 21st Century wonderful? The video above is one of my favorites. It’s part of the Relax Sleep ASMR channel. .This is another favorite, from someone who seems to share my taste in movies and SciFi based on their Youtube username.

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Friday Argument

A Monty Python classic, hilariously reenacted. This, along with Death of Mary Queen of Scots were favorites when I was kid. Enjoy!

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How Do You Keep a Reader in Suspense?

I’ll tell you next week. Open Culture posted a few articles about Alfred Hitchcock a couple of weeks back. This one discusses how the master of suspense did his suspense-mastering. The “ticking clock” is obviously how it’s done, but it’s interesting to hear Hitchcock talk about making sure the bomb never goes off. Interesting enough that my contrarian side, always a source of trouble, immediately wanted to go set a clock off.

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Ate My Homework

Ever lose a really critical document? If you’ve ever used Word, the answer is probably yes. Especially if you’ve used Word on the Mac. I haven’t ever lost a document because I am pretty compulsive when it comes to backing documents up. My use of computers predates the availability of hard drives for home use, so a lack of trust in computers is pretty well-ingrained with me. I still managed to lose an extensive collection of movies and scanned comic book collection to a thunderstorm once, when the power outage destroyed a system that had “mirrored” hard drives.

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How to Suck At Security, By Verizon

I switched to Verizon FIOS a couple of weeks ago. I live in the U.S, so I don’t have access to anything resembling a good Internet provider. This is because a central tenet of our form of capitalism is that utilities must be delivered by poorly run and weakly regulated monopolies. However I do live in area where I have a choice between a slowly dying cable company in the throes of denial (check out that 90s web design) and a company that only exists because the government won an antitrust suit and then let them ignore it.

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Friday Funny, September 9, 2016

Requires no introduction.

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Friday Funny, September 9, 2016

Requires no introduction.

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It's the Duty of Every Good Citizen of Gotham City

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Bee Updated

The puns just write themselves! Great news. Beekeepers showed up and have relocated the hive. They first showed up within minutes of me hitting publish on that earlier post. They spent a long time surveying the situation, undoubtedly because of where the hive was and also so they could do it right. According to a coworker with beekeeping experience (they may have come due to him contacting the local beekeeping society) they were probably looking for the queen, so they could take her first.

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Bees!

My day job is literally in Times Square. The address is 3 Times Square. Despite the grand-sounding name, the building is only a little over 15 years old. Across the street, however, is a slice of history; One Times Square. What was, long ago, the New York Times Building. It doesn’t look like this anymore. Now it looks like a large place to attach billboards. Yes, there’s a building under there.

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We Are Not Alone

The questions of whether or not other animals are sentient, and what “sentience” really means, have been with us for a long time. I spent a lot of time reading studying animal behavior, via independent reading, online courses, and classes. Most of this information doesn’t cross over into what consciousness is. When you focus on behavior, then you pretty much stick with inputs, outputs, and consequences. This constraint is a best practice; a critical technique when it comes to solving problems.

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Noisy Neighborhood

This neighborhood can get pretty loud in the morning.

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The Power of White Noise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpW7iYfuGDU I have a lot of writing to do. When I need to buckle down and focus, the music is shut off, and I switch over to white noise/ ambient sounds. Which means I am using top-of-the-line noise-cancelling headphones to listen to background noise. Isn’t the 21st Century wonderful? The video above is one of my favorites. It’s part of the Relax Sleep ASMR channel. .This is another favorite, from someone who seems to share my taste in movies and SciFi based on their Youtube username.

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Tears In The Rain

Is that real? The arrival of Blade Runner in 1982 was a seminal moment for me. Harrison Ford, fresh from Raiders of the Lost Ark and still frozen in carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back was starring in a movie based on a story from one of my favorite authors, Philip K. Dick. There are some critical differences between the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the movie Blade Runner but this still is, and will always be, one of the best adaptations from book to film ever made.

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Catch the Book Train

The New York Public Library has installed a “book train” system for delivering books to patrons. This replaces an older system in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building (the one with the lions) that consisted of boxes placed on a conveyor belt. I have a ticket for a event in October where they will unveil the new reading room. Hopefully I get to see this in action too!

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Thinking is Hard

Veritasium is another favorite Youtube channel of mine. Check this out. It’s long but well worth 12 minutes if you ever find yourself needing to use your brain for something more than a place to rest your hat. “You have to be willing to be uncomfortable,” Muller says. So what sounds like a quote from a self-help book has some scientific reasoning to it. The very act of slowing things down and focusing on them, makes our brain process them differently.

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We Are Not Alone

The questions of whether or not other animals are sentient, and what “sentience” really means, have been with us for a long time. I spent a lot of time reading studying animal behavior, via independent reading, online courses, and classes. Most of this information doesn’t cross over into what consciousness is. When you focus on behavior, then you pretty much stick with inputs, outputs, and consequences. This constraint is a best practice; a critical technique when it comes to solving problems.

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And Then It Made Me Sad

I went to the mall last Friday. Just going to the mall makes me sad, but this time something else happened that made me even sadder. I had to get the screen on my (crappy) iPhone repaired. To give you an idea of how mall-averse I am, it had been broken since October. When I arrived, I parked as close as I could to the door nearest the Apple Store, in order to minimize my exposure to mall.

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The First Monarch Arrives

My wife, Dagmar, works hard on our garden. It’s beautiful and I need to get out of the chair and take some photos. One of her projects has been growing milkweed, favorite meal of the Monarch butterfly. It grew this year, and we have our first customer! I really need to get outside.

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Sixty Minutes Hate

In the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we experience a “Two Minutes Hate” with Winston Smith. Two Minutes Hate is a daily ritual in Oceania, the fictitious totalitarian state in Orwell’s novel. Citizens assemble in public places, are shown video of Oceania’s enemies, usually Emmanuel Goldstein—the enemy of the state, and must publicly display their hatred for two minutes. Every time I read the book I find it a harrowing scene primarily because of one sentence:

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Hummingbird

Wish I had been closer to the window. Not much to add to this, really.

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Dogs Ruin Everything

Still catching up after visitors last week, so the post for today is not ready. Enjoy this instead.

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Friday Tunes: Chicken Sonata

Subject says it all. The chicken’s playing has not been altered at all: only accompaniment was added.

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Getting Over Gwen Stacy

Forty-two years later, I still haven’t gotten over the death of Gwen Stacy. Gwen Stacy died in Amazing Spider-Man #122, cover dated July 1973. In 1973 comics were dated 2 or 3 months in advance, so that issue hit the newsstands sometime in April or May 1973. The event actually spans issues #121 and #122, but it’s in the first few pages of #122 that we see she is really dead.

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Making it Hard for Everyone

If you follow my twitter feed, you know that commuting from New Jersey to New York is terrible. Especially if you have the misfortune of needing to take the bus. There are a couple of reasons for this, the primary two being NJ Transit, which is simply a poorly run organization, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a decaying, trash-filled, cesspool, that is far too small for the amount of traffic it fails to accommodate every day.

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Christopher Walken Reads Edgar Allan Poe

2017 is gonna be weird. Let’s get started on the right foot, shall we? Poe is a favorite of mine, dating back to an assigned reading of The Telltale Heart in middle school. It’s easy to imagine Poe being read aloud with an accent, maybe a slightly British one, even though he is a distinctly American author. Or maybe that pompous twang that William F. Buckley had. He’s hip again, now that conservatives have gone extinct and been replaced with kleptocrats and whiny white bigots, hearing a New England snob reading some Poe might be comforting.

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Please Awesome This and Share

How has Facebook’s “like” button changed the world? Is it responsible for the spread of inaccurate news and that thing that happened in November? Has it become so far detached from the simple concept of “liking” something that it’s become downright counterproductive and maybe even dangerous? Leah Pearlman is one of the people that came up the idea behind the button (which she called the “awesome button” for awhile.) She’s since left the company and makes excellent webcomics.

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Is Civil Disobedience (still) Effective?

Everything old is new again. From the video description on Youtube: “In November 1970, after my arrest along with others who had engaged in a Boston protest at an army base to block soldiers from being sent to Vietnam, I flew to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to take part in a debate with the philosopher Charles Frankel on civil disobedience. I was supposed to appear in court that day in connection with the charges resulting from the army base protest.

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Colossal Kaiju

Yeah, it’s a redundant title. You come up with these things five days a week. I love Kaiju. When I was a kid, WPIX-TV (channel 11) had “Chiller Theater,” which would run various “horror” movies, including kaiju like Godzilla on weekday afternoons. If the weather was bad, or if I was sick (which was frequent for a couple of years,) I would end up watching it. The Chiller intro was more frightening than the movie:

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Domo Arigato, Dick Tracy

An important part of my morning routine is reading the daily comic strips. When I say important, I mean it. My father introduced me to the comics when I was very young. He enjoyed laughing at the corny puns and following the exploits of ongoing strips like Pogo, Bloom County, and the beautifully drawn Prince Valiant. I don’t get the paper delivered, not because I don’t want to follow the news (although lately…) but because I’ve never lived in a place where they could get it to my house before I left for work, and coming how to last night’s news at 7PM seemed silly, even before the ‘Net become a big deal.

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Getting Over Gwen Stacy

Forty-two years later, I still haven’t gotten over the death of Gwen Stacy. Gwen Stacy died in Amazing Spider-Man #122, cover dated July 1973. In 1973 comics were dated 2 or 3 months in advance, so that issue hit the newsstands sometime in April or May 1973. The event actually spans issues #121 and #122, but it’s in the first few pages of #122 that we see she is really dead.

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How to Not Be Happy and Share It Far and Wide

Check out this comic. If you click on the image below, the entire strip will show up on the original site. You may have to click on it again to zoom in. (It will open in a new window.) This strip is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. SMBC is one of my favorite web comics. It’s aways different, usually funny, and sometimes very thought-provoking. The obvious metaphor here is for religion, and it is certainly apt.

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Making it Hard for Everyone

If you follow my twitter feed, you know that commuting from New Jersey to New York is terrible. Especially if you have the misfortune of needing to take the bus. There are a couple of reasons for this, the primary two being NJ Transit, which is simply a poorly run organization, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a decaying, trash-filled, cesspool, that is far too small for the amount of traffic it fails to accommodate every day.

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Heroes, Actions, and Consequences

This is a long video. With today’s online audience, a 12 minute YouTube might as well be 90 minutes. But it’s worth watching; especially if you are a storyteller. I have a problem with my NaNoWriMo project, and this video is helping me figure out a solution. One that I think will improve the novel. My heroes have secrets. These secrets are unveiled as the story progresses, which makes my heroes poor choices for my point-of-view (POV) characters.

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Short Story: Mixed Results

This is a story I submitted for a contest at thefirstline.com. It was rejected. With the research and writing I have been involved in for my first novel, this topic jumped right out at me when I read the first line, for obvious reasons. “Unfortunately, there is no mistake,” she said, closing the file. “You have the rest of the day to gather your things Dr. Pflaum.” Johann was stunned.

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Happy Monday, August 29, 2016 Edition

It’s Monday! Tired? Sad to be back at work? Having a hard time picking up where you left off from last week, or maybe from before a vacation you just finished? No matter how bad your Monday is, I bet you’re not as confused as this guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ovLSiUu6A Do you know what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to do this. Pretty impressive, eh? Foxes are amazing little creatures. This would be a great place to mention what they sound like and insert another video, but I’m going to pass and just wish you a good week.

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Ransomware: Scary Stuff

In case you’re not already familiar with it, “ransomware” is software that installs itself on your computer, scrambles your files so you can’t use them anymore, and then holds them ransom until you send money to the ransomer. (Via bitcoin, so (s)he cannot be identified.) Depending on who “sent” the software, sending the money may not get control of your computer back for you; some of the attackers are just scammers and don’t bother.

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Ansible Tutorial

More Ansible! I wrote this one for Cprime last year, around the same time as the other Ansible post. Enjoy! Ansible is an automation tool for cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and other IT operations. You can use it for simple tasks, like deploying and configuring software releases, or for managing complicated multi-tier environments. Ansible doesn’t need agents and works with existing security infrastructure, so it’s easy to integrate into an existing network.

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How to Suck At Security, By Verizon

I switched to Verizon FIOS a couple of weeks ago. I live in the U.S, so I don’t have access to anything resembling a good Internet provider. This is because a central tenet of our form of capitalism is that utilities must be delivered by poorly run and weakly regulated monopolies. However I do live in area where I have a choice between a slowly dying cable company in the throes of denial (check out that 90s web design) and a company that only exists because the government won an antitrust suit and then let them ignore it.

