dannyman.toldme.com

The Little Chinese Everywhere lady who makes video blogs about traveling around the overland silk road had to evacuate Iran when the Americans started bombing there. She just posted a video from Baghdad. 

She asked her local friend of a friend guide how things were going. He said the economy is about the same as 15 years ago, but they are much safer now. You can see that it’s not prosperous. In Baghdad itself, there are apartment buildings that are empty since the war. The guy explained that there are absent landlords who haven’t been looking after things. You can see the bullet holes still in the facades. On the street, all the prices are cheap.

The locals are extremely friendly. All the street food vendors didn’t want to charge their international guests. It reminded me of Jordan. When I traveled to Jordan 25 years ago, the locals were extremely friendly. They would see me in the streets and call out “helloooo! Welcome in Jordan!” But what is different in this video is that all the kids would call out to the Chinese lady “nihao” “nihao” “nihao” and I found myself wondering if they would be quite as friendly to an American anymore. Probably. It is in the nature of people to welcome guests.

I was glad that she encountered guys who had been to China. In one market stall were folks who imported goods. In a restaurant she encountered a group of guys who had been to China to study civil engineering. I found myself grateful that there is a world power that is welcoming people from around the world and helping them to build up their own countries.

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Easy: right-click on “Ask Gemini” and select “Unpin”

Right-click “Ask Gemini” and select “Unpin” …

… and the “Ask Gemini” button is gone! Poof!!

Yet another dull anecdote about Google sucking at UI:

I tried to ask Gemini by clicking the “Ask Gemini” button but it asked me for permission to spy on my stuff and I said no and so it wouldn’t let me ask anything of them.

In my country, Gemini asks you!

So I asked a Search Engine (Kagi) and it pulled up a Reddit post.

Sometimes, the old ways still work best!

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Today I learned how to set up “author attribution” for links to your web site attached to Mastodon posts. I discovered this after sharing a link to ploum on my Mastodon.

Thank you, @14mission for testing the attribution feature for me!

This is a very humane feature, I think. If someone shares your content then Mastodon helps you to connect with their social media profile.

Then I got to thinking about how there are accounts on Mastodon that basically mirror Bluesky. But I never check or post to Bluesky. I could mirror my Mastodon to Bluesky? Yes! Skymoth was super easy to set up. Nice!

I was chatting on Discord and a friend said he wanted to see Mastodon without re-toots. Bluesky has a nice OnlyPosts feature but then I spotted the applicable feature in the Mastodon UI.

Squeeze the “two carats” element to get a submenu.

That left me with one last grouse I have had about Mastodon: the one thing I can not easily block is re-toots of screenshots of X. Or can I? Well, I think I effectively can. The secret is that stuff is mostly re-toots of George Takei, so blocking muting George Takei ought to do the trick.

George Takei is great but his social media is too much.

Now, I love George Takei as much as anyone. Unfortunately, his social media is a barrage of stuff I don’t want to see that is frequently re-posted. This technique is probably applicable for other popular folks as well.

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“Our destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.” –Henry Miller

Hotel in Waikiki: from the balcony on the fifteenth floor I can see other high-rise hotels, but on our block are a pair of two-story apartment buildings. At the one apartment building, every patio is filled with stuff, and on the next building over, the patios are all completely empty. Between our high-rise and the apartment buildings is an empty lot with a fence around it, just across from our building. Between the street and the fence is a homeless man, who has occupied that same spot all week. He caught my eye on the first day, as he was visited by many birds, with whom he was sharing a Domino’s pizza. The next day I saw that there’s a Domino’s around the block. While most folks come and go through the day and night, he is always in his spot, like a video game NPC. I assume he doesn’t want to leave his stuff unattended for long. Aside from the difficulty of living outdoors, being tied to a spot to guard your possessions feels like an even worse burden. Humans need to stretch their legs, not be pinned down to a spot outdoors. “Lock down” without a roof or walls.

I am old enough to remember when The Internet wasn’t just screenshots of quotes from other websites.

What strikes me most is the difference between people who’ve learned to construct what I call ‘containers for attention’ – bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible – and those who haven’t. The distinction isn’t about intelligence or discipline. It’s about environmental architecture. Some people have learned to watch documentaries with a notebook, listen to podcasts during walks when their minds can wander productively, read physical books in deliberately quiet spaces with phones left behind. They’re not rejecting technology. They’re choreographing it.

