The internet is ok if you look in the right places. It's also awash with nonsense. I'm just hoping not to contribute to the nonsense. I publish little essays, notes, ideas, images, or pretty much anything else I want to share here. This site started with mostly computer related ramblings, but I went elsewhere with it after I quit the social networks. I wrote a post about this website. The easiest way to quickly scan everything on it is through the archive or sitemap pages.
Feel free to contact me if you have any feedback, questions, or just want to say hello.
I’d like to share my take on Section 2301 because it came up again while I was watching the congressional hearings on the stock market volatility. The Wall Street Journal had the best opening line on it with “It turns out a congressional hearing aimed partly at investigating stock-pumping on the internet is a great opportunity for, well pumping stocks on the internet”2. I really enjoyed the testimony3 from Keith Gill (“Roaring Kitty” aka DFV )4. The whole thing just reminded me of the early days of internet pump and dump spam schemes revisited and the fact that again, folks are publicly asking about how internet communications are having an effect on our society. Although I didn’t have any personal financial interest, I was pulling for the Wall Street Bets crowd because I was more interested in the power of communication medium. When Section 230 was mentioned during the hearings, it just reminded me of the other recent debates encircling the law so I’ve been thinking a good bit about it and making some mental notes.
First off, let me say that I think the actual bad part of the Telecommunications Act of 19965 was not Section 230. It was Title III Sec. 303, the law that deregulated media cross-ownership. Supporters of the law implied that it would create more competition, but in reality all it really did create more media concentration, less diversity, and higher prices. It’s why a handful of companies own almost all local radio and television stations. That’s an essay for another time and for now I just want to focus on Section 230.
It’s Title V, and particularly Sec. 230 that’s been making the news. It states:
“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”.
And with those words, the the majority of the modern internet and social media flourished because it allowed platforms to host user generated content without liability to the content. The reason it’s such a hot topic item now is the fallout from the foreign interference in the 2016 United States elections6, the subsequent online information war about the 2020 elections, and the recent banning of some users. There have been several bills introduced in an effort to remove section 230 protections. What it really emphasizes is how powerful our online communications have become. It’s no surprise that the same communication platforms responsible for the Arab Spring would also be responsible for meddling in elections and so on. I’m a moderate on it and can easily see both sides of the argument. However, I still firmly believe that a private company such as Twitter can set their usage guidelines however they see fit and removing the liability protections of section 230 will do very little to change those policies while filling the courts with libel cases.
I’ve only had a couple real life experiences with section 230. I learned quite some time ago how pitiful folks can act when they keyboard warrior7 behind a screen. I saw this up close when used to manage a bunch of daily newspapers with user commenting enabled. I kept wondering to myself why people could be so rude with their comments and my explanation to myself was that folks were just miserable out there. I often wondered why we even offered comments on the articles and I suggested to the upper brass that we only provide social sharing links so that folks could discuss their opinions elsewhere which many publications now do. The only clever thing that came out of dealing with those comment sections were that we designed a system that allowed us to ‘black hole’ an offensive commenter where we would still allow them to comment, but only show the comment to that particular user. It stopped the offender from just creating a new account by giving them the impression that their comments were being published. I also had a bit of real world experience more recently when my home owners association decided to send out an email stating that buses of protesters were coming to upscale neighborhoods. I checked with the management, my cousin in law enforcement, and with some others in the community to try and find the source of this information. Sure enough it originated on social media and spread like any other rumor does. I took the time to track down the original source of the information in a tweet from an account likely run from an overseas misinformation farm. The Twitter account in question had actually posted two contradictory tweets. One was that rioters were being bussed to Greenwood, South Carolina and the second was that the local police would be putting snipers on rooftops. This was widely documented to have happened all across the US8. The most distressing part of it was how rapidly this misinformation could spread around a small town without anyone ever really verifying the source of the information and literally landing in my inbox alongside of all of my neighbors. It’s for exactly this reason, that I’ve primarily abandoned social media.
Social media companies could be held liable for their users postings without the protections afforded by Section 230. If I slandered someone on this website and then had the top search result for that person, I’d certainly expect to receive a cease and desist. But let’s say I slandered someone over the teleconference call. Does that mean that the telephone provider should be held liable? Section 230 does not preclude providers from hosting anything that violates state of federal law, so the current debate really revolves around issues of civil liabilities. The impetus for which revolved around pornography because at the time it was passed, Congress was preparing the Communications Decency Act (CDA)9 which was challenged by the Supreme Court and removed all of the anti-indecency sections of the CDA and left Sections 230 as law. The major conflicting issues about Section 230 primarily revolve around exceptions to free speech not protected by the First Amendment. I think the most pertinent current topic related to Section 230 is disinformation, or as is written in the First Amendment, false statements of fact10. The supreme court has established a complex framework for determining which types of statements are unprotected. Essentially Section 230 has provided a shield to providers from libel and slander laws. Although I’d like to think it’s our own responsibility to verify sources of information, it’s become abundantly clear that a large swath of the population is unable to do so given the relatively complex nature of internet communications mediums. I believe that it is the responsibility of our laws to protect the majority of our citizens. And with Section 230, I think it’s the responsibility to moderate content that isn’t protected under the First Amendment11, particularly threats of violence, hate speech, child pornography, copyright, and false statements of fact.
I do not think we should remove Section 230. I think instead, that lawmakers and elected officials should focus on the end users and not the medium. They could do so by explicitly adding another provision stating such and giving them the rights to user discovery. There are two tricky parts to this. The first is that so much of the disinformation and other exceptions to free speech not protected by the First Amendment are not being created by our own citizens held accountable by our laws. The second is that in order to focus on the content creator and not the medium, we face issues removing privacy protections. It’s my opinion that if you violate the law in a way that hurts others, that you should lose your privilege to privacy. The provision should be written in an attempt to stop providers from shielding the identities of those who could be sued or prosecuted. Without being very carefully crafted this could have a chilling effect12 on privacy rights for other users.
So here we have the same folks saying that social media companies like Facebook are taking away their rights to First Amendment speech while they simultaneously consuming a rapid spread of disinformation that is clearly not protected by the First amendment. It’s a mess. I’ve tried to think of some clever ways to deal with this which don’t infringe on our rights to privacy or free speech. My personal approach has been simply to not participate in social media, but I don’t think my drop out attitude is a real solution for the majority of our citizens and it needs to be addressed by the law. As far as the law is concerned, I’m leaning towards the idea that social media companies should have the legal responsibility to moderate user generated content that isn’t protected by the First Amendment in which they have recently shown a propensity towards. I also think that we need a more robust legal mechanism of discovery to reveal users that break the law. I believe that the only real solutions are going to happen over a generation by educating the citizens as to the usage of the internet, their rights to privacy, and free speech online. I think we’re just now seeing the first real effects of a communications revolution where the laws are trying to play catch up. And yet, here I am keyboard warrior’ing on about my opinions with very little knowledge of the law, just like everyone else on the internet.
24/01/31 – I’m watching the Senate Judiciary Committee when my representative, the Chair Lindsey Graham addresses Mark Zuckerberg saying “you have blood on your hands, you have a product that is killing people” – https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5104614
While I agree that social media has been harmful to some children, I don’t think legislation will be the singular answer and they haven’t changed my opinion on Section 230. The internet is larger than ‘social media’ and they seemed to be asking these companies to police not only the internet but society itself. I didn’t think it would drastically change my opinions on it, but I do enjoy watching these folks debate the issues in a public forum. Zuck has gotten better and Evan Spiegel of Snapchat was the standout.