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The Customer Must Always Be Fleeced

Last week I went online and agreed to pay a little more for faster Internet. There are three adults in the house, and we all make pretty regular use of the ‘net for a variety of activities, so it seemed worth another $15 a month for a 50% faster connection. We don’t have cable TV. My connection from Verizon is an ethernet connection, not cable. So this should have consisted entirely of my checking a box indicating that I want to pay more, followed by something in one of their data centers telling something in my house to operate at a faster speed.

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The Spring Feature Toggle: Your Guide to Getting Started Quickly

This is a post I wrote for Rollout, a tech company that has a system for managing feature toggles in enterprise applications. The original post is here. When it comes to agile development and “moving fast and breaking stuff,” many people think of REST APIs. Decomposing services into manageable building blocks with clearly defined interfaces is a good step in designing any large system. Even if one doesn’t necessarily wish to be “agile,” REST microservices are an effective design pattern.

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Docker Tutorial: Get Going From Scratch

This is a post I wrote for Stackify a while back. You can find the original here. Docker is one of the most exciting technologies I’ve seen in a long time. I enjoy working with it. Docker is a platform for packaging, deploying, and running applications. Docker applications run in containers that can be used on any system: a developer’s laptop, systems on premises, or in the cloud. Containerization is a technology that’s been around for a long time, but it’s seen new life with Docker.

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Getting Started With the Swift iOS Feature Flag

This is another post I wrote for the Rollout blog. You can find the original right here. This post was a lot of fun to write since I hadn’t done any IOS development in a few years. Mobile users expect more. They want their applications to be as stable as yesterday while looking and acting more and more like tomorrow. How do you keep up? How can you reliably test and push new features without risking a disastrous release?

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Python Test Automation

Here’s a post I wrote for TestIm a while back. It’s more of a listicle than a tutorial, but looking into Python tools I wasn’t already familiar with was fun. A few weeks ago, we talked about automating tests. Now it’s time to take a look at six of the best Python test automation tools. The good news is that the Python standard library already includes excellent unit testing tools. You can go a long way toward setting up robust test automation using the language’s built-in capabilities.

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Ansible Tutorial

More Ansible! I wrote this one for Cprime last year, around the same time as the other Ansible post. Enjoy! Ansible is an automation tool for cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and other IT operations. You can use it for simple tasks, like deploying and configuring software releases, or for managing complicated multi-tier environments. Ansible doesn’t need agents and works with existing security infrastructure, so it’s easy to integrate into an existing network.

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Crosspost: Using Ansible for Configuration Management

I wrote this for Sensu last year. I had just finished a very large project with Ansible and loved working with it. So naturally the next gig required Salt…. Ansible is a powerful configuration management tool for deploying software and administering remote systems that you can integrate into any existing architecture. It relies on industry-standard security mechanisms and takes full advantage of existing operating system utilities. Ansible uses no agents and works with your existing security infrastructure.

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Lovecraft in Anime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjSnFPKAEA4 I enjoy Lovecraft. “The Dunwich Horror” was the one of first written story that ever really scared me. I think “The Witches of Worm” may have been the actual first, but I read them pretty close together in elementary school. The Cthulhu Mythos shows up in a lot of places. My favorite Robert E. Howard stories have always been about King Kull, rather than Conan because Kull tended to run into “foul necromancer” that were mucking about with Cthulhu and the gang more than Conan ever did.

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Jan 21 2020

Back to work after a long weekend. My new folding bike arrived yesterday (which is sad, because UPS drivers had to work on a holiday that too many companies don’t take seriously.) I unpacked it and put it together (which consisted of putting in the seat post and filling the tires) and tried it out. It felt great! I made the plunge and ordered this bike after getting tired of not being able to find a spot to park a Citibike at one end of my commute or the other.

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Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Going forward I’ll be posting daily post on days that are mildly interesting for one reason or another, such as a bike ride. There as much for me as for you, and I won’t be blasting these out to subscribers. Today I got up a little early and took a ride over to Piermont, NY, one of mt favorite cycling destinations when I only have an hour or so to ride.

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Pandemic Life and the Slow Burn

I could hear the birds outside while I was meditating this morning. That means Spring is here. I want to go for a bicycle ride instead of working out in the basement and enjoy the sunrise on the road. But I can’t. I need to cut the workout short, get showered, grab my mask and gloves, and go wait on line in front of the supermarket. This is life during the pandemic.

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Inevitable Coronavirus Post

Two weeks ago I took my wife to the emergency room. She’s better now, but that led to two and a half days in the hospital and five days (three working from home) to take care of her. I went to the office for a single day of work, and haven’t been back since. (She's fine now.) This, combined with the background of potential war with Iran (remember that?) and impeachment (wait, wasn’t that the 90’s?

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Feb 24 2020

“Were you an athlete?” That’s not a question I ever wanted to hear, but I did. I went to the DEXA Scan today knowing that I’m in bad shape. The idea was to get an idea of how much. I also wanted to know, once and for all, if there was a reason why I’ve never been able to get what the averages say is a “healthy” weight. The scan itself is pretty easy.

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Jan 24 2020

This shadowy pot holds today’s lunch. It may also make it to tomorrow’s lunch, depending on whether or not the rest of the family finishes it tonight. My last concoction, which was similar to this one, only lasted through one serving for lunch and then dinner. Any soup with sausage in it goes quickly. I’m not usually a TGIF kinda guy, but TGIF. Bis morgen!

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Jan 23 2020

Back to work today! Yesterday was a nice break. Even though it was fast on the heels of a long weekend, a day off in the middle of the week always feels special. I managed to get some writing done. Looking forward to sharing some stories about Martians and more importantly, how people react when they arrive. Isn’t this delightfully creepy? It’s from the classic illustrations by Henrique Alvim Corrêa.

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Jan 21 2020

Back to work after a long weekend. My new folding bike arrived yesterday (which is sad, because UPS drivers had to work on a holiday that too many companies don’t take seriously.) I unpacked it and put it together (which consisted of putting in the seat post and filling the tires) and tried it out. It felt great! I made the plunge and ordered this bike after getting tired of not being able to find a spot to park a Citibike at one end of my commute or the other.

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Sunday January 19, 2020

It’s a lazy Sunday that’s perched right in the middle of a lazy three-day weekend. We got a little bit of snow yesterday, but even that only provided about a half-hour of entertainment when it came to shovelling. Today I’ll need to make up for a week being the on-call engineer. When that happens I often see an assortment of nighttime interruptions that made it difficult to write and keep me up late enough that I want to go to bed early if are no calls.

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Friday, January 17, 2020

It’s 5:30AM as I’m start this post. The wind sounds like a freight train passing the house and my cell phone tells me it’s 25 degrees outside. Has Old Man Winter finally returned? There’s even word of snow this weekend! The return of cold weather is oddly comforting given what’s happening around the world, even if it means freezing my delicate tuchis off riding the bike from the ferry to the office.

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Thursday, January 16, 2020

It’s another dreary morning, part of what seems like an endless series of dreary mornings. There’s allegedly some sun coming. Allegedly. If we’re going to do this Winter thing, let’s do it. Bring on the cold temperatures and the snow! Got a little bit of work done on Great War of thew Worlds last night! Have a less dreary day. Bis morgen!

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Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Good morning! I bought this poster from the multi-talented Yale Stewart. It sold out in a few hours, but I bet you can find something else you like over there. I’ve been working on the Great War of the Worlds in earnest since the holidays. I’ll be sharing an excerpt here real soon. One of the things that’s helped me make a lot of progress is the excellent Ambient music Warren Ellis shares from his blog.

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Getting Over Gwen Stacy

Forty-two years later, I still haven’t gotten over the death of Gwen Stacy. Gwen Stacy died in Amazing Spider-Man #122, cover dated July 1973. In 1973 comics were dated 2 or 3 months in advance, so that issue hit the newsstands sometime in April or May 1973. The event actually spans issues #121 and #122, but it’s in the first few pages of #122 that we see she is really dead.

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Ways Characters Die In Shakespeare's Plays

As I continue to write more stories I am going to come to a point where I will need to kill a character. I’m posting this here so I can refer back to it in the future. Hat tip to Open Culture for sharing this.

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Monday Photo October 2, 2016

I’ve been playing with my camera again, and Mondays will be photos from now on. Here’s my derpy dog, Freya. That tongue. Click to get a ginormous version.

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Docker Tutorial: Get Going From Scratch

This is a post I wrote for Stackify a while back. You can find the original here. Docker is one of the most exciting technologies I’ve seen in a long time. I enjoy working with it. Docker is a platform for packaging, deploying, and running applications. Docker applications run in containers that can be used on any system: a developer’s laptop, systems on premises, or in the cloud. Containerization is a technology that’s been around for a long time, but it’s seen new life with Docker.

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Ate My Homework

Ever lose a really critical document? If you’ve ever used Word, the answer is probably yes. Especially if you’ve used Word on the Mac. I haven’t ever lost a document because I am pretty compulsive when it comes to backing documents up. My use of computers predates the availability of hard drives for home use, so a lack of trust in computers is pretty well-ingrained with me. I still managed to lose an extensive collection of movies and scanned comic book collection to a thunderstorm once, when the power outage destroyed a system that had “mirrored” hard drives.

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Rufus

Freya, not Rufus. I woke up feeling groggy and sluggish as I do during allergy season. June is late for allergy season, but all bets off this year regarding what happens when. I think it’s part of everything being great again. So Freya wakes up unusually bouncy and exuberant. Freya is a lazy dog. The laziest. Basset Hounds talk about her behind her back she’s so lazy. But not that morning.

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Dogs Ruin Everything

Still catching up after visitors last week, so the post for today is not ready. Enjoy this instead.

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Gone (Back) to the Dogs: Scent Workshop

It’s about 2 1/2 years since I started my self-imposed exile from dog training. There were a lot of reasons for my dropping out: mild burnout (if that’s possible), facing up to personal and logistical limitations, and discouragement about some of the people in the animal community, which is something I need to learn how to deal with. It’s one of the personal limitations I ran up against. I’ve done some substituting over the past year or so; but that’s different.

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Dogs Ruin Everything

Still catching up after visitors last week, so the post for today is not ready. Enjoy this instead.

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Lovecraft in Anime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjSnFPKAEA4 I enjoy Lovecraft. “The Dunwich Horror” was the one of first written story that ever really scared me. I think “The Witches of Worm” may have been the actual first, but I read them pretty close together in elementary school. The Cthulhu Mythos shows up in a lot of places. My favorite Robert E. Howard stories have always been about King Kull, rather than Conan because Kull tended to run into “foul necromancer” that were mucking about with Cthulhu and the gang more than Conan ever did.

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Christopher Walken Reads Edgar Allan Poe

2017 is gonna be weird. Let’s get started on the right foot, shall we? Poe is a favorite of mine, dating back to an assigned reading of The Telltale Heart in middle school. It’s easy to imagine Poe being read aloud with an accent, maybe a slightly British one, even though he is a distinctly American author. Or maybe that pompous twang that William F. Buckley had. He’s hip again, now that conservatives have gone extinct and been replaced with kleptocrats and whiny white bigots, hearing a New England snob reading some Poe might be comforting.

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Read Some History and Call Me in the Morning

The party out of power tends to run on the idea that things are terrible. The party in power tends to run on the idea that things are fine and only going to get better. These statements make sense. “Vote for me because I want the job” and “Vote for me because I want to keep the job” are not compelling campaign slogans. We’re at a strange place in history right now.

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Common Courtesy vs Strategy vs None of the Above

You arrive at the elevator bank at work. Several others are already waiting. It’s one of those banks with 3 or 4 doors on each side and call buttons placed in the middle of each wall. An elevator arrives near you as you approach. You know you’ll be getting off soon since your floor is near the bottom of the bank. Do you wait and let a few of the others on first, or scramble to get on as quickly as you can?

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A Visit to Ellis Island

A few weeks ago, Jürgen, a cousin from Germany, visited the U.S. with his wife, Annette. They were making their second extended visit to various Goebelbecker families around the country, that Jürgen found while he was researching his family tree. Jürgen is a research librarian at the University of Karlsruhe, a few kilometers from Liedolsheim. While he stayed with us we made a visit to Ellis Island. This was my first ever visit to the island.

