Usually, hello world is an introduction to the world. What if I just want to resume talking to it?

On New Beginnings and Delayed Transmissions

Well, the first (only!) newsletter went out in August of last year, which means this is almost a year late! I’d wanted these to be quarterly, but that didn’t happen. I guess we’ll see how often I get dispatches written. In the meantime, I’m not going to try to cover all of the year in between so that I might actually get this one written. However, I will say that one of the biggest things that happened in Novemberish was finally working through a long period of pretty serious depression; it’s maybe the single biggest change to my life in a long while.

On stringed instruments

Musically I’ve still been playing the banjo but I’ve also been taking up the guitar through Tony’s Acoustic Challenge. It’s going pretty well, comparatively; I feel better on the guitar than I think I did at this point in my banjo playing, but that might just be due to the fact that the guitar isn’t my first instrument and I now have some musical background. Picking individual strings on the guitar is still a challenge, and I’m not sure I’ve found The Pick for me; pick preferences seem to change based on which guitar I’m playing, too. I’m also still trying to adjust to the wider neck and more strings of the guitar --- it’ll come, just needs more practicing.

I decided this week that it’s been too long since I’ve learned a new banjo song (I haven’t been taking lessons, just playing things I already know or goofing around), and picked one of my favourites from Kaia Kater’s first album - Rose on the Mountain. At some point, I’ll have a recording of the in-progress version; I’m almost through mechanically learning the notes for the first part but I still need to get the rhythm down.

One of the things that got me back to trying to learn guitar again was that a friend of mine from London was in town. He’s been playing guitar for over thirty years and I managed to convince him to help me pick out my first acoustic. The one we found is just lovely and has a gorgeous sound. It was custom made in the 1960s by a local luthier for his daughter. I just hope that I learn enough to do it justice!

Musically related, I got to see one of my favourite bands in June: Trampled by Turtles. They released a new album after nearly four years, and it was really good. I liked it a lot better than their most recent albums. I'd bought a pair of tickets to go, but ended up breaking up with the lady I was going to go see it with the week before; on the plus side, I had two seats to myself.

I've also found some new favourite music: a coworker introduced me to Caitlin Canty and The Small Glories. I put some representative songs into a Spotify playlist, for those so inclined. I've been particularly drawn to Caitlin Canty's music; I think she writes and plays the kind of music I want to end up writing and playing, too.

On jobs and employment

In March of 2014, I drove 21 hours straight from Aurora to San Francisco to start a new job. It was an exciting, slightly terrifying experience, but in the end it paid off. However, as they say, all good things must come to an end; on the 1st, I start a new job.

The road to the new job has been a while in the making. I’ve been feeling like I’d stagnated and was unhappy with the day-to-day work at my current job. However, the company was a good place to work --- they do good things and the people are great. On a whim, I took a screening quiz for a recruiting agency; I did well enough that they scheduled a video conference screening session for a technical run through and much to my surprise, I was accepted into their program.

I was taken aback by the deluge of companies looking for interviews. I’m at a somewhat senior position at my current place, which is admittedly mostly by virtue of having been around for a while, making scheduling time for interviews (which are usually full day affairs) difficult. I think I ended up only interviewing at 5 or 6 companies out of two or three times that number, and even that was quite difficult to manage.

The other thing that I wasn’t quite prepared for was the feeling that people were genuinely interesting in having me onboard. The recruiting agency sent me two “kits”: one had a nice rain shell, and the next had a backpack, notebook, and coffee cup. I can’t use any of this, though, as I have a no tech-logo sort of rule on these things. They also sent me the book Cracking the Coding Interview; it’s sort of a compendium of “things software engineers are expected to know” book with lots of problems to work through; I don’t think it’s representative of what all software engineers actually need to know. It was fun working through a lot of the problems, though, and I do think it helped with interviewing at a lot of places. As you can see in the photo below, I was studying pretty hard.

Of all the places I interviewed, four gave me offers. All of them had interesting work, though their public missions were various levels of appealing --- I should note, however, that a requirement for working at a company is that their work can’t be unethical; I’d like to be happy with what the company is doing. It’s not that it needs to be about “saving” or “changing” the world, but doing good things is a hard requirement. I’m also not interested in companies that only serve customers on the high end; for example, one company that got in touch did apartment rentals for high-end business customers. This isn’t to knock it but to say that’s just not the right environment for me.

