Please stand by. I’m updating the template behind the site to work better on mobile browsers. Hopefully this won’t take long.
Update: The site should be working pretty well for variable browser sizes; I still have to work out some styling issues with comment layouts, random page elements, and the footer. But it’s working. Check it out on your phone or resize the browser window to see what I’m talking about.
Update Update: Typekit fonts are adjusted, and there are a lot of little edits here and there. The footer is the biggest issue now. I’d like to have it resize more gracefully into something better, but I need to work on it more. I’m not sure I’m going to keep using this template, but I haven’t found a good alternative yet.
My VW bus wasn’t an 23-window like the subject of this article, but it brought back a lot of great memories. I think I’ll have to do a series here on cars I’ve driven or owned. It’s quite a list.
This looks to be some excellent reporting, and it clears up a lot of misconception about the Fast and Furious scandal:
Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands… But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
In other news, the Hefeweizen is chilled, carbed, and pouring. It’s very good! So good, in fact, I may brew it again this summer. It’s a quick, easy recipe and very refreshing to drink. My neighbor also got my Co2 tank refilled for me, which is a relief. Unfortunately I lost about 200lbs of pressure before I realized one of my hose fittings was loose. I have a list of items to buy at the homebrew store this weekend to set up long keg leads from the cooler to the basement window and I’m going to mock up a wooden stand to place in the opening for people to pour at. I’ll post a sketch here when it’s ready.
To recap: an NPR intern wrote a short weblog post called I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With, where she admits to stealing something like 11,000 songs without paying for them. David Lowery of Cracker wrote a heartfelt and well-thought response called Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered which discusses the economic realities of music piracy. Several rebuttals have been written to Lowery’s article, the best of which is one by Travis Morrison of the Dismemberment Plan: Hey Dude From Cracker, I’m Sorry, I Stole Music Like These Damned Kids When I Was A Kid. Both articles resonate with me, because I truly believe artists need to make money to continue to make music; I use my iTunes account to buy albums I really like, and use the internet to screen the garbage. Morrison’s article also stuck with me, because his experience was identical to mine–taping from the radio, libraries, college radio (I was much too much a chicken to shoplift, though):
Music is so important to people. It is majorly important to young people. And to me? Literally somewhere below water and air but above food. And I just went for it. I bought a lot of music; I got a lot of free music from whatever sources were at hand; I just had to have it by any means necessary. If you duped a copy of a Dismemberment Plan record in college or something, it’s cool. I guess I’d like to have the money, but you know what, I hope you just listened to it with even 1/10 of the consciousness I gave to the music I listened to as a kid–copied, stolen, or bought.
Yes, I’m here. And I’m not slacking off in the illustration department; I’ve just been taking my time with a new piece that’s more involved than a simple portrait. Here’s a teaser:
I’m trying to balance my perfectionism with the appeal of handmade craft; once the black and white is finished I’m going to try a new approach to color and add some typography. I’m excited.
In other news, after finally kicking the Chinook IPA with dinner, I kegged the hefeweizen and chilled it overnight in the cooler. The final gravity was only .001 off from the recipe, and it tastes really good—a lot more personality than the American Ale I’ve got. My neighbor is going to take my tank with his and get them refilled with Co2 tomorrow, so I should be in good shape for the parade party. Next up: another summery recipe to brew after the parade.
“The South of France, a young man in his early 20’s, rock ‘n’ roll musician, that’s a mighty fine combination. I’m tellin ya, that’s when you’re shittin’ in tall cotton.”
A mutual thumbs-up from an Early Bronco on the way back from a beer run in the Scout
Watching Finding Nemo outdoors in Ellicott City with our neighbors. For the final 1/2 of the movie, Finn sat in my lap and giggled her way through the funny parts
My Father’s Day present: a blanket, umbrella, beach pail, some shells, a grape, and a rocking chair arranged on the floor of the living room: Finn made me “the Beach”
The Farmer’s Market for lunch: Big Bad Wolf pulled pork sandwiches, $.50 ears of corn, and cheap beets
Successfully resurrecting the basement server, which took a dirt nap on Friday
Dinner: grilled lemon chicken, beets, coleslaw, steamed corn on the cob, and for dessert: sour cherry clafouti
Waking up to a smiling Finn this morning, after joining her at 4AM to ward off further bad dreams
The WaPo did a very interesting article on the Christian homeschool movement and some of the underlying ideology behind it. I was surprised to learn how integral they were to the adoption of homeschooling as an alternative to public education but not shocked to hear how xenophobic and isolationist their doctrine is.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
The article follows a family who began to question their fundamentalist beliefs and sent their daughter to public school, only to find it wasn’t full of satanic child molesters, as they’d been told.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and why you should. I’d like to set this up among all of the devices we have here, but we run a lot of older gear that won’t be covered under this seup—and the idea that if I do enable this, we’ll lose some functionality on things like the Apple TV or this old laptop doesn’t thrill me.
Andy Baio has made many amazing things for the internet, one of which is/was called Belong.io, which was a tool using the Twitter API to scrape interesting links from the feeds of a bunch of interesting people daily. With Phony Stark blowing up the service and charging for the API, he’s shut the whole thing down:
Truth be told, it was already dying as those interesting people slowed down their Twitter usage, or left entirely in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition and a series of decisions that summarily ruined it as a platform for creative experimentation.
bummer.
The Washington Post did a deep dive of the dataset used to train popular AI models like ChatGPT, and as you might expect, the big websites got crawled heavily. Interestingly, IdiotCentral here didn’t show up at all, but billdugan.com ranks 1,078,227th.
Songslikex is supposed to be a tool to suggest other songs you might like based on something you suggest. I’ve put in a couple of slightly off-center suggestions and it’s returned a list of songs that were OK, but I don’t know that I’d put them all in the same category. I don’t know how they’re developing their list, but I guess it’s OK.
