I was always skeptical of eSIMs. The idea you have a mobile identity in a physical SIM that you control seems a sensible approach. An eSIM is sort of locked in to the phone, and you can't just move it. But does it matter? Possibly not.
But the real benefits were not as obvious to me until I started using one. It is mostly the benefits of a second number, or more specifically secondary service, on a mobile phone. This could just as easily be done with two physical SIMs, but it seems common for phones to have a physical SIM and additional eSIM. iPhones certainly allow a physical SIM and many eSIMs, and you can have any 2 active at ones.
Two numbers on one phone
Interestingly, the idea of more than one number is not new. When orange launched, what, 30 years ago, they allowed a secondary voice service on a second number, and their first phones allowed you to make calls and send texts on the two numbers, and know which was calling you, and so on. It was (is) a standards feature of GSM to allow a secondary number on a service. It is great for personal and work numbers on a phone, and for personal and more personal numbers or some such :-)
That was one service but with multiple numbers. I had this, and even had a separate fax and data number on the same SIM. It was only a second telephone number, not a second number for SMS though.
Using dual SIMs, or SIM+eSIM, etc, allows this but with separate service providers. Two services on one phone, including SMS.
A&A SIP2SIM
For a long time we (A&A) have sold a SIP2SIM service, a physical SIM, typically used in one of three ways:-
Connect to your own telephone system and use as part of an office internal phone system (very niche, but what the name SIP2SIM is all about).
Connect seamlessly to A&As service and so be a mobile phone service in itself, like normal, calls, texts, data, but with nice features like call recording (but expensive as a normal phone service)
As above, but using a landline number not a mobile (once again, when they launched, Orange offered this).
We sold the service for all of these. The first is niche, and the others are expensive, so limited take up.
Mobile phone contracts
One of the big issues with making this your "normal mobile phone service" means "changing service provider". This means "waiting to the end of your existing contract". It also means hassle if you don't like A&As service (even with no minimum term) as that means getting a new "phone contract" which is hassle, it seems. So the hurdles are actually contractual and hassle, not technical, or even price in all cases.
But a second service on a phone solves all of that!
It can overlap with the main contract with no hassle, and continue as such if needed.
It can be tested, and then ceased, with no impact on main number.
It can be activated and working in a matter of seconds.
This really is something of a game changer, and I have now seen it in action.
Talking to a friend, and he wants to sort a work number. Within minutes we have a new number allocated, a landline (apparently his older clients don't trust mobiles). It is on his phone as a second number, and working, even with iMessage. All sorted.
Am I a convert?
To be honest, more of a fan of dual numbers, which I had 30 years ago. Even with one SIM, A&A allow a lot of numbers to work to a SIM. So not quite a convert as such. But I am impressed with the easy and speed of using an eSIM, so maybe I am. I'm also a fan of a secondary service on a phone, which eSIMs make easy.
Plugging the new A&A SIP2SIM service!
Shameless plug time - the existing SIP2SIM stops working end of April. The new service is up and running, but not quite everything in place yet, so we are just allowing early access to customers before the proper launch now. More here.
It is more per month, but no air-time charges for calls/texts, some free roaming in EU and US, and (when launched) much cheaper data pricing. Call/SMS charges apply with the SIP/SMS service to which it is connected (even if A&A).
Feedback: That was ridiculously fast and easy to set up, and I got my iMessage activated without problems too.
"More Data Breaches Than You Can Shake a Stick At". That seems like a reasonable summary and I suggest there are two main reasons for this observation. Firstly, there are simply loads of breaches happening and you know this already because, well, you read my stuff! Secondly, There
"The county should buy a unicorn and stable it on the Plain roundabout, where it will magically stop any collisions, alleviate all congestion, and make walking and cycling safe and accessible to all." This would probably make more sense than some of the transport proposals being bandied about - bus tunnels, removing cycling from main […]
I've previously covered two of the major new requirements coming in PCI DSS 4.0, and now it's time to take a look at another one! I've long spoken about Certificate Transparency and the major benefits it can bring to security on the Internet,
So we continue to have guests in our show to talk to us about interesting things... This time is about Apache Tika. This is an incredible tool to do search file processing and metadata extraction. Think about that you have tons of unstructured files, like emails, or documents, and you want to extract, index and then search theses. This is Tika's purpose. And who best to walk us through how it does its magic that its Project Management Committee (PMC) Chair, Tim Allison!
So take a listen as we go deeper on ingesting tons of content (which is fundamental for things like training LLMs).
http://www.javapubhouse.com/datadog We thank DataDogHQ for sponsoring this podcast episode
Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to our cool NewsCast OffHeap! http://www.javaoffheap.com/
The legal changes to Broad St have been made permanent, but the current layout is clearly still temporary, in the sense that many of the features of the area no longer reflect its actual use. Most obviously, most of the existing kerbs are now redundant, or in the wrong place, and serve only as a […]
By Simon Woodhead In recent weeks I’ve poked fun at the dinosaurs in our sector, got cross at the lies and hypocrisy amongst others as well as ridiculed the fake “get global” people. I want to return today to “get…
Having run the CCTV for a while (and not trying to cover the legal issues today), I have been having some fun tweaking.
I am really liking the NX Witness system, but I have a mix of cameras, from dirt cheap to expensive. And the newest ones are really nice - very low level light still in colour and really good clear quality images.
The fun one is the front door. I doubt it is a prime target for burglary, being right on a busy road, and the camera is hidden up in the alcove over the door, so not even obvious it is there. The main use of this camera is for deliveries. To prove when they arrived, and by 24/7 recording, proving when they did not arrive. It is also to allow for parcels left on doorstep and being nicked, or parcels or letters I leave for collection by post man on the door step and being actually picked up by the post man and not someone else. I have used that before to prove postman did collect (long story, saved me a lot of hassle).
I have taken the opportunity to re-position all the cameras, trying to think where someone might jump over a gate or a wall, and ensure a good view. One of my current targets for cameras is showing if/when household waste was put out for collection and when the refuse truck drove off without collecting, as that has happened now 5 times in a row!
But back to the front door - it used to be a dome camera. The issue is it could not see down in to the doorway, so I have replaced with a pendant mount which allows facing down.
So now, with the down facing camera, I actually ended up thinking laterally and turning it 90 degrees. It nicely shows the door, gate, some of pavement, and, pretty well, the "delivery". The only tweak which I will do is raise it a bit to ensure a clearer focus on the parcels themselves.
Update: I ended up changing the type of camera, to one with better focus controls, but still mounting in the eaves facing down. I also managed to get it all turned around in nxwitness.
It also avoids catching too many passers by, or at least faces, which I don't need to record, so even though this should all be out of scope of GDPR, I may as well try and avoid recording.
In many ways it is amusing, and relieving, that the main use of the cameras is not related to crime at all, but proving to the council I put the bins out in time and proving they did not collect them, or that a delivery happened or not. These are more benign things but none the less useful.
Timestamps
Another aspect is the overlay text - I have all cameras showing time. All set to NTP. And I decided all set to UTC for sanity sake, as some will not do BST, some do and get it wrong, and some get it right. Easiest option is UTC, and then when savings images or video (as above image) is NX witness overlay local time to avoid any ambiguity. I also added fixed text to say "UTC" by the timestamps, again to avoid ambiguity. Timestamps are a pain, and UTC is one of the few ways to make sense of it, but helps a lot to state it is UTC!
P.S. Someone pointed out the council expect us to leave refuse "kerbside" which puzzled me.
(they ignored the question, saying to leave in the "usual place"!)
Update: to my surprise, after the 5 previous collections days being missed, they collected, yay! They then missed the next day, surprise surprise.
Keycloak is an essential pillar of many cloud-native systems and significantly impacted the conference, attracting thousands of Kubernetes and cloud-native professionals.
The engagement and collaborative spirit of the cloud-native community were genuinely inspiring, underscoring the collective drive to enhance and innovate within this vibrant ecosystem.
We’re very proud and happy to be part of this fantastic community!
Data breach verification: that seems like a good place to start given the discussion in this week's video about Accor. Watch the vid for the whole thing but in summary, data allegedly taken from Accor was published to a popular hacking forum and the headlines inevitably followed. However,
Tuta cries foul, Chocolate Factory denies service unreachable
Tutao, known for the encrypted email service Tuta Mail, has filed a Digital Markets Act (DMA) complaint to the EU over an alleged de-ranking in Google Search.…
Robert Milkins throws his cue to the ground in disgust after missing a red during his World Snooker Championship second-round match against David Gilbert.
Doing business in Beijing? 'You need to do a what-if scenario'
interview It didn't seem America's divest-or-ban bill for TikTok was going to make it into law when we last spoke with former White House chief information officer Theresa Payton – but law it now is. …
Nas has announced he's doing a tour and prices for a ticket, standing, is £109.35, in Manchester. I really like him and I appreciate his importance in the genre, but that's an insane amount, right? Or am I just cheap? I suppose if that's the price and people are happy paying it then I'm just close-fisted, just seems an awful lot of money to me.
For me it has to be the death of Garreth William who worked for GCHQ. It still puzzles me how he could have zipped himself in a small bag without leaving any fingerprints on the outside as well as padlock it.
This story is from April 2022 but I realize now I never linked to it.
Yandex Food, a popular food delivery service in Russia, suffered a major data leak.
The data included an order history with names, addresses and phone numbers of people who had placed food orders through that service.
Bellingcat were able to cross-reference this leak with addresses of Russian security service buildings—including those linked to the GRU and FSB.This allowed them to identify the names and phone numbers of people working for those organizations, and then combine that information with further leaked data as part of their other investigations.
If you look closely at the screenshots in this story they may look familiar: Bellingcat were using Datasette internally as a tool for exploring this data!
I’ve been at OpenAI for almost a year now. In that time, I’ve trained a lot of generative models. [...] It’s becoming awfully clear to me that these models are truly approximating their datasets to an incredible degree. [...] What this manifests as is – trained on the same dataset for long enough, pretty much every model with enough weights and training time converges to the same point. [...] This is a surprising observation! It implies that model behavior is not determined by architecture, hyperparameters, or optimizer choices. It’s determined by your dataset, nothing else. Everything else is a means to an end in efficiently delivery compute to approximating that dataset.
I needed to attach a correction to an older blogmark (my 20-year old name for short-form links with commentary on my blog) today - but the commentary field has always been text, not HTML, so I didn't have a way to add the necessary link.
This motivated me to finally add optional Markdown support for blogmarks to my blog's custom Django CMS. I then went through and added inline code markup to a bunch of different older posts, and built this Django SQL Dashboard to keep track of which posts I had updated.
I linked to a story the other day about book sales claiming "90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies", based on numbers released in the Penguin antitrust lawsuit. It turns out those numbers were interpreted incorrectly.
In this piece from September 2022 Lincoln Michel addresses this and other common misconceptions about book statistics.
Understanding these numbers requires understanding a whole lot of intricacies about how publishing actually works. Here's one illustrative snippet:
"Take the statistic that most published books only sell 99 copies. This seems shocking on its face. But if you dig into it, you’ll notice it was counting one year’s sales of all books that were in BookScan’s system. That’s quite different statistic than saying most books don’t sell 100 copies in total! A book could easily be a bestseller in, say, 1960 and sell only a trickle of copies today."
The top comment on the post comes from Kristen McLean of NPD BookScan, the organization who's numbers were misrepresented is the trial. She wasn't certain how the numbers had been sliced to get that 90% result, but in her own analysis of "frontlist sales for the top 10 publishers by unit volume in the U.S. Trade market" she found that 14.7% sold less than 12 copies and the 51.4% spot was for books selling less than a thousand.
Today's big model release was Snowflake Arctic, an enormous 480B model with a 128×3.66B MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture. It's Apache 2 licensed and Snowflake state that "in addition, we are also open sourcing all of our data recipes and research insights."
When I said “Send a text message to Julian Chokkattu,” who’s a friend and fellow AI Pin reviewer over at Wired, I thought I’d be asked what I wanted to tell him. Instead, the device simply said OK and told me it sent the words “Hey Julian, just checking in. How's your day going?” to Chokkattu. I've never said anything like that to him in our years of friendship, but I guess technically the AI Pin did do what I asked.
Apple released something big three hours ago, and I’m still trying to get my head around exactly what it is.
The parent project is called CoreNet, described as “A library for training deep neural networks”. Part of the release is a new LLM called OpenELM, which includes completely open source training code and a large number of published training checkpoint.
I’m linking here to the best documentation I’ve found of that training data: it looks like the bulk of it comes from RefinedWeb, RedPajama, The Pile and Dolma.
A bad survey won’t tell you it’s bad. It’s actually really hard to find out that a bad survey is bad — or to tell whether you have written a good or bad set of questions. Bad code will have bugs. A bad interface design will fail a usability test. It’s possible to tell whether you are having a bad user interview right away. Feedback from a bad survey can only come in the form of a second source of information contradicting your analysis of the survey results.
Most seductively, surveys yield responses that are easy to count and counting things feels so certain and objective and truthful.
We [Bluesky] took a somewhat novel approach of giving every user their own SQLite database. By removing the Postgres dependency, we made it possible to run a ‘PDS in a box’ [Personal Data Server] without having to worry about managing a database. We didn’t have to worry about things like replicas or failover. For those thinking this is irresponsible: don’t worry, we are backing up all the data on our PDSs!
SQLite worked really well because the PDS – in its ideal form – is a single-tenant system. We owned up to that by having these single tenant SQLite databases.
Microsoft’s Phi-3 LLM is out and it’s really impressive. This 4,000 token context GGUF model is just a 2.2GB (for the Q4 version) and ran on my Mac using the llamafile option described in the README. I could then run prompts through it using the llm-llamafile plugin.
The vibes are good! Initial test prompts I’ve tried feel similar to much larger 7B models, despite using just a few GBs of RAM. Tokens are returned fast too—it feels like the fastest model I’ve tried yet.
That talk had 12 different live demos in it, and a bunch of those were software that I hadn't released yet when I gave the talk - so I spent quite a bit of time cleaning those up for release. The most notable of those is datasette-query-assistant, a plugin built on top of Claude 3 that takes a question in English and converts that into a SQL query. Here's the section of that video with the demo.
I've also spun up two new projects which are still very much in the draft stage.
llm-evals
Ony of my biggest frustrations in working with LLMs is that I still don't have a great way to evaluate improvements to my prompts. Did capitalizing OUTPUT IN JSON really make a difference? I don't have a great mechanism for figuring that out.
datasette-query-assistant really needs this: Which models are best at generating SQLite SQL? What prompts make it most likely I'll get a SQL query that executes successfully against the schema?
llm-evals-plugin (llmevals was taken on PyPI already) is a very early prototype of an LLM plugin that I hope to use to address this problem.
The idea is to define "evals" as YAML files, which might look something like this (format still very much in flux):
name: Simple translatesystem: | Return just a single word in the specified languageprompt: | Apple in Spanishchecks:
- iexact: manzana
- notcontains: apple
Those checks: are provided by a plugin hook, with the aim of having plugins that add new checks like sqlite_execute: [["1", "Apple"]] that run SQL queries returned by the model and assert against the results - or even checks like js: response_text == 'manzana' that evaluate using a programming language (in that case using quickjs to run code in a sandbox).
This is still a rough sketch of how the tool will work. The big missing feature at the moment is parameterization: I want to be able to try out different prompt/system prompt combinations and run a whole bunch of additional examples that are defined in a CSV or JSON or YAML file.
I also want to record the results of those runs to a SQLite database, and also make it easy to dump those results out in a format that's suitable for storing in a GitHub repository in order to track differences to the results over time.
This is a very early idea. I may find a good existing solution and use that instead, but for the moment I'm enjoying using running code as a way to explore a new problem space.
datasette-secrets
datasette-secrets is another draft project, this time a Datasette plugin.
Currently those keys are set using environment variables, but for both Datasette Cloud and Datasette Desktop I'd like users to be able to bring their own keys, without messing around with their environment.
datasette-secrets adds a UI for entering registered secrets, available to administrator level users with the manage-secrets permission. Those secrets are stored encrypted in the SQLite database, using symmetric encryption powered by the Python cryptography library.
The goal of the encryption is to ensure that if someone somehow obtains the SQLite database itself they won't be able to access the secrets contained within, unless they also have access to the encryption key which is stored separately.
The next step with datasette-secrets is to ship some other plugins that use it. Once it's proved itself there (and in an alpha release to Datasette Cloud) I'll remove the alpha designation and start recommending it for use in other plugins.
Releases
datasette-secrets 0.1a1 - 2024-04-23 Manage secrets such as API keys for use with other Datasette plugins
llm-llamafile 0.1 - 2024-04-22 Access llamafile localhost models via LLM
By far the most detailed paper on prompt injection I’ve seen yet from OpenAI, published a few days ago and with six credited authors: Eric Wallace, Kai Xiao, Reimar Leike, Lilian Weng, Johannes Heidecke and Alex Beutel.
The paper notes that prompt injection mitigations which completely refuse any form of instruction in an untrusted prompt may not actually be ideal: some forms of instruction are harmless, and refusing them may provide a worse experience.
Instead, it proposes a hierarchy—where models are trained to consider if instructions from different levels conflict with or support the goals of the higher-level instructions—if they are aligned or misaligned with them.
The authors tested this idea by fine-tuning a model on top of GPT 3.5, and claim that it shows greatly improved performance against numerous prompt injection benchmarks.
As always with prompt injection, my key concern is that I don’t think “improved” is good enough here. If you are facing an adversarial attacker reducing the chance that they might find an exploit just means they’ll try harder until they find an attack that works.
The paper concludes with this note: “Finally, our current models are likely still vulnerable to powerful adversarial attacks. In the future, we will conduct more explicit adversarial training, and study more generally whether LLMs can be made sufficiently robust to enable high-stakes agentic applications.”
We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone.
Tim Paul, Head of Interaction Design at the UK’s Government Digital Service, published this brilliant prototype built on top of Claude 3 Opus.
The video shows what it can do. Give it an image of a form and it will extract the form fields and use them to create a GDS-style multi-page interactive form, using their GOV.UK Forms design system and govuk-frontend npm package.
It works for both hand-drawn napkin illustrations and images of existing paper forms.
The bulk of the prompting logic is the schema definition in data/extract-form-questions.json
I’m always excited to see applications built on LLMs that go beyond the chatbot UI. This is a great example of exactly that.
I've had many different development platforms over the years - from Notepad++
on library computers in my youth, to Gentoo and then Ubuntu installed on a
series of carefully-chosen laptops with working drivers, and then for the last
five years or so on Surface devices via the rather wonderful Windows Subsystem
for Linux (WSL).
Of course, in the WSL era I am still just running Ubuntu, but inside the
pseudo-VM that is the WSL subsystem of the Windows kernel. It's honestly pretty
great, and I regularly joke that I'm using Windows as the GUI layer to develop
on Linux.
Between the Steam Deck and WSL both being ascendant, maybe we finally got the
Year Of Linux On The Desktop, just not as we expected.
TLDR: I am looking for new developers and maintainers for Takahē who want to help in exchange for my mentorship, or I'll have to sunset the project.
I find it important to have hobbies that aren't the same as what I do for work, which is why an increasing number of them don't involve computers at all - I'm very happy building new things on my camper van, making weird geographic art, or hiking around bits of the Rockies.
However, I still love programming and systems work, and I'll always have at least one project going on the side that involves it - nothing beats the size and complexity of what you can create in just a few hours of coding. That said, I have two basic rules for my programming side projects:
There are many questionable things about American car culture, but the road
trip is not one of them. In a country as large and geographically varied as
the USA, road travel is not just a necessity, but it can also be the
attraction itself.
