Frosted Echoes

🎵 Wild Nothing - Partners in Motion (live): There aren’t a lot of dream pop bands that feature saxophone as prominently as Wild Nothing does in this song. The sax is allowed to take up even more space on the live version. The unusual instrumental arrangement with some interesting time signatures makes the song sound a bit like a cross between prog rock and sophistipop. The track is great on the record and takes on new life in this version. In other news, Wild Nothing just released an incredible new song called “Blue Wings” last week. I spent Friday night listening to it over and over again. The elements, both musical and thematic, resonate strongly with me right now.

Using LEGO as an inspiration for building better software.

Honesty in politics.

📚 The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky: I picked up this book many years ago and didn’t get very far. I recently decided to give it another go, wanting to examine the ways in which the protagonist Prince was imagined to be a Christ-like figure, working his way through 19th century Russia. Unfortunately, it feels like the only parallel between the Prince and Christ is that the Prince seems to be a really nice guy. The connection is very one-dimensional and I’m certainly disappointed in such a flat representation of the figure of Jesus. Reading this book makes me even more glad that Kingdom of Copper, the sequel to City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty, is coming out this week. I need to move on to something more interesting.

Whereas the rest of the world uses Google as a verb to mean doing an internet search, my six-year-old always talks about DuckDuckGo in the same context. I must be doing something right.

TJ’s unicorn.

My favorite storyline in the House of Cards series was the one where the president picked his official biographer on the basis of a review of an iOS puzzle game that the writer had done.

My boss in LEGO.

🔗 The wisdom of Deo Volente

Just as Muslims say “inshallah,” after mentioning plans to do something, so also can the Christian keep God’s providence in mind when discussing what the future may bring.

This hit home for me recently.

James 4:13 instructs those who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money” with the reminder, “You do not even know what will happen tomorrow…Instead you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that’”. It’s not that the Bible condemns forward planning, but it’s simply that we should never leave God out of our future plans. In the old days people used to add the letters D.V. to all such intentions, an abbreviation for a short Latin phrase, Deo Volente, which means ‘God willing’.

🎵 Stone Roses - I Wanna Be Adored: I probably saw this video when it first came out, but it’s taken me years to rediscover the song. I love to play the bass part, which is hypnotic in its simplicity and enhanced by the guitar part carefully winding around it.

🔗 Albuquerque mayor wears Pantera Christmas sweater while signing bill for paid parental leave.

I knew there was a good reason that I have been having somewhat frequent dreams about moving back to Albuquerque.

I like the idea of an analog manifesto from @rianvdm. The comparison to the Agile Manifesto, with it’s message of preference, not exclusion, seems appropriate. This coming year I’m going to try to manage my home tasks and journaling with a bullet journal and my work tasks with Things. I’ve discovered over this past year that what works in one environment is not always as effective in another.

I’m not sure about New Year’s Resolutions, but if I have any, it would be to look at everything through the lens of a new manifesto: analog over digital. Just as with the Agile Manifesto, the word “over” is of utmost importance here. It doesn’t mean I’m done with digital. It just means that I want to look at the things I do, and critically evaluate whether or not an analog approach could be more meaningful. For example, should I stop tracking my runs on Strava, and just enjoy them instead? Should I have a go at hand journaling instead of putting everything in Day One? The answer may very well be “no”, but I’d like to ask the question more in 2019.

Over at the house of the Browns for breakfast before worship.

Christmas Bells.

This paragraph from Tim Challies’ recent Merry Christmas post captures the twinge of sadness that comes from watching your kids grow up and lose some of that youthful enthusiasm really well.

I know I’m mostly waiting in vain, though, because I know those days have passed. In previous years the Christmas Eve discussion was, “How early can we get up?” This year it was, “How late can we sleep in?” It’s a funny thing to see your children grow up and to remember the way things used to be. It’s a funny thing to have to begin to create a new normal, to make old, comfortable traditions fit a new, less-comfortable context. I liked the way things were. But I think I like the way things are, as well. At least, I can come to like it.

Working on a cover for a 2018 year-end playlist.

Though I have yet to see any of the ad placements he writes about, this piece from John Voorhees in MacStories about Apple heavily promoting the Apple Music/Amazon Echo integration comes as little surprise. Voorhees believes that the motivation for Apple to strike this partnership with their sometimes rival in services may be to get their hardware back on Amazon’s virtual shelves. While I haven’t read any contradicting information about the deal, I believe there may be another reason entirely.

Ever since the arrival of the HomePod at the $350 price point, there has been speculation that Apple will eventually come out with a lower cost model to compete with Amazon and Google’s offerings. There seems to be consensus that Apple must achieve a lower price point to stand a chance of taking market share from their more entrenched rivals. M.G. Siegler even wondered if Apple might not be trying to compete with Amazon at all with their HomePod. I’m no tech pundit, but looking at the history of Apple reveals they don’t always offer a lower-cost alternative to compete in a given market. Despite all of the breathless commentary that they simply had to come out with a netbook, they never did. The Mac Mini was designed to be a low cost entry to the Mac world and even that is now more high-end that it’s humble beginnings ever suggested it would be. iPhone models keep getting more expensive. Look across Apple’s hardware line and you will find less entry-level options than perhaps they’ve ever had in the recent past.

Apple typically makes profits on margins from more expensive hardware. Amazon sells inexpensive hardware to move services and digital goods (look at the Kindle model). However, Apple Music is trying to be a Spotify competitor. They can’t do that with only a $350 smart speaker and a Sonos integration. They will lose. The barrier to entry for filling a room with music from Apple’s streaming service is too high. So do they dumb down their smart speaker? Why do that and lose the margins and the cultural cachet of having the best sounding smart speakers on the market? They can much more easily tap into the huge user base that Amazon has without having to adjust their hardware strategy.

Photo by Rahul Chakraborty on Unsplash

Evening festivities.

For those of us who follow the liturgical calendar, we are still in Christmastide. Merry Christmas! 🎄

Alone time.

The little guy imagining some characters.

📚 A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles: I really didn’t know what to expect from this book but it was as charming a novel as I think I have ever read. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the book’s protagonist is so eminently likable. The historical backdrop of the developments after the Russian revelation are fertile ground for rich plots and expansive character development.

Surprisingly, a not-insignificant part of the plot of the Bumblebee Transformers movie involves the main character, a teenage girl named Charlie Watson, trying to get Bumblebee to dig the Smiths like she does. What are the chances that a semi-anthropomorphic transformable robot from another planet will dig the heavily British jangle rock of the 80’s alternative band? Apparently, pretty good.

This aids my theory that the Beatles were not only not the best rock band, they weren’t even the best British rock band. I don’t know of a single Transformer that’s really into them.

Church parking lot at night.

It’s interesting to see forestry.io implement content blocks in Jekyll by using front matter.