We got a new car a couple weeks ago. It’s an electric BMW i3 1. and we nicknamed it ‘toasty’. In an attempt to humblebrag, I’d say my main motivation for sharing my experience with it, is that I think everyone should drive electric cars. I have a buddy who’s a car guy and he said to me “I didn’t think you’re a – green – guy” to which I responded “it’s not just about being green”.
I recently read that Britain and France will both ban the sale of all Gasoline and Diesel automobiles by the year 2040 2.. Norway kinda spurred the issue when they said they would heavily tax fossil burners by 2025 3. and India is shooting for 2020 4.. Volvo announced they will only produce electric vehicles by 2018 5.. Meanwhile in the U.S. we’re in the process of… I won’t go into it, but I will say you don’t have to be ‘green’ (or a science denier) to consider driving electric. It’s safe, it drives great, it’s quiet, you can ‘fill er up’ in your garage, it’s comfortable, and it can be a good value for transportation.
What does ‘green’ mean anyway? Yeah, I know… we recycle, compost, and are generally considerate of the environment regarding our actions and purchases. Regardless, we put a lot of other considerations into this purchase that just make sense on so many other levels that I thought I share those that may be making the same decision in the coming years. We started looking for this car about eight months ago. We finally found a lease trade in with under 8,000 miles on it. We have two other vehicles, a 2014 BMW 328d Touring and a 2004 Nissan Frontier Pickup Truck. The truck… well because I can’t seem to get rid of it and everyone needs a truck. It’ll easily run another 100,000 miles of dragging a trailer, picking up mulch and random DIY stuff from the hardware store. The wagon is a diesel and I had been following along closely on the diesel-gate issues with Volkswagen when we started considering electric options. The main issue we have is that is much as we’d like to think we’re out on the highways getting 50mpg @ 80mph with a 500 mile range between fueling, we were starting to rack up the miles just running around town and we want to preserve the wagon for our road trips because it’s perfect for just that.
And now we’ve found the perfect ride for around town. Anytime I take someone for a ride or let them drive it, they are always smiling. For those of you whom never driven or ridden in an electric vehicle, do yourself a favor and go test drive one. This car is roomier and drives better than any other car I’ve ever owned. It took just a couple days of getting used to while driving. It’s one pedal driving. When you remove your foot from the gas it decelerates to regenerate power. It’s great in that I rarely every use the brakes anymore. I installed a 220v charger in the garage and it only takes 3 hours for the full 100 mile change. It’s the REX model and has a little scooter engine to extend the range another 100 miles if needed. I ran it dry one time just to test it out and I’m guessing we’ll ever use it, but it does give you a little comfort if you’re stretching it on a day trip. I pegged it at the top speed one afternoon to see how it handles it and I’m completely comfortable on the interstate with it. The acceleration in the 40-80mph range is superb. What I like most is how connected I feel while driving it. The windows are huge and it’s quiet. There is something about pulling into a parking lot or out of our driveway without any noise. It just one less jarring thing in your life. Honestly, I haven’t yet found one single complaint about the car and I’d recommend anyone who’s even slightly considering to take the plunge.
* update 24/04/29 – We traded the i3 in on an i46 so I wanted to write a quick follow up here.
When my better half first suggested that we buy an electric car, I contemplated the risks, and in retrospect realized it was a smart financial decision. We didn’t have a single issue with the i3 except that it had a tendency to burn through tires. We traded it in mainly because it was a good time to upgrade. We considered keeping it, but I didn’t want the insurance on a third car. Kudos to BMW for taking the initial risks on the i3. The i4 is an upgrade. BMW got the mix just right on this one. Aside from the lack of engine noise, regenerative braking, and instant torque, it handles like a 4 series. I took a buddy for a ride yesterday who’s a car guy with a Porsche and a Tesla. He commented on how he prefers the Tesla because he doesn’t sound like a jerk when he’s got the pedal down. My dad, who has a Ram truck, spends a hundred a week on gasoline just running to the golf course and grocery store. I’m still a bit leary of possible repair costs but we’re under warranty again. Overall, I can barely come up with any complaints.
So again, I think the transition to electric vehicles is going well and I encourage anyone on the fence to go take a test drive and consider the long-term maintenance costs. I think our next step will be solar panels on the garage so the gas is coming from the sun. By the time our X3 is ready to retire7, BMW should have a more affordable electric SUV so that we can completely shed the dinosaur juice.
Nope, it’s not the Project 20251 you may have heard about … it’s what we’ve been calling the home improvements we’ve started to schedule early next year. Hurricane Helene2 dropped a big oak tree on our house back in late September and we’ve started working through some of the repairs.
The tree damaged just enough to make the repairs a bit cumbersome and I’ve documented the details in my notes3,4. The first reaction was just disappointment. Neither of us expected the storm to be that severe. We had planned a getaway that weekend for our anniversary and even up until the night of, we were still planning on traveling the next day. Like a ship out on the sea, the storm unalterably changed our course.
Instead of miring ourselves in the repairs or the insurance process, we’ve decided to go ahead and make some improvements along the way. I often try to set little rewards out in front my myself to keep the morale up. I remember when I had my first colonoscopy. As you could imagine, I wasn’t too thrilled at the idea so I decided to reward myself with a new iPad as motivation. Although the process is tough, the outcome will be a great improvement.
So we’ve gladly reappropriated the Project 2025 name for our projects. We’ve already gutted the master bed and bath upstairs and moved downstairs. We’ll be combining our two bathrooms upstairs into one master bath5. The new bath will seem luxurious as compared to our old ones.
I’ll also be transitioning my office upstairs into a studio6 in the den in order to convert the fourth bedroom upstairs into a dressing room. I’m calling the new space a studio instead of an office because it’s much bigger. I’m really looking forward to having all of my tools in one place with a generous amount of natural light. One additional carrot on this stick in this transistion is an integrated A/V system and a new set of keys… 88, the piano type.
In the process we’re also considering all of our other future home improvements. Although we try to stay true to the original design, our project 2025 isn’t looking backward. We might change up the style a bit and add some new front doors to boot. I’m hoping to have it all wrapped up by early spring next year. We’re lucky to have a little wiggle room financially to make a couple improvements and I’m sure I’ll follow up here when it’s done. Making the effort to turn an unfortunate situation into an opportunity is the way to be.
The older I get, the more it feels like high school… I’ve used that as an expression for at least the last fifteen years. I found myself saying it again at lunch the other day during a discussion about an upcoming fundraising event and I wrote it down in my notes. For whatever reason, I can’t help but notice that the basic social dynamics of high school are still the preeminent legem terrae… law of the land.
Perhaps it’s just our learned social psychology. I deal with a bunch of high school kids on an almost daily basis coaching tennis teams and I’ve watched how they interact with one another over the last several years. As much as I’m dismissive of their behavior as naive, I’ve been pretty quick to notice that the reality is that not much changes between the age of 15 and the age of 50. At this point, I’m expecting to see the same in a retirement home if I make it. I used to like to compare human behavior with that of chickens, but I’ve now found that high school is a much easier-to-understand reference because of our shared experience.
I suppose it’s an important element here to inform you exactly who I was and how I felt in high school for a little perspective. In retrospect, I’d like to think I was a bit like Ferris Bueller1.
