🎵 I’m trying out PlexAmp again, and am listening to Herbie Hancock’s “Gershwin’s World” (in ALAC) which has been in my library for over twenty years and probably hasn’t been listened to since 2000.

My thought of the day, as I do my house tidying: Systems of human behavior break down when people stop putting energy into them.

I have been writing Amazon product reviews thousands of words long this evening, on products as mundane but important as insulated coffee mugs. Ten years ago I was pretty close to being ranked in top 1,000 Amazon reviewers, and was very close, but couldn’t quite crack it.

Per Ethan Anderton on SlashFilm, quoting Bill Hader:

“Right when the lockdown happened in March, we were a week away from shooting. So the last time I was in a room with a lot of people was the table read episodes one and two of season three, and we were ready to go. Then it all got shut down. Season three is completely written, ready to go, and then during this time we actually went and wrote season four. So we have both of those kinda done. We’re just waiting until we can start shooting again.”

“Barry” is a _ sui generis_ example of peak TV. It takes a lot of risks in terms of both plot and tone, and so far they have all paid off. I certainly couldn’t predict how Bill Hader and Alex Berg were going to write their way out of the end of Season 2 of “Barry,” but I guess they cracked it and then some.

I made the mistake today of turning off my home media server (HP N54L) for a few minutes to see how quiet my office is without its fan running. Now I can’t help but be annoyed by it. 😀

Music for Programming is definitely not for me, but I love the all-text site design.

I just got a Logitech C920 webcam to use for video calls at work. Testing it out has shown me that (1) my office looks awful, and (2) I look awful. 😅

I thought the default webcam settings made me look like Emperor Palpatine, but an image search soon revealed that Emperor Palpatine looks much, much better than I do. 😂

I did find out how to adjust the white balance to make me look less cadaverous. However, for now at least, I’m going to apply the built-in black-and-white filter to my video stream. I wonder if that will be annoying to others, but I like the simplicity of it.

Pelosi, Schumer Join Chorus Of Calls For Invocation Of 25th Amendment Against Trump. I cosign. Swear in President Pence and swear him out in about two weeks when Biden is inaugurated.

I was having a pretty good day yesterday, full of minor but meaningful personal and professional accomplishments, and then all hell broke loose in Washington, DC. I pushed the news of it away as best I could, so I am less informed than I otherwise would be, but I am sad, angry, and ashamed nonetheless.

Per Philip Rucker in The Washington Post:

The “American carnage” that Donald Trump vowed to end at the dawn of his presidency was revived in terrifying, treacherous form at its sunset Wednesday, as Trump made a fiery last stand and incited his supporters to storm and sack the U.S. Capitol as part of an attempted coup.

I don’t even know how to comment on this event without seeming glib, but I feel compelled to say something anyway.

I am, by trade, an auditor. One thing auditors are trained to investigate is called “tone at the top,” which represents the values expressed by the top management of a company which are expected from everyone who reports up to them.

After auditing for years, I have discovered that “tone at the top” is almost everything you need to know about an organization to get an idea how well and how ethically it is operated. Ethics and decency from the top of an organization really do trickle down all the way to the bottom and permeate it entirely. Moreover, they are strongly indicative of the organization’s solvency—its ability to hold together as a going concern over time.

When the “tone at the top” is selfish, vain, petty, petulant, aggrieved, unethical, amoral, and violent—as Trump’s has been—that tone trickles down to the whole organization, and pollutes the thoughts and corrupts the actions of the people within it. Unfortunately in this case, the “organization” is not just the Executive Branch, not just the federal government, and not just the Republican Party: it is the entire United States of America. What’s more, because the U.S. is a vastly influential country, the corruption and willful deceit at the head of it spills over into the rest of the world.

