Fred and Loathing on The Internet

MarkyMarkDown and The Funky FlexBox

2023-Aug-09

Hey dear blog readers! Remember way back when this domain name pointed to a Django app with no blog section? I thought I ported everything over to Flask in the big frontend migration at the beginning of the year. A full HTML page Plotly dashboard about the name drops throughout the seasons of the TV series Mad Men. The reason it was a standalone HTML object compiled by Plotly rather than a dashboard with a live connection to my data was Django, or my knowledgebase of Django, did not make it easy for that to happen. I got bogged down in package hell getting some third party libraries made to get Django to play nice with Plotly. The difficulty outpaced my desire to provide a more robust web view of my data. It was a big reason why I decided to jump to Flask despite finding shelter in Django from the new and scary methods of web development.

Anyways, the Mad Men chart is coming back! And with interactivity changes afforded to me now because Plotly snaps on easily to my Flask stuff. Along with a new and slightly different one about Succession- the latest dramatic TV show I had finished end to end. Haven’t done that since got roped into the Breaking Bad bandwagon right before the last season was set to begin. I suppose Mad Men did finish after that, but I actually started that show in season two, drifted off and revisited it when I heard it was ending.

On the reading front I have put a big dent in a book about the battle of Actium. That particular battle has an indelible mark in my memory. The closest I ever got to winning a bar trivia night ended on a matchpoint with that being the answer. I don’t remember the question, except gathering from that night that battle was a very big sea battle and ended the post-Julius Caesar succession era of the Roman Empire. The writer, Barry S. Strauss, is putting this succession war as a divergence point that kept the Roman empire to the West, at least for a little bit longer. Rome would eventually become Byzantium to its East. If the author is to be believed, Antony and Cleopatra winning this battle would have accelerated this process, but their old world wealth was outmatched by Octavian’s plucky naval and public relations maneuvering.