When I first moved to the USA, I had vague plans of doing some driving around
and enjoying the sheer alien-ness of tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, or
motels where you are somehow the only guest. Nine years in, I've done a decent
amount of that, but these days my attention is more focused around the
camper van that I spent half a year building.
I like to try and share a bit of the experience with those who want to see it,
and as well as posting pictures and videos, I've always liked the idea of
having a live map of where I am - even if it's just for friends and relatives
who are interested in my progress.
I had taken two months off from developing Takahē in the run up to PyCon US;
both due to pressures at work (and then, more recently, half the company being
laid off around me), as well as not quite being sure what I wanted to
build, exactly.
When I started the project, my main goal was to show that multi-domain support
for a single ActivityPub server was possible; once I had achieved that
relatively early on, I sort of fell down the default path of implementing a
lightweight clone of Mastodon/Twitter.
While this was good in terms of developing out the features we needed, it
always felt a bit like overhead I didn't really want; after all, if you're
implementing the Mastodon API like we do, all the dedicated apps for viewing
timelines and posting are always going to be better than what you ship with
a server.
Today is the 0.7 release of Takahē,
and things are really humming along now; this release marks the point where
we've built enough moderation and community features to make me happy that I
can open up takahe.social to registrations,
albeit with a user number cap.
We've also launched a Patreon for Takahē, in a
quest to make development and operation of Takahē more sustainable - and
work towards start paying some people to help out with the less exciting work
like triaging tickets, user support, and moderation of takahe.social. If you
want to volunteer directly, that's covered in our
Contributing docs.
There's some interesting technical topics I want to dig into today, though -
it's been a little while since my last blog post and ActivityPub and friends
continue to surprise.
Yesterday I pushed out the 0.5.0 release of Takahē,
and while there's plenty left to do, this release is somewhat of a milestone
in its own right, as it essentially marks the point where I've implemented
enough of ActivityPub to shift focus.
With the implementation of image posting in this release, there are now only
a few things left at a protocol level that I know I'm missing:
Custom emoji (these are custom per-server and a mapping of name-to-image
comes with each post)
So, after a few weeks of development, I'm happy enough with the state of
Takahē to issue its first official release - which I've chosen to number
0.3.0, because version numbers are made up and I can start where I want.
We're only releasing Docker images right now in order to try and keep the
support burden down (it removes having to worry about people's OS versions
and library environments), so you can find it on Docker Hub.
Twitter is - was - such a unique place. Somewhere where you can have the President
of the United States coexist with teenagers writing fan fiction; where
celebrities give personal insights into their lives while government
departments post memes about public safety;
the place that gave us @Horse_ebooks and @dril.
The "Fediverse", with Mastodon at its helm, is not this. It doesn't seem to want
to be, and I honestly think that's fine - as many thinkpieces have recently
said, the age of global social media might just be over. And given the effect
it's had on the world, maybe that's alright after all.
But there is still a void to fill, and as someone who enjoyed Twitter most
at its "medium" size, I think the ActivityPub ecosystem is well-placed to grow
into such a space. But first, I think there's some important things we have to
discuss about it.
When I decided to properly start using the Fediverse via
my own Mastodon server,
I knew it was probably inevitable that I would end up writing my own server -
and, well, here we are!
My new server is called Takahē, and
it's built in Django and also specifically with Python's async library
ecosystem - I'll explain more about why that matters later.
This website has been running in some form since 2006, and back then it was
one of my very first Django sites, stored in a Subversion respository and using
the thrillingly new Python 2.5.
I can't actually remember if it was the very first thing I built in Django,
but I think it might have been.
It was a very basic CMS built out of the standard building blocks
Django is still known for - the admin, forms, and easy templating. It stayed
like that for many years, with me authoring blog posts via a somewhat-custom
markup language in a big text box in the Django Admin.
If you haven't been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don't blame you. There's a lot going on right now. It's a busy time. But let's pause and take a moment
With early computers, you didn't boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command
Hard to believe that I've had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that's yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster
In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it's not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right?
I've never thought of myself as a "car person". The last new car I bought (and in fact, now that I think about it, the first new car I ever bought) was the quirky 1998 Ford Contour SVT. Since then we bought a VW station wagon
When I wrote about App-pocalypse Now in 2014, I implied the future still belonged to the web. And it does. But it's also true that the web has changed a lot in the last 10 years, much less the last 20 or 30.
I didn't choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with zero
It's been a while since I wrote a blog post, I guess in general, but also a blog post about video games. Video games are probably the single thing most attributable to my career as a programmer, and everything else I've done professionally after that. I
We've read so many sad stories about communities that were fatally compromised or destroyed due to security exploits. We took that lesson to heart when we founded the Discourse project; we endeavor to build open source software that is secure and safe for communities by default, even if
When I wrote about The Golden Age of x86 Gaming, I implied that, in the future, it might be an interesting, albeit expensive, idea to upgrade your video card via an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.
Sagas have been on my mind in several ways since Easter. But first, exciting times in the tortoise world. We were given a new (to us) young one a few weeks ago, and he had been living in a cage inside until the weather warmed. It has now done so and today the larger tortoise emerged from its hibernation in the enclosure in the garden. I thought its was a lump of mud at first bat, as you can see, it has scrubbed up nicely and the younger one has joined it in the paddock!
The first saga has been of the literary kind, the Forsytes which have occupied our dvd viewing and my re-reading for the first part of the year. My name, Jon, was chosen by my dad (who was emotionally attached to the books) because of the young man Jon, the youngest Jolyon of the family. I think my father was rather muddled because he also professed an admiration for the 'man of property' epitomised by Soames who was on the 'other side' of the family. Never mind, the story was worth reading again, and the two tv productions are both good in theier different ways. But the third part of the 9 volumes, going up almost to Galsworthy's death in the early 1930s, were never dramatised as far as I know and I like them even better than the Victorian and Edwardian ones - a much more nuanced examination of love and marriage, with a dramatic view of mental illness thrown in.
Two less welcome 'sagas' lately have been to do with roof and health, both happily resolved. You'll recall perhaps that the roof was repaired last year by a firm which promised excellence and, as we thought, delivered it. It turned out that what they did not do was the issue - first neglecting to tell us of very old insulation which we've now had replaced, and secondly failing to fix any but the end tile in a whole ridge. Of course we could have no idea that there were problems - in the second case the rattling of tiles in the wind (after a long period of fairly calm weather) told us sometehing was amiss; and luckily our regular house and garden person Monsieur Beaumann was able to sort both. It turns out that he has long been a roof specialist - if only we had known...
Our conversation groups still active, with new arrivals from Chicago
The health saga is not, for once, my various aches and pains but the long-running one of Mary's heart and blood (since a minor stroke in 2010), very well surveyed but needing careful supervision. Not for the first time we have been glad of the very local A&E hospital, all built since we came here. In the past week the care has involved feeet up and suppport stockings which are too hot for comfort when the weather warms up.
The warm srping is a lovely time for flowers, so here are a few more from our garden.
And finally a word of praise for one of the few bits of the British administration that actually seems to work. With luck and a following wind my new passport should arrive soon, and like Mary's it was efficiently and quickly dealt with despite Brexit horror stories elsewhere.
I have written before about the dry conditions here. But when it rains it really does. Last week we had 60 mm in a few hours, and another 40 at the weekend, but this morning we are back to bright sunshine and blue skies. The photo above was taken a few days ago, a pink evening sky which we see quite often.
We have been a bit concerned about Edmond, 14 years old and with dodgy kidneys. But we've just returned from the vet, and all seems to be fairly well after a blood test and with a bit more diuretic - desmite occasional wheezes, he is lively and has put on a bit of weight. We hope he will be with us for a little whhile yet.
After our trips to the UK we have mostly stayed home and slotted back into our regular activities. These photos of our regular Tuesday French conversation group were taken by someone elsse for once, so I'm in one or two!
After a good excursion on DVD into the works of Mrs Gaskell we have passed onto John Galsworthy, not just through 2 tv series of the Forsyte Saga but, for me, rereading the books. I started on the paper versions but have passed over to the Kindle (lighter to hold in bed). The Forsytes have a particular association for me because I was called after Jon, son of young Jolyon F. My father pretended to admire the 'Man of Propeerty' characterised by Soames but much about Dad seems to me to have been nearer the softer, more emotional other side of the family, the Jolyons and their ilk. Rereading for the 4th or 5th time I find much in the detail of the written version which can only be hinted at in a tv adaptation, and in the end it is the characters of Soames and his daughter Fleur which dominate the first 6 of the 9 books in the saga. Of the final 3, which are far less well-known, I may write more anon.
Since we returned from the UK for the second time this year, we had one very enjoyable outing to see our friend Barry who lives in these rural surroundings in the area called the Laurargais south-east of Toulouse. Barry is South African in origin but had long re-acclimatised to England where I met him in the Canonbury Chamber Choir in the 1970s. He and his partner Peter (now sadly no longer alive) moved to France with their interest in antiques, and the house is a living reminder of those interests.
A few garden pittures to end with. Spring is with us, and the clocks go forward this weekend.
It is lovely to be back in the bright, light Languedoc. Don't get me wrong, we had a very good trip (apart from the first few hours when the motorways here were closed by prefectoral decree, because of farmers' protests - 5 hours to get near Lyon then a speeding fine for going 8 km/hr too fast in our relief at escaping the jams). We spent excellent days with our family, saw interesting things and ate and drank well. Our return trip, despite threats of farmers' blockages) was calm and trouble-free. We have established a simple, untiring driving routine, turn and turn about at the wheel with short breaks for fuel and snacks, and the hotels we used were convenient and reasonably comfortable.
