Thoughts for the week’s end

Lyrics can mean a lot of things, but it’s great when you can find a meaning that fits for you for a time. Thirteen years ago, Dave Grohl wrote this chorus to The Pretender:

What if I say I'm not like the others?
What if I say I'm not just another one of your plays?
You're the pretender
What if I say I will never surrender?

We watched the video by chance on Friday night—after enjoying the latest from The Hanukkah Sessions—and it creates this fantastic scene where the band faces off against a line of riot police. That visual combined with these lyrics made the song feel perfect as an anti-grift anthem.

We’re not one of your plays. We’re standing our ground. Move along.

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Is it ‘Grifter’ or ‘Grafter’? Probably both!

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The sun’s path has moved so far to the south that it now shines in my eyes through my south facing window at 11:20am and I have to close the blinds.

Further encouragement to stay standing until after lunch. Thanks, sun!

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An errant pingback led me to reread my series of deployment workflows that I wrote up way back in 2015.

Two thoughts: Oh how great it would be to go back and redo all of those with new knowledge and GitHub Actions. And, I still love this quote from the Guardian’s development team:

We view an application with a long uptime as a risk. It can be a sign that there’s fear to deploy it, or that a backlog of changes is building up, leading to a more risky release. Even for systems that are not being actively developed, there’s value in deploying with some regularity to make sure we still have confidence in the process.

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We really enjoyed Babylon Berlin on Netflix a few weeks ago and cruised through both seasons.

One great line from a journalist in the show, complaining about the preference for flashy headlines in the paper rather than real, meaty news: “We used to have readers, now we have lookers.“

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An Allen Ginsberg poem, ‘Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square’, from 1958, includes the following lines:

The movies took our language, the
             great red signs
A DOUBLE BILL OF GASSERS
        Teenage nightmare
    Hooligans of the moon

This poem set me down a road, listening to recordings and recordings of Ginsberg reading the poem to learn the pacing for those lines.

I’m not sure what would be cooler: Two movies, one titled “Hooligans of the moon“, or one movie titled “Teenage nightmare hooligans of the moon“.

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I’m 41 now, so I refer to all teenagers—in jest!—as hooligans or hoodlums. It’s a fantastic thing that comes with age.

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I’ve mentioned The Guardian’s Books that made me series before, and I still look forward to reading it every week. The app now notifies me when it appears for Friday, so it’s become slightly less happenstance.

I recently found the similar By the Book series in the NY Times. It hasn’t been as interesting as Books that made me, but it’s still fun to read what others are reading.

The only downside is how quickly the ‘want to read’ list grows.

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I hope nobody is planning a large vaccine heist, but I also hope that someone is writing an excellent vaccine heist movie.

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A clatter interrupted Smiley’s reverie. In the kitchen, Mostyn the boy had dropped a plate. At the telephone Lauder Strickland wheeled round, demanding quiet. But he already had it again.

Smiley’s People

John le Carré passed away today.

I started reading the George Smiley series on the flight back from WordCamp US in 2017. I got on the plane in Philadelphia, opened my kindle, started The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, and finished it as we started our descent into Seattle. It was the first time in a while I had read a novel in one sitting and it was so much fun.

Soon after I cruised through six others in the series and then just stopped. I’ve had The Secret Pilgrim waiting on my Kindle for a couple years now, ready to go. Now is as good a time as any to pick it back up!

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If all goes well, this next week is the last work week of the year. I’m looking forward to a couple weeks of reading, tinkering, maybe upgrading my laptop from uh… Mojave.

Maybe forgetting the computer exists most days.

We’ve just had our first “hey, I’m pretty sure this snow is going to stick around this time” snow of the year. The cameras on the road heading up to Palouse Divide seem to show snow piling up.

My hope is that snowshoe season is arriving and we’ll soon be out having some powdery fun. ❄️ 🥃