2025-06-29 12:00:00
It was a productive week on the starting my own company front. I signed my first two clients, and I'm expecting another contract this week. It's not paying all, or even most of the bills yet, but it is paying some of them. More importantly, the incoming cash lengthens my runway for when I run out of money to sometime next year. My nervousness at going solo is starting to turn to excitement as my plans come to fruition and I start to consider what my life will look like next year when this is working fully. I have an MBA and I actually built a pro-forma income statement and tested various scenarios to gauge my odds of making a living on my own. It was fun to work those financial analysis muscles, and seeing the plan actually work is cool too. I've proved the idea is valid and the strategy is solid. Now is the hard part, executing.
The reality in the US is that working for a company is not job security. Almost all white collar professional work in the US is "at-will." For those of you not in the US, that means you can fired at any time for any reason, or no reason at all, excepting specific protected cases like race, sex, national origin, etc. Not that the current administration would actually enforce those laws. In late stage capitalism doing a good job does not provide job security in corporate America. If you are going to live the uncertainty, you might as well do it on your own where you keep all the profits instead of making some rich asshole richer.
We saw the Indigo Girls in concert this week. It was brutally hot, but 100% worth it. I also published my top 5 books list for the first half of the year. This afternoon, I'm attending a lecture on the historical impact of the Declaration of Independence at my favorite local brewery. Yes, I'm paying to listen to a history lecture at a brewery. I'll probably have a post about that in July.
Harper is an open source grammar checker that works 100% locally. I use Language Tool because it seemed less icky than Grammarly, but I need to install this and give it a test run.
The moment you stop eating what everyone else eats, stop buying what everyone else buys, stop believing what everyone else believes — not because you're rebelling but because you're paying attention — you discover something unsettling: most people are sleepwalking. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
-What if Everything You Were Told About Happiness is Wrong?
This queer online zine can only be read via Telnet.
This mashup of 80s metal songs with "hell" in the title is an absolute work of art. Make sure you stick with it to the end, or at least through the extended guitar solo cuts.
Substack sucks, but you already knew that.
I found this new to me band this week, Massive Wagons. It's blues based bar room rock and roll done incredibly well. Check out this tune from their latest record, which takes on the British government.
Next week's edition may be delayed due to the Independence Day holiday in the US. We are no longer a functioning representative democracy, but we'll still take the day off. I expect it to renamed in honor of the orange shit gibbon in the near future.
And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.
2025-06-28 12:00:00
I've completed 23 books so far this year, with another 5 or 6 started and abandoned. These are the top 5 so far. At least a couple of these are destined to end up on my annual top 5 list. I have hundreds of other book reviews on this site.
The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings
Normally, you don't judge a book by its cover, but in this case, go ahead and do it. It's a stunning book cover and a perfect harbinger of what to expect in this book. If your reaction to the book cover is, “cool,” you can add this to your to-read list.
This is a stunning debut novel. It's fantasy, set in a post-Katrina New Orleans around 2015, IIRC. This New Orleans is soaked in magic, with a series of songs powering the magic and keeping everything in balance. Except that somebody is stealing the songs, throwing everything out of whack and opening a rift that allows spirits and humans to cross a usually forbidden passage between New Orleans and its mirror in the spirit world, Nola. Nola is a city of zombie cab drivers and a magical sky car system to get around. Our heroes are a trio of three young kids, aided by some magical artifacts obtained on a quest set up by Grandma. There is also a parallel story line involving a 20-something trans ex-pat who has returned to New Orleans. He ends up on his own magical quest to find his cousin, who is presumed dead in a magical accident, but no body has been found.
There are many players in this story, and keeping up with them as the POV shifts, and following where you are (New Orleans or Nola) can be a bit of a challenge at some points in the book. But stick with it. Ultimately, this is a love letter to New Orleans, both the place, the spirit, and the music.
Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario
The author won a Pulitzer for her newspaper reporting in The LA Times about Central American immigration to the US. Consider this book the extended version of that reporting. The journey is harrowing, with kids as young as 8 or 10 leaving Honduras headed North to the US, often in search of their mother's, who had gone North years earlier to earn enough money to support their kids from afar. The journey involves extended stretches riding on top of trains, with young kids dying or losing limbs from a fall just about every day. They also have to dodge gangs, corrupt police, the Mexican immigration police, and legit cops. Along they way they get help from churches and locals who sympathize with their plight. Even if they make it to the US and find their family, they live in fear of being deported daily. That fear is probably much more real these days versus when the book was written 20 years ago.
You'll learn a lot about immigration, and you'll also understand why Trump's send them all back strategy can not work. Enrique failed 8 or 9 times before finally making it into the US. Conditions are so bad in many places in Central America that the risk of death pales against the misery of staying home. Most of these folks are not criminals, they are refugees. And they should be treated as such.
