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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. ...

Movies reviewed this week: The Third Man, All the King’s Men, and The Neon Bible.

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 (original) 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.

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.

Movies reviewed this week: Cradle Will Rock, How Green Was My Valley, Alphaville, and Jules and Jim.

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.

Movies reviewed this week: Lola, Blue My Mind, The Tune, and First Love.

Movies reviewed this week: This Sporting Life and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Movies reviewed this week: The King of Marvin Gardens, Three Colors: Red, and Funny Games.

Movies reviewed this week: A Room in Town, Love and Anarchy, and Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers.