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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

  • Late Adopter

    I’ve gotten in the habit of taking a little time at the beginning of every year for general maintenance of the machines which I’ve written about several times. I’ve been reading a lot of other opinions on some various technologies recently and I’ve really started to consider why people decide to publishing anything. I’m really having to dig to sort the information from those who have lots of experience and enthusiasm from those who are either getting paid or trying to get paid in the form of self promotion by trying to show off their ‘knowledge’. There’s a lot of bad knowledge out there from the later and sometimes it gives me imposter syndrome as to why I’m publishing anything. Even though I tend to respect the opinions and efforts others, I generally try not to form my own opinion until I’ve had my own experiences by digging through it. As a kid, I liked to disassemble my electronics and either try and put them back together or, as was often the case, leave them in permanent states of disrepair.

    I like to tell folks I’m a late adopter. Let everyone one else be the guinea pigs. Sometimes I take it to the extreme like how I refuse to upgrade my smart phone until it’s absolutely dead. I’m currently six years behind on an iPhone 5 and I still use my original version 1 in a nightstand alarm clock. The book Diffusion of Innovations1 was first published in 1962 and first described the process by which an innovation is communicated over time among the participants in a social system. According to that theory, I’d fall into the 34% ‘late majority’ right at the midpoint of the distribution curb. This could explain why my brother liked to call me a poser2 when we first got into skateboarding or how he insisted that I immediately move to Ruby on Rails3 version 1 in 2005 when we first started web development. I’ve found that I’m very much OK being right in the middle of the distribution curve for most anything. It’s comfortable. This may seam counterintuitive for me considering that I’m often responsible for making technology recommendations, but I’ve found that it’s an effective strategy to save money, time, and labor.

    While running the annual updates on the machines I use for development, I’ve noticed how much less work was involved on the machines that aren’t configured manually and rely on Homebrew or Docker to create the development environments. With Homebrew4 and Docker5 I’m putting in three commands to spin up entire development environments, whereas I was previously spending countless hours of configuring the system manually and ‘googling’ through every error on Stack Overflow. One of the projects on my plate right now involves reconsidering the hosting for a relatively high volume client. I’m pretty well versed on the scalability and performance of various systems, but I haven’t yet dug too deep into containerization or container orchestration systems because I hadn’t had the need to. I’ve mostly been throwing money at additional hardware as a solution but the quote from a current vendor came back way too high. My proposal for alternatives ended up being services oriented around or managing hardware orchestrated6 by Kubernetes7 from the big three: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. I really don’t want to do any additional system administration or pay for managed services but I also want to avoid the technical debt8 of continually patching system and software upgrades. Although my bread and butter is in custom development, I still feel the need to disassemble these systems so that I have a solid understanding of the full stack.

    I’m a late adopter. The idea of Infrastructure as Code9 and cloud orchestration systems has been gaining traction for a long time. I first dabbled with Chef and Puppet quite a number of years ago, but I’ve been mostly constrained to solo DevOps10 and the lack of appropriate production experience with them to have any real solid opinion one way or the other. My upgrades this year are reflecting a change in that process. I maintain quite a number of servers and applications running an assortment of programming languages and databases, many of which are running on different infrastructure. Instead of just trying to keep everything on standard Long Term Support(LTS)11 versions, I’ve been maintaining separate versions of languages and databases on my machines. I’ve decided that the best path going forward is to mitigate the extraneous annual work by using Docker files to create the various environments I need on the fly. This will also give me the ability to keep those instances inline with the upstream12 providers. Because those instances are virtualized, I’ll still maintain a local core of languages and databases in my ‘wheelhouse’. The minimalist purest in me still wants a few moving parts as possible and is opposed to what is essentially server middleware13, but the practical reality is that aside from the fact that I end up spending too much time with configuration. This is really just an extenuation the meaning of ‘convention over configuration’14. And although I’m still kinda sold on Ansible15 because of how simple it is and the fact that it doesn’t consume any hardware resources, containerization orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes is truly helpful with systems of scale.

    I’ve now got at least a week of work invested into orchestration systems. I really enjoyed the ease of working with Rancher16. It’s just an outright impressive tool. These newfound skill sets are just enough for me to get what I need and I’m barely scraping the surface. It’s teaching me to focus on what I enjoy doing, which is building functional logic and features for applications. And although these skills really help me to fully understanding the stack, I don’t want to spend a quarter of my time with it because in the end, no one, especially the paying clients, cares how it’s running, just what it does and how well. I’ve been a loyal Linode customer for quite some time and I’m in on the beta of them spinning up a Kubernetes17 Engine. I’m sure to find some real world usage, learn some new skills, and gain a deeper understanding. I’m a bit skeptical of vendor lock in and I’ll wait another couple years to dive completely into the JamStack server-less computing18 trend. I see the value of a single language stack and infinite scaleability. I’m gearing up for it, but I’m still not entirely sold on the idea of purposely building software to capitalize on how the big cloud providers are dictating the use of dirt cheap CPUs or CDNs. Almost all of the ‘server-less’ vendors depend on Kubernetes to provide ‘Function as Service'(FasS)19. These hot ticket keywords are often misleading and confusing. There are still sysadmins in ‘server-less-land’. And although Rancher, Docker, and Kubernetes are essentially the current pinnacle of infrastructure technology, I’m not really in the business of providing cloud services. I’ll let everyone else work that out until a leading strategy emerges. I’m happy right here in the middle of the majority as a late adopter.