Others are drowning, attempting sustained thought in environments engineered to prevent it. They sit with laptops open, seven tabs competing for attention, notifications sliding in from three different apps, phones vibrating every few minutes. They’re trying to read serious material while fighting a losing battle against behavioural psychology weaponised at scale. They believe their inability to focus is a personal failure rather than a design problem. They don’t realise they’re trying to think in a space optimised to prevent thinking.

—Carlo Iacono

All the hype around AI this early may slow long-term adoption, as more people are drawn in to be underwhelmed and put off adoption longer than if they were lured in by a more mature product. That may slow the rate of job loss that we might anticipate due to the new technology. Also, perhaps, the AI bubble will have turned out to be a stimulus for deploying renewable energy generation faster than we might have otherwise, which will hopefully be put towards de-carbonization of the grid as the bubble pops.

“Our job is to keep up a police action against the possibility of a police state.” –Orson Wells

I do not mourn the Ayatollah. I think the Trump Doctrine may come to be defined as “Change the Regime and You Change the Nation” and I think it will turn out to be hollow. So far, Venezuela is as it was, and while Iran’s leaders have many challenges, there’s no reason to believe they can’t replace Khameni and continue more or less as they have for the past decades. Even in America, we elected a Great Leader who emits a great sound and fury and is doing real damage, but the People aren’t with him. Obama didn’t end Racism, and Trump can’t make us goose step. When you strike at the heart of a nation, you tend to make the State stronger. In America, after 9/11, we rallied behind a mediocre president, erected a new Police State, and looked the other way as our government tortured people. There is a reason that other presidents have been shy about following up on talk of “Regime Change” and that is because it can’t be achieved from the air. Change doesn’t come from the Top, it comes from the heart of the People. It is the hearts of Iranians that offer the greatest potential to change Iran. The same is true for Venezuelans and Americans. We The People are the change that we wish for.

I have no idea if people are reading what I write, and it really doesn’t matter. It gets the ideas out of the whirlwind in my head so I can make space for new things. —Michael Pusateri

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A software person reflects on the Self:

Tagging a bug “Won’t Fix” doesn’t mean it isn’t real and it doesn’t mean nobody noticed; it means the cost of fixing it exceeds the benefit, or the fix would introduce worse instabilities elsewhere, or the system has already built so many dependencies around the bug that it’s become, functionally, a feature. Every codebase of sufficient age accumulates these. They’re documented, acknowledged, and largely left alone so the engineers can go build something useful.

Note (and this is important): you are a codebase of sufficient age.

[…]

Won’t Fix is the practice of questioning the specification. Most of the things you’re trying to fix about yourself are only problems relative to some imagined ideal of a person you were never going to be. Your distractibility is a bug in the “focused knowledge worker” spec but might be a feature in the “person who notices interesting things and connects them unexpectedly” spec. Your sensitivity and your stubbornness, your tendency to monologue about niche topics at parties: all Won’t Fix, and all load-bearing, and all probably okay in the big, heat-death-of-the-universe scheme of all things.

Joan Westenberg
“Won’t Fix” Self Help

I remember a quote I can’t find, the gist of which was that “prior to the advent of modern psychology, people’s personality disorders were just their personalities.” Older folks are unlikely to “rewrite” their core functionality, but you can tweak around the surfaces of the system to ensure better compatibility. We can also learn not to take other folks’ unintuitive quirks personally.

I have long noticed that I am interested in things for somewhere between three days to three months at a time before my interests move elsewhere. The light of my attention blinks in and out, so I try to bring it around like a lighthouse in hopes that the various ships can course correct before they crash into the boulders.

Anyway, even if you’re not going to rewrite your Being from scratch, you can always work at experimenting with new features. I know some folks like to try a new idea for a month at a time, and evaluate whether this new could-be habit is worth trying to perpetuate. One month is a decent time to road test an idea and also to begin forming a habit, if that is a habit you want to have.

