Yes, a HALF hour

When I hit upon the idea of an annual summer walkabout, some years ago, I came up with a List.  I mostly travel off of Lists, after all — such as the challenge to visit all 50 states, or all 63 national parks, or all 30 Major League baseball stadiums, with an added bonus round of a NPBL and K?shien game in Japan. A good list brings you places you might not otherwise go, which can be the best of wandering.  And it gives you a launch for planning

So I had a summer walkabout list — places with good hiking and nature and terrible cell reception — brought me to the Maritimes and Gaspe a few years ago, the Pacific Northwest, the Canadian Rockies, and finally to Alaska.  But this summer, my list ran out.  I hadn’t done much to think beyond it, either.  I tossed around something further afield — Scotland!  Scandinavia?  But eventually cost and time made me think, might as well knock off another Canadian province, and go up to Newfoundland.

I knew half of nothing about the place going in.  It was remote and “way up there” which are usually pluses in my book.  The pictures seemed pretty, and it had a pair of national parks on each side of the island. There’s a funny leftover bit of France just off the southeastern end, too.  That seemed enough to occupy me for a journey, so off I went.

YOU CAN’T GET THERE

The classic Mainer like is “You can’t get there from here.”  The unspoken coda justifies it: “If you don’t know where you’re goin’, you don’t belong where you are.”  A nomadic New Englander is nearly a self-contradiction; we were the people presented with 400 years of free land and open opportunity to the west, and decided “Nah.” New Englanders with wanderlust became Oregonians a while ago. And that means we don’t share the Western impulse to just jump in the car and drive ten hours to go on vacation someplace.  We end up going to the same snippet of shoreline over and over, throughout our childhoods.

So I’m always a bit surprised when I try to go to someplace I think of as foreign and distant, and it only takes me half a day to arrive.  It wasn’t actually all that tough for me to get there.

You get to Newfoundland, if you are driving, by way of the ferries from North Sydney, Nova Scotia; the largest town on the breathtaking Cape Breton Island.  There’ a short ferry and a long one; the short one is 7 hours to Port aux Basques, on the southwestern tip of Newfoundland.  The long one runs overnight, 14 hours bringing you to Argentia, which is a few hours drive from St John’s and most of the population of the island. The correct way to do my trip would be to take the long ferry on one leg, and then drive around the island and end up at the other one for the return.  Since I’m an idiot and didn’t know much about Newfoundland, I booked too late to make that happen, and ended up doing a long unnecessary backtrack drive.

The ferryboat was a bit dated but comfy.  You can reserve a cabin, or sit out in a reserved section of seating — a waste of time if you’re not overnight, I think. The unreserved seating was wide open.  There’s a restaurant on board, and a little cafe — both have limited choices because you’re on a boat, but they weren’t half bad.  The bar was fully stocked. And on the way back, the weather was glorious, so I sat on the roof sundeck and read.  I love boat rides; if this one took off nearer to me, I might just book it round trip and get work done by a window.  There’s no wifi; for me a plus.  Unfortunately, I did get decent cell signal most of the way.

TERRAIN and Terroir

Much of the Northeast looks superficially alike; bit forests with maple, birch, pine and so on spread everywhere, while the coastlines tend to rock and cold water.  But you know you’ve tripped a border when you arrive on Newfoundland; you’re far enough north that there aren’t many leafy trees left.  And huge segments of the place are the kind of open plains and meadows you find in the subarctic.  The weather here is cold enough, but the geology helps.  The entire island is a big fist of rock that was scoured and sanded by glaciers an eyeblink of geologic time ago.

The topsoil that lays on that rock is sometimes far too thin for trees to take roots; and so what you end up with is grasses and mosses and low plants for miles. In these areas, telephone poles are held up by boxes filled with stones, because even humans can’t dig far enough. The water shows it too.  Rivers haven’t had enough time to dig channels here, and the rock resists it.  And so you encounter thousands of tiny ponds and lakes, which form wherever there’s a hollow.  The rock leaves rainfall with nowhere to go, so it just stays put.  There’s some amazing fishing to be had here.