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All Software Sucks, Eventually

My wife asked me to disable Amber Alerts on her phone. We get them very infrequently, and when we do, they’re always for something well outside of our area. I knew there was a setting for this because I had disabled it long ago on my phone. I also knew that it must have moved since Apple is always “improving” their software. So I used the search bar in settings.

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The Spring Feature Toggle: Your Guide to Getting Started Quickly

This is a post I wrote for Rollout, a tech company that has a system for managing feature toggles in enterprise applications. The original post is here. When it comes to agile development and “moving fast and breaking stuff,” many people think of REST APIs. Decomposing services into manageable building blocks with clearly defined interfaces is a good step in designing any large system. Even if one doesn’t necessarily wish to be “agile,” REST microservices are an effective design pattern.

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Getting Started With the Swift iOS Feature Flag

This is another post I wrote for the Rollout blog. You can find the original right here. This post was a lot of fun to write since I hadn’t done any IOS development in a few years. Mobile users expect more. They want their applications to be as stable as yesterday while looking and acting more and more like tomorrow. How do you keep up? How can you reliably test and push new features without risking a disastrous release?

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War Of The Worlds Flash Fiction

This week’s flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig is about Right vs. Wrong. I decided to kill two birds with one heat ray and made it a brief glimpse in the War of the Worlds-verse that I have been playing around with in a short story and a novel. In this world, the Martian attack in H.G. Wells’ landmark novel happened as he described it. But they didn’t just attack England, and as you might expect, the attacks change the course of history just a wee bit, so things are different when the Martians return to attack again.

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Not Today, Satan

This piece started out as an experiment in writing in the second person, and then sat in virtual mothballs until Chick Wendig posted his latest Flash Fiction contest. One of the titles seemed to fit after I edited it down a bit. It’s rough, but it helped me get back into fiction. I hope you enjoy! Not Today, Satan What was that sound? It sounded like someone in the kitchen. You lie still, afraid to move.

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The First Monarch Arrives

My wife, Dagmar, works hard on our garden. It’s beautiful and I need to get out of the chair and take some photos. One of her projects has been growing milkweed, favorite meal of the Monarch butterfly. It grew this year, and we have our first customer! I really need to get outside.

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Colossal Kaiju

Yeah, it’s a redundant title. You come up with these things five days a week. I love Kaiju. When I was a kid, WPIX-TV (channel 11) had “Chiller Theater,” which would run various “horror” movies, including kaiju like Godzilla on weekday afternoons. If the weather was bad, or if I was sick (which was frequent for a couple of years,) I would end up watching it. The Chiller intro was more frightening than the movie:

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Happy Monday, August 29, 2016 Edition

It’s Monday! Tired? Sad to be back at work? Having a hard time picking up where you left off from last week, or maybe from before a vacation you just finished? No matter how bad your Monday is, I bet you’re not as confused as this guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ovLSiUu6A Do you know what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to do this. Pretty impressive, eh? Foxes are amazing little creatures. This would be a great place to mention what they sound like and insert another video, but I’m going to pass and just wish you a good week.

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The Monster at the Door

Friday was a tough day, so we decided to treat ourselves to sushi. Home-delivered sushi of course, because it’s not really a treat if you can’t be lazy too, right? So we ordered from a local spot via Grubhub. While we were waiting, Freya became a little restless, so we let her “watch TV.” To Freya, “watching TV” means sitting at the front door and looking outside. Even though it was very cold, we opened the front door and let her sit in front of the glass storm door to watch for squirrels.

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Sunday January 19, 2020

It’s a lazy Sunday that’s perched right in the middle of a lazy three-day weekend. We got a little bit of snow yesterday, but even that only provided about a half-hour of entertainment when it came to shovelling. Today I’ll need to make up for a week being the on-call engineer. When that happens I often see an assortment of nighttime interruptions that made it difficult to write and keep me up late enough that I want to go to bed early if are no calls.

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She Didn't Know What to Say

Freya with a tummy ache Freya was sick a couple of Saturdays ago, so we called the vet and grabbed the first appointment we could get. It’s always tough when a pet is sick, but Freya is probably the most difficult of all of the dogs we’ve had. She’s the most fearful at the vet’s office and a tough dog to read at the same time. So, making a call on when it’s time to put her through the stress of a doctor visit is like trying to see colors in the dark.

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Monday Photo October 2, 2016

I’ve been playing with my camera again, and Mondays will be photos from now on. Here’s my derpy dog, Freya. That tongue. Click to get a ginormous version.

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Sixty Minutes Hate

In the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we experience a “Two Minutes Hate” with Winston Smith. Two Minutes Hate is a daily ritual in Oceania, the fictitious totalitarian state in Orwell’s novel. Citizens assemble in public places, are shown video of Oceania’s enemies, usually Emmanuel Goldstein—the enemy of the state, and must publicly display their hatred for two minutes. Every time I read the book I find it a harrowing scene primarily because of one sentence:

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Friday Tunes - New White Stripes?

Yes, you read that right. Third Man Records has released a compilation of acoustic music from Jack, and this track is on it. Enjoy!

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Friday Funny, September 9, 2016

Requires no introduction.

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Giving It All Away

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” – Eric Schmidt I finished Deep Work by Cal Newport last week and started The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains by Nick Carr over the weekend, so I’ve got the hows, whys, and wherefores of Facebook and Twitter on my mind. There’s a good chance I will be inflictingsharing some of these thoughts with you over the next few weeks.

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Happy Monday, September 5, 2016 Edition

Careful, this one has a lot of feels. Do you wish your town had a Bruno? I’d be worried about the traffic, our town has a busy main street that’s treacherous enough for people. Happy Labor Day!

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Friday Tunes: St. Cajetan by Cracker

I’ve decided Fridays will be for music videos. Since it’s my blog, that’s how it will be. This is one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands. The sound quality is a little low, but it’s worth it to hear to a live version. Cracker is a country band that was lumped into grunge and “post-punk” in the early 90s, partly because of their link to Camper Van Beethoven and partly because the people that used to control music publishing like to put things into neat little containers.

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Happy Monday, August 29, 2016 Edition

It’s Monday! Tired? Sad to be back at work? Having a hard time picking up where you left off from last week, or maybe from before a vacation you just finished? No matter how bad your Monday is, I bet you’re not as confused as this guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ovLSiUu6A Do you know what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to do this. Pretty impressive, eh? Foxes are amazing little creatures. This would be a great place to mention what they sound like and insert another video, but I’m going to pass and just wish you a good week.

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Voodoo Child (Slight Return) as You've Never Heard It

This week Friday’s post comes on Saturday. I apologize for being late…but this should help make up for it.

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Friday Funny, September 9, 2016

Requires no introduction.

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Colossal Kaiju

Yeah, it’s a redundant title. You come up with these things five days a week. I love Kaiju. When I was a kid, WPIX-TV (channel 11) had “Chiller Theater,” which would run various “horror” movies, including kaiju like Godzilla on weekday afternoons. If the weather was bad, or if I was sick (which was frequent for a couple of years,) I would end up watching it. The Chiller intro was more frightening than the movie:

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Colossal Kaiju

Yeah, it’s a redundant title. You come up with these things five days a week. I love Kaiju. When I was a kid, WPIX-TV (channel 11) had “Chiller Theater,” which would run various “horror” movies, including kaiju like Godzilla on weekday afternoons. If the weather was bad, or if I was sick (which was frequent for a couple of years,) I would end up watching it. The Chiller intro was more frightening than the movie:

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World's Oldest Piano (and an update)

Even with having posted a story yesterday, I would like to get back to posting something every Wednesday. First, have a listen to the world’s oldest piano: I came across this video on Open Culture, still one of my favorite sites. And then, for good measure, check this out: I saw it on Twisted Sifter. I’ve been taking the IAABC writing mentorship with Eileen Anderson. I’ve learned a great deal from it, and it is at least partially responsible for the stories I published here this week and last, as well as some other material that I will be submitting to websites and/or journals soon.

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Colossal Kaiju

Yeah, it’s a redundant title. You come up with these things five days a week. I love Kaiju. When I was a kid, WPIX-TV (channel 11) had “Chiller Theater,” which would run various “horror” movies, including kaiju like Godzilla on weekday afternoons. If the weather was bad, or if I was sick (which was frequent for a couple of years,) I would end up watching it. The Chiller intro was more frightening than the movie:

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Friday Funny, September 9, 2016

Requires no introduction.

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Friday Tunes: Chicken Sonata

Subject says it all. The chicken’s playing has not been altered at all: only accompaniment was added.

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It's the Duty of Every Good Citizen of Gotham City

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Friday Music: Grand or Graham Central

I shared a great picture of Grand Central Station on Wednesday. Let’s make it a theme! This video was made with yarn and lights, not computer animation! There are some details on the Vimeo page. I have to confess, though, I’d like to see that done with “Graham Central.” Have a good weekend!

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Friday Music: Grand or Graham Central

I shared a great picture of Grand Central Station on Wednesday. Let’s make it a theme! This video was made with yarn and lights, not computer animation! There are some details on the Vimeo page. I have to confess, though, I’d like to see that done with “Graham Central.” Have a good weekend!

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Monday Miso

What could I possibly add to the greatest TV commercial ever made? Actually, I can add one thing: I launched a new blog, Puttering About, over the weekend. It will be a place for me to write articles and tutorials about various technology topics. Take a look!

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How to Not Be Happy and Share It Far and Wide

Check out this comic. If you click on the image below, the entire strip will show up on the original site. You may have to click on it again to zoom in. (It will open in a new window.) This strip is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. SMBC is one of my favorite web comics. It’s aways different, usually funny, and sometimes very thought-provoking. The obvious metaphor here is for religion, and it is certainly apt.

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Tears In The Rain

Is that real? The arrival of Blade Runner in 1982 was a seminal moment for me. Harrison Ford, fresh from Raiders of the Lost Ark and still frozen in carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back was starring in a movie based on a story from one of my favorite authors, Philip K. Dick. There are some critical differences between the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the movie Blade Runner but this still is, and will always be, one of the best adaptations from book to film ever made.

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Thoughts On The Night Of Finale

Stone and Naz I watched the series finale of “The Night Of” prepared to be disappointed. If you’re not familiar with this HBO series, you might as well just stop here. Not only is this post written with someone who has already watched the miniseries in mind, but it’s also packed wth spoilers too. Caveat emptor. “The Night Of” was billed as a look at the criminal justice system from a suspect’s point of view, and for much of the beginning, that’s what it was.

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Lovecraft in Anime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjSnFPKAEA4 I enjoy Lovecraft. “The Dunwich Horror” was the one of first written story that ever really scared me. I think “The Witches of Worm” may have been the actual first, but I read them pretty close together in elementary school. The Cthulhu Mythos shows up in a lot of places. My favorite Robert E. Howard stories have always been about King Kull, rather than Conan because Kull tended to run into “foul necromancer” that were mucking about with Cthulhu and the gang more than Conan ever did.

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Voodoo Child (Slight Return) as You've Never Heard It

This week Friday’s post comes on Saturday. I apologize for being late…but this should help make up for it.

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Here Comes NanoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month 2016 (NaNoWriMo) is almost here. If you’re not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it means what it says; write a novel in a month. “Writing a novel” means a 50,000-word first draft, but the criteria for success is up to the participant. I am participating for the first time this year. I’ve decided to set my ongoing project, the book about my grandfather, and work on a fantasy novel that’s been banging around in the back of my mind for a couple of years.

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Heroes, Actions, and Consequences

This is a long video. With today’s online audience, a 12 minute YouTube might as well be 90 minutes. But it’s worth watching; especially if you are a storyteller. I have a problem with my NaNoWriMo project, and this video is helping me figure out a solution. One that I think will improve the novel. My heroes have secrets. These secrets are unveiled as the story progresses, which makes my heroes poor choices for my point-of-view (POV) characters.

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The Customer Must Always Be Fleeced

Last week I went online and agreed to pay a little more for faster Internet. There are three adults in the house, and we all make pretty regular use of the ‘net for a variety of activities, so it seemed worth another $15 a month for a 50% faster connection. We don’t have cable TV. My connection from Verizon is an ethernet connection, not cable. So this should have consisted entirely of my checking a box indicating that I want to pay more, followed by something in one of their data centers telling something in my house to operate at a faster speed.

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Stabs In the Back and Big Lies

By the end of September 1918, the Germans were beaten. Earlier that year Chief-of-Staff Erich Ludendorff commanded the “Kaiserschlacht” offensive that briefly seemed to turn the tide, but the Germans lacked the resources to support the effort. Ludendorff himself told the Kaiser and Germany’s Chancellor to ask for a ceasefire on September 29th. But the myth that Germany’s civilian leaders betrayed their military started to spread before the Treaty of Versailles was completed.