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“We used to have billionaires that collected books. Now we have, like, the chainsaw guy.” –Ben Levi Ross

“At first, I was amazed at the idea of a social media site for AI bots, but then I remembered that LinkedIn has been around for a long time.” —Jerry

The Matrix isn’t Virtual Reality; it is lonely people holding smartphones close to their faces for gentle loyalty-inducing dopamine injections into their eyeballs. A scruffy group of Resistors persist in The Real World, which is actually pretty nice and totally worth fighting for. Welcome, Neo, to the Real World.

“Too many people in my country don’t even understand what politics are. They conflate it with partisanship and assume all discussions of politics are team sports nonsense that only some folks have to pay attention to.” —Alec Watson

God bless America
Doesn’t matter if it’s Chile, Argentina
Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia
Perú, Ecuador, Brasil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana
Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras
El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico
Cuba, Dominican Republic
Jamaica, Haiti, the Antilles
United States, Canada
And my motherland, my homeland: Puerto Rico
We’re still here
Now!
–Bad Bunny, via genius.com

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There is a cloud of dread I can sense in the Bay Area. A shadow ahead of the Super Bowl, which will be hosted this Sunday a few miles from my house. Today it was the “nuke sniffing helicopter” zig zagging around a colleague’s house. Another friend reported that their car was searched by dogs on the way to the UPS store, as they live near the stadium. There’s a general dread of ICE and a surge of Federal Law Enforcement conducting raids while they are in town for game security. Now there are reports of pro-ICE billboards having gone up in San Francisco.

Today I headed home from the office not long after lunch, as I had some tasks to complete at the datacenter. I returned to the office for a spell because Caltrain was effectively shut down. I recognized a familiar pattern: delay due to police activity and single-tracking at the two stations in Palo Alto. I dreaded what that meant: another young person had succumbed to the worst decision they could make. The dread was later confirmed via Reddit.

Keep your eyes open for your neighbors. Ask for help when you need it. Be kind.

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Brita Hummel left a job at Meta.

A temp-worker’s view of the usefulness of Dilbert cartoons as a gauge for dysfunction.

“The land, still cold and wintery, was alive with creatures that trusted in the coming of spring.” –William Least Heat-Moon

A blog is the cultural equivalent of a yard sale.

Elon Musk turned a lot of people off by giving Nazi salutes, but the media never mentions this when reporting Tesla’s falling sales. “Elon Musk spent several chaotic months crudely slashing government programs,” reports The New Yorker.

During our Happy Birthday Phone Call, my Uncle mentioned that I was a Bicentennial Baby. “Yeah, I’m sorry our 250th is under such Circumstances.” “That’s okay, just stick around for 300.” “Uh … yeah, I’ll take some vitamins.”

“You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad.” –William Least Heat-Moon

“I don’t trust pride, but when you realize that we are all one, you can be proud of being part of that gigantic entity that we all are.” –Bob Weir

I had a dream that my bicycle got stolen and I was annoyed about having to replace it because can you even buy an affordable awesome new bike with a front fork suspension and rim brakes anymore?

My wife is going for an evening walk.
She asked if I would like to join her.
The cat sitting on my lap looked up at her and meowed “no.”
The older son is going in my stead.

“A city of men is also a city of horses–balding horses, horses beautiful as Brooke Shields. Cars kill more people, but relieve us of the sight of beings whipped on our streets.” –Sparrow

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I heard that with the Super Bowl coming to Santa Clara, we could expect a rush of federal Law Enforcement, so I signed up for Santa Clara County Rapid Response Training. That was my Saturday morning. A room full of volunteers and a word at the start that an observer had been murdered in Minnesota the same morning. We learned a bit about how ICE has been functioning locally, and how Rapid Response works. We signed up.

Back to the house and switch to the minivan to schlep the Pinewood Derby track over to the Pinewood Derby. “Have you seen the video?” “No, and that’s just as well.” I helped set up the track, then excused myself. “I am crashing. I need to eat.”

I ate and then climbed into bed. I rested but couldn’t nap. I missed most of the Pinewood Derby. I had just run out of energy. Not a physical thing so much as a state change. National despair. I can’t explain it but there’s a good chance you understand.

I caught the tail end of the Pinewood Derby, helped pack up the track. I stopped at Trader Joe’s for some non-alcohol Hazy IPA. The Family had eaten at The Derby. I dined on candy and fake IPAs for dinner. I don’t recommend that. But that’s a Sometimes Saturday Night. We watched Saturday Night Live. No mention of Minnesota and I understand why.

