A semi-regular newsletter on divers topics by Jonathan Crowe, a map blogger, piano maniac, sf/fantasy writer/critic, snake whisperer and typewriter fiend based in Shawville QC.
We’ve had a few things to deal with since my last: nothing we couldn’t manage, but they have required some managing, and it’s been adding up. The big one, the one that risks being an exception to the above, is discovering that our house requires radon mitigation. We picked up one of the hundred radon kits our town distributed last fall and tested over the winter; the results came in last month.…
A short while ago I got a notification email saying that someone had friended me on Snapchat. A short while after that I got a notice from Disqus, the blog comment service, that ads would be coming to my comments section shortly. The twist is that I haven’t used either service in about a decade—I stopped using Disqus in 2016, when I moved the personal site to WordPress, and I deleted Snapchat from…
This is the second half of what I’d planned for this edition of the newsletter. It was done first, and ran long, and the first half isn’t done yet, so how about I send what I have out into the world now. (I should these out more often anyway.) Impromptus that aren’t so prompt Fresh off his win at the 2025 Chopin Competition (which results were a bit controversial), Eric Lu is now getting some…
I have now had to reassure three people that I’m not in fact ghosting them or giving them the silent treatment, so let me put this on broadcast: If you’ve been wondering why you haven’t heard from me directly in a while (apart from these newsletters, I mean), it’s not you. What’s been happening is that I’ve been less and less able to get the words out, and this past year it got to the point where…
Pretzel, our oldest snake (and last remaining corn snake), is somehow still with us. This past summer she started refusing meals, which when a snake is at least 28 years old (my best guess: I got her in May 1999, and she wasn’t a baby then) you make certain assumptions as to what happens next. We’ve been losing two to three snakes per year to old age for a while now. Most of them were as much as a…
The piano and myself So a thing happened in the wake of the music festival last spring, the correct response to which was for me to walk away from my piano lessons. I won’t go into detail about what happened because, given the circumstances, it would be punching down. Suffice to say, a thing happened, it was some petty bullshit, and I was right to nope out of it. Simple enough—unpleasant…
During the last round of freezing rain and wind a neighbour’s tree came down and took out our internet. Because it happened late on a Thursday, Cogeco couldn’t send someone out until the following Monday. Now, there was a time when an internet outage of that extent would have thoroughly destabilized me, but when they told me it’d be four days before I’d have my internet back, I thought: I can…
I have now seen a draft of the schedule for the Renfrew Rotary Music Festival , which runs from April 23 to 25. Barring unexpected changes, I’ll be performing at 4:30 pm on Thursday the 24th at Trinity St. Andrews United Church . So if you’re at all curious about what I’ve been doing all this time at the piano, and you’re close enough or mad enough to make the trip, mark the date. (I’m also…
As I threatened last November, the new iteration of my website went live last week. Only two months later than I’d hoped to have it finished, which all things considered isn’t awful. This iteration is a deliberate throwback to the days of static HTML pages. Minimal JavaScript (like, eight lines), no embedded external media or resources (even the fonts and icons are hosted on my server, and I…
Pianos, typewriters—basically, if it has a keyboard, I’m in favour of it. So when I tell you that I bought a mechanical keyboard for the computer a month ago, some of you might well be surprised that it’s taken me this long to get one. I’m a little surprised myself—I’ve been thinking about it for years. What I ended up with is a Keychron V3 Max . Keychron makes a dizzying number of customizable…
So what’s on my plate this month, now that the holidays are over and we’ve recuperated from that respiratory illness that lingered about three times longer than it should have? The website redesign is almost done. I still have to settle on a layout for the front page, and then it’s a matter of optimizing the CSS (especially for mobile devices), making sure old pages redirect to the new ones, that…
IN THE BEGINNING there was the LETTER, and it was Slow; and there was also the PHONE CALL, which back then got Expensive if it wasn’t local. Then came the E-MAIL (it had a hyphen back in those days), and it was Instantaneous, except that the Computer Lab wasn’t always free, and Dialup was slow, and checking it when en route or abroad was nigh on impossible, but on the whole it was Good, and lo!…