Author: Tim Jarrett

Vinyl resurgence

I added eleven new albums to my iTunes library last month. Nine of those were vinyl rips.

Partly this was ongoing work from my ten-year-old, still not yet completed project to digitize all my vinyl. (Pro tip: don’t inherit over fifty records when you’re in the middle of a project like that. Or have two children.) But a big chunk of it stemmed from two record store trips, one to Harvest Records in Asheville, and one to Barnes & Noble, of all places.

Digital has gotten increasingly more prevalent and convenient. I can buy and download my friend Tyler’s band’s live shows within a few weeks of their performance, and you can pry my Bandcamp subscription out of my cold, dead hands. But I had forgotten how desperately I missed the physical act of browsing.

Which is why I love this development, the launch of a new state of the art vinyl record manufacturing machine, so much. Bring it on!

Václav Havel and the path forward

New Yorker: Václav Havel’s lessons on how to create a “parallel polis.” A perspective of hope drawn from Havel’s response to both Communism and Cold War capitalism:

The spontaneous and vigorous opposition to Trump, whether at the women’s marches the day after his Inauguration or at the protests at U.S. airports in support of a viciously demonized people, has already manifested many of the qualities that Havel wished to see in civil society: trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, and love. Many more people realize, as Havel did, that arbitrary and inhuman power cannot deprive them of the inner freedom to make moral choices, and to make human community meaningful. They are shaping a redemptive politics of dissidence in the free world, nearly three decades after the fall of Communism. To measure the American dissidents’ success in electoral or any other quantifiable terms would be beside the point. For they are creating a “parallel polis”: the vital space where many, over the next four years, will find refuge from our age of anger, and learn to live in truth.

I like this perspective very much. Here dissidence isn’t just opposition to the actions of an “enemy,” it’s assertion of moral values and enacting positivity. Definitely a lesson here.

Wait, what?

New York Times from yesterday: Trump and staff rethink tactics after stumbles. 

Key quote:

Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.

Read that again. 

Trump demoted the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Director of National Intelligence to give Steve Bannon, a white nationalist, a seat on the NSC, then complains he didn’t know what was in the order he signed?

Jesus. 

What I’ve been up to

I keep missing blogging days, but not because things aren’t busy. Here’s a roundup of places where I’ve been talking in the press and other stuff for the past few months:

On the Veracode blog:  Regulations like FS-ISAC and PCI are now looking at the security of open source components, are you ready?. Plus a three part series on the ransomware attack against the San Francisco MUNI and software composition analysis (one, two, three).

In the press:

And it looks like this year’s RSA will be pretty busy in a few weeks. It’s unfortunate that I haven’t wanted to write much about other things recently, but work is definitely making up for it.

Why I gave up soda

XKCD nails it, as always. But there’s more.

My addiction was to Diet Coke, of which I was drinking two cans a day during the week. While the medical evidence on aspartame is pretty unanimous, I felt like I always wanted to eat more back then. And the constant caffeine infusions weren’t great for my heart health, either. 

I quit Diet Coke cold turkey over three years ago, along with all other sodas. I rarely miss it. 

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.