My little Mac app is now up to version 3.0.0, is up to 10 ratings in the Mac app store, and still has an average rating of 4.9! I’ve received lots of feedback about the app over the last few months, and the latest release is better than ever!

Brian, Charlie and I have now published our thoughts on the bottom 80 of Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 best albums of all time. Check it out!

This is my assessment of the Democratic candidates for the US presidency, following the debates on the evening of 14 Jan 2020.

As users of computers, do we really want our experiences to be so carefully and intentionally and restrictively designed for us?

I want to take a moment to offer up a prayer – not to God, but to all of us – for a more integral sense of who we are in the new year.

Some of the albums in the latest batch flew like eagles, while others sank like stones. Check out our latest multi-generational assessments of the top 500 albums of all time.

I’ve been releasing new and improved versions of Notenik fairly regularly over the last couple of months, and it’s now up to 2.2.0 in the Mac App Store, with 2.3.0 on the way.

As I write this, my little app now has 7 ratings in the store, and an average rating of 4.9.

I’ve received emails about the app from a couple of people I’ve never met before — one user in Australia, and another in Finland! Nice to know that my software can be used around the globe.

Brett Terpstra was nice enough to mention my app in one of his recent blog posts, calling it “intriguing.”

But there’s still more to do, and continuing work on Notenik keeps me busy doing something I enjoy.

If you have a Mac, and haven’t yet checked it out, then I encourage you to give it a whirl!

See Notenik.net for details.

Published on The Practical Utopian, and on Medium, and emailed to subscribers in The Practopian Perspective Issue 40.

A couple of friends/relatives of mine are taking a trip through Rolling Stone’s list of the top 500 albums of all time, and commenting on each as we work our way up the list, starting with #500. We represent three different generations of listeners, and each brings his own unique perspective to this fascinating musical journey. See how far we’ve gotten and follow along. You might even discover some new old music worth a listen or two!

Implemented a few additional fixes and minor enhancements. Changed scripted sorting so that fields whose labels begin with “seq” will be treated as sequence fields, meaning that numbers will sort in numeric sequence. Added a basic Textile parser that, while far from complete, is good enough for my needs, since I still use Textile on ReasonToRock.com.

This release includes the following changes:

• Enhanced logic for incrementing the Seq field;

• Added a dash/minus sign as a new variable modifier that can be used after the letter ‘o’ to trim the opening and closing paragraph tags from the HTML generated from the Markdown source;

• Added special treatment forr the Artist field, to allow it to be used in place of Author when sorting by Author;

• Added an option to the Template file to allow a long text field to be specified by placing ‘’ as the value for for a field specified in the template file;

• Additional refinements, including fixing a bug that sometimes ignored some variants of a newline character sequence when loading a Note from disk.

See Notenik.net for the updated User Guide and other documentation.

“Rejiggering Our Religion” published via email in The Practopian Perspective.

This was a focused maintenance release designed to prevent the user from inadvertently specifying an existing folder as the repository for a new Notenik Collection.

This release includes the following changes:

• Improved the performance of Notenik when loading a new Collection (especially a large one);
• The Work Type field now provides a drop-down menu from which an appropriate choice can be made;
• A few minor bug fixes and improvements;
• Recording of PSTextMerge/TDF Czar style scripts.

See the latest version of the User Guide on Notenik.net.

I was one of the 15,000 people who gathered under the Space Needle yesterday to hear Warren speak. There were several things about her that impressed me.

• She emphasized the need for structural change, starting with getting big money out of politics. This just makes so much sense because, without it, we’ll soon be right back where we are now.

• She talked about the need for a wealth tax. This really clicked for me yesterday for the first time. I got it. People don’t like income tax, because everyone has income, and no one wants to lose any of it to taxation. On the other hand, not everyone has wealth — especially as Warren defines it, above $50 million. So it will be easier to get voters to accept a new wealth tax than increases in income tax.

• As part of her opening origin story, she talked a lot about her “much older” brothers. It wasn’t until I was riding home on the bus afterwards that I realized how smart this was, because it makes her sound much younger than her 70 years.

All in all, she seems like a smart policy person who genuinely has our country’s best interests at heart. but also a smart campaigner.

This release includes the following changes:

• One or more files can now be attached to each Note;
• Tags Export Preferences added, to allow tailoring of which Notes are included in an export, and which tags are included on those Notes;
• A few miscellaneous improvements;
• Playback of PSTextMerge/TDF Czar style scripts.

This last item is a big one. It means that the Notenik.net site is now entirely generated by this latest version of Notenik writtein in Swift.

See the latest version of the User Guide on Notenik.net.

When it comes to religion, the main question for most people is whether to keep the one we were raised with, or to lose it altogether.

But now I’m starting to wonder whether, instead of losing my religion altogether, it might not be better just to rejigger it a bit?

No matter what your age or orientation, it’s hard to gainsay the significance of humankind’s first trip through space to set foot on a celestial body other than our birth planet.

This release includes the following changes:

• Tokenized the Tags Field on the Edit Screen;
• Added Split Tags Export to the File Menu;
• Added ‘Standardize Dates to YMD’ to the Collection Menu
• A few miscellaneous improvements;

See the latest version of the User Guide on Notenik.net.

By now I’m sure you’ve heard of Trump’s recent attacks on four Democratic congressional representatives, all women of color, urging them to “go back … to the crime-infested places from which they came.” How should Democrats respond? Here are the sorts of positions I’d like to hear them articulate.

I’m not quite as old as Biden, and I’ve never served in public office, but I can still share his nostalgia for seemingly simpler times when our political leaders displayed some sort of respect for each other, even when they disagreed over issues of state.

Just reactivated my micro.blog account at hbowie.micro.blog, and set up cross-posting to Twitter (@herbbowie) and my Facebook Practopians page. Happy to be part of the Micro.blog community and to join those supporting the open web!

No wonder zombie movies have been popular of late: so many of us feel like increasingly isolated survivors having to fight off forces that we thought were previously vanquished and long buried, forces that seem to be arising all around us, springing at us from all sides.

I now have an application called Notenik listed in the Mac App Store!

I’d been doing some regular programming in Java over the past couple of decades, but decided this year to bite the bullet and try to learn Swift, Apple’s latest development language, and chose the Mac as my first target platform. It’s been quite an adventure to create a full-fledged Mac App in a new language, but I’m happy to report that I’ve finally crossed the goal line! More improvements to come, but I believe that version 1.0 is quite serviceable. And it’s free!

We all sort of know the problems, right? Monopolies. Lock-in. Stream addiction. Reality bubbles. Billionaires seeking market dominance. All other values taking a back seat to growth. I don’t think I need to elaborate. If you’re reading this, then you’re probably well aware of all these concerns.

Over the many years since the receipt of my Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Michigan, I have probably spent more rewarding hours reading detective stories than any other form of fiction.

Right now Democrats are focused primarily on two things happening in 2020: 1. Beating Trump; 2. Regaining control of the Senate. These would both be great accomplishments for the party, and for the winning candidates. But for the country, not so much.