Tags: alt

Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine | Quanta Magazine

The mathematics behind the halting problem is interesting enough, but what’s really fascinating is the community that coalesced. A republic of numbers.

Write Alt Text Like You’re Talking To A Friend – Cloud Four

This is good advice:

Write alternative text as if you’re describing the image to a friend.

Social, I love you, but you’re bringing me down

Posting in a space I control isn’t just about the principle anymore. It’s a kind of self-preservation. I want to preserve my attention and my autonomy. I accept that I’m addicted, and I would like to curb that addiction. We all only have so much time to spend; we only have one face to maintain ownership of. Independence is the most productive, least invasive way forward.

The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn’t Exist | jakelazaroff.com

Amen!

If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.

I try to get back to Ireland a few times a year to see my mother. At some point in each trip there’s a social gathering with her friends or family. Inevitably the talk turns to ailments, illnesses, and complaints. I sit there quietly and nod politely.

2023 was the year I joined in.

If it wasn’t relaying my experience of visits to the emergency room, it was talk of my sinuses acting up and keeping me awake at night with their noises. Nasal polyps perhaps? And lately I’ve been having this wheezy asthma-like issue at night, what with this chesty cough I’ve been trying to sha… you get how uninteresting this is, right?

So I’ve got some nagging health issues. But I consider myself lucky. In the grand scheme of things, they aren’t big deals. Even the allergy which requires me to carry an epi-pen is to the easily-avoidable Ibuprofun, not to some ubiquitous foodstuff.

In fact I’ve had just enough health issues to give me a nice dose of perspective and appreciate all the times when my body is functioning correctly. I often think of what Maciej wrote about perspective:

The good news is, as you get older, you gain perspective. Perspective helps alleviate burnout.

The bad news is, you gain perspective by having incredibly shitty things happen to you and the people you love. Nature has made it so that perspective is only delivered in bulk quantities. A railcar of perspective arrives and dumps itself on your lawn when all you needed was a microgram. This is a grossly inefficient aspect of the human condition, but I’m sure bright minds in Silicon Valley are working on a fix.

Hence my feeling fortunate. 2023 was a perfectly grand year for me.

I went on some great adventures with Jessica. In the middle of the year we crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary II with our friends Dan and Sue, then we explored New York, and then we relaxed on Saint Augustine Beach for a week. Lovely!

The week in Ortigia, Sicily was great. So was the week in Cáceres, Spain. And the week spent playing music in Belfast during the trad festival was a blast.

There was lots of music closer to home too. Brighton is blessed with plenty of Irish music sessions and I’m doing my best to get to all of them. Playing mandolin in a session is my happy place.

Other music is also available. The band had an excellent year with the addition of our brilliant drummer, Matthew. We made such fast progress on new material that we managed to get into the studio to record an album’s worth of songs. Expect a new Salter Cane album in 2024!

On the work front, my highlights were event-based. I curated and hosted UX London. I spoke at a bunch of other events, and I think I did a good job. I spoke at no online events, and that’s the way I’d like to keep it. I thrive on giving talks at in-person gatherings. I hope I can continue to do that in 2024.

I very much enjoyed having a four-day work week in 2023. I don’t think I could ever go back to a five-day week. In fact, for 2024 I’m dabbling with a three-day work week. I’m luckily I can afford to do this. Given the choice, I’d rather have more time than more money. I know not everyone has that choice.

My hope for 2024 is for pretty much more of the same as I got in 2023. More music. More travel. But fewer health issues.

When I was summarising 2022, I said:

I’ve got my health. That’s something I don’t take for granted.

I’ve still (mostly) got my health. I definitely don’t take it for granted. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2024.

I’ve been immersing myself in musical activities recently.

Two weeks ago I was in the studio with Salter Cane. In three days, we managed to record eleven(!) songs! Not bad. We recorded everything live, treating the vocals as guide vocals. We’ve still got some overdubbing to do but we’re very happy with the productivity.

Being in a recording studio for days is intense. It’s an all-consuming activity that leaves you drained. And it’s not just the playing that’s exhausting—listening can be surprisingly hard work.

For those three days, I was pretty much offline.

