auspicacious

In our lives, we're constantly challenged by far more than we can fully understand. I work on complex systems for a living; my interests lie in reducing the harm those complex systems can do because we can't fully understand them. My work is with computers, but it's fascinating to look into other fields and learn from them.

This past fall I found myself feeling trapped indoors. I was living in South Korea, and for the first time in my life was forced to confront what millions -- maybe billions -- of people face every day: nearly constant, dangerous levels of air pollution.

I found myself falling into a common mental trap; I could see it in others as well. The politician's syllogism describes it well:

1. We must do something
2. This is something
3. Therefore, we must do this.

I felt trapped and powerless; of course, I wanted to protect myself from this air pollution and keep myself healthy. So I started doing research and taking actions. I started observing what other people were doing.

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And I'm telling this story in a faraway scene
Sipping down raki and reading Maynard Keynes
And I'm thinking about home and all that means
And a place in the winter for Dignity...

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Lately, I've been listening to the neo-yacht rock duo Young Gun Silver Fox, which got me thinking about musical genres that have been rediscovered or redefined long after their creation. All three of the genres I'm writing about today have some roots in American soul music, which might be a testament to its lasting quality and influence worldwide.

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Update, 2020-07-05: Duplicity now supports Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive natively; that's a much better choice than using these scripts.

Duplicity's not a bad choice for making secure backups on Linux. It uses GnuPG to encrypt data and integrates well with typical Unix workflows. Best of all, it has support for many storage backends; the same tool can be used to back up to a USB stick or to Amazon S3.

I also use Tarsnap. Tarsnap has a smarter model than Duplicity for incremental backups that allows for deletion of old data. However, it's also tightly tied to the most reliable form of Amazon's S3 storage, which can make it relatively expensive.

Therefore, I use a hybrid model, where critical, extremely security-sensitive data is stored in Tarsnap, and the bulk of my personal data is backed up to a USB drive and cloud storage via Duplicity.

Even so, as I uploaded more Duplicity files into Amazon S3, I wanted to save more money. Duplicity doesn't have direct support for Amazon's super-cheap, super-slow Glacier service, but it's possible to ship objects in S3 buckets to Glacier without too much difficulty. Now, I spend less than a dollar a month on remote backup.

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This past summer, I visited more than twenty-five European towns and cities. Every few days, I had to orient myself to a new town, find where I was staying, know who to call if I couldn't find it. To get there, I usually had to find a bus, train, or flight in a place I had never seen before; I had to know what track to get to, and where to make tight connections. I might be sleep-deprived; my phone might've stopped connecting to the local mobile phone network -- or, as in rural Scotland, there just might not be any network available. Thankfully, the age of paper travel documents is largely behind us. So I started writing emails to myself.

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In the months before leaving home for a long trip abroad, many Americans play out a familiar ritual, visiting a travel medicine specialist in order to be stuck with a series of needles and given pills that cause nightmares. But the most painful part is often the price.

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I've written about how I spent the summer of 2018 chasing concerts across Europe. Here's the (heavily editorialized) setlists from many of those shows, below and also available to play on Spotify.

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It's no secret that I have outdated taste in music. This summer, I indulged it.

I often check out Pollstar to see if anyone I'm interested in will be coming to town.

When I first started planning how to leave my job and take another long trip, I did the same thing in some of the first cities. I can't remember which concert I found first, but pretty soon one became a dozen. As I started looking up cities and some of my favorite artists' summer tours, things quickly snowballed. I decided that I would use concerts and music festivals to help draw my path east across Europe, to where I would finish in Finland. Since the beginning of this year, I have seen at least thirty bands perform.

I thought I'd make up some arbitrary awards for the shows I've seen. The full list of shows is at the bottom.

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In September of 2001, I was just beginning my senior year of high school, still ensconced in my prep school's pastel, stained-glass world; it was a place for academics, where televisions would have ordinarily been rare but for that day.

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Outspoken traveler (and inspiration for my North Korea trip) Paul Karl Lukacs explains how being a digital nomad isn't without negative dangers. While he's largely right, I will comment that your employability post-travel largely depends on overall demand for your profession. During travel, unless you're already an independent worker, good luck finding someone to let you work remotely and -- inevitably -- erratically.

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