Rubenerd

I heard Esther Golton’s “Going to Shadu” play this morning on the Whole Wheat Radio stream that Jim put up again recently. Wait, you’re not listening to it? Even if it says you’re in Melbourne for some reason!?

It’s one of my all-time favourite songs, not just because it’s so beautiful, but because of how it made me feel upon first hearing it. 2007 to 2009 was a rough period for my family, and it was just the right song and album at just the right time. Hearing it again in our new apartment with all the hi-fi gear having scarcely been set up an hour before… gave me goosebumps.

You can should buy Esther’s albums on Bandcamp, including her album Unfinished Houses where this track came from. You shouldn’t use Spotify, but if you do, you can preview the track there too.

I spend most of my week building, fixing, tinkering, and talking about computers with clients and new sales leads. I feel exhausted at the end of the day; usually in a good way because I feel like I’m well tuned for what I’m doing. But occasionally I sit there, exhausted, and counting down the clock. I’m sure it happens to all of us.

Then the weekend comes around and, assuming I don’t have after-hours work booked or if I’m not on call, I sit around our little apartment, go for a long walk, grab a cup of coffee, and relish the opportunity to think about something else… anything else. Then I build a new webserver, or tinker with a FreeBSD template, or update our homelab.

Sure, I’ll do it under the false pretence of making our backups more reliable, or our Plex server that little bit faster. But Clara knows what’s going on.

Those two silly adages are that you do what you love, and that if you enjoy your work you never work a day in your life. Both are well-meaning but patently nonsense: loving tinkering with servers doesn’t mean you want to be woken out of bed by an outage.

Sometimes you need a break from what you do, even if weirdly it’s doing the same thing. I suppose it’s because its your timeline, and your own trail of curiosity that lead you down those delightful rabbit-holes, rather than meeting an external expectation.

My git hook didn’t fire, so all my posts since last Wednesday just generated at once. Apologies for the spam to your RSS reader and Twitter.

In other news, I’m working on putting my blog on a dynamic CMS again for specific reasons I’ll enumerate on at some point. Enumerate on? That’ll stop this from happening unless my cache gets stale.

Australia’s national music countdown doesn’t usually have the genres or acts I’m interested in, but music from last beer year had a few fun cases of beer surprises.

I love Tame Impala, and his “Is It True” made it to #17. But I can see why “Lost in Yesterday” made it to number #5.

The Australian state of Victoria had its premier Dan Andrews’ Covid press conferences, and an off-handed comment about getting on the beers, spun into this song by Mashd n Kutcher and released after the Melbourne lockdowns. I was fully expecting it to chart, but appearing at #12 demonstrated just how much this has been on everyone’s mind. I think we all needed a bit of silly levity… and the man himself took it well!

(It reminded me of Pendulum’s Australian ABC News theme remix. The fact it didn’t chart on the Hottest 100 of the Decade was a travesty).

I’d thought Lime Cordiale’s “Addicted to the Sunshine” was such a chill song, but I completely missed the environmental subtext until seeing the music video while writing this disjointed blog post… wow.

But I was most surprised to see the British group Glass Animals take out number 1 with “Heat Waves”. Their How To Be a Human Being album was what my 2018 sounded like, but I didn’t even know they had a new album last year. It’s a great track with that subtle electronic weirdness they’re known for.

I only just found out about this site. The Yale University Press Blog, not the site you’re reading now. It’d be concerning if I’d only just discovered my own site. Though I suppose… $_incessant_rambling.

Here’s a published excerpt from The War for the Seas by Evan Mawdsley, as posted back in August 2020. I feel like I wouldn’t be able to put this book down:

The SS Athenia was a substantial vessel, but not one of the great liners; a passenger ship of some 13,500 tons, with accommodation for 1,000 passengers, her speed was 15 knots: the white stripe on her single thin black funnel marked her as one of the ships of the Donaldson Atlantic Line. Completed in 1923, she regularly carried passengers – often emigrants – from the British Isles to Canada. In August 1939 there was a new urgency to get aboard, among those hurrying to escape the outbreak of another European war. The Athenia left Glasgow, bound for Montreal, on the evening of 1 September; that day, Germany had invaded Poland. After picking up passengers at Belfast and Liverpool, the liner sailed out into the open Atlantic on the 3rd. A few hours earlier the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had announced a state of war with Germany.

I’ve talked about my childhood fascination with maps and geography as a kid here many times. During my most recent leave I sat on the couch and fired up OpenStreetMap on my iPad, just like I used to do with my 1986 atlas when I was a kid. People say the iPad isn’t just a consumption device, but it’s surely the best one I’ve ever used for doing so!

I decided to stalk Jim Kloss from afar one evening, and to trace all the cool places he and Esther Golton graciously showed us in Philly. We were only there for a few days, but it’s one of Clara’s and my favourite US cities. Boston is the next major one on our list, but I’d also love to venture over to Pittsburgh one day too.