I’m not sure you could pin me on a typical high school social group because I liked to float between them. I wasn’t exactly nerdy, emo, stoner, rebel, jock, rich, or poor… but just a little bit of each which I still tend to identify as an adult. I liked high school and thought it was fun. And I’d like to think that I was liked in high school… except maybe the fella I punched in the face before his big football game because he was accosting my girlfriend. I might have been handsome because I seemed to get the girls but I also dated a girl from another school so that helped me out of the small social circle. I was in advanced academic classes but sometimes performed lackluster for sport. My school wasn’t really big enough to have many enemies but it also wasn’t exactly small enough to not have cliques. I still chat with about five or six fellas I graduated from high school regularly and we sometimes reflect on it. I’ll ask them who I am or was. If anything, I was likely the cynical humorist exploring bildungsroman2 themes just like I’m doing here.
The town I currently live in is small enough that I stop and chat with at least several folks every time I go to the grocery store and I usually recognize several others. It’s pretty close ideologically with my high school graduating class with a bent towards monoculture and religious conservatism. Although not necessarily in the majority, I still find it comfortable. What’s particularly applicable for my point here, is that a good chunk of them went to high school together or at least in neighboring towns, not unlike my wife and I. I don’t think I’d be too far off the bat to assume that the majority of them pretty much occupy a similar socio-economic status as they might have in high school minus some exceptions that remain obvious due to their overcompensation.
What’s unfortunate is that adulting is often full of the same artificial hierarchical caste systems as high school. Our basic values of friendship, community, respect, tolerance, and honesty seem to be learned at some level. The closest I could identify it would be the ‘social contract’ theory where a person’s moral obligations are dependent on an unwritten agreement to form the society in which they live3. The theory was first mentioned by Plato and is the most identified in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes who lived it through the English Civil War4. John Locke adopted it for his Two Treatises on Government5 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau for his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men6.
It’s actually fairly naive to believe that our social contract has changed that much since adolescence as this should be perfectly apparent in our current state of political affairs. The principles that guide our civil, social, and economic liberties are forever entrenched in our own needs to be both accepted and individual. Our morality and political obligations are dependent on an unwritten social contract that still guage the legitimacy of the state or church over our personal affairs. I’m sometimes smart enough to shut my mouth long enough to listen to adults talking with one another and I can’t help but to hear the subtle references. “I’m cool, I went here, I know that person too, our new whatever toy, I heard Sally went with John, l want to have this, or I know whatever”.
Part of this thinking was inspired by a deep dive on the filmaker John Hughes7. Hughes wrote and directed The Breakfast Club8 and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, two films I leaned heavily on in adolescence and I really enjoy dissecting my early influences in retrospect. Hughes friend P.J. O’Rourke9 wrote the best piece about him and his films in The John Hughes I Knew10. Ferris could be interpreted as an existentialist text convincing Cameron to cut loose while The Breakfast Club is a direct commentary on our social contract. After I got into a serious car accident as a teenager, I had a very distinct feeling returning to high school that everything felt somewhat stupid… like how can these adults and kids fool themselves into what they seem to be prioritizing when life if fleeting. Now that I’m older, I can’t help but to watch older adults reflecting on their lives and I try to pay close attention.
I’ve always wanted to write something in which the children are wiser than the adults because I know there’s a bit more to it. I’ve noticed over the years some recurring themes and I wonder to myself at certain crossroads in my life if I should try another road, but I tend to think of my place as the observer and I can’t help but to notice how I keep coming to the same crossroads. I’m not lost, I’m just enjoying the tour. I’m just glad I enjoyed high school so I’m not perpetually trapped in knowing the older I get, the more it stays the same. Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
This is an essay about how I am the sole arbiter of all that is fine and high culture in this world as evidenced by my seemingly endless essays on my personal consumption habits. Or… are they learned, is opinion easier than evidence, what is the paradox of tastes? I’ll try to write it as if I were a cultural anthropologist pondering the postmodern. Still, in reality, it’s just some things I noticed in recent conversations about how our aesthetic tastes are oft the first targeted in the disinformation game and have now become subject to congressional hearings.
Beyoncé & Swift
In my last note on The Purple Party, I mentioned that I joked with an acquaintance that I didn’t know what Taylor Swift had to do with the Super Bowl when I was told Swift was “no longer country” which I understood as a reference to towing conservative ideology. I suggested Beyonce’s new country music 1 as a clever alternative. When I mentioned this conversation to someone on the other ideological spectrum, I got this response:
“Beyoncé? I’m good. I prefer musicians to entertainers or stars”
Hunter, Travas. 2024. SMS (text) message in discussion with the author and Robby Archer. February 23. digital transcript, SQLite3 file. Greenwood, SC.
Is Beyonce a musician? Da’ hell? Of course, she’s a world-class vocalist and stage performer. Her musical melange performance at Coachella was a master class. She’s the first music artist to have six albums debut at #1 over four decades. Although it could be argued that her first foray into country music happened in 20162, the recent release seals the deal. I suppose those trying to pin it on some sort of cultural appropriation have forgotten she is from Texas. Although I didn’t respond to the text, I’m sure I’ll send this essay along. I get it… not your taste, I’m just not sure I would go so far as to preclude her as a musician.
I’ve become quite fascinated by how opinionated people have become about people like Beyonce and Swift because it kind of mirrors the other political obscurities running amuck. The fact that celebrities are dominating the headlines of the political sphere while more serious events unfold around the world just underscores the strength of our opinions on culture. Like her music or not, Taylor Swift is one of the most successful musicians and songwriters of all time. And just like Beyonce, she’s morphed her musical identity with each new release.
Although I don’t want to argue semantics, the word music is from Greek3 – mousiké (technē)—μουσική (τέχνη)—meaning “art of the Muses”, which reminds me of a recent Bob Dylan song Mother of Muses4that was inspired by his winning the Nobel prize in Literature. “When he had the golden medal in his hand, he turned the backside up, looked at it for a long time and seemed amazed” by an engraving that depicted a poet listening to and writing down the song of a Muse playing the lyre. The engraving is accompanied by a Latin inscription, adapted from Virgil’s Aeneid, “Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes”, which translates to: “It is beneficial to have improved life through discovered arts”. The muses were the names of the chords in the first written music notation. Before written language, the muses represented all forms of knowledge scientific and artistic. Although artistic merit seems to be entirely based on opinion and scientific knowledge on evidence, it’s not necessarily the case.
Wine & Design
One of the best analogies I can use in dealing with aesthetic tastes is literal taste5. I spent quite a few years in the wine business5. Daily, I would taste wine with others, talk about it, serve it to others, and then ask for opinions. I learned a lot about tastes through this process and I learned to manipulate people’s opinions without them even knowing what I was doing. In hindsight, I’m not exactly proud of that, but it was a sales gig. I worked for a wine shop with a pretty enterprising fella from Italy. We had millions of dollars in wine inventory that originated in the international construction trade. The Wine business is about as old if not older than almost any business and although it seems fairly straightforward, it’s also got some of the core corruption of other industries. Art is the second largest unregulated international market after illegal drugs and wine may be third. Winemaking methodology has been mostly unchanged for thousands of years and the subtle differences primarily occur in the casking, weather, terroir, and varietals.
I learned that individual tastes are from experience and education. I learned to size customers up based on their looks and know which direction to push them. I also learned that if you get enough wine in them and put them in a good mood, they’ll buy almost anything. I learned that the American palate is fond of fruit and sugar as compared to the Europeans and South Americans who started drinking wine at an early age instead of soda. I was selling wine in the era of Robert Parker’s rating system who’s since been blamed for the homogenization of wine. I still use professional reviews when I purchase because I don’t have the luxury of tasting but I know what my tastes are and what I’m being sold. I’m also somewhat in agreement with some of the criticisms of wine tasting being a junk science although I defend it to the naive as a matter of taste and artistic merit.
