Rubenerd

Good evening everyone. This post does not qualify as a Music Monday on account of it not being a Monday, and only tangentially being related to Music. Then again, neither was the last post that could best be described as tenously connected to Music. Why am I still capitalising Music?

A decade ago during the Before Times™ I was on a family holiday in Europe. It felt like we’d been hearing Robbie Williams’ song Bodies on the local Bayern 5 radio station for weeks, so on a lark I picked up the single.

The disc included two songs:

1. Bodies – 4:05
2. Bodies (Body Double Remix) – 6:14

I was importing this ripped CD back into my offline music collection when I noticed something horrifying. The Body Double Remix is not double the length of the original at all. Wah lau eh.

Jennifer Liu laid bare the real issue behind modern chat apps, and it’s not just their offloading of technical debt:

Communicating via Slack and other instant messaging platforms can be a blessing and a curse. For one, you and your teammates can share information more quickly. On the other hand, it can also encourage an “always on” culture where you’re expected to be available at all times.

My dad said the same thing about mobile phones in the 1990s. I still remember when I got my first one in late primary school, and he said “you’ll be happy one day when you can turn it off”. I didn’t know at the time what he meant. It’s amazing what a decade or two will do.

She also raised the issue of open-ended conversations, and those terse ones we’re all used to:

That means including a casual salutation followed by a specific request or message. Sending a lone “hey” without any context could send the recipient’s anxiety soaring, and it also doesn’t allow them to gauge what kind of conversation they’re entering when they respond.

Similarly, to close the communication loop and not leave anyone hanging, a quick “thanks” or “I’ll get back to you by X” can move the conversation along and give it a natural close.

It reminds me of this Blogger site from back in the day, and this other site with some examples.

I did report briefly to someone who made it a habit of messaging me at all hours of the night with “hey” and no further context. Given I was in an IT engineering job, my mind immediately catastrophised. Almost always, it was innocuous.

Working remote has forced all of us to learn these new frameworks on our feet, and in a compressed timeframe. Let’s at least try to not entrench bad ideas or attitudes.

Years ago I was listening to the radio, like a gentleman, and the soft-spoken Singaporean DJ Brian Richmond came on between songs to announce that “here’s a song by a guy… who’s never been to Kathmandu”. That deadpan delivery still cracks me up.

Speaking of cracking up, Bob Seger must surely have delivered one of the greatest versus in musical history:

I ain’t got nothing ‘gainst the East Coast.
You want some people… well they got the most!

He could be talking about the US, Australia, the PRC… a lot of places, now that I think about it. I did like wandering around East Coast Park in Singapore, though the population isn’t concentrated there.

(Update: Looks like my video embed script didn’t like the aspect ratio of that song. I’m going to leave it; I think the weird skew and positioning is fitting).

Everyone knows about global landmarks, but I’m just as interested in seeing photos of how people live in various places.

A post-migraine stupor over the weekend had me reading Wikipedia’s articles on the mass-transit system in Buenos Aires, and to this photo of a 500-series train by Maruicio V. Genta. I haven’t been able to stop looking at it.

It also lead me down the rabbithole of thinking where else has yellow suburban carriages like this. I could think of Berlin, The Netherlands, and Tokyo off the top of my head. I wish more did; it’s a striking colour and potentially safer.

Amit Kapila has done a great job summarising some of the Logical Replication improvements coming in the next Postgres, with concice examples and output. Clearer monitoring of replication slot state? Yes please! His post in July was also among the most approachable I’d ever read about how replication handles in-progress transactions.

In an alternative world where this blog you’re reading now hadn’t started as a side project by a teenager to discuss random thoughts, and instead become a serious place for technical discussion, his writing is what I’d aspire to.

No blockquotes in this post, I just wanted to direct people to Amit’s blog and web feed if you’re at all interested in this stuff.

I’m not sure what to call this post, or even this phenomena, so I figured something short with alliteration would be better than nothing. Microwave ovens. Custom kitchen delivery. Refrigerators. Colour TVs.

Wait, that’s Money for Nothing.

If you’re the kind of person who reads this blog (voluntarily, though I can’t imagine too many situations where people would be coerced to, unless it was a lesson about how not to write about something), chances are you probably also employ scripts somewhere in your life or work. Why not, if a computer can do things for you?

Like most kids from the early 1990s, my first scripts were QBasic, QPascal, and batch (BAT) files. I had a couple of programs that would copy files like my short stories into folders with timestamps, so I could “roll back” to an earlier draft and compare where the story went. I guess it was a rudimentary form of version control, but it was more just a practical way to work within the limits of the 8.3 filename system. I also constantly changed my mind about plots, and would integrate ideas from multiple drafts.

I’ve long since moved to Perl as my language of choice for scripts, then shell scripts for more basic tasks. I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve tried all manner of other languages, but while Ruby got close in some aspects, Perl has stuck with me given how its data structures map terrifyingly well to how my mind works. Read into that as much as you want. Microwave ovens.

I raise that I do both, because lately I’ve found myself realising that I get stuck in a loop deciding how to solve a personal problem. It goes, a little something, like this:

1. Identify a repetitive or tedious thing I do.

2. Think about how I’d throw together a quick script to automate it. It’d only take a dozen or so lines of shell script, right?

3. Think about how I’d “do it properly” with a formal structure, methods, and Moose. I’ll check out CPAN, and think about how I’ll store the resulting data. Ooh I could use sqlite3 for this, or even XML or a plist.

4. Think that step 3 introduced all this overhead, when all I needed was a quick and dirty script to do what I want.

5. Decide it’s too much work and abandon it.

Rather than possessing the wherewithal and introspective capability to identify and rectify this verbose recognition of counter-productive foundering, I’ll end up performing that task manually again, when I could have written a short script. It’s somewhat ironic, given Perl’s detractors see the language as an ugly hack to write quick scripts too.

