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  • Twitter

    I logged in the first time soon after it started in 2007. I did my ten years and then mostly logged off by 2017. I’m not likely to start using it again regularly although I still use it occasionally as a people bookmarking service of sorts. I logged in last week to get an ‘archive’ of all of my data and publish it elsewhere1,2.  I tweeted 828 times and based on the IDs in the data, I’m guessing that I was the 950,535th person to ever tweet. The process felt achingly familiar3. I’ve had some discussions with others about it recently and it reminds me to think about how I use the web. Per the course… I like to flush it out, write it down, and publish it so I can send a link instead of hashing it out in an email or text thread.

    Twitter was built as a MicroBlogging service. Microblogging as a type of broadcast medium was the forerunner to social networking platforms. Social networking existed from the moment the first network computer connections were made. Twitter had a good name and was the best breed of something not unique amongst the landscape at the time. The fundamentals of Twitter already existed elsewhere. The Twitter idea originated from Odeo4,5, a podcasting company. It was just a means of having an SMS group chat.  Evan Williams created Blogger which was sold to Google and was the basis of the ideas behind both podcasting and blogging. Before Twitter, social media meant connecting with others online primarily through email and RSS, both of which could be read from the same client and in a browser. Some folks worked out unique ways to notify others via email for pingbacks and trackbacks6. I was a fan of Friendfeed because it supported pulling feeds from various sources. Facebook acquired it for $15 million and shut it down7.  Similarly, Pump.io, StatusNet, and identi.ca were using the open-source Activity Streams format which was a precursor to the ‘Fediverse’ or federated social network terms tossed around today. 

    Inter-Net-work….the web was inherently social long before the media part. In Silicon Valley’s race to capitalize, proprietary methodologies were created because open standards hinder income potential. Even the data archive I got from Twitter last week isn’t exactly portable. The WC3, who sets the standards has recommended Web Mentions, Activity Streams, and Activity Pub9 standards which is the protocol that makes Mastodon federated. I migrated most of my Twitter follows over to Mastadon while I was at it last week. Watching the other platforms pivot to gain new users is amusing. Substack has added ‘mentions’, ’cross-posts’, and ‘best seller’ badges10. Tumblr rolled out a $7 badge and the owner insisted they would be implementing the activitypub specification which I noted appropriately11. I’m sure folks will figure out a way to spam those protocols too as long as there is a way to profit from them. Twitter turned to bots after it gained popularity and the account APIs were introduced. The bot, spam, link farms, etc were online long before Twitter too.

    Elon Musk recently tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” likely in reference to his surveys on reinstating previously banned accounts. It translates to the “Voice of the People is the Voice of God”,  but the full context of the most cited reference to that term is:

    Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.  “ And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. 

    ~ Alcuin in his letters to Charlamagne Epistle 127 in 760AD12.

    The riotousness of the crowd is Twitter. And Twitter is just a bellwether for the internet as a whole as we adapt to new communications mediums. Those first couple of years were just techie types tweeting because those were most of the same folks with websites.  Then came the journalists, media, celebrities, publishers, and internet celebrities. Then everyone’s uncle had it installed on their phone.  When those other folks started rambling on about their other interests, I lost interest. And then they started to monetize it all with adverts, tracking users across the web, and rewriting shared URLs so they could track those too.  The most retweeted thing ever was a pyramid scheme offering a reward for retweets. The web was already decentralized and will likely always be outside some platforms’ walled gardens. I just hope that the efforts to improve the open standards aren’t sabotaged by private interests.

    I’m sure in the coming year we’ll end up hearing a lot more on free speech and social media. I have a very simple minded approach to it which I wrote about pretty extensively in my article on Section 23013. I think that you’re welcome to espouse your opinions, ideas, or theories however you’d like but not entirely without consequence if they are damanging to others. I think that the main product of social media platforms, aside from usability, is sorting and moderating that information so that it’s vaulable to it’s end users. A platform like Twitter is a private company and can make itself reponsible for moderation however it best see’s fit to it’s own business model. And likewise, I can excersize my own liberty to not pay it any attention.

    I’d use social media again if I had something to promote and I suppose I’m lucky not to have the need. Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams apologized saying he was “wrong to think that an open platform where people could speak freely would make the world a better place”.  I wouldn’t completely agree with him on that because I believe there have been some good things gained through social networking platforms.  I read an essay recently fed to me, not via social media but my handy dandy good ole’ fashion hosted RSS reader…  entitled A Tweet Before Dying that said “What then? We’ll all move over to some Twitter replacement like Mastodon, hundreds of millions of us, and ruin that too? Sigh.”13. Other than echoing my sentiments here, whatever happens with Twitter means very little to me because I choose to rely not on the platform itself but on the interoperable standards of the internet which were social from the get go. 

    2022/12/03 Update:

    Right on Cue… Matt Taibbi, the investigative journalist published a series of tweets he’s calling the Twitter Files15 yesterday afternoon looking into the content moderation efforts of Twitter during the last election. Main takeaway for me was the fact that, imagine this… people are sending emails around requesting removals and questioning various policies. Sometimes just having an audience has it’s own consequences.

    2025/11/15 Update:

    The thing is… all this new reporting on foreign spam accounts seems so obvious to me, I can’t even really understand how it’s news other than the fact that they added the ‘about this account’ features showing country of origin16. The new reporting did kinda touch on something I hinted at here and that America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle17. Perhaps I’ll log in again and leave this as my only ‘tweet’ since I previously deleted all of the others… na, ole Space Karen isn’t getting any eyeballs from me.

    1. @windhamdavid tweets – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/tweets 
    2. @windhamdavid follows – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/people#i-follow-on-twitter
    3. Windham, D. 2020. Dirty Algorithm – https://davidwindham.com/dirty-algorithm/
    4. Odeo – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeo
    5. Twitter History – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#History 
    6. Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
    7. FriendFeed – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed 
    8. Silicon Valley – S3E10 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
    9. W3C Social Web Protocols- https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ 
    10. Substack – https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-mentions-and-cross-posts
    11. Tumblr –https://windhamdavid.tumblr.com/
    12. Alcuin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcuin
    13. Windham, D. 2021. Section 230 – https://davidwindham.com/section-230/
    14. Ford, P. 2022. A Tweet Before Dying – https://www.wired.com/story/tweet-dying-revolutionary-internet/
    15. Taibbi, M. 2022. The Twitter Files – https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
    16. Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors – https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-account/685042/
    17. America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle – https://www.404media.co/americas-polarization-has-become-the-worlds-side-hustle

  • David Byrne

    I went to see David Byrne in Asheville a couple weeks ago. We were in the first rows and the audience started following the performers dance moves. It was like being in some sorta intimate line dance with the band. It was stellar. Watching him perform is more akin to watching a preacher than a rock musician. I’ve had a long held fascination with David Byrne and I think it began in August of 1981 when MTV first went on the air and I saw this video.

    I would have been just under 10 years old the first time I saw the video, but I remember quite vividly the debut of MTV on our console television in the living room. MTV aired a bunch of the same videos1 over and over, but none of them grabbed my attention the way Once In A Lifetime by the Talking Heads2 did. In retrospect, I believe the innovative use of film editing was just the product of the art school background of the Talking Heads band members. At that age, I didn’t really understand the meaning of the lyrics and it was only the motion that intrigued me. Regardless, the song reappeared in a 1989 film entitled Down and Out In Beverly Hills3, which gave me a bit of insight into the meaning of it. The theme of the film kinda nailed the existential crisis of the song lyrics. About that same time (1989) I owned exactly two concert films on VHS: The Song Remains the Same by Led Zepplin and Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads4. Both of which are two of my all time favorite concert films. I bought up about every Talking Heads and David Byrne CDs I could get my hands on. And I played them non-stop. I had a couple friends who also enjoyed them, but they were few and far between.

