mdlbear | Done since 20180114Su (Reply)

The week started out with an excellent dinner at Gordon's on Blueberry Hill, in honor of N's birthday. Almost all of my spare "project" time was taken up with readings in category theory and functional programming, mostly Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski. I definitely can't claim to have understood the whole thing, but there's a lot of fun (if somewhat mind-boggling) stuff in there -- I'll write about it at some point.

Aside from the reading and a couple of very short programs, almost the only thing that got done off my new schedule was guitar practice. But I did do that, quite consistently; I've been doing about half an hour per day, in two chunks to build up my calluses.

Well, ok; I did write a haiku:

Wanting poetry
I try to write a haiku
But nothing comes out.

I've been hanging out a little on Genius.com, which is all about annotating song lyrics; I've started putting in some of the songs on CC&S. (One of the trivial programming projects was the one-liner that converts songs from my lyrics format to plain text without chords. See Monday's notes.)

We have acquired a new house cleaner -- the old one, T, had to quit because she turned out to be allergic to our cats. T' (their names start with the same letter) is a keeper.

I still haven't connected with a therapist. That's been on my list for at least three weeks now. I did find the email I used last time; I don't have an email address for the one I want to contact this time, but I can either plug it into a web form or use it to script a phone call. Ugh!

Notes & links:

0114Su
% awake 3ish; got back to sleep. nightmares.
* up 6ish; ;
* Guitar: Gentle Arms of Eden, The River, some others.
* 10ish go with N; shopping while she picks up kids
* afternoon: house cleaner interviews
-> had time for coffee and donuts, and some category theory, while waiting
@ Category Theory and Declarative Programming | Bartosz Milewski
" there is a curious unexplained duality in the way we can describe the laws of
physics. We can use the local picture, in which things happen sequentially and in
small increments. Or we can use the global picture, where we declare the initial
and final conditions, and everything in between just follows. "
" ... the Functional Reactive Programming approach to user interaction. Instead of
writing separate handlers for every possible user action, all having access to some
shared mutable state, FRP treats external events as an infinite list, and applies a
series of transformations to it. "
* 4:30 dinner at Gordon's for N's birthday.
% a little bit overstuffed.

0115Mo Martin Luther King Day
* up 5:30; W=203.2;
" QOTD: Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it
concentrates his mind wonderfully. " -- Samuel Johnson. The link has details.
* B1S1 add lyrics on Genius. Some confusion; their documentation and UI both suck.
-> it would be useful to have lyrics posted both with and without chords
Meanwhile, however, the following one-liner mostly works:
perl -p -e 's/\\\\|\\ |\\(begin|end){[^}]*}|\\vfill|(\[[\\0-9A-Za-z ;,()]*\])//g'
* B1S3 a little guitar, in the bedroom with Plink.
* more house-cleaner interviews
@ The Persian Always Meows Twice (A Cat Groomer Mystery) - Eileen Watkins ([The Mad Filkentist])
% 8:30ish sleepy

0116Tu
* up 6:30; W=203.6;
@ How to Get Rich Trading Bitcoin - I, Cringely buy when it goes down 20%, sell
when it goes up 20%. Takes advantage of volatility and the general upward trend.
* B1S1 guitar: Where the Heart Is, The Stolen Child, When the Magic Died
* forked html-helper-mode on github (from emacsattic)
* looking at code in XMonad
@ The Emacsmirror!
* 2pm (N) leave to go down to Lynnwood and pick up file cabinet
-> spoke to Justin, manager of the Lynnwood store. N can pick up; they'll give me a
courtesy call to verify.
* 3:45 Colleen UNW
: Bronx has discovered how to open the front of the laser printer.
* Finally tracked down the bedpad that Colleen likes: it's a MIP Aurorra, SKU 1103/DB.
Which is a size they don't make anymore, apparently (the 1102 is 34x36, 1108 is 34x54,
and the one we have is 34x38). The web store only sells to institutions in Canada,
and has a minimum order of CA$200. :P
* B2 guitar - Mary Ellen Carter, When I Go.
* 15min: cleared off and folded up the card table, to make room for the file cabinet.
<- Wanting poetry/I try to write a haiku/But nothing comes out.
: never did make up a menu for this week. Grabbed tortellini, beef and chicken, but...
. Resume/portfolio
x Plugins | LinkedIn Developer Network
* add to pubs: Automatic Discovery and Execution of Personal Applications
from Shared IO Devices, Bradley Rhodes, Sergey Chemishkian, Edward
L. Schwartz, Stephen Savitzky and Haixia Yu, in 2010 7th IEEE Consumer
Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), Jan 9-12 2010.
: N brought Anthony's fish and chips back for herself, me and C. Also cinabons

0117We
* up 5am; W=203.6;
& 8:15 took garbage cans up to street -- forgot last night. :(
~ B1S1 reading Monads Categorically | Bartosz Milewski's Programming Cafe and the related
paper by Eugenio Moggi, "Notions of computation and monads", which basically
introduced category theory and monads into the theory of computation.
* 9ish B1S2 guitar; Where the Heart Is (off-book, then checked), misc. noodling
* B1S3 update Raven, Blackroot.
* 2:15 or so (new housekeeper) T' - short days until her other boss can shift
schedule around, then 12:15-6 Tuesdays
~ 5pm music lesson -> actually, N' is out of town. We went to the library so that N and
g could get library cards.
: power glitch -- distributed lanterns.

