Emily Curtin

: Blog

Riding across the zone under the full moon, we'd stop sometimes and stare out at the woods and fields around us, all alone in the middle of that huge seeming expanse. The experience is full of tensions. It is so beautiful and so peaceful that it really feels like paradise, but it's a paradise that you can't enjoy. You have to be careful about where you sit, what you eat, how you eat it, what you touch; which is — ironically — why it exists. The reason it's so beautiful and so peaceful is precisely because we can't consume it. Like, perhaps, all real paradises everywhere.

Moxie Marlinspike • Stories >> Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

Wed 29 May 2019
I had always been independent, proudly so. But what we think of as independence is still dependence on luck and gifts: the ability to rely on your own health and strength and mind, rather than leaning on the strength of those around you.

Blair Braverman • Lyme Disease Changed My Relationship with the Outdoors

Sat 25 May 2019
What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. You can tell it's still sort of crappy. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will catch up and close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass • Ira Glass on Storytelling

Wed 16 January 2019
Debugging Adventures: Spark Failed To Start

Mon 04 December 2017
Today after browsing the latest William Carlos Williams memes on Twitter, I figured it was time to actually do work.
```
cd ~/git/spark-bench
sbt test
```
only to be met with a mountain of red.
```
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class com.ibm.sparktc.sparkbench.testfixtures.SparkSessionProvider$
    at com.ibm …
```

Arthur Dow on the Amateur Trifecta

EXT: A SPOOKY GRAVEYARD

MARZIPAN: This place is perfect for my Intro to Photography class. 
    {lowers her guitar and pulls out a Polaroid camera from Hammerspace} 
    I've already hit the railroad tracks and an abandoned factory. 
    This will complete the amateur trifecta! 
    {looks through the view-finder briefly}

Taken, of …

Envy is a symptom of lack of appreciation of our own uniqueness and self-worth. Each of us has something to give that no one else has.

Elizabeth O'Connor • Our Many Selves

Sun 12 November 2017
“One of the early conversations we had was about how indie rock always does the unintentional thing, so that it doesn’t have an opportunity to fail,” Perron said. By this, he meant, say, a band in T-shirts, looking tough, standing in the back of a warehouse—authenticity as a euphemism for the absence of an idea. “But we wanted pop-level intention.”

“The best ideas are the ones that might turn out to be terrible ideas,” Clark said.

Nick Paumgarten • St. Vincent’s Cheeky, Sexy Rock

Tue 12 September 2017
Spark + Parquet In Depth

Wed 22 February 2017
Talking About "Tech"

Thu 01 December 2016

Saying "I work in tech" is uselessly broad. Tech is vast, multi-faceted, and multi-disciplined. When one group lays claim to the term "tech," they shut out all other facets of the technology industry. One of many consequences of this narrow thinking is the stressed out people posting over and over …
Letter to Hilde

Fri 11 November 2016

Hilde, I haven't even gotten a chance to hold you at all yet, and already I want to hold you a little tighter.

Beautiful girl. You got your mama's big, questioning brown eyes and your daddy's quick and open smile. And you got your smooth-as-silk dark chocolate skin from both …
On Not Moving To Canada

Wed 09 November 2016

Last night, while we as a nation elected Trump, we as a nation also collectively DDOS'd the Canadian immigration website, crashing it sometime in the late evening.

It's tempting, I'll admit. Turn away from the ugliness and get out dodge and go somewhere with less yelling. But I can't.

My …
"New Open Source: streamsx.cassandra"

Wed 12 October 2016

Woo! Just open-sourced a project I've been plugging away at for TWC, the I'm sure soon-to-be-world-famous streamsx.cassandra.

This is a sink operator for IBM Streams that enables writing Streams tuples directly to Cassandra in a fast and scalable manner.

It's a thin Java facade (some of the @notations required …
We didn’t go from faith to secularism in one fell swoop.... Certain ideas and practices made others not so much false as less vibrant or relevant. And so modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.

Andrew Sullivan • I Used to Be a Human Being

Wed 21 September 2016
"Didn't Build It Here: Moving to Jekyll"

Thu 21 July 2016

I've been through so many half-ass iterations on this poor website. Bless its heart.

I had more whole-ass implementations back in the day, starting with iWeb. Gotta love those skeuomorphic themes. Then, after realizing there were reasons why serious people didn't do iWeb, I moved to Wordpress and felt pretty …
2015 Year In Review

Fri 01 January 2016

In 2015, I graduated.

And I guess some other stuff happened too, but it didn't make quite the same impression.
Hockney Style Photo Collages and Composites

Sun 20 April 2014

Creating a custom image manipulator in the style of David Hockney collages using Java because I didn't know any better at the time.