    Skip ahead fifteen years or so, when I met my wife in college. Two things really stood out about our first date from my other gal pals. The first is that she had a really good sense of humor, not just the giggle type, but the dark and cynical gut rolling humor I like. The second thing is that she really liked the David Byrne and Talking Heads. It wasn’t just the ‘oh yeah, they’re cool’ type of like. She knew all of the lyrics to most of the songs and understood them. The first birthday gift I ever bought her was a talking heads CD box set. We played that thing out on every trip we took. I’ve since read How Music Works6 and followed about every recording project, film, or book he’s been involved with. I’m also particularly fond of his internet radio station7 because of the way he curates the playlists. I can’t say there is anything he’s created that I don’t like. I am particularly fond of a couple though… the film True Stories, Look Into the Eyeball, and Uh-Oh. I also really like the soundtrack to The Last Emperor and it was nice seeing him play himself on the Simpsons Dude, Where’s My Ranch? and in This Must Be the Place.

    Neither of us have ever seen David Byrne in concert. I bought the tickets as soon as they went on sale and put us in the second row. As with what has been noted the style of that original video in that he studied archive footage of “preachers, evangelists, people in trances, African tribes, Japanese religious sects” to see how he could incorporate them into his performance… the live performance we watched wasn’t too far off. The way he engaged the audience wasn’t that of a rock star, but of an evangelist. Because the set design was so simple and the accompanying band members engaged in a rehearsed synchronized dance routine, the first ten rows of the auditorium were completely engaged in the performance. Him and his crew were working hard breaking a sweat, and had obviously spent countless hours rehearsing the material and choreography. Like I said… it was top notch. We already knew the lyrics to the new album so we listened to the Imelda Marcos inspired musical Here Lies Love5 written by Byrne on the way up, while Ginny researched the Marcos’ real life. On the way back we listened to Brian Eno. I’d give the American Utopia concert a 10/10. And I give David a 10/10 on being an artist and a decent human being.

    Here’s the setlist for the show (Asheville, NC – May 8th, 2018):
    Here – Lazy- I Zimbra (Talking Heads) – Slippery People (Talking Heads) – I Should Watch TV (David Byrne & St. Vincent) – Dog’s Mind – Everybody’s Coming to My House – This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) (Talking Heads) – Once In a Lifetime (Talking Heads) – Doing the Right Thing – Toe Jam (Brighton Port Authority) – Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)(Talking Heads) – I Dance Like This – Bullet – Every Day Is a Miracle – Like Humans Do – Blind (Talking Heads) – Burning Down the House (Talking Heads) – Encore: Dancing Together – The Great Curve (Talking Heads) – Hell You Talmbout (Janelle Monáe)

    25/12/04 Update: We saw David again last night in Atlanta for the Who Is the Sky? tour8. The thing is I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my lifetime and it’s definitely different. David takes a bunch of highly trained dancers, musicians, and vocalists and puts em through their paces in a thematic visually stunning choreographed set. He gave em what they wanted on this tour, yet the set list of songs somehow still felt like a tightly planned concept album. It’s really about him as an artist. It’s kinda hard to explain, but it’s like he’s floating up above it to steal a line from his song. He’s not rooted in any physical place or timeline even though several of the songs have very physical references. The lyricism is timeless and abstract – he blended a setlist that spans almost fifty years. Here’s the setlist:

    • Heaven ( Fear of Music )
    • Everybody Laughs ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • And She Was ( Little Creatures )
    • Strange Overtones (Brian Eno – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today )
    • Houses in Motion ( Remain in Light )
    • T Shirt ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • (Nothing but) Flowers ( Naked )
    • This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • What Is the Reason for It? ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Like Humans Do ( Look into the Eyeball )
    • Don’t Be Like That ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Independence Day ( Rei Momo )
    • Slippery People ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • My Apartment Is My Friend ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Hard Times ( Paramore cover )
    • Psycho Killer ( Talking Heads: 77 )
    • Life During Wartime ( Fear of Music )
    • Once in a Lifetime ( Remain in Light )
    • Everybody’s Coming to My House ( American Utopia )
    • Burning Down the House ( Speaking in Tongues )

    Anyway, you can go find the tour show reviews out there so I’m not going to sum it up. The Fox in Atlanta is wild with its mosque design. All I’ll say is if you haven’t seen a performance – it’s good – definitely worth the effort. Seeing the show is just a reminder of possibilities.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_music_videos_aired_on_MTV
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_in_a_Lifetime_(Talking_Heads_song)
    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Beverly_Hills
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Lies_Love
    6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Music_Works
    7. http://davidbyrne.com/radio
    8. Who Is the Sky? – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_the_Sky%3F

  • Man from Plains

    All this talk of politics has affected my netflix lineup. Last night we watched the documentary “Man from Plains“2 about Jimmy Carter3 and his most recent book. I’ve got to say that Jonathan Demme4 is one of the better filmmakers of our time. Ever since Stop Making Sense5, a video concert of the Talking Heads was released I’ve been a fan. What I like about Demme is the unbiased and personal approach. I’ve always said of good photographers and painters whom work with portraiture that the best approach is to be as transparent as possible so as to not influence the subject in any manner. This film does just that as it documents Carter’s travels to promote his most recent and controversial book entitled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid6.

    The film gives an honest perspective on the man and his principles as Demme was obviously given good access the former president during the filming and what impressed me most was exactly how candid and emotional Carter was during the filming. He is obviously a very intelligent man in the way he handles conversation and which may also explain why he is a physicist by trade. What is controversial about the book is that Carter is trying to explain that perhaps the Palastinians have been wronged which is very bold and politically incorrect these days. But Carter does it with eloquence and good rhetoric in the face of staunch adversaries.

    After the film, I followed up with some research on Carter and his policies. What amazed me is how strong his opinions about peace and energy conservation. He actually reduced the dependence on foreign oil by half during tenure as president. He installed solar panels (which were later removed) on the white house! It’s amazing how we continue to repeat ourselves in history as I think my third grade teacher began the first history lesson i remember with that exact phrase. President Carter had some interesting approaches to energy policy that may hold in todays atmosphere.

    Don’t get me wrong…I’m not a political or economic expert, but I can tell you a good deal about the Laffer Curve7 and supply side, trickle down Reaganomics including the fact that Author Laffer and Wanninski, credited with coining the term did so over a meeting in 1974 with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld present…so I’ll let you do your own research8. But I am a good with the study of human character and I can tell you that I am compelled to believe that Jimmy Carter is a good man with honest motives or at least the film did an excellent job of concealing anything otherwise.

    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library
    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library [1]

    I can whole heartedly recommend that you see the film for yourself. The photo above is of Carter fishing when a swimming rabbit “attacked” his boat.. lucky the secret service was there to capture it on film.

    23/12/06 – The rabbit incident came up in a conversation likely due to conflict in Gaza9. I replaced the missing photo and added the references. I didn’t replace any of the original links, correct any of the grammatical, or fix the spelling errors.

    25/01/09 – I referenced this essay in a recent conversation with friends since he passed away at age 100. He was the longest-lived president in U.S. history. I read quite a bit about him recently and I watched the service on C-Span 10 this morning. The Carter Center published a tribute site 11 that’s worth your time. I left a condolence message. The more I learn… the more I like.

