Michael Bester • Journal

Luke

2026-03-15T00:00:00Z

It was a bright October day in 2014. We had arrived at a puppy adoption event organized by Last Hope K9 Rescue. When it was time to meet the adoptable dogs, we were brought into a large room with maybe a dozen puppies running around for a meet and greet. My daughter’s attention was trained on an energetic pup with anxious energy, and started asking if we could bring that one home. Her mom and I weren’t so sure, as we didn’t want another high maintenance dog like our previous one. But then Seal casually ambled up to us, looked up, and—maybe with a little pop of his head—said “hey… what’s going on?”

How could anyone resist this little stinker?

Seal had a casual, easy-going energy. This pup was an old soul. After playing with him for a bit and a taking him for a walk, we were smitten. We signed the papers and Seal came home with us that day.

We figured that he had been named Seal because, well, he kind of looked like one. Especially with his ears flipped back. He even barked like one. Apparently, he had a sister named Heidi (as in Klum), which was… an interesting choice for siblings. For us, the name didn’t really feel right for him, so we asked my daughter what she thought his name should be. Having recently watched Star Wars for the first time, she suggested Luke. And so Luke it was.

Luke was a good puppy. At only 5 months old, he was already fully housebroken when he came home with us (thank you, Luke’s foster mom!). He never wanted to get up on the sofa or the bed (unless my daughter egged him on, and even then, he didn’t really want to do it). He did, however, have a penchant for tearing up pillows and his beds and making a mess, particularly when left alone. Oh no, I’m all alone! Mmmmm, delicious bed… Luke went through many beds over the years.

At the time, I was a freelance web developer, and my office was a rented desk in a small design studio near home. My office mates were all dog people, so I started bringing Luke to work with me. It was lovely to be able to walk 10–15 minutes to and from work with him, and it wasn’t long before he was joining me pretty much daily. Folks at the office were happy to have the canine companionship at work. When we arrived, he would say hello to everyone, then he’d settle into his bed and snooze most of the day. He became a fixture there, something of an office mascot. Once in a while, other folks brought their dogs in and Luke would hang out with them for the day, but none were there nearly as often as he was.

Luke, the office mascot

My town is very dog friendly, so we would take walks during the workday, stopping in different shops where they had biscuits. He always enjoyed popping in, saying hello and getting a snack. This routine would continue to give his days structure and keep him going near the end of his life, too.

In the early days, I also took him to the dog park pretty regularly to socialize. But dogs, being dogs, sometimes jockey for rank. While most of the time we were hanging out with something of a regular crew there, other people cycled in and out. We had more than one encounter with other mostly clueless dog owners insisting “Oh, my dog is so friendly!” while their dog is doing its best to be king of the dog park. Luke did get into a few skirmishes with some of these dogs. One of those times when he was really getting into it with another dog, I tried to pull him away by grabbing him at the waist (bad idea). He turned his head in the scuffle and chomped down my hand, leaving a deep puncture wound. I wasn’t mad at him, as it was a stupid move on my part—I should have grabbed the scruff of his neck—and I saw he immediately felt contrite about having bit me.

Getting uppity with other dogs was becoming a bit of a pattern with him. Enough so that I started to think he had…

A Demon Within

Despite his easy-going temperament, Luke had a demon in him which reared its head from time to time. He was never, ever, aggressive towards people—he always loved meeting people young and old and getting pets and giving kisses. But some other dogs could trigger him.

He didn’t like bulldogs, nor other short snout dogs. And he definitely took umbrage with dogs that had Big Alpha Male Energy™. My neighbor had a younger dog with BAME™ named Duck. Luke would yell at Duck from the window whenever he saw him. One July 4th weekend a few years back, I was moving some furniture out of the building when Duck’s owner was walking by with him. Unleashed and seeing the door open, Luke took his opportunity. He wanted to prove he was big dog on the block, so he ran out past me onto the sidewalk and attacked Duck. By the time we managed to separate the dogs, Luke had gotten a solid bite or two in on Duck’s back leg and my neighbor and I were both deeply shaken. I was mortified and deeply apologetic to my neighbor and his wife. Of course, I paid for Duck’s visit to the emergency vet.

Then there was the goat incident.

Goat Slayer

In summer 2019, I had planned a camping trip with a friend at a campground in Maine situated on a farm. There were barnyard animals to pet and walk. There was cheese to make, and there was butter to churn. We thought it’d be a fun weekend with the kids. When my daughter and I arrived, my friend was already there. I asked my daughter and my friend’s son if they would walk Luke while I set up the tent. Gamely, they set off with him and I got to work. It wasn’t long before I was visited by a manager of the grounds.

In their walk with Luke, the kids cut through a wooded area and ended up next to the goat area. The goats were fenced off, but the fence had horizontal slats with gaps wide enough for a curious goat to stick its head through. When entering the clearing, Luke spotted one curious goat with its head through the fence, braying in his direction. I’m not sure Luke had ever seen a goat before this, so maybe he didn’t know what to make of it, but, excited at the sight of it, he approached. The kids were still small and not strong enough to hold him back. And then he chomped down on its ear.

The goat was yelling in pain. Luke would not let go. The kids could not pull him away. A farm staffer tried to unclench Luke’s mouth from the ear, but he was locked down hard. Flailing his head from side to side, the ear started to rip away from the poor goat’s head. There was blood, and my daughter said she could see bone. He kept tugging and flailing, tearing that ear bit by bit. He yanked and yanked at it and yanked some more. He kept going until that ear was ripped clean off the goat’s head.

The farm/campground staff was amazingly understanding about the situation. They did not eject us from the premises, and wanted my daughter and I to enjoy our weekend there despite the incident. Of course, they did require that I keep Luke away from the animals and secured with me or locked in the car while we were there. I also got a visit from Maine animal control, who slapped a quarantine on Luke. As soon as we left the state, he was not allowed back for a month.

Tethered to a tree in the wake of the Goat Incident

When we got back to the office and I recounted the misadventure to my office mates, my buddy Matt took a look at Luke serenely relaxing in his bed and dubbed him The Goat Slayer™.

Although he had seen some goats on occasion since that time, I was now careful to not let him get too close (same for certain dogs—by this time, I had developed a pretty good sense of which dogs he would be uppity with). He never had another incident again.

Later Years

Shortly before the Goat Slayer incident, my daughter’s mom and I separated. Luke stayed with me. He continued being my office buddy, and we would continue making friends and chasing bunnies on our walks around town.

When I met Amanda, Luke was an excellent wingman. He reminded her very much of her last dog, Buck, who had passed on some years before. She showed me pictures of Buck. They could have been brothers.

We started spending time at Amanda’s place, and Luke really wanted to play with her two cats. They wanted nothing to do with him, though. When he was around, one camped out on top of the fridge, and the other under the sofa. Luke would sometimes stick his snout under the sofa and woof at the cat under there, wanting her to come out and play, but all he ever got from her were growls, hisses, and a few scratches on the nose. This went on for years, and was the source of many a good laugh.

COVID happened, and Amanda and I grew closer. She really bonded with Luke over this time, and he with her. She started calling him The Goodest Boy.

He was our constant companion. I was working from home by this time, and he would spend the days with me, the evenings with Amanda and I. He’d come on trips with us. There were a few visits to Acadia National Park (yes, his quarantine in the state of Maine had lifted by then!) where he would gamely accompany us on hikes up the mountains we thought he could handle.

Taking a break on Cadillac Mountain

My daughter, a teenager by this time, liked to do silly things with him, like put ridiculous headgear on him and take photos with the 0.5x wide angle lens to make his snout look huge.

Amanda with The Goodest Boy

So cute at 0.5x

The Decline

One day in early 2024, on his way up to the bedrooms, he made it up a few stairs before his back paw slipped and he tumbled back down. The stair treads were an ample size, but bare hardwood and slippery. It happened again a few days later, so I got ordered some clear adhesive grip strips to put on the stairs, so he (and we) could have some better traction on them. He was nine years old by this point, and I thought he was probably just getting a little more feeble with age. With the grip strips, he was able to negotiate the stairs confidently, so I didn’t think much more about it for a while.

After a few months, a new issue crept in. I heard it first. Click-click-click-scuff, click-click-click-scuff. While out on walks, he was dragging his back right paw. It started to wear down the claws on that paw too fast, sometimes wearing too close to the quick which would make it bleed a bit. I tried putting some light booties on his back paws, but he kept wearing through them quickly. At his next annual physical, I brought up the issue. They suggested it was probably arthritis. I would soon learn that it was not arthritis. That was the last time I brought him to that vet.

Of course, I had been trawling around online, asking Dr. Google what dragging the paw could be. There were a number of conditions that could be causing it, but one in particular which I had never heard about before kept cropping up in my searches: degenerative myelopathy, or DM. Of the conditions I was learning about, DM was the one that I was really hoping he wasn’t dealing with.

If you’re not familiar, degenerative myelopathy is basically the canine version of ALS. It breaks down myelin in the spinal cord, degrading the nervous system’s ability to communicate between the brain and the rest of the body. It starts with the back legs, and slowly moves its way forward. It can cause both fecal and urinary incontinence, breathing problems, and other complications. It is, mercifully, not painful. But it is insidious, and it is incurable.

Around this time, I was searching out better tools to help Luke with the scuffing paw problem. I found a small company that made boots with an ankle strap tethered to the toe which would hold his paw in the correct position when he walked, so I ordered a few. The owner of the company insisted on getting on the phone to make sure the boot fit properly and was doing its job effectively. Her own dog had suffered from DM and she wanted to work with customers to help them with coming to grips with the condition. It was during a call with her that she suggested that I get a DNA test done to check for the possibility of DM.

There is no way to clinically diagnose DM while a dog is alive—that can only be done post-mortem. An official DM diagnosis is one of exclusion, involving expensive and extensive neurological tests. It’s not this, not that, or not that other thing, so it’s most likely DM. I did not go down the expensive neurological test route with Luke, but I did do the DNA test. That test checks for mutations in the SOD1 gene. No mutations, there’s no chance of developing DM. One mutation, the dog is a carrier, but most likely won’t develop DM. Two mutations, though? Now there’s a far greater chance of developing DM.

When I read Luke’s DNA test results, a wave of grief hit me like a bus. Staring back at me, it said he had two SOD1 mutations.

Management

Now, two SOD1 mutations is not a DM diagnosis, nor does it mean that a dog will definitely develop DM. But Luke’s report convinced me that what he was dealing with was absolutely the early stages of DM. Arthritis? Pffft.

Since it is incurable, the name of the game with DM is managing the condition with an eye towards maintaining a good quality of life. The progression of it is rather slow, so it is possible for a dog to reasonably live with it for a year or more. Luke was healthy and happy, and I was ready and willing to help him as best I could. He could still walk well enough, and with the corrective boot on his back right paw, going on our walks around town, saying hello to folks, and collecting biscuits was still very doable.

The summer pressed on. I kept getting him replacement boots, as he wore through them pretty quickly. But we were still walking. I wanted to give him some bare paw time too, so I started taking him to local hiking trails regularly where he wouldn’t have to deal with asphalt, concrete, or brick underfoot. He enjoyed being out in the woods, and I loved being there with him.

I had heard that physical therapy could be helpful for slowing the progression of DM, so I booked him for a six week course of aquatic therapy. Each weekly session included about 20 minutes of laps in a pool. Luke hated getting wet, so his favorite part of those sessions were getting out of the water and drying off. Still, they gave him a blue ribbon after his last session which he wore happily, at least for this photo.

The newest reluctant member of the swim team!

Summer pressed on into autumn. He was still able to walk, but was starting to drag that back right leg more. He was also getting a bit wobbly—he was walking as if he had been out on a bender the night before. I knew that he would eventually need a mobility cart, as all DM-afflicted dogs do.

By November, I got him his Sympathy Chariot.

The Sympathy Chariot

I got him his mobility cart before it fully needed it, as I wanted to give him some time to get used to it. For the first month or so, we’d do one walk a day with it. He took to it without complaint. Other dog owners would tell me about their experience with a previous dog and how they rejected the cart. Not Luke. He seemed to enjoy it.

Getting an assist

The cart carried the weight of the back half of his body, distributing it to the wheels on either side of him. This allowed him to continue to walk with support. Because DM makes a dog lose proprioception, their paws start to curl into a loose “fist”, and they “knuckle”, meaning they walk with the paws curled up. Because of this, he still needed the boot when walking in the cart. He was happy to be able to keep going around town to go collect biscuits with relative ease. I even got a mini license plate for the cart that read BISCUITS PLZ.

The sight of this happy aged dog walking around town in a mobility cart attracted tons of attention. He would get a lot of sympathetic looks as we passed by. Many people wanted to stop and say hello to him. It was one of the most reliable conversation starters I’ve ever experienced, and I was happy to tell people about Luke and what was going on with him. A lot of people asked me if I had built the cart, presumably because they’re not a common sight, especially with a larger dog. Thanks to all the attention it garnered, I took to calling the cart his Sympathy Chariot.

I was never fishing for compliments in these interactions, but they came freely. A lot of people seem to think that most folks in my position wouldn’t want to deal with the inconvenience of caring for their pets in this way, which saddened me. Of course I would do it for Luke. Yes, his body was breaking down, but he was still happy and content, and I was able to give him the assistance he needed. There was never any question in my mind about “should I continue?” Not yet, anyway.

Before long, his left hind leg also started knuckling and scraping. So, another boot was in order for that paw. By that time he could barely walk at all without the support of the cart. A few more months passed, and he couldn’t really walk with his back legs with the support of the cart. He had started to drag them, so I slung them up in stirrups, first the right, then the left. The boots were no longer necessary. He was walking with just his front paws and the wheels. By this point, his hind legs were, for all intents and purposes, paralyzed. But still, he was happy and well adjusted through it all.

As the summer gave way to autumn, other things started breaking down. Because his back legs were now paralyzed, he could no longer stand. He couldn’t get up and go to his food and water bowls. He couldn’t scratch himself any more. He started having trouble just turning himself around in bed. Still, he tried to do all these things. He could still drag himself around the room using his front legs. His efforts gave him a solid upper body workout—he was kind of jacked for a bit there.

Throughout most of his life, Luke never had any bathroom accidents in the house. But as the DM was robbing him of his ability to feel what was going on in the back half of his body, he started to lose bowel control. While he did still sometimes do it when we were out on a walk, pooping in bed became the norm for him. I did sometimes wonder if he could still sort of control it, but because walks were getting harder, he found it easier to just let loose while lying in bed. By the beginning of 2026, urinary incontinence followed. Pee pads and diapers became regular accessories. He was still well adjusted, but struggling mightily. The aperture on his quality of life was closing shut.

Saying Goodbye

In the last few weeks, his front legs had gotten obviously weak. He could still use them, but they would soon shut down like his back legs did a year ago. While he would still reluctantly be game for them, walks had become a struggle. I didn’t want him to get to the point where his front legs also failed completely. It was time to say goodbye.

I scheduled a vet, a friend of friend, to euthanize him at home. When the day came, he was in bed, surrounded by people who love him. We were giving him love, giving him affection, and giving him lots of treats and goodies. He was happy. He was content to be there, sharing this moment with us. As the vet gave the injections, and he started to fade, there was no anxiety from him. He got drowsy, he stopped eating the treats, put his head down and drooled a little, taking in the last pets he could perceive. Within a few minutes, his heart had stopped beating. He was free. He would never have to suffer again.

Luke is not the first dog I’ve put down in my life, but his passing was the most peaceful of them. To have had ample time to think about the moment, and to be able to do it when it felt right to do so, rather than in an emergency, is huge.

Of course, I’m gutted that he’s gone, but I am at peace with it. It was a privilege to be his person, and my life is richer for him having been a part of it.

Always the Goodest Boy

RIP Luke, c. May 20, 2014–March 3, 2026. You’ll always be The Goodest Boy.

Whiplash

2022-12-28T00:00:00Z

A friend in a Slack group posed this question yesterday afternoon:

Just got around to watching Whiplash because my son wanted to watch it. Curious who else here watched it, and what your thoughts were on it? (Especially the musicians who went to music school)

I’ve watched Whiplash, and holy cats that movie is intense. It makes for great drama, but it’s not at all reflective of my experience in music school.

In school, I did have a few professors who scared the crap out of me. As a student studying jazz—something that I had very little knowledge of or exposure to before going to school—I was frightened by these professors because they were masters of the craft, able to play with a fluency that seemed unattainable to me at the time. (Decades later, I still haven’t reached their level of traditional jazz fluency, but I’m fine with that now). While I found them intimidating at first, none came even remotely close to the abusive behavior of JK Simmons’ character, Fletcher. They didn’t break students down to build them up, boot camp style. Sure they were demanding, but they were also supportive and encouraging. They wanted to share the music they loved, and they wanted kids to love it too. And they definitely wanted us to reach our potential without breaking our spirits.

Among my peers, I don’t think anybody was as intensely single minded on becoming the best musician in a generation, whatever the hell that means, as Miles Teller’s character, Andrew, was. We all wanted to get good and we worked at it. We spent plenty of time in hot, smelly practice rooms, honing our skills, both by ourselves and together. We inspired each other, pushing us all to get better. But we also liked to hang out, drink, get high, and fuck. You know, like young people do.

Whiplash isn’t really about music school. That’s just the setup. It’s about the relentless drive of two individuals, fueled by their unrestrained ambition and ego. What it completely misses as a “jazz school” movie is the fact that playing music, especially jazz, is very much a communal practice. It’s less about how amazing one person can be, and much more about what can we make together.

I may be rusty on my chord substitutions and bebop vocabulary, but there are two things that stand out as valuable in my music school experience. First, I was being consistently inspired by other students, more than I was by the teachers, as good as they were. Coming out of high school, I thought I was simply amazing. Seeing how damn talented my peers were threw a bucket of ice water on that misguided idea. I learned a lot of humility, quickly, and how to really appreciate and celebrate the achievements of others.

The other thing I learned is how to be a much better listener. It sounds simple, but it’s fundamental for any musician (and indeed, for anybody who wants to strengthen and deepen their relationships). As a musician, it’s easy to have blinders on when you’re burying your nose in a score to just play your part, or if you get enamored with how incredible you think you are. But when you’re playing music with others, being generous with your listening makes the music so much better. Not only for your bandmates, but for your audience too.

In their pursuit of greatness, Fletcher and Andrew needed each other. Though because that pursuit is at the expense of just about everything else in their lives, they really only have each other. The rest of us do need truly driven people to be great, to push the boundaries of what we think is possible and inspire us. But for most of us, I think we’re OK with letting others take that path.

Gratitude

2019-03-19T00:00:00Z

Years ago, Derek Sivers wrote a wonderful post called Friends From Memory. It’s a project which encourages gratitude, and in it, he lists out the names of people who have had a positive influence on his life from memory. I think it’s a lovely idea and I’ve been wanting to do my own version of this list for a while now.

In roughly chronological order, these are people who’ve come into my life who have been left a positive mark on me, nudging me towards who I am today. Some I’ve only spent a few hours with, others I’ve known for years. There are friends, teachers, mentors, colleagues, and acquaintances here. Some may not remember me, but obviously, I remember them.

David Luks
Jeremy Hoffer
Anthony Motta
Paul San Gemino
Mario Mihauchich
Erik DiCarlo
Roy Billiott
Camille Motta
Richard Kaval
Jamie Riccardi
Lou Albano
Francis Leale
Jim Hughes
Nick Megdanis
Luciano Meschino
Victor Powell (R.I.P.)
Catherine Livanis (R.I.P)
Terry Livanis
Arthur Cunningham (R.I.P.)
Jessica Foster
Renee Foster
Carmen Rivera
Jim Wagner
Tommy Black
Richard Black
Travis Clemins
Brian Carver
George Loutfi
Eugene Tang
Brian Forbes
Yarone Levy
Quincas Moreira
Andrew Manista
Seth Horan
Julianne Carmody
Carmen Nemeth
Jano Rix
Jon Arkin
Eric Gardner
Kynch O’Kaine
Peter Parente
Matthew Hewlitt
Matt Glassmeyer
Randall Dolohon
Neville Peter
Ron Miller
Bob Gower
Lori Bingle
Ian Herzog
Ryuji Yamaguchi
Jonathan Kriesberg
Jes Bernhardt
Bud Maltin
Dean Imperial
Isabel Arce
John Ballesteros
Michael (Miles) Miller
Kate Gauthier
Steve Bill
Baird Styles
Roberto Crepaldi
Alex Coletta
Subbarao Seethamsetty
Gerald Scully
Tim Sevener
Sandor Risko
Mark Anderson
Charlotte DeLon
Quartez Taylor
Donna Brockett
Eric Snowden
Karen Stavisky
Darwin Rodriguez
Sanjay Sen
Champ Bennett
Michelle Kempner
Yvette Pasqua
Rob Sung
David MacFarlane
Chris Bray
Omar Elsayed
Chris Casciano
Carlos Porto
Joseph Jorgensen
Christopher Reardon
Bruce Hyslop
Eoin Russell
Marc Amos
Kirby Turner
Chris Traganos
Mark Sarcione
Lily Sarcione
Juhan Sonin
Urszula Clemins
Dan Cederholm
Johannes Booy
Michael Witwicki
Glenn Kennedy
John Magnifico
Matt Parmet
Andres Martínez
Aubryn Thompson
Christine Pillsbury
Scott Borg
Frank Papineau
Jerome Mouffe
Donna Ricci
Adrienne Smith
Chris Ruth
Michael Hurley
Jason Yarrington
Jennifer Donovan
Alyssa Garber

If you found your way here because your name is on this list, please do send me a note and say hello! If you’re not here, and you feel you should be, my sincere apologies. Do say hello and let me know.

Unexpected

2018-06-05T00:00:00Z

Thanks to YouTube’s recommendation engine, I came across something which just floored me. It’s a clip from a 1965 Italian TV special called Chitarra, Amore Mio (“Guitar, My Love”).

In it, we are introduced to a modest, soft spoken man named Vittorio Camardese. We learn that he’s a doctor—a radiologist—working in San Filippo Hospital in Rome. Because of his work, he says he doesn’t travel to play music, despite all the stickers on his guitar case. The host asks him about a “particular technique” he uses when playing the guitar, and Dr. Camardese sheepishly says yes, he always plays this way, and that he is self taught. After a brief explanation and demonstration with a major scale, the host says “Let’s hear a piece”. The good doctor suggests a Mambo.

Then he plays…

I hope you watched that through to the end. I quite literally gasped the first time I saw it. This hit me hard on multiple levels.

When I was a kid, hearing the otherworldly sounds that Eddie Van Halen was able to coax out of an electric guitar for the first time transported me. I didn’t know sounds like that existed, much less that people could make them. I needed to learn how to do what he was doing. I soon got my first electric guitar and quickly learned about tapping. For the uninitiated, it’s a technique guitar players use where they tap notes on the fretboard with their picking hand, allowing them to play quick, wide interval arpeggios and lines, as well as percussive sounds. Eddie Van Halen uses it extensively and is widely considered to be a pioneer of the technique. When the first Van Halen album was released in 1978, guitarists everywhere were blown away when they heard what EVH could do with tapping. Many guitarists adopted the technique and some, like Steve Vai, took it even further than Eddie did.

