Done Since 2018-12-09

[mdlbear]

An interesting week. Parts of it were good. The high point was definitely my Younger Daughter's wedding on Thursday. Another good part was N coming up to visit Friday, to stay through Christmas. I gave her one of my (in)famous cutting boards -- she'd asked for it. She'd also requested a copy of my music collection. It fits on a (128GB) thumb drive, but we both then forgot about it. I'll have to mail it.

Also on the good side was Desti's vet appointment to get her sutures out; the vet said she's healing well.

A somewhat mixed part was figuring out how to copy a long-out-of-print LP onto disk. For some reason "line out" on the player wasn't working; fortunately the headphone jack was. Mixed, because I then discovered that my CD-burning scripts were long out of date and suffering from severe bit-rot. I will probably make CDs via the GUI and fix the scripts later.

Also in between was a little singing (good) and not enough blog posts (not so good). Blarg.

The low point was probably having my last singing lesson on Tuesday night -- I just can't justify the cost at this point. It had some competition from a wide range of configuration struggles with the local network and its devices. Struggles are still continuing -- I ended up having to hard-reset the router I've been using as a range extender. It turns out that range-extending WiFi is an insufficiently-solved Problem.

Other lows included a couple of depressed episodes. I think. It' hard for me to sort that stuff out.

Anyway, a week.

Notes & links:

1209Su
  * up 6:40; W=201, S=6:03;
  & sysadmin:  shutdown/restart nova to re-enable /mirror; thrash around lp and eventually
    un-pause it; there doesn't seem to be a good way of doing this.
  @ Beyond Burnout: Mental Health and Neurodiversity in Engineering | USENIX
    OSMI Home :: Open Sourcing Mental Illness - Changing
    how we talk about mental health in the tech community - Stronger Than Fear
  @ Lantern (software) - Wikipedia "is a free and open-source peer-to-peer internet
    censorship circumvention tool..."
  @ Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto's Nouveau Riche female journalist on a
    crypto-currency cruise.
  * sorting the songbooks on the floor.  C wanted me to clear the space in front of the
    stereo, and -is-_has been_ also expecting me to move my office into the cats' room.
    (Of course, she hasn't mentioned that in months, if ever.)
  @ Thread by @ByfordPoet: "I am in tears. I went to the wiki entry for female
    photographers (“Women photographers”) looking for information on the photographer
    Julia Margaret Cameron […]" (ysabetwordsmith)
  @ Facebook: Get back in the closet! [The Mad Filkentist]
  * Singing:  Ship of Stone, Ripple, Rambling Silver Rose.

1210Mo
  * up 5:30ish; W=201.8, S=5:54; shower
  ~ looking for an AV or dual RCA cable and the box of audio adapters, both of which I am
    _certain_ are in the house (or garage) somewhere.  Not good for my back.
    -> AV cable underneath the Blu-ray player.  Still no sign of audio adapters.
  * second trip to the garage found the wrapping paper.
  % 2:40 in pretty bad shape emotionally; not sure why
  * 2:45 track down Desti and get moving.
  * 3:20 Destra SWAC suture removal out of house by 3
    -> vet said that she's doing fine.
  ~ made a Heifer donation, but somehow didn't see the honor card page.
  * called Mom
  @ Me Too! – You Had Me At EHLO…