    Jimmy Carter is an inspiration for a life well lived. I told my friends I’m gonna pick up some tools in his honor and to handle some carpentry work for myself and I might even go so far as start working on the solar thing. I’ve referenced the Crisis of Confidence speech12 a number of times recently and I suggest a revisit. I first picked up on it in the film 20th Century Women and rewatching it had profound affect. I sympathize with Jimmy Carter’s tough mind, soft heart mentality and I hope that his work to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering is an inspiration for generations to come14.

    1. Jimmy Carter rabbit incident – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident
    2. Man From Plains – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_Plains
    3. Jimmy Carter – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter
    4. Jonathan Demme – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Demme
    5. Stop Making Sense – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    6. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine:_Peace_Not_Apartheid
    7. Laffer Curve – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
    8. Reaganomics – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
    9. Israel – Hamas War – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel–Hamas_war
    10. President Jimmy Carter Funeral Service at National Cathedral – https://www.c-span.org/event/public-affairs-event/president-jimmy-carter-funeral-service-at-national-cathedral/429876
    11. Jimmy Carter Tribute – https://www.jimmycartertribute.org
    12. President Carter Address on Crisis of Confidence – https://www.c-span.org/program/american-history-tv/president-carter-address-on-crisis-of-confidence/154404
    13. 20th Century Women – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Women
    14. Carter Center – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center

  • The White Lotus

    We started watching The White Lotus1 recently. I know, we’re late to the show, but that’s my style. We finished the first season. I think it’s really good and I’ve even been recommending it to folks.  When I’m left with an influence, I try to figure out why I connected with it. What first caught my attention was when a character in the series recites verse IV of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Lotus-Eaters2,3,

    Lord Alfred Tennyson – 8. August 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire by Julia Margaret Cameron

    Hateful is the dark-blue sky, 

    Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea. 

    Death is the end of life; ah, why 

    Should life all labour be? 

    Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, 

    And in a little while our lips are dumb. 

    Let us alone. What is it that will last? 

    All things are taken from us, and become 

    Portions and parcels of the dreadful past. 

    Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 

    To war with evil? Is there any peace 

    In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 

    All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave 

    In silence; ripen, fall and cease: 

    Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

    I think it pretty much sums up the entirety of the series in just one verse and the poem explores the same themes of escapism, the passage of time, and the search for meaning in life. Kudos to the art director or whoever included the video of the dark rolling ocean as segue-ways. Tenyson’s poem is a reference to the Lotos-Eaters of Greek mythology who appear in Homer’s Odyssey4 Instead of just being a cautionary tale about the dangers of temptation, it begs the question why leave the island?  It’s akin to Tenyson’s most cited quote “Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die” in The Charge of the Light Brigade but explores the outcome a little further. [ Minor Spoiler Alert ] Season one ends with a character returning to the island and finding meaning in paddling in the ocean and the last verse of Lotus-Eaters ends with ->

    Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore 

    Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; 

    O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. 

    I’ve looked for interviews of the series author describing the motivation for writing the series, but I’m pretty much left to speculate.  I knew the series would be good because I was mildly obsessed with Enlightened5 which was also written by White6. I skip the detail on Enlightened other than to say that the part was written specifically for Laura Dern to play a woman illustrating that humans are a work in progress while satirizing the corporate world. It’s still very much relevant and worth watching even though it was canceled after just two seasons back in 2013 likely because people just didn’t catch on to how good it was quickly enough.  This is certainly not the case with The White Lotus. Even the opening credits have become a bit of a meme of sorts with crowds going crazy when it’s covered in concerts. I even did a deep dive into the opening credits and online essays are referencing the symbolism. 

    Music by Cristobal Tapia De Veer7 and the opening sequence by Plains of Yonder8

    Although the opening credits certainly lend credence, I think the real secret sauce is in the writer, director, and creator Mike White. I gotta go into a little bit of detail on the writer Mike White though because it’ll give me a chance to take this essay completely off the rails. Although I’m sure he’s not a fan of everyone visiting his personal life, he was willing to participate in the reality TV series The Amazing Race along with his father, so it’s fair game. I think it’s a really important detail on the type of depth of thinking that created the series. 

    White’s father Mel9 was a ghostwriter for evangelicals. He wrote Billy Graham’s Approaching Hoofbeats: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse which compares The Book of Revelations with the current state of world affairs and is an apt marker in the evangelical worldview of the religious right that has since culminated. I read and watched a bunch of interviews with Mel White for this essay and in them, he cites Francis Schaeffer10 as a key driver of this movement.  Southern Baptists were on record supporting abortion rights in 1976 but reversed that stance in the 80s under the influence of folks like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham who were largely influenced by the writings and sermons of Schaeffer.

    C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer

    Schaeffer wrote Whatever Happened to the Human Race alongside C. Everett Koop in which both argued that the decline of Western culture and the rise of secular humanism led to the corruption of Western civilization. He augured that the Renaissance of Italy and Southern Europe had ruined the West while the Reformation of Germany and Northern Europe had provided the foundation for all that was good in Western civilization. If you’ve got four hours to toss aside, Google away… they made a lovely movie with plastic dolls scattered on a beach about it that I’m not going to link to. My point here is that these are the folks who are the founders of the rise of the contemporary evangelical movement in America and their children are not adherents. Frank Schaeffer12, the son of Francis Schaeffer said “When my late father denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush”. He published a letter to John McCain saying “that the hateful and prejudiced tone in the Republican Party’s campaign would promote fringe groups in America that could be goaded into pursuing violence” stating that his “father’s position on abortion was co-opted by people looking for an issue to that could shift political power within America”.

    Mel White cites his experience with his father as the key to a lot of what he writes. Mel White has since recanted everything he wrote for evangelicals after coming out as gay. He’s become an advocate against the religious right most obviously as it relates to this series is the topic of sex. I haven’t watched season two, but I know that it’s ripe with sex from the interviews I’ve read. In an interview with NPR13, he describes a core existential theme. “But if you’re in paradise and you feel like something’s missing or you’re melancholy or you’re tortured, you know it’s not the ambient nature of what’s going on – it’s something in you.” In an interview with Katie Couric14, he says he started writing plays in 2nd grade after Sam Sheppard’s, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, mother was his teacher.  He said, “I’ve always thought about things in terms of dialogue — and how what people say about themselves doesn’t always necessarily match what they think or what they’re going to do”. He goes on to reinforce that premise about religion with “There’s a lot of hypocrisy in those smaller evangelical communities, certainly around sex and motivations for behavior”. “We’re more complicated than how we present ourselves. There’s some kind of solace to know that everybody is grappling with this. The person that we want to be and the person that the world wants us to be — they’re not always the same.”

    Aside from the drama, the characters of The White Lotus speak to this sort of truth. I think that’s what makes them so compelling and the dialogue is carefully crafted to reflect this. I think it’s likely why people have connected with the show. Some of the characters prevalent in the theme of The White Lotus are struggling with one thing or another. The show is literally about a vacation that partly happened because a hotel was sitting empty in Kuaui from Covid restrictions. Even though the listing is just a ‘black comedy’ the show does reflect on Tennyson’s poem on the guilt of escapism.