One of the biggest changes in the new job will be the commute. At my current job, I have to take the BART (the subway-like train that goes under the Bay) or take a bus across the bridge. I’m in between two BART stations that take about a 5-10 minute bicycle ride; the problem with BART is that taking your bike on the trains can be difficult, and I wouldn’t trust my bike to be safely locked up at the station all day. On top of that, I’d rather bike down from the BART station in San Francisco to work. The bus works a lot better if you want to also have a bike, but the time between buses varies based on the time of day: sometimes it’s ten to fifteen minutes between buses, and sometimes it’s a half hour or longer. On top of that, there’s only two bike slots on the bus (some buses do have three), and I’ve found myself missing two or even three buses in a row because the bike racks were full. This is, as you might imagine, quite frustrating. Combine this with having to base your time around bus schedules, and it gets old pretty fast. (Yes, I could drive across, and deal with fuel costs, horrendous traffic and drivers, and exorbitant parking fees near work. I very quickly realised I wasn’t going to do that.)

This new job is a fifteen minute or so bicycle ride from my house and in the same city I live in (Oakland), and is less than a five minute bike ride to my climbing gym (which has both a gym and a climbing wall).

At first, it wasn’t going to be an increase in pay (though it was the lowest offer of all the offers I got), but my recruiter gave me some tips on asking for more (something I’m very not good at), and the new place agreed. That made it pretty difficult to say no to…

I’ll be doing software engineering, still, but a different kind of work than what I have been doing (for those of you in the know, I’m moving from systems engineering to backend engineering and eventually “full stack”). I’ve also talked with people over there about putting together a career development plan --- something my career has been sorely lacking. I’m mostly self-taught, and I’ve never really gotten great feedback as to what I was doing right. It’s all a giant change for me, and I’m approaching it with an excited trepidation. There’s a lot of changes here that even six months ago I wouldn’t have been prepared to take because I had to get over myself and release a lot of unproductive strongly-held opinions on things. It’s a byproduct of some of the personal growth I’ve been experiencing and cultivating.

On the great outdoors

I haven’t been to the mountains much this year (I didn’t make it skiing at all!); one day of outdoor climbing, and one car camping trip in the Sierras. I’ve been bikepacking a few times, where you fill your panniers with camping gear and ride to campsite. There’s a few options around here; the last trip was in Marin (where the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge lands) and it was beautiful.

The car camping was good --- we were supposed to climb, and we tried one route, but I’d thrown out my back and wasn’t really going to be able to do it. And, Mom and Dad, I finally got to use the hammock. It's pretty comfortable!

I am going this weekend, though. There’s a 12 mile looping trail with some lakes. I’m excited!

With the extra money from the new job, I plan on getting a truck shortly. I won’t be taking vacation in between, but I will be planning a trip up the coast and maybe to Glacier National Park in Montana later on. I’m split on when to do that one, because I’d rather not do it when there’s a ton of snow and bad weather, but Montana in the winter sounds beautiful too.

Once I have a truck, my goal will be to get to the mountains at least one weekend every month. Camping, backpacking, sleeping in the back of my truck, wherever and whatever, find me in the wild places.

A friend and I have started trail running on the weekends, too. This last run was just over six miles (not quite a 10K) but early enough in the morning to be rewarded by a lovely run in the fog in the redwoods. The giant trees lend a sense of quiet timelessness, the fog a stillness, and the cool air a tranquility. My heart was bursting with happiness; I'm looking forward to more runs there.

On the printed word

I’ve been reading, though maybe not as often as I’d like. On the technical side, I’ve been fascinated lately by quantum computing and I’m currently working through Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists; I chose to start with this one because the first two chapters build the maths background needed to understand the rest of the book. The other books I have (Quantum Algorithms via Linear Algebra and Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction) assume a stronger maths background than what I have, so they'll have to wait. Another technical book I'd like to get through is called the The Jee Book: Adventures in Physical Computing, named after Jee Labs. The author is the kind of engineer I want to end up as, exploring and engaging the world by building things with a certain curiosity.