My professional experience with design has been somewhat similar. In college, I learned to survive art critique because It’s literally what drives studio art programs. I also doubled up with art history so I know a little bit there too. And over the last twenty-five years since college as a web developer, I’ve spent a lot of time discussing design. I’ve worked on very nouveau bleeding edge sorta designs for agencies and I’ve helped my stepmom with her dainty garden blog. I’ve learned that with design it’s almost the same as wine. It is dictated entirely by the same taste which is an effect of experience and education. I’ve mostly stopped trying to convince someone who doesn’t have experience that a certain style is more favorable and have started just following their preferences and design sensibilities just as I learned to do with wine.
There is some scientific evidence about our preferences toward very fundamental parts of visual aesthetics like symmetry and harmony, but the rest is a product of culture. One of the most fascinating aspects of design is that there is nothing objective about color because we don’t see colors the same. Here’s a personal real-world example: A fella I knew once walked into a room with a pair of pink plastic clogs on, so I said “What the heck are you wearing”. He went on to explain that he had just bought into the distribution rights of these shoes called Crocs and gave me a pair. And I laughingly said “Good luck with that” and needless to say, I was wrong. I did not have the sensibility to understand the value. All design follows the same principles… graphic, motion, interactive, architecture, and fashion. The ‘eye of the beholder’ is your sensibilities which are based on your own subjective experiences.
Artificiality & Asymmetry
Have we invented these tastes? Are they entirely subjective? I think that commercial success, in and of itself, should be taken as at least one of the markers of quality. Although 50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong 7, it’s also encroached into every field of knowledge. The paradox mostly attributed to Hume 8, is that while aesthetic value is subjective, but the ability to identify high value can be empirically identified.
When what a critic of a specific genre might call bullshit outperforms, it’s not only a new raison d’être for a cultural divide but newsworthy clickbait. Since when did everything become a wedge issue? I might argue that it’s not exactly a consequence of the information age and started about the same time the phonograph was invented.
The term Kulturkampf9, translated as culture struggle, was first used in 1872 to describe the politics between Prussia, Germany, and the Catholic Church. Jumping forward quite a bit, the Nazi party published the Kulturkampf Newsletters written between January 1936 and the end of 1939. This same sorta worldview was reignited in the U.S. in 1992 in a speech known as the “Cultural War Speech” by Pat Buchanan10, who is somewhat of an architect of the paleoconservative movement.
“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
The 1992 speech echoes all of the same subjects almost verbatim… racial riots, environmentalism, abortion, liberalism, he even started the speech off by calling the Democratic convention the “single greatest exhibition of cross-dressing” in history while focusing undue attention on Hillary Clinton’s feminism which should sound all too familiar. The common belief is that political party or religious membership shapes our opinion on cultural differences, but the reality is somewhat the opposite based on academic research. Our tastes and opinions on culture tend to dictate our political party and religious affiliation and while the front lines of politics have always been culture, our partisan identities are what we espouse.
I like to attribute the majority of this to the fact that the US is a melting pot and on the cusp of becoming a new majority-minority. Artistic merit and scientific merit can both be objectively analyzed. My point is this… although you’re unlikely to find me listening to a Taylor Swift or Beyonce album sans scanning them for this essay, I have the wherewithal to respect the quality and importance of their work and I’m not so ignorant to think my erudite ways dictate what sort of culture I should expose myself to next. I have enough experience to know my taste in wine, design, music, or anything else. What I tend to enjoy is where we’re going next. What kinds of cultural juxtapositions will shake out to make some great art? It’s what happened when Bill Evens mixed classical music with New Orleans jazz. It’s what happened when Elvis grew up in a poor black neighborhood in Mississippi. And it’s what happens when a little girl who learns to sing in her mom’s salon in Houston sings the words of a country song. It’s not a culture war, it’s our culture. If you’re sitting on the sidelines criticizing other folks’ tastes then you’re just part of the problem.
Update: ( 24/03/16 ) I picked up on another bit of Beyoncé nonsense recently12 which was straight-up political propaganda right along the lines of other divisive materials being distributed online. Watch the video. Aside from being completely made up, half of the article and video don’t even make sense. The Reuters fact check claims it’s satire, but let’s be a little more clear… it’s propaganda. Seeing stuff like this13 on Facebook is how people become idiots.
Update: ( 24/03/29 ) Since Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter14 in its entirety, I gave it a spin, read some of the reviews15,16, and wanted to note a couple of details. Willie Nelson appears as a DJ alongside of Dolly Parton introducing her cover of Jolene. I liked the lyric modifications of “I’m still a creole banjee bitch from lousianne”. There are snippets of Chuck Berry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Son House. She covers Paul McCartney’s Blackbird17 which sorta sounds country with the acoustic guitar but more relevant given its reference to the Civil Rights Movement. I was particularly fascinated by the inclusion of an introduction by another pioneer musician, Linda Martell18,19 who is originally from and still lives just about thirty miles down the road. She retired from the local school district as a bus driver and special ed assistant, so somewhere someone is saying “hold up, is that our old bus driver on the new bey album”. On my personal charts, I won’t put it up near Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, but I enjoyed the listen. I rolled through it several times admiring the complexity each go around. I’ll take Beyoncé over Buchanan in a culture clash matchup. Although we can debate your taste, I don’t think this album leaves any doubt about its artistic significance.
I normally like to brag about how little spam and unsolicited text messages I receive, but unfortunately, this hasn’t been the case in the last couple of weeks. Almost all of them are text messages soliciting participation in the primary elections so evidently, my number has made it into the database coffers of the aggressive political marketing folks. The Republican primary is this Saturday and for whatever reason, both the Haley and Trump crew seem to think that I’m all in. The thing is… I’m pretty bored of politics on both sides of the aisle and the problem seems to be sides of the aisle.
I’m pretty sure I’m the only one thinking this and I’ve had some lively conversations about it in the last couple of years so I’ve meant to write about it for some time. I can go ahead and get it out of the way before our upcoming elections. I like to poke at people’s perceptions and prejudices. After the Super Bowl recently I joked with an acquaintance that I didn’t know what Taylor Swift had to do with Football or why she ‘hated’ her so much now. I let it be after a couple of days of poking and I mostly just try to stay out of it. I’ve got friends on either side of the aisle. Even though I try to poke at them equally, it’s easier being a sideline coach than putting your opinion out there.
So here goes… I’m a member of The Purple Party ~ a moderate who thinks that bi-partisanship is the answer. I lean a bit progressive in the middle but I can tolerate and empathize with a variety of viewpoints. If I were a politician, I’d target the middle and I’d likely lose mainly because the wedge issues seem to drive voters. I think the backbone of this country is teachers, nurses, and light blue-collar workers… not necessarily the blue-collar plumber Joe who quit the Republican Party1, and not necessarily the so-called college-educated white-collar elites. I don’t mind fiscal conservatism, but I also don’t mind social progressivism. I have a social theory about us all being on the same human team and raising the bottom quartile for the sake of the team’s performance. It’s just a hunch since I have almost zero experience or background in history, social, or political science.
