dhosek

A few years back, we hired an electrician to do some relatively small things for us—things I could do like replacing light switches with timer switches and the like, but didn’t have time to do. The thing that really blew me away was when I asked him if he wanted me to shut off the power at the breaker box and he said no and did all the work with live current in the wires. Yes, I know, gloves, rubber soled shoes, he was fine, but it still was somewhat terrifying to watch.

I remember religiously reading his Infoworld columns back in the day.

Apple-NeXT is probably the most successful acquhire in the history of modern business.

I had a $.20/month recurring charge from AWS that I could only remove¹ by completely deleting my AWS account. That was enough to get me to give up on AWS for personal projects.

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1. The key word was “I.” Maybe someone more skilled at navigating AWS’s menu structure than I could would have done it quickly and easily, but even though I knew what it was for, turning it off and not getting billed for it turned out to be a huge challenge. Thankfully it was only $.20, but if I were using the service for something that generated actual bills, that $.20 (and possibly more) would end up quietly siphoning money out of my pocket into Amazon’s).

The local library app is painfully slow on login to show my library barcode (it preloads all sorts of stuff it doesn’t need) and somehow never manages to stay logged in for any appreciable amount of time. It’s bad enough that it’s faster for me to open the library website, login, go to the menu item to display the library barcode and use that to check out books. Creating a new pass on my phone for the library took less time than logging into their app did. It’s really great for that.

One gotcha with some of the app stuff is that, especially for scan and pay, the barcode is dynamic and you can’t avoid the app. I know that’s the case for the 7-eleven app and its barcode for loyalty/scan and pay.

They have the resources to be able to do what Jobs described as “hobby projects” (he was referring to the Apple TV which definitely is the best streaming interface for video available, albeit one which is on the expensive side). They did kill their car project after spending a decade on it (and reportedly having thousands of people working on it).

I just showed it to my kids and it’s wild to think that he has been working on this since before they were born.

I don’t know that I would be willing to identify a “best” book, and while I’ve read the Bible in its entirety multiple times in a number of different translations (New American, New Jerusalem, Today’s English, King James, Douai-Rheims, Knox, much of the Anchor Bible, and currently working through the Vulgate), I don’t know that I would necessarily put any of those in the best book category (although I think it’s kind of essential cultural background reading regardless of one’s beliefs). It’s kind of hard to decide, for example, the relative rankings of say Chekhov vs. Calvin and Hobbes and I don’t think I want to try. I have included my favorite reads of each year for the past few years at https://www.dahosek.com/category/reading/ (although that also includes other blog posts about reading).

I read at a rate of 1–3 minutes per page, depending on the material. But here’s the thing: if you make time to read a bit every day, it adds up. Read 30 pages before bed every night, that’s almost 11,000 pages per year. When I commuted, I would read for about 60–90 minutes a day just riding back and forth on public transit. I’d guess my daily pace is maybe in the neighborhood of 30–100 pages a day depending on what I’m reading and what else is happening in life.

Just realized I never added the footnote which would have been:

1. Except most of the books I read out loud to my kids when they were younger.

I have roughly 48m of bookshelves stuffed with books in my apartment¹ (not to mention 25 more books sitting on my desk for which I lack the shelf space to shelve them properly and another couple dozen waiting to go to the used book store). The bookcases covering one wall of my office are about 80% unread books which I’m making slow progress at.

A sampling of the unread books (picking the rightmost book on each of the 19 shelves of unread books): The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Riverside Chaucer, Flimsy Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie Jr, I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek, My Days of Anger by James T Farrell, Antología Poetica² by Federico García Lorca, Blurred Lines* by Vanessa Grigoriadis, Just Like You by Nick Hornby, Diaries by Franz Kafka, A Different Kind of Tension by Jonathan Lethem, A Writer’s Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician’s Wife by Brian Moore, Father Elijah by Michael D. O’Brien, Challenging Problems in Algebra by Posamentier/Salkind, Cuentos by Alonso Reyes, All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva, Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda, A Silent Treatment by Jeanine Vanasco and The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.

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1. Thanks to most of these being IKEA shelves, with one antique glass-doored bookcase inherited from my grandfather which has four four-foot shelves, it’s not too much of a challenge to get the exact total of shelf space which is 487.68cm. There are a few places where the shelves.

2. Yes, I read books in Spanish.

I’ve kept a log of every¹ book I’ve read for the last 31+ years at https://don.dream-in-color.net/books/ The most recent was Careless People. Currently reading Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel and The Stories (so far) of Deborah Eisenberg.

Not necessarily. The problem isn’t that the taxes are unpopular, it’s the supermajority requirement for tax increases that makes it a challenge. The L.A. Times had done a study in the 90s that showed that most tax increase referenda submitted post Prop 13 had majority support but all but one failed because it failed to hit the supermajority threshold.

