Rubenerd

It’s been a difficult week in many ways. Kris Delmhorst’s new album hugely helped, as did playing the silly summer event in everyone’s favourite mobile game.

But now Good Smile Racing and Type-Moon Racing have announced another figure of everyone’s favourite emperor from Fate/Grand Order, the Fate/EXTRA series, and Fate/EXTELLA… am I missing any? I’ve been in this franchise almost from the start and even I find it hard to keep track of it all.

The sculptor captured her subtly-cheeky expression and confident pose so well, and the detailing on her eyes really does Wadarco’s indelible art style justice. That single strand of hair angled off her ponytail is probably my favourite feature.

She won’t be shipping until September… next year. I can only imagine the disruption COVID has caused on their supply chains at the headquarters of these evil, wallet-parting companies. But if there’s anyone else that could get us through this bleak period, it would be Umu. Or at least, the promise of future Umu. Umu!

Yesterday Clara and I were having no end of trouble setting up and using our respective video conferencing sessions, web demos, and company chat. It was enough that I gave up trying to video in, and had to succumb to these newfangled things called phones to dial a string of numbers and only get audio out of it. It was weird, and very low quality.

We got this email about an hour into our adventures:

There is a service disruption in your area
Performance issues and packet loss affecting some services

Disruption started Affected service: $username

Window Start Thu 20 Aug 2020 11:05AM AEST
Window End No ETA

I’m relieved when a telco at home, or an upstream at work, reports problems like this. It means they’ve been acknowledged, and presumably a NOC somewhere is investigating the cause and are fixing. Ambiguity is the most frustrating part of IT, especially when it comes to networks.

(This is one of the few ways I can empathise with doctors and car mechanics. They must constantly get asked by family and friends for advise on specific problems with insufficient information. Why does my car make this BBZZT sound? Why do I have this specific pain?)

I can tell immediately when our FTTB connection fails, because it feels as though everyone in our apartment building instinctively reaches for their phones to tether. Hundreds of people across dozens of floors drags the whole network down to crawl; which I suppose is tempting to do when we’re all stuck in our carpeted homes.

We’re not in higher stage lock-down here, so Clara and I donned our masks and headed to a coffee shop in the local shopping centre to tether off another cell tower instead! Call it forced exercise.

Still though, the experience reminded me that despite our Malcolm Turnbull’d Internet in Australia, network infrastructure is one of the precious few things keeping us and the economy going at this stage. These implausibly tiny little wires strung through the ground into our buildings have replaced direct human interaction. You could say they’re the ultimate masks.

Back in January I mentioned how to add redundancy to a ZFS pool by adding a mirrored drive. Someone with a private account on Twitter asked me why FreeBSD—and NetBSD!—doesn’t ship with a tmux or screen equivilent in base in order to daemonise the process and let them run in the background.

ZFS already does this for its internal commands. For example, I used zfs add to add a drive to fix a older RAIDZ2 pool, so I can just run:

# zpool status

Under status:

status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.
The pool will continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.

The pool will also continue to be available, though potentially with reduced IO performance while it (re-)replicates.

The only time I use tmux is during a large ZFS send/receive operation between machines over SSH. At that stage we’ve introduced networks into the mix, which even the most robust, trustworthy storage system in the world can’t guarantee will stay up!

Kate Aubusson and Pallavi Singhal reported this warning in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Sydneysiders with flu-like symptoms have been warned that they are more likely to have COVID-19 than influenza, with the flu rate in NSW at 10 per cent of what it was at this time last year.

The latest NSW surveillance data also reveals the total number of people killed by COVID-19 and influenza this year is half the death rate of influenza alone over the same period in 2019 and a fraction of the fatalities during the horror 2017 flu season.

Touch wood, and migraines aside, I haven’t gone this long without at least a cold in years. I suspect all it took was someone sneezing on public transport, or coughing in a public place.

I hope this will be a lasting legacy from this horrid disease. People will wear masks if they’re sick, will seek immediate testing and treatment, and employers will be more flexible with working from home if their staff are unwell.

It reminds me of the Australian International School in Singapore in the 2000s giving out awards to people with perfect attendance. Even at the time I thought it was perverse, counter-productive, and sent the entirely wrong message. Maybe I was just salty that I only got it once!

(Update: The permalink for this post indicates the original title of pirates instead blogging. I would have posted another dozen entries for this event, but I figured you were all getting sick of it by now! So I ended it here with something a little more meta).

It’s the sixth, and final installment in our accidental series exploring the Servant Summer★Festival 2020 event in everyone’s favourite mobile game, Fate/Grand Order. So far Blackbeard has discussed taking sides, and Jeanne Alter professed fear of data loss glasses, dolphins and nicknames.