Self-identified moderates currently make up about a third of the American voting public. They also make up about one-third of the Democratic Party, one-fifth of the Republican Party, and about half of independent voters. The only thing lacking is some ideology and a name. Although Truman and Eisenhower were both centrist, there was never an official group. A decent poll from 2022 found that a little over 42% of respondents would vote for a candidate from a new political party that’s “in the middle between Democrats and Republicans.”2 The Purple Party would cater to the middle with some decent regulations on the finance industry, monopolies, the environment, and the cost of education and healthcare. The Purple Party would not regulate morality unless it had pragmatic effects on society. The Purple Party would focus on a budget that did not revolve around a tax-and-spend approach. The centrist Democrats can have the blue dog3 because I think the Purple Party’s mascot should be an owl.
Given my lack of decent moderate candidates, I vote Democrat these days mainly because the Republican party seems to be squarely under the control of ole’ dumpy and I just can’t see a very healthy outcome with more divisiveness4,5. Although your information may be telling you otherwise, Biden is largely considered a centrist. I’d vote for either party who’s got a decent moderate candidate with some experience. Although I might stand out as a bit left of center in my deep red territory, that’s not the case6. Centrist viewpoints just don’t make for good headlines in our attention economy. In my conversations with others, I generally like to blame the information age, globalization, competition for resources, and economic pressures for the polarization and ‘us’ and them’ attitudes. I can’t point fingers because I think we’re all to blame7. Now I have something tangible to forward along and I’m just going to give it my best to fast forward right through all of the rhetoric surrounding the upcoming November election.
We spent the first week of the year in Charleston, South Carolina. It’s always nice for us to spend time there because we’ve got friends and family there and it’s where my wife and I met twenty years ago 1. Technically speaking we spent most of our trip out on Folly Beach with a little side time on Edisto, John’s Island, Sullivan’s Island, Mt. Pleasant, and downtown Charleston. I think I started calling it “Charlietown” about the same time I left perhaps as a way to make it seem more casual. I’ve had some conversations with folks recently about it so I’m jotting my opinion out for posterity.
I lived in Charleston for about 18 years which is almost as long as I lived in Columbia, where I grew up. Given my memories before age 8 or so are pretty sparse, it seemed like much longer. I’m going on 16 years in the Piedmont which means I’ve almost equally spread myself between the three and at some point, I’d like to do my last umpteen up in the Blue Ridge to round it out. I’ve lived elsewhere around the country for brief stints but the vast majority has been in South Carolina. I’ve been visiting Charleston since I was very young. My father lived in Charleston as a kid and then again as an adult for another fifteen years. His brother graduated from Charleston High School and his other brother lived in Charleston for years. Here I am a couple weeks ago in the same spot at White Pointe Garden with a 45 year difference.
Charleston is too overcrowded now. That’s it… that’s my general summary when discussing it with other folks. They should have put up a “Sorry Folks, We’re Closed” sign twenty years ago. Perhaps I’m just being nostalgic, but I try to be objective about the population growth. I was still there when it started to cross the tipping point. A lot of lifelong Lowcountry folks like to cite Hurricane Hugo2 as the impetus and I moved in right afterward for college so I could have been part of the problem more than I’d like to admit especially given I was supporting one of the largest and most aggressive property owners in the city. I spent a year prior in Savannah which gave me a good perspective on the two somewhat similar cities. When I first moved in, Charleston was starting to experience a bit of a renaissance of sorts. Charleston Place Hotel3, which opened just a couple of years before Hugo had already started the process, and then Prince Charles visited twice in 1990.
When King Charles III visited, he did so because of his interest in historic preservation and affordable housing efforts after the damage from Hurricane Hugo. He spoke to a group of executives explaining “that capitalism needed to become more humane, wielded in more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways”4. The King and the mayor at the time, Joe Riley planted a new tree for one that had fallen in front of a house on Cannon Street.
I lived on Cannon Street for a couple of years and house-sat for a family on Orange Street5 close to Riley’s house where I’d always pass him in the street and speak. I just tried to count the number of places I lived downtown and got eight, but I also lived in the old village of Mt Pleasant for a couple of years, out on Folly Beach, and up the highway in McClellanville. My father also lived on the Isle of Palms and in Mount Pleasant for about fifteen years. One of the houses I rented downtown on Vanderhorst Street got sold to an out-of-town buyer, whom I ran into at a sailing event at the marina where he explained to me that it was a better investment than New York. The last house we had downtown was a carriage house on Franklin Street. We used to talk a good bit to the third-generation owner who rented out the home and his struggles to pay the taxes and upkeep the house. Two years after we left, he sold it which I’m sure is a relatively all-too-common occurrence.
We came into Charleston last week via the back roads down to Edisto, ironically to see a new house construction, and up through John’s Island, but we left out I-26 and that’s where the majority of the evidence is. Multi-tenant housing buildings line the upper peninsula and new developments stretch at least halfway to I-95. I read a couple of editorial pieces on the development just to get a barometer of whether or not I’m just being curmudgeonly on it. Even when I lived there, it just constantly got busier and busier. The beaches and downtown got to where you had to avoid the holidays and weekends. Some of the more colorful aspects of the culture, which I’d argue are oft the most celebrated, have been pushed into a slim minority losing its authenticity like something rebranded that’s just slightly off. like when Charleston single-row style houses are constructed inland in a neighborhood with Plantation in the name and full-sized palm trees hauled in.
I first got my first whiff of this future in the late 90’s when Daniel Island and a bunch of new developments were started in Mount Pleasant. This was capped off by the new bridge in 2005 and all of the publicity on Charleston being a top travel destination. As this happens to other regional cities like Asheville and Greenville, it makes me wonder exactly what is a decent recipe for growth. I’ve also lived in really small economically distressed towns as well and can see the need for balance. Perhaps I’ve just become accustomed to fewer people at a slower pace but it’s now happening around the area I live because South Carolina has people coming in. According to a 2023 report, South Carolina is the top state and Charleston is the highest-ranked city nationally for inbound migration. Although it makes me want to capitalize on it, now I’m just primarily interested in preserving my interests, which happen to revolve mostly around peace and quiet.
When I think about places to live, one of the most important considerations is a sense of community. I think it’s an often overlooked aspect that has a major effect on quality of life. It revolves around having a well-rounded community of various types of people and services like healthcare, education, agriculture, industry, and business. It’s easy to fall privy to the false promises of places like The Villages in Florida or even Hilton Head Island in South Carolina but staying there any length of time will dissolve those facades. I’m sure there are bright folks from varying backgrounds in urban planning and architecture trying to wrangle these issues. I’ve always thought that Charleston could get rid of the cars on the peninsula. The billionaire-backed California Forever released its plans for a pre-planned walkable and affordable community that could eventually have half a million residents. Charleston doesn’t have the advantage of being pre-planned but that’s where it’s charm lies. It’s easy to imagine yourself car-free in an urban environment and taking in the amenities and culture of a city but speak with anyone who’s lived there long enough and you’ll likely hear conflicting stories. Just this morning, The Post and Courier’s front page was dominated by articles about the pains of growth. There’s just something nice about running into people you know and I think I’d find it pretty hard to live in a city that’s primarily a tourist destination or a college. I used to work at an Inn in Charleston and I loved to remind the guests of the more sordid history because they tended to romanticize the past. Perhaps I’m just doing the same for what I knew of Charleston.
I’m just not sure about the future changes to the quality of life for South Carolinians and I’m equally as unsure about any long-term solutions for maintaining a nice balance. I suppose the market is trying to level out the growth with pricing but that hasn’t seemed to slow down the migration. Joe Riley cited his studies of European cities in his efforts to revitalize Charleston, but some of the most beautiful places in Italy and France are now trying to incentivize the revitalization of old properties. And even now, one of the more prominent writers on Charleston’s architecture and historic preservation, Robert Behre is writing editorials about saving College Lodge8,9, a former motor inn converted into a dorm. I think King Charles III’s speech there years ago on sustainable development needs to be brought up at every single zoning request for some new developer.