By chance I drifted a little further south and came across the Pennsylvania state border with Delaware. I knew it was one of the smallest US states in population and size, but it’s tiny. My famously microscopic home town of Singapore is 14% its size, and Delaware isn’t even an island! And check out that northern border:

The arc is known as the Twelve-Mile Circle according to The Wikipedias, which would equate to the Nineteen Point Three One-Kilometre Circle in metric. It was roughly centred on the courthouse in New Castle. I almost wrote that as scented, which perhaps with a strong breeze could travel to all corners of the arc from the aforementioned structure.

If the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania continued straight across, Wilmington would be in the latter state. Human borders can be so arbitrary and weird!

The inflated Australian housing market continues to affect the prospects of people who didn’t make it onto the property ladder, or those entering the workforce after the boom started. Covid has only widened this stratification between the haves and have nots; Clara and I are lucky that we can afford a deposit, but we blanch at the absurdity of the mortgage debt it represents. I suspect it’s the same in cities like Vancouver, San Francisco, and Hong Kong where housing loans are also dozens of times higher than average incomes.

Redirecting so much disposable income into an unproductive asset hampers wellbeing and economic growth, but also has less-publicised effects we’re only beginning to realise. Take electric vehicle sales: financial and environmental writers are keen to wax lyrical about their future while praising government incentives like credits and subsidies, but they only go so far and are fundamentally one-sided.

Renters can rarely buy EVs, and we’re the fastest growing cohort in the housing market. Landlords without an altruistic or ethical streak have little motivation to pay for installing the charging infrastructure required; I don’t think we’re at the level of market penetration where an EV charger can be used to fetch a rental premium. Renters are understandably reluctant to foot the steep bill if we can’t take it with us, or have to pay all over again with each move.

This is doubly the case in apartment buildings where, again, more people are living than before. Renters don’t have access to strata the way landlords do, and can’t advocate for charging installations. Even if we could, and even if apartment buildings could have their electrical systems beefed up to support all these new cars, we’d be right back at the issue of who pays for it.

I only see a few options. I’ve had one wonderful landlord who was happy to split the bill on a home improvement that I argued improved the value of their investment while improving our quality of life. Most expect you to pay for it all, or wish you’d stop pinging them so they can treat you like glorified house sitters. Governments could get involved, though the Australian electorate seems adverse to spending money on infrastructure that would benefit them. The only other option would be raising rental standards to require houses to include charging infrastructure, but the same lack of forward-thinking political will applies there too.

Meanwhile, concerns about range, and the actions of an eccentric billionaire, seem to be all the press care to cover. Renters can’t buy the EVs they want if they can’t get them juice.

(I still maintain the ultimate solution to urban transport is slavish, unbridled investments in rapid transit and commuter rail. But a zippy EV for those times where you need wheels would be rather nice… like going to IKEA to get furniture to fit your latest rental).

I’ve developed a tolerance for marketing speak, but this email I got during leave was entirely new to me:

Talk to me Goose… about your $AWARD nomonation

Goose?

We hear you Maverick. You asked, we listened. We extended the nomination deadline for $AWARD until February 8. Submit your nomination now and recognize the rising IT leaders driving digital innovation in your organization.

I’m flattered they recognised my Maverick™ rugged individuality that breaks through barriers and disrupts synergistic paradigms to leverage digital transformation. How that makes me a goose puzzles me though.

Anyone know what that’s about? (inb4 Untitled Geese).

This all happened today. Rational people would say this is all confirmation bias, and I was out to find further examples given I got grumpy from a few failures! I like to pretend the world was out to get me.

• The power supply in my 1980s TEAC amplifier arked a bright blue inside, and died.

• My ThinkPad T550 reports detecting no internal keyboard or trackpad.

• The Minecraft launcher on Clara’s and my server initially crashed on start. Rebooting the server now leads to “lost connection: Disconnected” errors.

• Our NBN connection that was supposed to be enabled in our new apartment this morning wasn’t.

• My trackball mouse no longer responds to its left button, and one of the screws was attached too hard to remove.

• Our AppleTV couldn’t get to any of our tethered or ad-hoc Wi-Fi networks.

• Sudo.

• Misspelling “arcing” as “arking”

Phil Gerbyshak used to leave blog comments here advocating for defining New Years goals, rather than making resolutions. You’re far more likely to follow through with concrete, measurable steps like “enrol for classes” instead of “learn Japanese”.

This year I decided to go back to basics and define exactly what’s important to me, with the aim of writing goals against them. These were the first five things that came to mind, which just happened to be in alphabetical order:

• Family and friends
• Learning (at work, tinkering, building, fixing)
• Security (health, financial)
• Travel
• Writing

It was a learning experience for me to realise just how few of my past goals fit into those categories, which goes a large way to explaining why I still didn’t have a great track record of fulfilling those goals. I’ve now got a bit more of a framework to approach which goals I want to achieve this year.

It sounds like a silly exercise, like writing a grocery list. I’m a smart person who knows what I need to get, right? Then you come back from Coles and you forgot the avocado. Give it a try, you might be as surprised as I was.