I really wanted an iMac Pro at one point. I was most excited about its cooling system, of all things, because promised to be inaudible. I’m sorry to see the product go, and am hopeful that it means M1-based iMacs are coming soon.

Matthew S. Schwartz reports for NPR:

To millions of people around the world, the young poet Amanda Gorman represents hope, change and the promise of a better America.

But to a security guard on Friday night, the young African American woman represented a potential threat to public safety.

This is a sad story. My first thought was that Amanda Gorman could legitimately have been harmed in a situation like this. Then I thought, she should have a bodyguard or an entourage with her at all times for protection. Then I thought, she should not need to! That could ruin her life.

Amanda Gorman is a strong and bold speaker, and deserves the last word on the matter:

“In a sense, he was right,” the former National Youth Poet Laureate added. “I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.”

Tonight I learned about Mermaid, which is a plaintext markup language and renderer for creating flowcharts and other kinds of diagrams.

I want to make flowcharts quickly for my technical projects at work, but i don’t have Visio, and I hate fiddling with a GUI to line up shapes and worry about arrow lengths and so on. The way my mind works, I just want to type out what I want and have software figure out how to lay it out for me. I don’t care that much how it looks, as long as it is simple and makes sense.

Mermaid’s plaintext premise is really cool, and the syntax is flexible enough to not be awful. It is way more flexible than the examples on The Mermaid website originally led me to believe. You can name each shape whatever you like (not just single letter identifiers) and you can define the content (shapes) and relationships (arrows) separately if you want to. The only thing that stinks is that you have to manually insert html break tags (<br/>) for line breaks, because there is no word wrap.

I still need to figure out what the best renderer is for me. The Mermaid Live Editor does not produce usable charts on my work machine’s web browser (the new Edge) for some reason. Typora seems like it will do for now.

I realized today that part of my job is writing a short, really boring book about how I do my job. That, indeed, is the life of an auditor.

Ulysses invited me back into their beta testing program, and now I can test direct publishing to Micro.blog!

I’m setting up a new Celeron based mini PC. It came with Windows 10 Professional on it, which surprised me for such a low-end PC. Microsoft must be giving those licenses away now. Its fan spins up and for a second or two each time I do anything, which reminds me of the frequent hard disk chatter from my 90s and 00s PCs.

I watched Gen:lock over the past week. I was disappointed that it introduced a premise-breaking plot development in the penultimate episode. My beef is 100% spoiler-y.

The shows is a mecha anime. Its premise is that, in some future war in which big robots piloted by people fight each other, a new type of mech is developed that is remotely controlled by very rare, very special kind of person. That person must bind her mind to the mech through a lot of hand-wavey technology called gen:lock.

The problem is, we learn three things in the final two episodes of season 1 that make the pilots unnecessary:

1. A person’s mind can uploaded to, and downloaded from, a digital brain
2. A digital brain can be copied an indefinite number of times.
3. A digital brain is all that is needed to drive a mech

If one pilot’s mind can be copied, without harming her, and then bound to any number of mechs, then why do we need the pilots at all, once you’ve got the first one’s mind copied? If the pilots aren’t really necessary, why haven’t the characters in charge of the gen:lock program figured that out yet?

I’m not sure I will pick it up again when season 2 comes out. Maybe this kind of anime isn’t for me.

Per Mark Sweeney in The Guardian:

“Why would a music streaming company and a financial services company join forces?!,” Dorsey posted on Twitter, posing the obvious question as he announced the news. “It comes down to a simple idea: finding new ways for artists to support their work. New ideas are found at intersections, and we believe there is a compelling one between music and the economy.”

This is great news if you’re Jay-Z. He will cash out cash out with a tidy profit for his also-ran music service. I was surprised to learn that Tidal’s value appreciated so much since he bought it.

It sure seems like a bad deal for Square, though, who accepts a ton of business risk without much benefit. I probably don’t know what Tidal’s cultural cache is—I had assumed that most people had never heard of it—so I can’t appreciate its value. Still, even if the acquisition sounds like a bad idea, $300 million is play money to the Jay-Zs and Jack Dorseys of the world, so who cares?

The first time I heard the term “NFT” was yesterday, and I’m already sick of it.

I am grateful I received my COVID vaccine, but yesterday’s second dose has really knocked me for a loop today. 🤒

Sam Schechner and Keach Hagey report in The Wall Street Journal:

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry.

I don’t even know what to make of this, unless it is a flex of Google’s monopoly power in search, maps, and video (YouTube). Who needs to track users across websites when every browser tab starts at or ends at a Google-owned website?

