sweetmusic_27 | Reading

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

Not a very good week. Lots of anxiety -- my impending trip to Seattle, income tax, events in the world, and phone calls to repair places. We got (scooter)Lizzy back from getting her flat tire repaired, but now she has an electrical problem and won't go. We were supposed to get Scarlett-the-carlet back this week, but she still has an electrical problem. I need to make another call about Lizzy. Tomorrow.

On the other hand, I did go for a walk six days out of seven this week. It's better than usual, and about time. The only way I can do it appears to be going out before breakfast. Any later and I run into deliveries and appointments.

Substack is using Persona for age verification -- that's the same one that exposed 700,000 Discord users' data a while back. So has LinkedIn. There are plenty of good alternatives to Substack -- you're reading one right now. Discord is another matter, but people are looking. In either case, moving a community never goes well.

I've ordered a copy of "The Magic of Code" by Samuel Arbesman. See also, The World Inside the Crystal. I started working on a book based on that idea, a long time ago.

If you're an Emacs user you might want to look at This bad -- it says so on the tin -- version of emacs implemented purely from Unix shell commands I'm not sure I would advise it. If you're a web developer, you definitely shouldn't look at this 8086 emulation written entirely in CSS and HTML5. There are some things...

If you're into sewing, you definitely should take a look at FreeSewing, a collection of free parametric sewing patterns.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Current Mood: anxious
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: not much

I took K out to Texas Roadhouse for lunch in the interest of getting more protein into the kid. This worked admirably. Then we proceeded to the grocery store and to Sam's Club to acquire things for dinner.

Dinner tonight was a very nice corned beef, because K will not be home with us when St. Patrick's Day rolls around. There is probably another corned beef in our future although probably not until K is back at school.

In the meantime, the monthly bills are paid (actually, all of the credit cards are now on autopay, but the money has been moved around to fund those payments), and I've run the final session for last year's computer division in our APBA league. I finished second, five games out of first, largely courtesy of a 12 game losing streak two sessions back. But I finished first in the combined first half, so my team will make the playoffs based on that. Three of the four playoff teams are pretty much locks from the various first place teams, so one spot is left to be determined by the final results once the face-to-face division finishes up.

Should be interesting. :)

I picked up K from the bus for a week of spring break, picking up Chinese food for dinner on the way home, because it appears that finding suitable Chinese food in Muncie has been a challenge. This was followed by a lot of catching up and a lot of playing with dogs.

One of the projects that I wanted to finish before K got home was hanging the GAFilk quilt. This is because I wanted to get the ladder out of the upstairs hallway. The quilt is hung now and looks quite nice after Gretchen made a few adjustments in the way that the decorative rope that is holding up the rod was hanging.

There are a lot of projects that we want to get done this week. We'll see how they go. :)

We watched the first two episodes of the "Scrubs" reboot last night. I liked them a lot. They reminded me of the good parts of the original series, so if you liked that, it's going to be worth watching.

Meanwhile, I hadn't realized that the Olympic TV embargo had officially cleared, but a whole bunch of series hit my DVR today, meaning that finishing up "Warehouse 13" is going to wait for a bit. :)

Today I am thankful for...

Getting Scarlet repaired under warranty by the dealer. I'll be more thankful when we finally get her back. NO thanks for me not being persistant enough contacting Lizzy's dealer -- we sent her out to some random scooter repair place to get a flat tire fixed, and she came back broken. Might be related to an intermittent glitch we've noticed. But still...
Tea. Particularly genmaicha, 100g of which arrived at the house only a few minutes ago.
Also coffee.
Successfully trouble-shooting (home server)Nova -- turned out to be a bad power supply.
Mathematical rabbit-holes. Or else not so thankful, because they take up time that might otherwise be productive
Speed controls on videos. (Except for music videos, of course.)

Current Mood: grateful
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag

I should have mentioned this a few days ago, but the iSense folks have accepted the warranty claim on our leaky mattress and a new mattress is going to be on its way to us as soon as they build one. I'm not sure exactly how long it will take, but I am certainly looking forward to it!

Today was spent writing unit tests and fixing bugs that turned up when I ran the unit tests.