1211Tu
  * up 5:50; W=199.8, S=6:44;
  @ Letting neural networks be weird • Neural networks + Kittens = !!! (firecat)
    karpathy/char-rnn: Multi-layer Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM, GRU, RNN) for
    character-level language models in Torch
  @ greywash | State of the
    Migration: On fannish archival catastrophes, and what happens next (ysabetwordsmith)
    saw this someplace else last week, but apparently didn't log it.
    apricops: It’s quite likely no... coincidence that that most ‘mismanaged’ and
    least profitable social media site is also the one that turned out to be most amenable
    to the formation of actual communities
    Blue Ruiner — greywash: So the original post about the greymask...
    tumblr_backup.py Tumblr backup script,
    originally from Greymask—original post is MIA as of 2018/12/03.
    pangodillo | What Dreamwidth lacks tags as "whisperspace"
  @ The Survival Guide for Transgender Teens Is Here — And It Should Be on Every
    Bookshelf - them. (ysabetwordsmith)
    Trans Teen Survival Guide | IndieBound.org
  : T' called - downed power line - she'll call PSE and I'll pick her up
  * 11:40 C Dr. Rochier
  x 10:30 Whidbey Health Surgical Care - Dr. Miller  Arrive 10:15, so leave 9:30
  @ Rewire Your Burned-Out Brain | Psychology Today 
    " To get the dopamine-pleasure response from challenges achieved, you’ll need to plan
      for your brain to experience frequent recognition (feedback awareness) of
      incremental progress. The choices of what you set as a goal should be guided by
      their desirability and the goal’s suitability to be broken down into clear
      segments. "
  @ you feel like shit
    " This game guides you through a series of questions that help you practice self
      care. " - looks like an(other) expanded version of Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay...
  $ HSX: $20.86 from CD Baby.
  * last singing lesson.  Bittersweet, but we'll keep in touch.  Ship of Stone.
  @ pluspora diaspora pod for G+ refugees

1212We
  * up 5:50; W=200.8, S=6:21;
  @ Lessons in Vendor Lock-in: Shaving | Linux Journal
  * worked through Chapter 9 (out of 14) of the Rails tutorial
  @ What’s All This About Journaling? - The New York Times
    " Techies can take heart in knowing that, contrary to the romantic ideal, typing out
      journal entries on a laptop or even on a phone can yield effects that are just as
      positive, particularly if it’s more comfortable and convenient for you. The point is
      simply to get started. "
  * run fix on nova:/vv/mm/audio; update usb stick.
    should have used --modify-window=1
  * record Danny Kaye album.  Line out on the player doesn't appear to work; used the
    headphone output.  Slightly weird, but okay.  Disk is in pristine shape.
  * wrap wedding presents
  * download G+ content -> google-takeout-20181213T041212Z-001.zip
  % C.meltdown -> me.meltdown
  : 11:36 - 1:03 power failure (times from PSE email) Noticed because of the CPAP; took me
    a while to wake up enough to notice that the problem wasn't the device.

1213Th
  * up 5:50ish; W=200, S=5:24;
  * thumb drive (pants pocket), ferry reservation (shirt pocket)
  * V coming around 7am
  * Presents, flowers
  @ Gilbert & Sullivan & Danny Kaye (1949 Album) - YouTube
  * 9am  28 min to terminal, so leave 9am
  * 10:15 Ferry conf#  2038-1951-18 res# 20164258 arrive 30-45min before = 9:30-9:45
  * 11am Emmy and Martin's Wedding!
    Thursday, December 13, 2018 Ichikawa in Port Townsend.
  * 2pm Ferry conf# 2038-1951-18 res# 20164262 arrive 30-45min before = 1:15-1:30
  : ping fron Kahn Academy asking for interview time-slots.
  @ How To Switch Engineering Jobs—And Actually Like Your New Role - AngelList
  * Island Drug robo-call; called back and ordered CPAP filters, mask cushion
  @ 13 of the Best Bottom Shelf, Cheap Bourbons, Blind-Tasted and Ranked
    2. Benchmark Old No. 8  1. Very Old Barton (90 proof)
  @ 10 of the Best Bottom Shelf, Cheap Gins, Blind-Tasted and Ranked
    10. New Amsterdam...  3. Gilbey’s  2. Mr. Boston English Market  1. Gordon’s
    Gordon's is by far the best of the lot.
  * move UPS from desk (where it was only being used for the mac and the monitor)
    to the bedroom for use with the CPAP.  Decent outlet expanders are in short supply.