    The lotus is a sacred flower in Hinduism and Buddhism representing the path to spiritual awakening and enlightenment. There’s  Bible has the lotus tree in the Book of Job and the Quran has the Lote tree that marks the edge of the seventh heaven. The Nymphaea species of lotus also called the blue lotus, was cultivated in ancient Egypt and is still used as a psychoactive. It represents the path from death to rebirth to the afterlife. It is also considered a symbol of absolute purity, honesty, and rebirth. The lotus tree of Homer’s Odyssey bore a fruit that caused pleasant drowsiness and there are few botanical candidates including the persimmon. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the nymph Lotis was the daughter of Neptune who escaped an attempted rape by changing into a lotus.

    Priapus and Lotis – c. 1510 by Giovanni Battista Palumba16

    Tennyson’s poem was inspired by a trip in 1829 to a conflict-torn northern Spain. The mariners’ form of escapism is represented as a kind of self-sacrificing rebellion while Tennyson tries to evoke sympathy towards them. Some literary critics have written that the mariners are more than just a classic opium-eaters tale and that they are going up against Christianity. Tennyson had a somewhat similar experience as Frank Schaefer and Mel White in that he was famously closemouthed about his own father’s depression and alcoholism15. It’s evident to me even though I’m not much of a literary scholar or even very well-read, that the show and the poem both create the same sorta tension in the reader/viewer to sympathize with the lotus eaters and question the outcome of whether you do it in a practical or spiritual sense. 

    I sat on this essay for a while leaving it in my drafts folder because I sometimes worry about my audience here on this website. I don’t worry about their impression of me, because I’m generally pretty honest about who I am. I worry that I may introduce someone to something that is over their head. I really shouldn’t say over their head because perhaps it’s just below the belt. It’s not just the sex, drugs, or violence in the show, but sympathizing with the lotus-eaters isn’t too far off from the turn-on, tune-in, drop-out ethos. Whether it’s below the belt or above their heads, I’ve found that I don’t want to be a catalyst for any sort of turmoil or endorse epicureanism.

    Unlike the strife of Tennyson, Scheafer, and White, I grew up in a household where open dialogue about sex and drugs was fine. A majority of the dinner table jokes leaned towards the Benny Hill side of life. I’ve never really had any internal conflicts reconciling hedonism with religion because I’m not a fundamentalist. Although I’m not living through the type of secular materialism of Tennyson’s time, I don’t think the seamlessly neverending debates about the so-called culture wars of today are very far off. I’m playing modern lotus-eater in spirit instead. I vote and go to church on occasion but I think the vast majority of the political culture wars amount to a pile of bullshite. While they’re meant to resemble discussions on ethics and morals, most really revolve around money and power. I read quite a bit about the backgrounds of these folks for this essay and what I think is more important, studied the character of their children. Mike White is one of those children and The White Lotus is his poem.

    The White Lotus is right on time. I think it’d be fun to sit down to watch and talk about it with C. Everette Koop and Francis Schaeffer. I imagine the second season will be just as good and I’ll be following whatever Mike White does moving forward. In the meantime, I think I’ll continue to try and have a bit of mariner’s spirit to avoid the toil. As far as the righteousness of saying the Renaissance was ruinous and the Reformation was right… Nah, I’m not buying it. I’m going with the science of Galileo and the art of da Vinci. I could be wrong but it just doesn’t seem right. Francis Bacon17 seemed to quell the issue over the last four hundred years by reconciling the conflict between science and religion, but now I think some have this album on repeat in modern times with the superstition that Disney is making their children gay. The Age of Enlightenment is what encouraged the type of secularism that allows the United States to even continue the competition of these ideas18. It’s literally the First Amendment for a reason and all of the successful movements in social reform have revolved around it. I think Tennyson’s poem and White’s Lotus are both good fodder to revisit this discussion. For now, I’m just gonna stay out of it and try to avoid getting murdered while on vacation by not participating in some dramatic scandalous shite. And in the tradition of the Lotos-eaters, I’ll leave that for my screen time escapism next season.

    ** 23/03/25 – Update: We watched the second season. It’s awesome too. 

    ** 25/05/05 – Update: We finished season three last night. It’s still strong and the messaging is consistent. I’d rank em in order as 2,1,3 but all of them are good.

    1. The White Lotus – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Lotus 
    2. Alfred, Lord Tennyson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson
    3. The Lotos-eaters Alfred, Lord Tennyson. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters
    4. The Lotos-Eaters – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lotos-Eaters
    5. Enlightened – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_(TV_series)
    6. Mike White – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_White_(filmmaker)
    7. Cristobal Tapia de Veer – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristobal_Tapia_de_Veer
    8. Plains of Yonder – https://plainsofyonder.com/
    9. Mel White – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_White 
    10. Francis Schaeffer – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Schaeffer
    11. C. Everett Koop – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Everett_Koop 
    12. Frank Schaeffer – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Schaeffer
    13. ‘White Lotus’ creator Mike White finds wide success after 25 years in the margins – https://www.npr.org/2022/12/05/1140224760/white-lotus-mike-white
    14. Mike White Tells All About His Hit Show, “White Lotus” – https://katiecouric.com/podcast/next-question/white-lotus-mike-white-inspiration/
    15. The Classical And The Christian: Tennyson’s Grief And Spiritual Shift From “The Lotos-Eaters” To “Ulysses” – Carleen Lara Miller Ratcliffe – https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4479&context=etd
    16. Giovanni Battista Palumba – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Palumba 
    17. Francis Bacon – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon 
    18. Religion and Secularism: The American Experience – Pew Research Center – https://www.pewresearch.org/2007/12/03/religion-and-secularism-the-american-experience/

  • Updated Profile Photo

     I’m often amused at folks who don’t update their profile photos online. Since the one above is about ten years old, I figured I’d add something a little more recent while talking ownership of my dad’s public Facebook habit of sharing my birthday. The photo was taken in December of 2023 at the crossroads just about 20 feet from the photo of my mom and I in 1974. And if you want to really dig in, I’ve got a photo of the same spot from 1902.

  • Human Updates Available

    John Cleese – The Ministry of Silly Walks

    I keep a list of short, middle, and long-term reminders on all of my devices that I use regularly1.  Although I’m constantly editing the short-term list and the long-term has items that have been on there for years. The middle list seems to always have items that take longer than a couple of days because I’m not getting paid or rewarded for doing them.  For instance, there’s one titled ‘Garage Floodlight’ because I needed some extra light in the yard when I was taking our dog outside in the evenings.  I bought the wiring, fixtures, and switches to install I just haven’t carved out a weekend to make it happen.  

    Another item on my middle-term list is upgrading one of my servers to the more recent version of Linux. I have this shuffling technique I’ve been using over the years with servers, software, and programming languages where I like to keep three tiers in running. I always keep one running way out in front on a beta version, one on the current long-term support version, and then there is usually one that needs to be updated usually because it has some legacy feature requiring a rewrite. This is exactly how I handle my servers so that I can shuffle applications between them as needed. I’ve been calculating some time near the beginning of this year to spend on upgrading and it’s got me thinking that I should be applying that same approach to my own knowledge and skillset on occasion too. It’s time to dust out some useless brain cells to try and pack in some new information. Just reformat, pile in some new architecture, and reboot

    I’m generally a late adopter2 because I like the comfort of the middle and I joke in my Github bio that I “still haven’t learned Rust”3. Although I kinda enjoy being able to work in a bunch of frameworks as the master of none, during the last several years I’ve found myself using just several stacks to accomplish anything with the vast majority of my code being copied and pasted from project to project. Because I’m focused mostly on smaller-scale projects, I don’t have to dive into machine learning, artificial intelligence, or data science visualizations. I’ve got enough programming chops, cloud and network security experience to bring a project to scale, but it’s rarely needed. I understand and enjoy them, I just don’t have any real motive to acquire and analyze large data sets or scale a project to millions of users. 

