My house burned to the ground, taking everything I owned with it, as part of the Marshall Fire and Wind event on December 30, 2021.
Since then I have retired, liquidated my interests in two businesses, survived various medical complications, and made progress on rebuilding the house. It passed the roughin inspection a couple of weeks ago, and I should be able to move into in a few months.
I moved off of Twitter and onto Mastodon, where I have been more active than on any previous social medium.

I have also been writing fiction, and the first volume is nearly ripe, so I am starting a new business to self-publish.
Rather than maintain two blogs, once the paperwork has trickled through the bureaucracy I will link the publishing website to this blog.

I'm not sure whether it is a side effect of various EFF security measures, changes in Firefox, or changes in LJ, but most LJ sites have become very difficult to read for the past month or so, and now they has transferred ownership.

So I'm gone, not that I was ever very active there.

Some people complain because we ended up in a future without flying cars. You can keep your flying cars, which would be more dangerous than ground cars, and probably noisier, too. I like the future we ended up with.

My latest Android tablet weighs less than 18 ounces including the leather case and stylus. With the case closed it is 8.25 by 5.5 inches and less than 1/2 inch thick. It has 16 Gigs of native storage and a 64 Gig SD chip. Neither storage area is close to being filled.

The first hard drive I ever bought cost more than the tablet, and had 20 Megabytes of storage. In constannt dollars, the drive cost more than the tablet, case, SD chip and set of cables and accessories I bought to support the tablet.

I took advantage of some fast hotel wireless to pull my Nook books out of the cloud and into local storage, and between those and various side-loaded epubs and some PDFs and Kindle books, I have more than a thousand books literally at my fingertips in the tablet, which only weighs as much as a pound because I put it in a leather case/reading stand. And the vast majority of the thousand books are novels, not working texts, since I mainly use the Web for working references

In Ada Palmer's excellent talk on the Benedictine monastery of San Marco in Florence (http://www.lumenchristi.org/san-marco/ ) she mentions at one point that when the University of Paris was founded, back before the printing press, it had a huge library (for its time) of 400 books.

I have been traveling a lot on business in the past few months and will be traveling again beginning next week, so I am taking advantage of this interim week to finally rip most of my CD collection. I can carry my music with me in the same pound of tablet and have it with me in the hotel rooms in the evenings. I'm not doing the orchectral classical music or the holiday stuff -- I'll leave those for a later round. I've ripped about 2800 tracks as I write this, and I expect to reach 3000 before I finish this phase of ripping. Adding the classical and holiday tracks will put the count closer to 4000 than 3000, when I get around to ripping them. (With most of phase one of the ripping complete, I'm using less than 9 Gigs for the Music, so the SD chip is less than 1/4 full).

It will be nice to have a choiceof music in the evenings, though I will admit I have encountered a few mysteries. Thee song titles on the one Cranberries disc are generic enough that I can't remember which one or ones led me to buy the disc. And Portishead is even less familiar than that. I'm going to have some exploring to do.

And I dropped a group of discs that included the first Afro Celt Sound System disc before they fell and not when I picked them back up. One problem with discs that use "clever" packages instead of jewel cases is that they hide easily and are hard to scan for. If it had to get lost in the Twilight Zone, I wish it had waited until after I ripped the tracks. Gives me incentive to tidy that storage room, I suppose.

Jared Polis is my congressional representative. Unfortunately. Sorry, that's a mistake -- I have come to the conclusion that he is properly referred to as DINO poltroon Jared Polis. Where DINO, of course, stands for "Democrat in Name Only".

DINO poltroon Jared Polis is my congressional representative.

There was a time when I was proud to have him a representative. In the long ago days when the House of Representatives actually had votes on substantive matters, his votes on things like net neutrality and internet privacy that suggested that he had at least a passing acquaintance with technology. I donated some money to his campaign.

I wish I could get a refund of the money I donated to DINO poltroon Jared Polis.

In the past few years the House has done comparatively little, and when there are votes, DINO poltroon Polis has voted on the side stupidity and greed with depressing and increasing regularity. The question in my mind was becoming not "Has he sold out to the corporate interests?" but "Has he sold out? Or was he a corporatist stooge all along?"

His recent vote to effectively bar Syrian refugees has been beyond disgusting. Since the Daesh stated goal is to make Syrians miserable and destroy tolerance and cultural diversity in the west, I consider the House vote tantamount to treason.

I sent a very strongly worded email to Dinohim. It included words like "embarrassed", "ashamed", "gutless", "hard-hearted" (or possibly "cold-hearted") and "evil". He sent me an email reply making excuses. I think I left out "brainless"from my original letter. But I don't believe he is stupid or gullible, and I am insulted that he thinks I am either of those things.

I have also emailed the Colorado Democratic Party, asking whether there might be an actual Democrat available to primary him on the left. And I wrote to the Bernie Sanders organization asking whether they have someone in their Colorado organization who could go up against DINO poltroon Jared Polis.

It is possible that a lot of my usual charitable giving make be diverted into politics over the next year. This is very depressing.