    1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
    2) https://www.wikihow.com/Differentiate-Between-a-Real-Skater-and-a-Poser-Skater
    3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails
    4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_(package_management_software)
    5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_(software)
    6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestration_(computing)
    7) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes
    8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt
    9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_code
    10) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps
    11) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_support
    12) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstream_(software_development)
    13) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleware
    14) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_over_configuration
    15) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible_(software)
    16) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancher_Labs
    17) https://www.linode.com/products/kubernetes/
    18) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing
    19) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_as_a_service

  • 2019 In Music

    Well… another year come and gone. I make a new playlist every month that you can find on @ https://open.spotify.com/user/windhamdavid . I try to use only new releases and some re-releases to make up the playlists. I keep track of all of my listening details over @ https://davidwindham.com/studio/music using the Last.fm API @ https://www.last.fm/user/windhamdavid. Year over year since I’ve begun tracking them in 2007, Bill Evans is taking the lead again. There’s a lot of it to go around. Just the Bill Evans recordings posthumously released (Fantasy, Verve, Riverside, Village Vangard, etc) would be about 50 CDs worth or recordings. I really don’t tire of him. There were a newly couple newly recorded albums that stuck out last year. The various ‘music year in review’ articles from other publishers have become a ‘wash’ for me mostly because my taste have gotten crotchety like an opinionated old man. I still like to browse through all kinds of new music, I pay some attention to other curators, and I like to listen to various shows. The music discovery mechanisms have gotten pretty good, but I feel like they suffer the same kind of ‘information silo’ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_silo ) effect that plagues any other algorithmic driven data. There are some errors in my data because of the way single tracks are pre-released before the albums. I’m kinda weary of the ‘first to market’ approach to releasing single tracks for streaming because I miss the old days of being excited to hear an album in it’s entirety. I’m sure my tastes tend to lean towards my experience… after all I did wake up this morning trying to convince my better half how good the Bob Segar Live Bullet album I used to listen to as a teenager mowing grass is. Here’s what I was listening to in 2019:

    Artist

    • Bill Evans
    • Ahmad Jamal
    • Michael Kiwanuka
    • John Williams
    • Terry Allen
    • Brad Mehldau
    • Easy Star All-Stars
    • Merz
    • Duke Ellington
    • Kevin Hays
    • Jon Hassell
    • Talking Heads
    • First Aid Kit
    • Rayland Baxter
    • Destroyer
    • Steven Goldmund
    • Calexico
    • Hiss Golden Messenger
    • Quantic
    • Voyager
    • Deep Watch
    • Empty Space
    • Foxygen
    • James Taylor
    • Kevin Morby
    • Louis Armstrong
    • Steely Dan
    • Van Morrison
    • Wilco
    • Allah-Las
    • Beck
    • Ben Harper
    • Brittany Howard
    • Curtis Fuller Quintet
    • Frazey Ford
    • Iron & Wine
    • J.J. Cale
    • Jungle
    • Justin Townes Earle
    • Kraak & Smaak
    • Michael Nau
    • Momento
    • of Montreal
    • Paris Atmosphere
    • Poncho Sanchez
    • Sylvan Esso
    • Tejal Yann
    • Terry Riley
    • The National
    • Bill Evans
    • Ahmad Jamal
    • Michael Kiwanuka
    • John Williams
    • Terry Allen
    • Brad Mehldau
    • Easy Star All-Stars
    • Merz
    • Duke Ellington
    • Kevin Hays
    • Jon Hassell
    • Talking Heads
    • First Aid Kit
    • Rayland Baxter
    • Destroyer
    • Steven Goldmund
    • Calexico
    • Hiss Golden Messenger
    • Quantic
    • Voyager
    • Deep Watch
    • Empty Space
    • Foxygen
    • James Taylor
    • Kevin Morby
    • Louis Armstrong
    • Steely Dan
    • Van Morrison
    • Wilco
    • Allah-Las
    • Beck
    • Ben Harper
    • Brittany Howard
    • Curtis Fuller Quintet
    • Frazey Ford
    • Iron & Wine
    • J.J. Cale
    • Jungle
    • Justin Townes Earle
    • Kraak & Smaak
    • Michael Nau
    • Momento
    • of Montreal
    • Paris Atmosphere
    • Poncho Sanchez
    • Post Malone
    • Sylvan Esso
    • Tejal Yann
    • Terry Riley
    • The National

    Album

    Side TracksBob Dylan
    Mendelssohn: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2Felix Mendelssohn
    Glenn Gould GatheringAlva Noto
    Stay AroundJ.J. Cale
    Some Other Time: The Lost Session from the Black ForestBill Evans
    BalladesAhmad Jamal
    Face The FactsFoxygen
    Rated PGPeter Gabriel
    Grateful Dead Records Collection (Remastered)Grateful Dead
    The BalanceAbdullah Ibrahim
    Father MountainCalexico
    Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)John Williams
    Tenderly (An Informal Session)Bill Evans
    Dreams of Sleep and Wakes of SoundMerz
    Just Like Moby DickTerry Allen
    KiwanukaMichael Kiwanuka
    WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?Billie Eilish
    RadiodreadEasy Star All-Stars
    Liszt: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2 (Remastered)Franz Liszt
    In the Key of the UniverseJoey DeFrancesco
    Oh My GodKevin Morby
    Tracks (Remastered Anniversary Edition)Oscar Peterson
    Money JungleDuke Ellington
    The Saint Of Lost CausesJustin Townes Earle
    Spotify SinglesKurt Vile
    All Of Our YesterdaysMac DeMarco
    Motivic RetrogradeQuantic
    Come On Up To The House: Women Sing WaitsTom Waits Tribute
    Another Time: The Hilversum ConcertBill Evans
    Years to BurnCalexico
    Daddi (Reggie Watts Remix)Cherry Glazerr
    Seeing Other PeopleFoxygen
    Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)Jon Hassell
    Light YearsThe National
    Ride Me Back HomeWillie Nelson
    Simple Twist of FateJerry Garcia Band
    VioletaKevin Hays
    Pino EuropeoPino Europeo
    Blue TrainPoncho Sanchez
    That’s Not TrueSkip Marley
    RelaxamentoVarious Artists
    WhisperingsAhmad Jamal
    Finding GabrielBrad Mehldau
    FlashbackFujiya & Miyagi
    HopeKevin Hays
    Rides Through The MorningMichael Nau
    Santa Cruz de la Sierranico landa
    Good MmorninRayland Baxter
    Saw LightningBeck
    Uneven DaysBen Harper
    LargoBrad Mehldau
    KaputtDestroyer
    Strange Beauty – SingleFirst Aid Kit
    Jenny of Oldstones (Game of Thrones)Florence + the Machine
    Se Eu Quiser Falar Com DeusGilberto Gil
    California Voodoo, Pt. IIHoundmouth
    LEGACY! LEGACY!Jamila Woods
    Nothing Sacred / All Things WildKevin Morby
    Wide AwakeRayland Baxter
    I’m Comin’ OutShovels & Rope
    Take The Money And Run / Love Is Strange / Swingtown / Killing Floor / Rock’n MeSteve Miller Band
    True Stories (Deluxe Version)Talking Heads
    Go / Eagle Birds / Lo/HiThe Black Keys
    General StrikeThe Souljazz Orchestra
    Side EffectsWhite Denim
    JabulaAbdullah Ibrahim
    Portrait In Jazz [Keepnews Collection]Bill Evans
    UndercurrentBill Evans
    Bring It to MamaBoyfriend
    Midnight MagicCommodores
    GhostrideCrumb
    Not Ready To GoDiane Coffee
    Stay GoldFirst Aid Kit
    An AnthologyHank Jones
    Everybody Needs SomebodyHiss Golden Messenger
    Rolling into OneJordan Rakei
    Invocations / ConversationsJr Jr
    It Rains LoveLee Fields & The Expressions
    Hot TearsLeif Vollebekk
    The Great ReunionLouis Armstrong
    Poison The WellModest Mouse
    As Far as I Can SeePhil Cook
    Come Back to EarthRayland Baxter
    I Hear You Paint HousesRobbie Robertson
    They Want My SoulSpoon
    Can’t Buy A ThrillSteely Dan
    Spotify SinglesToots & The Maytals
    Valleys (My Love)Whitney
    Automatic YouthAlex Ebert
    LAHSAllah-Las
    Everybody Digs Bill EvansBill Evans
    You Must Believe in SpringBill Evans
    The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings (Sampler)Bob Dylan
    Can’t Find My HeartBroken Social Scene
    Hello SunshineBruce Springsteen
    The Great Pixley Train RobberyCass McCombs
    AntidoteChick Corea
    Blues-etteCurtis Fuller Quintet
    Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?Deerhunter
    A Fool Like Me (feat. Self-Made Men)Delbert McClinton