For me, seeing what the humble autodidact, Doctor Camardese, was doing on his classical guitar, well over a decade before Eddie Van Halen popularized the technique, upended what I thought I knew about how this way of playing evolved.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Eddie Van Halen got it from hearing Dr. Camardese—he probably didn’t. As far as I can tell, aside from a few appearances on Italian Television, Camardese never recorded any of his playing and was unknown outside of Italy. Plus, there were other guitarists in the ’60s and ’70s who used versions of the technique in their own playing, albeit to a more limited degree than what either Van Halen or Camardese did. What fascinates me about this is the multiple discovery aspect of it, where disparate people can independently develop similar ideas more or less simultaneously.

The other thing that hit me about the video is that it’s a strong reminder that there is talent all around us that we don’t know about, or perhaps choose not to see. Most of Doctor Camardese’s patients likely never knew that he was a guitarist, much less that he was a mad genius at it. Perhaps his coworkers didn’t even know.

Every person you encounter has a story, most of which you have no idea about. Remembering that idea fosters empathy. To me, it also means that plenty of people have skills and talents we just don’t know, and I find that idea endlessly fascinating. Look out the window, see someone, anyone, and wonder what his or her talent could be. Their stories, their skills, have the potential to transport you, if only you knew what they are.

Remembering What’s Important

2014-04-03T00:00:00Z

Today, Eric Meyer wrote about an unimaginably difficult situation that he and his family are dealing with:

We asked Rebecca to sit with us on the half-couch situated against the short wall of the child psychologist’s small office. She clambered up into Kat’s lap, facing toward me, looking at me sidelong with her unique mixture of shyness and impishness. I was already having trouble drawing my breath, arrested by her affection for and trust in us, and pierced by the knowledge of what we were about to do to her.

“Honey, we want to talk to you about something.”

Do take the time to read the whole post. Powerfully poignant and heartbreaking in its vulnerability, it reminds us what is really important in life. It isn’t work, nor is it gaining material possessions. All of that falls away when what really matters is thrust in to such sharp relief.

Go give the people you love a big hug and treasure the time you spend together with them. There is nothing more important.

Online Homesteading

2014-01-16T00:00:00Z

Two Thousand Fourteen is the year we all take back ownership of our data, or so I’ve been hearing, anyway. Whether or not that is any sort of official marching order for content creators for this year, it is a sentiment I can get behind.

For those of us creating content that we post online, why do post so much of it only to services which we have little to no control over the fate of? Services that we can’t pay money to use—even if we wanted to—so they reserve the right to use our content in ways that may be unsettling to us. Of course, I’m talking about services like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (nobody really uses Google+, right?).

Is all that content we’re creating so ephemeral that it’s not worth hanging on to?

Of the services I listed, Twitter is the only one I use with any regularity. My relationship with it has been pretty durable, too. I’ve been posting there regularly since 2008. I find value in occasionally going back over my old tweets when I remember that I posted something I found interesting, something which I’d like to dig up again because I can’t quite remember it. The trouble is, Twitter’s search is useless for searching through your tweet archive. There are other options to help with this problem, but they are somewhat clumsy tools, in that they retrieve and keep copies of what was posted to Twitter. They still don’t provide you with a sense of ownership of the content you authored and posted.

When I look at the body of content I’ve produced and posted to Twitter over the past 6 years as a whole, I begin to look at each of those items in that corpus less as tweets and more as short notes. In this view, it doesn’t make much sense to me to have Twitter be the canonical source of that content, particularly if it something I’m posting which I think may come in useful at a later date. It’s something I, as its author, should have the original source of. Because of this, going forward, I’ll be posting these short notes in the Notes section on this site.

I still love Twitter, though, and don’t want to leave it behind. It’s still valuable to me as a broadcast platform and a place for public conversation. I’d still like to post—or, rather, syndicate—my short notes there. That’s why I’ve implemented POSSE for them.

The rest of this post is going to be a bit more nuts-and-bolts oriented, seasoned with implementation details. If that sort of thing makes your eyes glaze over, feel free to stop reading. I won’t be offended.

POSSE is not a particularly new idea. A clumsy acronym though it is, it stands for Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I first came across this idea last month in a piece by Chloe Weil in which she describes implementing POSSE on her own site to post short, Tweet-like entries and syndicate them to Twitter. Chloe is not the first to do this, though. Tantek Çelik has been at it since early 2010, and others have followed suit, not only with Tweets, but full blog posts, too.

