Captain’s Log

Jedi Traps and Entertainment

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One of the periodic thoughts that I have is about how easily my brain comes up with random shit from its inputs that often is some kind of amusing. That tends to remind me that as a child, I was often bored and had to entertain myself for hours at a time. Recently, that train of thought made me recall one of my favorite past times from that stage in my childhood: designing Jedi traps!

It’s a great problem, it works like this: your goal is to kill the Jedi in the trap but they are a bloody space wizard with a laser sword, so they can do just about anything! Literally, you’re trying to stop someone who can do nigh anything.

Let’s say you drop a Jedi through a trap door. Okay, let’s put shooters to storm him, a dozen blasters! Well, between a lightsaber and the force that won’t work for long. The Jedi could deflect the blaster bolts back at them, go melee with their saber, even knock them over with the force or fling lightning bolts until we run out of cannon fodder.

Okay, let’s make it turrets that are remote controlled! But the Jedi could deflect bolts, so let’s put shield generators to protect the turrets. But what if they rip the cameras off the walls with the force? Okay, if the shields can’t guard agains that then we make the turrets automated – blast anything and everything ahead of them.

But, what if the Jedi just keeps deflecting blaster bolts until the shield fails? We can make redundancies, we can make multiple turret systems. We can solve that!

Alright, damn it, the Jedi will just do some foolish shit like cut a hole through the floor and escape. Okay, let’s put spike traps on the lower level and when they force magic themselves out of that deadly drop, we put dart throwers or more turrets to plunge them back into another more deadly trap.

And on and on it goes from the prospective that yes, that darn space wizard with their laser sword, I mean, that really cool Jedi with a lightsaber, can basically cheat their way out of anything that you can think up, but if you make the trap large enough and keep the pressure up, eventually the Jedi either escapes or they are overwhelmed by exhaustion or they just happen to make a mistake and get unlucky. May the force be with them.

Yeah, as a kid I was often really bored and often had to wait around for stuff or be dragged around as an extra bump on a log. The kind of mechanical, orderly problem solving type of thinking that designing Jedi traps calls for can also be pleasant for passing the time. It also has a fair bit of room for creativity, unless you just assume the Jedi will have a force vision of your trap and decide to hide in your closet to whack you over the head with a rubber hose instead of letting you turn them into a rat in a maze.

It was probably a good thing that my mom bought me a GameBoy Color at the pawn shop, lol.

Random things

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Powered on Stark to test a boot stick, and figured I’d let the system go update itself. Went downstairs to wash out my coffee cup, and coming back, the line of sight from down the hall to where I left it on my desk reminds me of one of the things I don’t miss about the old Latitude: the screen!

Stark was from a transient era. One in which more consumer oriented laptops began to adapt Intel’s concept of an “Ultrabook” and more business oriented laptops refused to give up their ports until you pry’em from their cold dead motherboards. But almost universally, they all agreed on having a shitty screen compared to basically everything else in computing at the time.

As such, while the laptop served me very well it wasn’t without compromises. The typical 1366×768 pixel screen was basically trash, but it did support external displays and that’s how I tended to use Stark. Onboard was a VGA port (ha!) and the size (mini)HDMI port that nothing else really adapted, but as it got older docking stations able to drive a pair of DisplayPort/HDMI outputs were cheaper than having one shipped off eBay, and the Intel chips back then maxed out at three display pipelines anyway. Ditto irksome things like having an eSATA at the price of a super speed port, having to dedicated a USB port to a Bluetooth dongle, and needing a fanny-pack type battery to get runtime that wasn’t a joke, and weighing almost a kilogram more than I wanted to lug around every day.

But the machine also had its upsides. Like a TPM for encryption, a modular slot that could be fitted with an OEM optical drive or a replacement fitting for a second 2.5″ SATA, and a Core i5 that actually served well up until the rise of Electron applications like Teams and Slack. It also helped that I had enough Latitude D/E series compatible chargers around to never worry, except when working away from an outlet.

