Author: Steven Garrity

RIP Mike Knott

by Steven Garrity

Mike Knott is among the songwriters who had the greatest influence on my life. I discovered Knott’s music as a strange underworld below the depths of the strange world of “Christian music” when I was a kid. As a typically disgruntled teenager, his music was everything that the Christian music industry was not: raw, honest, and sometimes ugly.

I learned today that Mike Knott has died. See this obituary from NPR.

I’m grateful to my friend and personal music consultant, Dennis, for introducing me to the music of Mike Knott.

Among the loads of music he made, the albums that resonated most with me were:

In 2000, when a flight to Ontario would have cost me several months of income, I flew to see Mike Knott perform in London, Ontario. I knew at the time it might be my only opportunity to see him live, and it was. I’m so glad I look the time.

Mike Knott performing on state with an acoustic guitar

Knott never quite broke through with mainstream popularity, but was deeply influential on those who knew his music. It’s only an accident of history that he isn’t in the pop culture pantheon of rock stars.

Three photos in a row. The first is a stage with speaker and a painting reading MISS YOU DENNIS. The second is Mike Knott performing on the same stage with acoustic guitar. The third is the other side of the stage with another similar painting reading MISS YOU GENE.

At this 2000 show, Mike was mourning the loss of his friends Gene Eugene (another of my favourite songwriters) and Dennis Dannell. He put two paintings up on stage with him, one reading “MISS YOU DENNIS” and the other “MISS YOU GENE”.

Miss You Mike.

 

Thank you Mitchell Baker

by Steven Garrity

Mitchell Baker announced today that she’s stepping down as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet Mitchell on a few occasions in the past 25 years through various types of work with Firefox and Mozilla. My various involvements in Mozilla and Firefox were only ever tiny contributions when compared to the huge scope of the Mozilla project. Even so, Mitchell was always kind, attentive, and appreciative.

It can’t be easy leading a large organization that operations so in-the-open, as Mozilla does. You are even more open to criticism than leaders of any other organization due to the transparency. I’ve never had any doubt that Mitchell was leading with the mission of an open and inclusive internet close to her heart. I’ve always felt Mitchell Baker has wise person, on top of being smart and kind. I don’t call many people ‘wise’.

I’m glad Mitchell will still be involved in Mozilla back in her role as Executive Chairwoman, but wish her well wherever her life takes her.

 

The RSS Talk

by Steven Garrity

Anil Dash wrote about how the decentralized nature of podcasting is a triumph of technology “that can’t be controlled by any one company”, in his essay titled: “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement.

My 8-year-old child was asking me about a podcast1 I was listening to. He asked: “What is it on?”

I didn’t understand his question and he clarified: “Is it on Tidal or Spotify or something?”

I think it’s time to have The RSS Talk.

  1. In the discussion about podcasting with an 8-year-old, I realized how podcasts I listen to are full of casual profanity. ↩︎
 

Cool Runnings in 2024

by Steven Garrity

Through some accident of weather and culture, I ended up watching the 1993 movie Cool Runnings with my family this evening. For those of you too young to know (like my kids), it tells the (dramatized) story of how a Jamaica bobsled team competed in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta.

It was not bad. It didn’t age as badly as I might have expected. A few observations:

  • I forgot how prominent Calgary was as the setting. I’m heading there next month it will now be “the place from Cool Runnings” for my kids.
  • The USSR and East Germany participated in the 1988 Winter Olympics.
  • The Swiss bobsled team in the movie were smoking (literally and figuratively).
  • The score was composed by Hans Zimmer.
  • John Candy, god rest your soul (my kids recognized him as the “guy from Home Alone”).

I did appreciate that my kids assumed the stars of the movie would win the big race, and they didn’t, but it was still triumphant.

After the movie, we looked up the how ‘true’ the based-on-a-true-story was. I enjoyed this quote from Wikipedia:

“The film depicts the team carrying the sled to the finish line to a slow-building standing ovation: in reality, the team walked next to it and received some sporadic applause.”

Wikipedia

A few other gems from the Wikipedia article:

  • Disney wanted Kurt Russel to play the coach, but John Candy insisted and took a pay cut to play the role (it was his last)
  • Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeffrey Wright, and Eriq La Salle were considered for roles of the bobsled team.

 

102 BBQ propane tanks worth of energy per year

by Steven Garrity

After having a series of energy efficiency improvements done to our home in Charlottetown, we received the following rating from an EnerGuide efficiency evaluation:

Info graphic showing a typical new house using 123 GJ/year and This House using 51GJ/year. One gigajoule (GJ) equals the energy from two BBQ propane tanks.

Our “before” audit showed us using 85GJ/year and our “after” audit has us down to 51 GJ/year. We had cold climate air source heat pumps added (like, a lot of them) and spray-foam insulation added to accessible portions of our basement foundation walls (including sealing some glaring air gaps out into an unconditioned garage).

The house already had a ~16kw solar panel system when we moved in last year, so the solar is incorporated into the before and after evaluations.

These evaluations are approximate. There’s no measure how how much energy I’m actually using. They do a blower-door test to measure for air-tightness (our “air leakage rate at 50 pascals” is 3.89 air changes/hour – down from 5.7 before our recent improvements). Beyond that, the values are calculated based on number and type of windows, house size, and a bunch of other static measurements.

So, these values could be better if I keep the house freezing all winter, or much worse when the kids leave the door half open in the middle of winter.

I do like that the rating from EnerGuide Canada includes this note:

One gigajoule (GJ) equals the energy from two BBQ propane tanks

Maybe a BBQ propane tank is the “football field” or “Olympic-sized pool” (!?) measure for energy. Note that this is just for comparison. We’re not actually powering our home with primarily with propane.

Knowing our house could be using around 100 BBQ propane tanks of energy per year sounds pretty low, and way too high at the same time.

 

Size or Speed

by Steven Garrity

Come along with me on a small thought experiment:

Imagine for a minute, you’ve been given a task by the United Nations Commission on Computers & Stuff.

  • Your job is to optimize all of the un-optimized digital images in the world (to take less storage space).
  • Your mandate dictates that you can only do lossless optimization. For context: there are tools that reorganize the contents of image files such that they take take up less storage space, but no data or image quality is lost. This is in contrast to compressing an image more, where you discard data and lose image quality.
  • In my thought experiment, you somehow have the funding, computing power, and the access to all computer systems in the world.

My question is this: Is it better (from a climate standpoint) to:

  1. Spend the energy once to save all of the storage space in the longer term, or;
  2. Don’t spend the energy to optimize, and keep spending the energy required for the un-optimized storage?

Obviously the real answer is It Depends on factors like: how much optimization is possible on most images, how long (and on what type of storage) are most images stored. Let’s not ruin a fun (?) thought experiment with nuance, though.

What say you? Does it cost more to squish a big image, or keep it around un-squished?