( 24/02/04) After I had written out the essay, I had some reservations about publishing it because of how critical I can be and the complexity of the issues. I had some follow-up conversations with my better half about the essay and how it relates to our small hometown and even down to the scale of our neighborhood. I just wanted to add that I think population growth and change can be healthy as long as there is some decent long term planning. Charleston has the challenges of both the population growth and sea level changes.
I’ve written up a couple of years in review essays and since I like the process, here I am doing it again. I like the title because it implies some sort of 20/20 hindsight which is most likely not the case. My 2022 review was fairly chin-up given some of the circumstances. Thinking about it now, for me 2023 was pretty, pretty, pretty good. I took some trips, coached some tennis, got a new dog, and tried to enjoy my work 2. Writing these out seems to be a good way to reflect and shake out some overarching themes.
While riding in the car yesterday, I told my wife how much I’m starting to enjoy self-deprecation. It’s so easy being your own public relations agent that we all seem to do it. I texted my friends joking about my lame eve plans and how I wouldn’t likely make it till midnight and could barely knock out a split of champagne. I left the champagne unopened in the fridge because I’m now easily downed by a half bottle of wine. No worries, I opened it for breakfast this morning. I think part of the key for self-deprecation is that I’ve noticed in my interactions with others that I’ve stopped worrying about myself and I’ve started thinking more about them. I think it takes a good bit of effort to reach this stage, but it’s definitely the way to be. Stop thinking about yourself.
I hit the big five-o last year and seem to be rolling into my fifties fairly nicely. A couple of days ago, a friend of mine texted a group of us that his father had passed which is the type of reminder I think we all need every so often. Personally, I’ve prioritized maintenance mode for my body and my attitude on this has shifted dramatically since my brother passed. I feel like we’re all still struggling with a type of infantile object permanence. Nothing is really permanent, not even our memories, and accepting it is part of what makes life fun. I’ve certainly stopped thinking that there is an imaginary finish line or goal and started looking at it all as just a process. Albeit a bit abstract, my first year in review essay in 2019 was on the money for having this attitude. Be here now.
I always scan through my photos about his time of year and I think that “whoa, look at how young we looked” is a relatively common experience for other people. A really interesting concept to me is the idea of change blindness… if you introduce small changes to something that we regularly see, like ourselves in the mirror, they mostly go unnoticed. Except of course that balding spot you can’t really see on the back of your head. I first saw mine in one of those security cameras at a store and had to raise my hand to make sure it was me I was looking at. I think this same sort of change blindness is also in play on a larger scale in relation to a sort of collective negativity bias. There was some recent press about a series of surveys that determined that 77% of Americans thought crime was going up while it actually decreased across the board by pretty good margins. My best explanation is that it’s a consequence of the information age and ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ sorta attention economy.
The situation in Gaza and Ukraine, or the hideous state of American politics don’t help, but my opinion of them thrown into the void won’t make a ripple. I won’t even mention that we had the hottest global temperature on record or the second and third-largest banking collapses in history. Even though some of the data shows improvement, I don’t necessarily think things are getting any better, but I also don’t think they’re getting worse. I just think they’re changing. I’ve made a real effort to stop applying my own bias to stop framing things as good or bad. I mostly try to disengage so that I can focus on what I’m able to control.
I’m already ahead of my taxes this year since we had to make some small changes related to the better half taking a new position. I was able to do some additional charitable work which is always a good reminder of how fun work can be without the deadlines and negotiations. I had some good glimpses of why I enjoy computers this last year with AI. Most of all, I’ve stopped thinking about work and money in terms of stuff or competition. I’ve started thinking about it in terms of time and since I know that my time is invaluable, I tried to prioritize just trying to enjoy my work.
I’ve got some challenges ahead this year. My first contract of the year is going to be a doozy in that it’ll require a heavy amount of learning and work. I think I’m gonna try to learn to get the most out of my brain without the morning coffee. I’m also wearing my body down, mostly from the heat and sun, trying to keep up with the kids on my tennis teams so I think I’m gonna go ahead and try to line up some younger assistants to help pull some of the weight. My parents are getting on up there and instead of dreading the inevitable, I’m just trying to enjoy them now. The better half has a pretty heavy load with her dissertation, so I’m gonna see if I can double down on the cooking and cleaning so I’m sure I’ll be adding recipes here soon.
I’ve got a couple of cool things coming up. We’re headed down to Charleston for the rest of the week. Our twentieth anniversary is this fall. Ginny will be defending her dissertation and we’ll get her a new car and take a trip to celebrate. We’re also going to be renovating our upstairs bathroom which means that I’ll be building out a new workspace in our den so that Ginny can take my office and hers can become a walk-in dressing room. I’m going to gear my new workspace a little less of an office and a bit more towards a studio by adding in some old fashion atelier tools and some new-fangled multi-media tools6. I’d like to re-learn the piano and some new audio/video production stuff for fun. Although it’s fun to have those carrots out there in front of me, I try to remember to take it day by day.
2023 in a sentence… I tried to stop thinking about myself, learned to live more in the now, focused on my locus of control, learned to enjoy my work, and just let it all happen. So let’s all just try to ignore the bullshit, cherish our time, enjoy our work, let it roll, and make the best of 2024.
Best wishes to y’all out there and I hope you have a happy new year.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with our new dog Iris1,2. Enough so that it’s become my first priority cutting in my work, tennis, and other chores. Iris is eight months old now and she’s a handful. I’m pretty committed to training and spending time with her. She’s sitting on the couch next to me as I type this up. It was cold out this morning which made me think about how thankful I am for our Halo dog collar. I stood inside the den eating cereal watching her roam the back yard for a good spot to do the doo. And since a lot of folks ask about it, I figured I’d just write about it here and send them a link.
It’s not my first rodeo training training a dog. I’ve had three now and can’t say it gets any easier. While she’s young, I still want her to be able to run wild because that’ll make her happy. I have no clue why some people seem to think that having big dogs in small yards or indoors is acceptable. Dogs are just domesticated descendants of wolves and wild canines, who for instance, have a territorial range that averages over 100 miles. My last two dogs had free roam because I was in a remote location but unfortunately, our current yard is just over an acre in a neighborhood. I walk her the loop around the hood and let her fetch in the yard and pond. She’s at the age now where she’s accepted we’re the lead dogs in the pack, but she’s still testing it every so often. I got somewhat comfortable with her off-leash out in the yard, but after seeing her go after a cyclist or golf cart several times, I knew I’d have to add a fence to be a good neighbor and for her safety.
We ordered the Halo Collar3 to give it a go because we really like the idea of taking the fence with us when we travel. I’ve been using it for about four months now and there will be no need for a fence. And no, there aren’t any promotional strings attached here even though they did email me asking for a positive review in a support ticket and I am using my referral link in the reference below. The best I can do is an honest write-up here for anyone who might stumble upon it.
