Words
- Grantland
- Toast
- Gawker
- Gothamist
- Awl & Hairpin
Choose Me
It’s common for a movie to have two-dimensional characters, poorly acted, placed in a riveting plot. The Star Wars comes to mind. It’s somewhat more rare for well acted and complex characers to be placed in a manifestly ridiculous plot. But that’s what Choose Me is. The plot feels like it owes a debt to Three’s Company in that the most improbably coincidences place characters in one another’s bedrooms. But somehow, the characters make it all work. Keith Carradine plays Micky, a mental patient who either escaped or was released from his institution. It’s not explained which. Nor is it explained whether he is a pathological liar or a former spy. Or a romantic or a creep.
Mickey lives in LA and hangs out at a bar named “Eve’s.” He mainly hits on two female roomates. One roomate is a host of call-in radio sex counsellor. The other roommate owns the bar and is a frequent caller of the radio show. Somehow, neither of the roommates realizes they are talking to each other on this call-in show. You might thing the distictive accent of the radio host would be a tip off.
Describing the plot of the movie makes it sound far more ridiculous than it is. The characters are all neurotic to some extent, and the movie is entirely about their interactions. Just accept the plot as a given, and try to pick out whether the mental patient is really a lover; wheter the sex therapist finds her first love; and wheter the jaded bar owner settles down for a one-man committment.
Rock ‘n’ Roll High School
Today’s movie is Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. It a it is an updated, punk-rock version of a Frankie and Annette teen romp, just as the Ramones are an updated version of 60’s pop. And while the Ramones are legit punk, it is too sweet and good natured to feel truly disreputable. That is probably it’s biggest charm. None of the students are really ruining their lives.
The story belongs to two girls: Riff Randall, who thinks school is a drag and just wants to have fun, and her smart friend Kate Rambeau. Kate is apparently on track to be valedictorian but keeps getting in trouble by hanging tight with Riff. It’s like Lindsay from Freaks and Geeks never stopped hanging out with Millie, her mathlete friend. Another break with expected types is the high school star quarterback: he is neither the villian nor a hero. He’s just another dull high school boy who doesn’t know how to talk to girls.
The Ramones play a concert, and while it isn’t really concert footage but it’s great band footage regardless. It was probalby about the most serious thing in the movie. Consisering they played a song about Pinhead at a concert attended by a six foot mouse, that sets a low bar for seriousness.
Return of the Secaucus 7
I saw Return of the Secaucus 7 as part of Richard Linklater’s Jewels in the Wasteland series at the Austin Film Society. This is often described as “The Little Chill,” as it is generally recognized being a spiritural successor to The Big Chill, a movie I viscerally hated when it came out. Secaucus 7 is populated by a group of more sympathetic people. The idealists went on to become teachers, doctors, drug abuse counselors.
It’s a talky, actorly movie, and the best scenes are dialog: Three guys recite a perfectly timed ensemble of a motor sports commercial: “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! At Washington Valley Speedway: thrills, chills, and spills!” Another scene has a woman vomiting off screen in another room, while to guys try to figure out who it is based on the sounds. “No, Maura more of a ralpher.”
It kind of makes me wonder how I’d react to The Big Chill now.
On a side-note, Linklater revealed that the big money in Hollywood is in rewrites. When a multi-million production is scheduled to start and they have script problems, they’re willing to shell out a boatload of money for a week of work. Apparenly Sayles is a writing machine, makes a living this way, and rolls much of the money into is indie projects.
Post by BBEdit
I’ve gone back and forth from static site generators, like Jekyll and Hugo, to hosted sites like Wordpress, which is the current platform. One of the benefits of static site generators is the ability to write posts in markdown and keep my content in a git repository. The advantage of Wordpress is the ecosystem around it. There is a plugin for just about everything, and good themes are easy to find.
This is my latest attempt to have my cake and eat it too. I wrote a script to turn a markdown file into HTML and post the result to Wordpress. I don’t have a good way to post photos, and I don’t have a way to update the post. At this this will help me see if the writing method was really hindering my posting, or whether that was just an excuse.
Churchwood at SXSW
One of the advantages of things like music festivals and SXSW is the chance that you’ll happen upon a band that you’ve never heard of before, but stops you in your tracks. Churchwood was one of those acts for me. A couple of years ago we were at the Yard Dog for the cheap Lagunitas and the Jon Langford show. We got an entire day of great music, including Churchwood. They had a great sound and put on a great show. So much that we now just spend our SXSW Saturdays at the Yard Dog and trust them to take care of us. Here are a few pictures from the 2017 and 2018 shows.