But on return our wifi was (literally) on the blink, and we waited 3 days for the engineer to arrive. The new world of telephones, internet, tv and radio has changed everyting. Like most people, a few years ago we had a fixed telephone line through which an adequate internet connection could be made. Then fibre arrived, and everything became much faster. Above all, the internet require more and more capacity to keeep up with graphics and so on. Now, everything comes in theory through the fibre-optic cable, much faster - if it works. If not, there is no longer a fixed phone line, no internet and only the old tv signals via the aerial (if they work at all - I have not checked). The tv satellite dish no longer works for British tv. I am a sad old geezer who has not taken on board the brave new world of mobile phones which our children and theirs swear by. For one thing the screens are too small - I love my iPad and computer whhich my old eyes can read. And of course, we pay for the service we are not getting.
Goodbye to Jeff and Fi at the end of a marvellous week together
Since I started to write this a very helpful man arrived, fixed up our internet and left before we had a chance to make sure our phone line was working. It was not and is not. So now we decide whether to abandon our 'landline' phones and tell everyone to call on our mobiles, or try to get things straight for the time being it's the mobiles or nowt. Watch this space, as they say. Above all, do not phone 04 67 85 52 12 - you may leave a message which is never heard.
Until we arrived home, the only shock of our return trip was seeing the appalling mess strewn across the roundabout as we left the A9 here for the main N113 road. At the risk of being a serial moaner, I was shocked by the piles of rubbish left behind by the protestors. I think we have always been in favour of fair prices for farmers - we enjoy good food and have the privilege to be able to pay for it. So I support the agriculteurs in their demands for better conditions, and for proper rewards for local produce rather than cheap imports. we love our local greengrocer who knows his local growers personally and guarantees freshness. I just cannot understand why protestors should not clear up their mess. We saw the final traces being bulldozed and shovelled away as we drove around yeterday, presumably a week or more since the first demos. A lot of work for people not at all involved in the original protests.
Anyway, this blog was among other things a way of sharing the odd notes I post on Facebook most days with you who do not use that dodgy medium. Here are a few recent ones. Letter
to the Guardian: “I am grateful to His Maj for his encouragement
to men to have the check (King Charles ‘doing well’ after prostate
treatment, 26 January). I visited my GP and was examined, blood-tested
and referred to my local NHS hospital in March 2022. I have now waited
22 months for an appointment. And waited etc. Of what exactly is he an
example? (John Dinning, Cardiff)”
Another letter
to the Guardian: ”Your article on a reproduction of the
Bayeux tapestry (29 January) should have mentioned the copy in Reading
Museum, sewn by 35 women from Leek in the 19th century. It’s beautifully
exhibited in the lovely town hall, with free entry. (Plus older
Londoners can travel there on their Freedom Pass on the Elizabeth line.)
A great day out. (Rosie Boughton, London)”
And part
of yet another letter to the Guardian, which rings strong bells: “…the
huge issue for me, and many other drivers according to recent RAC
research, is the dangerous dazzling effect of higher, brighter LED
lights. I am an older driver, and acknowledge this is likely to impact
on my night driving, but my optician has assured me that it’s not me,
it’s the cars. I find night-time driving, if there is a lot of oncoming
traffic, utterly terrifying, and feel trapped at home on winter
evenings. It’s time for a close analysis of accidents attributed to
dazzle, and legislation to ensure the safest possible headlight design
and position. (Sheila Hutchins,Tregony, Cornwall)”
This on my mind very often: the
face of local decline and fall. “Many councils are barely able to carry
out their statutory and growing responsibilities in adult and child
social care, let alone engage in the kind of “discretionary” spending
that enhances the life of their communities. Last week, facing a
rebellion by Conservative MPs fearful of further cuts in an election
year, Mr Gove made an extra £600m available to local authorities. Useful
but nowhere near enough.” The sign of timid, scared central government is to keep ever tighter central control over local spending.
Then, Jurgen Klopp is retiring as Liverpool manager - what a loss, but we all get older - he certainly deserves the rest of his life. And Nottingham is among many local councils nearing bankruptcy - how can this be alowed to happen?
We are in the UK for the second time since Christmas, this time visiting
Jeff and Fi in their new home in Uttoxeter. Like the first trip to Sam
and Sas in Wirksworth, over new year, we are driving which has all
sorts of advantages. However, this time things are complicated by the
French farmers' protests.
We set out from Lunel at 7.30 a.m. last Wednesday, but what should have
been a quick 2-3 hours' journey to Lyon turned into 9 hours, and we
eventually arived at our hotel in Cambrai around 9.30 in the evening
(original plan, before 5 and in daylight - we are frequently caught
driving after dark however much we try to plan to avoid it).
Most
of the motorway closures were officially organised by the Préfectures,
so we drove most of the way south of Lyon on routes nationales,
interesting but much slower. After that we just trundled on fairly
empty motorways, but continuing on Thursday we were held up again by
closures even on the short stretch to Calais and the tunnel. But there
was no major holdup and we arrived at our friends Elizabeth & Nigel
in good time, well tucked away in rural Surrey.
Despite the
tedium of the Wednesday morning journey we were glad to get a different
perspective and view of the northern Rhône vineyards around Crozes
Hermitage whhich we have known for many years on occasional visits.
Later on the town of Cambrai seemed interesting, with a splendid
redbrick railway station just opposite our hotel - we resolved to exlor
in the future when less pressed by travel unknowns. And the hotel
itself was, as we found out on our earlier visit, very comfortable and
friendly, with an excellent and welcome range of bar snacks to make up
for the lack of a full meal.
We have gravitated towards the Logis
de France chain over many years because it always welcomes pets, and
although we left our current dog Edmond in kennels on these trips the
familiar ambience still attracts us.
The farmers' protests look likely to continue, and we don't know if
we'll be delayed on the way home next weekend. But luckily we have
plenty of time.
Our
first day was delayed by official motorway closures, but more often the
hold-ups are caused by long slow queues of tractors, one of which we
saw heading south as we set out for Calais on Thursday. Shortly after
that the authorities closed the A26 motorway for a short stretch, but we
had a short journey and good alternative routes to the Tunnel. So
after out overnight with friends on Thursday we drove at a leisurely
pace to our home for the week in Uttoxeter, where we are very
comfortably housed by Jeff and Fi who find a bit of time for us despite
their busy working lives. We saw Sam, Sas and Ben for lunch on Sunday
and shall see other friends and visit Wirksworth again before we leave
for home at the end of the week.
We are in the UK for the second time since Christmas, this time visiting Jeff and Fi in their new home in Uttoxeter. Like the first trip to Sam and Sas in Wirksworth, over new year, we are driving which has all sorts of advantages. However, this time things are complicated by the French farmers' protests.
We set out from Lunel at 7.30 a.m. last Wednesday, but what should have been a quick 2-3 hours' journey to Lyon turned into 9 hours, and we eventually arived at our hotel in Cambrai around 9.30 in the evening (original plan, before 5 and in daylight - we are frequently caught driving after dark however much we try to plan to avoid it).
Most of the motorway closures were officially organised by the Préfectures, so we drove most of the way south of Lyon on routes nationales, interesting but much slower. After that we just trundled on fairly empty motorways, but continuing on Thursday we were held up again by closures even on the short stretch to Calais and the tunnel. But there was no major holdup and we arrived at our friends Elizabeth & Nigel in good time, well tucked away in rural Surrey.
Despite the tedium of the Wednesday morning journey we were glad to get a different perspective and view of the northern Rhône vineyards around Crozes Hermitage whhich we have known for many years on occasional visits. Later on the town of Cambrai seemed interesting, with a splendid redbrick railway station just opposite our hotel - we resolved to exlor in the future when less pressed by travel unknowns. And the hotel itself was, as we found out on our earlier visit, very comfortable and friendly, with an excellent and welcome range of bar snacks to make up for the lack of a full meal.
We have gravitated towards the Logis de France chain over many years because it always welcomes pets, and although we left our current dog Edmond in kennels on these trips the familiar ambience still attracts us.
The farmers' protests look likely to continue, and we don't know if we'll be delayed on the way home next weekend. But luckily we have plenty of time.
Our first day was delayed by official motorway closures, but more often the hold-ups are caused by long slow queues of tractors, one of which we saw heading south as we set out for Calais on Thursday. Shortly after that the authorities closed the A26 motorway for a short stretch, but we had a short journey and good alternative routes to the Tunnel. So after out overnight with friends on Thursday we drove at a leisurely pace to our home for the week in Uttoxeter, where we are very comfortably housed by Jeff and Fi who find a bit of time for us despite their busy working lives. We saw Sam, Sas and Ben for lunch on Sunday and shall see other friends and visit Wirksworth again before we leave for home at the end of the week.
Some of my friends are not really interested in wine and tend to skip these blog posts. So before you do that this time I will just add a note about the fascination for me apart from the stuff in the bottle or glass. As you can see from the photos, scenery is one of the many attractions.
Châtillon-en-Diois
Wine exploration has shaped our visits to France ever since we started regular trips here 30 years ago. If you look at the map of France, relatively small physical areas are taken up by vineyards, and you are much more likely to find yourself in logging forests or endless of cereals and grass, like the open horizons and rolling slopes of the northern plain we drove through on our way to England at the end of last year.
Beaujolais
But we hunt out the vineyards not just for nice wine but for the interesting people and scenery we discover, get to know and love. I think of the beautiful villages just near us in Lunel or north of Montpellier around the Pic Saint Loup; or of the vineyards of the Entre Deux Mers area south of Bordeaux - the two 'seas' here are the rivers Garonne and Dordogne as the flow northwards to join together as the Gironde at Bordeaux; or of the cossetted iconic hilly country of Beaujolais and the Côte d'Or in Burgundy and the breathtaking rocky beauty of the Rhône valley, whether near the great river at Condrieu and Crozes Hermitage just south of Lyon or, one of our favourite places, Beaumes de Venise tucked under the Dentelles de Montmirail, once best known for its fortified sweet muscat wines but now among the best red wine labels.