The Halo Collar is a satellite GPS powered collar that allows you to create a custom fences. It has three levels of encouragement and three levels of prevention feedback. There are various audio cues for encouragement and prevention. When your dog gets near a ‘fence’ boundary or beacon, it gives warnings and when it retreats it gives encouragement. The collar also has static vibrations and electric shock when they cross the boundary. We spent the first couple of weeks two training alongside the instruction videos. I think Iris and I both got bored of them after a while even though they’re well done. She responded pretty quickly to the encouragement feedback because well… she loves food and treats. That was the easy part. She mostly picked up on the beacon training before I was ready to let her roll outside. The beacon is like a small radius fence line. I tested the electric shock on myself first just holding it in my hand and I started her on the lowest setting because I’m more of a positive reinforcement sorta person and I didn’t want to create an adverse reaction to wearing the collar. She already knew the boundaries of our property because we’ve been leash training her within them and do not allow her into the road unless she knows we’re going for a walk.
Setting up fences is easy. You just walk the collar along the board and click to add fence posts. The GPS is accurate to within a couple of feet. ( we have version 3 if that means anything ). Most of the initial time she spent outside with the collar was closely monitored watching and calling her when she got a whiff from the distance and started easing off of our property. Then she got away the first time chasing a walker who had passed by down the road, ignoring the various beeps and whistles and just shaking her head every time she got shocked like it was a mild irritation. So I got her back onto the property and cranked up the electric feedback to 3 ( 1-15 setting ). That was all fine and dandy until she started running with a neighboring dog along a fence line and took off to the other side of the property again… just shaking her head when the emergency feedback happened. I turned the feedback up to 5 ( 1/3 power ) for the next time it happened, because I knew it would. The last time she ran off, it was because she started swimming in the pond, and for whatever reason, whenever she gets muddy she gets excited. She got a whiff of a deer trail along the back of the pond and just took off into the woods not even stopping or shaking her head for the shocks. They shocks are not constant, they’ll hit three at a time and then break for a couple of minutes before they continue in threes. I looked back at the app afterward, and she had 24 shocks and had been out of the fence line for about 16 minutes which means it’s about a two-minute break between sets.
I crunk it up again to 1/2 power ( 8/15 ) afterward and have left it there. We had about five or so outdoor sessions prior to the last escape so I know she knows, the deterrent and/or reward for coming back just wasn’t strong enough to keep her from running. I heard a story of an acquaintance whose dog had another electric fence product who would just move close enough to the fence line and sit there long enough to let the battery run out so it could run loose. I know Iris wants to chase those deer and we have a lot of them around our house so it isn’t going to be easy. Aside from other dog walkers, golf carts, and bicycles, we also have a pond full of turtles, dragonflies, and fish she also wants to catch. The main thing is keeping her out of the two roads which border our house. Although the collar is for her safety, I’ve seen other folks strap up their dogs to a shock collar with a remote and just buzz them for bad behavior. When I mentioned shocking our dog to others, I always have to explain how it works and tell them how I tested it on myself first so they might understand my sympathy.
The Halo collar works, but only after you’ve trained your dog to pay close attention to it with rewards and punishment. She now responds almost perfectly to the border warnings and has only crossed a couple times in excitement to visit other dogs walking by and quickly returned. I’ve had family dogs that would just dig out under our fence and would be lost for hours while we drove around the neighborhood calling for them. At least now I can see on a map exactly where she is. There is a much larger range than an in ground wireless fence where once they’ve crossed they’re free. I charge it nightly and have yet to have any glitches with upgrades or the app. I’ve set up fences around some common areas we travel to and she still responds to the border warnings albeit a bit tepid at first because she doesn’t know where they are. Another feature I really like is the remote signals feature. I have one set to whistle, so I can just tap a button on my phone to send the whistle to her collar and she’ll come running back to the back deck or front door. I put it on her about four to five times a day so she can nose around and hang out in the yard. I still mostly keep tabs on her whereabouts, but I’m now comfortable enough to do other things while she’s out.
Iris now knows she’s headed out as soon as I offer to put on the collar. She gets excited likely because I usually pair the time outside with chunking the frisbee or ball. I’m just thankful I didn’t have to fence in the yard and don’t have to suit up early in the morning to head out into the cold. Overall, it’s another one of those how’d I live without it things. The piece of mind far exceeds the cost and it’s just one more thing that makes living with a dog more rewarding.
We took a trip up to Lake Lure last week1. The weather was about perfect… a bit cooler than the scorching temps we’ve had down in the Piedmont. Getting out onto and into the water in summer is almost a ritual for me at this point. We rented a nice house on Lake Adger2 just about ten miles south of Lake Lure and we had a boat rental. We just spent a couple of days trolling around the area. We went partly because we’ve been looking at property in the area and the best way to get to know somewhere is to stay there. The lakes were nice and quiet because all the other folks usually travel over Labor Day weekend. There couldn’t have been more than fifteen other boats out Friday morning on Lake Lure. The best time to travel is when other people aren’t.
We have some friends who just got back from Lake Como3 in Italy and we joked with them that we had a much better experience because we saved about twenty-five grand and the commute was much easier. It’s only an hour and forty-five minute haul up the road from us and we’re lucky to have such beautiful getaways within a short drive. It’s also reasonably priced… we had a nice house with million-dollar views for around $200 a night. Granted the history is much shorter, but we had lunch at a local winery which surprisingly had some decent wines. We went to some local stores for fun. There’s a bit of good ole’ fashion tacky American tourist shite lingering around, but that’s certainly in Italy too. Lake Lure is mostly nice and I can see a lot of potential. Given its shorter history, Lake Lure still has the same kinda of small-town old-world charm with the boathouses lining the lake.
Lake Lure and Lake Adger were both privately built in the 1920s for hydroelectric power. Lure feeds and is fed by the Broad River4 and Adger the Green River5 which merges into the Broad further downstream. I grew up where the Saluda6 and Broad meet. I’ve moved downstream as far as I could go and now I prefer to spend time back upstream. Lake Lure, Adger, Jocassee, and the Saluda Reservoirs are about as far upstream as you can go in the Carolinas before you’re into the hills. The headwaters are always the cleanest and least developed mainly because of the constraints of the landscape. Aside from the dams, the legacy of various textile and other industries in the Carolinas has really spoiled the natural beauty of many of our watersheds. They get relatively overdeveloped and overused where they’re accessible. Where they aren’t, like the blackwater swamps of the Pee-Dee, are generally the most lovely. As a kid, I used to do a bit of the Lynches and Pee Dee Rivers where we kept a chainsaw in the boat to clear fallen trees. I also used to paddle a bit of the WambawSwamp7 at the end of the Santee River8, which is the terminus for the same water from Lake Lure.
Sometimes, the only place to really escape the summer crowds on the water is offshore. My budget isn’t exactly deep water friendly and even the Charleston harbor and Intercoastal waterways get swamped with people on busy weekends. Sailing in cold weather is about the only way to avoid it which is why my wife and I crewed a sailboat. I’m mostly a landlubber though and don’t enjoy the big water as much… likely because it just feels unfamiliar. I don’t really enjoy fishing, especially in deep water in a small boat. I like skiing alright, but not as much as just drifting along in decent company. I grew up on Lake Murray9 and even then, in the late 80’s, the best time to be out on the water was anytime but the weekends and mostly on the upper end of the lake that was less developed. That’s not the case now as the development has stretched all the way up into the Saluda River.
Lake Greenwood10 is also fed by the Saluda River and is very close to our home. We hardly ever get out on it though because it tends to get packed with the motorboat crowd zooming from one spot to the next. Much like Lake Murray, there is a lot of new development going on. We owned a lot out there for years but sold it because we had no intent on building. The whole ‘lake life’ thing is just the sound of jet skis, motorboats, and drunk folks on boats blasting music behind your house. There is something nice about how every inch of space along Lake Lure has mostly been developed and they’re now in the stage of trying to make it sustainable with boating regulations and building restrictions. Lake Adger has no jet ski and low-power motor restrictions. It’s hard to find a time and place to enjoy that people aren’t ruining with their nonsense. Lake Jocassee is one of those places just because the shoreline isn’t developable and we tend to visit there most often. And although I should ruin it by advertising, Lake Lure after Labor Day is also just that place.
