2022#04 Readings
5 minutes read | 926 words by Ruben BerenguelRIP Michael (originally Marvin) Lee Aday, Meat Loaf 🤘
Meat Loaf, one of my favourite singers died on Thursday, rumours say because of COVID. He was also an anti-vaxxer (seems, hadn’t seen him say anything about it). It doesn’t take me from having enjoyed his music, and saddened I won’t get to see him live. I was in London for the premiere of Jim Steinman’s musical Bat out of Hell, which is the closest I’d have been to it. Below some interesting links and articles from The Guardian.
- Gallery of Meat Loaf pictures (The Guardian)
- Humorous: Meat Loaf explains what he won’t do for love
- Some comments from this Hacker News Thread:
Unbelievable energy. I saw a gig in 1988, when I was working as a sound and lighting engineer at a big UK venue. I don’t like Meatloaf’s music much. But of the many shows I worked, that one sticks in my mind. It was billed as 1 hour 20 mins. At the “end” he said a big goodnight! Then the crowd chanted for the encore. He did another two songs and exited stage. Then the crowd chanted some more. He came back. Two encores. Three. Four! It was past two hours. The venue staff and stage crew were getting nervous and tired. The manager said stay with it, I’m authorised to pay you double overtime. Meatloaf came back on, and that’s when the show really started. Like he’d been holding back on half energy so far. Maybe it went to three hours. No wonder the poor guys back gave up, sounds like he died from giving it everything. I’ve never seen such a generous performer.
Saw him live in the 90-ies, was amazing and he had a great band. During the show he climbed on one of the big monitor speakers on the stage without thinking about how to get down again. A roadie had to help him out… I mean he was already a middle aged man at that point and no Eddie Vedder anymore…
I don’t always listen to Meatloaf. But when I do, so do the neighbors
Gruyère and Comté: Two of a Kind
I had always thought this was the case (I’ve been to Romans in the Comté region and to the Vaud area in the Gruyère region) but had been to lazy to check. They are my favourite cheeses by far.
Scaling Apache Druid for Real-Time Cloud Analytics at Confluent
This is an exceptional post about using Druid, with scaling and speed up tricks “from the trenches”. And Confluent’s trenches are large.
📚 The Art of Leadership
By Michael Lopp (aka Rands). Less known than his other management book, Managing Humans. I found it excellent, full of useful tips for managers at all levels. It starts with the line manager role and progresses until executive, following his learnings as he progressed. Next, Managing Humans, 4th edition.
🔊 Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants
Years ago I read the first chapter of this (free blurb somewhere) and marked it as “want to read”. Couldn’t easily find it available, and eventually forgot. My surprise when I found it’s not only on Kindle, but also as an exceptionally narrated Audible. There are chemical formulas and compounds, but it’s the color comentary what makes it cracking. Like these four quotes:
Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe.
It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers […]
For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
Their guess turned out to be right, but one is reminded of E. T. Bell’s remark that the great vice of the Greeks was not sodomy but extrapolation.
Apache Druid: Interactive Analytics at Scale
Some details on using Druid on Kubernetes and reading from Kafka. A bit light, but that’s not bad per se.
The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle
I jokingly said to my partner that we should get one (our house is large and the bedroom gets cold at night) some weeks ago. I’m more convinced now.
How to Become Your Own Career Coach
The coach-yourself questions in this article seem promising.
Improve Apache Spark performance with the S3 magic committer
This looks like magic! Time to enable it.
typhoon-orchestrator
We have a similar system (write YAML, get Airflow DAGs) we in the process of open-sourcing.
🐦 Some posters that appeared on Tokyo subways from 1976 to 1982
They are extremely whimsical.
