Recently

Early this month I arrived at work to see a Concorde parked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It’s been fun to identify the ships docked there, but an airplane was new, especially such a rare one. I guess a lot of airplane knowledge from my childhood has stayed with me, and being greeted by this Concorde, and watching the new Top Gun has brought it back.

This one’s G-BOAD, the Concorde that’s been flown the most, and it usually lives at the Intrepid, but it badly needs a new coat of paint, so it’s in the Navy Yard for that. Pretty fun! They brought it there on a barge.

Watching

The only great film I watched this month was Snatch. Brad Pitt’s accent in the film, which is supposed to be that of an Irish Traveller, is a big highlight.

On the shorter video front, I’ve been enjoying Berm Peak, which is sort of a mountain bike repair, chat, technology video. Already learned a few things from it, like how derailleur hangers are such a disposable part and SRAM’s really interesting attempt at making them unnecessary.

I was into mountain bikes as a kid and paid a lot of attention to what was new and fancy. It’s cool to see a few technologies truly mainstreamed, like 29ers, tubeless tires, and full-suspension, all virtually default for new bikes. And how a few technologies never took off, like belt drives and transmissions. And I’m totally surprised by the rise of wireless shifting, but I want to try it out soon. Not sure how I’ll craft a lifestyle that has me both living in a great city like New York, and also owning and riding a mountain bike, but here’s to trying.

Listening

This was a month with no new music. I’m kind of frustrated by my music setup recently: Roon, my favorite MP3 player on the desktop, has an awful bug that has kept me from using it since March. Hugops to the folks fixing it, and maybe it’s caused by .NET rather than their application code, but however it came to be, it means I’m not using Roon. So I’m using Doppler, which is fast, minimal, and doesn’t aim to be an application for music discovery. Meanwhile I’m hoping for a Roon bugfix or the release of Overtone, which might be like Roon plus better ways to take notes on your music.

In podcast land, I’m still enjoying QAnon Anonymous a lot. Conspiracy, like religion, has always seemed like a productive way to see the distilled and clarified core beliefs and fears of the people.

Reading

Both Fortress in Brooklyn, about the Satmar Hasidic sect and real estate in Brooklyn, and How to Hide an Empire, about America’s territories, were very good reads.

I’ve been reading and sometimes subscribing to Eric Newcomer’s Substack, and liked his piece about All-In and access journalism. Eric’s involved and knowledgable, and has a lot of entertaining scoops. I do think that Lex Fridman is the more extreme instance of access journalism: him barely interrogating Balaji Srinivasan’s hours-long idea salad, and taking a dive whilst Judo fighting Elon Musk to legitimize Elon’s fighting ability. The dynamic, I think, is that some of these people are self-identified servants to power.

Elsewhere

I finally wrote a new article, about open source dual-licensing. It touched on a lot of complicated topics and I don’t think I or anyone have the power to find a truly correct answer, but I at least tried to explain some of the factors at play. I wanted to get it out relatively quickly, so it’s not as deep as it could be. I might write a follow-up soon, but I have some other fun topics that are in the queue.