    And when I say motive, I generally mean money. A lot of folks may not realize it, but the underlying motives for many technology decisions are money in the form of security, network, and energy usage.  Users generate revenue either through advertising, subscriptions, or purchases. Serving up quadrillions of lines of code hourly to billions of users takes energy in the form of electricity sent to computers for processing power. Optimizing how efficient and secure the code is saves money in the form of maintenance, energy, and network usage. Programming languages are only being used to make calculations and database modifications, databases are being abstracted in APIs to reduce calls, file formats for media have shifted to the most efficient and graphics have moved to being served in line with code.  For instance, when a page from say Facebook is loaded into your app or browser they’re generally using JavaScript to query and pull in information that is changing from an API so that it is efficient. Their React library to do so has become one of the most dominant in web development.  I’ve built most of my career on JavaScript and I can empathize with those trying to take in all of the frameworks today.  Even a very simple website developer has to have a pretty robust understanding to customize the editors in the most common content management systems.  It’s pretty difficult to keep up. Recently Shopify acquired Remix4 for React and Vercel announced a new build tool called Turbo5 that is built in Rust6.  

    Although seemingly large changes have taken place since I started in the early 2000s, the basic underlying browsers have remained the same up until 2020 when WebAssembly7 (WASM) became the fourth officially supported browser language behind HTML, CSS, and JavaScript8. JavaScript is going anywhere and will likely keep its spot on the front end, it’s just that web assembly is much faster and safer allowing lower-level programming languages like C, GoLang, and Rust to work in the browser at near-native efficiency. The reason that Rust is picking up steam against the others is that it’s memory safe. I’d venture to say that the vast majority of the hacking out there starts with memory leaks. I’m going to have to dive into WASM sooner than later. And without any client motivation, I’m just going to have to invent a project or dive into someone else’s so that I can learn to find uses for it. I think I’ll start with the Rust WASM9 and Black Hat Rust10. 

    So aside from packing that new information in, I think I’ll also add a permanent middle-term reminder that there are human upgrades available. Although there may be various reasons why I’ve been relatively successful in my professional life, I think the core is that I enjoy learning and adapting to changes. It’s an approach that can be applied not only to your profession but also to your personal development. We’re upgradeable in so many other ways than just our professional life… just pile in some new architecture and reboot.

    1. Slow Thinking – https://davidwindham.com/slow-thinking/ 
    2. Late Adopter – https://davidwindham.com/late-adopter/ 
    3. GitHub/windhamdavid – https://github.com/windhamdavid 
    4. Remix – https://remix.run/blog/remixing-shopify
    5. Turbopack – https://vercel.com/blog/turbopack 
    6. Rust Language – https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
    7. Web Assembly – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAssembly 
    8. WASM W3C – https://www.w3.org/2019/12/pressrelease-wasm-rec.html.en 
    9. Rust & WASM – https://rustwasm.github.io/book/ 
    10. Black Hat Rust – https://github.com/skerkour/black-hat-rust 

  • 2022 in Review

    It seems that about his time every year, I’m looking to clean up, put a nice little bow on it, and start the new year fresh. I’m trying to get ahead of the little bit of traveling we do for the holidays. In the process, I just re-read the last year-end essay I wrote in 20191. I think a year in review post would make a good tradition and an easy way for me to share with others. And in that regard, I’ll try to keep it brief. 

    2022 started bumpy with my brother, our dog, and Ginny’s grandmom all dying within the span of a couple of months. That put me in just a general fog of reconciliation and reminiscing for the first part of the year2,3,4. I gained the most from those events to grow as a person. I could go on here at great lengths about this, but the most important aspect I was reminded of is that the life we know is fleeting. I’ve always kinda felt that way, but it’s nice to have a reminder every so often to keep your priorities in perspective. By midyear, I was back to joking about it. I’d finish lunch or tennis with someone and say “If I don’t ever see you again, it was nice knowing you” which got some interesting looks and responses, especially from the older folks.  

    We skipped our normal winter getaway likely because we were just tired from dealing with those but I made up for it on a couple of other trips in the spring.  I got a cabin up in the hills with some old friends which spurred on a couple of other gatherings and potentially an annual event5,6.  I saw Dylan for the first, and likely last time7. I went to see an old friend whose outdoor concert got canceled from lightning, so we just got to hang out. We also did a couple of tennis tournaments and participated in my first cycling event.  Being around kind people in really nice environments is a great reminder of how fun life can be. 

    Work this year was dominated by relatively short contracts. This is rewarding because I get quick positive feedback on them, but I don’t enjoy shifting my attention around. That’s likely why I wrote two essays8,9 on staying organized and it could be why I almost ended up in another full-time position. I replied to a recruiter’s email and ended up in a month-long interview process. I remember a long pause from the hiring manager right after I said something to the extent of “I need to have some flexibility with my schedule because I like to play tennis in the mornings and I coach tennis in the afternoons”.  Needless to say, I talked myself out of a six-figure salary which, although seemingly impractical, will likely work out for the best. 

    Ginny is simultaneously taking on a new leadership role and finishing a doctorate program at Clemson10.  She will be defending and graduating next summer. I’ve tried to spend some extra time with my parents this year because they won’t live forever. I discovered the rewards of coaching kids after I became the head coach of the high school tennis teams. I finally ditched my old truck since the transmission was going and got a new ride11. I’ve also accepted that I need to carry my reading glasses into the grocery store so I can read the expiration dates. I spent part of this year on a vegan diet until the cheese cravings kicked in. And like every other new year’s resolution, I’d like to prioritize my mind and body the best I’m able to compensate for the aging.

    I’m starting the new year by turning 50 which I’ve been saying I was for some time now12. I’m not planning a party because, in my mind, I’m not over the hill quite yet even though I’m getting close. I couldn’t convince the better half to let me rehab an old classic convertible but I did get permission to turn our den into a studio so I’d like do some of the woodworking for the cabinetry, re-learn the piano, and take up watercolor painting. I am planning on doing the deep dive on the Rust and Web Assembly early next year to keep up to date with work. I think my boy’s tennis team will have a winning season this spring. Ginny and I are planning on remodeling the kitchen later in the fall and we’ll likely take a long break post-graduation to stroll up the west coast to celebrate her hard work. Otherwise, I’m just going to try and make it long enough to write another one of these next year. 

    Best wishes to y’all out there and I hope you have a happy new year. 

    Be well, do good work, & keep in touch13 ,

    David 

    1. 2019 in Review – https://davidwindham.com/2019-2/ 
    2. Kristopher Roland Windham – https://davidwindham.com/kristopher-roland-windham/ 
    3. Zeke – https://davidwindham.com/zeke/ 
    4. Old Photos – https://davidwindham.com/old-photos/ 
    5. Jocassee – https://davidwindham.com/jocassee/
    6. Cold Mountain – https://davidwindham.com/cold-mountain/
    7. Bob Dylan – https://davidwindham.com/bob-dylan/
    8. Slow Thinking – https://davidwindham.com/slow-thinking/ 
    9. A Second Brain – https://davidwindham.com/a-second-brain/ 
    10. Gast, G. CV – https://ginnygast.com/cv/ 
    11. Automobiles – https://davidwindham.com/automobiles/ 
    12. Age 50 – https://davidwindham.com/age-50/ 
    13. Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac sign-off – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Writer’s_Almanac 

  • Net Jockey

    My schedule has been cooling down alongside the weather.  Since my day job involves sitting hours behind a computer monitor, the best time for me to get it done is when the weather isn’t that great outside.  It’s been raining almost all weekend here and I tend to enjoy working then.  It’s also about this time of year when I like to remind myself why I enjoy my work which often involves learning something new or delving into a fun side project. One project that’s kinda been lingering in my mind for the last several years is related to broadcasting.  It was brought up recently in a text thread between some friends because I grew up around broadcasting. My family spent the vast majority of their careers in radio and I hosted a nighttime radio show for a couple of years.  My father also had an advertising agency and had suggested I study design in college to help me take over the agency.  I slipped into web development while I was there and the agency is long gone.