I've been trying to read less fiction by percentage of my total reading; some of the nontechnical books I've read recently are

• Travels with Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck. Like so many Steinbeck books, I fell in love with this one pretty quickly. It's funny how little America has changed, really. There's a lot to like to this one and a lot of philosophizing on people, America, and life in general. I found about this book from a Trampled By Turtles Song (it's the Steinbeck book referenced in the song "Thank You, John Steinbeck;" of course, I had to read it. This happens to me a lot --- finding out about books from songs, other books, movies, or whatnot and the books turn out to be amazing; for example, one of my other favourite books is Wind, Sand, and Stars, which I think I found out about from All The Light We Cannot See (another great book!)
• Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey, is another one of those great travel essay books. Abbey was a park ranger for a bit at Arches National Park in Utah. He writes about the desert and living in the wilderness with a lot of passion. I don't want to spoil the ending, but I'll say I definitely agree with him.
• The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by Matthew Crawford, is a book I picked up while on a museum day (where I go check out a museum, usually in the morning, then get lunch, find a bookstore, and get coffee). The premise of this book is that we need to spend more time building physical skills and not be so tied to our phones. I really enjoyed reading it.
• The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability--Designing for Abundance, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, makes the premise that we should design objects not with a cradle-to-grave perspective, but with a cradle-to-cradle perspective: when the things we make are no longer useful, how do we make them useful again? For example, a t-shirt might end up with any number of other uses besides clothing once they're too tattered to wear. Making things biodegradable or trying to source non-toxic components could go a long ways, too. One of the points that the book makes that I really liked is that if you set out with the mindset of trying to limit the harm your product can do (e.g. making sure you use non-toxic paints), it puts a natural limit on how beneficial it can be --- you can, at best, end up not doing any harm. This isn't a bad thing, per se, but if you go with the mindset of maximizing the benefits of a product, you'll also be working to minimize the harm while also not constraining yourself to how beneficial your thing can be. The authors do a lot better job of explaining this (maybe that's why they're the ones to have written the book), but I thought it a useful way to approach the world.

I have a bad habit of underlining and writing in my books, then not copying those notes and underlines anywhere; otherwise, I'd share some.

For fiction, I read a couple sci-fi books that were pretty good if you're into the kind of sci-fi I'm into: After On, Gnomon (a real mind trip, that one), Bandwidth, and Void Star are the standouts. They're all pretty good. I also read Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, which is a fantastically imaginative collection of stories about cities that don't actually exist (but maybe could). It's hard to describe, but it's a short read that I really enjoyed.

On routines and rituals

One of the things that depression made difficult was sleeping at all. Now that I'm free of this, I've been trying to stick to a 4 AM wake up time, with a list of things to get done. In doing so, I've found myself in a much better mood than I've been in for a long while. One of the things I try to do in the mornings now is to write in my journal. As I write this, it's been five days straight of writing, and a lot of days in the last month with a few gaps here and there (I only recently "formally" committed to trying to write in my journal every day). One of the things I don't like about where I'm at with that is that my writing is still very "journalistic." That is, I haven't really done a lot of creative writing. One thing that might help with that is continuing to write this newsletter regularly. It doesn't have to be creative writing, per se, but I can have fun with it and see what happens.

Another thing is the idea of formalizing your intents. I'm using an app now, mostly because it automates a lot of the drudgery behind this, but by writing down the things that I want to accomplish and having it be a checklist in the morning, it's easier for me to make sure that it happens. It works as a kind of commitment to oneself, agreeing to do a thing and then making sure you stick with it. I've been happy with the results so far.

And that's all I have for now. I'm sure this thing is riddled with typos and more than a little rambly, but I'm going to send it out anyways so I get something out there. Thanks for reading!

• K

This is the latest attempt at long-form writing, meant to be adjacent to my photography site. Maybe people subscribe, maybe they don't, but hopefully it'll force at least semi-regular long-form updates.

So, where to start? Professionally, I've been rather bored on the whole with computers lately (maybe even a bit burned out), though not entirely. I've been experimenting with setting up a small Chromebook with a tiny amount of memory (comparatively) and a hard drive the size of a mid-size SD card (32 GB), and making myself make do with less. The idea is to focus on ideas, like I used to, rather than having a computer that does everything. I've had this thing lying around for quite some time, mostly unused; I've even tried to get rid of it, to no avail. This particular experiment is inspired by the work of Joey Hess, who lives in the middle of nowhere and runs off solar power but is still an active software engineer. If I think back to the times where I really enjoyed computers, they were almost always when I was learning new things and doing weird things with computers (for example, writing a web server, experimenting with file stores, writing virtual machines and CPU emulators)—generally spending more time thinking than the mechanics of software engineering. Part of the problem is that I largely don't have a peer group to discuss ideas with, particularly since the demise of the paper club at work (where someone picked a computer science paper every two weeks, did a short presentation on the paper, and then we discussed it). In contrast to this minimal machine, I've signed up for a course in artificial intelligence for which I've built out a massive laptop that could comfortable emulate at least ten of my Chromebooks without breaking a sweat.