All in all, Stark has the unique position of being a computer that managed to not piss me off more often than not. That’s not something many computers can say. So, I think Stark was a successful machine, even if it’s going to stay retired, lol.

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And the ‘SAS’ category is now converted to the ‘SAS’ tag. Any untitled posts that stood alone in the category have been assigned ‘Games’, as that’s usually the closest match. It having been a long time since those journal entries were made.

This was kind of fun, as it gives a stroll back down memory lane for things like the skins pack that I and a friend did, eons ago. Far nicer than stumbling on the computer posts I feared would never die from system stats, like my post on converting from one distro to another without reformatting.

Here’s one I’ll resurface here though: How he does it – Trees!

More than a decade later, I find my brain still largely functions this way. The key differences is that has my gaming habits and working environments have shifted over the years, I have less frequent need for ‘active’ navigation, leaving me with a more ‘passive’ form where my mind autonomously maintains a tree structure, but doesn’t have the need to track and replay paths and key points of interest along a navigational cycle through a building. That is to say, it’s less things like remembering what corner of a hallway my element took fire at and more things like remembering what room I left the tape measure in.

Plus there’s the upside, I now live in a place where you don’t need such a data structure just to drive around the darn roads without getting lost, lol.

Recategorization

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I think that the categories to tags conversion that began earlier this year, is now ‘only mostly done’. Except for the SAS category from my old gaming group, I think all the big moves are done. E.g., Android, Amazon, FreeBSD, Google, Linux, PC-BSD, etc are now converted to tags and should be in appropriate categories (e.g., Computers or Programming).

For the handful that remain, these either have someone more vague distinctions yet to be decided (Lyrics vs Music) or more vague taxonomy (Anime vs TV Shows vs Movies; Blogger vs Live Journal, et.al.) that I’ve yet to decide upon more concretely.

In any case, those pertaining to the topics I most frequently post about beyond the what I’m watching or listening to, are basically done.

Considering that the current implementation of my journal has a lot of years of content from many different sources dating back to when I first started blogging as a means of maintaining my journal, it seems to have held up pretty well. Entries that were purely Diaspora or Google+ aren’t here, although I’m tempted to find or write a way of importing them. Entries that were purely file or paper based, aren’t here. I’m pretty sure the exceptionally rare ‘Private’ entries from the early days aren’t here or were simply declassified a decade ago. But for 17 years of blogging, I think my journal has held up decently well despite the many system changes and having begun with absolutely no idea how the categorization and retrieval of information would grow. Yeah, I’m fairly happy with this current setup. That said, I should probably journal less about computer stuff 🤣

New chapters and new homes

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Lately, I’ve had a lack of free time and probably enough pressure to take a few years off my life expectancy, but I’ve finally hit that sweet spot where I’ve handed over my apartment’s keys and all my crap is now moved to my new home, although I suspect it will be closer to Labor Day that anything resembles sanity.

Thanks to a friend putting me in touch with an awesome realtor, I was able to find where this new chapter of my life is taking me. I think, I’m officially in debt up to my eyeballs now, but at least it’s for good reasons. Especially as cost of rent is effectively my largest cost of living, and retirement is another thirty years out, the timing works. It’s just not what I had expected to be doing for a few more years, but life decided on other plans.

I now find myself experiencing something that I’ve rarely experienced in a home: having space! It’s technically little things that make me feel this, but they add up. Things like having enough bathroom drawers to organize things instead of everything on the counter. Being able to create a separate study to use as my computer and game space instead of a desk that’s either crammed next to my bed or into a living room. Things like that really add up after a while especially when you’ve spent most of your life with space as a pure premium in fairly tiny apartments.

When I moved last time, I felt like Paul Atreides in the arc of Dune where he notes that they have entered the time where many will come and seek their life. This time, I feel more like I’ve arrived at Sietch Tabr, an orderly place of refuge. Actually, I’m tempted to incorporate an Atreides banner into my decor, if I can find one I like.