And there’s some amazing fish to be had when eating.  The trouble is, there’s not much else to be had, either.  The thin population combined with limited land based growth and a whole lot of Irish heritage mean the menus tend to be predictable.  Would you like to try the fish and chips?  We’re also offering a special today, which is fish and chips.  You can also get a side of fish, or a side of chips, if you would like?

I exaggerate somewhat, but there was a sameness to the cuisine, especially outside of St John’s population center. I can’t blame them; the people here spread thin, and the island is very far from the source of most ingredients.  Food is therefore expensive here. And sometimes the food selection was suddenly, violently not ordinary. One restaurant served me a pastry full of moose, which I tried and enjoyed. Another’s menu apologized  in both English and Mi?kmawi?simk that they were fresh out of pulled bear that day, but would I like to try the rabbit stew?  I sent a silent prayer of thanks to my very-distant Mik’maq ancestors that it wasn’t fish & chips, and ordered it.

NAMING THINGS

Newfoundland is amazing at naming places.  One of the first places you encounter after leaving Port aux Basques is the Wreck House, a stretch of highway on an open plain between the ocean and the enclosing mountains that produces incredible winds, capable of sending a cargo truck or an RV sailing off the road.  In these parts, even street signs are backed with thick plywood to prevent the wind from ripping them off.

There’s also Fogo Island, named by Portuguese fishermen for their word for fire, thus the restaurant name.  It contains the towns of Seldom, Little Seldom, Tilting, and Joe Batt’s Arm.  I’m not sure where the rest of Joe Batt ended up.  Its shores are slashed with Tickles, which are very narrow channels of water between two rocks.  You get to Fogo with a little ferry, where you only pay on the way out; they give you the return trip for free.  It also has an artist in residence program, where the artists live for a time in these little white Scandinavian austere structures plopped in dramatic places, far from roads or others.

South of Fogo Island you find Happy Adventure; at first I thought it the name of the touring company that brought me out to see whales & puffins, but no it was the town itself.  It’s joined by Heart’s Content, Come By Chance, Blow Me Down, Witless Bay, Cow Head, Conception Bay, and the self-defeating Nameless Cove.

Roads and streets showed far less effort; they were often enough just named for whoever owned the house on that road.  “Conner’s Road” next to “Miles’ Road” next to “Patrick’s Lane” and so on.  I did hike the Damnable Trail; it was quite lovely.  Apparently that name too is a corruption; some pirates were trying to sneak past the British, but someone accidentally hit the ship’s bell and they were found.  The captain’s cry of “Damn bell!” was shortened to name the area, and the trail.

But the island’s unquestioned nomenclature superstar is the town of Dildo. Yes.  And they really lean in to it: the coffee shop and the brewery both do a brisk business on shirts and mugs. There’s a Hollywood style sign in the hills across the harbor, apparently donated by Jimmy Kimmel.  Apparently the town’s name derives from the small pegs carved into a dory boat to hold the oars in place, not from the other device.

This is Canada, which means we must pay homage to the Francophones even if we’re thousands of miles from the nearest native French speakers. As most of my ancestry comes from those priggish French speakers, I say: damn right.  They get into the action first from hilarious mandatory translations of local features but in a half-assed way.  Dick’s Brook became “Ruisseau Dick’s.”  The larger of the two National Parks is named in French, Gros Morne, which is also the name of its largest mountain. In the park’s guides, they rendered the name as “Great Solemn One.”  I decided I prefer the equally valid “Big Fat Grouchy.”

YOU WILL CHAT

One of the many ways Americans puzzle the French is by chit-chat; we’re liable to just talk to strangers without intention or expectation of a lasting connection.  However, depending on time and place and context, there’s usually some friction. Some places you don’t chit chat, like somber occasions.  Or if there’s a big age gap; college kids almost never talk to old folks.  You’ll hear it more in the Midwest, and less in the Northeast.  We mostly don’t think about it, but there’s always a little bit of a decision to be made whether you’ll chat with a stranger or not.