Everything Burns by S.A. Cosby
This is Cosby's 5th book, I think. By now, you know what you are getting in a S.A. Cosby book. It'll be set somewhere east of Richmond, VA, within a few of hours drive of the city. There will be crime. It will be violent. People will die, and those deaths will be graphic. Almost all the main characters will be black, and the plot is usually driven by systemic racism in some way. This time the story revolves around a family that owns the local crematorium. A brother is on the wrong side of the local drug gang, and his successful, rich, older brother home from Atlanta has to fix things. In this case, fixing things involves financial fraud, crypto scams, execution style murders, and people burned alive in the crematorium. At the end of the book I wasn't sure if there were any good guys in this story.
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
If the news reported, completely seriously, that the moon and all known moon rock samples instantaneously turned to cheese (or a cheese like organic matrix per the official NASA statement), how would you deal with it? How would the President deal with it? Your neighbors? Evangelical preachers? And then, what if the moon turning to cheese appeared to trigger a life ending event on earth?
Can an author really did into those meaty questions with this ridiculous premise? Scalzi can. Did I mention the cheese related puns? He bounces back and forth between chapters where he very seriously considers how an evangelical preachers would explain this to the flock, and then in another chapter we spend the day with a Hollywood producer sitting through pitch after pitch of bad cheese related TV and movie pitches. It's not a traditional follow two main characters through a story book. It's more like an anthology, which each chapter considering how one specific group or person is dealing. There is a light connection weaving through the story, but I'm not sure it was even necessary.
Somehow when you finish this book you'll find yourself thinking about the meaning of life and cheese puns at the same time.
The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
An early leader for my book of the year. It's an inventive story involving books that bestow various powers on whoever has possession. The book of doors allows you to time and place travel simply by walking holding the book, thinking of where or where and when you want to go, and walking through any door.Our heroine Cassie comes into possession of the Book of Doors and upon realizing its power, finds herself pursued across time and space by dark forces that would possess the books for evil. So time travel set in the modern day world with good and evil, all very well executed.
2025-06-27 12:00:00
This was a good month for concerts. Last week, a free ticket from a friend put me in the third row at The National for Aimme Mann, with Jonathan Coulton opening. Coulton came to fame back in Web 2.0 when he did a stunt where he wrote a song every week for a year, selling them all off his website. It lead to him walking away from his web developer job to be a full time musician. And here he is in 2025 opening for Aimee Mann. His music is very humor forward, which was an interesting contrast to Mann's more somber take on the world. Alas, Coulton did not play my favorite of his tunes, Code Monkey.
Aimee Mann played the entire Lost in Space album, in what was essentially a COVID delayed celebration of the 20 year anniversary of the record. She describes the record as her most depressing album. It definitely is not get up and dance music. Alas, she did not dip into her big breakthrough with Till Tuesday, so I did not get to hear Voices Carry live.
Two night ago the Indigo Girls sold out the stage at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens. The opening act was Katie Pruitt. Katie is an up and coming County / Americana singer-songwriter with a powerhouse voice. You can check out her new single on YouTube.
The Indigo Girls were sans band for this tour. It was just Amy, Emily, and their violin player. I last saw them in a tiny club in Atlanta 30+ years ago. The heat index when Katie hit the stage was 100F. It was down to 95F when The Indigo Girls started at 8 PM. It felt like their song choices leaned hard into their more issue focused tunes, which is not a surprise given the state of life in the US. They were fabulous, as you would expect. Alas, they did not play my favorite Indigo Girls tune, Southland in the Springtime.
0 for 3 on hearing my favorite tunes live, but still 4 fabulous performances.
2025-06-22 12:00:00
3 weeks on the dole. Boredom is becoming an issue. I did take some serious steps towards self-employment this week. I formed my legal business entity, got my Federal ID number, opened a business checking account, set up an email account for the business, and built a website. I also submitted a million dollar proposal to the State of Virginia. I'd put our chances of winning at about 2%, but wouldn't it be amazing if my first win was a 7 figure contract?
The website was interesting. I spent about an hour looking at dozens of open-source templates for single page sites, and I hated them all. So I described what I wanted to Google Gemini, and it spit out the site you see. All I had to do was replace the filler content and tweak a couple of minor things. I could have built that site myself. It would have been an all day project. I feel like the people that can use AI effectively are the people that don't actually need it most of the time.
I took Friday off from being unemployed. I refused to set up any calls and just ignored my issues. There is a new dinosaur exhibit at the science museum that I want to see. However, I got confused and went to the state history museum, which was fine. It's a great museum, and I always learn something interesting when visiting. Then yesterday we made the 70-minute drive east for a day of saltwater therapy. I read 1/2 of a book while sitting under the sunshade in the pleasant ocean breeze. We need to do that more often.
This very long blog post is an interesting look at what life is like for an indie musician doing a short 2-week tour in 2025.
From 2003. The most dramatic finding from the survey was that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned. . The golden age of blogging was marked my the majority of blogs being dormant. Maybe the IndieWeb is doing okay!
Field Notes, like many cool things, started out as a side project.
I'll take jobs I would never, ever, ever do for $2000, Ken.