Come morning I couldn’t sleep. I really like to sleep in when I can. That’s what Sunday is for, right? I got up and went to the computer. The letter E in 700 point font. Two of them. And N, D, I, and C. I taped up the old sign: END ICE. I dressed warm and headed out.

Around the corner a guy walking his dog encouraged me to be a dumbass and go get shot by federal agents. He seemed good natured about it. I walked down to the crossroads where other protests have been held. A few cars tapped horns quietly in the residential neighborhoods but as I got to crossing the streets of the main intersection over and over, many enthusiastic honks. Kind words out of windows. Hand gestures of solidarity. A ride share driver pulled over and handed me a can of Red Bull. Another man, who looked a little like a priest, beckoned me over. He had an orange juice, a Kind Bar, “a chocolate milk, for later” and a $10 gift card for the coffee shop. He thanked me for what I was doing. As a son of immigrants. Rene nearly brought the tears to my eyes.

I did my thing for about two and a half hours. My first solo protest. I think organization is generally a better thing, but when people start coming out spontaneously, the mood has shifted. I didn’t mind being alone. I wasn’t. Most folks saw past me but plenty knew that I was there for them. We don’t want to live in a country that is ruled by Fear. I don’t want that for my boys. I really want my country to be that special place where people come to escape Fear, and for opportunity. Death in the streets is nothing new, but blessing Federal Police with power to murder people at their own discretion? I can not live with that.

Walked downtown for brunch. On the way home a lady asked if there was a protest. “It was one guy,” I said. She pointed me out to the kid as an example of a good person. What made me good, in my book, was heading home to plan out and run a Den Meeting for the Cub Scouts. We talked about pets, but mainly we enjoyed being kids together.

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When this post is published, I am fifty years old.

Go me!

Thanks, Mom!

This website is about thirty years old.

Go World Wide Web!

Thanks, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!

I have spent just over half my years in California versus Illinois. It is where we raise our kids, and where we own our home. Chicago and the Midwest will always hold a special place in my heart, but I have become one of those sunshine people who are just an earthquake away from sliding into the ocean.

Go Bears!

Thanks, California!

Our marriage, like our older kid and our mortgage, not to mention our cats, and my current job tenure, are all just over a decade old. (And the younger kid is closing in!)

I recently heard it said that your first decade is the happiest. But my forties have been really great as well. What makes a good childhood — being surrounded by loving people who support your growth — can really come back to you when you work to be a good spouse, a good parent, a good friend and a good citizen.

I am a very fortunate person.

Go Family!

Thanks, My Sweetheart!

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Along the Leestown Road, near an old whitewashed springhouse made useless by a water-district pipeline, I stopped to eat lunch. Downstream from the spring where butter once got cooled, under peeling sycamores, the clear rill washed around clumps of new watercress. I pulled makings for a sandwich from my haversack: Muenster cheese, a collop of hard salami, sourdough bread, horseradish. I cut a sprig of watercress and laid it on, then ate slowly, letting the gurgle in the water and the guttural trilling of red-winged blackbirds do the talking. A noisy, whizzing gnat that couldn’t decide whether to eat on my sandwich or my ear joined me.

Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I’d never have found this spring under the sycamores. Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest. Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It’s a contention of Heat Moon’s — believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he’s going to get — that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and his curiosity, they make and remake him.

William Least Heat-Moon
Blue Highways

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Previously: Movies I Have Watched Recently

Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away

Buddy Guy started Down South, picking cotton, as his ancestors had done for too long. He loved playing guitar and made his way up to Chicago. Worked a long time to get The Industry to dig his sound. Got some help from the English, who were more directly inspired by and keen on promoting Guy’s rawer, more energetic style of Blues.

About twenty years ago my father came to town to re-wire the recording studio he had wired up decades previous, and they put him on the guest list at Buddy Guy’s. I joined him and his wife and we listened all through the night, moving from standing around the perimeter, as is common in Chicago blues clubs, to sitting at a table once the crowd thinned. There was a blind organist that Dad’s wife had grown up listening to. It was a long loud night. Afterward we piled into Dad’s car. The wife wanted popcorn shrimps, so we cruised through the night to a stand that sold popcorn shrimp in paper bags.

