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Month: June 2022

John Sandford, Politics, and Extremism

John Sandford has always been both an author I enjoy and one who fascinates me from the political perspective. His writing is aware of politics, and often revolves around politics, but few of his protagonists have any interest in discussing their political views beyond the immediate. Perhaps this reflects the author. Who knows?

Lucas Davenport shoots and kills people, a lot. He’s a cop. There’s also a strong thread of police corruption in those books. Nobody is a hero just because they wear a badge.

Here’s the blurb for The Empress File, from the Kidd books:

One stifling summer night in Longstreet, Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Darrell Clark ran home thinking about two things: the ice cream he couldn’t wait to eat and an algorithm he was working on, a way to generate real time fractal terrain on his Macintosh computer. The cops who shot him in the back, mistaking him for a purse snatcher, found the ice cream in the paper bag on the ground next to Darrell. They’d never know anything about computers, or about the events they had just set in motion.

When the predictable cover-up occurs, a group of blacks, led by Marvel Atkins, decide the time for action has come. The city government must go. Through Darrell’s computer, Marvel, with the incredible liquid eyes, links up with Kidd, who takes on jobs that may be a little beyond the law. She lays out the objective, but he makes the plan. The mayor, city council, city attorney are all corrupt. The firehouse is the center for drug dealing, and the recreation director skims money like algae from the municipal swimming pool. And then there’s Duane Hill, the dogcatcher/enforcer who uses Dobermans to get his way. Kidd will simply find the crack in the machine and work it until the city comes down like a house of Tarot Cards.

Written in 1991. I haven’t reread it in a while so I’m not making any claims about anything other than to say that Sandford is keenly aware of the state of the world.

So: The Investigator. I read most of Sandford’s books eventually, once they hit paperback or from the library, and I added this one to my queue without knowing much about it. To my surprise, the antagonist group turned out to be an anti-immigrant militia. I could nitpick the depiction; for example, there’s a little bit more weight given to the economic anxiety theory than I’d have liked. On the other hand, Sandford did his research. He treats the militias as a real threat, he understands the distributed nature of the beast, and most interestingly he understands the military to extremism pipeline. I don’t know if he’s read Kathleen Bellow’s Bring the War Home, but he might have.

There are a couple of threads in there that lead me to think we’ll see some of those militia members again in this series. Even if we don’t, I have to be pleased that a book with this plot hit #1 on the NYT bestseller list.

Penstock Coffee Roasters: Sisola Mill, Indonesia

We signed up with Bottomless recently (referral link) because we wanted to get more forced variety in our coffee and because I’m a sucker for tech. I want to make sure I remember what we like so I’m going to try and get in the habit of dropping a quick review.

The first delivery was Penstock Coffee Roaster’s Sisola Mill from Indonesia. The base flavor is a really complex flavor, fairly sweet for coffee, and there’s a sour overtone that’s almost too much for my tastes. I also normally like a darker base. I enjoyed this nonetheless. I might not seek it out on purpose but I won’t be sad if it comes up in our rotation again.

Jupyter Notebooks, GitHub, & Secrets

This week I needed to do some analysis of JIRA tickets that goes beyond the reporting JIRA provides — not entirely an uncommon task. My usual quickie toolkit for that purpose involves Jupyter notebooks, which I prefer over downloading CSVs and playing with spreadsheets because I can automate the notebooks given a JIRA API key.

In this case, though, I really want one of my PMs to be able to run these reports, and I don’t want to get into the whole “OK then type this at the command line” thing. The post title kind of gives this away, but after some thought I realized, hey, just check the notebook into the company’s GitHub and there we go.

But how about that API key? Obviously I don’t want to embed mine in the notebook. Is there some way to use GitHub secrets for this? Answer: yes, there is, and it’s really simple, but I don’t see it documented step by step anywhere else so I’m gonna do that here.

If you want the quick answer: GitHub makes secrets available as environment variables, and if you’re working in the GitHub Jupyter environment, you don’t need to do anything special with workflows to make that happen. Therefore, you can just use Python’s os.environ mapping object to get at secrets.

Letterboxd Feed Update

I love copying my Letterboxd reviews over here, but I hate how much they dominate my feed. This week I started rewriting my script so that it’ll batch reviews up a week at a time. Gonna take a little more thought about formatting and such, but I’ve got the basic aggregation working and the output looks like this:

Year: 2022
    Week: 9
        Polytechnique, 2009 - ★★★★★ (contains spoilers)
    Week: 10
        Forbidden City, U.S.A., 1989 - ★★★½
        The Last Days of Disco, 1998 - ★★½
        A Bay of Blood, 1971 - ★★★

So that’s cool. This’ll also let me comfortably grab the whole backlog from Letterboxd via their export feature, which I didn’t want to do because a lot of my older reviews (from, say, Fantasia) are one-liners.