Recent content on Curious Musings
This is my emacs carnival blog post for January 2026 responding to Christian Tietze’s prompt “ This year I’ll… ” This year emacs-related goals include moving into denote, updating workflows, integrating AI where it makes sense and sharing more publicly. Specific packages will include denote, gptel, and likely something with Claude code. Still loving org-social. This…
1 Ab Initio In the beginning, there was TECO 1 . And darkness was on the face of the programmers, And the MIT hackers said “Let there be Emacs”, And there was a collection of TECO maros". This is the first in what is planned to be a series of posts on “The people of Emacs” who have influenced me. I’ve found that the use of Emacs is often a marker for…
1 Emacs Carnival, December 2025 - “The People of Emacs” This is a writing prompt for Emacs Carnival for December 2025. The basic ask is to write about “Emacs people you’ve known.” Preference is given to people who influenced you, who inspired you, who taught you, or who bent your mind. Bonus points if they are people you’ve known in “real life”…
I recently faced frustration while trying to get clarity on my insurance coverage. I discovered a solution that spares me from time on hold. It also holds promise for freeing people stuck answering calls to pursue more fulfilling work. I used AI in ways the company never envisioned. Figure 1: “Pete Rose and Harp” by George Jones and ChatGPT is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 I’ve had an…
Some perspective from a person who spent decades providing financial advice, planning for retirement and was then diagnosed with brain cancer at 61…. Figure 1: “Grim Reaper With Question Mark” by George Jones/DALLI is licensed under CC BY 2.0 For the past couple years, I’ve been reading/learning a ton from the retirement-related web site HumbleDollar , which is run by…
In ancient Rome, there was a temple to the god Janus (he of the month “JANUary” fame). There was a tradition that the gates of the temple of Janus were to be closed in times of peace, and open in times of war. They were usually open. I asked the Brave web browswer’s AI-assisted “Leo” search engine and ChatGPT to put that in in cotext, both in the history of Rome and…
I got motivated yesterday to do some credit-report hygiene. I wrote a HOWTO describing process of freezing all 3 major reports , see ( http://git.galthub.com:3000/gmj/home.public.howto/src/master/home/public/HOWTO/freezing-credit-reports.org ) I also added some commentary what motivates the credit unions (and it’s not your security and privacy) and the sad state of things 9 years after one…
Today was the day I removed the TNI (Telephone Network Interface) from my house. The last vestiges of our land line. The last outpost of a once vast network. Figure 1: “This Phone Is Property of Ohio Bell” by George Jones is licensed under CC BY 2.0 There used to be vast infrastructure (the Telephone Network) that got phone calls from place to place. I remember sometime around 1969…
So, life. Death. Taxes. Insurance companies and AI. This is one very real, present way AI is going to kill people. Not by HAL-9000 or Borg malevolence, but with a heavy dose of group-think by insurance companies. Life has brought me rather suddenly to the place that I’m interacting heavily with insurance companies about a medical issue for a loved one. The customer web site has a chat bot,…
I’m going to subvert the system and try to connect with humans I talk to in call centers as humans … at least until they are all replaced by AI. Figure 1: “No good deed unpunished, from Brazil” courtesy of MENTAL FLOSS may be copyrighted. My life has taken a turn where it looks like I will be talking to lots of customer service people on the phone: medical stuff, tax…
We’ve got to do better than this … https://haveibeenpwned.com/ Not sure what the answer(s) is(are). Decentralization? Required 2FA? Returning to the offline world? Several of my accounts were in the list multiple times. And then, our friends at the credit bureau lost it all 6 years ago, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach , and a large US federal agency that does…
This is a story about the similarity between finding good information to identify vulnerable devices on the Internet and finding the info one needs to sign up for US health care. Hint: in one of these domains it’s possible to find facts. In the other there is a shifting maze of marketing, laws, partisan media coverage, and bureaucracies who’s goal is to profit from making it impossible…