I've also joined the Association for Computing Machinery this month; it's a professional society for computing professionals. Though I've been kind of burned out recently, I'd like to still develop professionally and I thought this might be a useful resource to do so.

New camera

Earlier this month, I picked up a new camera and I have to say that a month later, I'm still rather fond of it.

All of the lenses I have for it are manual focus and that represents the bulk of what I'm trying to improve on lately. I think all of the sets I've taken average maybe 5-10% keep ratio; I've been working to aggressively reject photos, too, but so many are just out of focus.

This camera is a lot of fun to shoot with, and it's small enough to take places --- it even fits in my jacket pocket! It's definitely a camera you either know you really want, or not the camera for you, but it's been great so far. It has its downsides, though: the diopter adjustment for the viewfinder knocks out of place too easily, the eyecup has already fallen off, and the battery keeps knocking itself loose in the battery compartment (but not falling out). Thankfully, these aren't showstoppers.

I bought the camera body used, without any lenses, because a brand new body was too expensive; this was still the most I've spent on camera stuff ever. I think my Nikon SLR with the two lenses I got was maybe half to two-thirds the cost. Fortunately, I've got quite a few coworkers with the same camera and more with cameras that use compatible lenses, so I was able to save some money there. The lenses I've picked up so far are dirt cheap as far as lenses go, and all of them are manual focus. My favourite might be the 35mm lens (especially after Irwin turned me onto the 53mm site), but all three are proving to be good fun.

I used to use Apple's Aperture software for processing the photos from my Nikon, but that's been discontinued; I caved in and bought Lightroom. I've loved the VSCO app on my iPhone, and I love certain old films, so I also picked up a film emulation pack from VSCO that contains one of my favourite sets of films: the Fujifilm 160C, 400H, and 800Z films. It's no Aperture, but I've still had fun with the processing step; I even resurrected my old playlist I'd listen to when editing and processing photos before, with all the concomitant nostalgia of the times Jon Farmer and I'd shoot photos together forever ago.

The Soviet knockoff

Which brings me to the Soviet knockoff bit of the subject: I was browsing Leica-compatible lenses on eBay, as one does, and found a lot of rather cheap Soviet copies. The one I just picked up is a 1963 copy of a Carl Zeiss Sonnar lens; it's not the highest quality lens I've ever bought, but at $35 shipped from Moscow, I can't complain. The pictures aren't too bad; I opened the package and put on the lens in the post office (a minute after I picked up the lens) and took a picture of the windowsill.

On the walk back home, I shot a few more photos. In keeping with the status quo, only two others turned out.

Field testing the camera

One of the litmus tests for the new camera was seeing whether it would hold up on an outdoors trip; I'd love to take it backpacking instead of the SLR. I ended up going climbing at Mt. St. Helena over the weekend (the great heights from the subject), and it actually held up well. The battery compartment issue was a bit annoying, but even when I clipped the camera to my harness and took it out while setting up a rappel, it wasn't a show stopper. Next time, though, I'll probably wedge some paper in there to hold the battery in and I'll definitely wrap a sling around me to clip the camera to.

A coworker lent me his Rokinon 12mm f/2.0 wide angle lens, and despite my inability to focus a picture it was more than up to the task.

The lens was versatile at handling both landscapes, like the above, or shooting close ups.

