Team Murder

No Brain No Headache

Month: November 2020 Page 1 of 2

I Need A Day Off To Properly Recover from 4 Days Off

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On November 30, 2020

In Apple, Cool As Fuck, I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Link Dump, Robot System For Robots

I logged very little time at a keyboard this weekend, hell this past week excepting work, and spent most of the time off either driving around on errands or figuring out the logistics of getting to some place on some day by a certain time. I feel like I spend a lot of my life trying to stack tasks up to get small pockets of time to do things I like. Ultimately this is nearly always a losing strategy since I end up too exhausted to really use those time slots fruitfully. Thus, some links:

1. I am not a scientist but I do enjoy reading about bug sex on the internet when long and interesting stories about the aforementioned topic become available. I can especially and completely away from the topic of the article relate to the author’s compound dread and fascination with spiders. I don’t like them either when we come face to face while they descend on a web but I am fascinated by them.

2. text.fish is an invaluable bit of web hackery that allows you to bypass the javascript hackery that hides new stories behind an overlay about how expensive it is to publish words on the internet after you’ve published them on dead trees already. I may start actually linking to stories published by a certain monochrome lady again if this continues to work since the text is the only thing I’m really interested in. Good stuff that I hope isn’t immediately detected and blocked by more disgusting JS.

3. I was going to link yet another article about Parler and the weird-ass continuing outcry about election fraud from the fringiest crazy people and then I realized I may have already posted something about that story or maybe it was quoting large chunks of something I’d already read a week ago. Call it exhaustion or a hangover of sorts from the first couple of weeks of post-election misdirection and chaos mongering by the right but I’m about out of interest and/or enthusiasm for anything related to crazy people and the 2020 election.

4. Growl is ceasing development which is kind of a bummer because it was a great case of how to deal with Apple not being equipped to handle a necessary interface element and devs stepping in to handle the shortcoming. As seems always is the case with Apple, they took some of their good ideas, pasted some shit and failure on top, and made it just barely good enough for interest to decline in something better.

Sunday Was Thankfully Dull

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On November 23, 2020

In Apple, This Sucks

There wasn’t a whole lot of excitement at our house this weekend as both kids were at their respective other parent’s houses and, really, there isn’t a whole lot worth noting in tech news unless you’d like to read another unexciting rundown of all of the pre-Black Friday deals in hopes of getting you to click through an affiliate link. Blah blah blah.

There were a couple things that did spring to mind when I thought about making a whiskey fueled Sunday night post though. The major one is my experience with the newest macOS (I feel like an idiot each and every time I type that) release. Right now I’m typing this up on a 13″ MacBook Pro running Big Sur and despite being on a less than stellar hardware version (quad core i7 with 16G of RAM) it feels pretty snappy but that’s also because it isn’t doing very much of anything other than running Chrome with way too many open tabs and Mars Edit which is the application I’m writing this entry in right now. I’m also in bed with just the laptop on my lap (this is not typical computer usage for me) and all is well.

On my other MacBook Pro with an i9 processor and 32G of RAM everything is a complete shit show. I also run two large monitors on my desk (36″ and 32″), a mechanical keyboard, and always always a Logitech MX Ergo trackball mouse that keeps my shoulder from attempting to kill me. I also do crazy things like take advantage of my gigabit internet by using a wired connection. This crazy, wild collection of hardware that none of my Linux machines has the slightest bit of trouble running harmoniously is giving the other machine continous breakdowns. I’ve switched out both the USB-C hubs and even switched over to a wired mouse without a trackball to try to isolate what the fuck is causing $2.5K of vastly overpriced hardware to completely lose its marbles. What I’ve found is that it’s entirely due to the fact that I expect my mouse to track quickly over two spacious monitors. My mouse stutters, freezes, and sometimes just locks up until I move it with the trackpad and others leave it paralyzed until I log out and back in again or reboot. It’s frustrating to a point where I don’t even want to use that machine at all anymore. Apparently this is somehow related to polling frequency of the mouse being too high with the fanboys recommending switching to a win modem Magic Mouse which doesn’t in any way work for me since I’m not 23 years old and need to preserve what little connective tissue is left in my wrists and shoulder. I’m feeling pretty over the whole free beta tester role and have just set aside the recent MBP and am running the commodity Dell laptop running Arch which handles everything magnificently. It’s frustrating and I wish it were easier to downgrade the OS version without having a Time Machine backup to lean on. Guess my brief resurgence in Apple stuff is over. Not a huge surprise.

The Only Sane Explanation of Insane QAnon I’ve Seen

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On November 22, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Oh God, Politics, Robot System For Robots

Q Anon is bat shit crazy, right? It should be apparent to most people that the likelihood that celebrities are all baby eating pedophiles all hopped up on Adrenochrome is pretty unlikely to be anything but the product of completely insane theorists of the least discerning kind. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t seem to go away with new batches of freshly hatched lunatics hallucinating, connecting the dots between their hallucinations and other people’s hallucinations, and eventually getting together (online or otherwise) to either congratulate each other on being totally nuts or, you know, doing something crazy that involves too many guns and a bunch of cops. It makes no sense to me at all but then again neither does Christianity.

It really took someone with some insight into understanding what caused people to voluntarily alter their reality to present their perspective on it for the edges to align for me. This very long and extensive look at QAnon via a game developer who’s spent a lot of time thinking about how to best design immersive alternate reality is the best attempt I’ve reading at trying to understand the zeitgeist crazy of QAnon without completely discounting those who find themselves sucked into it. You should read it. It made me feel less dismissive about the folks who end up painting themselves into this ridiculous corner.

Best/Worst Title and a Reminder That Lyric Sheets Are Important: Soul Glo

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On November 21, 2020

In Music

Soul Glo’s Songs To Yeet At The Sun was released a couple of whiles ago but I was reminded of it recently by some mentions in a few places that usually bring my increasingly unhip awareness to new-ish things. Often I shoo those flashes away for later but when those things hit the review section at Pitchfork then I know I’m fucking up to see something as ferocious as this record via the grimy underworld where waxing academic about mediocre bedroom folk records is somehow okay. Listen to this song, buy the record, and read the goddamn lyrics.

Too Many Open Tabs: A Tragedy

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On November 18, 2020

In Apple, Baseball, Oh God, Politics, Robot System For Robots

Once more it is time to dump a bunch of links before my browser has a nervous breakdown since it’s already unstable enough.

1. Craig Calcaterra posted his reasoning behind opposing Curt Schilling as a candidate for the Baseball Hall of Fame and it’s worth reading if you have any conflicted feelings about giving awards like this to garbage people. Calcaterra says it better than I could, for obvious reasons:

But we are not what we believe in our heart of hearts. We are what we do, and what he has done is to use his considerable celebrity to spread lies, conspiracy theories and hatred, the sort of which have gotten people killed in the past and will get more people killed in the future. He has not done this as some dumb, one-off comment in an interview nor has he done it ignorantly in a way that might lead one to believe he’s simply uninformed, easily swayed, or perhaps not well, mentally speaking. He is an intelligent man who has consciously pursued the agenda he has followed as a means of making himself a media star or, potentially, a political candidate. It’s odious. And it’s dangerous.

You should also subscribe to Cup of Coffee if you care about baseball because his writing is always worth reading.

2. I know that most people who read a lot of things on the web don’t need to read much more about the human impact of Covid-19. We’ve seen the pictures of victims stacked in hospital hallways and refridgerated trucks. The horror about the pandemic and its disgusting mismanagement has already had our attention and anger more than enough. What is worth taking a few minutes to read to temper that horror with humanity is the story of the impact of the second wave on a small South Dakota town and a doctor who lives there. It’s heart rending and grounded in perspective and is illustrative of the fact that everywhere is a disaster in these dark days after the virus was just supposed to magically fade away.

The paragraph about his parents who were casualties of the pandemic and the parallels between their experiences of sacrifice during WWII are encapsulated brilliantly:

A lot of people have suffered worse losses to this virus. My dad was over 100. My parents lived a good life, and they were at the end of their road. They got married 76 years ago during World War II once they’d finally saved up enough of their sugar rations to bake a proper wedding cake. They loved telling that story. Everybody was sacrificing for the war. It was a national effort. They were proud of it. The country had bigger problems, and their wedding cake could wait.

3. Meanwhile, in less human than others-land, Lindsey Graham might actually suffer some consequences for his actions. In this case, it was giving the hard sell to Georgia’s Secretary of State about eliminating as many legally valid ballots from tabulation as possible. There simply aren’t enough bad things in the world to give this man back the ill that he’s done to the world during his time in office.

4. Huh. I may be in the market for one of the new M1 machines in the not so distant future. I’m not best friends with the operating system (although my experience so far with Big Sur has been relatively smooth) but it looks like the claims are turning out to be true about the M1’s performance. I’ll be damned. I’m probably of the more cautious bent given that we’ve seen mostly benchmarks which are good for measuring performance but not necessarily use over time. I would also like more ports.

Some Stuffs From the Webs

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On November 13, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, Link Dump, Oh God, Politics

Still getting acclimated to the ebb and flow of my new gig and mostly working through lunches at the moment so time hasn’t been on my side for wasting scads of time doom scrolling lately. Here’s what ended up on Pinboard:

1. The Donald J Trump Presidential Library site is brilliantly done. I’d seen mention of it in a few places but (incorrectly) assumed that it would be disappointing. It is not. Maybe I’ve just grown so tired of seeing that man’s name in print and the expected bluster, xenophobia, and obsession with how he is seen by the world that I just tuned it out earlier. It is worth a visit if only because it’s better designed than most non-parodies associated with real libraries and museums. Top notch stuff all the way around folks!:

History has judged the former President to be criminally negligent in the death of thousands of American citizens, morally bankrupt in treatment of immigrants, and vastly amoral in race relations in empowering white nationalism.

With our Criminal Records Room, you can do the research on how YOU would prosecute Trump’s crimes against humanity!

2. In an unfortunately similar vein is My Little Crony. It visualizes all of gross business connections between Tory politicians and various companies getting government contracts during the pandemic. It’s good comforting less humiliating as an American to know that we’re not alone in our beleaguerment by the corruption of our elected officials. Not that this was ever necessarily a question or anything.

3. I’m glad that Google is doing something with the still fresh leftovers from its failed forays into VR that doesn’t involve them slowly bit-rotting in an unmaintained state while a group of adherents try to keep the content afloat. We could all use a walk somewhere far away right now. The only issue is that you can’t walk there and stay permanently. That sounds nice right about now.

4. I also learned today that following a half bag of Zapp’s Voodoo chips with an unintentional gulp of coffee is a grave error that can only be undone with vigorous toothbrushing and an optional minty mouthwash chaser. It’s the umami version of the ol’ toothpaste and orange juice disaster and I would not wish it on anyone else.

5. This article over at Slate gives me much more hope after the sheer number of editorials I’ve read over the past few weeks that have basically said that Biden’s appointments are going to nearly impossible to get past the Senate. I strongly believe that Mitch McConnell should be sealed into a capsule and fired at high velocity to the Moon since he doesn’t seem interested in doing much for either his state or the country. Any public servant that single-mindedly focused on gaining and consolidating political power needs to be retired in the interplanetary sense. Poof! Goodbye! Don’t worry about samples! No one wants you to come back.

The Same Idiots Who Loved Calling You ‘Snowflake’ Now Fleeing The Repressive Notion of Being Held Accountable For Their Stupid, Stupid Words

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On November 12, 2020

In Oh God, Politics, Sad Spam Poetry, This Sucks

Now that things seem less hospitable for racist Trumpists terrified of factual evidence backed by observation in the real, actual world that we all inhabit they’re being encouraged to ditch the toxic wasteland of Twitter for its right wing discount equivalent Parler.

I’m not an avid Twitter user by any means but I do enjoy a quick stumble down into Lack of Reading Comprehension-Land when major news events happen just to see how LOL-worthy the public reaction is. Well, that and baseball. I do not consider Twitter a news source (excepting baseball trade rumors) so I don’t treat content there with any more seriousness than I do the unread copy pasta that fills up Facebook timelines. I do enjoy the idea of my flow of baseball gossip being less frequently interrupted with inflammatory word salad from sources even more questionable than social media sites. That exodus of folks who habitually misuse their caps lock key doesn’t sound awful to me. I suppose I can find other rich veins of unintentional comedy to mine in other places.

Hilariously, the wide open spaces dedicated to the unfettered venting of spleen don’t seem to magnetically attract the sharpest knives in the drawer. This is all fine and good for the folks making a few bucks swindling the rubes by repackaging worthless opinions from our own stupid shores but I worry, only a little, that the level of internet discourse will somehow get even more poisonous and concentrated by purposeful isolation from other ideas. I suppose that’s an idiotic thing to trouble me in this of all years. You can read all about Josiah Motley’s experiences on the platform here. It sounds pretty horrific and not something I can’t convince myself is a good idea to try myself. It just seems like more trash than I can cope with.

Is The ‘M’ For Meh?

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On November 11, 2020

In Apple, This Sucks

Despite the fact that I’m now working on Apple hardware at the new gig, I haven’t been a huge fan for a while. I have one of the 13″ MBPs as my company machine and I’ve been pretty disappointed with the overall OS instability, frustration with the sheer number of dongles and hubs that I need to use non-fruity accessories, and shitty thermal management of this machine. If I had paid for it myself I would return it. I’m fully aware that the 16″ MBP is a better machine for all of the above but that doesn’t mean that the other pricey machine should be trash because a better model is available.

It should be no surprise then that I’m not all that excited about the new models announced today. I’m skeptical of the exaggerated battery life since that assumes that the software you’re using isn’t running atop an emulation layer or something. I’m also more than a little underwhelmed at the maximum 16G of RAM on both the new Air and MBP. Oh, and two ports seems a bit optimistic as well. Maybe I’m reading this completely wrong and there is some mystical layer of magic as an intermediary? This is also the first generation which means the usual guarantee of a few terrible iterations. I just shrugged for the most part and then moved on. Oh, no external GPUs either. I guess that’s innovative?

Probably About Time For Some Words

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On November 10, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, Oh God, Politics, Work Horrible Work

Although Joe Biden wasn’t my first or even second choice for a presidential candidate given his propensity for being a grabass of slightly less odious proportions than the asshole we’re trying to get rid of, I’m glad someone reasonable seeming won the election. I think another full term of Trump would have finished off the tattered remnants of the United States. I don’t think that my positive reaction has nearly as much to do with Biden’s election as it does with the election of a woman of color as Vice President. I’m glad that shit is over with and we can now just amuse ourselves with watching judges bat down ridiculous lawsuits and then of course the Four Seasons press conference/slapstick comedy hour was just more icing on a cake already slick with sugar.

My wife is officially discharged and home from the hospital. She’s going to have to use a walker for a while and is having some interesting challenges navigating our house which has about as many stairs as any newly built house possibly could in even the worst case. It’s going to be a while until she’s fully recovered and we won’t know how much her leg will recover from the strokes until much further down the line of physical therapy and healing. It is good to have her home.

I also started a new job today which pays more and is potentially more interesting work. I can’t and won’t mention the company but I’m hoping to actually manage to stay at one company for more than two years. It has been a while and the job market for systems admin work that isn’t centered around AWS is slightly better than it was a couple of years ago so there is at least a little pressure to try to keep us happy and in place. It was probably the worst time to start something new but I had two choices of start dates and the thought of remaining at my old job for another month was unbearable.

That’s where I’m at. How the hell are you?

Don’t Know If My Anxiety Is Better But Boy Am I Tired

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On November 5, 2020

In Oh God, Politics

Right now, collectively, we’re kind of hovering somewhere between impatience while slow tallying regions (mainly because a certain party made sure that votes could not be counted until Election Day) and the reserved urge to celebrate early. Is that out of a sense of propriety or just because we don’t want to jinx anything? I’m not sure but I’ve been watching more broadcast television over the past 24 hours than I have in the past 3 years and I’m kind of worn out watching the various pundits try to fill airtime. I’m hoping that when I wake up tomorrow we’ll have a solidified idea of what is going on with the election and I can stop panic refreshing 15+ tabs in my browser. I sincerely hope for my own sense of feeling like I’m actually a part of this country that I do not awake to news like I did in 2016.

I am hoping that against all hope that some groundswell for an eventual abolition of the electoral college is mounting while we nervously wait for the election results. I have a feeling that regardless of your political affiliation most people are exhausted by the weird speculation about election results skewed by states with small populations. A popular vote would be so much simpler and remove that weird pressure to spend time and effort trying to impress racists in flyover states. Less attention paid to places that fit the above description seems like a beneficial effect.

I’m tired and going to sleep in any case. Tomorrow I get so spend some time with physical therapists to figure out how to best support my wife and her new mobility limitations when she comes home in two days. That is worthy of some celebration.

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