TIL that the maxim "My country, right or wrong" has a second part: "If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right"

Beautiful day. Beautiful flower.

My blog is 16 years old. I've rotated through several blogging engines in that time (Bloxsom, YAWT 1.0/2.0, Pelican and finally Eleventy) but they all have one thing in common: they all process blog entries stored as plain text files.

The fact that all my blog entries are stored as plain text files on my computer is, I believe, one of the main reasons my blog has lasted this long. Text files are trivial to back up. Text files don't really crash and rarely get corrupted. Text files are readable and writable on any computer manufactured since the 1980's - hell, the 1960's if I let punch cards into this conversation. When you contrast this simple durability with, for example, a MySQL data store (used by several blogging engines, including one of the most popular ones, WordPress), with all of its attendant version compatibility and data corruption issues, the superiority of plain text becomes undeniable if you're trying to write something that lasts.

Photo enlarged to show texture

Wow, the Brontë family was kind of cursed, eh?

I recently saw Umberto Eco: A Library of the World, a documentary about Umberto Eco's extensive book collection. At first blush this doesn't sound like the sort of topic that would make for an interesting documentary but with something like 50000 books spread over two libraries, a significant number of them dating from the medieval era, there's actually a surprising amount of stuff to unpack here. If you like books, you'll like the film. I thought it was great.

Try as I might, I simply cannot seem to get the hang of that "food flip" chefs on TV do when they're frying something.

Good article. I find myself becoming more sympathetic to this point of view the older I get. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/06/the-perils-of-innovator-mindset

I enjoy writing software more than I enjoy using software. I'm not berating myself over this, nor am I proud of it. It's just how I am.

What this means in practice is that I will often write a whole bunch of code before I even start trying to debug it. Writing code tickles what I imagine is the creative part of my brain, and it feels good. Running and debugging code tickles the "chore" part of my brain and it doesn't feel as good.

Interesting door in Saint-Henri, Montreal

Jack the Cock is coming...

It's just a building with fire escapes but this strikes me as very New York

I can't be the only one who thinks that the Brooklyn Tower looks like Sauron's home base from Lord of the Rings, right?

Joralemon and Columbia

The Oculus, near the World Trade Center

Near the new World Trade Center, New York

Noice

Some days I think I'm a Sans Serif soul and other days I think my soul is full of Serifs. It's like Jekyll and Hyde, but which is Jekyll and which is Hyde?

It's rare but, weirdly, this is not the first time a freestanding locomotive has just randomly appeared in the middle of my neighborhood.

I classified a lentil curry recipe on my website as "easy" and a friend of mind disagreed, pointing to the chopping it required and it never occurred to me that the necessity of chopping would disqualify a recipe from being easy, but here we are. And I guess that makes sense?

Pistachios. The clams of the nut world.

In 1931, a book was published in German under the title "100 Authors Against Einstein", attempting to refute the Theory of Relativity. By some accounts, when Einstein was confronted with this book, he is reported to have said something along the lines of:

Why a hundred? If I were wrong, one would have been enough."

I think I need to read some of this person's stuff. She apparently recreated Around the World in Eighty Days with 8 days to spare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly

I got a "book nook" for Christmas - kind of like a book end, but more elaborate. Super fun, I want them all.

8 photos

Annual Christmas tree snap