The sort of moving parts POSSE requires in order to function aren’t available by default in Statamic, my CMS for this site. It does, however, offer a fairly robust API which you can utilize to author your own add-ons (Statamic parlance for plugins). So over the past few weeks, I’ve cobbled together a workable system for syndicating my short notes to Twitter.

The first thing I did was to set up the Notes section. I wanted to pre-populate it with my existing Twitter archive, creating one entry for each tweet in the archive. Twitter offers each user the ability to request an archive of their tweet history, so I did exactly that. Within a few seconds, I had a bunch of JSON files, each representing a month’s worth of tweets. Since I wanted each tweet to be an individual entry in the notes section, and Statamic expects each entry to be a Markdown file, I pieced together a PHP script which read through the JSON files and generated a .md file for each tweet. I quickly had over 2,200 .md files which I dropped into the new notes section¹ and voilà—instant tweet archive²!

Now that the Notes section will be the canonical source of useful³ short-form content I write going forward, I needed to set up a way to syndicate new posts to Twitter. In order to make it all work, there were a couple of things I needed in place:

Set up a way to auto-generate titles and slugs for each note.
The ability to set up a short link to the post.
A mechanism to post the entry to Twitter as a new tweet.

The first point isn’t so much a necessity of POSSE, but rather, a need to reconcile the format of short post content with the needs of the CMS. Statamic requires each entry to have a title and a slug⁴, like a typical blog post. Tweets, and things that take a similar form to tweets, like the short notes, don’t typically get proper titles—it’s just the tweet/note text. As for the slug, in the case of a tweet, its slug is its ID, or identifier in the Twitter’s database. Since Statamic doesn’t use a database, you’ve got to provide a slug. To satisfy the CMS, I wrote a bit of JavaScript which truncates the first couple of words of the note into a title, and I generate a short unique slug based on the time the note is authored. It ends up looking something like KRyRb. Both are populated automatically by the JavaScript when I author a new note.

Moving on to the second point, one of the basic tenets of POSSE is the idea of original discovery. That is, when you post something and you syndicate it out, you provide some way to identify the original source of the content. Permashortlinks and their cousins, permashortcitations, are used to create references back to the original post. A permashortlink is a short URL points to the original post, typically rendered as a hyperlink. A permashortcitation is a unlinked, text only shortener of the permashortlink, and is included in a syndicated copy of a post when that copy of the post is displayed in its entirety. If you have a permashortlink like http://mub.io/KRyRb, the permashortcitation of it would look like (mub.io KRyRb)⁵. For the note at that permashortlink, you can see the permashortcitation in the POSSE‘d tweet.

Of course, to do that, I needed a short domain, so I purchased mub.io. I also needed a URL shortener service. In keeping with the ethos of owning your own content, I opted to build my own rather than tie the domain to an external URL shortener service. Once I had that up and running, I hooked into the publish event back in Statamic. I send the URL of the new post over to my domain shortener and get a short URL in return. It gets saved along with the post, as well as tacked onto the copy of the post that gets syndicated to Twitter. Which brings us to step 3.

If the post is short enough to be fully displayed as a tweet, the permashortcitation gets appended to the tweet, otherwise the permashortlink gets tacked on. This allows people who see the partial post as a tweet to follow the link back to the note on this site so they can read the whole thing. Of course, now that the tweet version of the post has been constructed, it needs to be posted to Twitter. I set up application-only auth credentials on Twitter so I could use its API to post new content to my timeline from this site. Using those credentials, I wrote a bit of PHP utilizing the awesome TwitterOAuth library which makes the post on my behalf when I publish a new note in Statamic. The response from that posting returns metadata about the new tweet, including its ID on Twitter. That ID gets saved along with the note so I can then create links to view, favorite, reply or retweet the syndicated tweet on Twitter from my original post.

Now that all that is in place, the process is complete. The note gets published here, it gets a shortlink and it gets syndicated out to Twitter. I have the original post in a Markdown file that I can keep as long as I have disk space to keep it on. POSSE, baby. It’s a bit of a rigmarole get it to work, but it feels good to have a sense of ownership.

I’ll refine the moving parts as I utilize this more, and am thinking of ways to POSSE more content, like my photos I post to Flickr. If you’ve done anything similar, I’d love to see it. Send me a tweet and let me know!