    Track

    • Ahmad Jamal – Poinciana
    • First Aid Kit – Strange Beauty
    • Ahmad Jamal – Whisperings
    • Ahmad Jamal – Because I Love You
    • Bill Evans – Baubles, Bangles and Beads – Trio
    • Bill Evans – What Kind Of Fool Am I?
    • Brad Mehldau – Dear Prudence
    • Curtis Fuller Quintet – ファイヴ・スポット・アフター・ダーク
    • Kevin Hays – Violeta
    • Michael Nau – Rides Through The Morning
    • Poncho Sanchez – Blue Train3
    • Wilco – Love Is Everywhere (Beware)
    • Ahmad Jamal – I Should Care
    • Ahmad Jamal – Land of Dreams
    • Ahmad Jamal – Marseille
    • Ahmad Jamal – Spring is Here / Your Story
    • Ahmad Jamal – What’s New
    • Allah-Las – Holding Pattern
    • Allana Johnson – Second Level
    • Angie McMahon – Take It With Me
    • Antologie – Time Travel
    • Barcelona Atmosphere – Parc Güell
    • Beck – Star
    • Bill Evans – Alfie
    • Bill Evans – How About You?
    • Bill Evans – It Could Happen To You
    • Bill Evans – Very Early
    • Bill Evans – You’re Gonna Hear From Me
    • Bill Evans – You’re Gonna Hear From Me – Alternate Take
    • Binary One – Tunnel Traveller
    • Binaural Landscapes – Skyline
    • Bing Crosby – It’S Been A Long, Long Time
    • Brad Mehldau – Paranoid Android I
    • Brittany Howard – Georgia
    • Calexico – Father Mountain
    • Calexico – Years to Burn
    • Deep Watch – Moments
    • Deep Watch – Reasons For Being
    • Duke Ellington – Switch Blade – Remastered
    • Earl St. Clair – Fed Up
    • Eleanor Arroway – Trancendent Sleep
    • Emblemic X – Pondering Life
    • Empty Space – Paranormal
    • Empty Space – Storyteller
    • Erik Wøllo – Ody At Sea
    • EverLight – Breath, Your Journey Begins
    • Frazey Ford – The Kids Are Having None of It
    • Gavin Luke – Gone
    • Gilberto Gil – Se Eu Quiser Falar Com Deus
    • Glen Hansard – I’ll Be You, Be Me

  • 2019

    Around the end of every year I always start thinking about goals and reflecting on the past. I suppose that’s good. This essay started as a couple notes to myself but I decided publish it to share with a couple folks. To those of you who got a link to this page, it’s way better than the card my wife would have whipped up and I signed. Or maybe just a cathartic exercise in reflection and self importance. Regardless, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kwanza, Winter solstice1, and Saturnalia2. We only did a few cards this year. I’ll try to make this note a bit personal so that we might feel connected. I’d sincerely ask how you’re doing if I had seen you in person this year. You’re welcome to send me a response anyway to let me know. Regardless, I hope you and your’s are doing well and would like to wish y’all a happy new year.  

    Well. My year? Let’s see… the first quarter was made up of a bunch of home renovation projects, summer was pretty much slacking on work to play tennis, and the last quarter has been mostly me ratcheting up work to catch up on the cost of said improvements from the first quarter. I think we spent twice what we had budgeted. I had always heard that would be the case. Oh well, It was well worth it. Our abode is where we spend our time and we’ve put our some sweat equity into it. Literally… we found ourselves mid summer rebuilding our deck in the South Carolina heat. My development work has shifted a bit in the last six months. Although I’ve been enjoying the challenge of being immersed in learning new tools, I’ve also been struggling with the fact that my pace isn’t as quick as it once was. Ginny has been doing double time as well taking on new responsibilities in her work world. It’s paid off though and we’re about caught up on the renovation costs. Otherwise, I’m very happy to say that our concerns are relatively few. Our dog Zeke turned 17 this year. He’s slowed way down and we just want him to pass peacefully in his sleep even though we’ve been telling ourselves that he has a couple more in him. We have 93 and a 97 year old grandmothers who we wish the same. I’ve got a younger brother who’s health issues with Crohn’s disease are concerning.  My eyesight. I’m getting closer to 50 and I’m pretty sure these computer screens are taking a toll on my eyes. I’ve got three pairs of reading glasses lying around the house, but I don’t carry a pair around and haven’t seen an optometrist yet. I’ve gotten to where I just ask Ginny to read me menus and other print when we’re out. It just kinda snuck up on me to where I was starting to get headaches from eye strain when working. It’s been my second real wake up about my own age.