Then the week after that, I was in Belfast all week for the trad festival. I’ve written up a report over on The Session. It was excellent! But again, it was all-consuming. Classes in the morning and sessions for the rest of the day.

I don’t post anything here in my journal for those two weeks. I didn’t read through my RSS subscriptions. I was quite offline.

I say “quite” offline, because the week after next I’m going to be really offline.

Remember when I took an ocean liner across the Atlantic four years ago? Well, to celebrate a milestone birthday for Jessica we’re going to do it again!

I’m really looking forward to it. And I feel like the recent musical immersions have been like training for the main event in the tournament of being completely cut off from the internet.

It all started with a trip into the countryside one Sunday a few weeks back.

The weather has been getting better and better. The countryside was calling. Meanwhile, Jessica was getting worried about her newly-acquired driving skills getting rusty. She has her license, but doesn’t get the chance to drive very often. She signed up to a car club that lets her book a hybrid car for a few hours at a time—just enough to keep in practice, and also just enough for a little jaunt into the countryside.

We went for Sunday lunch at the Shepherd and Dog in Fulking, near to Devil’s Dyke (I swear that sentence makes sense if you live ’round these parts). It was a lovely day. The Sunday roast was good. But it was on the way back that things started to go wrong.

We had noticed that one of the front tyres was looking a little flat so we planned to stop into a garage to get that seen to. We never made it that far. The tell-tale rhythmic sounds of rubber flapping around told us that we now had a completely flat tyre. Cue panic.

Fortunately we weren’t too far from a layby. We pulled in on the side of the busy road that runs by Saddlescombe Farm.

This is when the Kafkaesque portion of the day began. Jessica had to call the car club, but reception was spotty to put it mildly. There was much frustration, repitition, and hold music.

Eventually it was sorted out enough that we were told to wait for someone from the AA who’d come by and change the tyre in a few hours. To be fair, there are worse places to be stuck on a sunny Summer’s day. We locked the car and walked off across the rolling hills to pass the time.

The guy from the AA actually showed up earlier than expected. We hurried back and then sat and watched as he did his mechanical mending. We got the all-clear to drive the car back to Brighton, as long we didn’t exceed 50 miles per hour.

By the time we got home, we were beat. What a day! I could feel the beginnings of a headache so I popped some ibuprofin to stave it off. Neither of us could be bothered cooking, so we opted for a lazy evening in front of the telly eating takeaway.

I went onto Deliveroo and realised I couldn’t even manage the cognitive overhead of deciding what to eat. So I just went to my last order—a nice mix of Chinese food—and clicked on the option to place exactly the same order again.

And so we spent our Sunday evening munching on Singapore fried noodles and catching up on the most excellent Aussie comedy series, Colin From Accounts. It was just what I needed after an eventful day.

I had just finished my last bite when I felt I needed to cough. That kicked off some wheezing. That was a bit weird. So was the itchy sensation in my ears. Like, the insides of my ears were itchy. Come to think of it, my back was feeling really itchy too.

The wheeziness was getting worse. I had been trying to pass it off, responding to Jessica’s increasingly worried questions with “I’m grand, I’ll be f…” Sorry, had to cough. Trying to clear my throat. It feels a bit constricted.

When Jessica asked if she should call 111, I nodded. Talking took a bit of effort.

Jessica described my symptoms over the phone. Then the operator asked to speak to me. I answered the same questions, but in a much wheezier way.

An ambulance was on its way. But if the symptoms got worse, we should call 999.

The symptoms got worse. Jessica called 999. The ambulance arrived within minues.

The two paramedics, Alastair and Lucy, set to work diagnosing the problem. Let’s go into the ambulance, they said. They strapped a nebuliser onto my face which made breathing easier. It also made everything I said sound like a pronouncement from Bane.

They were pretty sure it was anaphylaxis. I’ve never been allergic to anything in my life, but clearly I was reacting to something. Was it something in the Chinese food? Something in the countryside?

In any case, they gave me a jab of antihistamine into my arm and took us to the emergency room.

By the time we got there, I was feeling much better. But they still needed to keep me under observation. So Jessica and I spent a few hours sitting in the hallway. Someone came by every now and then to check on me and offer us some very welcome cups of tea.