Warning. First-world baby-boomer problem described here: So, I'm stitting here on the group-W bench, I'm just sitting here... OK. Really. Not trying to get out of the Viet Nam draft, just having another surreal interaction with the US Federal government 50 years later along the lines of: Some folks are born silver spoon in hand Ah, they really help themselves But when the tax man comes to the door…
GoodRX may save my son $3,500 or more on his prescription meds. This is a large fraction of the income he’s earning on his first job. Congress exempted “Big Phrama” from kickback rules in the 90s, the result seems to be that prices signals are allowed to work in the market to the benefit of people who would otherwise be made poor buying medicine they need at artificially high…
It is somehow fitting that the day I retire, the state of Ohio chose to unveil an historical marker outside the former headquarters of my first employer, CompuServe. I guess I’m history :-) Figure 1: “CompuServe Historical Marker” I started in June of 1985, and, looking back, what was going on there was world changing: the first commercial email, the first online banking, the…
Ode to emacsconf 2023 All the world’s a text, And all the men and women merely editors; They have their reads and their writes, And Emacs in its time plays many parts… With apologies to William Shakespeare and actual odes. Figure 1: “2015-02-02 Making a virtual Emacs conference happen – index card #emacs #organizing-people #conference #planning #questions” by sachac is…
The chart below is a mental framework I’ve used to evaluate my work situation over the span of may career. The goal is to move as far up the pyramid as you can. Being at the top (interesting )is really a first or zeroth world problem. Insert discussion of human flourishing/εὐδαιμονία here. If you’re failing at a lower level, the upper layers really don’t matter. Figure 1:…
On my Mastadon feed this week, the question was asked “Why have #podcasts become so popular in the last few years? What’s changed?” I think there are a lot of answers… Figure 1: ChatGPT rendering of “Make an image of Dorothy Gale of Kanasas riding a bucking bronco with the wicked witch flying on her broom in the background and a tornado behind that” by ChatGPT…
In your “Presidents Log Book Entry” article in the monthly newsletter , you talked about the need for the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (PATC) to build its “brand identity” to reach our target “consumers”. About that… I’m involved in PATC as a trail maintainer and an avid hiker with 1700 miles of an AT Section hike over 14 years. I’m in it to…
Do something radical. Count your blessings, name them one by one Literally. Do it. Write them down. Meditate on all the good stuff in your life. Maybe even give thanks. https://hymnary.org/text/when_upon_lifes_billows_you_are_tempest (the fact that this follows yesterdays “ Making Lists ” musing is just coincidental … he asserts … our maybe it’s the positive…
Dad made lists. Lots of them. I have Emacs org mode. Making lists is part of the story I tell myself about how I’m working on the right things and getting them done. Dad was an incurable list maker. He had to-do lists from Mom. He wrote detailed instructions (a list) of how to set up the camper. He posted lists of the date that each of my brothers and me would start paying for their own gas…
The past couple weeks, I’ve intentionally cut the phone out my morning routine. I was already writing a daily journal (on paper), about a page or two a day. I’ve always found that to be cathartic, as well as a good way to organize my thoughts and do some day-to-day planning. Now I’m writing two daily journals. The second journal is an attempt to capture family history and oral…
Believe it or not, you will be OK if you don’t use your “smart”-phone to look up everything the minute you think of it, if you don’t have it by your bed at night and you don’t turn it on for a few hours. You might even regain a less-addicted, more thoughtful “smart”-you. For the past few days I’ve been going “Cold Turkey” on using the…
Today I’m going to pay my taxes, work on updating my living will and health care power of attorney, telling others when I want doctors to pull the plug if I can’t make that decision myself. Death and taxes. You can’t live with them, and they get you in the end. When discussing death, taxes, and “I know I’m right, why is all this bad stuff happening to me?”,…
I think I’m a member of “Gen-P”, the “ Peter Pan ” generation who grew up in the shadow of the 1953 Disney production that touted the idea that we never have to grow up. Figure 1: “Boat off Jeckyll Island” by George Jones is licensed under CC BY 2.0 A friend who’s a few years older than me recently related trials she is having caring for elderly…
In http://curious.galthub.com/blog/2022-12-25/ I said Bruce moved on from there to be VP of MSN at Microsoft for a while. Arguably a “Highly Successful Person” Which, of course, begs (assumes, cedes) the question: What is success? Bruce embraced the management track. I’ve fairly consistently and actively dodged it, ironically after Bruce promoted me to my first supervisory role…
This is two part rant on planning with (and without) Emacs Org Mode, shoved together into one post in much the same way as Lennon-McCartney songs were shoved together from musical scraps they had laying around. My Frankenstein post will probably have less impact and reach than “A Day In The Life”, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. 1 Rants on org mode, humanity and Bruce 1.1 Org mode and planning These…
make up a mak twain quote about crypocurrency Here is a possible quote that Mark Twain might have said about cryptocurrency: “The only thing more elusive than the value of cryptocurrency is the person who invented it. They must be a master of misdirection, for they have managed to convince the world that a string of numbers and letters has worth.” A poem about Pete Rose? A LATIN poem about Pete…
Why do we hack? Because we enjoy it? Because we want others to use our work? Because we get paid? Figure 1: “Teco Emacs on TOPS20” by George M. Jones is licensed under CC BY 2.0 Once again EmacsConf went to fountainhead of free software and gave us a chance to hear from and interact with rms . People in the public eye often get on (or get put on) a soapbox repeating the same lines.…
So, day 1 of EmacsConf 2022 is in the books. Another eclectic mash up of everything from the “ Emacs Buddy Initiative ” to a geeky dive on how to Edit live Jupyter notebook cells with Emacs (no, really, I like editing everything in browser text boxes … not!) to a serious proposal for a new economic model for software: Maintaining the Maintainers: Attribution as an Economic Model…
I got a flu shot this week. I happened to be at the pharmacy waiting for a prescription and had been planning on getting one, so I did. No politics… No threats of being fired by my employer. No media coverage. No G20 summit leaders agreeing I should not be able to travel without it. No politics dividing me from friends and family. No Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. books full of conspiracy theories.…
This is a HOWTO on publishing certain Unix config files while keeping others private using GNU stow and ?clever? groupings of files into directories such as home.public.dotfies and home.private.mailconfig I like to publish my personal config files (.bashrc, emacs configs, etc) but there are some things you probably just don’t want to share because they only apply to you (your list of rss…
As we approach another election in the US where hearing cries of “Red” vs. “Blue” become unavoidable, I’m increasingly convinced that such labels are unhelpful substitutes for thought and actually engaging with other people and ideas. I’ve been listening to Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules For Living”, as well as his podcast lately. Yes, per…
I was once eating in a restaurant with some co-workers in Prague, and it came time to leave. We wanted the check. In that setting, this would have been a meaningful sentence (in convoluted punning English) addressed to our waiter… Check [for the] Czech Check, Czech [waiter]? to which an appropriate reply from the waiter might have been: Check! #33 of #100DaysToOffload take 2.1,…
I’m in the process of installing a new “git” server. It’s written in the “go” language. I was about to get out of bed to work on it, so… Get going, go get go git going #32 of #100DaysToOffload take 2.1, https://100daystooffload.com/
See the title. #31 of #100DaysToOffload take 2.1, https://100daystooffload.com/
Aristotle identified three types of friendship - friendships of association, utility and virtue. Who were you “best friends” with in early school years? Do you keep up with your old co-workers? Who has hurt you deeply, yet you still wish them the best? This morning I listend to a podcast that gave a summary of Aristotle’s classification of friendships. This is a summary of a…
2022-10-17:14:06:52: Installing and migrating to Manjaro 2022-10-17:14:29:04: pacman -Syu # update pacman 2022-10-17:14:30:06: sudo pacman -Syu # update pacman 2022-10-17:14:30:23: sudo pacman -S ed # install ed 2022-10-17:14:32:41: scp -v -r -p 192.168.0.10:~/stow . # copy stow files 2022-10-17:14:33:39: sudo pacman -S stow # instal stow 2022-10-17:14:47:04: # INFO - Arch runs zsh by default.…