Today Jeanne Alter sees us off by answering how she and I have managed to blog over the years.

And better yet, both Jeanne Alter and Robin Hood praised my blog for being the best they’d ever read.

Porridge? Oats?! The world’s most perfect food!? That reminds me, I need to blog about oats, grilled cheese sandwiches, and coffee again. The last time I mentioned two of these was back in San Francisco in 2018.

Thanks to Type-Moon, Aniplex, DELiGHTWORKS, and the whole Fate/Grand Order team for such a fun game over the last few weeks. It’s been just what Clara and I needed.

Every now and then I think back to what the world was like before the iPhone. Steve Jobs described the landscape in 2005:

So the carriers now have gained the upper-hand in terms of the power of the relationship with handset manufacturers. And they’re starting to tell the handset manufacturers what to build.And if Nokia and Motorola don’t listen to them, well Samsung and LG will.

There’s no question Android manufacturers also benefited immensely from Apple coming in and shifting this power model from telcos to consumers; though you can still buy Android phones today loaded with carrier crapware. They also took advantage of Apple’s R&D into full-screen touch devices and abandoned making Blackberry clones. Few Android advocates or tech journalists seem to remember this, though given it was a decade and a half ago I don’t blame them.

Companies that didn’t react fast enough to this change were lost. Symbian struggled before disappearing. My beloved Palm came out with the Pre before being bought out and extinguished; some of the features from that phone are still only being added to Apple and Android now.

It’s time for the latest installment of Music Monday time, that blog post series that occurs on a specific day to talk about music. You could say I called it Music Monday owing to this fact. Thank you, I’m here all week. No, really, I’m working from home.

This week’s music recommendation comes from Kris Delmhorst, who released her latest album Long Day in the Milky Way last Friday. Her Bandcamp page lets you preview the album, and I found myself at the checkout ordering a digital copy and a vinyl LP before the first track “Wind’s Gonna Find a Way” had even finished.

Kris’s beautiful, unique vocals are matched so perfectly with the blissful instrumentation and stunning harmonies. I love every song already, but “Hanging Garden” especially made me choke up in a joyful way I can’t explain. For other Australians out there, her cover of “The Horses” made famous by Daryl Braithwaite here was a real treat.

The nerd in me also needs to comment on the mastering. The dynamic range and clarity of these tracks positively sparkle on my new headphones. It’s like I’m sitting right there with her and her musicians on a deck, with the stars above and passing around hot cocoa. Boston is still right up there on my travel wishlist, so maybe Clara and I will be able to catch her perform for real one day.

A special thanks to the imitable Esther Golton for recommending her, who you should also listen to and support through her Bandcamp. She’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, and her music has helped this soul through some tough family and personal times. It’d make my day if you’d consider supporting both of them :).

You know when sites ask you why you’re unsubscribing from their marketing mailing lists we didn’t register for? I think they’re designed to lend legitimacy, because otherwise we all know the reason.

Here’s a list from one such recent marketing list:

1. The information is no longer relevant to me
2. The content is not what I expected when I subscribed
3. You are emailing me too frequently
4. I don’t remember ever signing up for this in the first place!
5. Something else

Note the subtle gaslighting in point four. It’s the closest option to “I didn’t sign up for this”, but places the blame on you for not remembering, instead of the sender for spamming you withour your consent. Detroit isn’t the only place where this is a bit dodge.

Which leads me to this article by Jilt, where the site lays out a similar list as above. This is what they write under “I didn’t realise I’d subscribed”, with numbers added:

It’s happened to all of us: Suddenly some company starts sending you emails that you never asked for. Maybe they ① automatically subscribed you when you bought something, ② maybe they got your email by buying a list, or ③ maybe your friends thought it’d be funny to sign you up to 17 different florists’ email lists [..]

Point ① is deceptive by relying on fine print, and violates the trust customers place in suppliers to protect their email addresses. Point ② is abuse. Point ③ doesn’t happen, or is only included to deflect responsibility.

The site suggests the following ways to resolve the issue. See if you can catch their slight of hand:

That’s why, for the long-term health of your email list, it’s a good idea to do a double opt-in. That means a person doesn’t just have to enter their email on your site to subscribe, they also have to click a button in the subsequent confirmation email they receive to complete the subscription process.

Hold on, they’re suggesting we made a concious decision to sign-up, so having a “double” sign-up confirmation is the right thing to do. Except, by the author’s own admission in points ① and ②, these were “emails that you never asked for”. So how can this be double consent?

The fact they’re advocating for confirmation at all is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. I wish more sites did this, instead of assuming my email address belongs to them to spam. I don’t even eat pork. But let’s be clear, the author and I are talking about email that we never asked for in the first place.