I had heard Buddy Guy’s had closed down, but I looked it up and not only is the place still open, but Buddy himself is listed as playing more nights than not.

Die Hard

They had the original Charlie Brown Christmas on Apple TV, which is a sweet little thing I re-watched with the family. But you know what is a Christmas Movie we had never seen before? Die Hard! You know? That is an amazingly great movie. Another perfect action movie. If you haven’t seen Die Hard, go for it. You needn’t wait for Christmas.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Because it was referenced in “Americana” and because I remember enjoying it decades ago … once upon a time, a mafioso saved the life of this weird kid who was into Japanese culture. In the present day, that kid, now a grown man, lives alone on a roof with pigeons, working hits for the mafioso, His Retainer, in the spirit of the Samurai.

A gimmick in the film is when he chats with the Ice Cream Truck man, who only speaks French. They each speak in their respective languages, arriving at the same conclusion. This probably illustrates something relevant about perceiving the world beyond the limits of language. It is a fun movie and I’m glad I watched it again.

The Samurai is a way that is no longer followed, and the mafia in this movie also understands that it has lost its spirit and is also on the way out. Ghost Dog came out in 1999, when the world was changing quickly into the Brave New Digital World of today. It feels like every day, I see a bit more value in bringing back some Older Ways.

Le Samouraï

A loner hitman lives upstairs with a bird. He is very careful about his work and covering his tracks. He steals cars with ease. License plates are swapped. When a female witnesses his work, he takes no action against her. His client turns violently against him. Ghost Dog clearly drew some influence from this 1967 film, where everyone speaks French.

The Cops feature more in this film. Dogged Big City Cops. The boss detective is trying to pin the protagonist down: his alibis are too perfect. But the beautiful piano player lady swears absolutely, this is not the guy.

There’s a lot of hide and seek on the Paris Metro. And vintage French cars with headlights so dull that every not-young person would swear “aha! they have gotten so much brighter!” The plot is engaging, but the movie tends to drag a bit, in my esteem. Yeah, you’re doing a Noir crime chase but a lot of the scenes loiter too long in the dark.

I also learned that the 1967 Paris Cop term for a surveillance bug is “walkie talkie.”

The Apartment

This was playing at Alamo, but the online seat selector said there were no good seats to be had and the weather was crap so I pulled this up on Fandango at Home. 1960s Manhattan. A guy works on the 19th floor of an insurance company: a vast open sea of desks crammed together beneath a ceiling of fluorescent lights. But he has a scheme to advance his career: he makes his apartment available to executives who need a place to bring their mistresses for an hour or two.

This, of course, is a logistical hassle and often a great inconvenience. I like his apartment. Pre-war. Cozy. Nice architectural details. An air conditioner and a pathetic kitchen. Anyway, he has a crush on the Elevator Girl and as his prospects improve so to does his confidence in courting her. Of course, she’s working through her past(?) fling with The Big Boss … long story short, the protagonist comes home to find the Elevator Girl in his bed overdosing on pills. The neighbor, a Doctor, helps save her life and counsels that he needs to closely monitor her recovery.

It was a wonderful movie. Suspenseful and humane. One scene that caught in my attention is earlier when he’s trying to impress her by explaining “I know everything about you. Where you live, your family …” and he explains that he pulled her policy card to learn more about her. She takes this creeper news in stride. Either folks thought somewhat differently about privacy and ethics back then or we’re being told that her standards for decency in men have been lowered below the horizon. Point being that it can be really hard in New York to sort through all the ambitious young men and distinguish the ethical lapses of the over-eager from the bald lies of the truly rotten.

The Hospital

After “The Apartment” Fandango suggested “The Hospital.” Another hectic Manhattan workplace in 1971: a busy teaching hospital. The protagonist runs the place. The hospital is a giant complicated mechanism of endless headaches and his life and mental state are both badly on the slide.

There are people picketing outside because the hospital’s expansion plan requires the demolition of tenements across the street. At one point they have a meeting with the protestors and everybody wants something else. I have experienced enough public meetings to know that scene. Oh and it seems that maybe the medical staff are being carefully murdered.

Pairs really well with The Apartment. This time, the workplace affairs are conducted in broom closets, or, when a patient dies, in an empty bed in a room shared by a comatose patient. Young Doctors have no time for the shenanigans of Insurance executives.

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