So, I’ve been listening to the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Audible. How long until it gets canceled for use of the “N” word? Looks like Paypal might try to charge me $2500 for reading something they don’t approve of https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/the-2500-fine-read-it-and-weep.html . I’ve canceled Paypal. But that said, read it (while…
Email from [company I have investment with]: We are pleased to let you know that there is a new document for you to review Translation, the corporate machine sent this to you to mitigate it’s risk of being sued by you and fined by government regulators for not doing so. There is no “we” in the personal sense. And no human being is “pleased” by this. Emails like this…
Over the years you pick up useful ideas from people. One of the most useful “project management” ideas I’ve ever encountered is Can I get the job done by doing nothing? Use the code you already have. Use existing slide decks. Time is scarce. Don’t waste it creating something new when something you already have will do the job. Don’t spend hours getting a slide deck to…
I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. I’m trying to have a positive effect on the things and people I can actually change (myself and my own reactions in this moment). Below are some quotes along those lines from Longfellow, Bob Dylan, the Apostle Paul and Reinhold Neibuhr, some of classics of “Don’t worry, be happy”. Now if I can just internalize some…
This is the view from White Rocks 13 miles north of Harpers Ferry. In the fall you can see the colors (leaves changing) creeping down the mountain because it’s colder as you go up. Here you can see spring creeping up the mountain. Figure 1: “Spring Creeping Up The Mountain” by George Jones is licenced under CC SA 4.0 #25 of #100DaysToOffload take 2, https://100daystooffload.com/
Shared experiences bring us together. This is some (possibly obvious) introspection involving the Appalachian Trail, the moon landing and the Beatles. Figure 1: “Archive: Apollo 11 Sees Earthrise (NASA, Marshall, 07/69)” by by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 Saturday I was out on a training hike on the Appalachian trail in central Pennsylvania.…
I am listening to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road - Wikipedia . What a rant! What a stream-of-consciousness-grab-life-by-the-horns-drink-until-it-kills-you peaan to not missing a single moment or experience in life ! Figure 1: “Upward and Onward” by George Jones is licenced under CC SA 4.0 A lot of what happened in the 60s starts, I won’t say to make sense, but to have a…
The sun is always shining. The flowers are always blooming. There are no bugs. The trail is always flat. There are no rocks. It never rains. It’s never too cold. It’s never too hot. There’s never overcrowding. Your gear always works. Your physical conditioning is always good. Figure 1: “Sun on lake” by George Jones is licenced under CC SA 4.0 This is bloodroot. I also…
Cars have changed. Back in the day you could “pop the clutch” to start a car by letting it roll down hill, putting it in first gear with your foot on the (manual) clutch, let the clutch out (“popping the clutch”) and often the car would start. Handy if you had a car with a dead battery at the top of a hill. Cars are full of electronics now, and that can be good, and it can…
When you’re on a world tour following COVID lock-downs, nominated for 3 Grammys, scheduled to play at the Grammy’s this year … and your drummer dies …. https://youtu.be/fns6N_iAVBw I close my eyes Only for a moment and the moment's gone All my dreams Pass before my eyes, a curiosity ... Dust in the wind All we are is dust in the wind (All we are is dust in the wind) Dust…
Steve Wilhite died last week. Yes, he created GIF, but that was just a side project among mountains of mostly single-handed coding projects that were a large part of what kept CompuServe going for years in the face of AOL and the Web. One of my coworkers recalled : …many times when asked about a delivery date Steve would answer “it will be done when it is done.” I laughed when I…
Shelving the self hosting for a while. Just gonna push the static blog up to my 20 year old Hurricane Electric shell account. URL redirection is a marvelous thing. This is not your fathers CNAME record. After my raspberry pi died (when I unplugged it from the new UPS that was supposed to keep it up), and I manifestly failed for 2 weeks to allocate the time to rebuild it, I decided to let other…