I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was trying out Golden Ratio, an Emacs package that dynamically resizes windows inside the frame as you switch between them. I saw a few warnings here and there that it had a few bugs, but for the past few weeks it seemed fine. I finally came across one a few days ago that I couldn’t quite isolate — it broke the way org-insert-structure-template worked — and finally took the time to narrow it down this morning.

Golden Ratio isn’t being maintained anymore, so I decided “not enough time in the day,” marked that part of my config :tangle no and installed Zoom,, which does much the same thing.

Minimum config:

(custom-set-variables
 '(zoom-mode t)
 '(zoom-size '(0.618 . 0.618)))

Post-reddit

Golden Ratio made me think about reddit for a bit. I learned about that package from one of the Emacs subreddits. I don’t recall a ton of discussion about it, so it must have been one of the quiet link aggregator subs, like /r/planetemacs. That was the other half of my reddit experience: Grazing steady feeds of interesting stuff. I’ve learned a lot about assorted interests — motorcycling, longboarding, Emacs, ruby — from watching a subreddit scroll by and just grabbing links.

That part of my experience is largely unaffected by the third-party app shutdown. I don’t follow or participate in discussions much, so I can do that from a browser or reddit’s own, terrible app.

But while I’m not, like, boycotting mad, I’m irritated. I don’t know how spez managed to press so many buttons at once with me — ordinarily tech dude stuff rolls off my back, and C-level tech dude stuff barely registers as language or thought, but the combination of smarm, Ralph-Wiggum-esqe “I’m a business man <eats paste>” posturing, deceit, and bizarre turn into trying to make the whole thing some sort of identity politics issue just … wow.

Like, look: Even at my most business-like — my most “jacked director” — I’m pretty much just one of those vintage-looking prints you see at mall restaurants of little kids dressed in adult clothing sitting at a desk on an old-timey phone or whatever. If I have a philosophy of business communication or governing principle for “how I show up,” it is probably “best to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool …” etc.

But when I read the clown-like attempts at businessing going on over the Apollo debacle — the appalling, weak blithered promises that everyone was gonna be cool here — I was sort of appalled and a little embarrassed for them. It was like when you ask one of your managers “so did you give them that feedback about promotion?” and they swear to God they laid down the law but their report took it like a champ, then you actually read the check-in and it’s, like, “Joe Grudd was stellar this year. Recommending for immediate promotion. Top notch ace contributor. Indispensable.”

And then, after dithering around and failing to just sit up straight and deliver the damn message, they let themselves get clowned. Nobody covered themselves in glory in whatever negotiations were going on, but table stakes for people who’re busy ruining the customer experience on a beloved website because They Are Serious Business People Who Get How This Works is pretty much “don’t look worse than the one-man cottage industrialists who’re hoping you’ll get them to go peacefully if you just buy them out ha ha only serious.”

But somehow they couldn’t even do that.

Anyhow.

It just sort of shades the whole experience now. Perfectly nice, sometimes emotionally violent shitposters just getting on with their days, the occasional incel breaking cover and going down in a hail of gunfire under the helicopter spotlights of the moderation team, no longer ad free, forcing you to remember that when someone says “have some gold, kind stranger” that gold was sold to them by the Ed Rooney of web publishing. There’s just this lingering fart smell wafting through it all. Where do you go from here?

Lemmy

Well, I decided to look around at Lemmy.

I get it, more or less, and am assuming that all the weirdness I’m seeing is down to the same thing that happened with Mastodon last fall: Lots of little instances struggling to keep up with the newbies, plus different configurations, plus the codebase itself. Most of the instances I skipped through were either slow or glitchy. The most solid Lemmy instance I’ve seen — sometimes slow but usable — is the unfederated hexbear.net, and I don’t think it counts.

So I signed up for a couple of more normal ones and will revisit as things calm down.

Himalayan Day

Today is “work on the Himalayan day.” My new Antigravity self-jumping battery is here, the mounting base and passenger back pad for our Givi topcase are here (which will make it easier for Al to ride pillion), and I did some reading about how to test for that parasitic drain. So I’m going to give it all a few hours out in the driveway with a wrench and a multimeter. It’s sunny and beautiful, so I’m looking forward to the ride after I’m done.

I’m kind of wondering if this small round of “get ready for sale, but also make it a little nicer” investment will change my mind about selling it.