Moving is a process full of many little things. But I’ve generally found it a positive opportunity to revisit how I do things and let my inner pain in the ass out. Yeah, I’m the kind of nut who will go around measuring rooms and planning where things should go and building a vision of what the space should look like and how to mold it to fit desired use cases. I have a feeling, if I ever had a wife she would need to be patient to put up with me, or the same kind of pain in the ass that I am who enjoys bringing order to the chaos of “How will I use this space?”, enough not to stab me with a tape measure 😂

Ahh, it’s going to be fun having a study 🙂

Welcome to the 21st century

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It’s taken about twenty years, but I finally feel like I’m living in the 21st century.

Not sure if that’s sad, or if the use of Internet and digital paper replacing things I’ve had to suffer telephones and hardcopy for catching up this much, just proves how much I hate phones 😂.

That said, if we hit the point of the three sea shells and all restaurants being Taco Bell, someone toss me back in the freezer.

Last box

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Finally finished going through what seems to be the last box of “Get around to it”. Mostly some of ma’s stuff, or more likely some of her things that I didn’t have time to shift through when I moved. I had considered having it hauled off with some old furniture that I’m getting rid of, but decided it better to go through it and trash stuff. Walking to the dumpster is both good exercise and cheaper, lol.

Glad that I decided to sort through it because of all the things I didn’t expect to find. Most valuable, photos that never made it into the family albums or that have been missplaced over the years. A handful from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s that probably have copies or related photos in the family albums. But also some dating back to the ’50s and ’40s, those kind where you recognize your grandparents and go “Wow, they were young back then!”. There’s even a few of what looks to be grandpa’s masonry work on their house way back when. At least one, I’m guessing dates back to the first generation in America from the look of it. These need to be moved into the albums or perhaps an annex to them.

This is also weighed out by the number of junk found in the box. I’m pretty sure that I just threw out enough refrigerator magnets and little souvenirs from like every vacation ever and countless documents from courses my mother had done over the years that were filled under, “Hmm, might be interesting” and set aside. A few recipes I had wanted to keep. Etc. Probably all the DVDs I knew I had but haven’t found. Not to mention the damn paper shredder that I’ve been looking for for the last 6 or 7 years! Less thrilled of course is when I found the Tribbles we bought back in the ’90s. But nothing is perfect.

Between the patio storage area being cleaned out and the various inside boxes, I think I’m finally caught up with cleaning out my mother’s things. It’s only been 7 years, lol.

Sometimes I wonder

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Growing up finances were often tight. Whenever I hear the Juston Moore song “We Didn’t Have Much” and it’s lyric that “We had it all when we didn’t have much”, the break in the stanza often makes me think back. My family didn’t have much and certainly didn’t have that song’s kind of “All” during my formative years, but we had all the things. I always found it amazing as a kid that despite how tight things were, we had 3 TVs and 3 VCRs, which as a little boy seemed an order of magnitude more wealthy than we were by a long shot. Of course the way that worked out is a lot of our things were often rent to own or the bank of grandma, and mine were often hand me down. I didn’t care that my VCR was probably the first one pa bought back in the ’80s, it was just awesome sauce being able to watch VHS off in my own corner. When I was older, I found it more amazing that we had so much given what my mother had to work with. That’s the kind of way it was.

When I got to be older, I noticed the affects of this when observing others. As a teenager, I had come to the conclusion that my willingness to spend $1 was probably closer to how willing most folks I knew were willing to spend $20. Since we had little to work with it was often imperative to spend it wisely, especially for big stuff. Because if we screwed up there might not be the option to take it back or buy another. A lot of times the only options were the cheaper ones and the worse deals, but we still had little cause to complain. Like my first laptop: I had the third cheapest laptop at Best Buy because the cheapest was sold out and the second cheapest couldn’t run FreeBSD. Despite that, I loved that laptop and used it for about six years and a lot of my early programming.

