I seem to be collecting a lot of open tabs lately. Here are some highlights:
- The Defector 2024 Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog is live! I look forward to this as much as candy in my stocking.
- How long does medication actually last before it goes bad? Vox looks into the matter and finds mostly what I’ve suspected all along.
That is to say, drug expiration dates aren’t “bad after” dates as much as they are “good before” dates. For most drugs, these dates are set to about three years after the day they’re produced…
- Stereogum does a list of its best Shoegaze tracks of 2024. Shoegaze, much like any other form of music, can vary from garbage to gem depending on who’s making it, but I’ve enjoyed revisiting the genre this year. I haven’t heard of any of these bands but this should keep me busy for a week or two.
Here’s a collection of random links culled from a number of of tabs I’ve had open from the past week:
- Kingmakers is an upcoming game where you are apparently parachuted into historical battles with modern weapons and lay waste to medieval knights with rocket launchers and Corvettes. This looks like it would be a hoot to play. I remember a game 10-15 years ago where the goal was to mow down as many opposing forces as possible and the engine was optimized to have hundreds of NPCs active at the same time without melting down your graphics card. I have to believe you’d need a supercomputer to run this one at anything other than Minecraft-level graphics settings, but it does look like fun.
- What happened to the thousands of ships that were built by the U.S. to fight in WWII? Eventually they were scrapped, of course, but how did that work? Here’s a deep dive into the process. Directly after the war it was a profitable business, but as the numbers dwindled and the dangers of asbestos and PCBs were fully understood, it became a losing proposition and harder to do safely.
- The Cornbinder Connection is a magazine dedicated to IH trucks and nothing else. I’ve seen their booth at Nats for the last couple of years and for some reason I’ve never bothered to subscribe. If Santa needs a gift idea for me, this would be a good one.
- Character.ai is a chatbot that The Teens have been using (including ours) and, alarmingly, it’s going rogue and convincing them to self-harm, among other things. The people behind the bot have now introduced a new model specifically for teens which is supposed to guide away from these interactions, and they’re planning on rolling out parental controls next year. But, as with anything else, it’s still a simple matter to defeat the age verification requirements, which means this teen model will be useless. Maybe they should just make a single model and make it safer and better? And why weren’t these controls in place before they originally released the bot?
I’ve had about ten different tabs open in my browser for the past week, which usually means they contain something interesting and it’s probably time to share them. Here goes:
- Here’s an article about why mirrorless cameras are better than DSLRs; I haven’t actually been shooting much in the last eight months, but it’s always good to refresh my memory. The big takeaway here is about using focus peaking in the viewfinder, something you can’t do on a DSLR unless you’re using Live View.
- This is what it says on the tin: 3 hours of oldies music playing in another room with rainfall and some thunder.
- This is a good time waster website: Rare Historical Photos. The author(s) do a good job of researching the stuff they post, so it’s not the usual Tumblr image dump. See also: Shorpy.
- Austin Kleon, a writer/artist, posts a list of 100 things that made his year better. See also: 31 favorite records. His post on 15 years of blogging contains this excellent insight:
That last line is worth repeating: “Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.”
- I don’t know how I’ve overlooked this for so long, but Hype Machine is an aggregator of new music websites that posts interesting new stuff to listen to every day.
- We saw Soul on Friday night. It was good—as usual, Pete Docter (writer/director of Wall-E, Up and Inside Out) takes a big, adult concept and makes a warm, human-centered movie out of it. My only complaint is that it felt rushed compared to other Pixar movies—a lot happens and they speed through it all quickly. It could have benefited from a little more time throughout to breathe and let the character beats settle. Still—recommended. Here’s the song Just Us, which ran over the credits, but which I really loved:
- Finally, we saw the movie Uncle Frank on Saturday evening: a gay man in New York returns to South Carolina for his father’s funeral in 1973; along with him for the ride are his niece and boyfriend. Finley needs more gay uncles like these.
I was with sadness this morning that I read of the death of Grant Imahara, one of the hosts of Mythbusters, a show I watched as much as I could during its run from 2003–2016. There were several elements of the show I found annoying, mainly the narration, but I always enjoyed the format, the enthusiasm of the hosts, and the subject matter. Imahara was one of the best parts of the show—all science, and no attempt to be an outsized personality.
Having been astounded by the story of the St. Louis couple who walked out on their front lawn waving guns at peaceful BLM protestors, I was glad to see the St. Louis Post-Dispatch did an article diving into Ken & Karen’s backtory to find they (surprisingly) have a long history with the law and a raging persecution complex.
In 2013, he destroyed bee hives placed just outside of the mansion’s northern wall by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation and left a note saying he did it, and if the mess wasn’t cleaned up quickly he would seek a restraining order and attorneys fees.
This is the guy who gets a law degree just to make the rest of the world miserable. I was happy to see the cops showed up and confiscated their guns, especially after seeing how fucking stupid Karen was with her trigger finger.
In the New York Times, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D, Ill) took Tucker Carlson to task for questioning her patriotism.
But while I would risk my own safety to protect a statue of his from harm, I’ll fight to my last breath to defend every American’s freedom to have his or her own opinion about Washington’s flawed history. What some on the other side don’t seem to understand is that we can honor our founders while acknowledging their serious faults, including the undeniable fact that many of them enslaved Black Americans.
Because while we have never been a perfect union, we have always sought to be a more perfect union — and in order to do so, we cannot whitewash our missteps and mistakes. We must learn from them instead.
To hear Carlson, a privileged frat bro who was turned down by the CIA, question the patriotism of a woman who served in her country’s military, learned to fly rotary-wing aircraft, and who lost her legs in combat, just boggles my mind. The fact that the red states elected the guy who called John McCain a “loser” for being shot down in Vietnam illustrates the mental gymnastics these idiots—who claim daily they “SUPPORT OUR TROOPS”—have to do to convince themselves they’re right.
Seat Time Cars is a search engine which finds cars with a manual transmission for sale under $5,000 in any geographic area you desire. There are a lot of cheap Miatas on there that I’d wager have been thrashed to within an inch of their lives, but they sure look like fun…
Retrobatch is a small app that does batch processing of image files without all of the overhead of Photoshop. It’s fully scriptable and there are workflows that can be built and saved into standalone droplets. I haven’t worked out the kinks yet but I’m building one to convert iPhone HEIC image files to high-quality JPGs.
I’m coming back up for air after a busy couple of weeks. Hopefully I can finish up some long-standing projects at work (one of which gobbled up my entire Super Bowl weekend) so that I can focus on other things. Things like:
- Moving idiotking to a different hosting platform. I’ve been talking about doing this for years but have never gotten around to it, and my hosting bill at the current provider comes due on my birthday. It’s time to put the wheels in motion.
- Organizing a snowboarding trip with Finn and Zachary. There are two issues here that I haven’t figured out yet: it hasn’t snowed at all this year, so I need to find someplace that has been making decent amounts of fresh snow, and getting Zachary over the Bay early enough that we don’t pull in to the ski resort at 3 in the afternoon. It might be that we do an overnight at our house and get an early start the next morning, or we meet Karean over the bridge at the crack of dawn. TBD.
Getting some wood filler strips ordered for the bathroom,and scheduling someone to come out and measure for the countertops. With Hazel’s condition being what it is—and no end in sight there—I haven’t touched the bathroom in over a month. I’d really like to pick that back up and make some progress.- Brewing some beer. I have a kit in the basement that’s been waiting since last summer, and I’m tired of waiting around for my brewing friends to get their act together. This means I’ll have to brew inside, which always makes Jen really happy. While we were in Orlando I tried a chocolate stout that was delicious—flavorful and satisfying, but light in finish. I think that will be the next one I try, with an eye towards bottling and conditioning over the summer months for a fall unveiling.
- Cleaning up the basement. It’s a disaster down there, and there are a lot of long-standing organizational issues that need to be resolved. We’ve been out of shelf space for years, so there are boxes on the floor in random places, and there are piles of things that need to go to goodwill that have been sitting for months. It needs a brutal culling and then some re-organization. And I need to build more shelves in the ice room.