All of this comes down to one word omitted from the article: respect. You respect your customers, prospective and current, by not signing them up to things they didn’t ask for. You respect them by giving them an explicit, clear understanding of what they’re signing up for. You respect them by making it easy to unsubscribe. You do not respect them by coaching these concerns as merely a side effect of improving the “long-term health of your email list”.

Lack of respect for users is at the core of almost all the problems the Internet faces right now.

I still buy and download music. Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music were great for discoverability, but somehow left me feeling disconnected from what I was listening to. It felt like the audio equivalent of a buffet, instead of a carefully cooked meal by whomever you’re listening to.

You don’t need to think hard before realising this isn’t rational. Buying music probably puts the same digital audio files on our local drives that we stream. Data caps are sufficiently high that I could listen to a streaming service on my laptop or phone all month and never hit limits. Streaming services can work out cheaper. And now I have hundreds of gigabytes of audio files on my laptop again, for a selection that couldn’t ever hope to match what a streaming service can provide.

But art isn’t supposed to be rational. Read that again, maybe a few dozen times! If you’re not doing what makes you feel good with music, why are you listening to it? It still amazes me—though perhaps it shouldn’t by now—that this simple fact so often gets ignored when discussing everything from Hi-Fi systems to business models.

I wish I could say my decision to buy music was entirely motivated to better support artists, as opposed to the Dickensian pittance they get from streaming services. Or the fact the specific genres of jazz and electronica I listen to routinely had albums disappear, or had their tracks replaced in my playlists with versions I didn’t choose. Or that downloads tend to be higher quality. Or that it’s yet another subscription I can cancel. Or that Apple’s music software on the iPhone is now hot garbage, and a far cry from the elegant simplicity of the iPod.

Those did sway me, but I just like seeing that cover art on my laptop, and know that I paid for all of them over the years. It’s like an instantly-accessible CD changer in my laptop, without the bulk, and with extra metadata. I can tag something as Whole Wheat Radio, or mum, or silly, and recall them years later.

Then there’s Clara’s and my recent rediscovery of vinyl. We love going to second-hand stores and uncovering albums we remember from our childhoods, knowing that someone in the past loved and listened to them somewhere. And then there are MiniDiscs. They’re are among the most beautiful objects I’ve ever owned; perfect little homes for recording downloaded albums we’ve bought. Heck, I’ve even bought a couple of metal and high-bias type II chrome cassettes to play around with what sounds best depending on the genres and mastering of specific songs. Hint: the clarity of high quality type II tapes approaches that of metal more than I expected.

Inheriting some Hi-Fi gear from my dad also made the whole experience more personal, meaningful, and fun. Couple the above hardware with an AppleTV to play music that we’ve bought locally, and it’s been one of the things that has made home isolation during COVID that much nicer.

How good is music?!

Casey Liss—is more!—commented on his local barbecue place closing on episode #387 of the Accidental Tech Podcast in mid-July:

This restaurant it had suddenly closed out of nowhere. I kid you not, I cried a little bit, I was so upset. Now the good news is it was a very small local chain and so there was another one equidistant from my house so we could still get our fix. But it’s so funny that this restaurant which, even though I’d argue it’s excellent barbecue, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a barbecue joint, who cares? But this restaurant had such a defining moment or section of my life that I spent my time with my son, and it just up and disappeared.

This made me choke up by proxy, because I can relate to it so much.

My mum had weekly chemo and radiation therapy for most of my childhood, so she never regained much physical strength before having to do it all again. When we lived in Singapore, the local Starbucks was close enough down the road to our apartment building that we could walk there, arm in arm, and share a medicinal keeki as she cheekily referred to it as.

The staff got to know us so well that we had a stammtisch. Our favourite New York double-baked cheesecake would always be set aside, and be decorated with candles for our birthdays. I didn’t care that there were higher-quality brews further away, or that fellow Australian expats turned their noses up at “American coffee”, this was our spot.

Last year Clara and I went back to Singapore so I could show her around some of my childhood spots, and I was overjoyed and relieved to see our little Paragon Starbucks franchise was still there. On what would have been her sixty-forth birthday, Clara and I sat at that table again, bought a cake, and pretended she was joining us again in spirit. She never got to meet Clara, but I feel like I came the closest I ever have to introducing them in that space.

Sure it was just a Starbucks, like Casey’s memories with his son were just at a barbecue joint. But those memories are very real, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

(This is all the more reason why it’s important to help our retail and hospitality workers during this shutdown however we can. Frankly it’s a privilege and honour knowing my taxes are being spent on unemployment benefits and small business assistance. It should be much more, just as it was when my grandparents were dealing with their own World Wars. Nobody wins unless we all do).