Well, it looks like I got my drone at exactly the right time. The US Government banned all new foreign-made drones in the U.S., essentially shutting DJI out of the domestic market as of yesterday.
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.
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.
This post is a bit overdue, but here goes. There are 6310 posts on the site as of January 1, which doesn’t seem like a lot of new stuff this year. Strange. I will admit my cadence for posting was way down in 2024. I’ve found it hard to put time into reflective writing, so a lot of what I’ve posted has been shorter reactions about things I’ve seen or recaps of things I’ve done. But it’s still a good feeling to have a thought, write it down, go back and edit it into something worthwhile, and post it. Writing something—anything—is good for the brain, and it’s exercise I like to keep doing.
Here’s the post category count total for 2024.
Here’s the monthly post count to date. As with 2023, the overall trend is down a bit since a spike in 2019. The other big thing to note is that the plugin I was using to syndicate the Scout blog suddenly decided to implode—the formatting from those posts got completely mangled to the point where it wasn’t worth the time to fix every one, so I shut the syndication off. That brought the overall count way down because I’ve been posting progress over there pretty religiously every week or so.
When I was 22, I went to see a GWAR show at Hammerjacks on Halloween evening. For the uninitiated, GWAR is more of a theatrical experience than just a concert: highlights include being hosed down with fake blood, mid-set skits featuring simulated sex and murder, and pounding thrash riffs played by men on platform heels in full-body foam costumes. I was no stranger to loud music by this time; I’d seen a hundred shows by this point, in venues large and small, through professional sound installations and thrift-store PA systems. But the sound guy at Hammerjacks that evening just said fuck it, maxed all the levels on the board, and went outside to smoke a joint. The sound was so loud it vibrated my testicles. I felt the high frequencies in my spleen. That said, the show was a lot of fun and I walked out into the crisp evening with fake blood steaming off my head and a ringing in my ears. That ringing stayed with me as I fell asleep and was gone by morning.
These days that ringing doesn’t go away. Most of the time I’m not aware of it, actually. It’s been a slow progression over the last couple of years, not unlike my eyesight, where I started noticing that I had to hold stuff further away in order to see it and suddenly realized it was time for reading glasses. This sound isn’t even a ringing. it’s a high-frequency whine that sits somewhere behind my ears, blocking out other sounds in that range. Again, I don’t notice it for most of the day, but laying in bed in a quiet house, it’s hard to ignore.
With all the stuff I’ve been working on for the past couple of years, I’ve actually been very conscious of my hearing and my eyesight. My first set of progressives was actually a set of safety glasses, which were much cheaper than a pair of normal glasses. I used those to test out whether I could stand them, and found them smooth and helpful enough to pull the trigger on everyday frames. Where I used to run grinders and saws without any ear protection in my 20’s, I’ve had got three sets of earmuffs rotating in the garage since 2010. Anytime I’m sanding or cutting, I’m careful to wear them. And I wear iPods with noise cancellation on and the sound as low as I can make it almost constantly. But time is clearly catching up with me, as my hairline will testify.
I got together with my Scout buddies a couple of weeks ago. I usually bring donuts, and someone else will bring coffee, and we sit and chat for a little bit before we get started. It’s funny how we spend more and more time talking about getting older—our various aches and pains, complaining about the weather, commiserating about expensive home repairs, or how we don’t have time to get to fun truck stuff. I’d offhandedly mentioned the ringing in my ears and my friend Bennett immediately nodded his understanding. He told me he’s been battling the same thing, and has read about a promising method of treating it—electrical pulses on the back of the tongue to stimulate the trigeminal and auditory nerves. It doesn’t cure tinnitus, but apparently reprograms the brain to tune out the sound. The FDA has approved the first devices for this treatment, and I’m curious to see when it’ll be available—and if my insurance will cover it.
In the meantime, I’ll live with the whine in my ears and my lousier eyesight and thinning hair, and be thankful I’m still upright and healthy.
This week’s entry I blame solely on a podcast I was listening to the other day, which was reviewing A View To A Kill, one of, if not the worst of all the James Bond movies, featuring an ancient Roger Moore. As my contemporaries might remember, the theme song was composed by Duran Duran, who were on the downslope of their popularity at that point. This was right after they recorded Do They Know It’s Christmas and several members of the band spun off into the Power Station (which yielded two very good singles).
Anyway, here’s a cheesy video for your viewing displeasure: