The Mandelbear's Musings

Done Since 2019-09-29

Sun, 06 Oct 2019 18:11:08 GMT

It's been a long, tiring, chaotic week. Plumbers, exterminators, everything from the kitchen and my desk in and only partly back out of boxes, cleanups, etc. Mentally I seem to be holding up, and we took advantage of the chaos to re-organize the kitchen and rotate my desk 90 degrees. Getting the wiring and the printer configurations back into shape was not entirely trivial.

N came up for the weekend, so we've gotten in a little practice and pulled a Conflikt set list together.

Books: The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan/. History of Oak Ridge through the stories of the women who worked there. Recommended.

( Notes & links, as usual )

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Done last week (20170115Su - 21Sa)

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 16:44:54 GMT

Rough week. Feeling doomed at work; things aren't coming together as quickly as they need to, and I'm not seeing things that should be obvious. Getting old, and I don't like it.

I thought leaving the Starport was hard. This is going to be worse. I guess it's like getting old -- I have to do it, but I don't have to like it.

If I haven't grown up by now I don't have to, right?

We've been doing a lot of sorting. Colleen and I have been through our closet (though there's still a lot left) and bookshelves (about half done), and I sorted books in the Great Room with Naomi. We'll probably have to do another pass.

There were a few small triumphs. I managed to track down the lyrics to Naomi's song "Staying Home Tonight", which had gone missing -- we'd performed it back in 2007. Took grep-find on my home directory (including both mail and LJ archives) to find it.

The emacs grep-find function is wonderful. Basically it searches for a pattern in the contents of every file in your current directory tree, and flags every hit the same way it flags compile errors, so that you can visit each one and do whatever investigation or fixing you need to at that point. You can run the same thing on the command line, but then you don't have the convenient integration with the editor.

Back to small triumphs -- Monday we had (new Honda Odyssey) Rosie towed down to the dealership in Tacoma where we'd bought her, to have her blocked fuel line fixed. Got her back yesterday. And I surprised and delighted Naomi last night wth The Pharos Gate, which I'd just finished reading and which she hadn't known existed. Hmm. Should do a review of the series, shouldn't I?

A comment on last week's post has inspired me to write up my journaling system. It looks like what's now called a "bullet journal", but predates the eponymous fad by at least half a decade. Hmm. Should put together an emacs mode, or see if I can tweak org-mode for it.

A Wikipedia dive starting at Irregular Webcomic! #3594 led me to the article on Slouch hat, which in turn led inevitably to the Tricorne and Bicorne hats. Does that make the slouch hat a unicorne?

( Notes & links, as usual )

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Done last week (20150809Su - 15Sa)

Sun, 16 Aug 2015 17:03:35 GMT

So the big things this week were getting the drains fixed (for somewhere north of $10K), and getting word from Safeco that they'll cover a good part of the water mitigation. Though not all of it, and none of the reconstruction afterward. But that's still something in five figures that we won't have to deal with.

We will still need a loan.

Last Sunday I finally started practicing for my half-hour set at Sasquan (Friday afternoon). First time I've had to stop singing because I was crying -- For Amy followed by The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of just hit all my buttons, but I even choked up some on Where the Heart Is and Windward. Losing a home is also a trigger right now - that's still a danger, if anything happens that makes me unable to work.

Oh, yeah; about work. It seems that the part of the late project that I thought was simplest, isn't (for non-technical reasons -- basically office politics). I was, apparently, relying on old information when I made the estimate. :P

I was able to get through my entire set last night without even choking up. There are still some rough spots in the chords, but that's something I can work on.

My back is pretty much back to normal (meaning it aches a little when I over-use it, but I can mostly take it for granted). Now, of course, my right knee is giving me trouble. Cane GOOD.

My mood is now merely down, rather than severely depressed and anxious. I'll take it.

Some interesting reading -- links in the notes.

( raw notes, with links )

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Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart is dead

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 05:47:52 GMT

Michael S. Hart invented the eBook in 1971, and founded Project Gutenberg. He died on Tuesday, of a heart attack. He was only five days older than me.

Official obit: Michael S. Hart - Gutenberg

Obits at Boing Boing and Ars Technica.

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