Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1379
More political processing, Unifi setup, insulating the pump house, a new music idea I'm working on, Gavin Friday's techno tendancies.
Hello hello hello. What is up. Good morning. I hope you had a lovely weekend. I hope you had a lovely long weekend. I did, hence not the writing yesterday. Good times. Got a lot done. Lotta quality time with my daughter like a normal healthy parent.
We are listening to the new Gavin Friday this morning, Ecce Homo. It is probably too techno-ish. I have previously enjoyed his electronic-infused, house-ish, post-Virgin Prunes material (most notably “I want to live,”) and this album has a lot of good on it, but… I dunno, man. Techno.
Before we get too far may as well get the political shit out of the way. Here are my assorted new thoughts I had this weekend about the shitshow in which we find ourselves:
My body thinks this trauma is due to the death of a loved one. Which means that each day that goes by, it is supposed to get a little bit better, and my body is actin g accordingly. Obviously, my body is profoundly mistaken and in for a rude awakening. But I see no reason to disabuse it of that notion in the short term. May as well do what we can to at least ride out the rest of the Biden administration. Not that he will do anything cool like, you know, attempt to deport Elon Musk or Melania Trump or something.
I successfully convinced another Trumper to strongly consider an electric truck. I’m making the bold assumption that all old, white, retired excavating company owners in North Carolina are Trumpers. He is a RAM guy. He is going to go test drive the RAM and the Lightning. Trump might kill off the American car industry by letting Chinese Imports in (he has said he will) or save it by adding a bunch of tarrifs (he has said he will), who knows, but I am doing my part.
Still can’t look at social media and still sick of most of the armchair quarterbacking and recriminations about the loss. It is too anger-inducing and I am still not going to take part, though I did burst out laughing this morning on the drive home from Jane’s school thinking about how this country once elected Barack Obama.
It is absolutely insane how good this whole experience is for weaning me off my addiction to social media. Long ago my Barbarian partner Robert and I bought these nicotine-free cigarettes from the Amish in an effort to quit smoking. They were insane. Rationally tasted just like pretty decent cigarettes, but had no nicotine in them, and left us utterly sickened whenever we tried one. Going to social media right now still feels exactly like that.
I have been reading a lot of Tolkien. We are just finishing up Lost Tales book two: an early, failed attempt at what would be come The Silmarillion, except with a frame story where the island of Tol Eressa (which briefly made an appearance in Rings of Power last season) would eventually become England? And cats still bitter he got rid of the cats. Sauron was a cat originally. Come on. So good. The frame story was pretty wacky. But I love love love this insight into a writer and their process. I would read more behind-the-scnes books, it’s like watching the bonus making-of documentary that comes with every movie.
So basically what happens is I open up Threads or Bluesky, read like two or three threads of pundits confidently explaining what went wrong, I get sickened and disgusted, close it quickly, and then read Tolkien. It is working. I do not feel particularly ill-informed. Gonna roll with it.
Been working on a new idea: one for solving the problems of the working musician, I am kind of into it. Stuck in the spreadsheet phase, and then I’ll wrap that up and the most critical part of any idea will then be at the fore: whether and when to show it to someone else. This is always such a delicate moment: it can kill a new idea in its infancy, but also it is inevitable for any project that isn’t 100% personal. I think it’s a good idea? But I could be horribly wrong. Do you get a level-check from an expert friend early, to save you a bunch of work on a bad idea, or later, at the risk of building it up too much in your own head and devastating you when it proves to be unworkable.
Normally at this stage I just give up, because I can’t stand that Faustian bargain. But as I age I realize that a) several good ideas I’ve had in the past could have been something but for my fear, and b) I am getting older.
I have promised myself I won’t let this one die without properly exploring it. I may break that promise.
This weekend was great, great weekend of getting things done. I insulated the pump house, it was a great project, super fun, love pouring, oh, $500 down a hole. I vacuumed the thing out, got electricity to it, got a light in it, insulated the walls, the ceiling, then insulated all the pipes, then wrapped the pressure tank in insulation. I added a radiant barrier to the bottom half. Brought in a ton of ceramic tile, made a little fireplace corner, added a space heater hooked up to a thermostatic outlet. I mounted a 2×4 from the ceiling to place an LED worklight on a timer such that it illuminates the stained glass window.
I still have a few finishing touches: my HomeKit thermometer was late arriving (because I didn’t order it from Amazon), so I still gotta get that going. My 500’ outdoor shielded Cat6 cable was frustraingly three feet short of the pump house, so it does not yet have ethernet, thus it does not yet have wi-fi, thus I cannot install the security cameras (a big motivation for doing this whole project), or get the LED light on a smart timer. There is a hose that stays permanently out there to attach to the spigot in the pump house and do hose things in that part of the property. It was buried in falling leaves. I bought one of those stick-in-the-ground hose holder things. Still gotta install that. But it is mostly done. Behold:
On Monday I redid the network at Chore House, replacing the hodge podge setup with a unified Unifi (lol) experience. Dream Machine Pro, Wifi 6 Access Point. Took too long, even with the famous Unifi ease of setup. Half the Homepod Mini’s found the new network right away, the other half require a hard reset, one of them won’t hard reset. Wonder if this aligns to the Hompod Minis I have, in the past, had to hook up to a computer and completely reset. Get the strong suspicion Apple made a lot of improvements to the HPMs under the hood as the years went on, without acknowledging it. Still, though, big step, doing a brain transplant on a network. And this is the beginning of all five acres and all the houses and outdoors being on a single unified network, me getting off of cloud computing subscription losers, me getting off of Backblaze and Amazon, me keeping my data at home and not sending telemetry to China. A long way to go but, you know, baby steps.
Also got the Eufy hub working — I had bought this ages ago. We use Eufy at our main house for our cameras and HomeKit secure storage so even though it’s a Chinese company, I have been mostly okay with it since it’s rock solid, with local storage. But I THINK I’m going to migrate to Unifi for this too? I bought this Eufy shit for Chore House like nine months ago and never got it set up. And now I got it set up and finally have a camera on the greenhouse. I don’t think I’ll get rid of it, but I think I will no longer invest in their ecosystem. Gonna make the jump to Unifi.
Made the conscious decision to spend lots of time with Jane this weekend (except Bedtime I still can’t handle Bedtime). Took her to the playground two days. We had a lovely morning computing together. Great times. She is a good kid. I like her a lot. She even let me sleep till 8 yesterday: she’s obsessed with Duolingo Music and she is killing it. We talk a lot about Middle C these days.
Ambient playlist for you today. Should I buy the new Max Richter reissues? Tempting. Also, man, that Sky Cries Mary album is so good why weren’t they bigger? I think they’re still around? Might need to do a whole discography deep dive.
Okay I should do some work now you have a lovely day. Buttondown is much slower to send than Substack: never really thought about the actual, technical part of Substack’s business. They did a pretty good job of getting emails to you in a timely manner. Shame about the Nazis.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.