There's an old joke about a plumber who looked at a problem, took out a hammer, hit the pipes once, solved the problem, and presented a bill for $100.

When asked for an itemized bill, he produced:
Hitting pipe with hammer $10
Knowing where to hit $90
______________
$100

I have just had a week like that, only more so.

A client I consulted for previously hired me to help implement some software tools changes, and I felt like I accomplished nothing. I spent most of the week exchanging emails with people trying to figure out what they wanted to do and what information and tasks would be involved in accomplishing it.

I didn't even get near the point of hitting the pipe with the hammer, but the customer was very happy with the progress, because I knew what questions to ask and kept asking them until I was able to start sorting out the requirements for the project.

Knowing what questions to ask or figuring out what questions to ask is a big part of my skill set, either in this kind of project definition or in actual troubleshooting. It's not clearly related to any particular OS or software package, and in the recent past I've run into a number of situations where people I know are technologically competent displayed an amazing lack of it. Information I expected to be available, because of course you would collect it if you were dealing with a problem, just wasn't there. Sometimes not even when I asked for it because there had been no record-keeping or logs had been erased, or written over of not kept in the first place. I must be way the heck out on one limb of Dunning-Kruger.

I need to remember that knowing where to hit is valuable. I also need to remember that I can't expect most people -- even most technical people -- to do even a basic job of problem analysis without being led by the hand.

A little before noon I opened my front door on my way out to run an errand. A buck with complicated velvet antlers (10 points? 12? more?) jumped up from where he had been resting in the shade of the house and moved away from me. Another buck (maybe 6 points) closer to the south end of the house moved away into my neighbor's yard and the senior buck followed.

I've seen evidence of deer in the yard over the years -- Tracks. Droppings. Chewed branches on my lilac bush. Shapes in my headlights late at night. But this is the first time I've seen them in daylight or so close to the house.

I wish I hadn't left my phone on the coffee table... I wasn't able to get a picture.

The world seems to be pushing toward activism this year, sometimes in odd ways.

1)

DuPont is having a contested Board election this year. I usually don't bother sending in proxies -- I almost never own more than 100 shares of any one stock I've invested in, so my choices are likely to be hidden in the statistical noise. But the DuPont board of directors, with many millions of shares of which I own 100, called me FOUR times to make sure I would vote in the election... so I voted.

I did not vote for anyone on either Board of Directors slate (as far as I could tell it was a choice between sharks and tapeworms).

I voted for the proposed auditors, and against the executive compensation that was being proposed (see comment about tapeworms).

And I voted in favor of all of the questions that had been placed on the ballot by trade unions and religious groups.

I don't expect my votes made an real difference -- I'm a couple of decimal places below anything that will even show up in the voting reports. But there may be a lot of small stockholders like me who will be harassed into paying attention to the ballot. Maybe some of the ballot questions will make it out of statistical noise territory.

2)
Bernie Sanders.

For a long time I was registered as an Independent. Then one year there was a local race where the Democratic primary mattered more the the general election (there's a reason they sometimes call it the People's Republic of Boulder), and it occurred to me that it had been at least 10 years since I'd had an opportunity to vote for a Republican candidate I found acceptable, so I registered as a Democrat.

In the past few years I have started occasionally making small political donations, and also 'signing' various on-line petitions. I'd like to think that some of the recipients might check their donor lists and the petitions they receive for correlations, but I honestly don't think they are that smart. In 2014 I donated to the Democratic Congressional campaign rather than to my actual Representative because I did not like the way he voted on a few things in the lead-up to the elections, and I would be stunned if the analyses could pick up that sort of subtlety.

I donated to Bernie Sanders, possibly just outside the first 24 hours after he announced his presidential campaign. I want his voice in the debates and the Democratic platform. (I've been realizing lately that many of my opinions are left-ish even by Canadian and European standards.)

I got a phone call from the Hillary Clinton campaign this afternoon. I enjoyed telling them that I was supporting Bernie. Maybe it will decrease the phone-spam I get. Or maybe not. I think I was averaging more than a call a day from campaigns and pollsters last fall.

3)
The 2015 nominations for the Hugo awards were hijacked by a bunch of people with appallingly horrible taste who took advantage of a loophole in the rules.

The first WorldCon I attended was IguanaCon II in Phoenix in 1978. I have been an attending or a voting member many times since then (with occasional gaps), but have rarely nominated anything.

I think I missed voting last year due to health and other distractions, though I had a voting membership. I generally approved of the results and definiely approved of the Hugo for best novel.

I am voting this year. Emphatically. "No Award" is an option in Hugo voting, which is nice when all of the options presented are mediocre or worse. I am also making a point of buying works of non-slate nominees in the categories that have them.

I have sampled the works of some slate nominees who dropped out due to disagreements with the organizers of the ballot-stuffing, and I'm sorry to say I have not found anything that makes me regret that they are non longer on the ballots.

