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What if - we took care of people - instead of corporations?

This is my first time listening to Acoustic Syndicate. The set they put together for this show flowed really well and got me moving in my chair a little bit, but I’m not really digging it overall.

This was my first time listening to Blitzen Trapper. I wasn’t over the moon but I think they could grow on me. I will spend some more time listening to some of their other shows and see if my opinion changes over time. They are no doubt a talented band, just not my cup of tea.

This was a really great show from DMB. I’m always happy to listen to a live DMB show, particularly one that has as good of audio quality as this one. I was particularly impressed with Stefan’s playing in this show. He played some minor harmonies that a lot of people would miss in the background of Save Me.

Grateful Dead is definitely a newly acquired taste for me. I think there was some sort of unconscious bias I had against them that I can’t put my finger on them - or maybe I just wasn’t at the right point in my life to listen to them. Either way, here I am with a gigantic Dead archive. I have great respect for artists who focus their career on touring and playing for audiences instead of just plugging away in the studio, but I image you could have guessed that with my love of live music :)

I think Erin McKeown’s recording was my favorite of the day. She’s surpremely talented and quite funny during the banter between songs. I found her songs to be quite edgy, especially for 2008.

Following the poor quality of the first show I listened to today, it was a breath of fresh air to listen to a recording that was recorded and produced well. This was my first listen to Billy Strings and I can say I was definitely impressed. I’m normally not a big fan of Bluegrass but the sheer talent that this guy has had me hooked from the first hook of Sweet Blue Eyed Darlin.

The first recording I listened to today was of Desert Rain in North Haven, CT, in May of 2016. The first thing I noticed about this show was that the recording quality was absolutely abysmal. The recording was sourced from a Sony Handycam microphone which is obviously not up to the task of recording live audio.

I realized today as I stared at a simple document that I needed to update that I have nothing left to give. I have no bandwidth in my head for anything outside of my personal life right now. With the baby due any moment now, I cannot think about anything else. My initial response, the one conditioned in me for decades by the unhealthy obsession with work that the United States has, was to kick myself and push myself to get through it.

I’ve used Yubikeys for U2F Two Factor Auth for a long time. I’ve always wanted to use them as part of my login and sudo experience, but I’ve never spent the literally five minutes necessary to set it up.

After looking for this bottle for a long time, I was finally able to pick it up at a local grocery store. Even with a burnt tongue from cooking dinner, this whisky did not disappoint!

My iPad Pro is by far my favorite piece of technology that I own. It’s highly performant, functional, and sexy. Like many folks, I prefer to use it compared to other devices like my MacBook Pro. So, I tried to go iPad Only starting on December 5th. I didn’t set strict rules on this venture, but I knew that I was only going to grab my MacBook if I couldn’t find a reasonable workaround for a problem in a few minutes. Surprisingly, I only came across one item where I had to break out my MacBook, editing an existing video project in Camtasia.

With more and more devices offering the ability to detect if the OS is in Dark Mode or Light Mode, I decided it was time to implement a non-javascript method of switching to a dark stylesheet for this website. It turns out it’s pretty easy, so I’ll walk you through it below.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter probably saw my semi-public spat with Google this week. Normally I don’t bother with getting support from large companies like them, because it in general sucks, instead I either return the product to the retailer or deal with the issue. In this case, I was living with the fact that my Nest Thermostat has never reported the internal humidity of our house as anything other than 38%. This includes when we were adding on to our kitchen (where the thermostat is located) and had an entire wall open to the outside for two days. One of the days, it downpoured.

I’ve always had lots of side projects to keep my creativity flowing. My wife thinks I’m crazy every time I set one of them aside to start another, but over time she’s realized it’s less about completing the projects for me and more about the process of creating. For instance, I’ve been trying to turn bourbon barrels into drums and building an electric go-kart for 2+ years now. I pick the project up for a while, run with it and then put it back down.

On the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration, I thought I would reflect on what the last four years have brought us. Four years of a Donald Trump presidency have sown deep chasms of division in politics, friendships, and families. In my immediate family, we are deeply divided in our political views, mainly my siblings and me vs. my parents, grandparents, and extended family.

I hate the question, “What do you do?” even though I’m sure I’ve asked the same question hundreds of times in my life. In the United States, we’ve aligned our identities with our occupations. If I meet a random person outside of work, should I care more about their personality and who they are or what they do for a living? Maybe we should be asking, “What are you passionate about?”

I’ve started getting rid of references to master branches in all of my repositories. It’s rather easy with Gitlab, but I thought I would document the steps for anyone struggling with it.

A lot of bad happened in 2020, and a lot of 2020 Review blog posts will talk about those bad things. I’m not going to focus on the bad in this post. I’m trying to focus on my mental health and happiness, which means I will be trying to find the good in things. I’ll let someone else focus on the bad.

If you’re like me, you develop a lot of things to test on Raspberry Pis (ARM) and then deploy to production on AMD64 processors. This is all well and good, if you don’t mind spending time re-building the containers on each architecture, but I do mind. I want to write code, not deal with the back-end non-sense.

Below you’ll find my SSH tips and tricks. These are mostly as a note to myself, but you might find them interesting.