    The older I get, the more realistic I’ve become in terms of who I am. Although I’ve tried not to let my work define who I am, the bulk of my experience as a developer has relied on the evolution of the web as a medium. Although the illusion of some sort of computer code wizardry might make my job seem fanciful, it could also be described as a net jockey which would more closely link me to the family business. I’ve always looked at the web as a type of broadcast medium and a net jockey is just using a different medium powered by computer networks. The medium is the message1 no matter the jockey. I believe that a large part of my father and uncle’s success was deeply tied to the timing of the evolution of FM radio.  On a bunch of occasions, they’ve told me stories of how they went around to every car dealer in the region convincing them to order new cars with FM radios installed, sometimes with an offer to trade out promotion. Likewise, a fella named Gary Parsons2 who lived right up the road from where I grew up in South Carolina disc jockeyed a night show and later founded XM Satellite Radio which was the first satellite radio broadcaster in the U.S. It wasn’t until General Motors bought in that in dash satellite receivers started being offered in automobiles. He’s adapted to new technologies and is now working on geolocating network users.

    The people who influenced my father were folks like John Richbourg3, also a South Carolina native, who became the model for others like Wolfman Jack. He became famous jockeying from WLAC4 in Nashville when, in the early 50s the station bumped up to 50,000 watts with a directional antenna that could reach the majority of the east coast and midwestern states especially at night. Many music historians credit these nightly shows as the foundation of rock and roll. The station was acquired by Scripps several years back and has become a backbone of the sensational talk radio crowd which reminds me that I learned very early on to distrust broadcasted information.  In about third grade or so I heard my father talking on the radio one morning about going to dinner the night before with his family. Since I knew we hadn’t gone there to eat, I couldn’t understand how he could lie to others while insisting I never do it. I asked my mom why, to which she replied with “ask your father”. Although I don’t think I ever did, it brought down the third or fourth wall5 rather quickly and I became suspect of all advertising while learning to differentiate performance from reality. It always reminds me of this scene in American Graffiti6.

    The term disc jockey was abandoned sometime in the 80s in favor of radio personality. The etymology of the word jockey7 is actually pretty derogatory. It’s more closely related to jockstrap than horse or disc jockey. Although originally appearing as the Scottish version of the name John, it became associated with horse dealers, riders, minstrels and vagabonds. It became synonymous with a trickster, hence the verb jockey to ‘outwit’ or  ‘out do’. It was used as a slang term for a penis and subsequently used to define a prostitutes client. It was first applied to radio broadcasting by Walter Winchell8 in 1935 to slander his competitor. Winchell was notoriously brutal and several documentaries have been made largely focused on how power corrupts the influence of ‘the media’.  For years, many folks were very surprised to learn that the disc jockeys on WLAC who had ushered in the era of rock and roll were actually white.

    Needless to say, the internet has set the jockeys loose in the derogatory sense of the word. Everyone has become their own public relations agents promo’ing themselves and anything someone will pay for.  Most are still lying to sell you something, sensationalizing, propagandizing, blurring their identities, bending reality, and using the equivalent of modern sound effects.  Neil Young wrote in 1983, “the schemes of today would make Alan Freed9 look like a saint”.  Payola10 never went away, it’s just in an entirely different form. I can’t see any end in sight as I watch the young folks navigate the web. The new La La Lands are factories in China where live streamers work from scripts selling anything you can imagine. The New York Times did a documentary entitled Inside the Daily Life of a Live Streaming Star in China11 which is a fascinating modern study on the incredible machine that net jockeying has become. TikTok is now a record label and OnlyFans produces films. The rise of ‘influencers’ alongside the medium is just the same album on repeat. As Twitter changed hands this last week, I couldn’t help but wonder about the future of medium since I had logged on the week they began. Elon Musk is just another jockey, albeit a form closer to that of Howard Hughes11 or Henry Ford12. He’s just jockeying the new spruce goose or horseless carriage in the form of online payments and electric motors. The Twitter acquisition might end up resembling Ford’s purchase of the Dearborn Independent.  I’ve now spent enough time behind the curtains online to know how small the wizard really is.  E-commerce has finally overtaken adult content just last year.  Jockeying yourself into the lead using technology isn’t anything new and I think Elon is going to struggle with this one in the long term since the underlying technology isn’t really anything proprietary.  Although he complained about the bots, the pay to play model alongside other content monetization will just serve to amplify the inattentiveness13. If you’d like to join the choir, please know that the ‘void is full’14.

    About a decade ago, my father wrapped up his last radio stint hosting a morning show for the nations largest broadcasting network. He liked to joke about how the morning drive time slot was a ‘captive audience’. At some point, I’ll try to archive some old broadcasts and I sometimes wonder how I can help the legacy without having to be a jockey. Quite frankly, growing up around it always made me want to avoid the spotlight. I’ve had the luxury remaining relatively behind the scenes and turning away work I cannot personally support.  I avoid self promotion in favor of burying my name in the source code in case I need to prove my credentials elsewhere. Although I’ve manage to acquire the knowledge skillset to do so, this here net jockey has preferred to play the wizard. I’ll just set up a multi-platform syndication and broadcasting server for my colleagues and stay behind the curtains. As of now, I think I’ve made a wise choice because there is a lot of freedom in relative anonymity even though I’ve never been afraid to voice my opinion. If I ever decide that I want to make it about personal clicks, views, likes, audience share, or feel I have an important message… I’ll likely use a pseudonym, pen, or stage name so there is no way you could bet the jockey and not the horse. 

    I put this here because it makes me look like a jockey with the number and all… It’s from the BASC ( Bicycle Across South Carolina ) event.
    1. The Medium is the Message – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
    2. Gary Parsons – https://www.crunchbase.com/person/gary-parsons
    3. John R – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R.  
    4. WLAC – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLAC
    5. The Fourth Wall – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall 
    6. American Graffiti – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Graffiti 
    7. Jockey – https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jockey
    8. Walter Winchell – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell 
    9. Alan Freed – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Freed 
    10. Payola – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola 
    11. Inside the Daily Life of a Live Streaming Star in China – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlnfiULnmMY 
    12. Howard Hughes ( Watergate ) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes#Connections_to_Richard_Nixon_and_Watergate 
    13. Henry Ford ( Dearborn Independent ) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Antisemitism_and_The_Dearborn_Independent 
    14. Twitter @windhamdavid – https://twitter.com/windhamdavid/status/1357350087521947648
    15. The Void is Full. Please Stop Screaming into It. – https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-void-is-full-please-stop-screaming-into-it

  • Governor’s Debate Supercut

    Political rhetoric is tiring. For those of you who’d prefer to spend their time elsewhere, I cut the original1 down from one hour to seven minutes while I was watching it this morning. I tried to be relatively fair even though, for transparency sake, I should note that I’m pulling for the Democratic underdog Joe Cunningham2 over the incumbent Republican Henry McMaster3. I could go into detail on this, but like I said… political rhetoric is tiring and I’ve got better things to do.