While I always liked wine, it was meeting people who were and are involved in making it that has captured our attention. Jean-Michel and Christine Jacob have just retired from their Hauts Côtes de Beaune vineyard and J-M will doubtless now have more time for his beautiful art/sculpture, two pieces of which adorn our hallway. Jean-Philippe Servières, our best local winemaker near Lunel, would probably like to retire, having had precious little chance of a holiday over the past 20 years; and Benoit Viot of the wonderfully-named Chemin des Rêves north of Montpellier has gone from small beginnings - we bought our first wines sitting in the kitchen in Grabels - to becoming president of the prestigious appellation Pic Saint Loup.
We have got to know many other landscapes in the Languedoc, Rhône valley, the Diois (where twinning opened our interest in the Rhône Valley and beyond), or the wide variety of landscapes we have explored across the south - the wild hillls of the Corbières, coastal étangs around the Mediterranean where Picpoul de Pinet is produced, or tiny appellations with unusual grapes like Fronton north of Toulouse. We discovered Seyssel in the far north of the Rhone valley towards Geneva thanks to musician friend and mentor Stéphane Fauth (and his wife Chantal whose cooking helped to 'oil' the many music courses we shared). And we have started to discover the Loire Valley, one of the longest river courses in France which always confused me because the river flows north a long way, just a short distance from the south-flowing Saone and Rhône, before turning left and west at Orleans towards the Atlantic; we got to know various bits of the river - Sancerre, the Touraine, a stretch towards Angers, on various drives south from different channel ports and thanks to good friends Sue and Ian who have a house south of Tours.
Our all-too-brief stay with Sam and family is over halfway through as I write - lovely and we shall miss them but the weather began - let's say - sub-optimal (grey and wet, though not cold). But new year's day dawned with blue sky and sunshine.
Before we left home we indulged in Dickens DVDs, 2 sets of Little Dorritt, one excellent, the older dismal (I once liked this version...), and then a surprisingly good Martin Chuzzlewit (Tom Wilkinson who played an excellent Pecksniff has just died). The casts of all three are mostly outstanding, but the earlier Little Dorritt despite iconic actors like Alec Guinness and Derek Jacobi seemed wooden and stilted. Not helped by a weird 2-part presentation which separated Amy's view from Arthur Clennam's. Claire Foy's heroine is heaps better than Sarah Pickering, who seems to have done nothing else in film - Dickens writes a low-key character but not that low key.
I was encouraged by an Eng Lit friend to read most of Dickens on train journeys commuting to London, and still love the books - Mary came to them after she met me, and I remember buying a job-lot on £1 paperback classics to round out our library. Thinking over the whole series, the theme of financial insecurity and ruin, together with the vital importance of inheritance, is a strong common thread. Dickens' father was in debt and spent months in the Marshalsea, so CD knew of what he wrote. Few punches pulled either - the suicide of Merdle with a penknife in Little Dorritt is memorable in book and on film. But other books like Great Expectations - the title gives the game away - Bleak House with its fog of law-courts, A Christmas Carol of course (we have just seen a DVD with the splendid Michael Hordern hamming it up), Our mutual friend with its heaps of valuable dust, all have money and greed at their centres.
In between whiles I have caught up with Ken Follett's latest Kingsbridge novel, this one skipping centuries forward to the Napoleonic era, and yet another fictional rerunning of the battle of Waterloo. The moments where a character tells another rather artificially the name of such and such a farmhouse or Quatrre Bras crossroads does jar slightly, but Follett like Bernard Cornwell has done his research, and Follett is respected enough to write about cathedral construction in the rebuilding of Notre Dame Paris just as Cornwell has written a decent factual account of Waterloo alongside the romantic version. In my more idiotic moments I wonder how Sharpe, and a Follett hero, acting as adcs to Wellington might have bumped into one another!
We are having a great, relaxed family time here, and trying to live day by day before we drive back. Having heard some of the awful horrors and knife-edge adventures of Sam & Sas's family holiday (they did ultimately have a good time with close friends) across the world we feel glad to have chosen more local, staid journeys, and in our own car. It does of course strike us that the distances and complexities of air travel are inevitable when people fall in love with others from New Zealand or have great friends in the USA. These things tend to conflict with environmental considerations. But good plans tend to involve meeting family and friends in France, in spacious well-equipped gîtes as we did with Judi last summer. Sam and I have been discussing areas of France to meet in, and in any case we plan to visit friends in Normandy in the summer.
This is to wish all our friends and family a hapy and healthy 2024.
I'm writing this in Wirksworth where we're staying with family over the new year. We spent a quiet Christmas at home before we left Edmond in our reliable kennels and drove to England. We arrived on Thursday evening.
Musicians in Lunel last week
We'd decided to drive, and sharing turn and turn about that woekd well through the 1,000 km of France, on Eurotunnel and up the M20, but the M25 was a crawling nightmare. Once on the M40 we were fine again apart from rain squalls - the storms had passed or were further west and north - the M25 delay meant that we drove the familiar last miles in the dark, not as hoped or planned. But we arrived safely at Sam's by 1800 and found Ed, Isla and Karen already installed in their nearby Airbnb. On reflection the journey was a success - I think we shall be happy to drive that way again.
The Lunel sky we left behind
When Jeff and Fi arrived a little later we were delighted - our family was together; we all met up again yesterday for brunch and a mountain of presents. Sadly Sas and Ben had bad colds and could not join us - fingers crossed that they will be better soon.
Mary with Ed and dog Maisie, Jeff, Fi, Isla, Heather and Karen
Earlier this year I wrote about roof repairs. Tiles replaced, tiles made secure, woodwork treated, well done if at some expense. That led to two things. One was the firm which did the work coming back for the first 'guarantee inspection' and of course recommending more work. Of course, they had 'forgotten' to tell us things. So the other, luckily, was that we discovered that our splendid factotum (gardener and general Mr Fix-it) Monsieur Beaumann is, perhaps first and foremost, someone who mends roofs. If we'd realised thhis sooner we might have saved some money, but never mind, and better late than never. He checked things over and found things the others missed. He has now taken over all our roof needs, and has installed new insulation as well as removing mountains of pine needles which were apparently built as nests by rats. Warmer and less rodent-ridden now!
Then there are my teeth, or what remain of them. When I was about 10 some girls caused me to fall off a swing and break two front teeth. After a few years of unsuccessful crowns and some pain, I had a dental plate that lasted over 30 years, then another fitted in France in an emergency over Christmas (when we discovered the efficiency of French health services), and now a new one is due. The old method was to take an impression from the mouth with a kind of plasticene, but I discovered last week that this is old hat - everything is now scanned with a kind of glowing pen, and I should receive the result tomorrow. The wonders of modern technology!
Our dog Edmond is in surprisingly good spirits at the age of 14 plus, and keeps us active getting up to give him breakfast and taking him for walks. He does not seem to miss his twin sister Elvire, who died at Easter, and despite failing eyesight he's always at hand when his meal times arrive, and he still enjoys his evening walk with Mary.
We are looking forward to family visits over the winter, the first to Wirksworth for new year. Apart from Sam and family we have several good friends there, and are kept in touch by regular mailings of Community Fayre, the amazingly longstanding community newppaper (which has just arrived by post). Fewer and fewer things arrive in the letterbox - so much now is electronic - but another paper mailing just now has been the latest news from Médecins Sans Frontières, an absolutely admirable organisation engaged in relief work round the world. There are so many good causes appealing for our support, and this seems to us as good as any recipient of our contributions. A lovely watercolour shared on Faceboook reminds us of what we have to look forward to in Derbyshire.
Our reading in French continues twice a week with the splendid help of Danielle who corrects our pronunciation and explains French culture! Mary reads a lot in French anyway, currently rereading the diaries of Edmond de Goncourt, while my serious reading is of British history in the long and detailed accounts of the British Emipre, One fine day by Matthew Parker. This has fascinated me, starting as it does in the Pacific Islands and Arthur Grimble (whose stories, popular in the 1950s, were shared with us at school) and going on with the harrowing accounts of Amritsar. The subequent topics, Malaya and Aftrica, are less familiar to me, but the sheer brazen brutality of the British in Kenya makes sobering reading. "The Rev. Ryle Shaw, in a letter to the settler-supporting East Africa
Standard, asked whether the British settlers should really be classed
with ‘Asiatics imported for pick and shovel work’ who were ‘alien in
mind, colour, religion, morality and practically all the qualities
Europeans regard as necessary for constitutional citizenship’" is a mild example. We have new book arrivals in Christmas parcels (delights for the Day itself) just received from our friend Ruth in London whose failing sight and other difficulties never seem to deter her from thinking of us so generously.
The chaos of governments over immigration is not confined to the UK it seems: a report in the Guardian this week describes French indecision at its more rational but no less confused best: "The French government has said it will push on
with a planned immigration law in the face of a political crisis after
opposition parties from the left to the far right refused to even debate
it in parliament. The president, Emmanuel Macron, and the centrist government were surprised... on Monday – the first time in 25 years that a government bill was rejected before even being debated by parliament. The immigration bill is intended to show Macron can take tough measures on migration while keeping France's doors open to foreign workers who can help the economy. But its
contents have been rewritten several times, first toughened by the
right-dominated senate, then partially unpicked by a parliamentary
commission, resulting in ... fierce opposition.".
