Ten Years of Blogging

It turns out, that today is the ten year anniversary of this blog. I opened this blog with a description of my history with blogging, and started with a decision to make the blog open without topics. That lasted until 2016, when I split my technical blog off.

I’m super happy to have made it to ten years. To ten more years!

Some Favourite Posts:

• An Unproven Hypothesis about Kitchen Clocks
• The Peloponnesian War and Histories, by Herodotus
• On Burnout
• Surrealism In The Morning

I also wrote some work related blog posts that I really was happy with:

• A Brief Note on Environments and Scopes in SpiderMonkey
• An Inline Cache isn't Just a Cache -- this turned into an MPLR paper eventually, in a round-about-way.

Popular Posts

Year after year, my most popular blog post remains Some Notes on CMake Variables and Scopes. I totally get this -- CMake scopes and variables are bizarre.

This year, my number two most popular blog post has been Polybius: The Rise of The Roman Empire, which I find gently baffling.

I've managed to hit the front page of Hacker News, with Faster Ruby: thoughts from the outside.

New Album Alert: Devotion by Muriel Grossman

Muriel Grossmann is a really fascinating saxophonist who has been putting out many fantastic recordings over the last few years. This latest one, Devotion, is really interesting! Heavy blues influence this time.

Climate Change and Therapy

This article from the NYT really speaks to where I’m at; while I’m not in therapy for climate issues, the struggles are all real, the challenges all real.

Human well-being, the psychologist David W. Kidner wrote, has historically been linked to “participation in a healthy ecocultural context.” Living within a context that is obviously unhealthful, he wrote, is painful

This is amplified by living in a place that more than many others refuses to own up to the work and scale of transformation required.

The Wailing Mall - Alan Palomo

So far, I know nothing about Alan Palomo, but I’ll definitely be learning more after this track

Postcards - Lemon City Trio

Quite enjoying this album (which is oddly not listed on their Bandcamp?)

A Letter to my MP

Living in Alberta can be enormously emotionally draining at times. My Premier is organizing a letter writing drive, driven by fear mongering, trying to delay action on greening the Alberta grid.

I decided to write my MP to counter said letter campaign, insofar as I can. My frustration was perhaps too palpable as I wrote, but sometimes frustration is all you have.

“Honorable Mr. McCauley

You’ll get a lot of form letters driven by TellTheFeds.ca

This isn’t a form letter: This a letter to say the opposite: I am disgusted by our province’s attitude regarding climate change. By spending time and energy attempting to slow walk regulation rather than taking action on climate, our government shows they lack ambition or interest.

Climate change affects us today. It will affect my children enormously.

So far, all the Alberta government provides is excuses, rather than engaging with the demands of Albertans to decarbonize our future; don’t take the barrage of form letters as meaning that inaction is acceptable

Inaction on climate is unacceptable.”

I CC’d Steven Guilbeault as well.

Turnstile & BADBADNOTGOOD

My most surprising music discovery in 2021 was the album GLOW ON by Turnstile. I never would have come across it except for, weirdly, a recommendation from The Economist. It was the wrong style, the wrong genre for what I was listening to… and it was fantastic. An incredibly strong album that I continue to put on, even as I really listen to nothing else like it.

Then out of left field this week, comes this:

A little EP of reworked versions of songs from GLOW UP with the help of BADBADNOTGOOD, it’s a lovely little treat.