    1. South Carolina ETV – 2022 Gubernatorial Debate – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZsEWFaxr60
    2. Joe Cunningham – https://www.joeforsouthcarolina.com
    3. Henry McMaster – https://henrymcmaster.com

  • How to Win at Anything

    Last year I started as an assistant coach of the local varsity high school tennis teams and this year I took over as head coach.  Yesterday I got some feedback I cherished. A parent of a team we played against contacted me to say “I am truly impressed by your teams character and disposition. I wish all athletes had that sort of positive attitude”. This hit me in the feels because it struck a nerve with my outlook and it’s exactly why I volunteered to lead the teams.

    After starting back playing tennis about seven years ago I wrote an essay on Collaboration vs. Competition1 explaining some of my outlook on sports, education, and life.  Although I’m sure there is a myriad of reasons why I started playing, part of the reason I took up tennis began with me quitting football. My father had always wanted to be a football coach and he attended the University of South Carolina with that in mind. His first job was given to him by Bob Fulton who was the announcer for the Gamecock football games.  Needless to say, he got pretty involved in my early football days. I remember vividly being completely knocked unconscious during a football practice. The coaches pulled me up off the ground by my face mask, patted me on the ass and said something to the extent of “get back in there Windham”. I was still dizzy seeing ‘stars’ and I took my helmet off, slammed in on the ground, and started to walk off the practice field. My father said “if you walk off this field, you’re never playing football again”. Needless to say, I never played football again. 

    I had a childhood friend who’s parents were really into tennis who introduced me to junior leagues and tournaments.  I got good enough to compete at a regional level so I stuck with it. Loosing at tennis is still fairly tough mainly because it’s a drawn out process and it’s just you out there shouldering all the responsibility of a loss. I remember my father coming to one particular junior match I was losing. I was already acting defeated midway through the match and he disappeared even though I had expected that he was my ride home. I apologized for my attitude when I got home and he said something along the lines of “I left because I didn’t enjoy watching, you didn’t embarrass me at all, you embarrassed yourself”.  Years later I saw an interview with Roger Federer where he shared a very similar story2. 

    I’ve never been one to hype the motivational type ‘sports is life’ metaphors because I mostly find the majority of them relatively shallow emphasizing competition in life. Needless to say, I’ve taken that lesson to heart and I learned something really valuable in the process. If you’re giving it your best and having fun in the process, you never really lose. Part of the having fun in the process means that you’ve gotta feel good about what you’re doing and the key to that is being honest and fair to yourself. In a lot of ways, I think sports are an achievement of humanity alongside of the arts.  In a world of constant competition for resources, we’ve decided to take the time to play games with very little consequence. I often joke when folks get into conflicts on the court to imagine if we were playing this game with guns where we just shot at each other from the other side of the court. And although I’ve seen grown men swinging their tennis racquets at one another, It’s not exactly Roman gladiator games and the only thing we actually stand to lose is ego.  If you can put that aside and have fun, you never really lose. 

    You can apply that same approach to almost everything. Sure, there are cases in life where you lose and it’s very serious. Even if you’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness or can’t afford to feed yourself, I’d argue that keeping your chin up and giving it your best will still get you much farther than the alternative. I’d even go so far as to suggest that doing so may actually give you an advantage. I’d imagine it’s extraordinarily tough to ‘have fun’ under those sorta circumstances, but I’ve personally seen folks do it. I apply it to even the smallest of challenges. I can smile right through the most contentious of business meetings knowing I’ve done my best and realizing the consequences are generally minor. I can let someone vent in an argument without needing ‘win’, I can look at my work contracts not as a competition but as collaboration, I can look at life hurdles not as losses but as challenges, and I always try to find some fun in it. It is how I try to play the game. 

    Our final match is next week against the strongest team in the division. The girls varsity team this year was made up entirely of beginner players so we’ve managed to lose every match this season. I noticed that it started to wear on the players late into the season.  I started the practice season this year with just two rules: always try to have fun and give it your best effort. I ended the season reminding the players that challenging yourself to try something new and giving it your best is the epitome of success and in that regard, they are all winners. I’ve watched the players exemplify that attitude on the tennis courts.  They all thanked me for introducing tennis to them, asked to continue the practice season, and committed to coming back next year. I’ve had fun coaching so I already felt like a winner, but when I got that message yesterday afternoon, I knew we had really won the season. 

    1. Collaboration vs. Competition – https://davidwindham.com/collaboration-vs-competition/
    2. Roger Federer Interview – https://player.vimeo.com/video/170668278?#t=1m5s 

  • Artificial Intelligence

    I joined the OpenAI DALL-E 2 API1 waitlist just like tens of thousands of others did last week.  It’s a natural language processing system to create images from text or a text-to-image synthesis neural network.  I signed up because I just want to play around with it a bit. I’d imagine there will be hundreds of public facing generators in the coming months making everyone an ‘AI artist’.  As much as I’ve bemoaned artificial intelligence2, I had a conversation yesterday with some non-technical folks that seemed pretty enthusiastic about it and it got me to thinking about how I might explain my take on it to anyone else.  

    The fella who sent me the link to signup is a retired IBM systems architect whom I’m always arguing with about artificial intelligence. He’s pretty excited about natural language processing as it relates to aging and regularly builds models for his ‘personal assistant’… whereas I’m not particularly fond of depending on any technology.  My car, Alexa, and Siri might have me labeled as incorrigible due to my belittling statements as to their capabilities. I almost find their lack of capabilities and the promotion of their usage mostly entertaining. I’m not saying that voice commands and sorting large datasets aren’t useful, but I’m neither amused or encouraged by their usage as ‘artificial intelligence’. It feels mostly like Jared from Silicon Valley3.

    Part of my attitude is because I’ve always thought that intelligence encompasses so much more than just knowledge, problem solving, and logic. I think our mental capability, perception, and understanding involve much more. Machines are artificial and we shouldn’t devalue the word intelligence by attaching it to them.  It’s just another sales pitch… IBM’s Watson4 cheated on Jeopardy in 2011 and IBM’s Deep Blue5 cheated in 1996 at chess.  Yes a machine can respond quicker to a buzzer and they used human instruction to intervene in the Kasparov chess match. With that said, almost any cheap computer can easily whip up on me in chess making it’s moves in fractions of a second. The term Artificial intelligence is only used for the stuff that seems incomprehensible or problems yet solved. There’s actually a term for just that entitled ‘AI effect’6.  Wasn’t The Modern Prometheus ( Frankenstein ) a story about artificial intelligence.  This is the best take on it7:

    I suppose much of the existing technology becoming more pervasive in our lives could be considered artificial intelligence… my car parking itself, telling me what music I might enjoy, or my email sorting itself into threads. Artificial intelligence is not magic. It’s just computer programming, logic, data, and math. The real danger is not being able to understand it.  Even though my text generated art might say otherwise, I’m not entirely dystopian about it because it certainly can be helpful when implemented well.  And because most of my work revolves around the machines, I’m of the ‘work smarter not harder’ school of thought. If I can figure out a shortcut tool, I’m gonna use it as long as it doesn’t lodge itself between me and the process.  