It’s probably yet another manifestation of decision paralysis. Maybe I should write a script to figure out why. I could write a full CMS in Catalyst to solicit feedback and to explore this idea. Wait, that sounds like too much work.

Last night was Friday, so Clara and I decided to spluge and get some pizza. It’s basically carbs and sugar, so we limit our intake of the stuff when we can. This also means that I’m not as familiar with the ordering process as other things.

We decided to check out our local chain’s iOS application while on our evening walk, which was as bad as all the one star reviews indicated. I was surprised that in 2021 a glorified web wrapper was even still allowed on the platform; I thought Apple had clamped down on it. Maybe older software got grandfathered in.

We ordered our pizza, then saw the estimated cooking time as forty-five minutes. This seemed reasonable; Friday night would almost certainly be their busiest time, and we weren’t in a hurry. But then the estimated time flashed and changed to ten minutes.

The situation at the pizza place when we arrived could be best described as tense. We’d only managed to get there half an hour later, so the overworked staffer told me I only needed to wait a few minutes more. But it was evident that other people had seen the same time issue on their phones, and were demanding pizza that wasn’t ready yet.

Aiyo, your app says the pizza was ready twenty minutes ago, now you’re telling me its another twenty minutes!? Strewth!

He said something far more vulgar than aiyo and strewth, but I figured I have an international audience that expects a certain degree of Australian and Singaporean colloquialisms.

The few minutes waiting gave me some time to think about how we got to this situation. Was there an internal API the mobile application was polling every X amount of time, or was it a push notification? Was the local client making a best guess about the time to cook based on the time of day and week, then getting overridden by erroneous data? Could it have been as simple as one of the servers not having time in sync, or was there a race condition? I’ve been involved in enough complex systems now to know that time is not something you want to mess with.

But while interesting to contemplate, it soon lead me down the path to real-world consequences. This small blip in an application almost certainly made the lives of these people infinitely harder that night. How many times did the people at the counter have to explain, or their manager? How many irate or entitled customers who are used to treating retail staff like rubbish did they have to endure?

Computers, much like the economy, are built for people. Or at least, they’re supposed to be. The worst feelings I’ve had in this occupation are the thoughts that a system I’ve designed or helped build have worked against people in some failure scenario. I hope those pizza folks made it through the night okay.

I wrote last Wednesday about my adventures with making mix “tapes” in 2021, which in this case are my own compilation albums with custom ID3 metadata and covers. I also spent a disproportionate amount of my latest silly podcast thinking about mobile music players. It’s something that’s been on my mind again a lot lately.

Michael of Obsolete29 (he has a web feed, and he’s on the blogroll!) had some interesting follow-up questions and thoughts.

I enjoyed the mix tapes post as I’m going through this same process myself. One of the most frustrating parts of the journey is how many bands just simply do not offer ways to purchase digital music from them. They only link to the streaming services. An example is Hippie Sabotage. They literally do not even seem to consider that someone may want to buy music from them. I’d like to also say I’ve purchased some physical media and I do believe that every purchase of physical music should come with a code to download the digital copy. IMO.

Unfortunately it’s becoming all too common, and I see it as another casualty of streaming services. I’ve been very lucky that most of the acts I follow are happy to sell me digital copies, and even vinyl with codes to download; Kris Delmhorst and Cory Wong come to mind as recent examples. For my sister and Clara it’s another story.

One aspect I hadn’t considered when I was chatting with Michael was international music. Clara loves J-pop, but finding anyone who’ll even ship a CD internationally, let alone a digital download, is all but impossible unless you’re very famous. My dad still struggles with world music, especially from Africa.

Michael wrote in a follow-up email that he worries that a generation have grown up unfamiliar with the idea of buying music. That coupled with the fact that modern acts see their only way to survive is to just post on streaming platforms is a one-two punch.

Michael continued:

I’m curious about your music listening setup? What OS’s and apps are you using on desktop and mobile? Do you sync music and playlists between the devices? How are you editing the metadata?

We talked back and forward about our setups, but I’ll admit I’m still struggling to come up with a system that works for me. Michael uses Audacious on Linux, which lets him create and sync m3u playlists to his phone. It sounds compelling.

Right now my primary desktop machine is still a Mac, but I’ve transition to using Musikcube for much of my listening. It runs in the terminal, is cross-platform, and lets me just throw a folder of music at it. I edit metadata in bulk in the terminal with eyeD3, and the KDE Kid3 GUI for more complicated stuff.

My next step is to get my Palm Lifedrive syncing somehow, now that it has a giant CF card in it. I think another big part of this is not wanting music on my phone, which also has work stuff and other commitments. A portable media player, in whatever form it takes, might be cool.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

53:50 – Join your host as he enjoys some milder Sydney weather! Talking about monsoons in Singapore and Hong Kong, wanting to live in the latter after it blew me away (metaphorically, not in a monsoon), slim Japanese clothing, water-retaining socks, always feeling the need to be productive, embarrassing nerd magazines on the train, old-school MP3 players, downtime, meditation, a rant about music streaming platforms, and collecting music again.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released September 2021 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding. Hosted graciously by the Internet Archive.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

Craig Spencer, an emergency-medicine physician and global health director at New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, had this to say about this post title for The Atlantic:

Vaccinated people are not as likely to spread the coronavirus as the unvaccinated.

And he adds:

Even in the United States, where more than half of the population is fully vaccinated, the unvaccinated are responsible for the overwhelming majority of transmission.

He puts some of the blame on this on the media and health authorities for their confusing messaging. I agree with this regarding Australia as well. People who should have known better, should have. Is that a tautology? It might be, because it’s a tautology.