One fire pit to rule them all.

Thorough and clever analysis of Python interop resulting in an API for asychronous I/O managed across multiple cores.

It’s funny to watch my creative outlets shift back and forth over time, since the activities themselves are about as conscious and intentional as they could be, and yet the overall course of the river seems to meander through loops I can only see in retrospect.

I did a ton of sewing last spring, but I haven’t touched a machine in months. The middle of the summer was all about organizing Floodland, which went off really well, but exhausted me. Since then I’ve been cruising through a more than usually quiet and solitary mode, spending most of my free time deep in the guts of some really enjoyable compiler hacking.

Now the weather is turning, I seem to have a resurging interest in connecting with my friends, and I’m thinking about starting up weekly Rock Star Thursday Dinners. Perhaps this also has something to do with the changing of the seasons and the approaching dark months, but I’m feeling a spark of interest in some lighting projects that have been neglected during this bright summer.

Delightful. By Mark Morford:
Burning Man is so very wrong

Here’s what you need to know about Burning Man in this fine year of our unchecked chaos, 2014: Nothing.

I mean, just forget everything, all right? Whatever you’re heard, read, seen, rumored, teased, whispered, Facebooked, Instagrammed, linked to, thought about or had muttered in your general direction in an Uber fever dream anytime in the past month. Year. Decade.

Because it’s almost certainly wrong. Delightfully, hatefully, stupidly, shamelessly, deliberately, resentfully, innocently or even inadvertently, it doesn’t matter – there’s almost nothing the slightest bit accurate in what the modern media has said recently about the famed art/camping/dance/survival festival – now in its 28th year – happening right now out in the Nevada desert.

Ready for Rain:
Why Seattleites Crave the End of Summer

It’s not simply the arrival of rain, but the transition to a different environment and way of life. The drear has a certain dark beauty; a low-contrast softness. There’s no need to squint or close the blinds. Even the sound of the rain on our house is music to my ears, a lullaby.

MailInABox: a script for setting up your own mail server on an Ubuntu 14.04 machine.

note to self: this cheap subwoofer unit looks useful for that Rover project

Charles Stross’ essay about his support for Scottish independence illustrates a view of geopolitics which seems entirely sensible, and which accords with my feelings about Cascadian independence.

My feeling is that we’d be better served by a group of much smaller nations working in a loose confederation or treaty structure. Their job should be to handle local issues (yes, this is localism) while compartmentalizing failure modes: the failure modes of a gigantic imperial power are almost always far worse than those of a smaller nation (compare the disintegration of the Soviet Union with that of Czecheslovakia). Rather than large monolithic states run by people at the top who are so remote from their constituents that they set policy to please lobbyists rather than their electors, I’d prefer to see treaty organizations like NATO and the EU emerging at consensus after discussions among numerous smaller stakeholder entities, where representatives are actually accountable to their electors. (Call me a utopian, if you will.)

Cascadia from space.