A few days ago I took the kids to Canobie Lake amusement park. It's the closest one to Boston, and while it's not a serious roller coaster park I don't actually like roller coasters (and the kids aren't pushing for them yet). We went on a Wednesday, and going midweek was a good use of a vacation day: the lines are so much shorter.

I've done this a few times before, but this was my first time taking Nora (5y). Last year she was still highly dependent on naps, so we would have had a very short day. I did set expectations with the older two that bringing Nora might mean leaving early, but her stamina was impressive: we were there open (10:30am, though we got there ~10min earlier) to close (7pm). Very glad we brought her: she had so much fun, and her joy was infectious.

I had all three in bright colored broad brimmed hats with a strap under the chin. Normally when going out in the summer they can choose between hats or sunscreen, but for this trip I required the hats specifically because they are so much easier to pick out in a crowd.

When you have a lot of browser tabs open it can be very hard to tell them apart, especially if they're from the same site:

Since monitors are wide and websites are tall, we should very clearly put tabs on the side in a vertical stack. I was a heavy user of these in Firefox, and when I switched to Chrome I used their experimental --enable-vertical-tabs flag. When they removed it I wrote a post about how I love side tabs and switched back to Firefox:

White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep. The classic approach is a fan in a box, though in the past ten years people have mostly switched over to electronic ones. But a fan is really a great approach; you just need to put it to better use: have the fan clean the air.

Leading up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival the organizers asked Dudley Laufman to put together a band. He got together some folks he'd been playing for, and this was the start of the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra. They quickly became one of the leading bands of the contra dance revival, and in 1972 released a self-titled album (F-72-FW-3). I found a picture of the liner notes:

I couldn't find the text of these anywhere, so I had an LLM convert them to text and manually cleaned up the output:

Someone submitted my musical multitasking post to Hacker News, where Rochus Keller saw it and left some fascinating comments. He's developed a method of foot drumming, using midi organ pedals:

Dudley Laufman passed away last week at the age of 95. He's best known for his extensive contribution to the 1970s contra dance revival, and especially for fostering live music. Twenty years ago [1] I attended one of the "Wind in the Timothy" dances that he and his partner Jacqueline would host at their house in NH on fifth Saturdays, and it was clear he really enjoyed what he was doing.

As part of my project on understanding attitudes towards live music I thought I would read some of his own words. Most of his words were poems, though, and I generally prefer something more concrete and direct. He did co-write a 2009 book with Jacqueline, however, Traditional Barn Dances with Calls and Fiddling, which seemed more promising.