There are no easy answers to world environmental problems either. For example (from a recent article)
"This is a Tesla battery. It takes up all of the space under the passenger compartment of the car. To manufacture it you need:
--12 tons of rock for Lithium
-- 5 tons of Cobalt minerals
-- 3 tons of mineral for nickel
-- 12 tons of copper ore
You must move 250 tons of soil to obtain:
-- 12 kg of Lithium, -- 30 pounds of nickel
-- 22 kg of manganese -- 15 pounds of Cobalt
To manufacture the battery requires:
-- 100 Kg of RAM chips
-- 200 kg of aluminum, steel and/or plastic
The Caterpillar 994A is used for the earthmoving to obtain the essential minerals. It consumes 264 gallons of diesel in 12 hours. Finally you get a “zero emissions” car. Presently, the bulk of the necessary minerals for manufacturing the batteries come from China or Africa. Much of the labour for getting the minerals in Africa is done by children! If we buy electric cars, it's China who profits most! This 2021 Tesla OEM battery is currently for sale on the Internet for $4,99"
To finish, a sad song from Syria by a refugee
Take me to any country, leave me there, and forget all about me
Throw me in the middle of the sea, don’t look back, I have no other option
I am not leaving for fun, neither for a change of scenery
My house was bombed and destroyed; and the dust of rubbleblinded me
Let me try, no matter what, I am a human being
Call it displacement or immigration … just forget about me
Christmas greetings and our best wishes for the new year to all our friends
Well, we have seen Napoleon (the film..) We do like our local 3-screen cinema, and the film did not seem too long. But a bit boring partly because of drear dialogue. It did have interest for us after a long period reading about that confusing period between the Revolution (other revolutions are available) and the mid-19th century - timeline of important events was well mapped out - and the battles were well-staged, but in the end they are battles and by definition confusing and noisy. Josephine was well-acted despite the words she was given. The music was bad to awful, and the credits at the end were simply endless - we gave up witing to see who played what music in case the cinema management locked us in! Back home for a supper of M's delicious apple crumble.
In my catalogue of aches and pains last time I did not mention the psychological effects. Really it's all to do with not wanting to fall - I'm a bit too heavy and despite regular exercise I find getting up from the floor hard even when I am unshocked. The result it shtat I love slowly and sometimes eem to shuffle just toe make sure I stay upright. It is ironic - I used to stride out quite confidently, now Mary quite easily outpaces me, and I hold onto handrails a lot. I am reminded of my father who always used to say going downhill was more difficult than climbing, and more recently I think of my brother Tom who also strode out before his final illness left him nearly immobile before his sad death. Thankfully I am still realtively mobile and Mary is remarkably patient as we make our way round.
As you can see the autumn colours have been magnificent this November, with little wind yet to make the leaves fall. We must make the most of plane trees,because what with road widening and disease a number are cut down every year. A variety of alternatives are planted instead, but of course they take a long time to grow, which is a problem for sites like the Canal du Midi whose banks are largely denuded over long stretches. Also in the centre of town (disease) which is being changed in all sorts of ways - we hope the efforts of the mayor and council to gee up the centre will be successful, though the supermarkets that ring the town militate against a certain commercial future. Happily town centre commerce such as our excellenet greengrocers and the covered market Les Halles have an enduring place in local activity
It is a quiet autumn for us all round, our tv watching has move on from the zany comedy with emotional asides, the American series Soap to the equally crazy but darker Twin Peaks. Our DVD collection is being well used these darker evenings. And we read a lot - one excellent discovery (thanks to Juliet who sent it to us) has been Lea Ypi's Free about her growing up in Albania - she is now a professor at LSE - which shed light on that very hidden country and society, emerging even more reluctantly than other communist states from the shadow of authoritarian rule. It must seem as if the old evils might be preferable to some of the modern populist manifestations, but nobody really has any choice and where they do, in place of rigged elections we now have mass voting for oppressive politicians, or control by gangsters as sems to have happened in Albania. We met some really nice Albanians who have emigrated to France and are hav been takn under her wing by a marvellous French friend, older than us, who came on her annual visit to collect kakis (persimmons) from our tree.
Some of our regular activities have been going on week in week out since 2007, an amazing length of more or less continuous activity. Our Tuesday French groups (some French people join us in separate sessions to improve their English as well as helping us with our French) has now extended to a second session for some of us French learners on Fridays, and the general pattern has settled into reading a text and then trying to translate bit by bit, a challenge for us all. A good shared lunch always helps to round off the session.
Neither Mary nor I really like driving after dark. Sometimes we have no choice - people prefer to meet in the evenings and so on. So yesterday when choir finished at 6 I had to drive home with headlights in my eyes, and various evening meetings will oblige both of us to do this. Apparently most people don't mind - but brighter headlights and faster speeds make the thing more worrisome - so we do our best. Planning our Christmas visits to family though, we plan to drive. We can take our time, visit nice places, stay in comfortable hotels and eat good meals. Mary particularly likes the egg sandwiches on the Eurostar tunnel crossing in the priority lounge!
The last health update needs a coda, partly for things I forgot, partly for things that are cropping up for the first time. My dentist has had holidays over this half-term period, but eventually he will measure me for a new denture and take out a troublesome tooth. Meanwhile, apart from sicatica and various stiffness round the legs, I am beginning to have moments of pain in the hips. Since I have had arthritis elsewhere it would not be surprising if hips started to play up. I do know that hop replacements are simpler than knees, and usually successful, but I think I'll avoid further surgery as long as I can!
After the thrills of the rugby we are back to watching videos in the late evening. We have more Montalbano to come when the newest DVDs arrive, but since Juliet's visit in the summer we have been catching up on the Camilleri books too. The stories, in English translation or subtitles Italian videos, really repay a second (or maybe third) viewing. Several of the tv episodes are taken from short stories I'm now reading. In the end we understand at least some of the complex plots! Now we have also returned to lighter viewing with the American series Soap which is often a spoof of itself, but with moments of intense emotion mixed with increasingly improbable plots.
Yesterday was our 45th wedding anniversary, another Saturday. We celebrated today with a marvellous meal at the Ecailler des Beaux Arts in Montpellier. It is a fish and seafood restaurant, not too far from the Med to make the oysters and other shellfish seem out of place - sadly none of thsoe for me since I don't want to tempt the violent reactions I've had a couple of times. But many other kinds of fish and they certainly know how to cook it - Mary had sole and I rare-cooked tuna. A lovely, sunny meal on the terrace.
45 marvellous years, attested by the ages and lives of our sons and their families, seems an impossibly long time, and details blur, but so do even the details of the last 17 which we've spent in France. Before that we had spent a quarter of a century in Derbyshire, 3 different houses in Wirksworth, but I think this is the longest we've spent in one house. Ideally houses would grow and shrink around your changing needs, but they are stubbornly inflexible, though bits wear out and need replacing or redecorating, while the gardens just grow and have to be cut back unless bits just die.
our jasmine arch, sadly gone these past 2 years
The 17 years here have been accompanied by finding new friends (both French and fellow expats), much around the regular conversation groups we attend in various private houses twice a week through a network which has kept going in various forms since the mid 2000s. We have a modest but active musical life for both of us, my work in and for the Montpellier English-language Library (now counting over 2,000 volumes) and a gentle getting-to-know this area and others in France with wine connections. We were not dramatically affected by Covid and its restrictions because we continued to have a fairly quiet life (lots of reading and tv filling the gaps)
Our Friday conversation group last week
This blog has returned from time to time to the subject of pain. I remember writing a lot about it when my arthritic left knee was replaced in 2015. Actually these days the multiple pains I have are not too bad - more arthritis, sciatica, a touch of gout (from uric acid, an occupational hazard of a wine drinker - my doctor keeps telling me water is better for me), and a weird hangover of the old knee replacement which is a cross between numbness and a diffuse kind of pain - repeated x-rays show the metal joint is still in place and working OK. Oh, and intense itching which erupts at random on one leg or the other. This is interesting - dermatologists keep wanting you to rub cream and so on into the skin, but having read a bit I know that this arises from neurological disturbance inside the body, not from the skin. Ice packs help at night. I keep gently exercising on my static bike and Mary enjoys her weekly Qi-gong sessions, and we are very well monitored by a variety of generalist and specialist medical services.
There is a lot more on my mind, not least random comments I make on Facebook which non-FB friends don't automatically see, and of course nobody has to read all this. But watch this space...
Actually I don't really believe in an afterlife, but I do believe in strong memories of people we have known and loved. Today we are mourning the death of Polly, Shirley Jane Tatum, Polly Carton, my extraordinary colleague in the 1970s and friend from then till now. We met when I was working in Friends House Library when she became warden of the building; colleagues, then I was her head of department for some years before she moved with Arlo in his new role as warden at the Coram Foundation. By that time we and our families were firm friends and we benefitted for many years from her generosity in letting us enjoy holidays near the beach in Daymer Bay at her cottage, Angus. Later she moved near daughter Jan and family to Bodmin.
Polly will be remembered for many things, among them the gardens - plants in the unpromising roof terrace by the flat in Friends House, and for the little garden between Euston Road and Endsleigh Gardens which was a public thoroughfare as well as the entrance to Friends House itself. She kept that in great shape partly despite and partly because of the pollution of Euston Road - aphids had a hard time beating the fumes... Her gardens in Angus and then Bodmin were wonderful. Then music (a passion she shared with Arlo) and table tennis (perhaps that also). Until she died I think she was a very talented artist - painter above all. She could rattle away in Italian, as I am often reminded when we watch our favourite Montalbano. She was an exceptional typist, a skill for which I was often thankful. She was above all a passionate person, in championing right and justice; and a steadfast friend. She was a survivor, beating more than one heart crisis before it all caught up with her, and all with spirit, humour and fortitude. How I will miss her as so many others will too. Her memory will live on through her family, twins Jane and Sarah whom I have been privileged to know since they were 10, and their offspring.
Many other things on my mind, but they will have to wait. This is for Pol.
Aigues Mortes, one of our favourite local places, a nice aerial view
For a long time we had been wary of saturated fats - such as palm oil - in food. Apart from clogging arteries, planting oil palms ruins tropical forests. Gradually you see less palm oil on labels, but the visit of our friend Juliet alerted us to another ubiquitous oil passing under the radar - rapeseed, known here in France as colza. It may not clog arteries but it can have adverse effects on the digestion etc. of people sensitive to it. And once we started to look at labels, it turns up in a load of places you would not expect. Our favourite example is in preserved olives!! Neither of us luckily suffers adverse effects, but we now realise you need to be wary.
