Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. As tomorrow is Monday, I assume all the celebrating took place last night. Not surprisingly, given my last name, I trace my roots back to Ireland. My great-grandfather immigrated to the US in 1905 from Inishmann, the middle of the three Aryan Isles off the coast of Galway in Southwest Ireland. Maybe surprisingly, I have not typically over indulged celebrating St. Patrick's Day. I did my graduate degree at night school over 3+ years through my early 20s, and mid-terms always hit on Saint Patrick's Day, which kept me at the kitchen table studying and not in a pub in the middle of March. There was a road trip to the University of Missouri at Rolla during Spring Break my sophomore year of college that is better not spoken of. Rolla had a reputation for its Saint Patrick's Day celebration, and although my memory of that weekend is hazy, I remember the reputation being legit. Note - my memory of the weekend's activities were hazy the next morning, and have only gotten hazier almost 40 years later.
And as I typed that last line, I just realized that I went to college in fall of 1985. That was 40 years ago. So in March 1985 I was coasting into high school graduation by doing as little as possible. By March, I had already accepted my offer from Purdue University, so I knew where I was going to school in the Fall. Looking back, I'm not sure how I got into Purdue. I was a B student with no extracurricular activities beyond sports. No student council, no school newspaper, none of that stuff. I did get nominated to the Honor Society in my final semester of high school, too late to include it on my college applications. I finished high school in the Marshall Islands, where my dad worked on a highly secret missile base out in the South Pacific Ocean. I've sometimes wondered if Purdue thought I was a Pacific Islander. My high school record really should not have gotten me into Purdue as an out-of-state student on its own merits. I'm glad they did accept me, though, as I met my wife there.
On to the links.
In Defense of Unpolished Websites talks about learning HTML from looking at "View Source" in the browser, and how kids today are losing out because so many CMS-powered websites have such complicated code that you can't learn anything from it. My first website probably looked a lot like IBM.com from 1995 because I remember looking at the code and figuring out what an "h1" tag did, and what a "b" tag did, and so on."
You Are Not Free to Move About the Country starts with the enshittification of Southwest Airlines this week (your bags no longer fly free) and expands it into a wider discussion of how life as an American is undergoing rapid enshittification across the board.
The Charismatic Voice is the YouTube channel of a retired professional opera singer who does reaction videos to all the music she never heard growing up since she was so insulated in the opera world. She has an amazingly profound understanding of the technical aspects of singing and voice control and watching her analyze Bruce Dickinson or Rob Halford is incredibly interesting, plus you get an expert explanation of just what makes these guys so great. This particular episode is notable not for her analysis of Ozzy's vocals in Crazy Train, but for her absolute and utter astonishment at discovering Randy Rhodes. Imagine going back 41 years and watching your friend hear the guitar solo on Crazy Train for the first time. This is that video. She goes from never having heard the song or Rhodes' name to "This might be the greatest guitar player I've ever heard" in about 5 minutes. It's just delightful, and a great reminder not only of the power of music, but just how crazy good Rhodes was at age 24. Can you even imagine the music he would have made if he had not died in that plane crash? Personally, I think he would quit rock music and revolutionized classical guitar, making it popular in a way that it has never been.
That's all for this week. In a world where you can choose to be anything, choose to be kind.