Tag: uspol

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Significant progress was made on the historic blogroll graph. Most of the work was transforming the OPML files that can be rendered with D3. There were also a few anomalies in the data that needed to be handled. The results are on the blogroll page. It needs work, especially from a visual standpoint. Some basic interactivity would also go a long way towards making it more usable.

I made heavy use of Copilot on this, which reduced what might have been a day’s worth of effort (for me) to a couple hours. Watching some random dude on Youtube attempt to vibecode his way into a money-making app was the inspiration for using Copilot. Watching the way he worked for a few minutes changed how I used these LLM tools. Thanks random Youtube influencer!

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US Political Links

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It was a banner week here in the U.S. With a stroke of his pen, the President pushed the world towards a recession. Then, he toddled off to Florida for a long weekend for golf and fundraising. What an asshole. It really is so much worse than I expected.

People took to the streets all of the country on Saturday for the hands-off day of action. The tanking of the markets this week surely brought out even more marchers. It’s good to see more and more people getting vocal about the sad trajectory of the nation.

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I don’t have much to say this week, so it’s all about the links.

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That last, significant vestige of my boat ownership is gone. Someone at my old club bought my mooring tackle this week. This buyer came along at the right time as I was contemplating what sort of floating art project I could moor in the bay.

I made a minor update the Asterisk Home PBX this week. There is now a whitelist of callers that will ring straight through, bypassing the auto-attendant. There’s nothing fancy to automatically add phone numbers to the whitelist, it’s just maintained manually since it will always be a very short list. The auto-attendant, by the way, is very effective, we don’t even get voicemails from robocallers anymore.

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US Political Links

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Photo of several people, including David Johansen on the left, at the 2005 Mermaid Parade in Coney Island. One person is holding a toy, devil's pitchfork aloft, another is holding a large cardboard cutout of a key with the words "Coney Island" written on it.
David Johansen (left) as Mermaid King 2005

David Johansen died on Friday. There are much better pictures of Mr. Johansen out there, but I only have this one that I took. He was the Mermaid King at the 2005 Mermaid Parade. I first knew Johansen as Buster Poindexter, likely from his stint on SNL. It would be a couple more years before I was introduced to the New York Dolls. Rest in peace, David.

Something else died on Friday. Our President and Vice President berated an ally in full display of the media for not saying thank you. What a couple of assholes. Zelenskyy remained composed, which just made them all the more upset. One of the members of the White House’s hand-picked press pool joined in by mockingly questioning the Ukrainian President’s attire. It was a sorry display. At least everyone knows where this administration stands now, if they didn’t already. Timothy Snyder’s post, The War Trump Chooses, is a good analysis of this.

We didn’t really have quorum for our Jamulus jam this Friday without a singer, but we forged ahead anyway. Perhaps it goes without saying, but not having vocals makes it much harder to remember where the changes are. It was a good time nonetheless. I think I’m learning to project more when I sing, because my wife shut the door to “the studio” during this session. This also says a lot about the quality of my singing.

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