voluntaryXchange

Contemplating Daylight Savings Time

Most people know when the shortest day of the year is.

But most people don’t know that the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise do not fall on that day.

It turns out, the earliest sunset (December 5th) is about 16 days before the shortest day (December 21st), and the latest sunrise is about 15 days after (January 5th).

So honestly, I started thinking about this in late January. I was noticing the “days getting longer”. By this, most of us mean we notice that it’s light for longer after work.

I did some mental math, and realized that it was about 8 weeks after the earliest sunset.

And so I thought … oh … sunset changes are symmetrical … so late January has the same sunset as mid-October. And I thought about how nice those cold evenings are in mid-October.

I decided quickly that daylight savings was a bad thing, and we should move the clocks back right now, so I could have those cold, beautiful evenings full of light until after 7 in late January.

I have been laughing to myself at how dumb I was for about about a week now.

Moving the clock back also moves the sunrise back. And the sunrise was not 8 weeks into transitioning towards summer, but more like four.

And in Utah, most of us live hard up on the west side of the mountains. Twilight in the morning is long: the sun is up, but it remains blocked by the mountains. On the shortest day, it comes over the mountains about 8:35 (even now on February 20th, I was watching rays of sunshine peek through a canyon at 7:45, 30 minutes after sunrise, but the sun wasn’t visible yet).

Why laugh at myself? If we got rid of daylight savings time here, on January 5th, the sun wouldn’t come over the mountains until 9:35. I think maybe I’d like to keep avoiding that.

No Sympathy from YouTube

A couple of weeks ago I attempted to post a video clip of Monty Python, in memoriam for Terry Jones.

I made the clip from DVD’s I own.

The underlying service for videos on this platform (Typepad) is YouTube. So I had to upload the clip to YouTube to post it here.

It was blocked as a copyright violation. Their algorithms blocked the video in less time than it would take to view once through.

I protested in writing that it was fair use. I was not attempting to profit from the clip, I had justifiable motivation, it was quite short, and I owned the source material.

During the period after which I made my appeal, they kept my video blocked.

After 13 days, they responded by declining my appeal.

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All of this is perfectly legal, and above board, and I’m OK with that.

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But, let’s think this through.

We now live in a world with an internet where:

• Content can be blocked immediately.
• Content can be blocked while it is under appeal.
• (And obviously) content can be blocked after you lose the appeal.

The key point here is that the content was always blocked.

This is not the internet we grew up with.

And remember Belk’s Third Law of the Internet:

If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.

The Internet Didn’t Used to Suck

Like many of you, I’m frustrated at what the internet has turned into.

I was the perfect person for the internet. I had been warming up my tech cred from 1987 or so (gosh, I’d been on BitNet), I was mildly into hacker stuff by 1990, emailing in 1991, the most tech savvy person on my job by 1992, and had a PC at home capable of getting the internet by late 1994, and a website by 1997. I pretty much retooled my career around what I could go on here.

For me, the first sign of trouble was probably around 2008-9 when Facebook started making it difficult to keep your personal and professional lives separate.

The last decade has been less fun. I struggle for the right word, but for me it’s the app-ization of everything. Working through someone else’s small list of possible tasks through a crappy interface is not my idea of fun.

Lest you think I’m a curmudgeon, there are some apps that I think are amazing, like SoundHound, Reelgood, Pushbullet, and Musicolet.

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Yesterday I came across Belk’s Three Laws of the Internet:

• Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people.
• The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything.
• If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.

I love that third one. “The moment you were just in was as good as it got.”

Neil Innes RIP

Neil Innes passed away at the end of the year. He was a quasi-Python, appearing in many shows and movies, but not part of the core group of six.

This is just audio, but it’s my favorite bit, and it’s him doing solo from the Live at City Center album:

He also wrote one of my favorite sketches, from the shortened, Cleese-free, last season about the most disgusting family in Britain: “More beans!!!”

Terry Jones RIP 2

Terry Jones passed away at 77 this week. He is the second of the Monty Python six to leave us (Graham Chapman passed away in 1989, and quasi-Python Neil Innes died earlier this month).

Monty Python are fairly tight with public use of their videos. This is why if you browsed the many obituaries available this week, almost all of them featured one of the few publicly available scenes, from Life of Brian.

While that featured Jones, I wanted to post something a little more meaningful to me. I chose this one. I think this qualifies as fair use; we’ll see how long it takes for it to be blocked. Sorry for the delay; it took until the weekend to find it.

Of the six, Jones was probably on screen the second least. And often, he did not play a lead character (the obituaries are right that he often appeared in drag as a dowdy middle-aged woman). But again, everything in the legacy media was a carbon copy of everything else. Damn algorithms.

So again, looking for something completely different: a sketch featuring Jones, probably written by Jones, not from Life of Brian, and not in drag. That’s slim pickings.

Monty Python did not attribute sketches to the individuals as writers. It was a group. So prizing out what is likely to be a Jones idea is tough. Generally speaking, if the sketch was longer and sillier, it was from Jones or Palin. If it was edgy, aggressive, and shorter, it was from Cleese and Chapman. If it was a song, or some unusual wordplay, it was Eric Idle, perhaps with the help of Neil Innes. If it was a cartoon or montage, it was probably Terry Gilliam.

Also, later in the series, they juxtaposed more: Cleese and Chapman would appear in sketches written by Palin and Jones, and vice versa. The famous turn by Cleese as a self-defense instructor worried about attackers bearing fresh fruit seems like it’s all Jones-Palin with Cleese inserted to bring his best.