Do not depend on ChatGPT for wilderness routing. In related news, the popular hiking app AllTrails just added an AI tool to route hikes. Someone will die before the end of the year when AI leads them into a very dangerous situation. The kind of people that would use an AI routing tool are the same people that would blindly follow the directions into danger.
I'll end with the forecast for the week. Ugh.
And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.
2025-06-15 12:00:00
Week two of unemployment is in the books. It was characterized mostly by the growing realization that if I want a job, I'm going to have to make my own. My industry is a shitshow, and at my age, nobody outside my niche is going to even talk to me about a job. So I spent the week dutifully applying to jobs I won't even get interviewed for, while working my network for consulting opportunities to kick off self-employment. That latter option was far more productive this week. In addition, I have been learning all about forming an LLC, self-employment taxes, insurance needs, the Virginia Healthcare Marketplace, etc. I was very busy for a guy with no job.
Yesterday was hair appointment day for my wife, so we got up early to make the 60-mile trek to Fredericksburg. While she was doing the hair thing, I had coffee with a friend. I successfully avoided walking into the awesome used bookstore there because I have far too many books from previous visits that I have not read yet. Of course, we brought a cooler filled with ice so that we could stop by Carl's for a treat, as well as get a quart of custard home without it melting.
The No Kings protests across the nation, across the world really, have really uplifted me. 10 million+ people turned out in 1000 different locations to collectively tell the fascist regime to go fuck itself. Combined with the laughable turnout for Tangerine Palpatine's birthday parade, the events of today are a clear victory for the good guys. But now is not the time to get complacent. A rabid animal backed into a corner is dangerous, and his Trumpiness must be very pissed about how bad the optics were on his big day.
In other news, I dominated family game night last night, winning decisively in both Sagrada and Trekking Through History.
Today is Father's Day in the US. We have no plans, just doing the usual thing. On Sunday mornings, the usual thing is grocery shopping and other errands. Then I'm making my Puerto Rican inspired chicken and rice for dinner. Yes, I am cooking on Father's Day.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Links
Given that it is Father's Day, the very unlikely combination of events that led to me meeting my wife is worth revisiting.
I posted a bunch of photos from our afternoon at the botanical gardens last week.
This directory of abandoned blogs is quite the trip down memory lane.
This 12-minute video about how phones have caused us to neglect our real-world relationships is worth watching.
The Small Web is Beautiful. One thought I had reading this is how almost nobody that I know IRL reads my blog. It used to bother me a little. But I've come to realize that the IndieWeb is not for everybody. It requires a little more work, a little more bravery in putting yourself out there, and a little more caring about other people. I'd rather spend my time with the kind of people that feel comfortable on the IndieWeb.
And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.
2025-06-07 12:00:00
Happy weekend to both of you reading this :) Actually, Tiny Analytics recently informed me that I'm averaging over 1000 visits a month, which exceeds the free account threshold, and that they would like me to start paying. I never thought site traffic would build back up like that. I'll probably just remove the analytics because I really don't care about the stats.
I spent the week looking for a job. It's bleak out there. I've also spent a lot of time this week thinking, researching, and playing with cash flow spreadsheets for being self-employed. Right now its 50/50 which way I go. If my options at the end of this month are take a job I'm not excited about or go solo, I think I'll go solo. Maybe. This decision is more complicated than it needs to be in the US because of of the lack of a social safety net. I'll have to buy my own health insurance, which will be my second largest monthly expense after my mortgage. And even with that hefty premium, I'm still looking at needing thousands of upfront cash to get by deductibles. It could actually cost more than my mortgage on an annual basis. Imagine needing two mortgages just to get by. It fucking sucks. Basically, only live in the US if you rolled a 20 on your Constitution roll during character creation.
You'd think not working would mean I have lots of links for you, but I don't. I'm not sure if that is related to how focused I was on looking for a job, or maybe my mood was shit all week and nothing seemed good to me.
You should use /tmp more argues that we should get in the habit of puttting any temporary downloads in /tmp, so we always know they can just be deleted later. When I think about all the time I spend deciding what in my downloads folder I need versus what can go, this seems like a very good idea.
This 15 minute video argues that the hyper growth of the last 150 years is a complete outlier that has to end. We spent millions and maybe billions of years building up fossil fuels in the earth, and we are going to use up all that stored energy in 200 years.
If confronted by the police, can you prove you are a US Citizen? Unless you are carrying your birth certificate or passport around with you 24 x 7, your answer is nope. Scalzi makes a very strong case for getting a passport card and keeping it in your wallet, not for crossing into Canada or Mexico on a regular basis, but to avoid getting sent to El Salvador if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
AI is an important technology, but LLMs are likely to kill us all before we master the power of the technology. LLMs are basically very expensive Mad Libs. It's not crafting answers to your prompts, it's filling in the blanks, often totally devoid of context.
Keep writing and publishing, especially if nobody is reading. It's the only way you'll get better.
And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.
