Fred and Loathing on The Internet

That String Type Was Utterly Lacking In Character

2023-May-27

The big weekend update was the product of impulsive coding. I did not have any clear objective. What I did have was forty ounces of hot coffee brewed, a few hours with my battlestation, and enough zen leftover from work to put in some possibly difficult work. What came out was some ugly templating over on the line plot that shows the artist history in my data. Now the notable tracks for each artist will show up. The line plot is based on the ‘favorite_artist.short_term’ field I get from the Spotify API. The song titles come from ‘favorite_track.short_term’. I collect the top ten for each of those fields each day and throw that into a Sqlite3 database. Any data beyond that I made from SQL queries or SQLAlchemy methods. In the previous post or two I complained about my lack of consistency between my data models, Python functions, and HTML views. This last effort was made to tie those three things together in a somewhat effortless stream.

My current book’s title escapes me. I do know the author is Ben McIntrye. I also know the book is a personal biography of the famed MI6 defector to the USSR, Kim Philby. I know of that name because of other spy books, including another McIntrye one I read about the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky. Although I do enjoy reading a high level up political science wonk analysis of The Cold War, I feel my early and frequent forays into non-fiction spy books have colored my real perceptions of international politics. I would like to read more about The Great Game spy war between the UK and Imperial Russia.

I hope to finish the second half of the movie Marriage Italian Style. I had watched a great deal of it, near a finish I presumed when I hit pause. Turns out the death portended at the start of the movie was a ruse! There is a whole second half of cinematic Italian infidelity to revel in viewing!

A recent favorite of the cheap B movies I leave running on mute on my third monitor during the work hours are the trucker/gangster/businessman mexican films that are often titled around a make and model of car. From what I can gather about the visual storytelling, they’re about ‘good’ rural guys getting revenge on ‘bad’ urban types more sophisticated than the good guy’s bucolic simplicity.