Once it was clear that I was fully recovered, I was discharged with a prescription for an EpiPen.

I picked up the prescription the next day. Having an EpiPen filled with adrenaline was reassuring but it was disconcerting not knowing what caused my anaphylactic reaction in the first place.

After that stressful weekend, life went back to normal, but with this cloud of uncertainty hovering above. Was that it? Would it happen again? Why did it happen?

The weather stayed nice all week. By the time the next weekend rolled around, I planned to spend it doing absolutely nothing. That was just as well, because when I woke up on Saturday morning, I had somehow managed to twist something in my shoulder. I guess I’m at that age now where I can injure myself in my sleep.

I took some neproxin, which helped. After a while, the pain was gone completely.

Jessica and I strolled to the park and had brunch in a nice local café. Then we strolled home and sat out in the garden, enjoying the sunshine.

I was sitting there reading my book when I noticed it. The insides of my ears. They were getting itchy. I swallowed nervously. Was it my imagination or did that swallowing sensation feel slightly constricted. And is that a wheeze I hear?

It was happening again.

The symptoms continued to get worse. Alright, it was time to use that EpiPen. I had read the instructions carefully so I knew just what to do. I did the EpiPen mambo: hold, jab, press.

It worked. We called 999 (as instructed) and were told to go the emergency room. This time we went by taxi.

I checked in, and then sat in the waiting room. I noticed that everyone else had white wristbands, but mine was red. I guess my place in the triage was high priority.

As I sat there, I could feel some of those symptoms returning, but very slowly. By the time we saw someone, there was no mistaking it. The symptoms were coming back.

I was hooked up to the usual instruments—blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen—while the hospital staff conferred about what to do. I was getting a bit clammy. I started to feel a bit out of it.

Beep, beep! One of those numbers—blood oxygen?—had gone below a safe threshold. I saw the staff go into action mode. Someone hit a button—the red light in the ceiling started flashing. Staff who had been dealing with other patients came to me.

Instructions were spoken clearly and efficiently, then repeated back with equal clarity and efficiency. “Adrenaline. One in ten thousand.” “Adrenaline. One in ten thousand.” They reclined my chair, elevated my legs, pulled down my trousers, and gave me my second shot in one day.

It worked. I started to feel much better straight away. But once again, I needed to be kept under observation. I was moved to the “recus” ward, passing through the corridor that was so familiar from the previous weekend.

This time we’d spend a grand total of twelve hours in the hospital. Once again, it was mercifully uneventful. But it gave us the opportunity to put two and two together. What was the common thread between both episodes?

Ibuprofin. Neproxin. They’re both non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS). That fits

Foods are the most common trigger in children and young adults, while medications and insect bites and stings are more common in older adults. … Any medication may potentially trigger anaphylaxis. The most common are β-lactam antibiotics (such as penicillin) followed by aspirin and NSAIDs.

The doctors agreed—the connection looked pretty clear. I saw my GP a few days later and she’s reffered me to an allergy-testing clinic to confirm it. That might take a while though. In the meantime, I also got another prescription for more EpiPens.

Hopefully I won’t need them. I’m very, very glad that I don’t appear to be allergic to a foodstuff. I’d rather do without ibuprofin and aspirin than have to vigilantly monitor my diet.

But I do need to get into the habit of making sure I’ve got at least one EpiPen with me wherever I go. I’ll probably never need to use it. I feel like I’ve had enough anaphylaxis in the past couple of weeks to last me a lifetime.

Oh, and one more thing. I know everyone says this after dealing with some kind of health emergency in this country, but I’m going to say it anyway:

The NHS is easily the best thing ever invented in the UK. Everyone I dealt with was fantastic. It was all in a day’s work for them, but I am forever in their debt (whereas had this happened in, say, the USA, I would forever be in a much more literal debt).

Thank you, NHS!

It’s often said that it’s easier to make a fast website than it is to keep a website fast. Things slip through. If you’re not vigilant, performance can erode without you noticing.

It’s a similar story for other invisible but important facets of your website: privacy, security, accessibility. Because they’re hidden from view, you won’t be able to see if there’s a regression.

That’s why it’s a good idea to have regular audits for performance, privacy, security, and accessibility.

I wrote about accessibility testing a while back, and how there’s quite a bit that you can do for yourself before calling in an expert to look at the really gnarly stuff:

When you commission an accessibility audit, you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of it. Don’t squander it on issues that you can catch and fix yourself. Make sure that the bulk of the audit is being spent on the specific issues that are unique to your site.

I recently did an internal audit of the Clearleft website. After writing up the report, I also did a lunch’n’learn to share my methodology. I wanted to show that there’s some low-hanging fruit that pretty much anyone can catch.

To start with, there’s keyboard navigation. Put your mouse and trackpad to one side and use the tab key to navigate around.

Caveat: depending on what browser you’re using, you might need to update some preferences for keyboard navigation to work on links. If you’re using Safari, go to “Preferences”, then “Advanced”, and tick “Press Tab to highlight each item on a web page.”

Tab around and find out. You should see some nice chunky :focus-visible styles on links and form fields.

Here’s something else that anyone can do: zoom in. Increase the magnification to 200%. Everything should scale proportionally. How about 500%? You’ll probably see a mobile-friendly layout. That’s fine. As long as nothing is broken or overlapping, you’re good.

At this point, I reach for some tools. I’ve got some bookmarklets that do similar things: tota11y and ANDI. They both examine the source HTML and CSS to generate reports on structure, headings, images, forms, and so on.

These tools are really useful, but you need to be able to interpret the results. For example, a tool can tell you if an image has no alt text. But it can’t tell you if an image has good or bad alt text.

Likewise, these tools are great for catching colour-contrast issues. But there’s a big difference between a colour-contrast issue on the body copy compared to a colour-contrast issue on one unimportant page element.

I think that demonstrates the most important aspect of any audit: prioritisation.

Finding out that you have accessibility issues isn’t that useful if they’re all presented as an undifferentiated list. What you really need to know are which issues are the most important to fix.

By the way, I really like the way that the Gov.uk team prioritises accessibility concerns:

The team puts accessibility concerns in 2 categories:

1. Theoretical: A question or statement regarding the accessibility of an implementation within the Design System without evidence of real-world impact.
2. Evidenced: Sharing new research, data or evidence showing that an implementation within the Design System could cause barriers for disabled people.

The team will usually prioritise evidenced issues and queries over theoretical ones.

When I wrote up my audit for the Clearleft website, I structured it in order of priority. The most important things to fix are at the start of the audit. I also used a simple scale for classifying the severity of issues: low, medium, and high priority.

Thankfully there were no high-priority issues. There were a couple of medium-priority issues. There were plenty of low-priority issues. That’s okay. That’s a pretty good distribution.

If you’re interested, here’s the report I delivered…

Accessibility audit on clearleft.com

Colour contrast

There are a few issues with the pink colour. When it’s used on a grey background, or when it’s used as a background colour for white text, the colour contrast isn’t high enough.

The SVG arrow icon could be improved too.

Recommendations

Medium priority

• Change the pink colour universally to be darker. The custom property --red is currently rgb(234, 33, 90). Change it to rgb(210, 20, 73) (thanks, James!)

Low priority

• The SVG arrow icon currently uses currentColor. Consider hardcoding solid black (or a very, very dark grey) instead.

Images

Alt text is improving on the site. There’s reasonable alt text at the top level pages and the first screen’s worth of case studies and blog posts. I made a sweep through these pages a while back to improve the alt text but I haven’t done older blog posts and case studies.

Recommendations

Medium priority

• Make a sweep of older blog posts and case studies and fix alt text.

Low priority

• Images on the contact page have alt text that starts with “A photo of…” — this is redundant and can be removed.

Headings

The site is using headings sensibly. Sometimes the nesting of headings isn’t perfect, but this is a low priority issue. For example, on the contact page there’s an h1 followed by two h3s. In theory this isn’t correct. In practice (for screen reader users) it’s not an issue.

Recommendations

Low priority

• On the home page, “UX London 2023” should probably be h3 instead of h1.
• On the case studies index page we’re currently using h3 headings for the industry sector (“Charities”, “Education” etc.) but these should probably not be headings at all. On the blog index page we use a class “Tags” for a similar purpose. Consider reusing that pattern on the case studies index page.
• On the about index page, “We’re driven to be” is an h3 and the subsequent three headings are h2s. Ideally this would be reversed: a single h2 followed by three h3s.