That is not the law in Newfoundland. There, the friction to chit-chat is permanently set to zero. If you are in someone’s presence, no matter the context, you simply will have a conversation with them.  It will be pleasant, friendly and interesting.  They will learn where you are from, what brings you to Newfoundland, and oh if you like hiking there’s a truly great trail just over a ways.  And if the person is older and female, you will be addressed as Darling, Luv, or Dear.

I often maintain a quiet bubble; I’ll chat with people if they start it, but I won’t often start it myself, and prefer to people watch, or reflect.  These people turned me into a raging extrovert.  I’ve been chatting with just about everyone as I returned through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine.  I’ve had to temper it since returning to Boston, for fear someone would have me committed.

That chitchat in Newfoundland will always be kind.  However, it will not always be understood. The local accent is famous in Canada, but less so in the US. It sounds like you took a half dozen randomly selected counties of Ireland and ran them through a blender for an hour.  Demographically, that’s more or less what happened.  The local greeting is “Whattya at?”  The correct response? “This is it.” “What’s after happening now?” means “What just happened?”  Your parents are Mudder and Fadder.  I once had to figure out a reply to “Quite some marnin’ we’re having this marnin’.”  Like most regional accents, older folks have the strongest ones. One hotel host of mine told me all kinds of things cheerfully for a good ten minutes. I spent the monologue hoping none of it was important, because I caught one word out of three.

The one thing you will not hear from the locals is the Canadian “eh?” at the end of a sentence.  However, there were enough other Canadians that I caught myself telling a family from Toronto wheezing their way up a long hike “You only have a little more to go, eh?” and realized I’m in danger of going native.  There’s not very much overlap between Newfoundland and Canada in general; the province did not join with the rest of the Confederation in 1870, but instead held out until 1949, spending the years between as a British dominion and then flirting with independence until debts from World War I and the Great Depression ended that dream.  Geographically it seems to fit into Canada nicely, but St John’s and its peninsula contains the lion’s share of the population, and it faces away from Canada, towards the ocean, which is what Newfoundland was truly founded on.

A final note: it’s Newfound-LAND.  Not New Finland.

THE WEATHER

In most of the States, and the world, if you tell folks you’re from Boston, they picture you in a full fur jacket, mushing a dog-drawn sled across a frozen harbor or something like that. In Newfoundland, their reaction is to ask you what living in the steaming tropics is like? All is relative.  I had my car’s oil changed while I was there, and after some confusion when they tried to register my plates as Albertan, since their color schemes are similar. The mechanics were also amazed that a five year old car had so little rust.

The average summer temperature hovers around 60-70 degrees. One day I was there it hit 75, and the locals could not stop complaining about the scorching, terrible heat. I did not pack, and did not miss, shorts on the entire trip. I also had unusually nice weather; the island is normally good for a dour rainy week here and there.  The rain was there, and the mist and clouds, but for the most part it politely worked around my itinerary.

THE HALF HOUR

Nerds like order, and are attracted to anomalies, but also repelled by them. I can make a lot of nerds twitch by explaining to them the perfectly sound advantages of the imperial measurement system over metric — when one is doing carpentry math in your head, a base 12 measurement is infinitely simpler than a base 10. And I found that you can horrify a nerd by telling them that Newfoundland’s time zone is `30 minutes offset from the Atlantic time zone.

How dare they!  Did they do that just to be difficult?  They have a reputation for that, up there.

As it happens, the idea of time zones in North America was the invention of railroad companies. Before them, most towns kept time by the sun. You can determine local noon by the moment when the sun is highest in the sky; a sextant can make that measurement simple, and any port town then would have those in abundance. Since nobody had terribly accurate time devices anyway, and travel was slow, it did not matter that each town’s clocks were just a bit off from each other.  If you traveled, you set your watch to the local church bells, and carried on.

But then large steam engines running on narrow constrained tracks shortened the time between towns. Suddenly, timing mattered a great deal, as two trains found out the hard way.  One day, a train coming from Providence to Worcester was run by a conductor using Providence time, while another headed the opposite route running on Worcester time, 8 minutes slower. If they’d used the same watch, one train would have been safely on a siding while the other passed. But that 8 minutes offset was enough to produce a head on collision, with many passengers killed as a result.

