Month: January 2017

Ban the ban 

Sorry for the unplanned radio silence on the blog. The combination of the horrific first week of the Trump presidency and a busier work schedule than normal has temporarily stopped my words. 

At least here. For some reason, I can still write on Facebook. Here’s what I said recently about the immigration ban targeting Muslims:

The anesthesiologist from Iran who assisted with my heart surgery does not need to be banned.

My son’s best friend, a Sikh boy in kindergarten who played at our house yesterday, does not need to be banned.

Students who are legal residents, with full documentation and vetting, who went home to visit their parents for winter break and cannot return to complete their studies, do not need to be banned.

And don’t try to tell me that this is about terrorism, when Saudi Arabia, the country of most of the 9/11 hijackers who killed my friend Doug, my dear friend M’s husband, and thousands more, is not included in the ban. Nor are any other countries linked to Trump’s business interests. 

This isn’t about terrorism. This is about unprecedented levels of institutional racism and bigotry in a country founded on religious freedom.

Links for January 25, 2017

Boing Boing: Rep. John Lewis’ civil rights comic trilogy still at #1. Thanks Trump! Going to check this out and hope to share it with my kids.

Washington Post: ‘This is dangerous’: After D.C. protesters shout at ex-N.C. Gov. McCrory, lawmaker floats bill to protect him. Interesting: my initial reaction was a knee-jerk response that this is yet another demonstration by North Carolina lawmakers that they don’t understand the Bill of Rights. But the Post article (unlike the Boing Boing pointer to it) references a DC law that similarly protects current or former DC employees in the course of their duties. Very curious on the back story of that one.

New Mac time

I got upgraded at work from a late-2011 MacBook Pro to a late-2016 MacBook Pro—the kind with Touch Bar. I’m learning and relearning a lot of things that I had figured out how to do on the old machine as I set things up. Observations:

  1. The thing is fast. (Probably mostly because of the SSD drive, though the 3.3GHz vs. 2.4GHz processor may have something to do with it.)
  2. And so much more reliable. I was kernel panicking all over the place in the old machine.
  3. I hadn’t tweaked the old machine as much as I was afraid I had. After moving my home directory over, there were only a handful of apps I had to reinstall from scratch. I had also been smart enough to do most of my custom fonts in my user/Library/Fonts directory rather than in System, which made migration much easier.
  4. Speaking of migration, Thunderbolt really did the trick. I think moving all 300+ GB of stuff took about six hours, much faster than I remember when I used Firewire or Ethernet in the past.
  5. The keyboard is a non-issue. Feels great. Maybe a little loud but very easy to type on.

There are some things I’m still getting used to:

  • I hit the Siri key by accident a fair amount.
  • I really should have registered my index finger rather than my thumb on the fingerprint sensor.
  • The touch bar is pretty cool, but not much uses it yet. I spend most of my day in Chrome and it’s got nothing there.

And the big thing I’m waiting for: better USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) docks. While I’d love something like the OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock, which has pretty much every port you’d ever need, they don’t ship until sometime in March, presumably thanks to the TI chipset issue. In the meantime, the only thing I’m really missing is an Ethernet adapter, and that’s just because it’s back-ordered.

(Also, it’d be great if I could get SheepShaver working, but that’s not required for work, obviously.)

One Last Time

It’s been a great ride under President Obama. I’m not looking forward to what tomorrow will bring. Because tomorrow I have to stop ignoring the reality of last November’s election and dig in.

I was listening to Hamilton for the first time last week when I was traveling (I know. I’m the last person on earth to hear it), and when we got to George Washington’s farewell address, it got me thinking about Fortuna, the (lowercase-w) wheel of Fortune. How Washington set precedents for the peaceful transfer of power that all 44 presidents since him have followed, but that Donald Trump seems determined not to.

I think we’re going to find out in the next few years just how much that we take for granted in our public life—in the life of our Republic—is set by precedent rather than law, and how easily those precedents can be overturned.