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On Use of the Word "Nazi"

Writing my grandfather’s story is going to mean writing about the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920’s. The word “Nazi” is loaded — for good reason. It’s what call the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP.) The Nazis are responsible for the murder of over 6 million Jews, a war that killed another 50 to 80 million people, and shaped the world in ways that still affect us today.

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The Battle of the Somme - Starting My Research

I wrote a few weeks back about my grandfather and his experience in World War I on the Somme. There’s more to my grandfather’s story: quite a bit more. I’ve been engaged in quite a bit of research and plan on writing a book. I’ll be posting bits and pieces here as I go along. This week is a couple of Youtube videos with footage from the Somme. It’s not much.

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Read Some History and Call Me in the Morning

The party out of power tends to run on the idea that things are terrible. The party in power tends to run on the idea that things are fine and only going to get better. These statements make sense. “Vote for me because I want the job” and “Vote for me because I want to keep the job” are not compelling campaign slogans. We’re at a strange place in history right now.

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How Do You Keep a Reader in Suspense?

I’ll tell you next week. Open Culture posted a few articles about Alfred Hitchcock a couple of weeks back. This one discusses how the master of suspense did his suspense-mastering. The “ticking clock” is obviously how it’s done, but it’s interesting to hear Hitchcock talk about making sure the bomb never goes off. Interesting enough that my contrarian side, always a source of trouble, immediately wanted to go set a clock off.

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How Do You Keep a Reader in Suspense?

I’ll tell you next week. Open Culture posted a few articles about Alfred Hitchcock a couple of weeks back. This one discusses how the master of suspense did his suspense-mastering. The “ticking clock” is obviously how it’s done, but it’s interesting to hear Hitchcock talk about making sure the bomb never goes off. Interesting enough that my contrarian side, always a source of trouble, immediately wanted to go set a clock off.

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Is Civil Disobedience (still) Effective?

Everything old is new again. From the video description on Youtube: “In November 1970, after my arrest along with others who had engaged in a Boston protest at an army base to block soldiers from being sent to Vietnam, I flew to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to take part in a debate with the philosopher Charles Frankel on civil disobedience. I was supposed to appear in court that day in connection with the charges resulting from the army base protest.

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Developing a Last.fm shortcode for Hugo

I moved this blog to Hugo from Ghost over the holidays. This was after about a year of dissatisfaction with (very expensive) hosted Ghost, after many years on WordPress. While Hugo has fewer bells and whistles, it suits my purposes perfectly. I can write in Markdown, which I prefer over any other format. Ghost claims to support Markdown, but you can only input Markdown to its editor. You can’t see it.

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Hummingbird

Wish I had been closer to the window. Not much to add to this, really.

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High Speed Hummingbird Video

Every year my wife hangs out our hummingbird feeders, hoping that at least one decides to hang out near our yard. Most years we’re lucky and we see a couple, and if I am really lucky I even get a few photos. As a matter of fact, I just ordered a new lens for taking photos of birds around the neighborhood. But I’ve never caught anything like this:

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Friday NaNoWriMo Filler

Still working on making it to 50k this month. Enjoy this in the meantime.

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A Visit to Ellis Island

A few weeks ago, Jürgen, a cousin from Germany, visited the U.S. with his wife, Annette. They were making their second extended visit to various Goebelbecker families around the country, that Jürgen found while he was researching his family tree. Jürgen is a research librarian at the University of Karlsruhe, a few kilometers from Liedolsheim. While he stayed with us we made a visit to Ellis Island. This was my first ever visit to the island.

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Scummy Marketing

I’m sure you’ve seen them. The ads for the online “information products.” I wish I could say I’m surprised to see the writing community filled with this stuff, but I’m not. I’ve been around the ‘Net long enough to know that all communities have them. Pages and page of copy, filled with elaborate descriptions of the problems that the product addresses and specific descriptions of what the product actually provides you… somewhere on the next page maybe.

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And Then It Made Me Sad

I went to the mall last Friday. Just going to the mall makes me sad, but this time something else happened that made me even sadder. I had to get the screen on my (crappy) iPhone repaired. To give you an idea of how mall-averse I am, it had been broken since October. When I arrived, I parked as close as I could to the door nearest the Apple Store, in order to minimize my exposure to mall.

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Friday Tunes - New White Stripes?

Yes, you read that right. Third Man Records has released a compilation of acoustic music from Jack, and this track is on it. Enjoy!

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Monday Miso Redux

Cute, but James Brown was better.

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Monday Miso

What could I possibly add to the greatest TV commercial ever made? Actually, I can add one thing: I launched a new blog, Puttering About, over the weekend. It will be a place for me to write articles and tutorials about various technology topics. Take a look!

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Java 12 Switch Expressions

Oracle will release Java 12 in March and it comes with a handful of new features. I’m going to cover them in the next few posts. We’ll start this week with switch expressions. I’ll take a look at how they change how you’ll use the language. A Basic Class Let’s start with a simple car class. public class Car { public enum Model { Standard, Deluxe, Limited } private final Model model; public Car(Model model) { this.

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Java 12 Switch Expressions

Oracle will release Java 12 in March and it comes with a handful of new features. I’m going to cover them in the next few posts. We’ll start this week with switch expressions. I’ll take a look at how they change how you’ll use the language. A Basic Class Let’s start with a simple car class. public class Car { public enum Model { Standard, Deluxe, Limited } private final Model model; public Car(Model model) { this.

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Developing a Last.fm shortcode for Hugo

I moved this blog to Hugo from Ghost over the holidays. This was after about a year of dissatisfaction with (very expensive) hosted Ghost, after many years on WordPress. While Hugo has fewer bells and whistles, it suits my purposes perfectly. I can write in Markdown, which I prefer over any other format. Ghost claims to support Markdown, but you can only input Markdown to its editor. You can’t see it.

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Common Courtesy vs Strategy vs None of the Above

You arrive at the elevator bank at work. Several others are already waiting. It’s one of those banks with 3 or 4 doors on each side and call buttons placed in the middle of each wall. An elevator arrives near you as you approach. You know you’ll be getting off soon since your floor is near the bottom of the bank. Do you wait and let a few of the others on first, or scramble to get on as quickly as you can?

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Domo Arigato, Dick Tracy

An important part of my morning routine is reading the daily comic strips. When I say important, I mean it. My father introduced me to the comics when I was very young. He enjoyed laughing at the corny puns and following the exploits of ongoing strips like Pogo, Bloom County, and the beautifully drawn Prince Valiant. I don’t get the paper delivered, not because I don’t want to follow the news (although lately…) but because I’ve never lived in a place where they could get it to my house before I left for work, and coming how to last night’s news at 7PM seemed silly, even before the ‘Net become a big deal.

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Here Comes NanoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month 2016 (NaNoWriMo) is almost here. If you’re not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it means what it says; write a novel in a month. “Writing a novel” means a 50,000-word first draft, but the criteria for success is up to the participant. I am participating for the first time this year. I’ve decided to set my ongoing project, the book about my grandfather, and work on a fantasy novel that’s been banging around in the back of my mind for a couple of years.

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Friday Argument

A Monty Python classic, hilariously reenacted. This, along with Death of Mary Queen of Scots were favorites when I was kid. Enjoy!

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It's the Duty of Every Good Citizen of Gotham City

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Friday NaNoWriMo Filler

Still working on making it to 50k this month. Enjoy this in the meantime.

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The Last of the Rhinos

If you pay attention to nature in the news, you are familiar with the plight of rhinoceroses in the wild. It’s sad, and it’s infuriating. Full version, with a content warning.

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Developing a Last.fm shortcode for Hugo

I moved this blog to Hugo from Ghost over the holidays. This was after about a year of dissatisfaction with (very expensive) hosted Ghost, after many years on WordPress. While Hugo has fewer bells and whistles, it suits my purposes perfectly. I can write in Markdown, which I prefer over any other format. Ghost claims to support Markdown, but you can only input Markdown to its editor. You can’t see it.

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Rufus

Freya, not Rufus. I woke up feeling groggy and sluggish as I do during allergy season. June is late for allergy season, but all bets off this year regarding what happens when. I think it’s part of everything being great again. So Freya wakes up unusually bouncy and exuberant. Freya is a lazy dog. The laziest. Basset Hounds talk about her behind her back she’s so lazy. But not that morning.

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Scummy Marketing

I’m sure you’ve seen them. The ads for the online “information products.” I wish I could say I’m surprised to see the writing community filled with this stuff, but I’m not. I’ve been around the ‘Net long enough to know that all communities have them. Pages and page of copy, filled with elaborate descriptions of the problems that the product addresses and specific descriptions of what the product actually provides you… somewhere on the next page maybe.

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We Are Not Alone

The questions of whether or not other animals are sentient, and what “sentience” really means, have been with us for a long time. I spent a lot of time reading studying animal behavior, via independent reading, online courses, and classes. Most of this information doesn’t cross over into what consciousness is. When you focus on behavior, then you pretty much stick with inputs, outputs, and consequences. This constraint is a best practice; a critical technique when it comes to solving problems.

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Catch the Book Train

The New York Public Library has installed a “book train” system for delivering books to patrons. This replaces an older system in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building (the one with the lions) that consisted of boxes placed on a conveyor belt. I have a ticket for a event in October where they will unveil the new reading room. Hopefully I get to see this in action too!

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Liedolsheim Evangelical Church

For just about my entire life there’s been a picture of the church in Liedolsheim somewhere in the background. At our house, my grandparent’s, and both my aunt’s and uncle’s houses, and now mine: the picture above is in our living room, along with another I’m saving for a future post. As children we were all told about the Bible in the church that contained a record of the births of all of our family members, from when the French burnt the church down right up to my father, the last one born before the family emigrated to the U.

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Research on Liedolsheim

My grandfather’s story starts in his home town, Liedolsheim, moves to France for World War I, and then returns to Liedolsheim until he is forced to leave before members of the NSDAP (Nazis) try to kill him. Again. So of course, writing about this involves a lot of research about Liedolsheim. Liedolsheim has always been present: pictures of the Village Church were always visible in my grandparent’s home, and I heard the name many times in my childhood.

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Thinking is Hard

Veritasium is another favorite Youtube channel of mine. Check this out. It’s long but well worth 12 minutes if you ever find yourself needing to use your brain for something more than a place to rest your hat. “You have to be willing to be uncomfortable,” Muller says. So what sounds like a quote from a self-help book has some scientific reasoning to it. The very act of slowing things down and focusing on them, makes our brain process them differently.

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Lovecraft in Anime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjSnFPKAEA4 I enjoy Lovecraft. “The Dunwich Horror” was the one of first written story that ever really scared me. I think “The Witches of Worm” may have been the actual first, but I read them pretty close together in elementary school. The Cthulhu Mythos shows up in a lot of places. My favorite Robert E. Howard stories have always been about King Kull, rather than Conan because Kull tended to run into “foul necromancer” that were mucking about with Cthulhu and the gang more than Conan ever did.

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Making it Hard for Everyone

If you follow my twitter feed, you know that commuting from New Jersey to New York is terrible. Especially if you have the misfortune of needing to take the bus. There are a couple of reasons for this, the primary two being NJ Transit, which is simply a poorly run organization, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a decaying, trash-filled, cesspool, that is far too small for the amount of traffic it fails to accommodate every day.

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And Then It Made Me Sad

I went to the mall last Friday. Just going to the mall makes me sad, but this time something else happened that made me even sadder. I had to get the screen on my (crappy) iPhone repaired. To give you an idea of how mall-averse I am, it had been broken since October. When I arrived, I parked as close as I could to the door nearest the Apple Store, in order to minimize my exposure to mall.

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On Not Being Funny Anymore

In case you’ve been under a rock for the past 36 hours or so, Donald Trump has won his second primary. This blog is not about politics. It’s supposed to be about my writing. But current events have taken an eerie, and actually quite frightening, parallel trajectory to my most important writing project. When I was very young my father told me a story about my grandfather. In the late 1920’s, before he brought his family to the United States, my grandfather opposed the NSDAP (the Nazi party) in an election.

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Ways Characters Die In Shakespeare's Plays

As I continue to write more stories I am going to come to a point where I will need to kill a character. I’m posting this here so I can refer back to it in the future. Hat tip to Open Culture for sharing this.

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All Software Sucks, Eventually

My wife asked me to disable Amber Alerts on her phone. We get them very infrequently, and when we do, they’re always for something well outside of our area. I knew there was a setting for this because I had disabled it long ago on my phone. I also knew that it must have moved since Apple is always “improving” their software. So I used the search bar in settings.

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An I-Didn't-Write-A-Post Post

What happens when you decided to work on the house and spend time with the family over the long weekend? This.

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Friday Argument

A Monty Python classic, hilariously reenacted. This, along with Death of Mary Queen of Scots were favorites when I was kid. Enjoy!

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Noisy Neighborhood

This neighborhood can get pretty loud in the morning.

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Monday and Stuff

I think one of the worst aspects of Daylight Savings Time is all of the stories about how bad it is and how everyone hates it. If only we could do something… Been busy putting things together for Camp NaNoWriMo and so forth. Are any of my writer friends participating? Is everyone on the East Coast ready for the latest Snowmageddon? I’ll have more of a post tomorrow.

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Happy Monday, September 5, 2016 Edition

Careful, this one has a lot of feels. Do you wish your town had a Bruno? I’d be worried about the traffic, our town has a busy main street that’s treacherous enough for people. Happy Labor Day!

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Monday Miso Redux

Cute, but James Brown was better.

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Monday Miso

What could I possibly add to the greatest TV commercial ever made? Actually, I can add one thing: I launched a new blog, Puttering About, over the weekend. It will be a place for me to write articles and tutorials about various technology topics. Take a look!

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Monday Miso Redux

Cute, but James Brown was better.

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Happy Monday, August 29, 2016 Edition

It’s Monday! Tired? Sad to be back at work? Having a hard time picking up where you left off from last week, or maybe from before a vacation you just finished? No matter how bad your Monday is, I bet you’re not as confused as this guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ovLSiUu6A Do you know what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to do this. Pretty impressive, eh? Foxes are amazing little creatures. This would be a great place to mention what they sound like and insert another video, but I’m going to pass and just wish you a good week.

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The Customer Must Always Be Fleeced

Last week I went online and agreed to pay a little more for faster Internet. There are three adults in the house, and we all make pretty regular use of the ‘net for a variety of activities, so it seemed worth another $15 a month for a 50% faster connection. We don’t have cable TV. My connection from Verizon is an ethernet connection, not cable. So this should have consisted entirely of my checking a box indicating that I want to pay more, followed by something in one of their data centers telling something in my house to operate at a faster speed.

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Friday Argument

A Monty Python classic, hilariously reenacted. This, along with Death of Mary Queen of Scots were favorites when I was kid. Enjoy!

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Rufus

Freya, not Rufus. I woke up feeling groggy and sluggish as I do during allergy season. June is late for allergy season, but all bets off this year regarding what happens when. I think it’s part of everything being great again. So Freya wakes up unusually bouncy and exuberant. Freya is a lazy dog. The laziest. Basset Hounds talk about her behind her back she’s so lazy. But not that morning.

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Still Catching Up

Still catching up from being away a little over a week. Not coming back seems like a better option with each passing minute. But it is a Friday, which should mean good music. Enjoy some Dead Weather.

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Voodoo Child (Slight Return) as You've Never Heard It

This week Friday’s post comes on Saturday. I apologize for being late…but this should help make up for it.

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Friday Music: Grand or Graham Central

I shared a great picture of Grand Central Station on Wednesday. Let’s make it a theme! This video was made with yarn and lights, not computer animation! There are some details on the Vimeo page. I have to confess, though, I’d like to see that done with “Graham Central.” Have a good weekend!

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Monday and Stuff

I think one of the worst aspects of Daylight Savings Time is all of the stories about how bad it is and how everyone hates it. If only we could do something… Been busy putting things together for Camp NaNoWriMo and so forth. Are any of my writer friends participating? Is everyone on the East Coast ready for the latest Snowmageddon? I’ll have more of a post tomorrow.

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Here Comes NanoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month 2016 (NaNoWriMo) is almost here. If you’re not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it means what it says; write a novel in a month. “Writing a novel” means a 50,000-word first draft, but the criteria for success is up to the participant. I am participating for the first time this year. I’ve decided to set my ongoing project, the book about my grandfather, and work on a fantasy novel that’s been banging around in the back of my mind for a couple of years.

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Happy (Belated) Monday September 12 (13th), 2016

This is 24 hours late. Apologies. It’s time for National Geographic’s Nature Photographer of the Year Contest for 2016. They started accepting entries in August, and will until November 4. National Geographics is making all of the entries available for viewing online as they are submitted. There are already some amazing shots in there. Here’s a few that caught my eye. Check out the contest for more.

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Noisy Neighborhood

This neighborhood can get pretty loud in the morning.

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The Last of the Rhinos

If you pay attention to nature in the news, you are familiar with the plight of rhinoceroses in the wild. It’s sad, and it’s infuriating. Full version, with a content warning.

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Happy (Belated) Monday September 12 (13th), 2016

This is 24 hours late. Apologies. It’s time for National Geographic’s Nature Photographer of the Year Contest for 2016. They started accepting entries in August, and will until November 4. National Geographics is making all of the entries available for viewing online as they are submitted. There are already some amazing shots in there. Here’s a few that caught my eye. Check out the contest for more.

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Noisy Neighborhood

This neighborhood can get pretty loud in the morning.

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New Blogging Schedule

What are friends for? ?? A post shared by 》MOLLY // LADY // & BOOMER《 (@mollythenewfie) on Mar 28, 2017 at 10:11am PDT Five days a week is too much, especially with Camp NaNoWriMo on the horizon. For the foreseeable future, I’ll be doing Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Have a consolation video in the meantime.

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A Visit to Ellis Island

A few weeks ago, Jürgen, a cousin from Germany, visited the U.S. with his wife, Annette. They were making their second extended visit to various Goebelbecker families around the country, that Jürgen found while he was researching his family tree. Jürgen is a research librarian at the University of Karlsruhe, a few kilometers from Liedolsheim. While he stayed with us we made a visit to Ellis Island. This was my first ever visit to the island.

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A Visit to Ellis Island

A few weeks ago, Jürgen, a cousin from Germany, visited the U.S. with his wife, Annette. They were making their second extended visit to various Goebelbecker families around the country, that Jürgen found while he was researching his family tree. Jürgen is a research librarian at the University of Karlsruhe, a few kilometers from Liedolsheim. While he stayed with us we made a visit to Ellis Island. This was my first ever visit to the island.

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Making it Hard for Everyone

If you follow my twitter feed, you know that commuting from New Jersey to New York is terrible. Especially if you have the misfortune of needing to take the bus. There are a couple of reasons for this, the primary two being NJ Transit, which is simply a poorly run organization, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a decaying, trash-filled, cesspool, that is far too small for the amount of traffic it fails to accommodate every day.

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Rufus

Freya, not Rufus. I woke up feeling groggy and sluggish as I do during allergy season. June is late for allergy season, but all bets off this year regarding what happens when. I think it’s part of everything being great again. So Freya wakes up unusually bouncy and exuberant. Freya is a lazy dog. The laziest. Basset Hounds talk about her behind her back she’s so lazy. But not that morning.

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The Power of White Noise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpW7iYfuGDU I have a lot of writing to do. When I need to buckle down and focus, the music is shut off, and I switch over to white noise/ ambient sounds. Which means I am using top-of-the-line noise-cancelling headphones to listen to background noise. Isn’t the 21st Century wonderful? The video above is one of my favorites. It’s part of the Relax Sleep ASMR channel. .This is another favorite, from someone who seems to share my taste in movies and SciFi based on their Youtube username.

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Gone (Back) to the Dogs: Scent Workshop

It’s about 2 1/2 years since I started my self-imposed exile from dog training. There were a lot of reasons for my dropping out: mild burnout (if that’s possible), facing up to personal and logistical limitations, and discouragement about some of the people in the animal community, which is something I need to learn how to deal with. It’s one of the personal limitations I ran up against. I’ve done some substituting over the past year or so; but that’s different.

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Ate My Homework

Ever lose a really critical document? If you’ve ever used Word, the answer is probably yes. Especially if you’ve used Word on the Mac. I haven’t ever lost a document because I am pretty compulsive when it comes to backing documents up. My use of computers predates the availability of hard drives for home use, so a lack of trust in computers is pretty well-ingrained with me. I still managed to lose an extensive collection of movies and scanned comic book collection to a thunderstorm once, when the power outage destroyed a system that had “mirrored” hard drives.

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Here Comes NanoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month 2016 (NaNoWriMo) is almost here. If you’re not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it means what it says; write a novel in a month. “Writing a novel” means a 50,000-word first draft, but the criteria for success is up to the participant. I am participating for the first time this year. I’ve decided to set my ongoing project, the book about my grandfather, and work on a fantasy novel that’s been banging around in the back of my mind for a couple of years.

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Is Civil Disobedience (still) Effective?

Everything old is new again. From the video description on Youtube: “In November 1970, after my arrest along with others who had engaged in a Boston protest at an army base to block soldiers from being sent to Vietnam, I flew to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to take part in a debate with the philosopher Charles Frankel on civil disobedience. I was supposed to appear in court that day in connection with the charges resulting from the army base protest.

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Stabs In the Back and Big Lies

By the end of September 1918, the Germans were beaten. Earlier that year Chief-of-Staff Erich Ludendorff commanded the “Kaiserschlacht” offensive that briefly seemed to turn the tide, but the Germans lacked the resources to support the effort. Ludendorff himself told the Kaiser and Germany’s Chancellor to ask for a ceasefire on September 29th. But the myth that Germany’s civilian leaders betrayed their military started to spread before the Treaty of Versailles was completed.

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Pandemic Life and the Slow Burn

I could hear the birds outside while I was meditating this morning. That means Spring is here. I want to go for a bicycle ride instead of working out in the basement and enjoy the sunrise on the road. But I can’t. I need to cut the workout short, get showered, grab my mask and gloves, and go wait on line in front of the supermarket. This is life during the pandemic.

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Inevitable Coronavirus Post

Two weeks ago I took my wife to the emergency room. She’s better now, but that led to two and a half days in the hospital and five days (three working from home) to take care of her. I went to the office for a single day of work, and haven’t been back since. (She's fine now.) This, combined with the background of potential war with Iran (remember that?) and impeachment (wait, wasn’t that the 90’s?

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Tears In The Rain

Is that real? The arrival of Blade Runner in 1982 was a seminal moment for me. Harrison Ford, fresh from Raiders of the Lost Ark and still frozen in carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back was starring in a movie based on a story from one of my favorite authors, Philip K. Dick. There are some critical differences between the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the movie Blade Runner but this still is, and will always be, one of the best adaptations from book to film ever made.

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Monday Photo October 2, 2016

I’ve been playing with my camera again, and Mondays will be photos from now on. Here’s my derpy dog, Freya. That tongue. Click to get a ginormous version.

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Happy (Belated) Monday September 12 (13th), 2016

This is 24 hours late. Apologies. It’s time for National Geographic’s Nature Photographer of the Year Contest for 2016. They started accepting entries in August, and will until November 4. National Geographics is making all of the entries available for viewing online as they are submitted. There are already some amazing shots in there. Here’s a few that caught my eye. Check out the contest for more.

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Raspberry Pi: Programming the GPIO

So far, you’ve unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car. Then, you set it up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub so you could write Python code to control it via a web browser. Just before the holidays, I dug up my old post about reading a USB game controller and refreshed it, so you can use a gamepad to control the car after I go over how to control the motors.

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Black OR White

Ayn Rand’s name pops up in the political news at least a few times a year. Both Ron Paul and his son Rand have praised her philosophy and her books. House Speaker and Invertebrate-at-Large Paul Ryan has called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book, and it’s allegedly required reading for his staff. Swearing fealty to Ayn Rand is almost a prerequisite for elected office as a Republican. Outside of these circles, Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, has a reputation for being heartless and selfish.

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More Ransomware

On Monday I wrote about ransomware and how more and more instances of it have been surfacing over the past few years. Yesterday, this popped up on my radar. Scammers were exploiting a bug in IOS (iPhone and presumably iPad) Safari to make it appear as if a user’s device had been hijacked, and that they had to pay to get access back. The ransomware was installed on some porn sites.

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A Note About Privacy

It’s been a few years since I quit Facebook. I wasn’t alone. Many people left the site around the same time, and many more have left since. Quitting Facebook is cool now, which is a good thing. While many people have quit or cut back their social media use in order to improve their mental health, privacy was my primary reason. I feel that if the implicit bargain people make when they use Facebook as well as many other “free” services, was made explicit, folks would reject it.

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Giving It All Away

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” – Eric Schmidt I finished Deep Work by Cal Newport last week and started The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains by Nick Carr over the weekend, so I’ve got the hows, whys, and wherefores of Facebook and Twitter on my mind. There’s a good chance I will be inflictingsharing some of these thoughts with you over the next few weeks.

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Developing a Last.fm shortcode for Hugo

I moved this blog to Hugo from Ghost over the holidays. This was after about a year of dissatisfaction with (very expensive) hosted Ghost, after many years on WordPress. While Hugo has fewer bells and whistles, it suits my purposes perfectly. I can write in Markdown, which I prefer over any other format. Ghost claims to support Markdown, but you can only input Markdown to its editor. You can’t see it.

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Raspberry Pi: Programming the GPIO

So far, you’ve unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car. Then, you set it up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub so you could write Python code to control it via a web browser. Just before the holidays, I dug up my old post about reading a USB game controller and refreshed it, so you can use a gamepad to control the car after I go over how to control the motors.

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 1: Reading the Device

Last week I wrote up how to prepare the UCTRONICS robot I’ve been playing with for hacking.. This week, I’m taking a break to update an old tutorial from five years ago: how to use a gamepad to control a Raspberry Pi. This post has been around a few years, and I just found out that a bunch of images broke, so it’s time to update with a new Pi and easier-to-follow instructions.

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Hacking the UCTRONICS Robot Car: Prepping for Hacks

Last week I assembled a Raspberry Pi-based car kit. I bought the kit from Amazon. (Affiliate link.) The car has a live video camera, a sonic collision sensor, and a line-following sensor. You’ll need a Raspberry Pi to go with it. I recommend a 3 B+. The car works with an Android or iOS app, and the apps are functional enough, but where’s the fun in simply relying on them?

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 3: Adding a Gun Turret

Subtitling this one “Adding a Gun Turret” seems almost like click bait, doesn’t it? But yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing. One of Dexter Industries’ sample projects is attaching the Dream Cheeky Thunder Cannon to the GoPiGo. I’m going to show you how to control it with the same gamepad that also controls the robot’s movement. In part two of this series we connected the gamepad events to the GoPiGo movement commands.

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 2: Controlling the GoPiGo

Welcome to part 2 of my series on working with programming the GoPiGo and a Gamepad controller with Python. In part 1 I talked about what a gamepad “looks” like to a Raspberry Pi and how the excellent evdev package makes it easy to read and process information from it. I finished the post with a script that reads buttons on the gamepad and prints the direction it would send the GoPiGo in.

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Python Test Automation

Here’s a post I wrote for TestIm a while back. It’s more of a listicle than a tutorial, but looking into Python tools I wasn’t already familiar with was fun. A few weeks ago, we talked about automating tests. Now it’s time to take a look at six of the best Python test automation tools. The good news is that the Python standard library already includes excellent unit testing tools. You can go a long way toward setting up robust test automation using the language’s built-in capabilities.

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Raspberry Pi: Programming the GPIO

So far, you’ve unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car. Then, you set it up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub so you could write Python code to control it via a web browser. Just before the holidays, I dug up my old post about reading a USB game controller and refreshed it, so you can use a gamepad to control the car after I go over how to control the motors.

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 1: Reading the Device

Last week I wrote up how to prepare the UCTRONICS robot I’ve been playing with for hacking.. This week, I’m taking a break to update an old tutorial from five years ago: how to use a gamepad to control a Raspberry Pi. This post has been around a few years, and I just found out that a bunch of images broke, so it’s time to update with a new Pi and easier-to-follow instructions.

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Hacking the UCTRONICS Robot Car: Prepping for Hacks

Last week I assembled a Raspberry Pi-based car kit. I bought the kit from Amazon. (Affiliate link.) The car has a live video camera, a sonic collision sensor, and a line-following sensor. You’ll need a Raspberry Pi to go with it. I recommend a 3 B+. The car works with an Android or iOS app, and the apps are functional enough, but where’s the fun in simply relying on them?

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 3: Adding a Gun Turret

Subtitling this one “Adding a Gun Turret” seems almost like click bait, doesn’t it? But yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing. One of Dexter Industries’ sample projects is attaching the Dream Cheeky Thunder Cannon to the GoPiGo. I’m going to show you how to control it with the same gamepad that also controls the robot’s movement. In part two of this series we connected the gamepad events to the GoPiGo movement commands.

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 2: Controlling the GoPiGo

Welcome to part 2 of my series on working with programming the GoPiGo and a Gamepad controller with Python. In part 1 I talked about what a gamepad “looks” like to a Raspberry Pi and how the excellent evdev package makes it easy to read and process information from it. I finished the post with a script that reads buttons on the gamepad and prints the direction it would send the GoPiGo in.

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Any Country Of the World Today

The past few weeks have seen vandalism at Jewish cemeteries, bomb threats at Jewish community centers, and an administration that seemed to have problems remembering that the Holocaust involved killing Jews while also refusing to acknowledge the widespread increase of racially and religiously charged violence we have been experiencing since the election. If you’re not white, you need to be more careful than you were before November 8th. Are comparisons to post-World War I Germany off base, or are they appropriate?

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More Ransomware

On Monday I wrote about ransomware and how more and more instances of it have been surfacing over the past few years. Yesterday, this popped up on my radar. Scammers were exploiting a bug in IOS (iPhone and presumably iPad) Safari to make it appear as if a user’s device had been hijacked, and that they had to pay to get access back. The ransomware was installed on some porn sites.

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Ransomware: Scary Stuff

In case you’re not already familiar with it, “ransomware” is software that installs itself on your computer, scrambles your files so you can’t use them anymore, and then holds them ransom until you send money to the ransomer. (Via bitcoin, so (s)he cannot be identified.) Depending on who “sent” the software, sending the money may not get control of your computer back for you; some of the attackers are just scammers and don’t bother.

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How to Not Be Happy and Share It Far and Wide

Check out this comic. If you click on the image below, the entire strip will show up on the original site. You may have to click on it again to zoom in. (It will open in a new window.) This strip is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. SMBC is one of my favorite web comics. It’s aways different, usually funny, and sometimes very thought-provoking. The obvious metaphor here is for religion, and it is certainly apt.

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Research on Liedolsheim

My grandfather’s story starts in his home town, Liedolsheim, moves to France for World War I, and then returns to Liedolsheim until he is forced to leave before members of the NSDAP (Nazis) try to kill him. Again. So of course, writing about this involves a lot of research about Liedolsheim. Liedolsheim has always been present: pictures of the Village Church were always visible in my grandparent’s home, and I heard the name many times in my childhood.

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Review: Counterpart

This is a review of Counterpart, a TV series that premiered on Starz in late 2017 and was broadcast for two seasons. It’s available on Amazon Prime now. While I am not going to spoil specific plot points, I will ruin a few surprises and cover the general direction of the series. Proceed at your own risk if you haven’t seen it. Better yet, go see it! The best science fiction is about how people, society, and cultures, react to fictional science.

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Thoughts On The Night Of Finale

Stone and Naz I watched the series finale of “The Night Of” prepared to be disappointed. If you’re not familiar with this HBO series, you might as well just stop here. Not only is this post written with someone who has already watched the miniseries in mind, but it’s also packed wth spoilers too. Caveat emptor. “The Night Of” was billed as a look at the criminal justice system from a suspect’s point of view, and for much of the beginning, that’s what it was.

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Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Going forward I’ll be posting daily post on days that are mildly interesting for one reason or another, such as a bike ride. There as much for me as for you, and I won’t be blasting these out to subscribers. Today I got up a little early and took a ride over to Piermont, NY, one of mt favorite cycling destinations when I only have an hour or so to ride.

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Raspberry Pi: Programming the GPIO

So far, you’ve unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car. Then, you set it up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub so you could write Python code to control it via a web browser. Just before the holidays, I dug up my old post about reading a USB game controller and refreshed it, so you can use a gamepad to control the car after I go over how to control the motors.

Post

Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 1: Reading the Device

Last week I wrote up how to prepare the UCTRONICS robot I’ve been playing with for hacking.. This week, I’m taking a break to update an old tutorial from five years ago: how to use a gamepad to control a Raspberry Pi. This post has been around a few years, and I just found out that a bunch of images broke, so it’s time to update with a new Pi and easier-to-follow instructions.

Post

Hacking the UCTRONICS Robot Car: Prepping for Hacks

Last week I assembled a Raspberry Pi-based car kit. I bought the kit from Amazon. (Affiliate link.) The car has a live video camera, a sonic collision sensor, and a line-following sensor. You’ll need a Raspberry Pi to go with it. I recommend a 3 B+. The car works with an Android or iOS app, and the apps are functional enough, but where’s the fun in simply relying on them?

Post

Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 3: Adding a Gun Turret

Subtitling this one “Adding a Gun Turret” seems almost like click bait, doesn’t it? But yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing. One of Dexter Industries’ sample projects is attaching the Dream Cheeky Thunder Cannon to the GoPiGo. I’m going to show you how to control it with the same gamepad that also controls the robot’s movement. In part two of this series we connected the gamepad events to the GoPiGo movement commands.

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Raspberry Pi and Gamepad Programming Part 2: Controlling the GoPiGo

Welcome to part 2 of my series on working with programming the GoPiGo and a Gamepad controller with Python. In part 1 I talked about what a gamepad “looks” like to a Raspberry Pi and how the excellent evdev package makes it easy to read and process information from it. I finished the post with a script that reads buttons on the gamepad and prints the direction it would send the GoPiGo in.

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Getting Started With the Swift iOS Feature Flag

This is another post I wrote for the Rollout blog. You can find the original right here. This post was a lot of fun to write since I hadn’t done any IOS development in a few years. Mobile users expect more. They want their applications to be as stable as yesterday while looking and acting more and more like tomorrow. How do you keep up? How can you reliably test and push new features without risking a disastrous release?

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The Spring Feature Toggle: Your Guide to Getting Started Quickly

This is a post I wrote for Rollout, a tech company that has a system for managing feature toggles in enterprise applications. The original post is here. When it comes to agile development and “moving fast and breaking stuff,” many people think of REST APIs. Decomposing services into manageable building blocks with clearly defined interfaces is a good step in designing any large system. Even if one doesn’t necessarily wish to be “agile,” REST microservices are an effective design pattern.

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Any Country Of the World Today

The past few weeks have seen vandalism at Jewish cemeteries, bomb threats at Jewish community centers, and an administration that seemed to have problems remembering that the Holocaust involved killing Jews while also refusing to acknowledge the widespread increase of racially and religiously charged violence we have been experiencing since the election. If you’re not white, you need to be more careful than you were before November 8th. Are comparisons to post-World War I Germany off base, or are they appropriate?

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Rufus

Freya, not Rufus. I woke up feeling groggy and sluggish as I do during allergy season. June is late for allergy season, but all bets off this year regarding what happens when. I think it’s part of everything being great again. So Freya wakes up unusually bouncy and exuberant. Freya is a lazy dog. The laziest. Basset Hounds talk about her behind her back she’s so lazy. But not that morning.

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How Do You Keep a Reader in Suspense?

I’ll tell you next week. Open Culture posted a few articles about Alfred Hitchcock a couple of weeks back. This one discusses how the master of suspense did his suspense-mastering. The “ticking clock” is obviously how it’s done, but it’s interesting to hear Hitchcock talk about making sure the bomb never goes off. Interesting enough that my contrarian side, always a source of trouble, immediately wanted to go set a clock off.

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And Then It Made Me Sad

I went to the mall last Friday. Just going to the mall makes me sad, but this time something else happened that made me even sadder. I had to get the screen on my (crappy) iPhone repaired. To give you an idea of how mall-averse I am, it had been broken since October. When I arrived, I parked as close as I could to the door nearest the Apple Store, in order to minimize my exposure to mall.

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More Ransomware

On Monday I wrote about ransomware and how more and more instances of it have been surfacing over the past few years. Yesterday, this popped up on my radar. Scammers were exploiting a bug in IOS (iPhone and presumably iPad) Safari to make it appear as if a user’s device had been hijacked, and that they had to pay to get access back. The ransomware was installed on some porn sites.