We decided to adopt a new puppy last year and we picked up Iris last weekend. Her full name is Iris of Zoey & Adger House of Zekën Woozer from her parents and to imply a dynasty from our former dogs. I’m not sure how the name Iris came about, but it could have something to do with the Iris’ that started blooming in our front yard and the fact that I saw that her sister from another litter is named Daffodil. In mythology, Iris is goddess associated with communication, messages, the rainbow, and new endeavors. She is the personification of a rainbow linking the heavens and earth… but right now our Iris is just chewing up anything she can get a hold of.
The first thing I ever published on this website was a picture of our dogs2. I’ve since published several others3,4 and our last dog Zeke passed at the end of 2021 at 19 years old5. I’ve had dogs most of my life. My mom has a pug and terrier mix named Emmit and my dad has a Collie named Lucy. My grandmother on my father’s side raised and bred Boston Bull Terriers. My grandfather had one that played golf with him everyday named Duke. Growing up, my family had Airedale Terrier, black Cocker Spaniel, white German Shepard, and a black Pug named Macs6. It’s likely the reason that I’ve always liked dogs.
Our first dogs just kinda came to us, and although I regularly checked the local humane society pages, we decided to pick a Golden from a breeder7. Although partly based on the mom and dad, we also wanted a pup that had been raised around a large family. It’s important to have a good temperament because we will be training her so that she can be certified to work with kids with disabilities in the schools. My wife will have a day every so often when she can take a break from adminstration and just take the pup to visit the kids.
Woozie ( Honey Boozer )
We previously had a rescued Golden mix name Woozie that was quite the character. Something about her personality that reminded me of the dad of Iris… a bit more red or a bit more wild perhaps. Dad is a hoss named Adger and Mom is Zoey, who has a big smile. I’ve gone to wearing a fanny pack full of kibble and carrying a clicker with me everywhere. I’ve been doing my due diligence on training, service animals, and researching the effects on students. I’m learning quite a bit so perhaps she’s training me. It should make for an interesting essay somewhere down the line comparing artificial and canine intelligence. At just under ten weeks she’s already getting some of my commands and signals down pat. She’s out and about exploring, meeting other dogs and people, watching tennis, and riding in the car.
Just one week in and I’ve already noticed the postitive impact Iris is having on our lives. Instead of spending our waking hours scrolling through emails and whatnot, we’re spending them outside listening to the birds chirping or watching the sunset while playing with Iris. I’m spending much less time at my desk, so I’m having to make the time here more valuable. Even writing up this post was only made possible because I went out and ran her early this morning. I just want her to be happy. And if she’s happy, she’ll make other people happy too. I think we all know it’s just something about how dogs can make people smile.
23.05.31 – @ 11 weeks. She’s gonna be a big girl… we’ve been calling her “little miss big booty”.
23.06.08 – @ 12 weeks. She’s learned to eat books and attack the sprinklers.
23.06.10 – @13 weeks. Took her first running dive into the pond yesterday afternoon.
23.06.18 – @14 weeks. Learning to listen when she wants.
23.07.03 – @15 weeks. Drooling for treats.
23.08.01 – @17 & 18 weeks. Chewing up everything and outruns me.
23.08.05 – @19 weeks. Tall enough to reach whatever she wants off the countertops.
23.08.12 – @20 weeks. Almost calm enough to sit with me at my desk without destroying something.
23.08.20 – @21 weeks. Ready to roam… or chase dragonflies.
23.09.10 – @ 6 months
23.10.08 – @ 7 months
23.10.17 – I’m gonna stop on the photo above for this essay. Iris enjoys a good belly rub. I’ll upload future photos @ photo.davidwindham.com . She’s doing great.. loves people, going for walks, rides, swims chasing squirrels, chewing up everything, playing with the cat, and just hanging out the couch. I’ve set her loose in a classroom. We’ve still got a little bit of training to go before I can get her to stop jumping and service certified, but I’m sure that’ll be in a future post.
I’ve been doing the deep dive on Artificial Intelligence and I’ve already written several essays1,2. It started with an essay entitled A Second Brain3 about personal knowledge bases. I started taking some online courses to help and asking questions to those much more informed. And what I’ve learned thus far is that I have a LOT more to learn. I’m still a bit fuzzy on vector dimensions, weights, how neural networks are built, and why linear regressions are used in machine learning. I don’t really want to delve into any of the technical here mostly because I don’t completely understand them, but I would like to add to my essays on AI.
I’ve found that I really learn best with hands-on experience in reverse engineering. About a week ago I started learning how to integrate LangChain into OpenAI’s GPT-44. I published a simple demo forked from another project that uses a tool to extract info from a pdf into a vector database. I’ve since started using and testing other large langugage models. And I’ve gotten up to speed on a development environment supporting running various transformers and models locally.
This morning I published a personal AI Assistant @ https://davidawindham.com/til/ai/5 which has access to all of the documents in my ‘Today I Learned’ repo. It wasn’t very technically difficult given that the code to ingest the repo was already written and I’m just using the OpenAI API for the language model. Although there will be a ton of service as software offerings for doing so, I’m now on to the more difficult task of learning to customize the vector databases and weight-train the models.
I’ve had a lot of discussions about AI recently and I started off, as I usually do, rather unimpressed. The second essay I wrote changed my mind and now I’m on to how can it be applied. Larger clients may have the need to apply semantic search and answer sort of applications using AI, but the majority of my work still revolves around supporting mostly small-scale clients’ who could benefit most by using it internally to train new staff or maintain documentation. The 20 to 30 two-way interactions I have on a daily basis generally revolve around support or service questions via email which could be serviced by AI, but I’m still mostly focused on using it as a personal second brain. Perhaps I’ll try training a model on my emails and text messages for fun.
“Garbage In, Garbage Out” is a term colloquially used to describe that nonsense input data will produce nonsense output. I regularly use the expression for both technical and non-technical explanations. My wife sent me the screenshot today on the right of my AI bot responding before we met for lunch:
It reminded me of the importance of the organization and quality of the source documents. I don’t want an AI to do everything. I just want it to do some things very accurately. Perhaps I’ll go in and improve my list of favorite foods at some point to improve that result. Here are some results that are a bit better organized.
I think this is going to be the issue moving forward with various AI platforms and tools. It won’t matter that your spreadsheet can give you a natural language response to the thousands of rows of sales data because that data isn’t entirely accurate or organized. It’s what folks are now finding out now about the sources of ‘Artificial Intelligence’. My sometimes incoherent rambling on this website is in the dataset powering some models. I think there will be a huge number of professional use case scenarios. I’m certainly not gloomy in my outlook, but considering the amount of misinformation that folks seem eager to swallow up and share, it’s just going to make it even more confusing.
Five years from now, it’ll just be part of everyday life. My fridge will take a photograph of its contents, use AI to determine what they are, use AI to compare it against the previous stock, and use AI to message me a shopping list using natural language. If I haven’t updated my favorite foods or grocery lists by then, it’ll only be suggesting pickles, vinegar, and okra. The more I wrap my head around it, this scene from the film Her6 seems to be not only completely plausible, but somewhat likely.
