mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

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 )

mdlbear: (distress)

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 )

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

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 )
mdlbear: (spoiler)

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.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
raw notes )

I guess the most interesting "accomplishment" of the day came in the morning as I was making breakfast. I noticed that my stomach muscles were knotting up, and deliberately relaxed them. The associated anxiety was almost certainly over the evening's test session at work, which I wasn't ready for.

I was, mostly, ready at 5pm, after a grueling afternoon in the code mines. It made for one of the most productive days I've had at work in a long time. I'll need to keep that up until next week, when the stuff will actually get used, because there's still quite a bit that needs doing.

A couple of amusing links.

Bang & Olufsen BeoTime Alarm Clock Caters to Flute Enthusiasts, the Rich (waves at [livejournal.com profile] cflute)

When Bang and Olufsen tackles a new type of device, they do it in a very specific way: oddly, stylishly, and with reckless disregard for cost. Exhibit F: The $375 BeoTime, a flute-like, accelerometer-equipped wireless alarm clock.

Wood computer workstation takes up space, looks great, does little else (waves at [livejournal.com profile] gmcdavid)

I spent most of my spare time away from computers reading. I seem to recall that that's how I made it through a lot of our parties, a long time ago: sitting in a corner absorbed in a book, interacting only enough to keep up the pretense that I was being social.

mdlbear: (spoiler)

From this post by [livejournal.com profile] technoshaman comes a link to a New Yorker article titled "Twilight of the Books" that asks "What will life be like if people stop reading?"

Like [livejournal.com profile] technoshaman and unlike Caleb Crain, the article's author, I'm rather more optimistic. I think that, with the rise of the web, we're well on our way out of the decline of literacy caused by television. Of course Crain's measure of literacy, reading "a work of creative literature", may well continue to decline. I know I don't read nearly as many novels as I once did. But I think nothing of devouring a 100-page legal document over on Groklaw -- it doesn't look nearly that big when it's all in one big, scrollable, HTML page. And my kids happily spend their bookstore gift cards on rollplaying game books. And read them.

mdlbear: (spoiler)

Ganked from [livejournal.com profile] kayshapiro and [livejournal.com profile] thatcrazycajun: These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today whenever it was). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

The list. )

Most Popular Tags

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Page generated 2025-07-01 08:26 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios