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Happy to have this completed. My team was awesome; I couldn’t be prouder of all of them.
Every six months or so, I look at the bins of antique computing hardware stored in the basement, and wonder whether I should continue to keep them, or pull the pin and recycle everything after wiping the drives. Then I stumble on an article like this one from the Harvard Law Library, and I feel better about having kept everything.
With digital storage there will always be two separate but equal battlefields of maintenance to consider: maintenance of the digital holdings and software environments in which they live, and the simple physical maintenance of the hardware and architecture that contain them.
It’s a really well-written and well-designed article, and worth reading if you nerd out on stuff like this. Now, to think about a secondary data backup for the server in the basement.
My Instagram feed has been suggesting videos of parts being turned on lathes for a couple of months now. They must know it’s the ASMR my brain needs to soothe itself. I’ve always been curious about how they work and fascinated by the engineering behind them; there’s so much to learn about tolerances and the math behind how to cut threads in bolts. One of the YouTube channels I follow just posted a video where he saved a professional lathe from being scrapped, got it back to his shop, and modified it to run on regular 120V house power vs. the three-phase it was built for. Along the way he shows how it works, explains some of the basic math behind its electrical requirements, rigs up a 120V motor and a three-way switch to make it work.
Once again, I am super jealous. I would LOVE to have a shop big enough to hold this and the time to learn how to use it properly.
In 2004, Jen and I had a choice to make. We were planning out our new kitchen, and we had to make the most of the space we had, as well as our money. I’d taken out a home equity loan to front the cash, so we were on a fixed budget, and that prevented us from doing the obvious thing, which was to blow out the wall between our dining room and the kitchen to open the space up. We worked with a kitchen planner and they helped us fit a set of cabinets into the space we’d inherited, but the critical choice we had to make was this: whether or not to sacrifice a cabinet for the radiator that was shoehorned under the existing rental-grade countertop. We decided, correctly, that storage was more important, and removed the radiator. But we’ve been living with the fallout of that decision ever since, and it’s never been more apparent than this past week of single-digit temperatures.
It sucks to be out there when it’s cold outside. To the point where Jen has turned the oven on just to stay warm while making food. Even when the radiator was there, it was never any great shakes; the kitchen is at the very end of the closed-circuit loop in our steam heating system, which means that it and the bedroom above get the least amount of heat last. But walking in there after just having gotten out of bed to get some coffee started is like walking through a snowbank; it sucks.
Contrast that with the Schluter radiant floor heat system we put in the master bath, which is like walking on a warm hug. In the morning, when the cats are freed from their prison (they sleep in the basement, otherwise they rattle the bedroom door and keep Jen up all night) they make a beeline for the bathroom and lay around up there all day. I can’t say I blame them; there have been days when I’ve wanted to shove them aside to take a nap.
Looking around the interwebs, I found a radiant floor retrofit kit for houses like ours, where the entire thing is essentially a roll-out mat sold in various lengths that are attached to a central 120V controller. You staple them to the joists under the floor with about 2″ of void space, and then tuck insulation up underneath. Something like this would go a long way to making things more livable out there, and we could move the big, bulky Edenpure heater my Mom gave us out of there for good.
Given that interest rates aren’t going down anytime again in my lifetime, and we’re going to need to make this dump more livable for the future, $2K in materials + electrician visit to hook it up wouldn’t be disagreeable.
98% of Costco shareholders voted overwhelmingly to reject a review of their ongoing diversity programs. The National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, put forth the proposal, claiming DEI initiatives are somehow a risk to shareholders, which is fearmongering nonsense. We’ve been Costco members for years now, and I couldn’t be happier about it. In a time when we need to vote with our wallets (because our regular votes don’t seem to matter), this is one small bit of support my family can offer.
I finally finished playing the library’s copy of Star Wars: Fallen Order and returned it after having renewed it twice; I liked it enough to find a cheap copy of its sequel, Jedi Survivor, on sale at Amazon, and bought it. These games are a fun challenge, and much different than the shooters like The Division and the shooter/loot grab titles like Fallout I’ve been playing. Truthfully, I’m pretty tired of the Bethesda engine. Nuclear apocalypse, sword-and-fantasy, or outer space: it’s all the same mechanics, and there’s very little that’s new to the formula. The Jedi games are 50% skill based puzzle-solving and 50% kool lightsaber fights, all set in a sprawling, richly detailed environment. They don’t go super dweeb-heavy on the lore, and there’s just enough of a music cue to let me know I’m in a galaxy far, far away without beating me over the head with it. (See: Battlefront, which was fun but forced me to shut off the music entirely).
Speaking of the library, I had to drive Finn out to a different branch to pick up a book for school, and found it to be much larger, and much better stocked, than our local. I walked out with a stack of 10 CDs, two new games to try, and an interesting history book. Their wall of multimedia is huge compared to the branch down the street—so I believe this will be my new go-to for the immediate future.
I’m happy to see Mogwai have released a new album, and happier still to see Pitchfork (yes! they still exist) gave it a good review. Glad to see my favorite Scottish post-whatever band still going strong, and from what it sounds like, pushing some new boundaries.
Where they once reveled in disrupting ominous quietude with explosive outbursts, these days, they’d rather redirect tense energy into uplifting expression. As such, a band that once offered apocalyptic mayhem has become a source of comforting consistency as the real world turns evermore turbulent.
I was happy to stumble on a $5 copy of Come On Die Young at a secondhand CD store this summer, and definitely need to update/complete my discography.
First, let me say I have NO idea how this song got stuck in my head this week. This is by a prog/thrash rock band called Dream Theater, and it came out way back in the late 90’s, at a time when I was most adjacent to hair metal. I remember the metalheads at high school speaking reverently about the shredding skills of the lead guitarist. It’s the only song I know by this band, and it’s their only song that reached Top 10 charting position (which is probably how I first heard it). It’s got some good ideas but like most prog/thrash bands of the time, the songwriting never coalesces into something complete. It starts and stops and every time it settles into a groove they switch time, switch the beat, or leave the phrase for something completely different in tone. I’m irritated to even admit it’s stuck in my head, but here we are.
Maybe I can offer a chaser to wash that out of our heads. I was watching a video the other day that used a track for background music which I really liked, and tracked it down. It’s by a band called Cigarettes After Sex, and the track is called Apocalypse. This band is all vibe; it’s slow tempo, surf-tone guitars and moody keyboards drenched in reverb.
As usual, this album is six years old, but I’m just getting to it now.