1214Fr
  * up 6am; W=200, S=7:29; cat boxes
  @ De-facto closed source: the case for understandable software (LWN)
  @ n2n – ntop p2p vpn
  @ AWS Announces Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Amazon Managed Blockchain
    " unlike the ledgers in common blockchain frameworks, Amazon QLDB doesn’t require
      distributed consensus, so it can execute two to three times as many transactions in
      the same time as common blockchain frameworks. "
  : The track/album/concert/ make targets are in terrible shape.  Way too much has
    changed.  Problem.  And it never would have been all that good for ripping LPs.
  * 3pm MAC clinic
  % 3:30 sleepy
  : shopping
  * litter boxen
  : a couple of power glitches in the evening.
  * N coming up; will stay through Xmas.
    -> 9pm ferry.  Met her on the dock to wrangle luggage.  A couple of sketchy spots on
       the drive out due to power outages, including the Ken's Korner signal.

1215Sa
  * Up 5:30; S=6:02;
  : Rails is being exasperating.
  : both extenders are supposedly working now.  Believe it tomorrow.
  & making lists on slack with N.  Apartment, house, business

Comments

[alatefeline]

*hugs offered*

So glad for you that you've got N for a bit! And that Desti is doing okay!

I'm sorry to hear about the singing lessons. Those have been a Good Thing for awhile and it's a shame that you can't afford the price tag right now.

Take care, fuzzy bear.

[mdlbear]

Thanks! I'll try.

[alatefeline]

<3

[kengr]

You sure that was a line out on the turntable? Most older ones have a weaker output that's intended to hook to a dedicated "phono" connector on the amp that runs the signal thru a pre-amp.

Me, I solved that by getting a USB turntable. Turns out the software for using the USB wasn't that hot, but it also had line-out connectors, so it was easy enough to hook to the PC and use Audacity.

Gotta rip my old filk tapes one of these days.

[mdlbear]

It's not a turntable, it's a combination turntable, cassette player, CD player, and FM radio in a vaguely steampunk-looking wooden case.

There's a pair of RCA jacks on the back labeled "Line Out".

[kengr]

Ah. Then my guess is that either the jacks are busted, or the "brilliant" designer didn't think anybody would need to do line out from the turntable. I've seen stranger design decisions.

[mdlbear]

They don't work for the radio or CD player, either. Either they're broken (why _both_ jacks, though) or they're just for show. Or there's a hidden switch.

[kengr]

Guess it's time to do an online search for a manual. And a service manual as well.

If it's a switch, does the player have a "remote" or "aux" selection on the selector knob/switch?

There's one other *remote* possibility. They may be mislabeled line in jacks. Not very likely, but given some stupidities I've seen, it's worth checking.

[mdlbear]

Not really that important. I don't expect to be doing this very often; if I were, I'd get a real turntable (possibly USB unless I intended to go pro). Not worth the trouble for a one-off.

[patoadam]

Congratulations to Younger Daughter and her lucky spouse!

[amaebi]

*gentle pawpat*

[mdlbear]

Thanks!

Sound gear

[markc1957]

And it's fare thee well, all vestige of harmony, all of your sound gear is singing.

[freyjaw]

{hug} Conga-rats on marrying off the YD!

Glad Desti is well. We have a new shelter kitten named Achilles, and he is a good, smart, well-socialized baby! He's integrated into the house well except for Honor still grumping about it. Mac is his best buddy and he and Nimitz get along well. Achilles likes people food so we have to defend our food.

I had singing lessons for credit in college and they were fun. Sorry yours are ending as I know you liked them so much.

We miss you. If you're ever in SoCal, come see us! We have a guest room, and so does Chris' cousin across the street. Couldn't afford SF anymore so we moved to the Inland Empire which we can afford. Bought a nice house outright.

[mdlbear]

Thanks! And if you're ever up this way...