Blog

  • Belief without a reason

    I have a belief, but my media background can’t explain why you should care.

    I want you to care. If you did it would help explain that feeling of insanity

    Yet,

    I can’t find the words. The reasoning. The nut.

    So instead I write vague posts.

  • Hat’s off to all producers

    Hat’s off to all of those who create.

    I commend all of you who produce something with any form of regularity.

    It’s my weakness.

    You do it through all the excuses.
    Through exhaustion.
    Through nervousness.
    Through repetition.
    Through drinks with friends.
    Through desires to binge watch.
    Through child vomit.
    Through partners to-do’s.
    Through bill payments.
    Through little voices inside your head.
    Through sickness.
    Through happiness.
    Through fear.
    Through success.
    Through confusion.
    Through it all.

    You hit publish.

  • 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

    https://datalere.com/tips-guides/ec2-aws-linux-ami-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.

  • Launch of Orality.ca

    With all my media thoughts, I’ve started Orality.ca. Hopefully I can mash through what’s
    been bouncing around in my head and make some semblence of a thought. Feel free to head over an read.

  • 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.

  • Dopple-GIF-er

    It’s creepy seeing a gif that:

    1. It looks like you and
    2. Something someone might actually catching you doing
    https://giphy.com/gifs/dance-tube-wacky-RBN9u2B4hQIh2