What books helped shape your political and moral opinions? A lot has gone into my reading list. Here’s a list of the things I think were most important, with a focus on fiction: Starship Troopers. Often derided as fascist, this book… isn’t fascist. It’s not a complicated book, but it does contain a lot of [...]
My Thoughts on Vapor Trails
This is my response to “What does everyone like about Vapor Trails?“ To me, Vapor Trails is an amazing album. When I first heard it, it was a revelation: “Rush is back!” — and I didn’t even realize how much I’d lowered my expectations after T4E, which was a good album but lacked a certain [...]
Education in 2021
Education is going to have to change in the world of COVID-19. Here’s what I think it should look like when things have stabilized. It’s not really COVID-19 that’s the motivator; it’s just the proof that we should have changed education a long time ago. And I’m not an educator, unless you count my experience [...]
I migrated an account to GSuite and it was trivial.
I recently migrated my wife’s email to GSuite after an unconscionable delay – delayed mostly because the documentation for GSuite left some questions that I wasn’t sure I could easily answer – and the delay was entirely unjustified. It was easy. The History I had my own email server back in the day. There were [...]
What Makes Rush Special?
I’ve been a Rush fan for close to four decades now – since 1983 or so. In that time I’ve probably absorbed every lyric multiple times, and hundreds of musical nuances (with thousands to go, with my luck and attention spa- hey, look, a squirrel!), and despite what I think is a pretty absurd level [...]
“People are stupid; get over it”
One of the things I tell my kids all the time, in an attempt to help them cope, is “people are stupid; get over it.” For a long time they saw this as being cynical; in some ways they still do, but they’ve also matured enough to see it for what it is: coping with [...]
Socialism
In a lot of ways, the way people talk about Socialism today sounds like an attempt to say “I want to take what you have” without the guilt associated with theft – because it’s corporate and pits membership in social classes against each other. “I do not have it, and I need it” elicits natural [...]
Voltage Modular and MIDI Out in Cubase
I’d like to explain how I got Cherry Audio’s Voltage Modular to generate Euclidean patterns for Cubase. The process for it should be generalizable to other DAWs, but since Cubase Pro is my daily driver (as a DAW, I guess) I’m going to focus on it. Euclidean patterns rely on the idea that percussive hits [...]
The Trees is an ideal (and pragmatic) leftist’s song
I love the song “The Trees,” by Rush, on their “Hemispheres” album. It’s the first song of Rush’s catalog that I heard, even though I didn’t know the band was Rush at the time. It’s an incredibly leftist song. I wholly approve. I am a leftist at heart. I’ve been asking people I know what [...]
Installing GraalVM on OSX with SDKMan
Want to install GraalVM on OSX? It’s easy. First, get SDKMan. Trust me. You want it. Almost as much as brew, if you’re doing anything with the JVM. You’ll want to install bash – via brew – because SDKMan uses bash and the OSX bash shell is badly outdated. Once you have SDKMan installed and [...]