Which is, I suppose, the best reason for writing unit tests.

I have a few more unit tests to write tomorrow and then I can move on to the next project.

It was back to work today. I think I've gotten a bit of coding done, but we'll see what happens when I finish writing the unit tests *and* the guys who are supposed to hook it up to the UI take a run at it.

In other news, I was pinged by one of my fellow programmers today who was playing around with the OLE compound document format that our desktop files are stored in. I showed him the set of Java code that I wrote on top of Apache POI to provide additional support for features that we're using. Then I said, "Watch this."

I bounced into VS Code and fired up Cline and told it to look at these classes in my source base and then write a code snippet that would open up a desktop file and dump out all of the custom settings from the user defined property set. Now this isn't overly hard code to write, but even so, the resulting code was very nice and took advantage of features like try-with-resources and such. I cut the code out and emailed it to my coworker, suggesting that he could put this somewhere that we could get at it. :)

It was, in any case, faster than writing it myself and certainly not bad code.

On a completely different note, if no one is interested in the treadmill, I am going to list it sometime in the next few days as available for free on Nextdoor, which is a pretty good way to get large objects to leave my home. If you *are* interested, let me know.

I spent some time today dealing with some smaller projects around the house. One of these was to take some measurements in the library, which is now done.

The next trick is going to be finding someone who wants our old Reebok RX-3000 treadmill which is sitting in the library taking up space. It is free to a good home. A good home is currently defined as "someone who is willing to take it away". :)

I am continuing my efforts to get the Flash pinball in the basement up and running. One of the projects that I may be able to handle myself is to fix some screw holes in the playfield where the screw no longer bites in properly, resulting in loose parts, which is not good. Filling these with toothpicks and wood glue has been suggested. Curiously, that is the same suggestion that has been made online for fixing Julie's bedroom door, which will not latch. I figured that I like the pinball machine better than the bedroom door, so why not experiment there?

The door still does not latch. It *might* latch if I had carved out a bit more wood to make room for the strike plate, because the door actually *does* latch if I *remove* the strike plate. But the toothpick and glue method is a bit messy.

I fixed one of our bathroom cabinets that had a similar problem using some very nice wood filler and I am thinking this may be a better solution to the problem. I will think about this a bit longer before taking a run at it. :)

Anyway, tomorrow it will be back to work, so projects will wait for a bit for me to catch up...

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

It's been a rather stressful week, and most of the time I've been very down on myself, mostly for procrastination. But I got through it. I think I'm supposed to count that as a win, even though it doesn't feel like it.

I did figure something out, though. I often (usually?) procrastinate things that may require a decision, because when I finally get around to them the decision often (usually?) turns out to be wrong. (The decision is sometimes to skip something with a time limit, and then regretting not going for it while I had the chance. Same thing.)

Now that Discord has started age-gating NSFW channels and servers, many people (including me) are looking for alternatives. Especially since it was revealed that their age verification vendor Persona left frontend exposed, researchers say. In particular, people are looking for open source alternatives, since those are less likely to be enshittified in the future. We have some time, because most fannish discord communities have few, if any, NSFW channels, and because moving a community is always an extremely lossy process (as those of us who left LJ for DW remember well) and not to be undertaken lightly.

It's concievable that matterbridge could help hold things togather. Not counting on it. I hate this timeline.

You should also replace links that use archive.today, which includes archive.ph et.al., which I have lots of links to. That's going to take a long time. See also Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links.

Links: You can find Babylon 5 on YouTube HERE. OpenFactBook - Country Data & Statistics is the replacement for the CIA's recently-shut-down World Factbook.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Current Mood: okay? for the moment
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: stupidly, no

Now that the taxes are out of my hands, there were other things to do today. Happily, none of them was laundry.

I took a box of stuff to Goodwill over lunch, getting it out of the house. Then it was off to Sam's Club, where I restocked a great many items. I have been intending to hang the GAFilk quilt that Gretchen won in absentia out in the hallway for a while now and *that* is finally done. While getting that sorted out, I put away the old CPAP as a backup, which cleaned that mess out of the chair in the bedroom that it had shared with the quilt.