Anyway, I think this is a Jones sketch featuring Jones. It’s from the first year of the show, and it’s pretty silly. Jones is filing the complaint.

You can see the sketch, preceded by a commercial if you click through this link to DailyMotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6qglg9. It starts about 40 seconds in.

Hard to say where the idea for this began. The Pythons wrote individually, then got together with a partner to sharpen things up, then brought that to the whole group for more fine tuning. The sweetness and innocence of this bit makes me think it started with Jones or Palin, with big help from the other one. The bit at the end, where there’s a quick transition to another scene with no punchline is all Jones.

Terry Jones, RIP

I don’t even know what to say. Just such a huge influence on my life since I first started watching in the 6th grade.

I do wish someone in the legacy media would show some clip other than Brian’s mother or Mr. Creosote … perhaps Clodagh Rodgers or something.

P.S. Also saddened by the passing of quasi-Python Neil Innes a few weeks ago.

Just Wondering …

Why are garbage bag sizes measured in gallons?

Does anyone go to the store and think … gee … I put 10 gallons of garbage in that can last week, so I’d better buy the 13 gallon bags?

Or is it that I have 9 gallons of garbage here, so I’d better borrow 4 from the neighbors to fill the bag?

A PS4 WTF

We got a PS4 for Christmas. When we set it up, it would not detect our Wifi.

I live in the rural west. The tradeoff is bigger house for less restaurants.

In a big house, the reach of your Wifi is tested. So, while we’re running dual bands, the 5.0 Ghz band is the one that is best received by the locations of our devices.

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FWIW

I am getting increasingly frustrated by everything produced by Google. Do you get the impression sometimes that all the items fed to you by Google are actually the same thing regurgitated in slightly different form?? As if the only thing Google tries to present to you is crap written by algorithm?

Anyway, the internet was basically no help, until I found some 3 year old articles about how top end PS4’s released that year were going to have dual band receivers, but that you had to enable the band used.

BTW: I also found quite a few posts from people who’d done DIY jobs on their PS4’s to add better antennas.

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So I went back and dug through the custom set up of my PS4. Buried several layers down I found a choice for the band to use. The PS4 was set to check both bands by default. I reset that to use 5.0 exclusively. What had failed repeatedly now worked in seconds. Clearly the dual band default choice is dodgy.

But really. It’s 2019. Who uses 2.4 Ghz. unless your device is parked right next to your router? I mean, c’mon, someone with a pencil and a place to write made an executive decision to make the default appropriate only for someone living in a dorm room??

A Dog Playing Jenga

The vXyoungman and me talk a lot about "dog culture". We suspect there's much more going on than we guess. And then this came along:

Holy crap, this is incredible: A dog playing Jenga. Turn-taking, fine motor control, apparent understanding of the aim of the game. I would not have guessed a dog could do this. pic.twitter.com/cewL7wmaK5

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) December 29, 2019

Click through for the video.

Recommended Longread (Well, Not Too Long)

I hate getting fed, but Pocket through Firefox will come up with a few things I like on most days. I try not to succumb.

Today I enjoyed a navel-gazing essay from The Cut entitled “I Met My Husband When I Was 22 and Wild: How Did I Make the Decision That Truly Mattered?” Some snippets:

I had absolutely no sense of consequence, although I was plagued by intrusive thoughts and knocked constantly on wooden tables and doors.

… When I realized I was pining for the man I would marry, I invited him to my grandmother’s 75th birthday party — a bold strategy for courtship.

When I mention the wilder years before, they seem incredulous. It’s dangerous, this gap between past perception and present reality. You insist you’ve been around the block, but it’s a block in a town you no longer recognize and the windows are boarded up.

The curious mix of nostalgia and embarrassment I feel for that freewheeling version of myself coexists with the present reality

Now that we have children, now that our relationship sometimes feels less like a romance than it does a small business involving spreadsheets … The tumult of girlhood flowed into the orderly irrigation channels of civilization.

I made so many stupid decisions during that time it literally takes my breath away to think I might not have made … [fill in your blank there]

For my part, I think the only reason time travel is a thing that we daydream about is that it’s exactly what we’re doing every day as we get older.

I have forgotten so much. I suspect others have too. So I wonder how many occasions I shared with others now exist only in my memories … available for a weird and unsatisfying and barely sharable time travel with people who weren’t there.

It’s especially weird now that the vXyoungman is on the cusp of turning 21, and the vXteengirl is halfway to 18. So many of the experiences that made me who I am occurred before those ages.

I had met the vXwife by the time I was our son’s age, but she says she felt like I was out of her league (it was almost 3 more years before we started dating). I think part of that is that I didn’t dress or act like I was 20. Neither does the vXyoungman.

By the time I was our daughter’s age, I’d already made the dean’s list in college. And I’d already had one of those non-relationships that never launched; I still regret that might-have-been (what was I thinking walking away from that??); even though I chose other seemingly better possibilities, went for a spin, and barely recall those people now, even with effort.

How do I explain to my kids that the only time travel we ever experience leads me to regret nothing I did, but many things I didn’t … and honestly don’t really know about?

And the really bizarre thing is that there have to be some things that weren’t forgotten by the others. I wonder how many of the memories of intersections with people I have I are shared by those same people, and that we both wonder what might have been on the paths not taken so many decades ago?