    Health and aging would be one of my 2019 themes. Several years ago… 2014. Six years now. Time flies. I really made a hard turn on my health. The reason being is that I thought I was having a heart attack one night. After a bunch of test, it turned out to be a panic attack and heartburn. You make a lot of promises to yourself when you think you’re dying. I quit smoking finally… and I say finally because I had been on and off, mostly on, for the previous ten years. I used to get up and drink an entire pot of coffee and smoke a pack of cigarettes while sitting at my desk. I’m pretty sure that cut into a couple years of my life. In the last six years, I exercising regularly and I eat healthy. Aside from my own mortality, both of my parents are starting to get up there in years. I’m sure that, not unlike everyone who proclaims their new years resolutions to be about health and diet, aging might sound like a dull year end theme. Alright. It Is… Let’s talk about figuring out how to live healthily until at least 2070. Now that’s better. Makes it look like time is a long stretch of road ahead. It’s much more fun to be future focused. After having done the renovations here, we’ve been putting some serious thought into custom designing and building a new house. A sustainable net-zero house with some land for a small farm. That’ll be another chapter though for a different year end summary. 

    Another thing that has persistently stayed on my mind 2019 is something I’ve been trying really hard to work on in the last five months trying to complete a couple projects. It’s a bit abstract so bear with me. It’s mostly about focus and anxiety. I think the idea of retiring and more specifically investing money is what started me down this trail. The idea that I could make money off of money without working has been sounding oh so nice especially since I knew the bulls would make a run. The reality is that I also started reading the news again daily. I had stopped for the previous five years or so. I feel like it’s stolen my time and energy. I’m not sure it’s all worth it. I’m a pretty anxious person to begin with, but I’d say that anxiety could be part of the general zeitgeist in the last several years. I had been trying desperately to purposefully disengage from connective-ness as a means to simplify and make my life more rewarding. You know the ‘be here now’3 mantra. As I moved past my understanding that the anxiety of constant connection is mostly manufactured tool designed to take your attention, personal information, and sell you shit. The addictive apps, the infinite content streams, the apocalyptic headlines, the political postering, and the exploitation of our psychological weaknesses. These are all very much manufactured anxiety which some have dubbed the attention economy. The closest explanation to this trend that I’ve come up with is that we have essentially invented a new communications medium of which we are unequipped to use in the most appropriate means. I’ve started to frame that same sort of information age ‘era’ thinking to other events as well. I read a long paper on peak oil this year from a series of energy companies and soon thereafter was able to quickly frame the whole of current climate debate and regional political struggles into a framework. Using that sort of long range thinking has helped me frame any discussion about the current headlines and relegate them into more digestible bits that make sense in context. My point here is this… being consciously aware that the the world around you is dizzyingly complex and the information thereof is moving at unconscionable speed. The “Turn on, Tune in, drop out”4 approach is why I think you’re seeing things like legal cannabis, the opioid epidemic, minimalism evangelists, mega-churches with rock music, organizational coaches, and everyone acting like they do yoga even though it’s mostly just wearing the pants. To me, it’s all evidence that part of our collective consciousness is trying to counteract the effects of the information age.  

    Anyway, back to what I was saying. FOCUS. How to avoid distraction in lieu of meaningful awareness. I’m not sure I have the answer yet. I try to set all kinds of rules for myself. I think that maybe it just might be a luxury to be unfocused. My essay on the 20 hour work week from last year might be supporting evidence. Kierkegaard writes “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.”5 I’m certainly not in much of an existential crisis even though evidently a lot of folks are since I just saw that ‘existential’ was the word of the year for something or another. Mine is more of a “be here now” mindfulness approach to life that I’m working on. I am trying to be very mindful of the affects that all of my actions have on a daily basis. I’ve grown from dealing with issues of attention and anxiety. I often find the later to be a source of motivation6,7. I think Herman Hess’ Glass Bead Game8 nails this theme since he wrote it in anxiety prone times with the message that wisdom is only when knowledge is applied to the real world. I encourage everyone I know to take control of their attention and don’t let the systematic influence of the information age give you anxiety. Put down the endorphin driving devices and tune into the world around you. This is coming from someone who legitimately suffers from periods of hypo and hyper focus. I think the reason I took the time to write this essay today is because I told my better half this morning over coffee that sometimes when I have ‘flow’9 answers just seem come to me. I had an early morning epiphany of sorts in that I am constantly reminded that when I have the mindset of just trying to be helpful to my fellow human beings things just tend to work out and when I’m mired in the self protection and competition they don’t. Yesterday morning I mentioned to her that my driving force is curiosity and that the reason I appear to be lucky in life is because I turn over a lot of stones. 

    Here’s to being helpful and flipping those stones in 2020. 

    ~ David

    1. Winter solstice – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_solstice
    2. Saturnalia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia
    3. Be Here Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Here_Now_(book)
    4. Turn on, tune in, drop out – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out
    5. The Concept of Anxiety – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Anxiety
    6. Kierkegaard on Why Anxiety Powers Creativity Rather Than Hindering it –https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/06/19/kierkegaard-on-anxiety-and-creativity/
    7. Kierkegaard On Using Existential Anxiety to One’s Advantage – https://medium.com/@mustaphahitani/kierkegaard-on-using-existential-anxiety-to-ones-advantage-5ec266dc9b45
    8. The Glass Bead Game – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game
    9. Flow (psychology) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

    Update – 12/28/19: Ram Dass died December 22nd. That’s really weird how I was wrote this essay the days prior and had listened to two of his lectures in the previous days. Maybe the ‘be here now’ mantra has me more ‘in tune’ than I’m even aware of. As he said “The next message you need is always right where you are” and “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass

  • How Does a Website Know My Name?

    Well… it finally happened to me today. While reading the news this morning I noticed that the Bill.com1 IPO managed to gain 60%2. I wanted to dig a bit into their business model since I’ve been thinking about reworking the invoicing application I use.  In doing so, I headed over to Bill.com, scrolled down a bit, and viola… the inevitable new-fangled chat-box appears. However, this time the chat bot correctly identifies me with my full name. I’ve know about this practice for years and I’ve seen the exponential growth in the arena, but today is the first time, I’ve actually had it happen to me. I’ve previous figured out and am pretty well versed in all kinds of methodologies for various privacy invading tracking techniques used by the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook etc, but this one is a bit different because I was on a mobile device using a browser in incognito mode so it wasn’t cookie or tracker based. It was done just using my IP address. I headed to my desktop, changed my IP address, and tried it again using an IP set to Central America. The site chatbot misidentified me as “Jobcluster” which turns out to be an employment agency in Florida.

