Ran across this tonight on YouTube while chasing an old ’80s song. This is one of a few spoken-word records that Harvey Kubernick produced in the early ’80s, and each one is a goldmine of LA punk artists and poets — John Doe, Henry Rollins, Wanda Coleman, and more. It’s one of those records that I don’t think ever made it to CD.
In case the embed doesn’t work , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu42tMcu93g. It’s a pretty good digitization with detailed liner notes about the 70 or so cuts. It was a double-record.
I have this on vinyl and I think two other 2 record sets from the series. One was called ‘Voices of the Angels,’ and the other ‘Freeway Sounds,’ if I recall correctly. I’ll have to dig deeper.
Enjoying WMFU Give the Drummer Radio today. The Dark Night Of the Soul show hosted by Julie is a perfect accompaniment for todays cold, cloudy, rainy day in Los Angeles.
For forever, I had been wanting to learn Python. I haven’t been doing much with scripting languages in recent years, just the occasional shell script fix here and there. Last substantial thing I did was in Perl, back in the late ’90s. I built a Perl script for autogenerating static web pages about Los Angeles radio stations from a simple text file.
A few months ago, I learned of Boot.dev, which is a gamified platform for learning back end development technologies. It’s not particularly expensive to subscribe, and you can try it out for free before you commit. You are awarded XP for lessons you complete, are rewarded for keeping up streaks of daily learning, etc.
So far I’ve managed to maintain a 183 day streak of daily coding, which has been encouraging. The curriculum currently has tracks for backend development with python/go and python/typescript. I just finished a unit on memory management in C, which was a nice refresher course. The curriculum also covers things like basic Linux commands, use of git, and provides some guided projects and opportunities to build personal projects. The platform also has an active discord community, and is somewhat oriented towards people getting skills for their first programming jobs.
I’m basically using it to get some daily mental exercise coding, and to expand my reach on the backend of the stack, as mostly I work on mobile client apps. It is definitely a professional advantage , if not a necessity, when working with devops and backend engineers to be able to read and understand Python, Go, and Javascript.
Enjoying the journey so far, and about to start a personal project, which I’ll talk about in later posts.
So, have been behind on maintaining the blog again, which is no surprise given that I hardly update it. Did an update to the current version of WP, which was long overdue.
Also made a few tweaks to the CSS on the theme, which I’m now not seeing in the editor — think what I did next might have wiped it out.
WordPress was giving me warnings about the security risk of having unused themes laying around, so I took a little time to look at what themes I had. Some were pretty old. The main thing about older themes is that they aren’t responsive for mobile, so those had to go. Other themes that had to go were ones that don’t look good with the current content I have. Most of those are set up to have an image with each post, and so they have huge blank spaces.
I’ve kept a couple themes that I might use yet, but that’s another session.
This kind of assistance can be crucial in helping DV survivors recover a normal life. It’s hard to successfully interview for jobs or perform in a public facing job if you have damaged or missing teeth, and often poor dental health results in other health issues.
Seriously, WordPress has been pushing out a lot of maintenance releases, enough that I have been caught with a pending update more often than not when I want to make a posting.
I’m very happy that they went to an automatic update strategy that doesn’t require special server permissions. The update scripts are also really solid — my update from 2.x to 4.x used their auto-update, and it just worked, to my shock. The smaller updates have been painless as well. Given all the security concerns around blogging software in general, I’m happy that I can keep up to date easily.