Enough about cameras, though. The "great heights" topic is about how terrifying it was to do that first rappel. We were doing lead climbing, in which you clip the rope into protection on the way up. The best picture I found for this is this:

When you rappel from the top (where there's the two bolts that serve as a rappel anchor), you have to clip a personal anchor into that, which is just a loop of (admittedly strong enough) nylon attached to your climbing harness that holds you in place. In the process of setting up the rappel, you disconnect the rope from your harness and go off belay, which means the person down below can't catch your fall with the rope. This maybe isn't so bad for a lot of people, but I'll admit to having a fear of heights and particularly of falling to my death (remind me why I climb, again?), so removing the rope was positively daunting. Still, the best way to get over a fear is to stare it in the face and not let it have power over you, so that's what I did. In the process, while off belay, I managed to unclip the camera hooked to my harness and take some photos. So, there's that. Later on in the day, we set up a top rope anchor in a particularly sketchy area and that was even worse, but we still did it. Outdoor climbing remains challenging for me, as it's (yes, obviously) a whole different set of skills than climbing indoors. Despite the challenge of learning a new set of skills and stepping remarkably far outside of my comfort zone, being in the mountains does my heart exceedingly good.

My reading list

• Split Second was one of the Kindle First picks. It was okay, but not great. The story revolves around the repercussions of a semi-realistic time travel scenario. Enough small details were off, and the writing sort of clumsy, that I didn't think it was that great of a read. I don't think I can honestly recommend it, but I read it in an afternoon so I just waded through it.
• Lost in Arcadia was another Kindle First pick. It was also okay, and another story that it only took me a day or two to get through. It's about a virtual reality world (think Second Life meets Steam meets Facebook) and deals heavily with the future of advertising. Now, I hate advertising, probably more than most, so maybe that irked me, but I also don't really like social networks. The writing wasn't too bad, though.
• Wake in Winter is what I'm in the middle of now --- surprise, it's another Kindle First pick. I wasn't sure what I'd think about this, but I like the explorations of character and the general writing style. I'm only about a fifth of the way in, so I can't say whether that will continue. One of the topics is international adoptions (which seems like the main topic, so far), and how that plays out. This copy is translated from the Russian original, and it's been an engaging look at a Russian take on the subject.

For technical books, I'm reading:

• Rust Essentials: this is yet another attempt at learning a programming language I've wanted to learn for a while, but which I've struggled to learn. One of the first things I did with my Chromebook was get a Rust development environment set up and a PDF reader installed (which brings along Xorg) so I could work through this. I'm disappointed that O'Reilly no longer distributes offline-able copies of its books, because I wanted a different book to learn this with.
• Kubernetes in Action covers software that's used to take a bunch of computers and turn them into basically one large computer. I'm kind of fed up with doing more operations work than software engineering, but this will probably be useful for me later on with the AI stuff.
• The No BS Guide to Linear Algebra is a great resource for learning linear algebra. The first chapter covers high school math, which I'd largely forgotten, thereby bringing the reader up to speed with enough math to get started.

On selfie-capitalism and experiencification

I recently read an article titled "Inside the trillion-dollar selfie industrial complex." It's an interesting take on "selfie capitalism," the idea that people are willing submitting surveillance of themselves --- not that they are submitting to surveillance, but rather that they are contributing the data themselves. Companies then take this data and use it for their profit; for example, for learning to recognise people and associating this with location data to refine advertising. Somewhat disturbingly,

Facebook can recognize people even when their face isn't showing. (It looks at contextual clues — clothing, lighting, background objects — in a selfie, then recognizes those contextual elements in other shots where the user's face isn't visible, still identifying the person even with head outside the frame or with back turned.)

As an example, the article notes that

The most explicit example of "selfie capitalism" yet is Amazon's Echo Look smart speaker product. Large numbers of people take pictures of themselves every day after getting dressed to share on social media. Using hashtags like #mirrorselfie #outfit #ootd (outfit of the day) and others, they post "outfit selfies" for the purposes of both self-expression and friend-and-follower feedback.

Amazon created a version of its smart speaker designed to make this process better by offering consistent lighting, voice control and A.I. that helps customers choose outfits. In the process, they're blazing a trail to a world where selfies and shopping are the same seamless behavior.

It's a parasitic relationship: customers get better outfits, or better image search,

But the classic selfie is by far the richest source of user data there is. It shows the user's face up close, who they're with, what they're doing, what they're wearing, what they care about and where they are. That's user-data gold mine for businesses looking to monetize user data.

The theme of modern online living is that the users are the product.

What I found maybe more interesting than this is a number of the articles linked in this article on the subject of "experiencification." That is, people as a trend now look for "experiences," rather than living their lives: they want instagrammable moments, and businesses are obliging.

The picture is often more important than the experience.

It's as if people desire more strongly to have the appearance of a live well-lived than to live a life well-lived. The former is certainly easier, especially with apps that make this easier. When we live on social networks, we only see glimpses into other people's lives that they want to show us and it's a sure bet they're only showing the best parts of their lives. I can think of numerous times I've seen my peers (or even random people) posing for a picture rather than enjoying where they are. One of the things I love about street photography is that it attempts to capture people as they are, rather than as they try to appear.

The takeaway from this:

Instead of advertising, companies are increasingly staging instagrammable experiences and letting customers spread the good word.

In Lost in Arcadia, marketing gets out of control, too. From a manufactured musician to etching advertisements on food, advertising permeates society. Advertisers now can use consumer data warehouses like Acxiom, which collect user data from all over (everything from Facebook likes to credit card transactions to trackers on virtually every website we visit), to build a picture of who we are.

That's it for this newsletter. The next one will hopefully feature more trad climbing (which I didn't really get to do this weekend), some updates on the AI course, more books, and who knows what else. Thanks for reading!

• K

I started a Tiny Letter last week as a way to send long-form updates to friends and family. I thought it would be a good opportunity to do more long form writing as well as showing them some of my photography. I'd much rather the whole thing was self-hosted, but I have no desire to be a mail admin anymore ;)

One of the key features for me was that it's an email newsletter --- this is much easier for my parents to keep up with rather than trying to set them up with an RSS feeder and explain how to use it (easier said than done over the phone). As an experiment, I might try posting them here for posterity, too.

I recently picked up a Meike MK-FX-35-1.7 35mm f/1.7 lens for my X-Pro2. At $90, it is the cheapest lens I could find for the camera (and 35mm, too, which is the focal length I was looking at).

I'm still getting used to the lens. The focus and aperture ring both operate in the opposite direction of the other lenses I've used, which makes it difficult. The aperture ring also doesn't have click stops, which is another thing I'm not used to. I don't have focus peaking working well with it, so focus is still troublesome. It's been a while since I've used this focal length, which means I have to learn how to frame and compose shots with it. And yet, I have to say, I like this lens. It's compact, the shots are good enough for now (especially during the stage where I'm still getting used to the camera itself), and I think with more time I'll become more proficient with it. One thing I do wish is that the lens reported the aperture setting, but that's a minor thing and hardly to be expected from such a cheap lens.

The first shot I took was while I was waiting for the bus this morning. Focus is obviously an issue, but as I was framing the shot, I noticed the bus was just up the street so I took it in a hurry. It's not a good shot, but it's also not terrible.

When I went for lunch, I brought the camera with me and wandered around a bit. One nice thing about the camera and lens is that the pair fits in my hoodie pocket. I'll probably adjust the strap to use microlock S-biners so I can take it off when it makes sense to without having to do the reattachment dance. I took roughly 20 shots, of which only three turned out at all; about half of photos were rejected were due to focus, and the rest rejected due to composition. I processed all of these in Lightroom; I picked up the VSCO Modern Films collection to get the Fuji 400Z and 800Z profiles.

This image was cropped to remove a distracting out-of-focus light pole in the foreground. It uses the Astia profile, and is mostly untouched.

This picture uses the Fuji 800Z colour profile with the VSCO F2 preset.

This shot of the Salesforce tower in the fog uses the Acros+R colour profile with a CPL.

There's a lot of work to do to get familiar with the camera, but that's a matter of time, I think.

I walked around Berkeley (really, mostly Shattuck and University) lugging the X-Pro2 along. 112 shots pared down to 19 that made it to editing, with 11 of those surviving that I'm more or less happy with.

All of these were shot with the Rokinon 21mm f/1.4 MF lens and post-processed in Lightroom.

There's a traditional ballad recorded by Clifton Hicks called "How Came That Blood" (or "How Come That Blood") that I've gotten stuck in my head, so I figured I'd try to learn it.

Turns out, it's somewhat obscure. I've found four recordings: two with a banjo (the other being from Art Rosenbaum, which is who Clifton learned the song from), one on guitar, and one as a sort of electropoppy sort of thing. There's sheet music for a version in a 1960 book called Folk Music of North America that I have, and I found some tablature for a different playing style of banjo. I've started with that tablature, and tried to work it out into something I could actually play based on all of the above sources. I recorded a first draft, and figured why not upload it. This is just a rough draft of the song, as I don't quite have it worked out yet. I think it's getting there, though. Still need to figure out how to sing along, too.