Sometimes I wonder about how this has affected my mentality as an adult. Actually, I think my current laptop best reflects how child hood affected my purchasing decisions. Shion is actually the most expensive laptop that I’ve ever bought. It was very carefully planned and budgeted for. It was very carefully decided how much the cost was worth it to me versus the value for those dollars. Kind of like my dad, I don’t have a problem spending an inordinate amount of money on something to solve a problem, but like my widowed mother, I learned to spend it well when I do.

I also developed a metric for factoring into these sort of problems: value over time. It’s kind of like amortization but the formula is simpler, since there’s no loan interest. When shopping for my laptop, I tallied the cost of the various configurations and its value to me. Then I broke it down based on how many years I might use the system: 3 years, 5 years, 7 years, or 12 years. From experience over the years, I know that the average time I will use a computer for is approximately 6 years. It may be a few years less or a few years more but about 6 years is the average. So, to make it a good deal the value had to be a good deal for the 5 years mark and an acceptable deal for the 3 year mark, and at least balance out by the end of the decade.

Likewise over the years, I developed a concept for obsoleteness of computers. If you buy the cheapest laptop you can get from the current hardware and will use it heavily: it will probably be worth buying a faster cheapest computer in another year or two. By then, you’ll often pass the point where doing a task very frequently becomes enough bottleneck that being able to do that task faster is worth the upgrade costs. Accordingly the opposite is true but with different numbers: buy the fastest machine you can get, and in about 10 years it will be about as good as that ‘cheapest’ option will be, if you replace it with the cheapest machine a decade later. That balances out with the average time I use computers, which is in 5 years in enough things will have changed that if the system isn’t enough of a bottleneck to be worth replacing yet, it will be soon therefore start planning; and if it’s already a bottleneck, start planning.

Moral of this planned obsoleteness is don’t be first and don’t be last to upgrade; rather upgrade when the improvements are worth it. And if everything goes sideways in about ten years, whatever you can afford won’t be any worse than a ten year old computer, lol.

Shion has now been in service for approximately 1 year. So far, it’s proving to be quite effective with no sign of retirement on the horizon. Based one earlier calculations a year ago, in another year it will have proven to be an ok deal; next year it will have proven to be a good deal; by the third year it will be a great deal; by 5 years, I’ll definitely have gotten my money’s worth. Here’s hoping that I don’t drop it out a window or sit on it by mistake 😂.

Rating photos and building remembering albums

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By virtue of it being one of the most ‘normal’ weekends in a very long time, I finally cycled back to a task that I’ve been meaning to start since June: building remembering of albums for Misty and for Willow. Normally, I do this sooner after a death but with them being back to back and so much going on, I hadn’t had a chance to start the process.

I’ve started rolling through all of my YYYY/Dogs albums in Digikam and assigning a rating to each based on the following concept:

  • 5 Stars: Best photos (essential)
  • 4 Stars: Good photos (above average / memorable)
  • 3 Stars: Okay photos (average)
  • 2 Stars: Wish it came out better photos (meh)
  • 1 Stars: Low value photos (useless)

My hope being to find the best photos for their albums, and add a few to Corky’s along the way. I’m also thinking that when I finally get to setting up photo frames, I’ll probably use the 4 stars and up to seed the memory cards. Made it as far as 2014, but I know that the rate of my dog photos largely tended to increase year over year as camera sensors got better. So that’s only a small chunk of them. I’m very glad camera sensors improved a lot before they got old.

Aside from feeling like opening the box of tissues I bought after the last family death, I find myself both very glad that they were in my life for so many years and so sad that they’ve all gone on ahead of me. Dunno when I’ll be able to welcome a new furry member to the tribe, but I hope that they will become a good part of life too. Willow, Coco, Misty, and Corky: I’ll never forget you goonies.

Sleep: sometimes more or less

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With how much my life of recent months has felt like the old curse often ascribed to the Chinese, of ‘may you live in interesting times’, I am glad that more often, I’m finding myself kept awake by my hopes and dreams for the future than by fears and uncertainties about the future.

But dang it, brain, I’m going to threaten you with a Q-Tip if I don’t start sleeping better!