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Good, but I didn’t feel very engaged with the music.

I was in the Lower Orchestra section, in the 16th row - and pretty tired, that Monday evening. I like their music, but I found myself drifting off, thinking about other things.

Thinking much at all is a bad sign for me when I’m watching live music. I usually find it very engrossing & uplifting - ideally, I get carried away by the music and exist fully in the moment for the duration. That didn’t happen for me at this gig. I felt rather disconnected from the performance - perhaps because it felt like it was happening far away?

Photo from my seat
Figure 1. The view from my seat

Learnings

Things I learned from this gig:

  • Only go and see people if you would listen to their stuff for an hour or two without …
Continue reading “Review: Sigur Rós World Tour, Vancouver 2022”

I’ve been using Linux exclusively for ~15 yrs. I’ve recently started a fantastic new job – the only wrinkle was that it came with a Windows 10 laptop. This is my first time using Windows after a 15-year break. This is how it’s been going.

First Impressions

Windows is such a mess! It’s sort of shocking how much of a mess it is. Desktop Linux is often criticized for this, but Windows is much worse, somehow! It’s really inconsistent. Half of it is “new” UI and half of it is old Win32/GDI type UI - just as bad as KDE/GTK - except worse, because you can’t configure them to use the same theme. Also, when you install a Linux distribution, it’ll start off either all KDE or all GTK, or whatever - but with Windows …

Continue reading “Using Windows after 15 years on Linux”

The last thing we need right now is new fossil fuel projects. Send a message to Minister Steven Guilbeault and key cabinet ministers, calling on them to reject the Bay Du Nord project and investing in a just transition instead: https://act.leadnow.ca/bay-du-nord-ett/

This is what I wrote, if anyone wants some ideas:

To Minister Guilbeault and cabinet,

I’m writing to you to urge you to reject the Bay du Nord offshore drilling project.

Oil and Gas is ~26% of Canada’s emissions - AND this is ONLY the emissions from production - not the emissions from burning all that fuel for transport, heating etc…​ the Oil and Gas industry needs to go away, ASAP. Fossil fuels must stay in the ground to have any chance of getting to zero.

No approvals for new fossil fuel extraction projects, ever …

Continue reading “Write to Minister Guilbeault Opposing Bay Du Nord Offshore Oil Development”

A spellbinding & breathtaking evening, with a couple of surprising jewels, in a night full of riches.

Just got back from seeing Nick Cave and Warren Ellis in Vancouver. What a joy and a privilege! I’ve missed live music so much - what an incredible night!

This is a video from that night in Vancouver, of their cover of Cosmic Dancer, which was a fantastic surprise for me. That video was taken by someone standing just in front of me!

We got two encores. The first one was Hollywood, Henry Lee & Girl in Amber - all great. Then they cleared the stage and lots of people left. Then we got a second encore!

This is Into My Arms, which he did with just the amazing backing singers, as a second encore, after half the audience had left thinking it was done - one …

Continue reading “Review: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis Gig, Vancouver 2022”

The Python Black formatter outputs to stderr, not stdout


Windows PowerShell does support aliases, but doesn't support commands with parameters in aliases - you have to create a function


How to template out JSON in Bash


I have three different text editors, that I use for three distinct use cases.

I’m a software developer, so I basically edit text files for a living, and the editing software that I use for this is fairly important to me.

Projects

For any substantial editing, either for work, or for personal projects, I currently use Visual Studio Code - generally known as “vscode”. It’s good enough: it’s extremely actively developed, so always up to date, and it has all the plug-ins you could ever want. Performance is good enough, once it’s started up.

I tend to just start my project editor once and leave it open permanently.

I’m still aggrieved that Microsoft killed the Atom editor when they bought GitHub, despite promising that they wouldn’t. It was a better editor - better UX, Tree-sitter, etc …

Continue reading “Three Editor Use Cases”

Tag Icon in the shape of a luggage tag
Figure 1. This pages tag list is using this tag icon from FontAwesome. This is a 550 byte SVG file, 346 bytes gzipped.

If you want to use SVG icons on a website and style them with CSS - then the SVG needs to be inline - i.e. the SVG markup needs to be included with the rest of the pages HTML markup.

Unfortunately putting things inline means that they can’t be cached. In this article I’ll show one way to get around this - and get the best of both worlds: inline styleable SVG icons, with caching!

Continue reading “Styleable Inline SVG Icons, with Caching & Fallback”

I’ve just emailed my UK MP to complain about government corruption & Owen Patterson. You should do the same. As always, we need as many people as possible to speak out.

This is what I wrote, if anyone wants some ideas:

<My Name>
<My Address>
<My Email Address>

Dear <MP Name>,

Like many others, I am angered - but not very surprised - by the latest revelations of government corruption, revealed by the corrupt behaviour of Owen Patterson.

I do have to admit to being slightly surprised that the government’s reaction to this was naked collusion and a blatant attempt to water down the rules & standards!

The existing Committee on Standards needs to be strengthened, not weakened by the introduction of another Conservative-dominated committee overseeing its work.

The government needs to adopt the recommendations of numerous independent bodies - such as the …

Continue reading “You Should Write to Your UK MP about Corruption Now”