We are coming to the end of our welcome procession of visitors - Judi, Alex and their friends depart on their onward travels this weekend having confirmed the good quality of the nearby gîte where they are staying. Travel is never straightforward - yesterday on a short excursion to Arles they had a tyre blowout in their hire car and had to spend time getting it fixed.
At our age life is always surrounded by absences and memories - neither shadows nor ghosts, but rather warm memories of those who are no longer alive. Some were close friends or family, but others have touched our lives in various ways, like Jacky Riou whom we first encountered as the proprietor of a hotel long-closed in the town centre, but then until very recently as the chef at La Terrasse where we often ate, especially if we knew he was on duty!
satirising Marine Le Pen but the figure could just as well be Georgia Meloni
Our hearts sink at the rising tide of populist right-wing politics in Europe, and having recently caught up with Andrea Camilleri's fictional detective Salvo Montalbano based in Sicily, who frequently stumbles (literally and metaphorically) across migrants washed up from the island of Lampedusa, off the coast of Tunisia we are reminded often of the sorry lives of many refugees. I was asked recently how one could distinguish between economic migrants and others - to me human need is paramount, and the intervention of 'smugglers' clouds the water. As we see in the UK and in Europe, politics is ever ready to redefine 'deserving'; in the absence of safe secure routes people who feel desperate will choose dangerous ones. And climate change drives even more people to desperation. I am deeply grateful that our own free choice to migrate has been well-supported, but I can also see how political change could change our feelings of security.
a sculpture symbolising the plight of refugees in the Mediterranean
One excellent book I have begun to read is by Georgina Sturge, a former government statistician. The book is Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers and one example she quotes is the Cobra effect: "as the British government in India in the late nineteenth century learnt, offering a literal reward for people to catch and cull poisonous cobras led to a new enterprise of cobra-farming. Farmers would bring them in by the wheelbarrow-load to claim the money – but at the same time cobras now posed a greater threat to the public in their greater numbers. Such an unintended shift in behaviour in response to incentives is called, after this unfortunate episode, the Cobra Effect.". Watch out for snakes, in the grass of otherwise! Another example - "In nineteenth-century China, European palaeontologists would pay the locals for every dinosaur bone or fossil they brought them. As a result, people started smashing bones into smaller pieces to reap greater rewards. No one said they had to be whole or in the same state as found."
Another passing visit recently was from Christine and Jean-Michel Jacob (this is his sculpture on our hall wall) just retired from their wine business in Burgundy and on their way to a deserved break in Spain. We shall miss their wonderful wines but hope to see them en passant from time to time.
Today’s house, built in 2001, comes to you from, you guessed it, the Chicago suburbs. The house is a testimony to traditional craftsmanship and traditional values (having lots of money.) The cost of painting this house greige is approximately the GDP of Slovenia so the owners have decided to keep it period perfect (beige.) Anyway.
This 5 bedroom, 7.5 bathroom house clocks in at a completely reasonable 12,700 square feet. If you like hulking masses and all-tile interiors, it could be all yours for the reasonable price of $2.65 million.
The problem with having a house that is 12,700 square feet is that they have to go somewhere. At least 500 of them were devoted to this foyer. Despite the size, I consider this a rather cold and lackluster welcome. Cold feet anyone?
The theme of this house is, vaguely, “old stuff.” Kind of like if Chuck E Cheese did the sets for Spartacus. Why the dining room is on a platform is a good question. The answer: the American mind desires clearly demarcated space, which, sadly, is verboten in our culture.
The other problem with a 12,700 square foot house is that even huge furniture looks tiny in it.
Entering cheat codes in “Kitchen Building Sim 2000” because I spent my entire $70,000 budget on the island.
Of course, a second sitting room (without television) is warranted. Personally, speaking, I’m team Prince.
I wonder why rich people do this. Surely they must know it’s tacky right? That it’s giving Liberace? (Ask your parents, kids.) That it’s giving Art.com 75% off sale if you enter the code ROMANEMPIRE.
Something about the bathroom really just says “You know what, I give up. Who cares?” But this is not even the worst part of the bathroom…
Not gonna lie, this activates my flight or fight response.
If you remember Raggedy Ann you should probably schedule your first colonoscopy.
Anyways, that does it for the interior. Let’s take a nice peek at what’s out back.
I love mowing in a line. I love monomaniacal tasks that are lethal to gophers.
Alright, that does it for this edition of McMansion Hell. Back to the book mines for me. Bonus posts up on Patreon soon.
Hello everyone! The word is out – I am writing a book!
If you ever wanted to read a book about McMansions, 5-over-1s, the ignoble toil of architects, ridiculous baubles for rich people, hostile architecture, private equity, shopping (rip), offices (rip), loud restaurants, and starchitects who behave like tech founders, this is the book for you!
Thank you all for your support throughout the years – without you this would not be possible. And don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging throughout it all, so stay tuned for this month’s post.
Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Come on, Kate, that’s a little kooky, but certainly it’s not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory.” Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.
The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.
It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it’s a cheap joke. But there’s something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.
And then there’s this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.
Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don’t think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.
A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.
Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they’re not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.
At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house’s most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.
And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God’s sitting.
Hello, everyone. I hope this blog can bring some well-needed laughs in really trying times. That’s why I’ve gone back into the archives of that precipitous year 2007, a year where the McMansion was sleepwalking into being a symbol of the financial calamity to follow. We return to the Chicago suburbs once more because they remain the highest concentration of houses in their original conditions. Thanks to our flipping predilection, these houses become rarer and rarer and I have to admit even I have developed a fondness for them as a result.
Our present house is ostensibly “French Provincial” in style, which is McMansion for “Chateaux designed by Carmela Soprano”. It boasts 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, and comes in at a completely reasonable 15,000 square feet. It can be yours for an equally reasonable $1.5 million.
Every 2007 McMansion needed two things: a plethora of sitting rooms and those dark wood floors. This house actually has around five or six sitting rooms (depending if you count the tiled sunroom) but for brevity’s sake, I’ll only provide two of them.
With regards to the second sitting room, I’m really not one to talk statuary here because beside me there is a bust of Dante where the sculptor made him look simultaneously sickly and lowkey hot.
Technically, if we are devising a dichotomy between sitting and not sitting (yes, I know about the song), the dining room also counts as a sitting room. The more chairs in your McMansion dining room, the more people allegedly like you enough to travel 2.5 hours in traffic to see you twice a year.
Here’s the thing about nostalgia: the world as we knew it then is never coming back. In some ways this is sad (kitchens are entirely white now and marble countertops will look terrible in about 3 years) but in other ways this is very good (guys in manhattan have switched to private equity instead of betting the farm on credit default swaps made from junk mortgages proffered to America’s most vulnerable and exploited populations.) Progress!
Okay I really don’t understand the 50 bed pillows thing. Every night my parents tossed their gazillion decorative pillows on the floor just to put them back on the bed the next morning. Like, for WHAT? Who was going in there? The Pope?
Here’s a fun one for your liminal spaces moodboards. (Speaking for myself.)
Yes, I know about skibidi toilet. And sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler. I wish I didn’t. I wish I couldn’t read. Literacy is like a mirror in which I only see the aging contours of my face.
When your kids move out every room becomes a guest room.
Anyway, let’s see what the rear of this house has to offer.
The migratory birds will not forgive them for their crimes. But also seriously, not even a garden?
Anyway, that does it for this round of McMansion Hell. Happy Halloween!
Howdy folks! Sorry for the delay, I was, uhhhh covering the Tour de France. Anyway, I’m back in Chicago which means this blog has returned to the Chicago suburbs. I’m sure you’ve all seen Barbie at this point so this 2019 not-so-dream house will come as a pleasant (?) surprise.
Yeah. So this $2.4 million, 7 bed, 8.5+ bath house is over 15,000 square feet and let me be frank: that square footage is not allocated in any kind of efficient or rational manner. It’s just kind of there, like a suburban Ramada Inn banquet hall. You think that by reading this you are prepared for this, but no, you are not.
Scale (especially the human one) is unfathomable to the people who built this house. They must have some kind of rare spatial reasoning problem where they perceive themselves to be the size of at least a sedan, maybe a small aircraft. Also as you can see they only know of the existence of a single color.
Ok, but if you were eating a single bowl of cereal alone where would you sit? Personally I am a head of the table type person but I understand that others might be more discreet.
It is undeniable that they put the “great” in great room. You could race bicycles in here. Do roller derby. If you gave this space to three anarchists you would have a functioning bookshop and small press in about a week.
The island bit is so funny. It’s literally so far away it’s hard to get them in the same image. It is the most functionally useless space ever. You need to walk half a mile to get from the island to the sink or stove.
Of course, every McMansion has a room just for television (if not more than one room) and yet this house fails even to execute that in a way that matters. Honestly impressive.
The rug placement here is physical comedy. Like, they know they messed up.
Bling had a weird second incarnation in the 2010s HomeGoods scene. Few talk about this.
Honestly I think they should have scrapped all of this and built a bowling alley or maybe a hockey rink. Basketball court. A space this grand is wasted on sports of the table variety.
You would also think that seeing the rear exterior of this house would help to rationalize how it’s planned but:
Not really.
Anyways, thanks for coming along for another edition of McMansion Hell. I’ll be back to regular posting schedule now that the summer is over so keep your eyes peeled for more of the greatest houses to ever exist. Be sure to check the Patreon for today’s bonus posts.