Fixed Links
I’ve been moving around from one hosting provider to another, and a lot of my links have grown stale. Links to my own content were broken because they used URLs from the old site. If you looked at older photos, you probably would have seen a 404 if you clicked through to see the larger image. I spent some time with wp search-replace and hopefully fixed those issues.
Posting with Byword
ByWord is another app I’ve tried for posting. It works well on a Mac, and it has support for posting to a self-hosted WordPress blog (publishing to Wordpress requires a in-app purchase, which I bought). I just realized that it has support for uploading local image files. It detects them in the markdown document, and uploads them to the server. This might be the thing I need to use. As a test, here’s a picture from onbaord the schooner Seaward
Posting Workflow
This post was written in BBEdit and rendered from Markdown to HTML using a custom script. It’s still manual in that I have to copy and paste the HTML into a Wordpress edit form. I have scripts in progress that can read YAML front-matter and create a new post using the Title, date, category, etc. from the front-matter. So as a text-publishing solution, BBEdit is pretty complete. Or will be once I finish those scripts. The problem is with images. I don’t have a good solution for images, and I don’t have a good plan on how to deal with them.
One possible solution is MarsEdit. I’ve been a registered owner for years and have always wanted it to work for me. MarsEdit allows for a custom script to render markdown into HTML. The difficulty I’m coming against now is getting my Python markdown scripts to work. MarsEdit executes its scripts in a restricted environment, so it can’t load the libraries.
The Big Hack
Bloomberg published a big article last year about Chinese infiltration of American computer hardware. Reportedly, servers at Amazon and Apple were manufactured with a covert chip that could report back to China anything that passed through the server. It was explosive and widely publicized, but also a little suspect. Now it seeems Bloomberg has sent another reporter to follow up on the story.
From Eric Wemple at the Washington Post:
According to informed sources, Bloomberg has continued reporting the blockbuster story that it broke on Oct. 4, including a very recent round of inquiries from a Bloomberg News/Bloomberg Businessweek investigative reporter. In emails to employees at Apple, Bloomberg’s Ben Elgin has requested “discreet” input on the alleged hack. “My colleagues’ story from last month (Super Micro) has sparked a lot of pushback,” Elgin wrote on Nov. 19 to one Apple employee. “I’ve been asked to join the research effort here to do more digging on this … and I would value hearing your thoughts (whatever they may be) and guidance, as I get my bearings.”
One person who spoke with Elgin told the Erik Wemple Blog that the Bloomberg reporter made clear that he wasn’t part of the reporting team that produced “The Big Hack.” The goal of this effort, Elgin told the potential source, was to get to “ground truth”; if Elgin heard from 10 or so sources that “The Big Hack” was itself a piece of hackery, he would send that message up his chain of command. The potential source told Elgin that the denials of “The Big Hack” were “100 percent right.”
Riding Horses is More Dangerous than Riding Motorcycles
Via the National Institute of Health, a 1991 study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine identified horse-riding is more dangerous than motorcycle riding.
Horse-riding carries a high participant morbidity and mortality. Whereas a motor-cyclist can expect a serious incident at the rate of 1 per 7000h, the horse-rider can expect a serious accident once in every 350h, i.e. 20 times as dangerous as motor-cycling.
Configuration is the Root of All Evil
From the fish shell design document:
Every configuration option in a program is a place where the program is too stupid to figure out for itself what the user really wants, and should be considered a failure of both the program and the programmer who implemented it.
If any program could go wild with user configuration options, a shell program could. Its notable that fish explicilty tries to avoid this.
Scott Meyers Can No Longer Remember the Full Intricacies of C++
Scott meyeres is one of the foremost experts on C++. He recently had this to say regarding bug reports on the code in his books.
I retired from active involvement in C++ at the end of 2015, and in the ensuing two and a half years, I’ve forgotten enough details of the language that I am no longer able to properly evaluate bug reports regarding the technical aspects of my books. C++ is a large, intricate language with features that interact in complex and subtle ways, and I no longer trust myself to keep all the relevant facts in mind.
In case you don’t know him, he’s not particularly old (born 1959, which makes him 59 as of this writing), and in good health as far as I know. So this is a statement about the complexity of C++, and not about Scott Meyers, who is still as sharp and brilliant as the day he retired.
One of the criticisms of C++ has always been its complexity. There are so many “gotchas,” special cases, and unexpected side-effects that it seems impossible that a single person could keep it all in her head. This seems like a good illustration of the extent to which that is true.
Lady Snowblood at Austin Film Society
I’m in a period of Japanophilia. Recently the Austin Film Society showed all six installments of Lone Wolf and Cub, which were excellent.
This weekend they’re playing Lady Snowblood. I have never seen it but am very excited. Apparently it’s an inspiration for Kill Bill, but I won’t hold that against it.
Cutting the Cord
We recently cancelled our cable TV. We’re an Apple household, so we get most our stuff from AppleTV apps now. In addition to the usual Netflix and Amazon, here’s what we use.
iTunes: We purchased episodes of The Expanse (which airs on SyFy) on iTunes. We’ll have to do the same thing if we want to watch Better Call Saul. That, or wait for it to come on Netflix.
HDHomeRun: This is a TV tuner with an Ethernet port. An app on the AppleTV streams the video. This is working great for local broadcast channels. We use it the occasional live sports broadcast, a few network shows (The Good Place and Saturday Night Live come to mind), the BBC stuff that airs on PBS, and whatever else might show up on broadcast.
Channels DVR: This works with the HDHomeRun and runs on my QNAP NAS (which I already had). It writes the digital broadcast stream to the NAS and comes with an AppleTV app which ties it all together. The same app can either stream the broadcast from the tuner, or stream recorded shows from the NAS. The DVR service costs $8/month, which give you the schedule data and the ability to sechedule a season pass, etc. The price is on the high side for comparable services. There’s no contract, so I can switch if I figure out a better service.
I tried Hulu, both with and without the live TV option. Neither one was completely satisfactory. For example, I didn’t watch the first episode of The Good Place Season 2 soon enough, and it becase unavailable. A broadcast show unavailable? What am I paying for? That won’t be a problem if I record a broadcast off my HDHomeRun.
There’s one more service we use that isn’t generally available–membership to the Austin Film Society. They have a membership level that comes with free movie tickets for a montly fee. We live a few minutes away from their new theater, and we average about two films a week.
What’s missing is premium cable. We have no HBO or Showtime. If we had HBO, we would have watched the latest season of Silicon Valley and Westworld. There’s enough other stuff on that I can’t say I miss it too much. When Game of Thrones comes on, we will subscribe to HBO Now, but until then we have plenty of stuff to watch.
New Blogging & Hosting Platform
As everyone knows, the number one reason for poor craftsmanship is poor tools. To that end, I am addressing my poor blogging output by changing the blogging platform. I have moved from Wordpress to Jekyll.
Joking aside, WordPress is powerful in lots of ways, but it does require care and feeding. For a business website, I would spend money on dedicated WordPress hosting that takes care of it. For a personal site, I don’t want to spent the money, nor do I want to spend the time to do it myself.
So here I am with a new Jekyll site. Most of the content is ported over, but not all of it came over cleanly. There’s some mangled posts. Also, I still have to find a solution to move the images over. Things may appear a bit under construction for a while.
WordPress Hosting Benchmarks
If you’ve ever tried to research web hosting, you’re probably noticed the disreputable nature of hosting reviews. Most review sites are riddled with affiliate links, which calls into question all the reviews and ratings.
When I was shopping for managed WordPress hosting, one site I’ve come to trust is Review Signal. They now have a 2018 edition of their WordPress hosting benchmarks. I have a Lightning Base account based on their recommendation, and I’m very happy with it. I had never heard about the company before I read about them in Review Signal.
I’ve also tried Pressable. They rank highly, and their interface was nicer than Lighting Base. They are also a Texas comany. But I only have one site I really need top-tier hosting for, and Lightning Base had better pricing for that use case.
Reports of Blogging's Death
Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker laments that blogging is over:
Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surely disappearing from the Internet, and so, consequently, is a lot of online freedom and fun.
As evidence she cites the closing of
Those are her idea of blogs? If you had asked me for an example of a blog, none of those would have come up.
Now here is a list of honest to goodness blogs, curated by Julia Evans. Where did I find this list? At Scripting News, a blog.
Is Swift Easy?
Michael Tsai on Swift:
I like Swift. But, having programmed in probably more than a dozen languages, I would not classify Swift as easy to learn. It’s at the end with the harder ones like C++.
People see the var declarations and think, “Javascript!”. Type inference hides a lot of the complexity of the type system. So, yeah easy things are easy. But then you think to yourself that you want to create your own collection and you’re deep into the a generics system that you never realized was there.
That Sinking Feeling – Talking Points Memo
That Sinking Feeling – Talking Points Memo:
I suspect [the trump team] now fear[s] (no doubt rightly) that Trump officials lied during their interviews with the Special Counsel’s office and the investigators already had the emails that proved they were lying. That’s a real sinking feeling for everyone involved.
Paul Krugman says bitcoin is a bubble - Business Insider
Paul Krugman says bitcoin is a bubble - Business Insider:
There's been no demonstration yet that it actually is helpful in conducting economic transactions. There's no anchor for its value. You know, unlike pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, those are anchored by the fact that you can use them to pay taxes. There's not anchor for bitcoin.