    So, of course I’m intrigued and I set about to reverse engineer the feature. Firstly, I can see why the Bill.com IPO gained so much traction and I’ll give the companies involved kudos for being able to do so. The chat feature on Bill.com is powered by Drift3 which offers a ton of integrations and is a sophisticated project4. Drift is able to add datapoint integrations with MadKudu, Demandbase, 6Sense, and Clearbit5. Combining this data into or alongside of another system such as Segment, Saleforce, Google Analytics, or Facebook Pixel can create a powerful dataset on any person. I say person whereas most of the typical language about the tracking is either customer, consumer, market, etc. If you then combine that data with that of the big name companies like IBM and Equifax who compile and sell personal data, then you’ve got a bunch of data-points originating from a single web requests6. The are vast amounts of resources being put into closing down the ‘last mile’ of the anonymity of the internet. I suspect that it won’t just be IP addresses for long as the telecommunication providers and governments make strides in pushing to identify the devices on their networks7 for regulation and legal purposes even though vendors are had been trying to randomize those addresses8. If you’re following along, you might have noticed the recent attempt by the US Government to impose restrictions on encryption9. I’m not going dig into all that here for the sake of focusing just on the little feature I ran into this morning. I’ve previously written about privacy and tracking online10 so I’ll just leave you with the fun fact that folks are now attaching beacons to identify you on everything from churches to those little roadside political signs11 so the tracking is not just online, it’s in real space in real time12.   

    In order to reverse engineer the identifying info on the Bill.com site I saw this morning, I ran through each of the their third party Drift chat APIs quickly and determined that the identifying information on my IP is most likely the data coming from Clearbit. I say ‘most likely’ because I’m unwilling to set up thousands of dollars in accounts to test my theory.  Drift integrations with Clearbit indicate that the Clearbit Reveal13 feature is what is trying to identify the user. Try it out by loading up a VPN and flopping around your IP addresses while viewing this page https://clearbit.com/reveal. As far as I can discern, it’s using a combination of IP and cookies. I set up a Clearbit account and starting making some API requests out of curiosity and sure enough, the IP address I was using identifies me by my name, my job, my address, my website, and my social media accounts. It’s still kicking up null for my annualRevenue, but I tried some other folks I know who work for larger public companies and it was able give me the annual revenue using the combined Enrichment API request14. I have implemented a number of structured data15 elements into my website including Open Graph elements which are also a form of structured data16. That data explains much of the data present using the Clearbit Enrichment API. However, it doesn’t explain how the Reveal API is able to pair the IP address assigned by my ISP to that data. My first guess was that I signed into an another identifiable service using the IP and it’s stored and shared that data with Clearbit. My IP has been static for years, so it could be any number of services. (Please Clearbit don’t send me a cease and desist over this post… or do and then help me explain to others how my IP is being matched to my identity). I double checked my ISP policy on customer data protections which simply stated that they can ‘share’ data with their business ‘partners’ and I also tried looking at any other identifiable service I’m using that could pair that data. I tried running a bunch of other IPs through the API and can see some of the more obvious data collection points, but I’m still baffled as to which data point is exposing my real identification through my ISP’s assigned IP address.  

    So what do I do with my newfangled discovery. I know… I can use my knowledge to make money… if you can imagine that. These type of services and APIs can provide some serious firepower to client facing web applications and sites. It’s potent stuff for marketing. Although I have some reservations about privacy, I’d certainly recommend them to other companies trying to engage ‘customers’ online. It’s a powerful marketing tool when used added to a CRM or funneling tool. The more advanced tools do come at a price though. The costs for the Clearbit Reveal Google Analytics plan is a thousand a month. The costs for the Reveal API subscriptions are two grand a month17. For any business of scale that’s just a drop in the bucket. I’m already trying to figure out ways to incorporate it into projects and I can see where these are going to be an invaluable tool for folks trying to reach customers or improve their sales and customer retention tactics. Just thinking about it this morning has given me some fun ideas as to how to customize a bunch of different aspects of applications based on third party data points. As of now, I enjoy messing around with the AI bots in an effort to garner humorous responses, but I suspect that these AI data driven features in applications will inevitably be messing with me given more data. 

    Of course there is a drawback… I think the other message here is that as these types of services start combining data points from various sources that the majority of folks will inevitably lose a large piece of their perceived anonymity online. The type of targeted messages being published by the clients of Cambridge Analytica18 showed some of the vulnerabilities of the exploits of personal data. I’m not too personally worried about my anonymity online mostly because I’m educated about the practices and have been sharing personal information online for 15 years now without issue mostly because I quarantine it under my own control. I also admit that I’m very much guilty in that arena by running reverse IP searches on everyone, tagging emails with trackers, tracking user locations via IP address through the headers in their emails, and just ‘Googling’ people to find out more about them. I recently had a conversation with some folks where I had done a bit of cyberstalking on the person and just outright asked them about their history to which they said ‘how do you know this?’. I replied with ‘the internet’… like it’s what everyone does. I just assume they do and make no bones about it because I’ve been working with this stuff for years. Maybe abuse is the wrong word here… marketers might call it a strategic advantage. But, let’s just say if I can identify you before you visit a website or other application and I know your address and can infer your wealth, I might decide to price a product or service accordingly. It’s already being done with geolocation data. Is it fair? Is it abuse or is it strategic? Does’t it happen in real life all the time? I sometimes have to give consent as to when my data is pulled in the fine print of whatever agreement I’m signing. In many ways I’ve understood very clearly that this is the direction that it the internet has been heading and I’m wasn’t entirely surprised to see a website correctly identify me by name. My experience this morning is more evidence that it’s happening online already. The last time I had that type of eye opening web experience was in the early days of LinkedIn’s connection recommendations when I was baffled as to how they understood all of my email contacts. Although I’m not a fan of treating everyone like a ‘user’, it does personalize the experience and in doing so, it makes it more effective and personal. Let’s hope the data rich developers and companies who use these tools decide to do so wisely and not just for maligned interest. I believe that the privacy laws in other countries are heading in the right direction and I’m leery of the unchecked use of this data. Just something to chew on this morning… I’ll leave you with this quote from my favorite tweeter and futurologist ~ “The Future is here – it’s just not very evenly distributed”.19