I am filing a warranty claim for our leaky iSense mattress. They requested photos of the stripped mattress and the platform that it sits on, so I got that done (with a bit of help from Julie to stand the mattress on end so I could easily get photos of the platform) and sent them off. We'll see what they have to say, but the answer should be "let us fix this now". If it is not, there is going to be a problem.

And I ran the next-to-last session for the computer division in our APBA league, so I just have one more to get to the end of the year. All of the adjustments are made for three of the four teams, so this should be pretty straightforward once the fourth manager reports in.

Meanwhile, Gretchen made a lovely pot of beef stew using the stew beef that I picked up at Sam's Club earlier in the day. And then we went back and watched the recording of the Olympic women's free skate, which was a lot of fun.

Now it is time to go put the bed back together. Happily, the mattress is sitting on the platform, not standing on end...

Ok, it *wasn't* March, but weather around here was certainly like the end of March -- and a *temperate* end of March -- for several days in a row. I was able to go to my lighter coat, the sun was shining. It was gorgeous.

February has now reasserted itself with a cold and blustery wind. It seemed even colder just because it had so recently been relatively warm.

Overall, it made sitting at my desk and getting some programming done look really good. :)

Real spring will be here soon.

The winter musical at the high school is "Mamma Mia!" and Julie and I headed over to see it tonight on opening night. It went well. The cast, crew, and orchestra did a fine job and everyone had a lot of fun.

Note for those who didn't get the memo (like me): this is the first time that I've seen a show at the high school with assigned seats, so if you're planning to go, get your tickets early. I managed to get a pair of decent seats today, but not where I usually sit when it's general admission seating.

Today I am thankful for...

Getting Scarlett-the-Carlet back (hopefully today, assuming I didn't misunderstand the phone call from the dealer). NO thanks for (folding scooter)Lizzy getting a flat tire.
Naproxen. NO thanks for my lower back.
The microscopic fungi that make bread, booze, and blue cheese. Also the mostly macroscopic ones that produce edible mushrooms and other delights.
Naomi's book finally getting a review. It's a start.

Current Mood: grateful
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: Eurofilk tonight?

I am working with the code assist AI at work to try to clean up our Gradle scripts. It did a magnificent job of doing so, but managed to delete some instructions from the scripts that we use and that it didn't realize were being used. Oops.

But that's no problem. I'll tell the AI to restore the missing parts from the version that's saved in our Git repository.

If only it hadn't accidentally discarded all of the changes in one of the files when it retrieved the backup copy. Oops again.

So I have the AI remaking the changes that it discarded.

And a new appreciation for knowing when to back up code changes to defend them from the AI.

It was back to work today where I have picked up what I hope will be a short, but interesting project.

Over lunch, I mailed the Dodeka taxes. Now, let's see if the IRS can be bothered to open them...

The Dodeka taxes are now printed, signed, and in envelopes ready to pay tomorrow.

All of the documents for our personal taxes have been downloaded and/or scanned and then uploaded to the accountant along with various caveats about "expect a revised form for this account" and "K had a summer job" and "please note the Certificate of Error for the property taxes". We'll see how that goes.

In other news, our iSense mattress has developed an annoying leak on my side. Today, I finally managed to call them and start a warranty claim. I am hoping this goes well. :)

I have finished filling out the Dodeka tax forms, which means that I just need to print out the packets for the Federal and Illinois tax filings, assemble them, put them in envelopes, and mail them. I still need to get all of *our* information to the accountant, but that is tomorrow's project.

In other news, my passport has arrived, which means that I am officially good for the trip to FilkOntario. :)

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sweetmusic_27

November 2023

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Page generated Mar. 1st, 2026 07:08 pm

Miscreants, Rogues, Etc.

Reading

Done Since 2026-02-22

Getting Things Done

Spring Break

Scrubbing In

Thankful Thursday

News I Forget

Testing, Testing

Back to Work

Smaller Steps

Done Since 2026-02-15

Doing Things

Waving Bye to March

Mamma Mia!

Thankful Thursday

Learning Experiences

Work and Taxes

Taxes and Stuff

One Down, One to Go

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November 2023

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