🎵 I’m giving “Hadestown” a first listen tonight. I never heard of the show until today’s Tony award nominations. , which surprised me, because I try to keep track of all the Broadway musicals. I thought that this was another very weak year for new musicals, so I am happy to learn of a completely new one. I hope that it is a new classic. I’m not sure, though, how closely the “Hadestown” on Apple Music resembles the Broadway version; I read that the show went through a bunch of changes over the years.

After seeing “Game of Thrones” and “Avengers: Endgame” over the past two days, I can now breathe again and use the internet like a normal person.

I’m trying to get my mind around Reeder 4 for iOS. It looks great, has a very nice article view and the smoothest scrolling around, and features an excellent use of animation throughout the app. I miss the (admittedly old-fashioned) direct sharing link option (which I used for Pinboard) and the old gray theme (the new dark theme is darker). The J and K Emacs-style keybindings are welcome, but it puzzles me that arrow keys and the space bar are not allowed for navigation.

I normally wouldn’t post pictures with family members in them on my blog, but I’ll make an exception for this one. Me wife and son are kind of hard to spot in it.

Monmouth Battlefield State Park

I listened to this TED Talk yesterday, via the TED podcast. Carole Cadwalladr’s message was chilling but not at all surprising, considering just how much news there is about how Facebook (mostly) is abused to undermine trust in facts, in institutions, in each other, and, ultimately, in democratic elections.

Dark money flowing into ephemeral, misleading, highly-targeted advertising is rightly identified as the leading cause of these problems. Sometimes I think that if the advertising element were removed from Facebook, a lot of these problems go away. After all, isn’t the problem that people can pay to publish whatever they want, targeted to whoever they want, and there is no tradable record of it anywhere thereafter? But after thinking about it for a little while longer, I think that the advertisements are only part of the problem. The algorithms that target content, wherever it comes from, to the most engaged (most gullible?) users, are another huge part of the problem. People will spread user-generated misleading nonsense almost as fast as the targeted advertisements will spread.

I have concluded that the human brain isn’t well adapted to the scale, speed, and the algorithmic targeting of information that social media sites. Those are the very things that make a site like Facebook work. These kind of websites are flawed because our brains are flawed. That’s a problem that is not possible to solve.

Monmouth Battlefield State Park

🎵 Nancy Wilson, who I have known about forever but have never really listened to, is awesome.

Holmdel Park on a cloudy day

Longstreet Farm

Longstreet Farm

As much as I love Auto Layout, I also, in equal measure, hate it, too—mostly when I can’t figure out why I can’t get something to work.

I took my son, in the stroller, on a long, long walk through a local park on Sunday, while my wife and daughter did an indoor activity there. It was so nice to walk for an hour or so outdoors, in warm weather, while the trees were blooming.

I did not ever expect to see giant ray-, octopus, and squid-shaped kites, but now they haunt my dreams. Thanks, Point Pleasant Kite festival!

The burning of Notre Dame shook me to my core yesterday.

The images and videos made me so upset that I thought I was going crazy. After all, it is just a building, and presumably no one died, so what is the big deal? Still, the cathedral is a symbol of beauty and hope—literally of reaching to the sky to a higher power—and, to me at least, of human achievement, collective action, and indomitable spirit. To see it, a world monument, burning up (and potentially collapsing altogether, though thankfully that did not happen) deeply troubled me.

I have thought about it a little more now, and have realized something: When upsetting things occur, it makes sense to be upset, even if what is happening isn’t the most upsetting thing that could occur. Feeling so bad wasn’t really a bad thing for my me, and it wasn’t an outsized emotion to something that wasn’t really affecting me. I’m not crazy; I’m sensitive, and that’s OK.

I have been in a weird state lately in which I am not excited about any company’s recently released, or recently announced, products or services. I feel grateful that I didn’t drop everything in 2007 and start covering the smartphone and gadget market for a living. (I wanted to!)

Thanks to the couple of warm-weather days we had this week, I discovered that I need to replace not one, but two air conditioners shortly, before I really have to turn them on again. Sigh. 💸

🎵 Temporary, by Feathermerchants

I was poking around my iTunes library, found an old album I loved from senior year of high school, by a local Connecticut band called Mr. Right. After some Google searches, I found a copy of a song that was one of my all-time, lost, never-had-it-on-a-proper-CD, never-could-get-it-anywhere songs: “Temporary”. It wasn’t what I expected, however. It was a different arrangement, which was entirely unexpected.

When I first heard “Temporary”, it was a power pop song, recorded by Mr. Right (or maybe just Jim Chapdelaine). Apparently, he dusted the song off almost ten years later to record with his new band, Feathermerchants, and reimagined it as a folk-rock (dare I say, Americana?) ballad, sung by a feather-light soprano.

When I was seventeen, I recorded, with my high school band, an EP weeks before we all left for college. Due to dumb luck (one of our friends grew up next door to a bonafide music producer—and the knew each other), two of our four-song EP was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jim Chapdelaine, who went on to become a 13-time Emmy winner, among other amazing things. We first met up with him because his band at the time (in 1995), Mr. Right, played a gig at my hometown's annual fall festival on the green. My friends and I pretty much idolized him for a little while after high school graduation.

