A number of people in the town where I now live have blogs and do podcasts. It feels weird to me, so far from the center of civilization, I guess there's a bit of pride, but mostly bewilderment. Like the guy who creates a new computer system in Soul of a New Machine and sees someone using it and thinks you can't use this stuff. Heh. I don't play much of a role in these things anymore. Not sure I'd want to actually, though I think the software most people use for blogging is nowhere near as good or complete as what we had in the early 00s. Just a little factoring and UI reorg would make things flow much better. Podcasting has become a huge undertaking for people, with seasons and episodes, sponsors. It should be imho like leaving a voice mail to a few friends. Nice thing is today it can easily scale up to millions of friends. That wasn't true at the beginning. #I had breakfast last week with a new local friend who reads this blog. He's a former DJ at WDST, and from that he built a business selling music at fairs in the northeast. He was in the business when Napster rolled through. We shared some interesting stories. I told him what I had been hearing about the sale and reboot of Bearsville and Todd Rundgren's old studio and stage. British dude, his sports are rugby and soccer. Not much overlap with this NBA and MLB guy. #
I was hoping podcasting would be more spontaneous and casual, sort of like the Talking Heads song that goes like this: "When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed. Say something once, why say it again?" Of course I don't live up to that rule on my own blog. 💥#
The reality of Kyrie is sinking in for the Nets. I didn't used to care about the Nets, and I still don't, but I wonder why Kyrie thought we would? Their story is only interesting because of the drama. I would have preferred if they grew slowly. New York is a dysfunctional NBA city, btw, in case it wasn't obvious. #
I've been working on an SQL-based RSS aggregator for a while. I just got it working with a managed database on Digital Ocean. That's a big deal because I don't want to manage databases. Now I don't have to? So far I like it though there were too many hoops to jump through for the setup. A Hello World app for Node with step by step instructions would have helped. Good docs is the thing that sets Digital Ocean apart from AWS. This time I have to say they could be better.#
It'd be kind of fun to make a Lock Him Up hat using exactly the same red hat as he uses. So from a distance you couldn't tell if it was one of his assholes or one of ours.#I know this is blasphemy but Michelle Obama is wrong. We need rallying cries too, and demonstrations, and slogans. We've bottled up our anger, that's nice, but look where it's gotten us. What Trump's assholes are doing to America, our country, is unacceptable. #
Robert Occhialini is restoring his old blog and reports that one of the only links from November 1997 that still works is the old Frontier home page. That was a good page, a lot of love was poured into it. But there was a broken image, I was immediately sure of the cause. The original server, a Mac, had unicase filenames. It's now hosted on S3 which has case-sensitive file names. So what worked when it was originally posted, now is broken, when served through S3. I guess it must be hard or impossible for S3 to offer unicase for HTTP requests. #
Today I'm working out problems with Digital Ocean's managed MySQL database. Currently trying to turn off ANSI_QUOTES.#