* …I did in the lone CS class…

One of the few homework assignments I took in the line cs class I took was to write a calculator program that could store data in variables a–z. I wrote a simple algebraic solver instead with arbitrary length variable names.

I used to be able to type, e.g., “days since 24 June 2024” into a browser window and get an answer. At some point, Duck Duck Go stopped giving a response, so I turned that into “days since 24 June 2024 !g” to get it from Google. In the last couple-three weeks, Google now gives me an AI-generated answer that is wrong as often as not.

Something else I’ve noticed is that occasionally I’ll do random queries in Claude (since I never hit my usage limits on my personal account) like giving it piles of my writing and asking it to speculate on the identity of the author or asking it to tell me what it knows about various people I know. On the latter, I’ve found that Claude has strict boundaries about what it will say about people while the AI box on Google will happily dig into people’s backgrounds to an uncomfortable level.

They play a clever little game where they borrow against those shares to live on. Since there’s no realized gain, there’s no income (and the interest is deductible against any incidental gains that might happen along the line). Then when they die, the sale of shares to pay off the loan is a non-taxable event and the estate value is reduced so the heirs won’t pay as much (or any) estate tax.

Property tax increases are hamstrung by Prop 13 and until that’s repealed, will continue to be.

And while the wealthy always threaten to leave when faced with higher taxes, the fact is that they never seem to actually do so.

The site is based around georgism whose fundamental premise is that taxing land is the universal solution (much like for republicans cutting taxes is their solution to everything: economy going great? We should cut taxes. Economy going poorly? Cut taxes. Deficit too high? Cut taxes.) I don’t put much stock in analysis by single-solution thinkers.

The Art Institute of Chicago is not on the lakefront. There are a handful of buildings east of Lake Shore Drive, with the most notable being the Field Museum, The Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, McCormick Place, Lake Point Tower and Soldier Field. McCormick and Lake Point Tower are the newest of these, with the former built in 1967 (replacing an earlier structure built in 1960 but destroyed by fire) and the latter in 1968. The others were all built in the 1920s and 30s (the Art Institute building, which is in Grant Park, with roughly half of its structure east of the trench with the IC and South Shore electric railways and the rest fronting Michigan Avenue, had the older section built in the 1890s and notably was the only construction in Grant Park to not be opposed by Montgomery Ward¹). The proposed location for the museum in Chicago would have been in land owned by the Chicago Park District which is part of Grant Park and is meant to be free and open to the public and would have been a privatization of that land (it’s worth noting that the Shedd, Adler and Field properties, along with Soldier Field are all owned by the park district and not their primary tenants).

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1. The person, not the company named after him which he founded.

He also wanted to put it on the lakefront of Chicago, but that’s not what Chicago’s lakefront is for.

Let’s not forget though, the prequel trilogies were—not good. Lucas is at his best when he has collaborators who can help take the half-baked ideas and fully bake them.

I was curious about what was happening with the domain name here (after all, shkspr.mobi has nothing to do with Shakespeare) so imagine my delight at discovering it was an actual poem and my vague notion that I’ve been to the site for poetry in the past was, in fact, correct.

But that’s because that’s a situation where there’s only one president. If you were in a situation where there were multiple presidents you would definitely say he’s a president.

My kids find mechanical disks (let alone things like CDs/DVDs or (gasp) vinyl) to be bizarre concepts. The fact that the disk drives for the IBM mainframe that I worked with in the mid-to-late 80s were the size of a washing machine absolutely blows them away.

Ugh, TIL that Python doesn’t have labeled breaks. Now I’m wondering what other languages in current use don’t have this functionality.

I’ve not quite had the same dramatic change of weight (only about 20% gain), but my fingers have retained their diameter through that. I was genuinely curious about what caused people to need resizing.

Infinite distance and travel cost too!

Odd, I was married for almost twenty years during which I think I took off my ring twice (maybe not even that much—if I recall correctly, I persuaded the surgical staff to tape my ring rather than have me remove it when I had surgery). Never had to resize it and it fit fine the whole time. I don’t know what lifestyle leads to a finger changing size dramatically during the lifespan of a smart ring.

I think Nepal is the only flag that cut a corner.

I’m surprised that the near-identical flags list omits Slovenia and Slovakia which both have white-blue-red horizontal stripes and a coat of arms (albeit with slightly different placement and different background colors on the coats of arms). A part of me feels like it’s part of a long-time joke the two countries are playing to confuse non-Slavs (the Slovenian word for their language is Slovenščina while the Slovak word for their language is Slovenčina and this is just the beginning of the confusion between the two countries/nationalities).