Jim played a recording of the original song through his board as we were waiting for something to happen—probably while we were waiting for our gold master CD to be written, at 1/2X speed, in Jim’s basement music studio. The chorus is an ear worm, and I really enjoy the lyric. I remembered it to this day, and hearing it made me feel nostalgic.

I just purchased my ticket to “Avengers: Endgame”. I got a Monday night showing, because I have a wife and kids to spend the weekend with. I’ll have to stay off the internet, I guess, between the movie’s premiere and my showtime.

Journal 2019-04-07

This weekend was great.

On Saturday, my wife and I took the kids to the Staten Island Zoo. One of my wife’s best friends is the director of education there, and she gave us (my 6-year-old daughter, mostly) a private tour. We all had a great time, and my daughter had an absolute blast. She loved everything about it, and got to touch a bunch of animals (sheet, goats, birds, snakes, lizards, an armadillo, a rabbit, and a chinchilla) that we never through she would touch. (You can’t touch most of these animals unless you’re on a field trip or you know someone who works there.)

On Sunday, my wife and I took the kids to one park in the morning and let them play a long time. My 2-year-old son, of course, only wanted to be pushed on the swing, but my daughter wanted to climb and jump and slide and dig in the same, and so on. We had a blast. I took her to another park in the afternoon, where she played for hours, blew bubbles, and made some little friends.

It was great to be able to watch my kids learn and play all weekend. We didn’t go too far from home, or spend that much money, but we all had a great time together.

My (Former) Hobby: Home Media Streaming

For someone who is, now, only marginally interested in television and movies, I have spent a lot of time and money over the years to make my television watching experience awesome. I used to be really into it, and—unless you had a lot of money to burn—it used to be hard to get it working correctly, which fed into my engineering mindset and led me to tinker with hardware and software frequently, for almost a decade.

I started in 2008 by connecting my 13” white MacBook to my (non-HD) TV via a $30 video adapter. Even though my TV was primitive, picture quality was way better when playing video this way, and I could watch streaming videos directly from the networks’ web sites, like “Lost”, on my real TV for the first time. I loved it. After about a year of this, I got a mini-PC as a Christmas gift, which I started using, with an external hard drive, as a home media server.

For the front end, I bought a set-top box that Western Digital used to sell. The system worked…mostly. Streaming over WiFi was reliable for non-HD (480p) and 720p HD encoded TV shows, but anything with higher resolutions, higher bit rates, or DTS audio would usually be impossible to play.

I was never serious enough to buy an expensive computer to connect to my TV, because I figured, correctly it turns out, that video streaming devices would become cheaper and more capable over time. Of course, during that time, I cycled through a ton of set-top boxes (most of which I got for free as review units): Roku boxes, a couple Roku knock-offs, the Boxee Box, the first Amazon Fire TV, an Amazon Fire TV Stick (which was quickly returned), a couple Raspberry Pis running XMBC (which worked great for TV but stumbled on DTS audio), and eventually a number of Apple TVs (fourth generation).

The reason I went through so many front-ends is that they all had two limitations. First, each one left out at least one of the top video sources: either iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, or Plex. (Nothing left out Netflix.) Second, all of them choked on certain sorts of videos, depending on their audio or video encodings.

Eventually, I began to watch video on my iPad while I work. This led me to discover Plex in the App Store. Plex is a server that you can install on a computer, coupled with client apps that run on many different devices. Plex looks great, has server side transcoding to make video formats less of an issue, and allows you to manage a centralized library of TV, movies, music, and more. I used Plex on an Amazon Fire TV for a year or two. I started out very happy with it, but the software stability of the Amazon Fire TV decreased over time, and Plex and Amazon did not release software updates timely enough to fix it. Eventually, I was very unhappy with the Fire TV + Plex combo, but still pretty happy running Plex on my iPad.

When the Apple TV, 4th generation, was released, with support for iTunes, Apple Music, Netflix, YouTube, and Plex, I bought one right away. I figured, at the time, that Apple was so big that only it had any chance to get all the major video providers on a single box, and get them to stay long term. (Amazon, of course, was conspicuously absent for several years, but that was not as important to me back then as it is now.) I didn’t expect to love it for to watch baseball on MLB At Bat, but it plays games at 1080p/60fps, which looks amazing, so I do.

Over time, home media streaming went from being a niche hobby, in which nerds like me tried to hook up computers to their TVs, to a very mainstream way to consume video and audio. Thanks to cheap and nearly ubiquitous modern hardware, my home media streaming “hobby”, has basically come to an end. I still maintain a Plex library, but I no longer have to upgrade or to fiddle with hardware connected to my TV, or worry about audio and video encodings and bit rates before I watch a movie with my wife. I also stream a lot more video from outside the home (not via Plex) than I ever did before—just like everybody else these days. It’s not special any more; it’s just another entertainment product, and it deserves very little thought, because it just works. Things are much better now, but sometimes I do miss tinkering with hardware.