Years and Years – The Storyteller

I am hooked on Years and Years. If you’re a
Black Mirror fan, and haven’t already started watching, this should be your next show.

Spoilers.

Small spoilers.

Teeny tiny spoilers.

The show follows a family over 15 years into the future. Nuff said about that.

A man meets a woman. They ask what each other does for a living. She is a Storyteller.

A Storyteller.

A storyteller as in sitting in a crowd using words. Ever one of those syllables taken
in by those around.

A storyteller as in myths, and fables. Lessons woven in metaphors.

Even the writers of a TV show, are feeling it. Orality.

PYODBC face smash

Just had a hell of a time installing pyodbc on AWS ECS Linux AMI. And since I think I smashed it… here’s what i did.

First go though everything on this post. An awesome start

AWS EC2 Linux AMI with pyodbc

However, the challenege I had next

(env) [ec2-user@ip-172-30-1-231 eurion]$ pip install pyodbc
Collecting pyodbc
Installing collected packages: pyodbc

Yet, pip freeze still had no pyodbc! FACESMASH!

So, after running through it 100 more times slightly differently, it occured, let’s go manually, shall we??

(env) $ cd ~/src
(env) $ curl -O -L https://github.com/mkleehammer/pyodbc/archive/4.0.26.tar.gz
(env) $ tar xvzf 4.0.26.tar.gz
(env) $ cd pyodbc-4.0.25
(env) $ python setup.py build
(env) $ python setup.py install

not there… one more error.

TEST FAILED: env/lib64/python3.6/dist-packages/ does NOT support .pth files
error: bad install directory or PYTHONPATH

You are attempting to install a package to a directory that is not
on PYTHONPATH and which Python does not read ".pth" files from.  The
installation directory you specified (via --install-dir, --prefix, or
the distutils default setting) was:

    env/lib64/python3.6/dist-packages/

and your PYTHONPATH environment variable currently contains:

    ''

So I guess I’m setting $PYTHONPATH

After trying a few try’s, I needed to knwo not just my virtural environment directory but also where my
site-packages and dist-packages. Which ended up being

export PYTHONPATH=$PROJROOT/env/:$PROJROOT/env/lib64/python3.6/dist-packages/:$PROJROOT/env/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/

Any now give python setup.py install a go.

And we’re good to go.

My Personality (2019 Edition)

Given that the past year has been a big one, it’s time to see how my personality test holds up to last years.

Your type is: INFP

“Questor”. High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.

Introverted (I) 54.29% / Extroverted (E) 45.71%
Intuitive (N) 86.67% / Sensing (S) 13.33%
Feeling (F) 64.52% / Thinking (T) 35.48%
Perceiving (P) 88.89% Judging (J) 11.11%

Type 1 Orderliness |||||| 23%
Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||||| 60%
Type 3 Image Awareness |||||||||||||||| 63%
Type 4 Individuality |||||||||||||||||||| 83%
Type 5 Rationality |||||||||||| 50%
Type 6 Cautiousness |||| 13%
Type 7 Adventurousness ||||||||||||||| 66%
Type 8 Aggressiveness ||| 20%
Type 9 Calmness |||||||||||||||||||| 83%

Your main type is Type 4

Your variant stacking is spsxso

type score type behavior motivation
4 25 I must be unique/different to survive.
9 25 I must maintain peace/calm to survive.
7 20 I must be fun and entertained to survive.
3 19 I must be impressive and attractive to survive.
2 18 I must be helpful and caring to survive.

High level – still INFP. Lower level my type has shifted a tad. Probably as priorities and desires have changed with the little man.

If you’re curious about yours, this was made using the Jung+Enneagram test.

Email is awesome

I tell everyone that email should not be overlooked. And
here I am, knowing this and doing nothing about it. It’s
almost done and running. Come on in – sign up.

[Update: 2020-10-30] – bailing and switching hosting, the self-hosted newsletter is dead. Though, Substack is doing nice things.

Not that it’s public, nor have I written anything yet, I am tinkering.

Conflict

My head is all jumbled. Conflcts of priorities. My therapists has a wonderful word for this: Confuckeded.

And when I am, I do something to break the pattern. To make a small step towards something. This post – considering
I haven’t posted in more than 9 months is just that small step.

What’s my next step?

A needed time of fallow

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

Humanity is audacious. We have the audacity to believe that we are capable of exponential growth in perpetuity. And yet, humanity cannot sustain itself forever. We must stop periodically and rest: to sleep, to eat, to heal. Humanity cannot manage exponential, our bodies are more designed like natural fallow systems. Rest is not a choice but biologically mandatory. Yet our expectations today run in contradiction. Our media is full of hope that we can advance quicker than the truth: 2001 a space odyssey was long ago, back to the future part two came and went, blade runners, are not hunting for androids

Not only do we stop, sometimes we stop catastrophically, and perhaps after stints like these. There are several periods in history where we backslide. Each time our superiority becomes plump and full of arrogance stating it’s impossible to fail. Yet the empire falls and fades. The insurmountable libraries of Rome, the mystic and architectural knowledge of the Mayans and Egyptians, the religious supremacy of England.

Late antiquity they call it. That awkward phase into the darkness. A few struggled to remember while the rest didn’t know they should care. A Barbarian ruler was finally the emperor of Rome and choose to divide it and in turn, Romans started to forget. Of course, it was much more complicated than that, but it feels relevant.

If this period of time didn’t happen – to give humanity the reprieve from change it needed, the fallow time it needed to re-energize for the next phase, would the Renaissance have happened?

Patterns in history should be not ignored. These cycles continuously happen again and again regardless of whether we are audacious and arrogant enough to believe that our miraculous century is special. Patterns of history, life and our universe, are there to see and learn from. While we may be special to this galaxy, to believe that we are so special to have the amazing power to leapfrog against such a process, is as simple as getting into our flying car and driving to your home on the moon.


This post was originally published on one of my old blogs. I backdated this to the original publish date.

Journalists and Lawyers

There are good lawyers & bad lawyers. But we still know they follow the law. The power is in the
institutions and systems that make them.

Journalists should be the same. The more I think about this, the more I like it.

  • Lawyers have a “bar” organization that oversee’s the overarching ethics of behaviour
  • Judges are external arbiters. Should an editor be the same?
  • There is an open system of archives.
  • Lawyers need to pass additional standards
  • Not being a lawyer doesn’t preclude you from participating, but you’re still not a “lawyer”
  • Law firms are legally set up in a specific way and can’t be set up otherwise
  • Lawyers buy into ownership/partnership, and therefore have several fiduciary duties to balance

Have any more points to add?