My strong impression of Himalayans in general is that the user base is split between people who just drive them off the lot and love them, never really having much trouble that doesn’t get addressed during early service; and people like me, who get a badly QA’d one and more than their share of glitchy components.

I like riding the thing. It’s a manageable size for city riding, and it does really well anywhere you’d want to go in the Portland metro area. Holds its own on 205/84, fine for runs up to St. Johns or Sauvie Island, great down to Estacada. With the panniers and topcase it’s fine for groceries. There’s just enough power to two-up in town on date nights. I don’t think I’d ever take for a run down I5, but I could see running downstate on the back highways.

I’ve done so much to it at this point that there’s some sweat equity I don’t want to part with. If I could nail down the parasitic drain I’d have a bike that I feel more than a little attached to, because I’ve put a lot of time into getting it dialed in. Knowing there’s a dealership up in St. Johns that spends most of its time selling RE’s, vs. the sort of crappy “RE’s are a weird loss-leader for broke Harley wannabes” dealership out on the west side I had to get early service from, makes me a little more hopeful, too. It was frustrating having to go do my own research about assorted RE glitches then convince the service team to try fixes. I get the impression the St. Johns people are a little more into REs and would be a little more proactive.

We’ll see. If I get it into a place where it just feels good and I don’t have that “poorly shimmed table leg” feeling every time I turn the key, maybe we continue another season.

Anyhow, that’s the plan for today, so I’m gonna save and ship this.

Thorns game

Oh … going to a Thorns game tonight. Our first. Kathleen and Amy had extra tickets, so off we go.

Apple News does this thing where you can block a news source, but any time that news source turns up on the Today page the space the story would have taken up is replaced by a notification that you blocked the source. It was annoying when I was just blocking CNN and other TV news outlets, but it got more annoying when I started blocking subscription-based channels I don’t want to subscribe to. My mind goes to what sorts of compromises and deals are made to keep, e.g. the Washington Post on the platform, with its mix of freebie loss leaders and subscription content.

Evidently:

“Blocking is not supported in Top Stories or other groups curated by the Apple News editors, who vet each story in those groups for quality and accuracy.”

I think where my acceptance of Apple’s whole “let go and let us” is concerned, I’ve found my demarcation line.

RSS is the way.

On a wider note: It feels like so many things that are bad are because we’re struggling to stay on top of all the things in the digital era. We’re delegating aggregation, curation, etc. to platforms that are worse decision makers than us because their bad decisions cost less and are more convenient than our good decisions. The tradeoff we make is that we get the ease in exchange for a quantum of financialized badness we’re meant to either ignore or endure.

Two decades ago, my impulses were super democratic, but I wanted to share my technical expertise with people that had less of it so they could participate in the Web as full citizens. It’s weird to me that I felt a little impatient with people about how slowly they were adapting to it all in, like, 2003. The Web wasn’t even old enough for middle school at that point.

When the big platforms started to roll in, I’d mellowed a lot and my thought was “this seems to be how people are going to participate.” It was super weird to me that friends were ceding basic connectivity to Facebook, and using work addresses for personal mail when forced to send an email, but I’d also lived through a cycle of hosting other peoples’ stuff, helping people who decided to self-host unfuck their little Red Hat servers, etc. and I didn’t like the responsibility. So whatevs.

Now? I don’t know what to say. I’m tired of the big platforms, I don’t care for the tradeoffs you have to endure for zero-interest-funded services, and I’m pretty happy with the little base of operations I have set up. I sympathize with people who don’t have the cycles to commit to things like figuring out RSS readers or mail hosting, or making an identity in the Fediverse, or building a blog, and who have to live with more acute tradeoffs. But I also don’t care to have much more emotion about it than I would about a friend whose mac-n-cheese recipe doesn’t involve a little extra effort in the form of a tasty mustard roux. Like, enjoy your mac-n-cheese, friend!

I think the thing that might have finally beaten it all out of me was the Muskification of Twitter and the Mastodon migration wave I came in on. People kept trying to turn the whole thing into this epic, moral, world-historical twilight struggle. That’s perfectly in line with the very neoliberal, very postmodern, very consumption-centric view of the world that would have us believe that no, actually, posting is praxis.

End on a positive note? Sure. My friend and former coworker Gene has a cool podcast about volunteering technical skill. That’s praxis. He reminds me that now that I’ve got some basics covered again, it’s time to go out and do something to help somewhere. Posting isn’t that.