I did have some reservations over the potential performance hit of a dropping a few thousand entry files into Statamic for it to chew through. I considered using a database in which to store the notes, but was pleasantly surprised to see that the speed to load the pages averages around 2 seconds. Not exactly blazing, but still acceptable for now. I’d still like it to be faster, though. As Fred suggested, this sort of thing is an edge case for Statamic, and it would probably perform best with a database. Given that Statamic’s philosophy is to be a flat file CMS, that doesn’t feel right to me. I’m more inclined to implement a caching layer rather than add a database as a sidecar to a Statamic site. ↩
I’m not displaying @ replies in the short notes section, so that brought the archive of tweets I’m displaying from about 2250 down to around 1450. ↩
I don’t intend to post everything I would normally tweet as a note. Retweets, @-replies to people, and silly tweets like this one will by in large still get posted directly on Twitter. Things which I think may be useful or interesting both now and at a later date will get posted here as a Note and POSSE‘d to Twitter. ↩
The slug is the part of the URL, or address of a web page, that identifies a particular page within a section. In the case of this post, the section is journal and the slug is online-homesteading. ↩
The whole point of the format of a permashortcitation is that it doesn’t get converted to a link when it gets posted on a service like Twitter. If you syndicate a post to another service, it’s poor form to include a fully fledged link to the original post if the reader isn’t going to see any additional content when they follow the link. If they really want to, they can copy the permashortcitation without the parenthesis and replace the space with a slash. That turns it into the permashortlink, which will bring the reader to the original post. ↩

A Man Must Constantly Exceed His Level

2014-01-14T00:00:00Z

I just came across this passage, and I think it’s terrific:

Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce if I run any more,”—and we’re still running—”if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”

It’s from a book called The Art of Expressing the Human Body, which compiles notes and stories from Bruce Lee.

While the quote may come off as sounding high-minded or too hardcore to take too seriously, I think that it’s a powerful thing to remember during those times you find yourself stagnating. For me, anyway, it’s the sort of mental kick in the ass I occasionally need to push me forward during those moments.

On Being A Digital Craftsman

2013-11-25T00:00:00Z

I have, for some time now, considered myself to be a “craftsman” of code. In my Twitter bio, I’ve even been calling myself “A craftsman of fine digital goods”. By using that term, I intend to convey that I take a good measure of pride in the fact that on whatever project I’m currently working, I do my best to build interfaces that are a pleasure to use. That is, interfaces that help a user get their job done, and don’t get in the way by being showy or gimmicky. It also means that the code which I author to realize those interfaces is meticulous and rigorously written. Logically structured? Check. Namespaced to avoid scope collisions? Check. Thoroughly commented? Linted? Minimized for production? Check, check and check.

The use of the term “craft”—as well as its variants “hand crafted” and “craftsman”— arose in the collective consciousness of the web developer community perhaps 5 years ago as a synonym for “high quality”. Of course, I strive to produce the highest quality work I can in both my personal and my client’s projects, so I started to apply the word “craft” and its variants to my own work. I must admit that I hadn’t considered all the implications of what the word actually means.

I recently came across some posts1 which take critical views on the term and this particular application of it. They are The problems with ‘crafting’ code by Harry Roberts and I’m not a Craftsman by Mark Boulton. Together, they’ve made me consider more deeply the term which I’ve chosen as a convenient handle to represent the level of work I do and the pride with which I do it. Am I really accurately representing myself by calling myself a “craftsman”?

Among web development folks, in addition to denoting “quality”, I think the word “craft” and its variants also connote some gauzy, romantic notions of spending hours in a cozy workshop, whittling away at code to produce this perfect little, artisanal, one-of-a-kind handcrafted thing. Now that I consider the word in this light, it strikes me as sounding self-congratulatory, twee, and not really appropriate for the realities of the work we developers produce.

Most of my work day is spent doing contract development for clients. My clients expect that I deliver code that is efficient, fast, solid, robust, and scalable. They expect that I can turn their requirements into a functional product that adheres to those standards and do it reasonably quickly. While I’m fortunate to typically have a lot of latitude in my projects in which I can inject my own approaches methods and tastes, my clients couldn’t give a toss whether or not I “craft” my code. They only care that my code is clear, maintainable, and bulletproof.

While I’m not yet sure what the appropriate alternative to “craftsman” should be to describe development work of a certain quality, I do like the terminology used by Thomas Moser to describe himself and the people who work for his company.

…designers and builders of fine, solid wood furniture…

It’s earnest, unfussy and thoroughly appropriate for what they do. By using the adjectives fine and solid, it also connotes an easy, mature confidence in the idea that when you buy a piece of Thos. Moser furniture, you’ll enjoy using it, you’ll enjoy looking at it, and it will last you a lifetime.

So what is the most appropriate analogue to connote those ideas as they apply to development work? Am I a “designer and builder of fine, solid user interfaces”? Using the same adjectives is too facile and rings with a bit too much pretense to my ear. How about a “designer and builder of robust user interfaces”? Perhaps, but perhaps I should simply call myself a “designer and builder”, code the highest quality work that I can muster, and let the quality speak for itself.