“It’s a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won’t last forever.”
― Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo

My Goodreads rating is 4/5, where 5 is reserved for books that have a profound impact on my life.

I absolutely loved this book. From the descriptions of life in the city (both before and during the war), to the internal explorations and character development as each of the three main characters explores who they are and who they've become because of the war. Given my past experiences in war zones, I could certainly sympathise with the characters. I assume Galloway has never actually been in a war zone (which may be quite the assumption on my part), but he's done a convincing job in his research.

I'd picked up the paperback after returning from visiting family in Denver on Christmas, and pushed it on the queue while I (foolishly, perhaps) tried to blunder my way through War and Peace, which only took four months (for comparison, I finished The Cellist of Sarajevo in less than 48 hours; I'd guesstimate it to be around four or so hours of actual reading time, with much of that on the commute). I don't remember the motivation for this, but I ended up getting the Kindle version as well. There's only one quote on Goodreads that I shared because I only read a little bit in the Kindle version, but there were so many other quotes in the book that I wanted to share. Instead, I just kept reading.

The book centres on three characters: Arrow, the sniper; Dragan, the old man on his way to get bread; and Kenan, the man who wants to get water for his family. Sarajevo is a city surrounded by hills, and the men in the hills have laid siege to the town. Snipers and mortars await ordinary citizens trying to get on with their lives. All three of these characters are pitted against these men in the hills, and must survive under threat of violence (and in Arrow's case, with the capability and wherewithal to commit violence). Under the pressures of survival, they're forced to reflect on how the war has changed them, how they came to be who they've become, and whether it's who they want to be. The choices the characters make in guiding their development were key to the story, playing a central role in the plot.

The titular cellist is mourning the twenty-two people killed in a mortar attack while queueing for bread. In remembrance, he's pledged to play Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor for twenty-two days. Each of these three characters is affected by the cellist's music, which has its own effects on their reflections and lives.

The Cellist of Sarajevo is a beautiful story, and perhaps a shorter read. I quite enjoyed it. If you'd like to hear the Albinoni's Adagio, here's one YouTube version.

After reading the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (or, at least, the Edward Fitzgerald translations), I've decided to try to get back to memorising poems again. I tried to explain to someone why you'd want to do this, but it's difficult to articulate.

I guess, if I thought about it, words have a taste—and taste is a terrible description, but it's a sensation that it leaves in your mouth, and hoo boy does that ever sound weird written out—and a poem is such a wonderful thing to just hold there in your head and mull over and just savour. They're like songs, made of rhythm and prose, but in their own way. Why would you ever want to learn to sing or play a song?

Anyhow, I've been starting again with the Rubaiyat; this is, on the whole, a terrible idea considering the poem is comprised of over one hundred quatrains and after a week I have but one to show for it. My technique originally consisted of writing out the quatrain on a notecard. I did this exactly once. It's kind of difficult to just randomly do wherever unless you're one of those people with a hipster PDA (note to self: reconsider going back to this) and a pen and you have a decent writing surface (this isn't particularly throne friendly). I got tired of typing this up in a text document, then going back to check whether I'd successfully remembered it; it's also a pain if you're trying to learn because ideally you'd write the lines underneath or above the line you're trying to remember so you can read it while writing it. This is useful the first couple of times, at least for me, as the physical act of writing or typing something out—provided I've not checked my brain out and done a straight mindless copy—really helps to cement the words in my head, at least anchoring them enough that I can start from a blank sheet of paper (or notecard, as it were). This seems to form a more permanent impression than what I did to learn Do not go gentle into that good night, in which I just memorised each line enough to write it down, then read and recited it a lot.

It was sometime just before midnight and I couldn't sleep, so I got to trying to memorise this, which is admittedly a terrible idea if you're trying to fall asleep, but I wrote this program up in about a half hour. It only works in a text console, which is fine by me because I have SSH on my phone, even if I don't always have reception. If I was more motivated, I'd do some more with it but this is Good Enough™.

That's enough rambling for now, I guess. I really just wanted to write something (I liked it when I used to do the 750 words exercises), and this is what I happened to be thinking about.