There is one special case: I bought the latest book in the Dresden series by Jim Butcher when the ebook first came out. It had some nice bits and the writing is decent, but I would have been surprised if it showed up on the Hugo ballot. Having it show up as part of the slate is... disconcerting. It indicates that he is not part of my tribe. What's the saying? "If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas". I'm a cat person.

I have been reading and enjoying the Dresden series long enough that I would have bought the first volume of Butcher's new series on spec when it first came out if he had not displayed a casual opportunism regarding the slate that I find a bit off-putting. I think I'm going to wait for either the paperback release (and accompanying ebook price cut) or mind-bendingly good reviews before I sample it.

My voting membership this year gives me nominating rights next year, but I have also just bought my voting membership for 2016 (which will give me nominating rights in 2017) and mailed out the fee for voting rights in 2017 (which will give me voting rights in 2018).

Unlike past years, I'm going to make use of my ability to nominate. I tend to think of myself as not a short fiction reader, but I read enough on-line and follow enough links from various websites and blogs that I have more exposure to current short works than I've had since I stopped subscribing to some of the genre magazines, 25 or 30 years ago.

I have detected a flaw in the algorithms used to decide what ads are presented to me. If I browse a site where I don't have ads blocked (there are a few where I allow them) I see ads for store I have brwosed and items I have googled for over the past couple of months.

As a case in point -- I currently see a fair number of ads from Jos A Banks, especially for leather jackets. The trouble is (from their point of view) that I have a new leather jacket that I bought from Jos A Banks, and it is very unlikely that I will need to buy another one any time soon. The same problem happens with other items I have googled, especially mid-range durable items like electronics gear and small appliances.

I typically search online for things for a day or a few days, and then buy what I was looking for. So ads based on things that were the subject of a cluster of browser hits that have stopped are the least likely things that I will buy.

Showing me ads for a blender (I just replaced my 10-year-old one) or a leather jacket, are a waste for both the advertiser and the sites on which the advertisements appear. Non-durable goods are less of a problem, of course, but I am less likely to buy those on-line. And even then, trying to sell me shoes or undergarments when I just bought some is kind of self-defeating.

And the ads for things I just bought fill space that could be used for things I might actually buy... though I can't predict what those might be.

I'm not sure what anyone can do about this.

Imagine a land where no trickster god was moved to be inventive with a tortoise shell. A place with no magic harps or cursed fiddles.

What music there is, comes from percussion, flutes, and the occasional conch.

There are no tuned horns either.

No concepts of musical scales, harmonics and such. Pythagoras is right out.

So, most likely, are bagpipes, which some people might consider an advantage, though I am not one of them. (I also loved fruitcake until I became allergic to all the ingredients except the fruit.)

Concepts like tuning and proportion do things to the worldview and provide different ways of interacting mentally with the organization of things.

Without the idea of a musical scale, what would Newton have seen when his prism made a rainbow? Without acoustics, do you also lose optics as a metaphor for modulations of the immaterial?

I wish the Spaniards had not been so thorough about burning the libraries of the Aztecs and Incas. If there were any philosophical and mathematical treatises, they were probably among the first on the pyres. Just knowing the calendars may be giving us a very skewed view of pre-Columbian ideas of universal structure.

I wonder if the peri-Columbian plagues effectively erased much of the transmission of rhythmic complexity of music in the Western Hemisphere. Music is a basic human fuction like (or possibly part of, or, it has been suggested, a precursor to) language. Complexity is going to happen one way or another, and in a musical culture based on percussion rather than strings (and a mathematical culture where the Mayas had a bunch of different calendars beating against each other) the complexity may have been rhythmic rather than tonal.

I wonder how much of the famous Latin American rhythms had a local basis. Or how much the African rhythms were adopted because they "felt right".

I just finished reading The Poison King by Adrienne Mayor. A few months ago I read Debt: the First 5000 Years.

The life of Mithradates is very intereting from the perspective of Debt.

During Mithradates long lifetime there were about three cycles where the Romans invaded areas east of the Adriatic, directly enslaved a big chunk of the population, destroyed the renewables, carried off the valuables, and imposed burdensome taxes and horrible interest rates that wrecked what was left of the economy. Then Mithradates threw out the Romans, freed the slaves, and nullified the debts. (And then it happened again. And again.) And the Romans wondered why the local populations were very very loyal to Mithradates...

The really interesting thing is that Mayor repeatedly says that modern historians don't understand how the economics of Mithradates' kingdom worked: he never seemed to lack cash to pay HUGE armies and never collected general taxes until near the end when things were going really sour (and even then the tax rates were ridiculously low by Roman standards).

Some of his advantages may be due to more or less literally not killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, and partly to ruling what Mayor describes as an area previously ruled by Kings named Croesus and Midas. But there was clearly something about the way things worked that was different organizationally, too.

It seems like Mithradates was on the other side of the cultural Debt boundary.

Politically, Mithradates called himself Shah of Shahs for much of his life, when the Black Sea was Mithradates' lake. But he worked with alliances and coalitions not conquests (including with the Greek democracies -- the general defending Athens at its fall was employed by Mithradates).