Link text

Sometimes the same text is used for different links.

Recommendations

Low priority

• On the home page the text “Read the case study” is re-used for multiple links. It would be better if each link were different e.g. “Read about The Natural History Museum.”

Forms

The only form on the site is the newsletter sign-up form. It’s marked up pretty well: the input has an associated label, although a visible (clickable) label would be better.

Tabbing order

The site doesn’t use JavaScript to mess with tabbing order for keyboard users. The source order of elements in the markup generally makes sense so all is good.

The focus styles are nice and clear too!

Structure

The site is using HTML landmark elements sensibly (header, nav, main, footer, etc.).

The other side of egoism | A Working Library

Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

Space Elevator

Scroll up to the Kármán line.

The one about AI - macwright.com

Writing, both code and prose, for me, is both an end product and an end in itself. I don’t want to automate away the things that give me joy.

And that is something that I’m more and more aware of as I get older – sources of joy. It’s good to diversify them, to keep track of them, because it’s way too easy to run out. Or to end up with just one, and then lose it.

The thing about luddites is that they make good punchlines, but they were all people.

The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism

Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.

GB Renewables Map

A lovely bit of real-time data visualisation from Robin:

It’s a personal project created at home in Wales with an aim to explore and visualise renewable energy systems. Specifically, it aims to visualise live generation from renewable energy systems around Great Britain and to show where that generation is physically coming from.

50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World - IEEE Spectrum

A profile of the Xerox Alto and the people behind it.

This time last year when I was looking back on 2021, I wrote:

2020 was the year of the virus. 2021 was the year of the vaccine …and the virus, obviously, but still it felt like the year we fought back. With science!

Science continued to win the battle in 2022. But it was messy. The Situation isn’t over yet, and everyone has different ideas about the correct levels of risk-taking.

It’s like when you’re driving and you think that everyone going faster than you is a maniac, and everyone going slower than you is an idiot.

The world opened up more in 2022. I was able to speak at more in-person events. I really missed that. I think I’m done with doing online talks.

There was a moment when I was speaking at Web Dev Conf in Bristol this year (a really nice little gathering), and during my presentation I was getting that response from the audience that you just don’t get with online talks, and I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, I’ve really missed this!”

But like I said, The Situation isn’t over, and that makes things tricky for conferences. Most of the ones I spoke at or attended were doing their best to make things safe. CSS Day, Clarity, State Of The Browser: they all took measures to try to look out for everyone’s health.

For my part, I asked everyone attending dConstruct to take a COVID test the day before. Like I said at the time, I may have just been fooling myself with what might have been hygiene theatre, but like those other events, we all wanted to gather safely.

That can’t be said for the gigantic event in Berlin that I spoke at in Summer. There were tens of thousands of people in the venue. Inevitably, I—and others—caught COVID.

My bout of the ’rona wasn’t too bad, and I’m very glad that I didn’t pass it on to any family members (that’s been my biggest worry throughout The Situation). But it did mean that I wasn’t able to host UX London 2022.

That was a real downer. I spent much of 2022 focused on event curation: first UX London, and then dConstruct. I was really, really proud of the line-up I assembled for UX London so I was gutted not to be able to introduce those fabulous speakers in person.

Still, I got to host dConstruct, Leading Design, and Clarity, so 2022 was very much a bumper year for MCing—something I really, really enjoy.

Already I’ve got more of the same lined up for the first half of 2023: hosting Leading Design San Francisco in February and curating and hosting UX London in June.

I hope to do more speaking too. Alas, An Event Apart is no more, which is a real shame. But I hope there are other conferences out there that might be interested in what I have to say. If you’re organising one, get in touch.

Needless to say, 2022 was not a good year for world events. The callous and cruel invasion of Ukraine rightly dominated the news (sporting events and dead monarchs are not the defining events of the year). But even in the face of this evil, there’s cause for hope, seeing the galvanised response of the international community in standing up to Putin the bully.

In terms of more personal bad news, Jamie’s death is hard to bear.

I got to play lots of music in 2022. That’s something I definitely want to continue. In fact, 2023 kicked off with a great kitchen session yesterday evening—the perfect start to the year!

And I’ve got my health. That’s something I don’t take for granted.

One year ago, I wrote:

Maybe 2022 will turn out to be similar—shitty for a lot of people, and mostly unenventful for me. Or perhaps 2022 will be a year filled with joyful in-person activities, like conferences and musical gatherings. Either way, I’m ready.

For the most part, that played out. 2022 was thankfully fairly uneventful personally. And it was indeed a good year for in-person connections. I very much hope that continues in 2023.

Why the super rich are inevitable

The interactive widgets embedded in this article are excellent teaching tools!

99 Good News Stories From 2022

A look at back at what wasn’t in the headlines this year.

Jamie Freeman passed away yesterday.

I first met Jamie as a fellow web-nerd way back in the early 2000s when I was freelancing here in Brighton. I did a lot of work with him and his design studio, Message. Andy was working there too. It’s kind of where the seeds of Clearleft were planted.

I remember one day telling them about a development with Salter Cane. Our drummer, Catherine, was moving to Australia so we were going to have to start searching for someone new.

“I play drums”, said Jamie.

I remember thinking, “No, you don’t; you play guitar.” But I thought “What the heck”, and invited him along to a band practice.

Well, it turns that not only could he play drums, he was really good! Jamie was in the band.

It’s funny, I kept referring to Jamie as “our new drummer”, but he actually ended up being the drummer that was with Salter Cane the longest.

Band practices. Concerts. Studio recordings. We were a team for years. You can hear Jamie’s excellent drumming on our album Sorrow. You can also his drumming (and brilliant backing vocals) on an album of covers we recorded. He was such a solid drummer—he made the whole band sound tighter.

But as brilliant as Jamie was behind a drumkit, his heart was at the front of the stage. He left Salter Cane to front The Jamie Freeman Agreement full-time. I loved going to see that band and watching them get better and better. Jonathan has written lovingly about his time with the band.

After that, Jamie continued to follow his dreams as a solo performer, travelling to Nashville, and collaborating with loads of other talented people. Everyone loved Jamie.

This year started with the shocking news that he had inoperable cancer—a brain tumor. Everyone sent him all their love (we recorded a little video from the Salter Cane practice room—as his condition worsened, video worked better than writing). But somehow I didn’t quite believe that this day would come when Jamie was no longer with us. I mean, the thought was ridiculous: Jamie, the vegetarian tea-totaller …with cancer? Nah.

I think I’m still in denial.

The last time I had the joy of playing music with Jamie was also the last time that Salter Cane played a gig. Jamie came back for a one-off gig at the start of 2020 (before the world shut down). It was joyous. It felt so good to rock out with him.

Jamie was always so full of enthusiasm for other people, whether that was his fellow musicians or his family members. He had great stories from his time on tour with his brother Tim’s band, Frazier Chorus. And he was so, so proud of everything his brother Martin has done. It was so horrible when their sister died. I can’t imagine what they must be going through now, losing another sibling.

Like I said, I still can’t quite believe that Jamie has gone. I know that I’m really going to miss him.

I’m sending all my love and my deepest sympathies to Jamie’s family.

Fuck cancer.

I spent Friday morning in band practice with Salter Cane. It was productive. We’ve got some new songs that are coming together nicely. We’re still short a drummer though, so if you know anyone in Brighton who might be interested, let me know.

As we were packing up, we could here the band next door. They were really good. Just the kind of alt-country rock that would go nicely with Salter Cane.

On the way out, Jessica asked at the front desk who that band was. They’re called The Roebucks.

When I got home I Ducked, Ducked and Went to find out more information. There’s a Bandcamp page with one song. Good stuff. I also found their Facebook page. That’s where I saw this little tidbit:

Hello, we are supporting @seapowerband at @chalk_venue on the 30th of October. Hope you can make it!

Wait, that’s this very weekend! And I love Sea Power (formerly British Sea Power—they changed their name, which was a move that only annoyed the very people who’s worldviews prompted the name change in the first place). How did I not know about this gig? And how are there tickets still available?

And that’s how I came to spend my Sunday evening rocking out to two great bands.