Matt 4.1

Birthday, New York, Travel, WordPress

Forty-one is a nice birthday because it doesn’t feel like too much pressure. For forty I did a big eclipse thing that ended up amazing, this year I’m replicating what I did a few years ago and celebrating in New York, Houston, and San Francisco.

My birthday today has already been lovely. Saw the amazing Broadway show Maybe Happy Ending (powered by WordPress!) thanks to a suggestion from my colleague Susan Hobbs who’s a connoisseur of musicals. Then did some fun karaoke in K-town. I didn’t realize how much I missed New York! Tonight will celebrate with one of my favorite DJs, Lemurian, who flew up from Tulum. In the spirit of a blog post for my birthday, I’d like to share with you all a blog post I’ve been working on a while inspired by one of Lemurian’s mixes. In 2018 Max (aka Lemurian) played at someplace called Concept and opened with a very interesting track.

Now, the thing that caught my ear was the bassoon. A double-reed instrument that you don’t often hear in the front of things, much less house music. Here is the original track on Spotify:

This lead me down a rabbit hole to an amazing (WordPress-powered) site called Lyrical Brazil that takes the Brazilian Portuguese lyrics and translates them. Please read that entire blog post. It turns out this song was written by a police officer who was shot and then paralyzed from the waist down, then started a Brazilian music school Candeia which was a fixture of Portela samba school. Here’s the lyrics of the song, translated:

Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry (repeat)
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live
Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry
If anyone asks after me, tell them I’ll only come back after I find myself
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live… (repeat)

Stunning poetry. Made all the better when you understand the context in which is was written.

One of the things I say to my friends is that in lieu of birthday gifts I just want them to publish, whether it’s words, photos, music, or anything. I leave you all with that. Each of us has an incredible story, a unique life experience that is yours and no one else’s. Find a way to express that creatively, and put that on the open web. It’s scary! Vulnerable. But you’ll find once you do that the rewards are better than you ever imagined. 2025 is going to be a weird year, let’s blog through it. Mazel tov!

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.

Find three hobbies you love: one to make you money, one to keep you in shape, and one to be creative.

I’m not sure the provenance of this quote, but I read it and it really resonated with me, and I’ve found myself repeating it frequently.

Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Argument

Ideas

As always, this is best appreciated as a PDF, but for the rest of you here’s the text:

The divine command theory is the view of morality in which what is right is what God commands, and what is wrong is what God forbids. This view is one that ties together morality in and religion in a way that is very comfortable for most people, because it provides a solution to pesky arguments like moral relativism and the objectivity of ethics. Continue reading Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Argument →

More Googlebot Flailing

Google, RSS, Tech

Now I’m seeing the Googlebot request /about/ pages relative to known blogs that don’t have any links to any /about/ URI. The last time the Googlebot flailed around like this it was fun to watch for a little bit and wonder what they had cooking in the labs, but then it got annoying. I don’t know if there are rules of bot etiquette, but requesting imagined unlinked resources while spidering can’t be a best practice.

There is of course one blog vendor who consistently has about pages at /about/ URIs, and that’s Typepad. Now my question Google is: what should the rest of us do if we want our about pages indexed by this new system? Mine happens to be in the about subdirectory of my blog, but what about people who have about.html or about-me.php? Should I set up a permanent redirect for every blog I have redirecting to the real about page?

(Note: That’s faux indignation. I don’t have any juicy conspiracy theories, and I’m not really that peeved, mostly I’m just curious what they’re up to. However juicy conspiracy theories are welcome in the comments. [As long as they don’t make fun of me for noticing these things.] )

UPDATE: It just requested a non-existent non-linked /contact/ URI.

UPDATE: It just requested a non-existent non-linked /stats/ URI.

DEVELOPING . . .

Nerd Attention Damage

Essays, , ,

I would like to award the prize for the Most Damage Inflicted to the Geek/Nerd World in the Past 5 Years to Michael Lopp, author of the seminal Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder in 2003. No article more effectively romanticized an inability to do one thing at a time, and do it well. On the bright side, Digg and Bloglines should probably give him stock. Need an antidote? Spend 10 minutes collecting everything you need to work on a problem, and unplug the internet for 2 hours. You’ll finish in 30 minutes.