I feel like I have known this from the beginning—before the slow-moving coup even started—because I understood what the “tone at the top” was, and knew that it was vitally important. Knowing this, sadly, is not enough, because in a democracy a majority of people need to know this for things to turn out better. Being able to know this, like being able to discern the “tone at the top” as a new auditor, is a rare gift. It requires a trait that is not easily acquired, but is so difficult to teach and to learn that it is often considered to be innate: shrewdness.

That’s because “tone at the top” isn’t always as blatantly obvious as Trump’s vitriolic tweets and shambolic rally speeches. Understanding what the “tone at the top” really is, it requires a combination of healthy skepticism, decent powers of observation, and the knowledge of how things are supposed to work. You have to understand both context and subtext; subtext is much harder to grasp than context, but is often the more important to the two. You have to interpret people’s words and actions, and compare them to each other to see if the actions follow the words. You also have to have some kind of ethical foundation—which may be laws of the state, societal norms, or virtue ethics— on which to base your conclusions.

The human mind has evolved to do a lot of this analysis automatically. Consider that establishing whether you trust another person is, and always has been, an essential part of human interaction. But, like a lot of thought processes that are largely automatic, many times mental shortcuts are taken and the wrong choice is made. To be able to second-guess these automatic thought processes takes intellect, some degree of guidance, and a willingness to think a little harder.

I would not be surprised to learn that many of the people trying to unlawfully overturn the election—not counting the elected officials who are operating out of cynical self-interest—really do think they are making an ethical decision, and really do think they are doing the right thing. They just trusted the wrong person, or made the wrong decision about voting for or supporting, because they lack the shrewdness and imagination to discern that the “tone at the top” really does matter, and that bad words from a lazy president really will lead to riots in the streets.

I realized today that in, ACL, a scripting language I use at work, I have been using a mixture of PascalCase and snake_case (like this: Table_Name) that is the worst of both worlds in terms of typing difficulty. Fortunately, ACL is not case-sensitive.

It appears that the M1 Mac Mini I ordered is going to spend 8 hours today riding around on a delivery truck in an area only a couple miles from my house before it is delivered to me. That’s OK. I’m just excited to finally get it. My current Mac is almost 8 years old.

Neil Young and Jimmy Iovine sold part or all of their music catalog publishing rights to Hipgnosis. This closely follows Bob Dylan’s catalog sale to Universal Music Group. Strange things may be afoot in the music industry.

I posted my “Publish to Micro.blog” Scriptable script on the Automators forum to help share it with the people who are most interested in iOS automation.

I published a Scriptable script that lets you publish text posts to Micro.blog from any iOS text editor using the standard share sheet. I am excited to share it with the community. Maybe @jean or @manton would be kind enough to share it more widely than I can.

I have been using the Magnet app on my Mac for years now, and I still can’t remember any of the keyboard shortcuts for it.

I am working on a Scriptable script to publish to Micro.blog via iOS share sheets, so I don’t have to rely on Drafts for that purpose forever. I am preparing it for publication on GitHub, and am making too many changes to its variable names right now in the process. 😅

I submitted a small but vital bugfix to one of my iOS apps this evening. It feels good. 😀

I created a Siri Shortcut to send my daughter a “Word of the Day” email (which is based on a template I created) to help her build her vocabulary. It’s the first Shortcut I created that does something that’s actually useful!

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposes national lockdown on England to combat new Covid variant. Yes, we have vaccines now, but COVID-19 has mutated into a much more contagious strain. It feels as if the whole world is in a macabre race right now.

Microsoft planning ‘sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows. I use Windows for work at least 8 hours each weekday. The last thing I need is a “sweeping visual rejuvenation” of it.

Google workers announce plans to unionize. This is, potentially, a great development. I am curious to see how many computer engineers unionize. I know, if it were me, it would be a tough sell to pay 1% of my salary to a group without collective bargaining power, even though I strongly believe in unions.

Chipotle launches cauliflower rice nationwide as consumers cut grains from their diets. This is a good idea. Cauliflower rice can be very good, at least when it is not overcooked. Still, it probably won’t get me to go back to Chipotle ever again. 😅