The train companies had viewed the competing definitions of “noon” as a nuisance to that point, but now it was a menace.  So they invented time zones; as far as the train company was concerned, each quarter of the USA, or each fifth of Canada, was now on the same time regardless of local noon, and that was the time that train schedules were written to, and the station kept. It’s no coincidence that every old time train station had a giant clock set atop it. The convenience of that shared time in an age of telegraphs and trains proved popular, and the population as a whole, and finally the governments, adopted these time zones as standard.  They’ve been tinkering with them ever since.

But Newfoundland did not have a continental rail line running to it, not then or ever.  An island-wide network of rail was only completed in 1898; it finally shut down in 1988. And again, they weren’t Canada until 1949 — or as a tour guide put it, “When Canada joined Newfoundland.” For the most part, transit around the island and to anywhere else was done by boat.  “Why don’t they build a bridge,” you ask?  Check a map sometime and realize that you may not understand just how big that distance is.

In fact, Newfoundland worried about the viability of their connection to Canada by ferry so much, it was written into the treaty of their accession that the Canadian federal government would guarantee the service. That promise in turn was incorporated into the Canadian constitution, when it was repatriated from the British.

At any rate, because they went a good century without a connection or need for common time with the rest of North America, local St John’s noon prevailed throughout the island, and that happens to be nearly exactly 30 minutes offset from Atlantic Time.  And that remains its time, to this day.

THE BEST OF nature

Gosh, so much.  Gros Morne is a spectacular national park, up there with the best of them.  It’s better still for being so hard to reach; there’s a comfortable sense of camaraderie among the pilgrims there, unlike the type of park where half those present view it as a backdrop to their budding careers as influencers.  The park is wrapped around a huge fjord, with other glacial lakes and more.  There’s a shoreline called the Green Gardens that looks like an Edenic fairyland of lush life; and then not ten miles away you can hike the Tablelands, a barren and stark area whose soil chemistry forbids most plants, making you think you’ve stepped onto the surface of Mars.

Terra Nova National Park is not so outwardly appealing.  But it’s the other type of park — less about the geology and more about the ecology.  Here you find a park that’s about what lives in it. Puffins and whales and dolphins in the harbor, and animals and birds and bears and yes, the invasive moose throughout the forest.  I find you can appreciate parks that are about their geology in a few days, even if you know you’re missing a lot. Parks that are about their ecology take months to appreciate, and alas I had two days.

And then on Avalon itself, you find plains to the horizon, a bird colony with thousands of residents, whales playing offshore, and eagles going for casual strolls.  You can walk to the easternmost point in North America, and watch the cold Arctic light play on the waters here before anywhere else.

WAIT WHAT ABOUT

Newfoundland and Labrador together are about 90% of the land area of California, with 1.5% of the population.  It’s a massive place, with a very thin road network that does not reach vast swathes of hinterland. Initially I wanted to see it all — I checked an itinerary that brought me all the way up the Northern Arm to L’Anse aux Meadows, where the signs of the old Viking settlement were found.  I looked at the ferry to get into Labrador, which makes Newfoundland seem overpopulated.  I explored what it would take to visit Torngat Mountains, on the very northern tip of Labrador. The photos were stunning.  But, so was the price tag.

But I realized that type of trip would involve me spending almost all of it in the car, not out in the air.  So I cut it short, to the greatest hits.  I didn’t get to see the Northern Arm, or the Burin Peninsula, or those little bits of France.  But that’s alright.  A place like this deserves a repeat, and so you have to leave things for that to justify itself.

I returned to an actual heatwave, 100 degrees and full humidity in Boston.  It only lasted two days, like heat waves do here.  But I was ready to pack the car and turn around.

August

Taking Temperature

I’m back in time to be slapped in the face by a heat wave, even if it’s only going to last two days. Here in New England, a hot day is anything above 90°F, which the desert dwellers of Arizona sometimes scoff at us for, until they experience the 90s with full humidity, and your only relief coming from a 20 year old window unit A/C shoved into a 110 year old window frame. Like mine.

