Electron

I always knew my grandfather fought in France in World War II, but the details were fuzzy. As a kid I’d ask dumb questions like, “did you ever shoot anyone,” and he’d reply with, “I shot at them, they shot at me, who knows where the bullets went,” before shooing me off. In High School I was given an “Interview a World War II veteran” assignment for an American History class, so I asked him some more formalized questions, but he couldn’t quite remember the names of places he had been to, or when exactly things had happened. At the time I wondered how it would be possible to forget something like fighting in World War II, but he was there as twenty year-old in 1944, this was maybe in 1998, he was trying to recall fifty-four year-old memories of things he probably didn’t want to remember.

I asked again, every few years, about what he remembered. At some point we got him a computer, and installed Google Earth, and he would mouse around France trying to figure out where he was. He would do some searches for the places he had been, but his misspellings of mispronounced locations in France didn’t return much. At some point he remembered (or saw on a map) that he had been in Metz, and we figured out that the fort he fought at was called Driant, not Durant or Verant, as he usually pronounced it. In 2009 I sat down and asked him a few more questions and actually recorded it.

My grandfather passed away two years ago, but I listen to the recording every so often, and search around for any more details. Coincidentally, someone added a Wikipedia page about the battle in 2009, not long after I had talked to him: Battle of Fort Driant. The initial entry refers to it as a “minor skirmish” in the larger Metz conflict. This year I finally got around to transcribing some of our conversation so it was saved somewhere other than my iCloud Voice Notes. A lot of it is sort of - as he remembers it, not in a clear chronological order. Or it was pieces of conversations that I knew I had with him in the past the he was interjecting. But there’s one part of the story that was always clear in his mind:

“...the fort was big. When we left the fort, two o’clock in the afternoon, they come down with a British (unsure of the word used here) they called it. See we only had a piece of the fort, we only had a little piece. And they put that in the tunnel, and they blew it. And the blew into the hole, because it was plugged. So they blew it out. So they sit there with machine guns firing at us, and they sit there with a machine gun firing at them, down the tunnel. You know, back and forth? And you know the back of the damn machine guns sit like there, and they had ten satchel charges here (1), they weighed 18 pounds a piece. TNT. And a bullet, or a uh, they don’t know whether it was a bullet, or... the door was right here, whether they put a hand grenade in. They blew up. And you know I was gonna go into the door, cause we were all retreating then, because they tell us, “everybody on that side of the fort get the Hell out”, because they were afraid the Germans was gonna break through. So we were all crawling through, and when that blast - the five guys in front of me they had faces like hamburger. The two guys in front, medic said they wouldn’t live, but the two guys in front, the lash above the eye was even gone, and the other guys they had their lashes but the meat was like the powder of the satchel charges, they were in the flame in other words. And the five machine gunners that were sitting there by the hole they were gone. I got blown across the room there, helmet fell off. Stunk! I mean the smoke, couldn’t even breathe. I got my handkercheif out, put it over my nose, then I could breathe, because it saved the big punches from coming in. Then we got out of there. When we got over to the next part, there was a tunnel that went into another opening. And that’s where we, we were so tired then we were just sitting and snoring so loud you’d wake yourself up. Because the last two or three days we didn’t get much sleep. And after that, they took us out.

We went up with a hundred and forty-nine, went over with a hundred and forty-nine, and we came back with forty-nine.“

1 - I believe he was pointing across the room while saying this, indicating the machine gun wasn’t far away from the charges.

At some point in the recording you can hear my Grandmother chime in with, "I'm glad you didn't have to go to war Joey". Me too, Grandma.

Veteran’s Day

 on Texas voting machines. This is a pretty egregious failure on the part of some UI developer somewhere, but it does speak to an often overlooked part of UI development: if a user can see an interface, they're going to try to interact with it, and it's your job to make sure that they can. If you don't have a good understand of what interactive means (or what can block it), Phillip Walton's recent post, 

In case you worried UI development wasn’t important

the problem with shop local

 on the problem with the idea of "shop local" saving small businesses, and an 

It paints a picture that lines up with what I've observed, that major city centers will eventually all look the same because only "big retail" can exist there, and smaller cities will take up the unique stores that big cities once had. If you want to save big cities, it might be time to switch all of the "keep CITY NAME HERE weird" slogans to "the rent is too damn high".

Shop Local

I always set out to make Halloween decorations that are creepy-cute, like something from Tim Burton, but end up with things that are disturbing-cute, like a bunch of clown dolls in an attic.

Window Goblin

Let me start this by saying: I like cemeteries. I find the quiet relaxing, I like wandering around looking for unique headstones, and I make a game out of trying to find the oldest grave in the park. I especially love the colonial-era headstones you can find in New England, with their hand-hewn skulls that are either dopey or terrifying or reverent or some mix of all three.

I was also raised by a father who thought that the maybe-true story of Eskimos putting the elderly out on ice floes when they became a burden was a good idea. So, reading a book with a section about the dead being fed to vultures was kind of right up my alley.