    When I started using Github’s CoPilot8 and I knew there was going to be a way to make use of all of that publicly contributed code.  When Github was acquired by Microsoft for 7.5 billion in 2018, I knew that Microsoft’s Visual Studio was going to be the first key to capitalizing on it. I was chatting with a colleague recently who was complaining about ‘how the kids these days are writing code’.  I informed him of another acquaintance who teaches AP high school math and computer science and what he is using to teach his kids which involves an intermediary software which makes it easier for them to understand the fundamentals. I think that in the near future, the fundamentals of programming will be low code as the software will eventually just evolve to parsing natural language to describe setting strings, variable and arrays. Even though CoPilot is impressive in it’s execution, the first pitch says it all… ‘Autocomplete as a feature’ in code editors is nothing new and I’ve been using various editor plugins to save time long before CoPilot.  One effect I’ve noticed is that when I go and grab an autocomplete library package for whatever I’m working on, I have the tendency to learn less about it. 

    So perhaps the real consequence of this so called artificial intelligence is the reason why IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries9,10.  I believe that it’s giving us a false sense of technological improvement especially to those that do not understand it.  I learned that lesson some years ago when I started substituting memory for machine11. Time will tell… I’m always intrigued by modern research that incorporates using technology and programming to gather and analyze extremely large datasets that would be impossible without the assistance of computers. I do think these types of AI usage will absolutely be used to benefit our lives in areas like science and medicine. I just don’t think we should offer up our own intelligence as a sacrifice. 

    Update: 22/11/08

    Github CoPilot now has a lawsuit on it’s hands12 which also makes ask the same question about the usage of the images in the DALL·E image generator.  Even though the output is modified, AI relying on data which has copyright is going to be problematic.  

    Update: 22/11/30

    Open AI released a new model called ChatGPT. I played around with it for a bit and had a long discussion about it while generating chats and surfing the Discord channel to see other dialogues. This is the first question I asked:

    Although some of the results are really interesting, I’m fairly confident that aside from web applications and automated phone handling systems, the next application is going to be the drive through window at fast food restaurants. Here’s my Open AI DALL-E 2 image for “HAL from 2001 a Space Odyssey serving hamburgers”:

    Update: 23/04/01 – I wrote a second essay on artificial intellegence @ https://davidwindham.com/artificial-intelligence-2/ .

    1. OpenAI DALL·E 2 – https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ 
    2. Artificial Intelligence – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence 
    3. Silicon Valley – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series) 
    4. IBM Watson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) 
    5. IBM Deep Blue – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer) 
    6. AI effect – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
    7. Young Frankenstein – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Frankenstein 
    8. Github CoPilot – https://copilot.github.com
    9. NBC News IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn’t bode well for humanity – https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-many-developed-countries-doesn-t-bode-ncna1008576 
    10. Stanford MAHB – Idiocracy: is the decline in human intelligence undermining democracy? – https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/idiocracy-is-the-decline-in-human-intelligence-undermining-democracy/
    11. Never Substitute Memory for Machine – https://twitter.com/windhamdavid/status/742432751987609600
    12. The Lawsuit that Could Rewrite the Rules of AI Copyright – https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai-github-copilot-class-action-lawsuit-ai-copyright-violation-training-data
    13. OpenAI ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue – https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

  • Now Streaming

    The better half is on holiday and we’ve been doing some class A lounging. We’ve also recently added a nice 75 inch television to the bedroom which is a pretty good excuse for a midday nap now that the summer heat is settling in.  I’m watching Wimbledon1 and the Tour de France2 is good napping material. During a recent discussion on what to watch, a buddy of mine went on a rant about how it’s a mess navigating the streaming landscape insisting it’s all designed to just charge you more money. Although I cannot completely disagree, there’s never been a better system for having access to content. It’s literally the vast majority of the world’s media on demand.  You can watch the snow drift in Antarctica3 or take a train ride across Sweden4. Instead of turning my teen angst against the mind numbing television towards the internet, I like to remind myself how great it is to watch this transformation.  Navigating the infinite can seem pretty treacherous so I just wanted to share my approach to streaming. 

    It’s amazing how much consumers just consume whatever is presented in front of them. I guess that’s why advertising works and I’m certainly not immune.  I’m often always asked if I’ve seen the ‘new show’ that is featured at the top of Netflix, Hulu or whatever. The same goes for whichever podcast or album Spotify or Apple Music is featuring.  Sometimes I’ll do a bit of stream surfing the apps and most popular categories to just kinda try and reverse engineer what folks are watching or listening to. Of course, I also get the in-person recommendations that I try to note. Most often, I’m in My Own Private5 Idaho of sorts. We’ll watch only one show at a time only occasionally breaking it up. We’ve just currently wrapped up Star Trek Deep Space Nine6 which is 176 episodes filmed in the 90s. Before that, we rewatched The Simpsons which is over 700 episodes. Needless to say, it’s usually easy for me to duck out of any casual conversations about whatever may be trending.  

    I like to watch movies mid-summer and mid-winter mainly because it’s either getting dark early or because it’s too hot outside midday.  I never turn on the television just to fill up the room with noise.  I listen to music when I’m at the computers and podcasts when I’m cooking. I’ve worked up a pretty decent tracking and discovery system. I’m no slouch when it comes to film either. I would roll through 5 discs at a time from Netflix back when they came in the mail and I did the whole deep dive on great films and filmmakers because the web interface would allow you to sort by director, studio, producer, etc. After I had rolled through the old Academy Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards. American Film Institute5 catalog and Criterion Collection6, I moved on to foreign films. Even after almost thirty years, I still discover good old films I hadn’t seen. I’m also convinced that the further you move upstream, you had better be reading because the best ideas are where the pen hits the paper so perhaps a ‘now reading’ list my be my future too. 

    There are plenty of publications that cover film and keep up to date watch lists.  Because the only close to universal search for film is IMDB9 and Wikipedia. It’s complicated by competing interests.  For instance, the search on Apple tvOS will not feature films licensed to Netflix. I’d imagine this is because they don’t want Apple to have analytics on their content.  This is true of a bunch of user interfaces from various providers. And then the licensing is often switching around too, so the provider is irrelevant except for the fact you often need to be a subscriber… which brings me right back to my buddy’s rant on it.  When you fret about the fees or lack of universal search,  just remember that it wasn’t too long when everyone was watching the same four channels, then the same 38 channels, then what the movie store had on VHS. Granted that I like to I support artist by paying for the content, I also realize that the vast majority of it goes to the studio and streaming provider. I crank them up and clear out what I want and shut them off because very few vendors require an annual subscription. 

    I’ve just started a simple list of shows and films to replace my practice of bookmarking. I share it with the better half like we do our grocery list and I’ve decided that I’m going to chronicle it like I do my music listening and keep a list of favorites. This way I can share it with others.  As of now, I can’t figure out a way to pull my lists or watched from any APIs or whatnot, but I’m sure I’ll be able to in the future.  Just trying to avoid mindless consumption …unless of course I’m in the mood for mindlessness which happens more often than not. Speaking of, we just discovered Mike Myers’ The Pentaverate10 and aside from watching Wimbledon, our current attention is pointed toward solving the game Pikmin11.

    If you want to take a look at what’s next, I’m going to keep the list @ https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/next 12.

    1. Wimbledon – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Championships,_Wimbledon 
    2. Tour de France – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France 
    3. Blizzard in Antartica – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ_MkkyhV0o 
    4. Sweden, Jordbro to Stockholm – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REuhC74uaa8 
    5. My Own Private Idaho – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Own_Private_Idaho
    6. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine 
    7. American Film Institute – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Film_Institute
    8. The Criterion Collection – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Criterion_Collection 
    9. IMDB – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb
    10. The Pentaverate – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentaverate
    11. Pikmin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikmin 
    12. David A. Windham – TIL- Up Next – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/next