For Your Consideration

I haven’t been in Copenhagen long, just a whirlwind twenty-four hours so far, but I’ve already been delighted by so much. Walking around, one can’t help but notice little things and how they speak to the ethos of a culture. Here’s a running list. 1 Cars get a yellow light before both a green and red light. That is, on a red light, there will be an additional yellow light a second or two before it turns green. Pedestrian walk signs are red and green. The majority of crosswalks have no warning that the walk sign is about to turn red. That’s been tricky. If a crosswalk does have a countdown, it’s obvious. The green walk sign remains green alongside the numbers. Then, when it turns red, there is a countdown for when the walk sign will turn on next. Copenhagen residents typically do not jaywalk. Even on a quiet morning with almost no cars in sight, four runners came to a dead stop at a red crosswalk. Biking is the primary mode of transportation. They have traffic signals (that bicyclists actually obey). Cars are second-class vehicles. Pedestrians are third-class, so crossing any street requires paying attention to both the generously wide bicycle lane2 and the road itself. I’ve noticed exactly one bike that was locked up. They are, by and large, parked without tethers among throngs of other bikes without worry. Outside of cardamom rolls/buns, I have no clue whether traditional Danish cuisine is represented in the restaurant scene.3 But every restaurant and café I’ve been to has been fantastic, with surpassingly friendly service. Harbor swimming is a huge summer activity, at all hours of the day. There are little piers dotting the length of water where swimming is either explicitly allowed or essentially tolerated. Because it’s a harbor, there’s no beach. You jump in the water, tread or swim around a bit, climb out, then repeat. Sidewalks have a loose “lane” organization, where concrete walkways are split by thin cobblestone lines. Unlike most other cities, there are no gaggles of people walking four abreast, clogging up any opportunity to pass them in their brainless ambling. Walking has been a treat. Copenhagen is remarkably flat. The only terrain for pedestrians or bikes are bridges. There are a few modern buildings and hotels, some castles and church spires that form a scattered skyline. However, walking around Copenhagen mainly presents dense, old, multicolored five-story buildings. It reminds me of San Francisco, with its vertical regularity that encourages unique expressions at street-level. I’m not well-traveled, so there could be significant overlap with other European cities or countries. Bear with me. ↩︎ ...

There are three ways to hold four marimba mallets in your hands. Really, there are two ways, one of which has a slight variation. It comes down to whether you hold the outside mallets between your index and middle fingers, allowing them to cross in your palms,1 or you hold them between your middle and ring fingers.2 Crossing provides stability. The mallets are firm in the grip. The player easily brings them both to bear on the marimba or vibraphone. Shift to the desired width and hammer away. It’s staccato. It’s sturdy. It’s jazz. ...

The other month, a friend held a housewarming PowerPoint night. For the uninitiated, this is a trend that I assume begin during remote pandemic hangouts but has since continued in the physical world. It’s exactly what it says on the tin: present a slideshow to your friends. I’ve done a few, and also enjoy watching comedians do it professionally on the excellent Dropout show Smartypants. Slideshows are certainly a standalone “deliverable” business, but a presentation comprises both the slideshow and the presenter. While I believe that my exposition added quite a lot to this most recent slideshow about how to fix political discourse in America, a suitable reader in good humor can infer much on their own. ...

I wanted to play “When You Go” by Noah Guthrie on guitar. Since Noah is rather a niche musician, these tabs weren’t available on Ultimate Guitar or any of the other less common sites known to host chords and tablature. A classic singer-songwriter chord annotation sheet has lyrics that are triple- or quadruple-spaced, above which are the chords one should be playing during that lyric. If you know the melody and general shape of the song, this document is always sufficient to play along with a guitar. That’s precisely the notation used on sites like Ultimate Guitar, and I wanted to create that for “When You Go”. ...

I’m enamored by The New Yorker. It’s available via the Apple News+ subscription that Erin and I share as part of a broader service package, and indeed it’s one of the few publications I follow on that app. But I’ve spent little time reading any of its eclectic writing. I had only a vague awareness of its history, and had seen plenty of its comics. The miasma of information I’d gathered but hadn’t yet assimilated about The New Yorker came together after Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz published a detailed profile of Sam Altman. I read it all, then read the interview transcript of Farrow’s appearance on the excellent Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel of The Verge. Since then, I’ve read The New Yorker’s Wikipedia page, poked through their archives, saved the landmark “Hiroshima” report from 1946 to read later, and recently followed a link to the hilarious “Coyote V. Acme” piece.1 ...

Before moving my blog, I’d been rethinking my writing process. As I noted several months ago, I want to relieve the pressure of pushing out posts on a regular schedule by focusing on improvement and quality. That means recognizing that I earn nothing by writing faster, and that I have to actively engage with my prose. It means following a thorough process of writing and revision while not losing the intuition and nose for what feels right. It means reminding myself that patience and perseverance are always rewarding. ...

I adore niche corners of the internet. Small projects, independent developers, targeted publications, and so much else can only exist because the internet helps them connect to a sufficiently large captive audience. So many companies and industries view the internet as a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos—who can capture the most delicious little spherical bits of yummy data? My kinds of people aren’t trying to win capitalism and aren’t pushed by metrics besides “Am I making something cool?” and “Can I find just enough people who also think it’s cool?” ...

I volunteered to revive the newsletter for the Connecticut “Smoky Joe Wood” chapter of SABR, and successfully sent out its first new edition last week. You can access it here. This was so much fun to create. I had minimal guidance and effectively carte blance from our chapter president. That was a bit intimidating, but I started with editions from the previous editor to guide my design. More directly, I ripped it off as closely as I could in Affinity. I had to relearn the basics of desktop publishing while I figured out how badly I wanted to do this “the right way” with master pages and repeatable formatting. I made mistakes, learned how to fix them, and am pleased with the overall design. Graphics and layout are not my passion nor my strong suit, but I got the job done. ...

As of last September, Netlify uses “credits” to measure hosting use. On their free tier, I get 300 credits each month. Each deployment—as far as I can tell, every time I update the site whether it’s for adding a whole post, or making a tiny edit—costs 15 credits. That means I can make 20 changes to my blog each month for free. It’s actually slightly less than that because there are tiny bits of usage for traffic and other boring hosting miscellany that, at my scale, don’t matter. I’m only noting this because: ...

I moved my blog from WordPress.com to Bluehost and the open-source version of the WordPress engine back in 2018. I wanted more control, and wasn’t willing to pay the Automattic folks for the right to add more plugins to my blog. Instead, I probably paid even more money to a different corporation because, well, it felt better. Technology has evolved, and I’ve decided to move backwards and save some money. With three or four hours of work, I migrated my entire blog off WordPress and into Hugo, a lightweight static blogging engine that relies directly on Markdown. The files live in GitHub (for free) and are subsequently hosted on Netlify at their free tier, saving me a couple of hundred dollars each year.1 ...