A year ago I broke my laptop screen, and took the opportunity to build something I've always wanted: a monitor that folds vertically so I don't have to bend my neck:

A few months ago my cracked-screen laptop finished dying, and I got a new one. I use the stacked monitor a lot less now, since for quick things the built-in monitor is much more handy. But it's still something I want when traveling, where I might be working on the laptop for a significant time.

I originally used quite a lot of velcro on my laptop:

A while ago I played around with manually generating iCal feeds for events, encoding the BIDA's regular schedule (1st and 3rd Sundays back then, with a more complex pattern for family dances and open bands) as in a machine-readable format. This was a fun project, but it didn't work very well: it didn't have any way to handle cancellations, special events, or other one-off adjustments to the schedule.

Still, having events automatically show up on calendars is great, and after Jeff Keller asked I decided to put something together.

Here's the feed: bidadance.org/events.ics.

I love the Burren. It hosts something like seven weekly sessions in a range of styles and the back room has hosted many great acts including many of my friends. It's a key space in the Boston folk scene, and it's under threat from developers who want to tear it down.

But after thinking it through, and noting that this puts me on the other side from many of my friends, I think the project should go ahead. The proposal isn't to tear down paradise to put up a parking lot, it's to put up 500+ apartments (studio, 1br, 2br, 3br), 100+ of them limited to people below income thresholds ('affordable'). We're in the middle of a housing crisis, where instead of letting people build up to meet demand we've been competing with each other to bid up the apartments that do exist. Rising rent has been really hard on our communities, folk scene included. Of my Cambridge/Somerville folkie friends from, say, fifteen years ago, the majority of folks still in the general area have been priced out, to Vermont, Maine, and Western Mass. While spaces to make music are a key component of a thriving community, housing is even more critical.

We've been keeping attendance statistics for BIDA since 2011, and looking at the online chart I noticed some patterns in the moving average that looked seasonal:

How seasonal is it?

I think of a standard contra dance as running 8pm-11pm: three hours is a nice amount of time for dancing, and 8pm is late enough that dinner isn't rushed. Looking over the 136 regular Free Raisins dances from 2010 to 2019 matches my impression: 85% were 3hr, 62% started at 8pm, and 51% did both.

I think this is out of date, however, and dances now tend to be earlier, shorter, or both. For example, in the Boston area the regular dances are:

I make breakfast for the kids most mornings, and one thing I didn't realize before I started playing with an air quality monitor was how much this puts smoke in the air. It's not like cooking Naan or searing meat where if I don't put a fan in the window the smoke alarm will go off, but apparently it's quite a lot of particles: