This is What You Get When You Mess With Us

Rob

2019: No Resolutions

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I’m a person of greater than modest means. Still: Getting out of bed, making coffee, dressing myself & the kid, driving to school and then work, working, doing work that matters, reading a few pages on the can, trolling Twitter and FB for pictures of your beautiful tropical holiday between stories describing of our impending political/environmental doom, buying groceries, feeding myself, the family, bath time, 3 books and a song, paying bills and doing dishes, watching a little TV while locked into work email with a customer just starting her day in Asia, holding my tiny family close, clacking out 200 words… that’s all I can squeeze out most days. That’s success. I don’t owe the universe more than that.

Read the rest here: tiwygwymw.us/dz

2019: No Resolutions

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I drive down Georgia Avenue towards DC nearly every day and meet one or more of these drivers each journey: 20 in a 35; Ride-a-Tail; Stops for No Discernible Reason; Slows for Turn But Does Not; Slows for Turn With No Signal; Swerves into Adjacent Lane Because a Bus/Pedestrian/Uber has Stopped in Theirs (Obviously); Crosses Three Lanes of Traffic to Get On Beltway; Turning Left from Lane Marked ‘No Left Turns;’ Still Reading Text 10 Seconds After Green.

These drivers make me angry. Furious. I gesture. I shout. I roll down my window to scream toothless threats into the wind until my face is wet with spit.

They’re doing this to me.

They are hurting me.

No, of course they’re not. Like me, they’re just trying to get through the day without falling through an open manhole or slipping on a banana peel. They’re thinking about work. Their sick Aunt. What to make for dinner.

I’m a person of greater than modest means. Still: Getting out of bed, making coffee, dressing myself & the kid, driving to school and then work, working, doing work that matters, reading a few pages on the can, trolling Twitter and FB for pictures of your beautiful tropical holiday between stories describing of our impending political/environmental doom, buying groceries, feeding myself, the family, bath time, 3 books and a song, paying bills and doing dishes, watching a little TV while locked into work email with a customer just starting her day in Asia, holding my tiny family close, clacking out 200 words… that’s all I can squeeze out most days. That’s success. I don’t owe the universe more than that.

Women who do it solo1, likely with more children and far fewer resources than my family, are the only people who can every rightly claim to be “owning” this life. That they don’t collectively say “Fuck this” and seize the halls of power is a testament to how steep – and exhausting – are the barriers we demand women surmount before the day even begins.

Some of you, though, are ethereal beings – pixies, imps, demi-gods – who can push out a novel or a business or music in the spaces between the events that take up a normal day. Do you have a staff? Shadow henchmen? Office space that sits on the periphery of time-space? Maybe you don’t. Is there an accounting at the end of the day that is suppressed, omitted from the public record? I’d guess yes.

In work and life, I can over promise and under deliver. Sometimes I try to connect with people and I fail. I try again and fail again and that failure carriers a great weight. We’re all just trying to muddle through the day. I’m (mostly) succeeding at my core responsibilities and the core is fucking hard.

You know that.

Driving down Georgia, I know nothing about the souls of those drivers, if they are good or bad people. I can think: “She’s self-involved. He hates his family. Maybe that guy’s a Adolf Hitler and Hugh Hefner chimera wrapped up in a $5000 suit, a JD and an S-Class.” But I don’t know. I do know that I am deeply distrustful of any system that applies a value to a human being. I do know that humans make mistakes and and are exclusively focused on just getting through the day.

You don’t know, either. You think you know the specific quality in people creates conflict, but you don’t know.

I forget anniversaries. I miss conference calls. I say the “right” thing the wrong way. I drift over into your lane while singing along to the Beatles. I am human. I make mistakes and spend 99% of my brain cycles trying not to trip over my own mess.

You might call this privilege. Ok.

Expecting perfection and attributing anything short of it to a trait other than “human” is to set yourself up for unending misery.

Good luck in 2019.

  1. Know it’s exclusively women. Take a good think on why you object, Men, when anyone makes that evident observation. ↩

TNYGLXY – A Christmas Night on Soliloquy – The Playlist

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Christmas is Coming and my love of Christmas music, traditional and novelty, is well documented.   We’ve already put some lights up around the house and will add more in the coming days.  LED lights are more expensive than incandescent and don’t seem to be any more robust; I’ve replaced 2 sets this year.

I won’t do anything like this.  Nothing at all like this.

You may recall Keep Fucking That Chicken: the global playlist I maintain of music in my library.  It’s a constant, on going project.  You will surely not be surprised that I have started a similar list for Christmas music: A Christmas Night on Soliloquy.  This is a subset of my nearly 10gb of holiday music (which includes a nice chunk of Halloween hits) and is currently mostly culled from compilations.  I’m still sorting through the single artist records and will likely be doing so for years.

TNYGLXY, as I’ve mentioned, will have a streaming audio, powered by IceCast2 and MPD,  as well as an FM transmitter, and will blast Christmas Joy, like sparkly flying reindeer jizz, all over our neighborhood.

TNYGLXY

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I do like the Little Free Library boxes planted in folk’s lawns across the country.  I nearly never find a book I haven’t yet read or wish to read (lots of grocery store paperbacks).  I’d be even money there are dedicated fans who know the best installations and stake them out early and often.   That said, I love the idea of sharing what I love with others. 

***

I have always been a Windows user, although I’m a big fan of opensource and “free” software, like GIMP, IrfanView, Audacity, and others.  So I’ve always wanted to dig a little deeper into Linux (I build my own PCs, why not roll my own version of an operating system?)  I’ve been intimidated.  I learn best when I have a project that lets me root around in the works and figure out the inner workings.  I’ve read books and signed up for online coursework, but haven’t really cracked the patient open.

***

Around the 2016 elections, I landed on another couple of interesting projects, with the same spirit, but digital.  SWMNBB took me to the Women’s March and I brainstormed on how we could communicate if wireless internet went down (it did) on purpose or by volume (there were so many people.  So many.  My knees locked up I was standing stock still for hours).  I found a project called PirateBox, which used off-the-shelf hardware, including a travel WiFi router, a USB cable, and an large external battery pack, and a custom DD-WRT distribution that turned the router into a self-contained internet hotspot.  Point your phone’s wifi at the PirateBox and users can access documents, webpages, and chat right from a phone that might not otherwise have access to the greater internet. 

Of course, I bricked the thing the night before the Women’s March and left it behind.

The PirateBox was fun to play around with.  Setup was well documented.  But if you weren’t really familiar with Linux and and embedded systems, like me, when you wanted to do something a little outside of the scope of their project, you were in the wild.  Like me.  When I bricked my little repurposed travel router, finding out how to fix it was honestly more trouble than the $20 it cost and was a skill that didn’t scale up.

A fork of that project is LibraryBox.   While the PirateBox tries to live down to it’s name1, LibraryBox is button-down project, serving up digital files in a cleaner interface.  It’s for Libraries and as an all in one solution for a specific application it’s super cool, but not for me.

If I was going to customize, I might as well start from the beginning and do it right.

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I have a handful of Raspberry Pi sitting around my office, gathering dusts, bought to build projects I’ve considered and invested in, but never completed.  For those who don’t know, a Pi is a low cost, low power computer designed for education.  Although it can run pretty much any flavor of Linux, the foundation that designs the devices also produces a distribution of Debian Linux (called Raspbian) that drives the hardware.  There’s strong support documentation and a robust community built up around the device to help get people with little experience (kids and adults alike) up and learning in no time.

It makes good sense to be the foundation of the TNYGLXY

What The Hell Are You Doing?

I have 3 distinct objectives with the project I will call TNYGLXY:

  1. To make something (I think is) cool.
  2. To learn more about interacting with Linux, particularly the command line, and building user-interactive web applications
  3. To interact with my neighbors and passersby, to share digital media as one would physical media in a Little Free Library, and to stream audio out via FM and Web

The end result will be a self-contained wireless access point, which can’t access the Internet, nestled into a small, waterproof box, tucked away behind a bush in front of my house.  Visitors will find/be advised of the SSID and will not require a password to access the device.  Once they do, their browser will be directed to a single URL (tnyglxy.lan?), from which they can access digital books, audio files, videos, and a music stream played right from their browser.

It will also broadcast FM radio.

More soon.

  1. I bricked my PirateBox trying to change the name of the SSID from PirateBox because I thought people would have their doubts about accessing something called PirateBox if they didn’t know what it was.  Note: Don’t use apostrophes in your SSID.  There are no dumb mistakes, except for this one.  This one is really dumb. ↩

Be Jolly

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Christmas is coming (in two months), I’m fat, I guess it’s time to celebrate?

The Wee Bairn and I went to a Starbucks this past weekend.  Amy Grant was on the satellite radio singing about Yule Tide Carols.  A barista stacked shiny red and green travel mugs near the register.  Shouldn’t be suprised?  Costco and Home Depot have had animatronic Santas on display since early October1.  Getting this stuff gone and numbers in early makes Good Business Sense, I hear from people who don’t have to pick and pack or stand under a tiny speaker blaring “Santa Baby” folding Gap sweaters.

SWMNBB mentioned that JD McPherson had a new album of Christmas songs out.  A couple of years ago, he released this track, which also appears on the new album:

Of course, after looking for this new music, I spent another several hours and $100 on a stack of additional Christmas CDs2.  They’re coming in now.

Those who know me know I love Christmas songs, novelty and traditional, and enjoy sharing them with others.  I will again this year.

Any suggestions or requests?

 

  1. I’ve seen a lot of seasonal anxiety in my trade, more than usual, during what is normally the busy period of manufacturers and retail.  Looming deadlines for 45’s tariffs on Chinese manufactured goods are for juicing #s in shipping, imports, raw material exports, volume of goods, warehouse space, salaries for stevedores, and low-wage warehouse workers.  When they’re put into action, and with the traditional slowdown in the Western and Lunar New Years, everything is going to come to a screeching halt.  Merry Christmas! ↩
  2. That’s right, CDs.  I buy physical media and rip them at a quality that I can’t download. And I still hold the disks if my PC and her backups going blooey. ↩

The Cheaper the Crook, the Gaudier the Patter Week 29

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“It’s better to ask for the earth than to take it.”

ITEM:

ITEM: I had forgotten, until the Wee Bairn showed up, how great libraries are, especially the well-funded ones in my part of the world.   Books, CDs, DVDs, an opportunity to learn, a safe place to hang out for a few hours and charge your phone if you’ve got nowhere else to stay.  A couple of hours of fun for a Wee Bairn.  Communities need good libraries.

Of course, there’s always some asshole who wants to blow up a common good to save himself $1.50 in taxes a week and make googly-eyes at a sociopath who makes $250 Million a day.

ITEM:  Co-workers donating vacation time to expectant mothers and CEO “gifts” car to employee who walked all night to get to job.  Feel-good stories!  No, not at all an indictment of our collective neglect of social support and infrastructure, while wages stagnate, taxes get cut, and the pocket book of the C-suite bulges!

ITEM: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, like her father, is a bezoar in the good functioning of democracy.

ITEM: I’m ready to do my bit:

Let’s back up here briefly and establish something important, though: No one, and I mean no one, is saying that straight guys, white or otherwise, shouldn’t have a place in comedy anymore. Only that — like the brilliant Mulaney, who has described himself on many occasions as the whitest man alive — in the future, they’ll have to take more risks and work harder to earn a spot that might’ve been more easily obtainable 20 or 30 years ago, when the sight of a woman or a person of color onstage was more of an anomaly. They’ll also have to listen, or at least pretend to listen, when somebody calls them out on their subject matter, their joke writing, or their political opinions. They’ll have to refrain from trying to short circuit debate by claiming that the other person is too sensitive or “can’t take a joke” or is somehow endangering their free speech. And they’ll have to make peace with the fact that, if they’re able to claim a spot of prime cultural real estate, they’ll be expected to constantly defend it as they age, by becoming better at the art and craft than anyone who dares to accuse them of sucking up cultural oxygen that should be nourishing them instead.

ITEM: When all candidates are clients, how does the algorithm choose the winner? 

Facebook took the methods it learned from the Trump campaign to further refine a marketing model called “Test, Learn, Adapt” (TLA), which it currently uses to assess its own advertising. These internal documents are a candid recognition by Facebook of the GOP candidate’s advertising success and reveal the degree to which the company views Trump not just as a potential regulator or a source of misinformation, but also, above all, a valued customer.

Also, the Zuck is totally running and his Facebook is going to tell us whatever we want to read to make it so.

ITEM: Prime Day has come and gone.  Another chance for Bezos to hoover up $$$ and crush his warehouse employees under the strain of unreasonable deadlines, and of course I’ve played my part like stooge. Picked up Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, with Joseph Cotton, A collection of all five Star Trek TOS movies on BluRay, and Remo Williams on DVD.

Found a pretty good copy of the Blade Runner Blu Ray 5 disc set with all cuts of the film, from Working to the Final, from a guy on eBay.  Case broken, but otherwise fine.

This is me personally trying to keep physical media alive and well, so I can watch the films I like when I want to, not when Netflix decides I want to.  Why go back to the 70s?

ITEM: I’ve upgraded my DSLR three times in the last 15 years, each time expanding on speed and functionality… and price.  I know have a D750 with several FX lenses of good quality.  Finally, the Bairn is in focus, but I have not improved my photography.  I took a class in Lightroom this weekend with the hope that I’d be able to enhance their quality.  I left with enough knowledge to understand that It’s a poor artist who blames his tools and I should probably stick with what I’m best with: my Instax and cellphone.