    1. Bill.com – https://www.bill.com/
    2. Bill.com, of Palo Alto, gets an early Christmas present as shares climb 61% in IPO – https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/12/12/bill-com-of-palo-alto-gets-an-early-christmas-present-as-shares-climb-61-in-ipo/
    3. Drift – https://www.drift.com/
    4. Drift Intel Integrations – https://gethelp.drift.com/hc/en-us/sections/360003545753-ABM-And-Intel-Integrations
    5. MadKudu, Demandbase, 6Sense, Clearbit – https://www.madkudu.com/, https://www.demandbase.com/, https://6sense.com/, https://clearbit.com/
    6. Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information- https://www.fastcompany.com/90310803/here-are-the-data-brokers-quietly-buying-and-selling-your-personal-information
    7. Home Affairs floats making telcos retain MAC addresses and port numbers- https://www.zdnet.com/article/home-affairs-floats-making-telcos-retain-mac-addresses-and-port-numbers/
    8. Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance- https://www.eff.org/wp/behind-the-one-way-mirror
    9. Distrust of Tech Could Be Encryption’s Achilles’ Heel – https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-codebook-9630f129-ae8b-4813-b64d-4712b65e9835.html
    10. David A. Windham – Privacy and Cookies – https://davidwindham.com/privacy-and-cookies/
    11. Campaign Put Beacons on Lawn Signs to Track Phones – https://mashable.com/article/beacons-location-tracking-republican-campaign/
    12. Beaconstac – https://www.beaconstac.com/
    13. Clearbit Reveal – https://clearbit.com/reveal
    14. Clearbit Enrichment API Docs – https://clearbit.com/docs#enrichment-api
    15. Schema.org Structured Data – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema.org
    16. Facebook Open Graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Platform#Open_Graph_protocol
    17. Clearbit Reveal Subscriptions – https://help.clearbit.com/hc/en-us/categories/115001976668-Reveal#Subscriptions
    18. Cambridge Analytica – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
    19. William Gibson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson

    22/04/12 – Update: Saw an episode of Last Week Tonight last night on Data Brokers that touches on some of the issues I mention in this essay. The full episode is available @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA

  • Dorian

    Well… it’s about that time a year again that I’m glad I don’t live on the coast. This screenshot gave me pause, because I like how the shape of Hurricane Dorian1 perfectly curls along the beaches between Charleston and Wilmington.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian

  • Joshua White

    I’d like to share a story that I think is important and relevant to modern times about Joshua White. Today is the anniversary of the “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr.. Every morning after I get up and have my half of cup of coffee I do a bit of reading. I’ll scan my email and the news quickly and try to find something interesting. What gave me pause this morning was a tweet from the “People’s Daily”, the largest newspaper in China and the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China. The tweet1 referenced the words of “I have a dream” with images of the speech.

    Although unrecognized by many folks, the movement that lead up to the “I Have a Dream” speech was largely initiated by the labor movement of organizations such as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters2. The speech was made at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That march was organized by Philip Randolph3 and Bayard Rustin4. Rustin was able to pursue an education because he was an accomplished tenor vocalist and earned music scholarships to college. He performed with Josh White and the Carolinians in the recording6 below.

    Gottlieb, William P – [Portrait of Josh White, Café Society (Downtown),
    New York, N.Y., ca. June 1946] – Library of Congress

    Joshua White7 was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1914. His father threw a white bill collector from his home in 1921 for which he was beaten so badly that he nearly died. His father was subsequently locked away in a mental institution and died there several years later. Two months after his father died, White left home to drift with a blind street singers often sleeping in fields and stables while still a teenager. This was documented by Barlow, William Barlow in his 1989 book “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture. White eventually returned to Greenville to take care of his mother and siblings working various labor jobs. Later, in the 30’s, White was sought out back in the Carolinas by A&R men interested in his talent. He eventually was cast as Blind Lemon Jefferson in the Broadway play John Henry to which he received some notoriety. but late run the 40’s he recorded “One Meatball”, the first million-selling record by a male African-American artist.

    In the 1940s Joshua White became close friends with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. He would spend Thanksgivings and Christmas at their home in New York. They became the godparents of his child and he became a friend and confidant of the president. After the death of the president, White’s younger brother William White became Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal assistant, house manager and chauffeur for the remainder of her life.

    In the 1950s White was tagged by Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television8. In an effort to clear his name, he consulted Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson. On September 1, 1950, White, appearing with only his wife Carol at his side, sat down before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and explained his childhood background and read the lyrics to the song anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” which was placed into the congressional record. Because he volunteered to testify before the HUAC, it greatly affected his posthumous reputation in America, causing him to become the only artist of the era to be blacklisted by both the political right and left. Mrs. Roosevelt had an astute understanding of the political climate in Washington and in America when she warned White that the government would turn his testimony against him. Indeed, this was the case, and White’s blacklisting would not be lifted for years. White relocated to London for much of 1950s, where he hosted his own BBC radio show, My Guitar Is Old as Father Time. White’s blacklisting in the American television industry was finally broken in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy invited him to appear on the national CBS television’s civil rights special “Dinner with the President”.

    Joshua White died in 1969 during heart surgery. He was the first black singer to give a White House command performance (1941), to perform in previously segregated hotels (1942), to get a million-selling record (“One Meatball”, 1944), and the first to make a solo concert tour of America (1945).[26] He was also the first folk and blues artist to perform in a nightclub, the first to tour internationally, and (along with Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie ) the first to be honored with a US postage stamp. The 1956 book The Josh White Guitar Method9 is still in print. While White has undeniably left an indelible mark on American culture, this story should serve as a warning that a friend of presidents and the organizer of one of the most significant civc events in American history could be pushed into virtual obscurity by a political process motivated by fear.