As some of you may know, I have been going to language school for the last few months in order to learn the world’s most widely spoken and useful language: Slovenian. At this point, my Slovenian is about as coherent as, well, a McMansion. In order to feel better about myself, I have sought out a McMansion that is worse than my cases and word-order. This house (in Naperville, IL, of course) does, in fact, make me feel better, but will probably make you feel worse:
This Cheescake Factory house, built in 2005, boasts 5 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms and can be yours for the entirely reasonable sum of $3.5 million dollars. Also for some reason all the photos look like they are retouched with 2012-era Instagram filters.
First of all, trying to visualize the floor plan of this house is like trying to rotate seven cubes individually in my mind’s eye. Second, if you stand right beneath the hole in the ceiling you can get the approximate sensation of being a cartoon character who has just instantaneously fallen in love.
Even if this was a relatively mundane McMansion it still would have made it into the rotation because of the creepy life-sized butler and maid. Would not want to run into them in the middle of the night.
The mural is giving 1986 Laura Ashley or perhaps maybe the background they use for Cabbage Patch Kids packaging but the floor? The floor is giving Runescape texture.
Have you ever seen so many real plants in your life? A veritable Eden.
The overwhelming desire to push one of the chairs into the haunted jacuzzi…but in reality they probably put those chairs there to keep from accidentally falling into the tub at night.
(elevator music starts playing)
This is one of the all time [adjective] rooms of McMansion Hell. I personally am in love with it, though I don’t think I understand it. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood…..,
Continuing with the baseball theme, the guy in the painting looks how I feel after it’s been raining in Ljubljana for two straight weeks. (Not ideal!!)
And finally:
We love a house that has four unused balconies and also a sporting grounds that is large enough to build a whole second McMansion on top of. Everyone should so value their health.
Thank you for tuning into another edition of McMansion Hell. Be sure to check out the Patreon for the two bonus posts (a McMansion and the Good House) which both also go out today!
Hi everyone: I’ve written a long deep-dive on the present state of the McMansion, from farmhouse chic to imminent environmental collapse. If you’ve been seeing an inordinate number of big ugly houses pop up in your neighborhood, you are not alone!
In my latest column for The Nation, I defend single stair buildings against their detractors - I think single stair is wonderful! - But I also don’t think it’s some kind of panacea for the housing crisis.
Howdy everyone! Some exciting news: I’m doing a stint at The Nation this month writing biweekly design columns. In this first one, I’ve done my best to expand on an earlier McMansion Hell post in order to answer the defining question of our time: why the hell is everything greige now?
Often people say to me, “Kate, you’re an architecture critic! You must have an impeccably designed home full of wonderful design.” Haha, NO! However, I do think it’s entirely possible to collect design and live an aesthetically satisfying life on, like, a normal salary. Last week, I wondered via Twitter whether anyone would be interested in what my favorite things are - since this blog is usually devoted to, well, shitty and ugly things. The post got over 1,000 likes, so here we are. Because it’s February and everyone is miserable (February is the most miserable month of the year), I figured I’d try some positivity for once. The photos in this post are taken using my garbage iPhone and the links aren’t affiliate links so I’m not making any outside money on this post - but if you enjoyed it, you can always buy me a coffee.
Swatches
I love Swatches. They’re one of the first things I bought with my first adult paychecks. They are inexpensive (for a watch), they are fun, they are very design-y. Some of the watches in my collection were co-designed by the likes of Memphis-Milano designer Nathalie Du Pasquier and famous composer Philip Glass. Every time I pass by a Swatch store I’m tempted to pick up another one. Once, when I went to a lecture by a famous architect, half of the people in the audience were wearing Swatches. (The other half were wearing Skagen watches which were popular during the height of minimalism.) Consider that an endorsement. Or a warning. $50-$200, Swatch.com.
2. This Mug Warmer, Specifically
I think good design solves a problem without creating another problem. The mug warmer is a great example. I hate when coffee goes cold. The first solution presented to me was a warming mug. The mug, though aesthetically pleasing, wore out easily and forced me to consume my coffee in the same mug every day if I wanted it to stay hot which is annoying. Exasperated, I bought this small, unbranded device (the brand name is literally listed as COFFEE MUG WARMER) on a whim. It is stupidly simple: when you put a mug on the warmer, it depresses a button which turns on a mug-safe electric coil. When you take the mug off the warmer the device shuts off. For some reason you can also use it to charge your phone. 10/10 no notes. $24, Amazon.com.
3. The Ikea Kallax
I think the Kallax shelf is a revolutionary piece of furniture. First of all, it holds a lot of shit – books, coffee table tomes, vinyl records, boxes for crafts and toys, clothes etc. It’s not the most economical plain Ikea bookshelf (that would be the Billy), but the diversity of items it’s able to accommodate makes it the most financially accessible large storage system out there and it’s not even remotely close. It is so simple, so easily reproduced: a bunch of interlocking boxes. Duh. In my opinion, the Kallax looks good, too – it is a statement piece and can fill up a decent size wall. I’ve used my Kallaxes as display cases, room dividers, bookshelves, craft storage, and more. Plus you can also put even more stuff (plants, collectables, more books) on top of it! $89 and up, IKEA.com
4. Muji Pens and Notebooks
Muji, a Japanese company known for their minimalist clothing and home goods, makes the best pens and notebooks out there, and unlike Moleskines, they are cheap. It is a cliche that architecture-y people love Muji’s stuff, but in our defense, that stuff feels sooooo gooooood. The pens come in a variety of points - many under 0.5 so you can get some real fine lines going; they write smoothly and travel well, even on airplanes. The pack of five slender notebooks is a must have - they don’t feel impossible to fill up, they lie flat, and they’re not so good looking that you feel that writing in them is a form of desecration. I go through several every year. Muji’s planners and novelty notebooks are high quality and make me feel as though I could potentially become an organized person. (This is not true but aspirational consumption is a real thing.) Under $15, Muji.com.
5. The Rains Backpack
I have three criteria for a backpack: it sits comfortably on the shoulders, it can get wet, and it doesn’t make me look like a hiker or schoolchild. The Rains backpack is the only one that satisfies all three criteria. I’ve taken it along with me when covering the Tour de France and the Tour of Spain and during those travels it’s survived some extremely wet days in both, along with the contents inside. (As you can see, mine has been through a lot.) $110, Rains.com
6. Vintage Ski Jackets
In Chicago it gets cold and it snows a lot. A good winter coat is a must, but those are usually very expensive and not very cute. Indeed, for absolutely polar weather I’ve acquired an ugly down insulated coat, but for the days where it’s like, 32 degrees (0 degrees C) I own a number of different vintage ski jackets so that I can match my jacket with my outfits. Vintage scalpers have gotten to a lot of the market - chore coats, 80s sweaters, etc, but for some reason the ski jacket remains relatively untouched. Fine examples made in the USA by companies such as Roffe sell for $30-50 on eBay. Apologies in advance for causing a run.
7. Open Edit Jewelry
Open Edit is a Nordstrom sub-brand of jewelry targeted at people who like big chunky statement pieces (aka me.) Their jewelry is relatively decent quality while feeling and looking expensive. Open Edit makes jewelry using a variety of bold colors and materials - translucent plastic, pastels, brass, etc. They also make pieces in more subtle forms such as loopy gold chains, y2k-drippiness and asymmetric styles that are popular at the moment. Nordstrom is trying very hard to be the cool department store these days and entry-level brands like Open Edit are a step in the right direction. What’s more, it’s very affordable. $30-50 Nordstrom.com.
8. Vignelli Hellerware
Rarely are home goods designed by extremely famous designers attainable by us normal people. In 1964, Italian high modernists Massimo and Lella Vignelli designed a set of dinnerware for Heller. Using melamine, a durable plastic, the multicolored set shows up repeatedly in primary source design materials from the 70s, including the MoMA show devoted to radical Italian design. Stackable, colorful, and genuinely fun, I love my Hellerware, which I received as a Christmas gift from my husband the year we were married. Your day simply feels a lot less bad when you’re drinking orange juice out of a cup that speaks to your inner child. $60 per set, MoMA Design Store.
9. Tom Sachs Nikecraft Shoes
As many of you know, I collect sneakers and own around 25 pairs ranging from Jordans to Chucks. My favorite pair, however, are the brown Tom Sachs Nikecrafts, a recent collaboration between the American contemporary artist Tom Sachs and Nike. Sachs has been working with Nike for a number of years, and the Nikecrafts are his attempt to design a functional, handsome “everyday” shoe - a “General Purpose Shoe,” an attempt I consider successful. I love the hell out of my Tom Sachs. The Nikecrafts are comfortable; the big tabs on the tongue and heel enable them to be easily put on without a shoehorn. The brown color can get dirty and doesn’t show as much wear. Plus they are hype-y enough to look very cool, playing into current trends of “normcore” and “Gorpcore” without looking too much like either. The current crop of Nikecrafts are sold out, but can be bought via resellers. $87-125 (size dependent) StockX.com.
10. The Freitag Maurice Tote
A writer is nothing without their tote bag. Whether the tote is a signifier of cultural participation (a la The New Yorker) or simply a carry-all, step into a cafe in any major city and you’ll find there’s a reason they’ve become a creative-class stereotype. The Freitag Maurice tote, while expensive, is the tote bag to end all tote bags to the point where I’ve gotten rid of most of my other ones. Freitag, a Swiss company, makes their bags out recycled truck tarps, hence they can take an immense beating. They’re water proof. They can be dragged through hell. They hold a lot of stuff and the strap sewn on the inside is, like, triple reinforced so even if you sling it across your shoulder when it’s full of heavy books, there’s nothing to worry about. This is probably my most beloved item. I use it every single day and it has never failed me. I find it very handsome. It has become a part of my personage. I cannot imagine my life without it. $170, Freitag.ch.
I hope you enjoyed this little post about the things I like! Now you, too, can outfit your life like an architecture critic making a middling income.
However, if you are filled with a bunch of hate in your heart and still want to see a McMansion this month, you can:
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