“Four Good Days” (2020) is a heart wrenching dramatic film about a mother helping her daughter through heroin and other drug withdraw for the four days before she can get a shot that will help her reset her life.

(SPOILERS BELOW)

“Voyagers” (2021) is an entertaining the merger between “Lord of the Flies” and Passengers (2016) .

(MILD SPOILERS BELOW)

I’ve long recognized that I’ve let pop culture pass me by in all areas. I was never the most plugged in person on that matter to begin with. Like most people as I got older I’d rather listen to old songies, now definitely “oldies”, or my favorite older movies, now often definitely “classics”. That has left me feeling more disconnected than ever from the modern world. I have no idea who current actors, singers, writers, directors, etc. are. I am somewhat plugged in to some of the shows on the streaming services but that is not exactly the same thing. So for 2020 I decided I’d make an effort to see every first run movie that came through my local movie theater. COVID killed all that. Now that I’m fully vaccinated I’ve decided to revive the challenge.

About a month ago I decided to try a head to head match up of various Linux rolling release distributions, documented in this blog post. A month in I’ve added a few new distributions and have some initial observations.

NOTE: the continually updated results spreadsheet is hosted on a NextCloud server here and the repository with all of the most recent data, commands, etc. is hosted here .

For a long time I’ve felt that we need a better way to do capitalism, or more generally a market based economic model. My first foray into actually studying that was running across John Abrams’s The Company We Keep back in 2007. I was suffering extreme burnout from starting my own company with the traditional workaholic model and thought there had to be a better way. In my own company at the time I started advocating for and pushing some of these sorts of things within the bounds that we could. If I ever started another company, I said, I wanted to do a radically different model of ownership, governance, and culture to really test out these newer ideas. In recent years I ran across the writings of the founders of Basecamp , David Heinemeir Hansson (DHH) and Jason Fried . They have a whole podcast called Rework which covers these topics as well. It is very much about rethinking a lot of the conventional wisdoms in the corporate world using techniques they’ve used at their own company for 20 years or so. I thought they were a good model to look at when trying to formulate what my own new corporate culture and structure should be. That fact is what made the events of the last two weeks even more distressing to me. I decided to re-read their two books It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work and Rework as well as looking at how these events unfolded to see how if I was confronted with the same scenario I would handle it differently. I’m not doing this as a beat up on Jason and DHH exercise but instead to try to process this to learn from this whole thing.

Back in March I wrote this piece on the whole RMS debacle and how we have to stop worshiping and coddling idols. I came to that conclusion long before the RMS debacle. I experienced my own idol worship experience in my early years. My most intensive idol worship was around Steve Jobs. I’ve read many biographies on him, watched all the movies, documentaries, etc. I could find. The biography and history story of NeXT chronicled in the 1993 book Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing by Randall E. Stross though is something quite different. Most Jobs biographies are fawning with a hint of mild criticism in a few choice places. Some like The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman and Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson provided a more nuanced picture that showed a bunch of Steve’s warts, and not in a “well akshully that was a good thing” rationalization sort of way. They were written after Job’s had his redemption with the return to Apple though. Stross’s book on the other hand is a very one sided scathing critique of Jobs with very little if any positive things to say. It was written in 1993 at the trough of NeXT the hardware company and before they “successfully” converted to a software company. While it is scathing and solely/mostly negative I believe it is fair and accurate.

In this era of new idol worship I’m finding myself rethinking my own prior positions in the context of the now-known reality. Beyond my prior worship of Jobs I absolutely love NeXT computers, the hardware and the software. I obsess about the design aesthetic and think it is peak computer design. I collect them along with other classic computers. I spend way too much time reading about them. I love the fact that modern macOS and iOS are built on them. I still need to look at the dark history of the company revealed in this book and confront it. So the TL;DR are that I love this book for bringing this harsh reality of this thing and person I paid too much deference.

This is an update on my monthly blog stats generated with my non-tracking The BlogStatViewer program. I followed the same steps as in last month’s post for refining the updates to make sure that bots/spiders/etc aren’t in the statistics. This month it took a grand total of ten minutes cleaning up about a dozen new bot type accesses. Below are the updated stats for the month of April.

As I wrote in my previous post two months ago I deployed my own custom made blog/static site statistics generation tool. March was the first month that I have full statistics on since the Nginx logs that were processed in the early part of March, when I finally deployed it, go back into late February. With this first month down I decided to review my blog’s statistics and share them with the internet as well. I don’t think I’ll necessarily be doing monthly updates of my blog statistics but at the very least I could see doing annual ones. The ultimate schedule is TBD but let’s look at this first month’s statistics. All of these statistics have the bots/spiders/automated systems excluded from them. This includes things like Fediverse servers hitting a post as it federates across the network and it hits the link to generate OpenGraph information, RSS feed reader systems, etc.

A couple months ago in this blog post I debuted a home grown blog/static website statistics generator that used nothing but the Nginx log data. I’ve been letting it run since then to see if it is really getting the job done for what I need: basic information about traffic to my various posts, the referrers that they came from, and maybe some information about browsers/OS’s. I was hoping that it would be lightweight, efficient, and easy to use. I’m very happy to say that I have found it to be exactly that. There are rough edges of course, this is a 1.0 release of software that is intentionally hobbled by not being able to use tracking JavaScript code etc., but it is something I’m proud of and am glad I wrote. Below I’ll be exploring how I use it and what improvements I can see making.

My desire to always experiment with operating systems and the drumbeat of OpenSUSE updates on The Coder Radio Podcast had me give OpenSUSE for a whirl. It’d been awhile since I’d experimented with my one and only foray into rolling releases, Solus , so I decided to go with their Tumbleweed rolling release. Overall I’m pretty happy but I keep complaining about the time it takes to run updates. I’ve been told that’s pretty par for the course for a rolling release but I didn’t recall Solus having that sort of issue but memory is a funny thing. I figured the best thing to do would be to run the two head to head to see if it’s just a rolling release thing or an OpenSUSE thing. Then I figured why stop there. Thus the Linux Rolling Releases Head to Head Competition was born.