    I find this little artifact significant and timely, given the recent press about the rapid deforestation in the Amazon, the ongoing protest in Hong Kong, Boris Johnston trying to push through a ‘no deal’ Brexit, and the press that Trump has financial ties to the same folks campaigned for him using fear tactics. Often times, the juxtaposition of newsworthy items and cultural artifacts are fascinating enough to me that warrant sharing. This story started just a couple mile up the road from me when a young teenager left home with a blind musician because he father had accosted a white bill collector. I’m just guessing here, but I’d put my money on the the bill collector being a crook. I played an Ovation guitar for some time because I liked the ease on my fingers. That guitar evolved from White’s bleeding fingers. The song Jerry, by Josh White and the Carolinians is about a prized mule who’s driven hard because “Lord, this timber gotta roll”. Jerry got spooked from the sound of timber crashing and “kicked the boss in the rump”. The “Boss tried to shoot him in the head” and Jerry the mule “stomped him dead”. Jerry is a poignant folk story. The warning of Joshua White’s life being pushed by fear, racism, and political process, is similar to the the fear in a mule driven hard leading to the demise of the boss. It’s a fable that’s has contemporary implications. My favorite reference to Joshua white is from Shel Silverstein and Bob Gibson who remembered White with the first verse of Heavenly Choir10.

    Last night I heard Josh White playing
    From somewhere on the other side
    In an orchard full of strange fruit hangin’
    With his head thrown back, he stood there singin’ He snapped those strings till his fingers bled
    He bent those notes till his guitar wept… now he’s…
    Part of the Heavenly Choir
    Where all the poor restless souls can be found Ain’t that a heavenly choir
    Ain’t that a hell of a sound

    1. https://twitter.com/PDChina/status/1166538390856245250
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Sleeping_Car_Porters
    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Philip_Randolph
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin
    5. https://www.loc.gov/item/gottlieb.09081/
    6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDpjPm143dI
    7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_White
    8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Channels
    9. https://www.amazon.com/Josh-White-Guitar-Method/dp/B07C479SJR
    10. https://www.bobgibsonfolk.com/song-heavenly-choir/

  • The Magical Number Seven

    It seems that almost every time I’m involved in designing a new user interface for an app or website, I inevitably bring up the magical number seven1. Although I’m using it in design terms, it’s origins are actually from a psychology paper published in 1956. It’s also commonly referred to as Miller’s Law2, which refers to both working memory and communications. It’s a simple concept about our working memory which you can read more at the Wikipedia page linked below in lieu of repeating it here. It’s also cited by the US CIA in Psychology and Intelligence Analysis3.

    The reason I refer to the concept is generally in an effort to try and simplify user interfaces. I believe, as Miller had cited in his original paper, that anytime more options than needed are presented, the information becomes confusing. I like for any menu navigation item to contain less than seven options. I actually believe that closer to 3 is optimal and if you can fold the options out like a tree in steps of three you’ll get better results. Now, don’t get me wrong on this, I’ve built menus with 40+ items. Sometimes is necessary if you’ve got a directory of information that a user might want to try and navigate to a specific piece of information. This is also where search plays a vital role… or in the case of this website, I’ve playfully made the whole thing a maze of information. However, if you’re presenting the user with new information and trying to elicit an objective response to the stimuli, then my recommendation is to always limit the choices to seven or less. Some folks might cite the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle3 on this, but I think the Magical Number Seven is more appropriate to what’s really going on. I always try to present users with seven or less choices as to their next action. If you’re really only trying to get one single action from a user, limit the choices to one or none. I like to think of users as savvy and not just Pavlovian4 mouse clickers. That’s why I think it’s all about the magical number seven.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%27s_law
    3. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/art6.html
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning

  • Twenty Hour Work Week

    I’m often out working in the yard, riding the bike, swimming, or playing tennis midday mid-week and folks are always saying “don’t you have a job Windham”. Since the majority of the folks saying it are retired and I like to respond “It’s not my fault it took you so long to retire”. In reality I work hard and more importantly I work efficiently. In an effort to respond to those folks I figured I’d write a short little post this morning about how I try to be efficient with work my work. And don’t let the title fool you, that’s just what I’d like to shoot for and in reality I’m sometimes working fifty hour weeks.

    Quality of life… I can’t emphasize it enough. It’s always the little details that drown folks in the traditional work week nonsense. Even though most folks are doing the nine to five, I don’t think they are getting any more work done. Every time I’ve taken a traditional job, I’ve been discouraged by the amount of time my co-workers spend ‘riding the clock’ and the amount of time I have to spend on site twiddling my thumbs. In fact, the last full time position at a local university I left simply due to the fact that our new dean was cutting down on tele-commuters and I was being forced to drive into the office. Prior to that, I actually liked coming into the office certain days just to socialize with my coworkers. One of the first corporate jobs I had was as a web developer for a publishing company where I learned all kinds of bad work habits from the seasoned developers there. After one of our first ‘code sprints’, a fellow developer came to me and said “don’t do the work too fast, they’ll come to expect us and you’ll make the rest of us look bad”. They also taught me to leave broken items in the development repositories just so we’d already know what was going to be requested of us by the project managers. I attribute this to Parkinson’s law 1. in that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. This type of time wasting stuff is nonsense. I prefer to just do my work in such a way that the faster and more efficiently I do it, the more time I have away from the office.

    Reducing the number of office hours has made some headlines in recent years. Given that I’m doing remote IT development work from home, it makes sense that I’d be learning towards the shortened work week. However, a lot of decent research suggest that we are all moving towards shortened work hours. I think we’re all kinda contaminated with the ‘busy-ness’ disease. I think It makes us feel like we’re valuable and productive. I’m no expert, but it’s been an idea in the making for years. Bertrand Russell wrote in his 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness”, that “if society were better managed the average person would only need to work four hours a day”2. John Maynard Keynes noted in a 1930 essay, “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”, in which he reckoned people might need work no more than 15 hours per week by 20303. I’m not going to philosophize on production, consumption, and work hours. There are plenty of others doing it3. However, I will tell you that my quality of life has increased by concerning myself with issues of time management.

    I’ve always been easily distractible. I had an English teacher in high school who made it a point to contact my mom about my inattentiveness in class. Being the hypochondriac she is, my mom and some psychologist quickly accessed my condition as ADHD. I still think it’s just general boredom with the mundane and uninteresting. That’s another issue for another essay. I now mostly do contract development work. This work is generally within a team development environment that makes me accountable for my time in that I’m often pair programming. I also manage to take on other smaller projects for additional billable hours. This type of work has given me the liberty to devise ways to use my time the best I see fit and over the years, I’ve developed little habits that help shorten my work week and make me more efficient.

