Jim Willis

I’ve been second-guessing drive read/write speeds on my new iMac because it has a fusion drive. My iMac has a 2Tb Fusion Drive so that means it has 128GB SSD and the rest is spinning platters.

I never really know if I’m reading/writing to/from the SSD or the platters. I mean, it seems zippy so my inclination is just to leave it as-is and trust that Apple knows what they are doing.

I have entertained the idea of splitting up the fusion drive and trying to manage the SSD space on my own but thanks to this post, I’m feeling less inclined to do so. Rauol Pop did it and then ran some tests that show splitting the drive up yields equivocal benefits and some measurable negatives so, I’m trusting that the engineers at Apple know what they’re doing.

That, and I’m making good use of 24GB of RAM and just loading up all my applications into RAM anyway, so, there’s that. Also, as soon as they come down in price just a smidge, I’m going to pickup an external SSD that supports Thunderbolt 3 like the Samsung X5, that ought to be pretty close to the speeds of the internal SSD.

lxml 4.0 doesn’t build on Mac OS Mojave. But the latest version does. Unfortunately pyinstapaper looks for 4.0 when it builds.

I would have never figured this out but another developer submitted a merge request that noted the lxml issue.

The request hasn’t been accepted yet so if you try to install pyinstapaper using pip it will error out. That said, you can still install pyinstapaper from source (assumes you have jumped through all of the ‘brew install $foo’ requirements stuff) to get python 3.x running on your Mac.

To get pyinstapaper to install:

• Download the the code for this module as a zip file.
• Extract zip.
• Edit the setup.py file and change  the line that reads:
• ‘lxml>=3.4,<=4’, to ‘lxml>=3.4,<=5’,
• save the change and then from within the directory that you downloaded the source run
  ‘python setup.py install’ and you should be good to go.

This was my first Cormac McCarthy book. I asked a good friend of mine who is a McCarthy fan to pick one and this was his pick.

Man. What an amazing read. All of the components were there: great story, unfamiliar-sounding yet authentic dialog, characters who you really, really cared about. And then on top of that there is a meta-plot about how the hell one ought to behave when the world around you is falling apart, something that seems especially timely.

The story here seems mostly about choosing to commit and persevere no matter how bad the outcome looks. Doing the right thing in the face of inevitability. But it’s so much more than that. The Sheriff may be one of my favorite characters ever. McCarthy’s dialog partly accounts for that but it is also really compelling to watch his internal struggle reconciling his behaviors, something we all deal with at one level or another. Such a great book. Really grateful to have read it.

The premise of Brave New World is compelling enough to recommend the book. Especially if you’re in high school, which I think is when I first read it. The dytopian future portrayed by Huxley of a world that tries to engineer a better version of itself challenges the reader to pull connections from more modern attempts at these efforts.

Despite the interesting premise, I just didn’t enjoy the writing. The world represented in the book seemed like an academic exercise that Huxley engineered to make a point. It was interesting but only as a thought exercise.

I discovered that Ridley Scott was going to try to make a movie out of the book and seems to have backed away, citing:

I think Brave New World was probably great in nineteen thirty-eight, because it had a very interesting revolutionary idea. Don’t forget it came shortly before or after George Orwell, roughly the same time. When you re-analyze it, maybe it should stay as a book. I don’t know.

I think Scott would have been hard pressed to get an audience to feel real empathy for any of the characters the way he did in Blade Runner.

Huxley apparently was inspired to write the book in response to a trip he made to the US where he observed our obsession with youth and commercialism. That’s easy enough to believe. Out national fixation on self-improvement seems like just the kind of ecosystem that unchecked could eventually yield the kind of attempts to engineer the friction out of life represented in Brave New World.

To me, it’s this thread of the book’s narrative that is so interesting to me. Specifically, what happens when you engineer the suffering out of life. Huxley’s plot seems to fixate on the tools and techniques used to engineer the friction out of life but I think the tools and techniaues are mere disctraction.

Instead, especially relevant and meaningful are the effects of a life devoid of friction or where friction is seen as somehow being different from or seperate from the good life. Huxley fails to really dig into this thread in a satisfying way and perhaps that why it felt a little flat to me.

It certainly seems relevant today where we seem spend so much energy trying to reduce friction, sadness, pain, etc. from our lives. But it occurs to me that those things we try to avoid and minimize (and which have been erradicated in Huxley’s work) are exactly the things that make life worth living.

That is the underlying message of BNW that gets hidden in all of the dystopian engineering: If life is all good, it’s no good. Life is only good to the extent that we are open to the suffering it exposes us to.

The Nickel Boys was on a lot of “Best of” lists for 2019 so I figured to check it out and I’m glad I did. I haven’t read anything else by Colson Whitehead so not sure if this is true with all of his writing but he got me to feel a degree of empathy for his characters that was so deep that by the end of the book I felt wrung out.

I don’t get that a lot.

Moreover, I’m a middle age white guy and here I am feeling really deep connection and empathy towards these African american boys in Jim Crow south. Whitehead’s ability to connect the reader to these characters is unreal. I found myself highlighting certain passages throughout the book that achieved this effect and by then end I realized that part of his skill lies in what I think of as a casual intimacy with the characters’ inner lives.

Meaning the powerfully brutal scenes built connection and alone they would have probably been sufficient. But certain scenes where the narrator makes these offhanded observations—like when waiting for a table at a restaurant, briefly wondering if the delay is racism or just bad service—reveal the lens through which the characters are viewing the world and by the end of the book you and the character are nearly one and the book is just a powerfully moving experience. Grateful that Whitehead wrote it and that I got to experience it.

I implemented this great python script from @micahflee to automatically get rid of my tweets after a specified period of time. Similar to the Chrome extension I use to get rid of my Facebook posts but automated/scheduled so much more convenient.