An orange in an apple orchard
For some reason it bugs me that I’ve found it hard to get up all week, and the day I can actually sleep in, I find myself waking up on time \o/.
About an hour later, coffee fueled, fed, and quartered, and onto making the day’s agenda a more actualized plan than a loose concept. Also, I quickly determined mornings are more productive if you grab the coffee beans instead of the corn chips and wonder what the fuck you’re doing standing in front of the coffee grinder. Hahahahaha!
Tonight’s dinner turned out better than expected, despite using a rice bowl for portion control. I ended up with independent plating as a side effect of trying to avoid the “Bed of rice” and “Mixed in rice” approach, trying to get a higher veggies to rice/lentil ratio.
I can’t help but think, it’s probably the first time I’ve actually used the bowl for rice. It had quickly become the measuring scoop for the dogs’ dry food, and I had happened to remember its intended purpose was rice, when I was cleaning stuff out. On the flip side, at least I’m smart enough to have fed it through the dishwasher first!
This morning was rather slow, given that my “Get up early, get stuff done” plan was waylaid by the strong feeling that even for all the tea in China, I wouldn’t want to get out of bed. Nice and cozy ftw! But of course, eventually this had to be substituted with starting the day.
If an hour or so late, my experiment with tamogoyaki went quite well. This is the first time I’ve mad a bottle of mirin to incorporate the flavor, which makes for a notably sweeter result. Half the omelets for breakfast, half saved for part of Monday’s lunch. Then off to iron out the grocery shopping. By lunch time everything was done, and I finally had my coffee. Which went well with some cornbread, which of course was not a low carb lunch but solved hunger for the afternoon. The coffee that I ground last week has held up well enough that much enjoyment was had.
Finding myself in that fickle mood where I know that I can’t spend all my time working, and sometimes I’m not in the mood to do anything restful or useful; I’d say this afternoon was an example in borderline stir crazy. But on the flip side, a split off into playing a bit of Battletech 2018 made for a pleasant way to unwind.
I also got to test out a “Splurge” as part of my dinner plans. Typically, I roast veggies by tossing them into a mixing bowl with some olive oil and seasoning, toss on a silpat on a baking sheet, and in it goes. The downside of course is this then means I’m stuck wiping out a mixing bowl with a paper towel and then having a larger item for the dishwasher’s top wrack, or a thing to soak/rinse after the food’s in the oven. With the whole blood pressure thing, I’m roasting veggies more often. Trying things the less clean-up way of toss veggies on the silpat, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle seasonings is a nice plan. But using the bottle of EVO, it just results in more puddling than oil properly applied to vegetables. Which in turn means more paper toweling down the silicone baking mat and sheet pan, and less even results.
In the past, I used to keep some of ma’s flask like cruets handy until I decided these were a bigger pain to clean than they made any real difference versus using the bottle directly. So, thinking on a solution, I decided to splurge on a nice leak free cruet that’s perfect for drizzling the veggies and that more importantly, is easily cleaned. For tonight’s dinner plans, roast carrots were on the menu which made a perfect opportunity to test this out.
I’m calling that cruet $16 very well spent, lol.
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.
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 🤣
Waking up this morning, I wondered why the heck my watch was displaying the forecast a day out of date as I started getting dressed for work. Then about the time I’d be putting my socks on, I realized yesterday was Saturday which means today is not Monday, therefore it’s time for coffee not pants.
Decided to run with a higher volume version of last weekend’s impromptu experiment, of grinding enough coffee to last a while. Looks like my Shardor was up to grinding about 110~120 grams, which is pretty much max capacity. That should be enough freshly ground espresso roast to feed my Chemex pour over next weekend and the weekend after, on top of giving me an ample amount of coffee today. I’ve been guzzling coffee from the big cup almost all morning as of time of writing, and probably have about a regular cup’s worth left.
In retrospect, I should have gone easier on filling the bag when I bought the coffee beans. It was so full it was hard to close the baggy, and ordinarily I don’t buy full bags of beans the odd times that I’ll go with the spout instead of pre-packaged stuff in grocery stores. But I’ve got to admit, the espresso roast at Sprouts Farmer’s Market is working for me, and the beans last quite a darn long time. It offers a bit of a spicy feel for coffee, and seems to retain its flavor well whether making a more intense brew or a thinner brew.
Ahh, darn, now I’m tempted to make more coffee 😅
When you say screw it and decide to buy the remaining books in a series as you near the end of middle novel, I think this could be defined as a successful novel on the author’s part, or at least evidence of being well entertained by it.