A dump run. There are 12 casement windows leaning up against the back porch, two garbage cans full of debris, 1 ton of lead window weights, and a pile of other crap that have been waiting to leave since September. Done!
Oh, yeah, there’s the other small matter of my sabbatical, which is now 6 months overdue, and for which there is no current plan. We can now start shopping around for airfare, as we’re within the purchasing window of opportunity. I happened to chat with an old work friend through Instagram while we were in Orlando, and I recalled that she runs a side gig planning trips to Japan. That got some wheels turning, and I asked her if we could discuss the rough outline of a trip for the family. More on that possibility later…
Prompted by a post on Kottke.org, I followed a link to an Ask Metafilter thread where the poster was wondering if any old-school bloggers were still active and what the links were. I’ve been a member of Metafilter for over a decade and visit it daily, but haven’t posted anything for years. I figured this was as good a time as any and added my site to the list.
Update: See this interesting 2018 review of a blogroll from 2003. These names take me back, kids.
I don’t know what else I can write about 2016 that hasn’t been covered elsewhere; from my humble perspective everything in the world that I know seems to have gone completely sideways. We elected a narcissistic clown for president, we lost Prince, Bowie, Gene Wilder, Alan Rickman, George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and Abe motherfucking Vigoda. Closer to home, the plumbing crapped out, the boiler blew a gasket, we had to trade two trees in our backyard for a summer vacation, and on that vacation we had to deal with head lice.
On the positive side, the Lockardugans did what we could to make progress in 2016. Finley entered the Second Grade and tested in the 90th percentile for both math and english. She learned how to snowboard and ride a bike. We had fun at the beach and in Philadelphia for our vacation. I was lucky enough to travel to Mexico and London and work in some sightseeing time. We refinanced our house and set the wheels in motion to start working on it again.
Miles of copy has already been written about the possibilities and perils of the next four years. Personally, I’m terrified; I didn’t predict the election results, but I tried to get us as prepared financially as I could–we already know that interest rates are going up, and I’m betting that our new president’s inability to censor himself will cause gigantic ripples in the economy that he won’t feel. Beyond that, he’s surrounded himself with a bunch of supply-side economists, big business apologists, and frightening throwbacks to Jim Crow America. They will start making decisions that will have lasting effects on my family’s well-being for decades. Our balance on the knife edge of the Middle Class has never felt more precarious.
And yet, I’m still hanging on to optimism. I work for an organization that is gearing itself up to fight for sustainable environmental policies. My family is healthy, and my daughter is thriving. We will teach her to fight for the truth, think independently, make smart decisions for herself, and to be a compassionate and socially conscious woman. Because I think those qualities in that gender are exactly what this country needs.
Well, that’s it. All of the old hand-coded log is now here in WordPress. After I-don’t-know-how-many-years, I finished migrating it the other night, so everything from 2001 is included here.
Meanwhile, poking around my other site, I came across a bunch of stuff I’d forgotten about. From 2002-2005 (pre-Flickr) I used to use a small script to generate galleries of photos and then post them to my website, but there’s never been any real good list of links to the whole cache. Here’s a master list, in date-correct order:
6/7/02 – Backyard pictures from my old house in Canton
6/11/02 – More backyard progress shots
6/22/02 – Assorted pictures, Jen’s apartment kitchen
7/6/02 – Fourth of July weekend and some more backyard pictures
7/15/02 – Model T Club meetup in Ellicot City
7/30/02 – July vacation in Aurora
9/1/02 – Labor Day in Aurora
9/14/02 – Matt comes in from San Francisco, and our group of friends meets at Rob & Karean’s house in Canton
3/18/03 – Snowfall in Canton
3/17/03 – St. Patrick’s Day weekend
3/29/03 – Checking out a old building on River Road in Ellicott City
bimini_photos – Bimini pictures
divelog – Bimini trip writeup with pictures
5/27/2003 – Engagement trip to Savannah, GA
5/10/03 wedding – Tim & Betty’s wedding in DC
5/24/03 – Engagement trip to Aurora
6/7/03 – Lockard reunion in Orlando
7/4/03 – Fourth of July 2003, up in Aurora
7/25/03 Stas & Vicki’s wedding in NY
9/8/03 – New Catonsville house pictures
12/21/03 – Christmas dinner on Tyndale Ave.