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Gone (Back) to the Dogs: Scent Workshop

It’s about 2 1/2 years since I started my self-imposed exile from dog training. There were a lot of reasons for my dropping out: mild burnout (if that’s possible), facing up to personal and logistical limitations, and discouragement about some of the people in the animal community, which is something I need to learn how to deal with. It’s one of the personal limitations I ran up against. I’ve done some substituting over the past year or so; but that’s different.

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Monday Miso Redux

Cute, but James Brown was better.

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My Shoes Are Too Tight

“My shoes are too tight. But it doesn’t matter because I have forgotten how to dance.” I’m binge watching Babylon 5 on my commute, and this scene from the first season is one of the scenes that hooked me when the show first aired in 1994. Londo Mollari is the Centauri ambassador to Babylon 5, a space station that is a center for interplanetary trade and diplomacy. It was a series that broadcast at the cusp of TV’s renaissance, overlapping with Buffy the Vampire Slayer for two years, and The Sopranos for one.

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Your Personal Data Will Be Sold

(assuming it isn’t being sold already) Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that makes it possible for your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to save your Internet usage history and sell it or mine it for data to use for advertisements. By the time you read this, the President may have already signed it into law. There are a few aspects to this bill and the debate surrounding it that I find deeply upsetting.

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Scummy Marketing

I’m sure you’ve seen them. The ads for the online “information products.” I wish I could say I’m surprised to see the writing community filled with this stuff, but I’m not. I’ve been around the ‘Net long enough to know that all communities have them. Pages and page of copy, filled with elaborate descriptions of the problems that the product addresses and specific descriptions of what the product actually provides you… somewhere on the next page maybe.

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How To Protect Yourself From the Next Cambridge Analytica (Maybe)

So how about that Facebook thing, huh? How can you protect yourself? There are a couple of things you can do to prevent, or at least hamper, the next Cambridge Analytica. (Of course, the next 10 or 13 Cambridge Analyticas have already struck and already have your stuff, but you know what I mean.) Before I give you specific instructions, let’s go over a few points. Stop Calling It a “Breach” When this story broke Sunday (even though it’s really old news, but I digress) new readers repeatedly called it a “data breach,” while techie folks and most of the techie press kept correcting them.

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How to Suck At Security, By Verizon

I switched to Verizon FIOS a couple of weeks ago. I live in the U.S, so I don’t have access to anything resembling a good Internet provider. This is because a central tenet of our form of capitalism is that utilities must be delivered by poorly run and weakly regulated monopolies. However I do live in area where I have a choice between a slowly dying cable company in the throes of denial (check out that 90s web design) and a company that only exists because the government won an antitrust suit and then let them ignore it.

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The Culture of Interruption

You’re finally making some progress on that thing that you owe that person on that date. Maybe you’ve got headphones on with music that helps you focus, or maybe you prefer to work in total silence. You’ve been putting off this particularly complicated part of the thing, but now you’ve got a handle on it. And then your phone beeps with a text message. Or Facebook message. (Or facebook ‘like’ if you’re masochistic enough to let them notify you of those.

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How to Not Be Happy and Share It Far and Wide

Check out this comic. If you click on the image below, the entire strip will show up on the original site. You may have to click on it again to zoom in. (It will open in a new window.) This strip is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. SMBC is one of my favorite web comics. It’s aways different, usually funny, and sometimes very thought-provoking. The obvious metaphor here is for religion, and it is certainly apt.

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Crosspost: Using Ansible for Configuration Management

I wrote this for Sensu last year. I had just finished a very large project with Ansible and loved working with it. So naturally the next gig required Salt…. Ansible is a powerful configuration management tool for deploying software and administering remote systems that you can integrate into any existing architecture. It relies on industry-standard security mechanisms and takes full advantage of existing operating system utilities. Ansible uses no agents and works with your existing security infrastructure.

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We Are Not Alone

The questions of whether or not other animals are sentient, and what “sentience” really means, have been with us for a long time. I spent a lot of time reading studying animal behavior, via independent reading, online courses, and classes. Most of this information doesn’t cross over into what consciousness is. When you focus on behavior, then you pretty much stick with inputs, outputs, and consequences. This constraint is a best practice; a critical technique when it comes to solving problems.

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Ways Characters Die In Shakespeare's Plays

As I continue to write more stories I am going to come to a point where I will need to kill a character. I’m posting this here so I can refer back to it in the future. Hat tip to Open Culture for sharing this.

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She Didn't Know What to Say

Freya with a tummy ache Freya was sick a couple of Saturdays ago, so we called the vet and grabbed the first appointment we could get. It’s always tough when a pet is sick, but Freya is probably the most difficult of all of the dogs we’ve had. She’s the most fearful at the vet’s office and a tough dog to read at the same time. So, making a call on when it’s time to put her through the stress of a doctor visit is like trying to see colors in the dark.

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Happy Monday, August 29, 2016 Edition

It’s Monday! Tired? Sad to be back at work? Having a hard time picking up where you left off from last week, or maybe from before a vacation you just finished? No matter how bad your Monday is, I bet you’re not as confused as this guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ovLSiUu6A Do you know what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to do this. Pretty impressive, eh? Foxes are amazing little creatures. This would be a great place to mention what they sound like and insert another video, but I’m going to pass and just wish you a good week.

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On Not Being Funny Anymore

In case you’ve been under a rock for the past 36 hours or so, Donald Trump has won his second primary. This blog is not about politics. It’s supposed to be about my writing. But current events have taken an eerie, and actually quite frightening, parallel trajectory to my most important writing project. When I was very young my father told me a story about my grandfather. In the late 1920’s, before he brought his family to the United States, my grandfather opposed the NSDAP (the Nazi party) in an election.

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How to Suck At Security, By Verizon

I switched to Verizon FIOS a couple of weeks ago. I live in the U.S, so I don’t have access to anything resembling a good Internet provider. This is because a central tenet of our form of capitalism is that utilities must be delivered by poorly run and weakly regulated monopolies. However I do live in area where I have a choice between a slowly dying cable company in the throes of denial (check out that 90s web design) and a company that only exists because the government won an antitrust suit and then let them ignore it.

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Thinking is Hard

Veritasium is another favorite Youtube channel of mine. Check this out. It’s long but well worth 12 minutes if you ever find yourself needing to use your brain for something more than a place to rest your hat. “You have to be willing to be uncomfortable,” Muller says. So what sounds like a quote from a self-help book has some scientific reasoning to it. The very act of slowing things down and focusing on them, makes our brain process them differently.

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It's Like Grand Central Station in Here

Busy this week. Look at this picture and pretend I wrote something entertaining.

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How to Not Be Happy and Share It Far and Wide

Check out this comic. If you click on the image below, the entire strip will show up on the original site. You may have to click on it again to zoom in. (It will open in a new window.) This strip is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. SMBC is one of my favorite web comics. It’s aways different, usually funny, and sometimes very thought-provoking. The obvious metaphor here is for religion, and it is certainly apt.

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Happy Monday, August 29, 2016 Edition

It’s Monday! Tired? Sad to be back at work? Having a hard time picking up where you left off from last week, or maybe from before a vacation you just finished? No matter how bad your Monday is, I bet you’re not as confused as this guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ovLSiUu6A Do you know what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to do this. Pretty impressive, eh? Foxes are amazing little creatures. This would be a great place to mention what they sound like and insert another video, but I’m going to pass and just wish you a good week.

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Monday and Stuff

I think one of the worst aspects of Daylight Savings Time is all of the stories about how bad it is and how everyone hates it. If only we could do something… Been busy putting things together for Camp NaNoWriMo and so forth. Are any of my writer friends participating? Is everyone on the East Coast ready for the latest Snowmageddon? I’ll have more of a post tomorrow.

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Baby Driver

Most movies tend to include pretty terrible music. There have been some great soundtracks from composers like Henry Jackman, Hans Zimmer, and Howard Shore, but when it comes to pop and rock well, bleah. The Guardians of the Galaxy films have been a rare bright spot, and now we have Baby Driver, a movie named for a deep cut from Simon and Garfunkel, and that I may hit the theater more for the music than the film itself.

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The Spring Feature Toggle: Your Guide to Getting Started Quickly

This is a post I wrote for Rollout, a tech company that has a system for managing feature toggles in enterprise applications. The original post is here. When it comes to agile development and “moving fast and breaking stuff,” many people think of REST APIs. Decomposing services into manageable building blocks with clearly defined interfaces is a good step in designing any large system. Even if one doesn’t necessarily wish to be “agile,” REST microservices are an effective design pattern.

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Docker Tutorial: Get Going From Scratch

This is a post I wrote for Stackify a while back. You can find the original here. Docker is one of the most exciting technologies I’ve seen in a long time. I enjoy working with it. Docker is a platform for packaging, deploying, and running applications. Docker applications run in containers that can be used on any system: a developer’s laptop, systems on premises, or in the cloud. Containerization is a technology that’s been around for a long time, but it’s seen new life with Docker.

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A Visit to Ellis Island

A few weeks ago, Jürgen, a cousin from Germany, visited the U.S. with his wife, Annette. They were making their second extended visit to various Goebelbecker families around the country, that Jürgen found while he was researching his family tree. Jürgen is a research librarian at the University of Karlsruhe, a few kilometers from Liedolsheim. While he stayed with us we made a visit to Ellis Island. This was my first ever visit to the island.

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Friday Argument

A Monty Python classic, hilariously reenacted. This, along with Death of Mary Queen of Scots were favorites when I was kid. Enjoy!

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Making it Hard for Everyone

If you follow my twitter feed, you know that commuting from New Jersey to New York is terrible. Especially if you have the misfortune of needing to take the bus. There are a couple of reasons for this, the primary two being NJ Transit, which is simply a poorly run organization, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a decaying, trash-filled, cesspool, that is far too small for the amount of traffic it fails to accommodate every day.

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All Software Sucks, Eventually

My wife asked me to disable Amber Alerts on her phone. We get them very infrequently, and when we do, they’re always for something well outside of our area. I knew there was a setting for this because I had disabled it long ago on my phone. I also knew that it must have moved since Apple is always “improving” their software. So I used the search bar in settings.

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How Do You Keep a Reader in Suspense?

I’ll tell you next week. Open Culture posted a few articles about Alfred Hitchcock a couple of weeks back. This one discusses how the master of suspense did his suspense-mastering. The “ticking clock” is obviously how it’s done, but it’s interesting to hear Hitchcock talk about making sure the bomb never goes off. Interesting enough that my contrarian side, always a source of trouble, immediately wanted to go set a clock off.

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Getting Started With the Swift iOS Feature Flag

This is another post I wrote for the Rollout blog. You can find the original right here. This post was a lot of fun to write since I hadn’t done any IOS development in a few years. Mobile users expect more. They want their applications to be as stable as yesterday while looking and acting more and more like tomorrow. How do you keep up? How can you reliably test and push new features without risking a disastrous release?

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Java 12 Switch Expressions

Oracle will release Java 12 in March and it comes with a handful of new features. I’m going to cover them in the next few posts. We’ll start this week with switch expressions. I’ll take a look at how they change how you’ll use the language. A Basic Class Let’s start with a simple car class. public class Car { public enum Model { Standard, Deluxe, Limited } private final Model model; public Car(Model model) { this.

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Tears In The Rain

Is that real? The arrival of Blade Runner in 1982 was a seminal moment for me. Harrison Ford, fresh from Raiders of the Lost Ark and still frozen in carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back was starring in a movie based on a story from one of my favorite authors, Philip K. Dick. There are some critical differences between the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the movie Blade Runner but this still is, and will always be, one of the best adaptations from book to film ever made.

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Review: Counterpart

This is a review of Counterpart, a TV series that premiered on Starz in late 2017 and was broadcast for two seasons. It’s available on Amazon Prime now. While I am not going to spoil specific plot points, I will ruin a few surprises and cover the general direction of the series. Proceed at your own risk if you haven’t seen it. Better yet, go see it! The best science fiction is about how people, society, and cultures, react to fictional science.

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Python Test Automation

Here’s a post I wrote for TestIm a while back. It’s more of a listicle than a tutorial, but looking into Python tools I wasn’t already familiar with was fun. A few weeks ago, we talked about automating tests. Now it’s time to take a look at six of the best Python test automation tools. The good news is that the Python standard library already includes excellent unit testing tools. You can go a long way toward setting up robust test automation using the language’s built-in capabilities.