Link roundup

Brian Krebs: Who is Anna Senpai, the Mirai Worm Author? Fascinating and detailed explanation of how the economics of Minecraft combined with DDOS led to the rise of the seriously nasty IOT DDOS bot.

Aquarium Drunkard: Bash & Pop: Anything Could Happen. Review of the forthcoming album from ex-Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson.

Wired: Finally, Miles Morales Will Get to Be a Big Screen Spider-Man. Awesome. Looking forward to hearing more about this. Not looking forward to hearing racists lose their minds that this Spider-Man is biracial (African-American and Hispanic).

Boing Boing: John Edgar Park’s Mystery Box DIYs. Cool video and tutorial about JP’s AdaFruit work.

“One thing”

Rands in Repose: One Thing. A good description of some of the psychology behind the Deming principle of minimizing work in progress.

You cross the threshold of inbox usefulness when you begin to mistake the act of managing the importance rather than acting on the importance. Speaking as a human who has crossed this uselessness threshold multiple times, I am prepared to declare that I am 100% done with productivity products. There is a better, simpler, and more productive way.

Natural Bridge, revisited

Today was the first time I had visited Natural Bridge in more than eleven years. (You can read my previous write-up.) The bridge continues to be more imposing than can be easily absorbed, as the photo above hopefully shows.

This time I walked further up the path along Cedar Creek. (I had, after all, paid my $8 for access to the trail.) I passed a reconstructed Indian village – don’t flinch, it was done sensitively – and a cave, and made my way to the Lace Falls. Seeing more of the Bridge made me better appreciate Thomas Jefferson’s pilgrimages there – and his practical desire to explore the area’s mineral resources, including opening a saltpeter mine just up the creek.

Bookhunting

I have real trouble passing a good bookstore. Days like yesterday are why.

I didn’t start out the day intending to visit the Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar, and certainly didn’t want to get champagne there. But Esta and I were parked nearby and it seemed a shame not to go in.

I only made one full circuit of the store, but during that circuit I found first editions of the following:

  • Ray Bradbury’s Toynbee Convector (1988), which he published when I was in high school but which I’ve never read
  • Porte Crayon‘s The Old South Illustrated (1959), the first major collection of his published works, including Virginia Illustrated and first appearance of the “typical 1850s UVA student” drawing that the Virginia Glee Club has used for years
  • And Countee Cullen‘s Copper Sun (1927), pictured above, his third published book.

The Cullen is a beautiful work, illustrated in an art deco inspired style by the unrelated Charles Cullen, and featuring some of Countee Cullen’s most shattering poems, including “Threnody for a Brown Girl.” A Google search shows that first editions can go for north of $300; I got very lucky to find it for less than a tenth of that.

Listening: Kate Tempest, KEXP live performance

I’m an occasional podcast listener. I subscribe to a handful, all music, including the mighty Funky16Corners and Iron Leg and a few from KEXP. Because all three of these have some shows that last a half hour or more—typically longer than my commute—I tend to binge-listen to catch up.

I had a long drive down to North Carolina starting Sunday and took the opportunity to catch up on my listening. I almost fast forwarded past the KEXP live sessions entries, but I’m glad I didn’t. Something about the announcer made me want to listen to the first episode I had downloaded, from an artist named Kate Tempest.

What an amazing session. Twenty-five minutes or so of live hip-hop and spoken word, telling the story of a group of Londoners and their lives at 4:18am. The net effect is somewhere between The Streets and Hamilton for the immediacy of the verbal portraits and the breadth of the impact. Well worth checking out.

Ten years ago…

…(yesterday), the iPhone was announced. I went looking through my blog archives, and found my reaction.

Particularly funny is reading, after-the-fact, the commentary claiming that Nokia, Blackberry and others had such a big lead in mobile device design. Ten years on, it’s even more apparent than ever that all mobile prior to the iPhone was just a prelude. And every successful device since then has leveraged the same design architecture—big touchscreen, flat device, minimal hard buttons—whether from Apple or from any one of a galaxy of imitators.

I rewatched the launch announcement last night … on my current iPhone.