George Bernard Shaw, a playwright from around the time of World War I, is given credit for saying, “Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.” It’s good advice that few seem to consider. A few years back, when the news was full of such “happy” [...]
Karmic Inertia
I find that I really wish that there was a sort of Law of Karma like there is for Thermodynamics. Just imagine what the world would be like if the harm you wished upon others was visited on you at the same time. You want someone else to suffer? Easy! The only cost is that [...]
Bye, Trump!
(This is a repost from Facebook – why did I post it there instead of here? I do not know. But it belongs here, so here it is. It’s also a faintly ironic read, considering that after I posted it, Trump has continued to protest his electoral loss.) Bye, Trump! It is with an almost [...]
Ayn Rand and Rush
There’s been some discussion recently on Rush Fanatics – a Facebook group – about Ayn Rand, in part because of a reference to the “meek inheriting the earth.” The phrase comes from “The Fountainhead,” and is in the context of the book’s overarching villain – a man named Ellsworth Toohey – who uses the phrase [...]
Rush from 2000 feet
I wrote an article a few years back entitled “How I See Rush’s Albums from 10000 Feet,” basically summarizing each studio album in the context of the entire discography. That’s… pretty high level. I wanted to kinda of give myself more room to dive in to each album, to look at them all a little [...]
Dividers in Chief
I saw a reference to Donald Trump as the “Divider in Chief” recently, and the comment made me laugh. The context was that of the pandemic and response to it, and how to frame the response: the model most people take is that of motorcycle helmets, and the model the poster preferred was that of [...]
My Fractured Writing Process
Yesterday I mentioned using Scrivener to write, and I mentioned that I have sort of a graduated process for writing that isn’t very efficient. I wanted to actually write down how I write, just to sort of collect what I do; maybe the documentation process will help me see it for what it is (“a [...]
Scrivener 3.2 Compile Issue
I’m a big fan of Literature and Latte’s Scrivener product. If I’m writing “for real,” it’s typically in Scrivener, although I think my process there could still use a lot of work. (I use a graduated system for writing, which … now that I think about it, isn’t very efficient for organization or promotional purposes.) [...]
Programming is also Teaching
Programming can be thought of as something that takes place as part of interacting with a culture – a culture with two very different audiences. One “audience” is the CPU, and the other audience is made of other programmers – and those other programmers are typically the ones who get ignored, or at least mistreated. [...]
Big Sur and Homebrew
I converted to a mostly-Apple home office over the past couple of years. I still have different platforms hanging out – I have a Windows laptop for games (which is currently gathering a lot of dust), a few Linux embedded devices lurking about… but my primary tools are all running OSX. I typically keep them [...]