I learned in Newfoundland that anything over 75°F will have people there gasping and wishing for cooler temperatures, which I found endearing. When I mention where I live to others from the States, I can tell from their reaction that they envision us wearing a full fur-lined jacket, mushing a team of dogs pulling a sled across frozen tundra while cheering for the Red Sox. The average Newfie apparently hears “Boston” and asks what it’s like living in an equatorial rainforest while cheering for the Red Sox. All is relative.

And days like today do tempt me to pack the car back up and head for the ferry again.  I’ll write something more extensive about Newfoundland later, that odd little outpost in the North Atlantic that I found pretty excellent.

Tabroom’s Unknown Founder

I was greeted during the northern peregrination with an Instagram message from David Alpert. Few in debate know this today, but David is responsible for the co-founding and most of the original code of the very very first edition of Tabroom. We collaborated on a project for a databases course in college, that was supposedly a dead-easy A, but honestly I learned a lot from it that I use all the time these days. And among that class’s legacies is Tabroom.

Back then David was in his fourth year of a computer science degree, while I was in my second CS class ever. I was a psychology major, which I picked as a half default under pressure of a deadline. I wasn’t very good at college, to be honest. And at that point I definitely was no programmer. But I did have a fair few practical computer skills, setting up servers and databases and the like. So I set up the infrastructure, while David wrote the lion’s share of the actual code. I felt, and told him, I felt I was cheating him a little in this; he assured me that the parts I’d handled would have been a pain for him to do. We did indeed get an A.

I think we had visions of releasing it for profit into the debate world; it is traditional for 22 year olds to believe they can profit off providing services to speech & debate. For the most part, you can’t. The pond is too small to catch enough fish to live off of. And people drift after college, and David wandered into the world of Google and High Big Tech. I worked in Low Tech, but kept tinkering around the edges of Tabroom, mostly because I was also still coaching extemp and debate.

Only then did I really become a Programmer. I learned a lot about writing code by reading his. Frustration was another good teacher. I’d hit a problem, and teach myself to solve it by searching, tinkering, and testing. And no small amount of swearing.

None of his code survives; in 2004 for various good and bad reasons, I tossed it all and rewrote the system from the ground up. I’m doing the exact same thing now with the Project Rewrite, though with the added complexity of writing it in an entirely new language.  I remain jealous of my past self, because I did the rewrite then in about six weeks. But 2004 Tabroom’s functionality was maybe 1/20th of what it is today, and I was a lot stupider about software.  I suspect, on grayer days, that my better understanding of the difficulty of the problem is part of what’s slowing me down.

But it was nice to hear from David! He lives in DC, which is where NCFL will be this year, so I’m going to try to arrange a visit; either to see him, or maybe he can come to the tournament and see what chaos he launched. It also makes me think of writing a more complete history of Tabroom and account of the odd twists that led me here. The community tends to see the project as synonymous with me as a person, but that’s fair to neither Tabroom’s other tinkerers, nor honestly to me.  I’m a little more than just Mr Tabroom, I think. But for now, Mr. Tabroom tips his hat to David Alpert, the Unknown Founder.

Systems Full Steam Ahead

When vacation ended, and the tears dried up, I confronted Mount Workload. Unlike my brave houseplants, this mountain only grows larger when I absent from it. And of course, now that I’ve said all that stuff about how I dealt only in systems at first and only now primarily write code, I spent the last two weeks mostly fighting systems problems.

I am going to have to schedule a mid-week downtime sometime in August to perform some necessarily upgrades and patches to the ol’ database server.  It’s also been running on the same cloud hardware for a very long time, so I’ll take this chance to move it to something newer.  That requires me to bring the whole shebang down, but an hour or two on a Wednesday morning in August shouldn’t hurt many folks, I hope.

I’ve made the staging server, https://staging.tabroom.com, much snappier.  I had thrown it up on an old raspberry pi I had lying around, which for you civilians in the audience is a credit-card-sized mini computer popular with hobbyists for micro projects, like “build your own TV streaming device” type of things.  I’d put up the staging machine for my own benefit, largely, but its value as both a testing flatbed and a place where folks can log in and get their data as-of-this-morning is pretty strong, as is having a copy of Tabroom running outside our data centers.  So I moved it to my previous laptop, which is not as powerful as my current one, but way faster than a six year old Raspberry Pi.  It also runs some stuff for my personal use, and I can’t guarantee it’s going to be perfect on uptime. It does, after all, depend on my home internet, in that same 110 year old house with an electric system that matches.  That’s life in New England.

And finally I’m about to finally test and deploy an auto scaler. What that means is a program that looks at how many tournaments, rounds, judges and entries are going to be active on Tabroom in the next few hours, and spinning up enough server resources to match. Until now I’ve done this manually, which has all kinds of issues; you have to guess well ahead of time, so you end up spending more money than needed.  I can’t watch it 24/7 so the system won’t react to changes at odd times. And then one weekend I straight forgot to do the scaling, which earned me great embarrassment, and another staffer got tasked to remind me about it every week.

It can be hard to write rules for a computer to follow based on the anticipated usage of a custom software program; it does us no good if we try to let Tabroom figure it out itself but it consistently underestimates what we need, and I end up having to intervene anyway.  Or it could run wild and we’d have beautiful performance — and a $150,000 server bill. So it wasn’t the type of thing I wanted to just spin out into the world during the postseason national tournaments.  I wanted to test it more extensively and really beat it up.  But I think we’re just about ready for a deploy.  And the best part is, it can do something I wasn’t really able to — the system will monitor how much actual capacity we are using at any given time, and if it spends more than 15 minutes at 80% it will scale up further on its own.

At least, so I hope. Once more into the breach, dear friends.

Finally, I’ve have to deal with some housekeeping. One of the less pleasant ones is a pile of emails from people I like telling them I won’t be tabbing their tournament this year.  There are limits, alas, and if I’m going to plow through as much of this rewrite this fall as I’m hoping, those limits have to be stringent ones.

And then, hopefully, dreamily, soulfully — I’m going to try to spend the rest of August hacking away at another platform altogether.

June/July 2025

In most of the country, folks believe that the summer begins sometime in May, while the “official start” in late June seems to lag the weather.  But here in New England, the expectations line up with the reality; June can be a cold and rainy month, but July and August and even September can beckon with our only great weather, big bright skies, long days that only end reluctantly after long purple sunsets, giving way to the summer stars above swimming the Milky Way, and the ones below sparked by fireflies dancing in the trees.

I never stop appreciating it, even though hot weather is my less favorite extreme, but also because y’all stop having big tournaments and I can give it a rest for a little while.  May and June tend to be consumed with the national tournaments, and this year was no exception, but I did make progress with the rewrite here and there, both in the coding and the conceptual.  A fun challenge of rejoining the world of modern stacks from the ancient clay tablets and cuneiform I was writing software in before, is that the stack changes about as fast as my own code does.  They keep updating, and sometimes improving it — and sometimes not.  It can feel a bit like having to build a sandcastle on a shaky moving train.  But later this summer the Nationals distractions die down again.

This summer I head out on my traditional walkabout, in another typically nonsense wild arctic place.  Newfoundland is a big place with only a small coating of people, boasting two national parks, stunning coastlines, and absolutely terrible cell phone service coverage. I’m not worried about the GPS, because it appears they have three roads. This time of year I enjoy scrambling and walking to far off places, and pretending that I’m an unemployed lobster fisher who doesn’t know how to type.  And then I have a few weeks of seclusion and summer vibes where I can maybe, just maybe, roll out a beta front interface that y’all can see, play with, and yes — break.

In final news, I did write a monthly Tabroom update but somehow it didn’t get out.  I don’t know what happened other than the normal header of “National Tournaments Absorbing Attention.”  But something about the process of sending them also seems to be taking undue work and effort on others’ part, which I do not want to create.  I’ll be figuring out what’s wrong there and trying to unclog the plumbing so they’re more regular next year.

For now, au Canada.

April 2025

April finds me on a short trip to the UDNC at April on the first weekend, then a rapid fire sequence of running the online Last Chance Qualifier in Des Moines, going to help CHSSA State in Los Angeles, and then the Mock Trial nationals in Phoenix in early May.  Phew. Then later May sees me at the NCFL tournament in Chicago, and then of course Nationals again in Des Moines.

But there are lights at the end of many tunnels.  The form of the new Tabroom interface is beginning to look like something real. I’ve even been nitpicky about text alignment in several places, which is a sure sign of maturity in design.

The long dark of New England winter has begun to lift, although as I write this there’s a morning crust of overnight spring snow on the ground.  That’s not unusual, alas; we’ve seen snow four Aprils of the last five, I believe, but it’s been a while since we’ve had a significant amount.  That said, my freshman year of college delivered two feet of wet heavy snow on April Fool’s Day; the week before was in the 70s.

And yes, the end of the year approaches. I’ve made it official by planning the annual July walkabout trip in a remote location with extremely poor phone service.  You’ll find out where when I post it to Instagram or something; it would not do to have to deal with the relentless Tabroom paparazzi on location like that.

As if.

February and March 2025

TABROOM

So we’ve launched an actual formal Tabroom newsletter!  I’ll still talk here about the process of software development in the context of what it means for me, since this space is just mine to ramble and update folks about my goings on.  Leaving out my day job omits too much, and there’s always things I’d like to say that apply more to me than to the software. The intent of the newsletter is for people who are more interested in this as a Tabroom user than a Friend of Me, which is fine.  And it’ll still go out in my voice, I’m told.

If you’d prefer just the Tabroom announcements, please sign up here.

At any rate, I’ve started tinkering with TanStack Query thanks to Hardy’s recommendation, and while it simplified things, it did cause me to retread on some conquered ground as it were.  I’m going to have to stop doing that.  The challenge with a rewrite is when your drive for the ultimate purity in code means you just keep rewriting the first parts over and over again.  Coming from a stack that hasn’t changed or had new tooling since 2010, I’m not used to avoiding the temptation to switch to the latest shiny tool; and in JS world that tool is released every two weeks.

In operational land, I made it through the Stanford+ weekend (26,000 students & judges) and the Cal/Harvard weekend (23,500 students & judges) without a blink.

WHEREABOUTS

I’m taking my traditional sojourn after the tournament up at the North Coast, in Fort Bragg this time.  Fort Bragg is festooned with signs protesting a proposal to rename the town so it’s no longer named after a Confederate general.  The name predates the Confederacy, as it happens, but not for great reasons.  It turns out ol’ Braxton Bragg was the former commanding officer of the person who built that first fort here.  However, the fort existed to exterminate the local Indian tribes, to clear the land for more redwood logging. So even if it’s sorta free of the Confederate association, it runs smack into another stain on history.

The keep-the-name crew is mostly focused on the fact that the town has never felt a real connection with ol’ General Bragg in any of its traditions, tourism or marketing. And changing the name would cost a pile of money that’s not insignificant for a small town on the remote coast.  Personally, I think their best unmade argument is that Bragg was such a horrendous general, his efforts may have helped the North prevail more effectively than many Union officers could claim.  He lots a ton of battles, opening the door to Sherman’s march, and in the process was so hated by his own soldiers that they plotted and attempted to assassinate him multiple times.

But at any rate, the coastline remains a strip of beautiful hills, trees, fog and dark skies, which are all things I relish, and are hard to find. There are far too few places that humans live where the night is allowed to be dark, and the air is filled with only the sounds of oceans and frogs.

March will find me in Wilmington in the early part of the month, and LA in the middle, and probably hiking in New Hampshire or Maine for the spring melt waterfall season, when a muddy stomp is rewarded by torrents across New England.

THE OTHER STUFF

I’m re-reading A Prayer for Owen Meany, an old favorite I haven’t read in far too long.  Not much writing otherwise these days, because I’ve been trying to get my photographs in order, and helping the neighbor clear out some Old Crappe from our shared basement. There’s an understandable impulse when trying to empty an overly full basement to find new homes for all the items therein; surely some of these 138 VHS tapes would have value to someone who likes the almost-retro!  But at some point you have to realize the energy expended in finding them new homes surpasses their worth.  I am in the self appointed role of “I’ll find a place that wants them or toss them for you” which makes it psychologically easier, I think.