Ella Nilson at vox.com reports:

But much of Tanden’s résumé was overshadowed by her proliferous online posting — at least 1,000 tweets raking both Republicans and leftist Democrats over the coals — that Tanden quietly started deleting in November 2020.

I haven’t been following this story, but my interest was piqued when I learned that Neera Tanden’s nomination chances were in jeopardy because of her tweets from the past. People keep getting in trouble for what they post to Twitter. (“Social media” in these cases always is Twitter, too. That is probably just because it is public facing, though it is also a popular place for broadcasting, calling out, and grandstanding.)

It will soon be the conventional wisdom that those who seek high offices—in public service or in private industry—should have no public social media presence, no blog—certainly no Twitter account—maybe no public online presence at all. That bothers me because I think there is value in publishing one’s thoughts to the world, in a blog, vlog, podcast, or whatever other medium I can’t even conceive of yet. People have an urge to share and should not feel that they will be punished for it, especially years after they tap the “post” button.

I understand that some people are deliberately awful on social media, and that is a problem, but isn’t it also a problem that “the Internet never forgets?” The right to be forgotten is at both ridiculous to ask for and essential for people to get along with each other after a certain point. How should we evaluate a person based on what she posted online? Does it matter how long ago a thought was posted? What is fair? I think we are at a cultural crossroads regarding these questions, and may be stuck at that crossroads for a long, long time.

Today i will receive my second COVID-19 vaccine. I am excited to be so close to finished with the process.

I just looked at the latest release notes (see picture). So that’s why I couldn’t save my files to OneDrive this week. 🤦‍♂️ I figured out a workaround, but was bamboozled for days why something that once worked now did not. OneDrive’s iOS Files integration was always pretty unreliable. Maybe after this feature pull Microsoft will finally fix it.

Having tons of meetings all the time is kind of killing my impulse to micro-blog. Perhaps it is because of all the social interaction I am getting at work, that I usually don’t.

Programming has got me pulling my hair out today. There seems to be no good way to do the simple things I want to do. I’ll have to pick a bad way and just deal with it.

Spotify’s new lossless tier isn’t enough to make me switch, but I would pay Apple more for lossless tracks on Apple Music. That makes me sound like a fanboy, but I was a Spotify subscriber before and like Apple Music more.

I have come to the conclusion that the best way to automate moving data around in Excel and formatting it, via Automation Anywhere, is by simulating keyboard shortcuts and putting delays in between them. I wish there was a slicker way, because it sure is fiddly.

The “projects” listed on my Hugo-based website are hyperlinks when I run it via hugo server but are not when I publish the site. Sadly, I have no idea how to fix it. Perhaps I have to try another theme.

I updated my home page/landing page using Hugo: mjdescy.me.

I definitely don’t have the hang of using Hugo yet, but I’m learning. One thing that made me feel stupid is that I don’t know how to get rid of the “Blog” section that the template I’m using wants to include. In the interest of getting something that is not bare HTML published, I created some meaningless blog posts.

The last time I used a static website publisher, I had to create my own themes from scratch. The hard part with that was in creating something that looked halfway decent on various screen sizes. With Hugo, there are a ton of great themes available, but they all have constraints about what content the site must contain. That is tough for me right now because I don’t know how to change those settings, and I mostly want to create very simple sites.

📺 My wife and i accidentally found the Mo Willems special, “Mo Willems and The Storytime All-Stars Present: Don’t Let The Pigeon Do Storytime!”, on HBO Max earlier this week. We watched it with our kids this afternoon, and we all loved it. It is so joyous and nutty and fun that we got sucked into it right away. Mo Willems is a treasure.

🎬 I enjoyed Pixar’s Soul quite a bit.

I installed Hugo a fifth time tonight. (Is this a record?) My network is being stupidly slow, and having all these little website files bouncing between three computers is causing latency problems in my text editor. Hugo is running on my mac Mini, and I found a way to do it that does not require homebrew to be installed.

It’s amazing how little I paid attention to the lyrics of OK Computer in the 1990s. It is way more depressing—and poetically expressive about it—than I knew back then. I will blame not having decent enough speakers or headphones to make them out clearly.

Apple reportedly plans March 16 event with new iPad Pro, iPad mini and AirTags. This is just a rumor at this point. The only Apple thing left for me to buy this year is AirTags—if they ever get released. I actually have been waiting for them eagerly. I want to get rid of my Tiles, mostly because their app got annoying, and partly because I bet Apple’s version would work better.