Ugly but they work

A few years back when I was in the market for new hiking boots I ended up with Hoka Anacapas. They were still a relative novelty, and they stood out for their “neon pontoon boat” aesthetic. People were concerned about preserving trail feel with such a built-up, cushiony boot, but they worked pretty well for me and I’m glad I have them.

What wasn’t working so well were the lighter day shoes I was wearing as Al and I ramped up how much walking we did during the week. They were wearing out fast, blowing out in three or four months, and my back was noticing, so I gave Hoka Speedgoats a try. They’re classified as “trail runners,” but I found they worked really well for getting around on long walks in the city. They weren’t at all to my taste in terms of appearance, but I also didn’t like the whole whole “brown suede and mesh” aesthetic, either. I think, in terms of Hoka’s lineup, that they’re considered a more neutral build, so they look more “normal” compared to the more built up ones.

I got used to how they looked pretty quickly because my back and hips did a lot better with them, and because I could get six months of heavy use out of them instead of three or four. And even when they wore down to the point they weren’t great for long urban hikes they had a second life as longboard shoes. My one complaint was that the toe box was a little narrow and took a few weeks to stretch out.

When my last pair came due for a reup, I looked around at Hoka’s site and noticed the colors I’d gotten used to were gone and the ones that were available were somehow even more bright and un-me. So I went to the local outdoor store and shopped around and got some Merrell’s, reasoning that the Vibram sole would provide some of the stiffness and shock absorption I was probably getting from the Speedgoats.

It’s not lost on me that a minor back thing I would have walked off in a day turned into a multi-week ordeal at exactly the same time I started wearing those around. So … off they go. I just got my new pair of Speedgoats in the mail today: I went with a wide size, so they feel great right away, the color is definitely not my favorite but it’s not that much worse now that I see them on my feet. Since I know how much life I’ll get out of a pair, I just got normal ones instead of the Goretex version: These’ll be dead about the time the rainy season comes back.

Getting a good shoe is a joy. One of the bad things about getting older and caring more about these things is how you come to see the bigger product cycle. I have no idea how long Hoka Speedgoats will work well for me. It’s a matter of faith that they’ll do something to revise the line that’ll make them not work. They all do it, to the point that when I found an outdoor hat that worked for me I just bought three more and put them on a shelf in the closet. I’m grateful every time I see the newer, less breathable, worse version on the rack at REI. If I play my cards right, I may never buy that particular kind of hat again.

Time to sell the Himalayan

I’ve written about my Royal Enfield Himalayan. Just noting here that it is time to be rid of it. If you know anybody interested in a bike:

• Low mileage
• Cargo racks and metal panniers
• Improved rear view mirrors
• After market adjustable brake and clutch levers
• Booster plug

It runs pretty smoothly, and the booster plug does a lot to help with rough idling it arrived with from the factory. It mostly comes down to taste. I’ve got another trail bike — my Yamaha TW200 — and I’m looking for something better for two-up date nights.

$3,500 firm.

Band of Brothers

When I was recently recounting Great Prestige TV, I left out Band of Brothers. I don’t know what put it back on my radar, but I rewatched it over several days last week. There are a few things about I’ve got a problem with, and a few more things I suspect I would have a problem with if I dug in more, but it’s pretty effective television.

If you went to jump school then ended up at Ft. Liberty (formerly Ft. Bragg), the show can’t help but have an effect: The streets are named for the battles and places. You were surrounded by the lore. You’re watching a show about the people you were told you had to measure up to. It’s not SpecOps or high speed stuff — it’s just rigorously trained, determined people dropped into battle, expected to take hideous losses.

Watching the show, feeling a sort of resonance during the jump sequence as they run through the pre-jump ritual, thinking about what they did … it put me back in touch with the feeling I had the first time I saw it, which was a sense of kinship, but also an awareness that I had no frame of reference for what they did or endured. I went to jump school because basic training was a disappointment and signal school was boring. People told me it would be hard, and a training sergeant who bought me a lemonade one night when I was on fireguard duty told me he thought it would help me make sense of the decision I’d made to enlist at all.

“You think you’re outsmarting someone, but you’re here for a reason.”

I was proud to earn my wings, but I still didn’t think jump school was as transformative as I’d hoped. It took years and a lot of distance to realize that the pride was still there.