I learned some surprising things while reading this book. I always thought a funeral pyre was a neat idea, like a dramatic cremation, but it turns out they're not great for the environment. I would have assumed a dead body in the wild would be gone overnight, but it turns out unless you have the right kind of animals around, it's unlikely something is going to show up and eat your body. I learned that, in general, it's actually kind of hard to get rid of a body, especially the bones, and it's mostly regulations and price gouging that requires you to take something that is already hard to break down and wrap it in a bunch of metal and wood and cement enclosures that are even harder or impossible to break down.

More than anything, the book reminded me that death in the United States is an inglorious thing, and there's really not much you can do about it. The options for alternative burials are incredibly limited, and the system is setup in a way that means end-of-life for most people involves dying in an uncaring hospital environment and picking a pre-packaged plan from a funeral home, with the nice plan giving you two hours to grieve and please make sure the photos we're going to display on the TV in the lobby are formatted correctly. Or as the book puts it:

In our Western culture, where are we held in our grief? Perhaps religious spaces, churches, temples - for those who have faith. But for everyone else, the most vulnerable time in our lives is a gauntlet of awkward obstacles.

I am not religious, so I understand this. If I was, and I could pick a religion that I thought would respect my death in the way I want it to be respected I'd go with the religion of the ancient Egyptians and be buried in a rock pyramid with my cats. Since that's probably out of the question, cremation seems like a fine backup plan, but after reading about the 

, I kinda want someone to keep my skull around too. Doesn't even have to be a family member, a future web-worker can make me a crown of USB cables and I'll help them decide which JavaScript datetime library to use, or something.

Anyway, I recommend this book. It's a quick read, it's mid-October, you can finish it before Halloween, when Americans dress up as ghosts and ghouls and pretend that death is terrifying, and most of the rest of the world throws a party to celebrate the part of life that is death.

I like cemeteries. I find the quiet relaxing, I like wandering around looking for unique headstones, and I make a game out of trying to find the oldest grave in the park. I especially love the colonial-era headstones you can find in New England, with their hand-hewn skulls that are either dopey or terrifying or reverent or some mix of all three.

Book Thoughts: From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty

If you're reading this, huzzah, it worked!

I made a few changes to this site, namely:

The Great Gatsby - Upgrade

This is my first attempt at updating this site from my iPad. "Wait, how hard is that," you might wonder. "Just log in to your CMS and write something and hit publish."

 be easy. So maybe I should clarify: this is my first update to this site from my iPad, and this site is completely serverless. The magic here is simply:

Working Copy is a pretty amazing iOS app which lets you pull down, modify, and push git repos. It has a decent editor built in, so I wrote this post (in markdown) in the app. It's also possible to use Working Copy as a file source in iOS's Files app, so you can create a markdown file and then open it in your editor of choice. If you don't have one for iOS, I'm a big fan of 

After that, you commit the new file and push it. Netlify is setup to look for any changes on the 

 branch, it runs a Gatsby build script that compiles all the markdown content into blog posts and violà, the site is updated.

There's still no way to preview this site on my iPad. Someday, maybe, we'll live in a world where iOS and MacOS overlap enough that you can do actual development on an iPad - what a crazy idea that you could build iOS application in iOS, right?

Until then, I'm just happy to have a very convenient way to update and publish my site from my iPad.

I’m Posting this from my iPad

Every morning, on the way to the office, I walk by a dog park. It's in a nice part of the city, so it's a lot of 

 dogs with hypoallergenic hair and such, although I doubt the dogs know that. What I always enjoy about the dog park is how excited the dogs are. Excited to chase a ball, excited to sniff other dogs, excited to roll in the grass. You never see a dog walk after a ball, even old dogs will run their slow wobbly-kneed run after a thrown ball.

It's not just dogs, I see my daughter do it as well. If she sees a friend on the way into daycare she runs all the way to the daycare door. If we say she can watch TV, she runs to the couch, tell her she can have a cookie she runs to the table and waits for it. She could walk and arrive concurrently with the cookie, but that thought never crosses her mind.

You rarely see adults run out of sheer joy. The dog owners usually stand around, many looking more interested in the prospect of being able to leave the park than being at the park. The parents at daycare don't run along with their kids, and I assume they, like I, do not run to work if we meet a co-worker on the way there. You see someone running in something other than obvious jogging attire and you wonder what they're late for, or if they're really moving, what they're running from.

I haven't started running out of excitement. I do some days stop and watch the dogs do it.

You never see a dog walk after a ball, even old dogs will run their slow wobbly-kneed run after a thrown ball.

Unbridled Enthusiasm

A silly thing to do, if you’re a universal idea, like Death or Spring or Music or Peace. But Suzie had learned something interesting about people: They knew the wisdom of simply being busy sometimes.

Chop wood; carry water. Do the dishes. Sweep the garage. Milk the cows.