Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • And That's a Wrap

    My quintet had its last gig of the summer last night, playing a private event in a courtyard in one of the old residential neighbourhoods of the city. It was a beautiful evening - warm, clear sky, then rain threatening briefly, then not. The set went well. I don't think quite as well as some of our other gigs, but certainly fine. Not everything has to be 10/10. There were lots of photos. There was a photo booth, and we piled in to get snaps taken of us. After, we got some free drink tickets for the cafe next door. I slipped one to my partner; I had a cappuccino, and she had an iced coffee. We sipped them in the courtyard for a bit while the event continued.

    So that's it - four gigs this summer, enough rep for about 45 minutes of music, actually a pretty fair amount for a woodwind quintet. Unlike playing in a full band or orchestra, there aren't a lot of rests. Especially for me, it can be a bit of a slog. I've really built up my endurance. Now I need to keep up semi-regular practicing until our next event in the fall. A maybe thing. We put in an application. Who knows if it'll be accepted.

  • Answering song title questions 2

    It's wandering, mostly. And by wandering, I mean it's traveling with no particular destination in mind, which is what I'd like physically be doing as well. I can tell you where my mind isn't: it's not on money, it's not on work, it's rarely on tech, and it's not even really on movies or video games these days, either. I'm actually really proud of the fact that my consumption of passive entertainment is at the lowest level it's been at in years. Yay me, I guess? I'm reading a lot, and thinking about what I've read, and writing a lot and thinking about what I've written. I'm still engaging heavily with music, and I'm anticipating some future creative projects where reading, writing, and music intersect.

  • What the goldfish knows

    We're exceedingly good at knowing things that aren't actually factually correct. Goldfish, it is known, have a memory of only 3 seconds. Now that certainly has an appeal, they'd find that little plastic castle at the bottom of their tank a fresh delight every time they turned around if it were so.

    The only problem is that the thing that is known isn't actually true. That's never stopped things being "known", especially in this age of alternative facts. Like many things that are "known" perhaps this one has its origin in how we routinely are as a species.

    We are absolutely bloody awful at remembering things, its much more like we're the ones who have the memory of only 3 seconds.

• Politics and World Events

  • Stop the Hate

    Stop the Hate, a UK-based non-profit aiming to tackle racism and anti-Semitism, has a T-shirt for sale on their website that simply reads:

    ZIONIST.

    I wanted to buy one to show my support, not just for the commendable work of the Stop the Hate, but for Israel and for Jews worldwide.

    I realised that I actually don't have the cojones to wear a shirt like that in public.

    In fact, I think I would most likely be verbally abused or worse yet physically assaulted for daring to wear a shirt emblazoned with that one simple, yet for some perplexing reason, problematic word.

• Technology and Free Software

  • xmpp.nz

    I was sitting in the Server Operators MUC recently and someone was asking about NZ based public servers they could have friends join, or anyone asking, as they were only planning on keeping their personal xmpp server for personal use, and didn't want it to grow to people unknown to them. For the last 2 years I have run my own Prosody server, and also ejabberd server for a couple of stints.

  • f3s: Kubernetes with FreeBSD - Part 10: A New Home

    This is the 10th post in the f3s series about my self-hosting home lab. f3s? The "f" stands for FreeBSD, and the "3s" stands for k3s, the Kubernetes distribution I use on FreeBSD-based physical machines.