mdlbear | Done Since 2019-02-10 (Reply)

There is sadness this week, as NASA's Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to End. Oppy's last transmission amounted to “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”. Several songs have already been written; I'll almost certainly try to write one of my own. Probably from Oppy's POV; I seem to enjoy anthropomorphizing AIs and other inanimate objects.

Not a whole lot has been getting done this week. I did manage to run some errands Thursday and Friday, with the car on the street. Pulled back into the driveway Friday after things were done, anticipating that the predicted good weather would make it possible to get up again the next time I need to. Fingers crossed.

I started working on the potential writing (tutorials) gig -- we'll see whether $editor likes my proposal. Not many notes Friday and Saturday as a result. Not sure I'm working fast enough. That remains to be seen; it's going slower than I'd like but that may just be because I'm working on the outline.

If you're into music at all, you'll get a kick out of (Gimme Some of That) Ol' Atonal Music - YouTube and Twelve Tones - YouTube (via ysabetwordsmith).

And I was highly amused to find someone seriously advocating the use of RFC 1149, some 18 years after I wrote a song about it.

Notes & links:

0910Su
* up 6:30ish; W=197, S=7.03; shower, cat boxes
: in yet another household mystery, the label-maker has vanished from the kitchen area`
@ Twelve Tones - YouTube (via comment in (Gimme Some of That) Ol' Atonal Music - YouTube (ysabetwordsmith))
@ Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy earliest known date 1854
@ carolxdanvers: [internet likened to Faerie] (freshbakedlady | Customer
Service Fairy Tales)
cf: True Names by Vernor Vinge and "The World Inside the Crystal" by me
: E called to check up on me. (She'd called C earlier.)
: snow has started again.
@ Google has quietly dropped ban on personally identifiable web tracking

0211Mo
* Up 6ish; S=5:34;
: Should have bought coffee Thursday. I'm going to have to switch to tea.
overnight from $A? -> :P they're not promising anything before Thursday.
~ L wants to borrow Molly -> maybe later in the week
* installed Starlight's new keyboard. Piece of cake, though I did have to invoke
YouTube to clarify a couple of things.
: mail wasn't delivered today (can tell because outgoing wasn't picked up)
Cecil has clearly been around; tracks into shed and under L's car among other places

0212Tu Darwin Day
* Up 6am; W=198.6, S=6:50;
x 11:20 C Dr. Rochier -> cancelled yesterday
@ Darwin Day - Wikipedia
@ In the Era of Electronic Warfare, Bring Back Pigeons (LWN)
" Considering the storage capacity of microSD memory cards, a pigeon’s organic
characteristics provide front line forces a relatively clandestine mean to transport
gigabytes of video, voice, or still imagery and documentation over considerable
distance with zero electromagnetic emissions or obvious detectability to
radar. These decidedly low-technology options prove difficult to detect and track. "
@ Get started with Org mode without Emacs | Opensource.com vim and atom plugins
@ BeyondCorp - Enterprise Security | Google Cloud end-to-end; no firewall, no VPN.
based on endpoint identity. Cool! At this point, probably useless for anything but
the google cloud, but that could change.
@ Asexual Fairy Tales by Elizabeth Hopkinson — Kickstarter (ysabetwordsmith)
* replied to ES's email -- I may very well have found myself a writing gig.
@ GitHub - cferdinandi/ebook-boilerplate: A lightweight boilerplate for self-publishing
ebooks with markdown and command line. - boilerplate not build system; can be
mined for ideas but could easily be reimplemented with make.
@ Google’s Waymo risks repeating Silicon Valley’s most famous blunder | Ars

0213We
* Up 5:30ish; S=6:34;
: C just coming back to bed. An Ensure seemed to help
@ LBRY - Content Freedom sort of blockchain-based DNS
Art in the Internet Age: An Introduction to LBRY
* put out some diatomaceous earth in the kitchen.
@ NASA's Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to End
" The Opportunity rover stopped communicating with Earth when a severe Mars-wide dust
storm blanketed its location in June 2018. After more than a thousand commands to
restore contact, engineers in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) made their last attempt to revive Opportunity Tuesday,
to no avail. The solar-powered rover's final communication was received June 10. "
Opportunity, NASA’s record-setting Mars rover, is declared dead after 15 years
Jacob Margolis on Twitter: "The last message they received was basically, “My battery
is low and it’s getting dark.”
* went up to the street with a snow shovel to help V get out.
: Mail included our Worldcon 2018 membership packets. *sigh*

0214 Valentine's day
* Up 4:40ish; W=200.2, S=4:25; shower
@ greywash | How to make your journal not suck for people who don't like your style
(jesse_the_k)
@ Thread by @Foone: "If I was setting up curriculum at a university I'd make an entire
semester-long class on The Challenger disaster, and make it required for a […]"
@ RIP Dr Peuto, Zilog and Sun's bright SPARC • The Register
@ The WIRED Fiction Issue: First, by John Rogers f(G)
$ pledged $32 for Asexual Fairy Tales by Elizabeth Hopkinson — Kickstarter V-day seems appropriate
* SL: oatnut or 12-grain bread, english muffins, cran/blood orange juice, eggs, cottage
cheese, coffee, blackberry jam (blue tub), almonds, roast sunflower seeds, lettuce,
babyfood apricots, babyfood bananas, dried basil, TP (2-ply), pretzels, dark meat
chicken, fish, pork ribs, ginger ale (C), Farman's dill pickles, Idahoan dried mashed
potatoes 4-cheese/garlic w. herb, chutney (tamarind, mint if available), lime pickle,
peanut oil, cat food (land)
* SL: RiteAid: L meds, pantsu, x fish oil (720)
@ AI Speed Dating - YouTube cute

0215Fr
* up 5am; S=5:25;
@ How to recognize fake AI-generated images – Kyle McDonald – Medium (elf)
* L wants to leave ~10am - move Molly, put her scooter in back.
-> made more work for myself by trying to drive up the driveway and worrying about the
state of the battery.
* working on the git module. Forgot to check it in when I started, but I probably
started around 3. It's 5pm now. Taking a break.
@ bairnsidhe | They Named Us
* fish oil -> ordered from $A

1216Sa
* Up 5:45; W=198, S=6:36;
@ Internet pioneer Paul Vixie blasts Google over Chromecast (N)
: problems with popup blocking on $A interfering with gift options.
bug report to CS via chat
* working mainly on tutorial outline