    1. I go to bed early and I wake up early. At our house, we’re almost always in bed by nine. We’ll talk, read a book, or watch a film and I’m usually out by 10pm. I get up around 6am, have a cup of coffee and get right to it. I’ve found that the midday chaos of communication is really distracting and I get my best work done before noon.
    2. I exercise often so that I sleep well. I evaluate how I’m sleeping often and I will sometimes meditate or take a nap if I’m not feeling particularly on task or focused.
    3. The smartphone is rarely an entertainment device for me. (unless of course, I’m stuck somewhere, like the doctors office waiting room or airport with nothing else to do) I’ve turned off all notifications on my phone and when I’m working, I turn the ringer off as well and leave it in a drawer downstairs.
    4. I try to only open up an email twice a day in the morning and after lunch. I draft my responses and send them out in the afternoon.
    5. I use project management software to keep a list of projects, tasks and calendars that keep me current at a glance. It functions like a Kaban4 board as an easy way to manage tasks.
    6. I spend very little time doing invoices or paying bills. I write up each billable hour every day and I auto pay all bills online.
    7. I try to communicate efficiently in that I only respond to emails/texts/calls that need an immediate response and I always wait until I have all of the questions I need to put into an email/text/call before I make it.
    8. I try to spend a couple hours every week playing with development tools and servers in an effort to continually make leaning new skills fun and keep me interested in my work.
    9. I write code efficiently. I make notations and document as I’m writing it.
    10. I learn tricks to speed up and automate development.
    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Other_Essays
    3. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/26/no-time
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

  • BioTherm Solutions

    Although I’ve mostly stopped posting technology related ramblings on this website, I have to remind myself every so often that I should be keeping up with my projects in an effort to self promote. I built a new website for BioTherm Solutions this last year and I’m going to run through the highlights. If you’d prefer to just take a look, head on over to BioTherm Solutions to view it online or the code repository at https://code.davidawindham.com/david/biotherm.

    BioTherm Solutions has been in business since 1980 designing and manufacturing greenhouse environmental solutions. They are based out of Cotati, California which is just north of San Francisco and west of Sonoma. I was introduced to the company through a project had previously done for another greenhouse based company. BioTherm had pretty much the same set of web issues that most projects I work on… outdated content, non-responsive1, and a design dated site. I reworked the main logo and created additional vector graphics to match their new divisions. I gathered an assortment of other graphic resources, created a color theme, and started in on the site.

    They had an old site based on Expression Engine2 which hadn’t been updated in a number of years. I went through the process of migrating the site locally and gave them a number of options about upgrading Expression Engine, redesigning the content, migrating the existing content to a new content management system. The owner had a brochure that had been updated and I worked form the design from a print brochure which had been updated. For this project I settled on a couple of standard libraries to build out the templates. I primarily used Bootstrap from Twitter and Material Design3 from Google. All of the pages have been built as static HTML assets. Sometimes I really miss working with static files because of the simplicity. There was a minimal amount of JavaScript added, so there was really no need to further complicate it with additional preprocessors4 although I generally like to use a task runner5 to compiles assets on a project like this. Ideally, I’m left with one single CSS and JavaScript File. The only other technical considerations on this project were some forms and third party analytics. I used PHPMailer6 to handle the forms. I used Google ReCaptcha7 to deal with form spam and I used Google Analytics.

    I think the design on this one is clean and provides a simple experience that guides users to action. They’re happy with it and that’s mostly what makes my job rewarding. As with most projects, I always make a promise to support them for the lifetime of the project. In this case, I’ll likely be doing some additional work by migrating to a CMS8, maybe a new host, and adding an SSL certificate9. Although I do the majority of my work for other agencies, it’s kinda nice being directly involved with the company. This also cuts out a lot of potential for feature bloat10 since I can recommend only what they need and I’m not pitching them new fangled solutions. I wish all of my projects could be so straightforward.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EllisLab
    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_Design
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preprocessor
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_automation
    6. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer
    7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA
    8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system
    9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL
    10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat

  • 2018 Playlists

    Every month I make a new music playlist. I usually do this while I’m avoiding work at my desk. I’ve started doing these playlists in 2013 and I just post them online for anyone interested ( here’s last year ). I like going back and listening to old playlist just like the old mixtapes I used to make. I generally try to only include new releases for each month. Sometimes these will include reissues and remastered releases from that month. I keep statistics and track my listening habits at https://davidwindham.com/studio/music/ and http://radio.davidawindham.com/. If you see anything I missed last year, please let me know.

    Looking back through these tracks… here are some that stuck out to me last year. ( in no particular order )

    • Phil Cook – People Are My Drug
    • Ry Cooder – The Prodigal Son
    • John Grant – Love Is Magic
    • Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile – Lotta Sea Lice
    • Kurt Vile – Bottle It In
    • Courtney Barnett – Tell Me How You Really Feel
    • David Byrne – American Utopia
    • Brian Eno – Music For Installations
    • Phosphorescent – C’est La Vie
    • Dr. Dog – Critical Equation
    • Kamasi Washington – Heaven and Earth
    • Mark Knopfler – Down the Road Wherever
    • First Aid Kit – Ruins
    • Neko Case – Hell-On
    • Blood Orange – Negro Swan
    • Ziggy Marley – Rebellion Rises
    • Medeski, Martin, & Wood – Omnisphere
    • Olafur Arnalds – re:member
    • of Montreal – White is Relic
    • Douglas Firs – Hinges of Luck
    • John Prine – The Tree of Forgiveness
    • St. Paul & The Broken Bones – Young Sick Camellia
    • Ben Harper & Charlie Musselwhite – No Mercy In This Land
    • Willie Nelson – My Way/Last Man Standing
    • Keith Jarret – La Fenice (LIve at Teatro La Fenice)
    • His Golden Messenger – Virgo Fool
    • Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Sex & Food
    • Jason Isabell – Live from the Ryman
    • Superchunk – What a Time to Be Alive
    • Elvis Costello – Look Now
    • Parquet Courts – Wide Awake!
    • Rayland Baxter – Wide Awake
    • Gregory Porter – One Night Only (Live at the Royal Albert Hall)
    • Paul McCartney – Egypt Station
    • Brad Mehldau Trio – Seymour Reads the Constitution!
    • Jim James – Uniform Clarity
    • Grateful Dead – Pacific Northwest ’73-’74
    • Soulwax – Essential
    • Father John Misty – God’s Favorite Customer
    • Chick Corea & Steve Gadd – Chinese Butterfly