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And Then It Made Me Sad

I went to the mall last Friday. Just going to the mall makes me sad, but this time something else happened that made me even sadder. I had to get the screen on my (crappy) iPhone repaired. To give you an idea of how mall-averse I am, it had been broken since October. When I arrived, I parked as close as I could to the door nearest the Apple Store, in order to minimize my exposure to mall.

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All Software Sucks, Eventually

My wife asked me to disable Amber Alerts on her phone. We get them very infrequently, and when we do, they’re always for something well outside of our area. I knew there was a setting for this because I had disabled it long ago on my phone. I also knew that it must have moved since Apple is always “improving” their software. So I used the search bar in settings.

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Thoughts On The Night Of Finale

Stone and Naz I watched the series finale of “The Night Of” prepared to be disappointed. If you’re not familiar with this HBO series, you might as well just stop here. Not only is this post written with someone who has already watched the miniseries in mind, but it’s also packed wth spoilers too. Caveat emptor. “The Night Of” was billed as a look at the criminal justice system from a suspect’s point of view, and for much of the beginning, that’s what it was.

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Christopher Walken Reads Edgar Allan Poe

2017 is gonna be weird. Let’s get started on the right foot, shall we? Poe is a favorite of mine, dating back to an assigned reading of The Telltale Heart in middle school. It’s easy to imagine Poe being read aloud with an accent, maybe a slightly British one, even though he is a distinctly American author. Or maybe that pompous twang that William F. Buckley had. He’s hip again, now that conservatives have gone extinct and been replaced with kleptocrats and whiny white bigots, hearing a New England snob reading some Poe might be comforting.

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Short Story: Mixed Results

This is a story I submitted for a contest at thefirstline.com. It was rejected. With the research and writing I have been involved in for my first novel, this topic jumped right out at me when I read the first line, for obvious reasons. “Unfortunately, there is no mistake,” she said, closing the file. “You have the rest of the day to gather your things Dr. Pflaum.” Johann was stunned.

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How Do You Keep a Reader in Suspense?

I’ll tell you next week. Open Culture posted a few articles about Alfred Hitchcock a couple of weeks back. This one discusses how the master of suspense did his suspense-mastering. The “ticking clock” is obviously how it’s done, but it’s interesting to hear Hitchcock talk about making sure the bomb never goes off. Interesting enough that my contrarian side, always a source of trouble, immediately wanted to go set a clock off.

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It's Monday, and I'm Tired

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f62Z8Ev9OXA Get it? Nudge, nudge. Worth watching for the last tire.

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Common Courtesy vs Strategy vs None of the Above

You arrive at the elevator bank at work. Several others are already waiting. It’s one of those banks with 3 or 4 doors on each side and call buttons placed in the middle of each wall. An elevator arrives near you as you approach. You know you’ll be getting off soon since your floor is near the bottom of the bank. Do you wait and let a few of the others on first, or scramble to get on as quickly as you can?

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Gone (Back) to the Dogs: Scent Workshop

It’s about 2 1/2 years since I started my self-imposed exile from dog training. There were a lot of reasons for my dropping out: mild burnout (if that’s possible), facing up to personal and logistical limitations, and discouragement about some of the people in the animal community, which is something I need to learn how to deal with. It’s one of the personal limitations I ran up against. I’ve done some substituting over the past year or so; but that’s different.

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Read Some History and Call Me in the Morning

The party out of power tends to run on the idea that things are terrible. The party in power tends to run on the idea that things are fine and only going to get better. These statements make sense. “Vote for me because I want the job” and “Vote for me because I want to keep the job” are not compelling campaign slogans. We’re at a strange place in history right now.

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Voter Intimidation Then and Now

According to Donald Trump, if he loses the Presidential election it will be because of a rigged election. The New York Times has called these statements hedging. Most credible polls show Clinton with leads that indicate a shellacking in November. Claiming that the fix is in seems like a very Trumpian thing to do. On the other hand, this looks like the beginnings of something much darker: voter intimidation. Consider what Trump said in Pennsylvania.

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Thoughts On The Night Of Finale

Stone and Naz I watched the series finale of “The Night Of” prepared to be disappointed. If you’re not familiar with this HBO series, you might as well just stop here. Not only is this post written with someone who has already watched the miniseries in mind, but it’s also packed wth spoilers too. Caveat emptor. “The Night Of” was billed as a look at the criminal justice system from a suspect’s point of view, and for much of the beginning, that’s what it was.

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Thoughts On The Night Of Finale

Stone and Naz I watched the series finale of “The Night Of” prepared to be disappointed. If you’re not familiar with this HBO series, you might as well just stop here. Not only is this post written with someone who has already watched the miniseries in mind, but it’s also packed wth spoilers too. Caveat emptor. “The Night Of” was billed as a look at the criminal justice system from a suspect’s point of view, and for much of the beginning, that’s what it was.

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Thinking is Hard

Veritasium is another favorite Youtube channel of mine. Check this out. It’s long but well worth 12 minutes if you ever find yourself needing to use your brain for something more than a place to rest your hat. “You have to be willing to be uncomfortable,” Muller says. So what sounds like a quote from a self-help book has some scientific reasoning to it. The very act of slowing things down and focusing on them, makes our brain process them differently.

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The Customer Must Always Be Fleeced

Last week I went online and agreed to pay a little more for faster Internet. There are three adults in the house, and we all make pretty regular use of the ‘net for a variety of activities, so it seemed worth another $15 a month for a 50% faster connection. We don’t have cable TV. My connection from Verizon is an ethernet connection, not cable. So this should have consisted entirely of my checking a box indicating that I want to pay more, followed by something in one of their data centers telling something in my house to operate at a faster speed.

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How to Suck At Security, By Verizon

I switched to Verizon FIOS a couple of weeks ago. I live in the U.S, so I don’t have access to anything resembling a good Internet provider. This is because a central tenet of our form of capitalism is that utilities must be delivered by poorly run and weakly regulated monopolies. However I do live in area where I have a choice between a slowly dying cable company in the throes of denial (check out that 90s web design) and a company that only exists because the government won an antitrust suit and then let them ignore it.

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She Didn't Know What to Say

Freya with a tummy ache Freya was sick a couple of Saturdays ago, so we called the vet and grabbed the first appointment we could get. It’s always tough when a pet is sick, but Freya is probably the most difficult of all of the dogs we’ve had. She’s the most fearful at the vet’s office and a tough dog to read at the same time. So, making a call on when it’s time to put her through the stress of a doctor visit is like trying to see colors in the dark.

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Voter Intimidation Then and Now

According to Donald Trump, if he loses the Presidential election it will be because of a rigged election. The New York Times has called these statements hedging. Most credible polls show Clinton with leads that indicate a shellacking in November. Claiming that the fix is in seems like a very Trumpian thing to do. On the other hand, this looks like the beginnings of something much darker: voter intimidation. Consider what Trump said in Pennsylvania.

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War Of The Worlds Flash Fiction

This week’s flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig is about Right vs. Wrong. I decided to kill two birds with one heat ray and made it a brief glimpse in the War of the Worlds-verse that I have been playing around with in a short story and a novel. In this world, the Martian attack in H.G. Wells’ landmark novel happened as he described it. But they didn’t just attack England, and as you might expect, the attacks change the course of history just a wee bit, so things are different when the Martians return to attack again.

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Sunday January 19, 2020

It’s a lazy Sunday that’s perched right in the middle of a lazy three-day weekend. We got a little bit of snow yesterday, but even that only provided about a half-hour of entertainment when it came to shovelling. Today I’ll need to make up for a week being the on-call engineer. When that happens I often see an assortment of nighttime interruptions that made it difficult to write and keep me up late enough that I want to go to bed early if are no calls.

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Friday, January 17, 2020

It’s 5:30AM as I’m start this post. The wind sounds like a freight train passing the house and my cell phone tells me it’s 25 degrees outside. Has Old Man Winter finally returned? There’s even word of snow this weekend! The return of cold weather is oddly comforting given what’s happening around the world, even if it means freezing my delicate tuchis off riding the bike from the ferry to the office.

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Christopher Walken Reads Edgar Allan Poe

2017 is gonna be weird. Let’s get started on the right foot, shall we? Poe is a favorite of mine, dating back to an assigned reading of The Telltale Heart in middle school. It’s easy to imagine Poe being read aloud with an accent, maybe a slightly British one, even though he is a distinctly American author. Or maybe that pompous twang that William F. Buckley had. He’s hip again, now that conservatives have gone extinct and been replaced with kleptocrats and whiny white bigots, hearing a New England snob reading some Poe might be comforting.

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Friday Tunes - New White Stripes?

Yes, you read that right. Third Man Records has released a compilation of acoustic music from Jack, and this track is on it. Enjoy!

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Grand Central Forest

A busy spot in Italy’s Abruzzo National Park, in a supercut covering one year.

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World's Oldest Piano (and an update)

Even with having posted a story yesterday, I would like to get back to posting something every Wednesday. First, have a listen to the world’s oldest piano: I came across this video on Open Culture, still one of my favorite sites. And then, for good measure, check this out: I saw it on Twisted Sifter. I’ve been taking the IAABC writing mentorship with Eileen Anderson. I’ve learned a great deal from it, and it is at least partially responsible for the stories I published here this week and last, as well as some other material that I will be submitting to websites and/or journals soon.

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Fluency

Fluency in writing has been elusive for me, while when it comes to coding I’ve had it for a long time. I define fluency as being able to translate something from my mind to screen as quickly as I can type. There may be a more scientific definition somewhere, but I don’t care right now. When I figure out I need a programmatic thingie that can do this or that, it’s usually written before I start typing.

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Slow TV

It’s impossible for me to overstate how much I enjoy having this on in the background when I am working, whether it’s writing or coding. Pluto TV has a Slow TV channel, which I run on my Roku. It runs train rides 24×7 (as near as I can tell) with some fantastic cuts, such as seasonal transitions as the train moves and the occasional picture-in-picture, with drone footage, interviews, or historical footage.

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Here Comes NanoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month 2016 (NaNoWriMo) is almost here. If you’re not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it means what it says; write a novel in a month. “Writing a novel” means a 50,000-word first draft, but the criteria for success is up to the participant. I am participating for the first time this year. I’ve decided to set my ongoing project, the book about my grandfather, and work on a fantasy novel that’s been banging around in the back of my mind for a couple of years.

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Stabs In the Back and Big Lies

By the end of September 1918, the Germans were beaten. Earlier that year Chief-of-Staff Erich Ludendorff commanded the “Kaiserschlacht” offensive that briefly seemed to turn the tide, but the Germans lacked the resources to support the effort. Ludendorff himself told the Kaiser and Germany’s Chancellor to ask for a ceasefire on September 29th. But the myth that Germany’s civilian leaders betrayed their military started to spread before the Treaty of Versailles was completed.

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On Not Being Funny Anymore

In case you’ve been under a rock for the past 36 hours or so, Donald Trump has won his second primary. This blog is not about politics. It’s supposed to be about my writing. But current events have taken an eerie, and actually quite frightening, parallel trajectory to my most important writing project. When I was very young my father told me a story about my grandfather. In the late 1920’s, before he brought his family to the United States, my grandfather opposed the NSDAP (the Nazi party) in an election.

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Getting Over Gwen Stacy

Forty-two years later, I still haven’t gotten over the death of Gwen Stacy. Gwen Stacy died in Amazing Spider-Man #122, cover dated July 1973. In 1973 comics were dated 2 or 3 months in advance, so that issue hit the newsstands sometime in April or May 1973. The event actually spans issues #121 and #122, but it’s in the first few pages of #122 that we see she is really dead.

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On Use of the Word "Nazi"

Writing my grandfather’s story is going to mean writing about the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920’s. The word “Nazi” is loaded — for good reason. It’s what call the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP.) The Nazis are responsible for the murder of over 6 million Jews, a war that killed another 50 to 80 million people, and shaped the world in ways that still affect us today.

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Ways Characters Die In Shakespeare's Plays

As I continue to write more stories I am going to come to a point where I will need to kill a character. I’m posting this here so I can refer back to it in the future. Hat tip to Open Culture for sharing this.

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Friday NaNoWriMo Filler

Still working on making it to 50k this month. Enjoy this in the meantime.

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Please Awesome This and Share

How has Facebook’s “like” button changed the world? Is it responsible for the spread of inaccurate news and that thing that happened in November? Has it become so far detached from the simple concept of “liking” something that it’s become downright counterproductive and maybe even dangerous? Leah Pearlman is one of the people that came up the idea behind the button (which she called the “awesome button” for awhile.) She’s since left the company and makes excellent webcomics.