0118Th
* up 5am; W=203.6
@ An Introduction to Tor on Chrome OS - OMG! Chrome!
& walked with g to the (school) bus stop.
* 8:45 guitar - continuous Travis-picking noodle in G, D, E, A, etc. A little practice
with B7 and barre chords. I'm really weak in E.
* 9am j math DBA
* fired up torbrowser; updated.
* Mounted the Seagate USB drive; it's backups from 2012. Probably worthwhile
investigating. There has certainly been lossage in the Ricoh backups; maybe others.
In any case, it's ext3, so not useful as a replacement for the Mac backup drive.
& helped N get her new phone working.
* measured garage to find out distance from front to window -> 10'
* ordered plastic-over-frame greenhouse for next to garage.
@ Haskell/Category theory - Wikibooks, open books for an open world
$ H 1029.27 from UB checking to Whidbey Handy Home Helper. trans ID a0hq8dwd
-> I note that my credit score has improved; now into the "very good" range.
@ Curry–Howard correspondence - Wikipedia
Haskell/The Curry–Howard isomorphism the implication A -> B is isomorphic to the
type A -> B, where an inhabited type counts as True. Tuples are products are
conjunctions; unions are sums are disjunctions. This is bizarre. But not as bizarre
as a zipper being the derivative of the underlying type.
-> I'm not getting nearly all of this stuff, but it's fun to read.
& caught Brooklyn eating a piece of thread from C's spool rack. Put a pillowcase over
it, held on by binder clips.

0119Fr
* Up 5; W=202.8;
* B1S1 guitar - on time for once. Bits of Desolation Row, QV (G and C), Cap and Bells
% It's really easy for me to _think_ I'm learning something (e.g. category theory) when
all I'm doing is saying the words in my head without understanding their meaning.
* 11am j's swimming lesson - I'm driving because of N's foot.
* gave N the blue walker; will help her keep her balance and take more weight off foot
* noonish: another call from idiots at OnStar.
@ nLab
" a wiki-lab for collaborative work on Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy...insofar
as these subjects are usefully treated with tools and notions of category theory or
higher category theory. "
# remembering I sent an email query to a therapist, but apparently it was via the
Psychology Today listing and I didn't save it. *headdesk*
-> no, I used email. I was able to find it by searching for "dysthymia". Yay?
& Took kids to ferry - N was in no shape to do it.
% very mentally fragile after making dinner. Don't know what the problem is.
@ hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf: Bartosz Milewski's 'Category Theory for Programmers'
unofficial PDF and LaTeX source
& 15min: post-update hook for nova:/vv/mm/books.git. Dead simple.
# trying to do things when I think of them rather than putting them on hold. Still
really hard, and I fail more often than not.

0120Sa
* Up 6:15; W=201.6;
* T' coming for cleaning
* go to town and get cash - BECU ATM in Rite Aid. Pick up pantsu as well. Sizeable
shopping list by the time I got there.
* 11:30ish guitar. About 20min
* Merged Arne's pull request in MakeStuff. Discovered that the last four commits on
Cygnus had been pushed to dreamhost, but not github. Oops! Fortunately, I had the
presence of mind to realize that a simple merge would still work and allow the merged
history to be pushed to both places. Whew! I'm so used to a rebasing workflow that
I'd forgotten how easy -- and forgiving -- git makes merges.
* UT moved dated files, and a few others, to Secret. Not all are tax-relevant, not all
are in the right place, and not everything relevant has been moved, but it's a start.
@ Categories / Building a strong community - GitHub Help
@ drewrwilson/toolsforactivism: growing list of digital tools for activism things
(via GitHub: Collection: Social Impact)
@ OpenGovernment
@ GitHub: Collection: Music
@ Open Source Guides | Learn how to launch and grow your project.
* second guitar session around 5:30pm.
* installed tor brower on raven -- signature wouldn't verify when torbrowser-launcher
tried to download it, so downloaded it straight from tor and installed it locally.
* down 10pm -- at least, that's when we headed for the bedroom. So earlier than usual.
& both kittens - they were very well-behaved.