4/4/20 – Spring flowers
Wedding – Wedding pictures
Rome – Honeymoon trip to Rome with writeup
4/10/9 – Matt & Sophie’s wedding in San Francisco
4/11/26 – B&O Railroad Museum
Baby – Finn’s progression in Jen’s belly
House – Shots from the first day we looked at the house
House_photos – A few pictures from the house inspection
House_progress – Semi-updated gallery of house renovation pictures
Oklahoma – Pictures of the crazy roadside signs in Oklahoma, 1992
Panoramics – Test panoramics (needs a Java applet, which I don’t have a link for)
At some point, I’d like to upload all of these to Flickr, but I don’t know of a way to backdate them so that they list in sequence. I’ll have to look into that some more.
Our weekend was full and fun. Saturday we started out with a soccer game under bright blue skies. Finn claimed she was nervous on the ride over, but as she got onto the field and comfortable, she guarded the goal well.
On one play toward the second half of the game, she collected the ball in front of her own goal and drove it all the way down the field to the other side–and past the opposing team’s goal. She’s come so far in a couple of weeks!
In the afternoon she hung out with me while I got a bunch of boring house chores done:
- Hauled brush to the dump
- Brought in the AC units
- Closed the storm windows
- Cleaned off the front porch
- Cleaned up and closed up the attic
- Closed up the cracks in our foundation with hydraulic cement
Then we walked over to the neighbors’ and grilled on their deck. As the sun set we built a fire in the firepit, enjoyed adult conversation, and let the kids play until long after bedtime.
I’m wrapping up a lot of small projects here today:
- I’ve got a sick iMac on my desk waiting for a fresh install of Snow Leopard. The hard drive died on it last week so I had R&K drop it off to let me do a little surgery. I put a new 1TB drive in it and got it back up and running. Now I have to find out what OS it tops out at and attempt a rebuild from their backup.
- I’ve had another sick MacBook Pro come in and out of the office, the victim of an overstuffed email database and general malaise.
- I’ve got a web project for Finn’s old pre-K school that’s going pretty well. It’s a church site I built in WordPress with some nice calendar functionality and some other custom features, and I’m waiting for them to start adding content so that I can style it and fill out the pages.
- I’ve got another client who’s going through a move and needed two MailChimp templates for a pair of email blasts, as well as an updated address to all the pages on their site.
- We’ve got a friend who’s been looking to get a personal WordPress site off the ground for a while, and has a renewed focus on making that happen.
I was able to wrap up a lot of small things this afternoon, which feels good and should open my weeknights back up. Last week I was bouncing from one thing to the next but not making a lot of headway, so an afternoon’s full attention made all the difference. I like having paying work, and I’d like to solicit some more, just as long as it’s not overwhelming–as it has in the past.
I keep meaning to post a link to Open Culture, but I get sidetracked by watching/reading/exploring hours of links of video footage–lectures, documentaries, photo archives, and other great stuff. This site should have a Roku channel of its own.
So any woman who seeks an abortion in the state of Virgina is now required by law to have an ultrasound; thankfully they took the transvaginal part out before signing it into legislation. (For the uninitiated, transvaginal is where they use a huge plastic dildo). I’m glad to see that, in times of economic stress, our lawmakers continue to focus on the important things, like telling women what to do with their bodies. How’s that Republican majority working for you, Virginia?
The Colts have officially cut Peyton Manning, which makes about as much sense as cancelling the moon program while your guys are still in space. Seriously, what the hell are they thinking? Even on a bad day the guy is worth four quarterbacks. They’ve spent more than ten years building a team around him; they were 2-14 last year without him. It’s going to be a long couple of years in Indianapolis.
Apple announced another iPad I probably won’t buy (not because I don’t want one) but did update the AppleTV to 1080p, added AirPlay and iCloud support, which means there will be one in our immediate future once the new TV mount is finished.
Rush Limbaugh is losing advertisers left and right for being a douchebag, which makes me cackle with glee. Fuck you, Rush.