A while back, one of my Kindle’s suggestions for what to read next was book one of The Vixen War Bride by Thomas Doscher. Having a bit of rewards piled up and it sounding like it could be worth a read, I decided to check it out. There went a night’s sleep, lol. The Vixen War Bride is full of amusing cross cultural misunderstandings and people who are trying to do the right thing even if it’s hard to communicate that to the other.
Ben’s forces come from a period where armed security drones making like flying monkeys and optics that can turn night into day, are simply old hat and have been for centuries. Then they get shipped off to an occupied alien planet where the background level of electromagnetic interference is so strong that they may as well be dressed in uniforms from 1942 😅. Life is surely sad when someone has to switch from computer all the things to a Mark I Pencil, but that pales in comparison to the problem of understanding the locals and vice versa. The exchange of weapons of mass destruction between the aliens destroying the American’s colony with an asteroid and several nuclear strikes on the alien home world, surely did not endear either side to the other before the war’s end. Ben and most of his troops come from our destroyed colony, and given the enemies skill for slitting throats in the night and the Va’Shen’s horrific sci-fi weapons, it’s little surprise that most sectors have at best an uneasy relationship with the local population.
Alacea’s village is deserted and the chieftain is giving the Ben’s folk the run around. Fearing that the vicious, cruel, baby eating monsters from outer space will destroy the village in punishment for the war, the community has fled into the hills leaving only a few behind that are too old to make the long journey to shelter. When the Alacea barrels into town to face the dark ones according to their custom, she literally sets off a storm. In their culture, the head priestess is responsible to the community and arguing their position before their gods. If your Na’Sha guides her community and argues well when entering the afterlife, she may make it to the glade and her people be blessed with good fortune, or if her community is not righteous, sacrifice themself to an eternity in the frosts beyond and pray the gods be merciful in the hardships set upon their community to set them back on the right path. It’s into such a culture that paths cross.
It doesn’t take very long before cross cultural communication to rear its head and begin the snowball effect. Alacea’s confession to war crimes against humanity is quickly understood to be full of shit, but she’s the only one who will both talk to the Dark Ones and knows where the villagers are hiding. Deciding maybe-pissed-off villagers down the road are better than angry ambushes out of know where, Ben wants them to come home and live normally. Sadly, the Va’Shen language is virtually unknown and they are just lucky to have an interpreter along that can “Kind of” speak the language. Convincing Alacea that Ben’s people won’t destroy the village or kill them all in a rage is virtually impossible, and convincing her to help them is hard to do when your terp can barely speak the same language herself.
Thanks to a mix up in translation and very different social histories this results in Ben and Alacea’s sudden marriage! Not quite the help the terp was trying to ask for, lol.
For one whose culture sees marriage and divorce as but a post card in the mailbox, and one whose culture sees marriage integral to every part of their society, it’s quite the mix up. But it’s one full of story potential.
For Alacea, it’s a chance to secure her community’s safety from the dark ones and direct the dark one’s anger away from her people. For Ben, it’s a chance to avoid hundreds of angry villagers wiping his company off the map before the army knows they’ve even been hit. Somewhere in the middle, the truth is it’s a great opportunity for peace and understanding, if they don’t kill each other first.
By the Va’Shen customs, marriage is forever and taking the head priestess as a bride is an old way for a conquering overlord to dominate a village, but by extension her community becomes his and due some measure of protection. But how can some alien from Earth know their ways? Everyone in Pelle expects such cruelty and horror from the humans that few Va’Shen believe their Na’Sha’s sacrifice will protect them. By human customs a few hundred years into the future, divorce rates are over 80% and far less eternal than anything known on the alien world. A world so foreign yet familiar, that flashlights are a water jar full of rocks that grow when wet and sound-reactive crops can rot if you fly loud helicopters overhead.
The journey to where the villagers of Pelle are hiding and their return home sets the tone well. I especially loved how the discussion of how Alacea can be sure Ben won’t harm her village and that she will kill him if he does betray her plays out. Seeing that she’s unlikely to succeed in it but will make it her dedicated mission in life if that comes to pass, Ben hands her his Ka-Bar and tells her if he breaks his promise not to harm her people, she can use that knife to kill him for it. Likewise, the brawl between Ramirez and an angry young farm hand that turns into a friendly exhibition while folks were discussing peaceful terms, that then snowballs into Alacea and Yasuno yelling at tod for his stupidity until the Ranger feels bad for the guy, was just freaking hilarious and well executed.
By the second book, Holdouts, the antics of SSgt Ramirez and huntress Alzoria seriously had me laughing my ass off and made it quite the binge read. Both Ben and Alacea’s own antics end up intersecting and making it quite a story. It was great, best book in the series so far. By the end of the third book, Uncivil Affairs, both main characters now know the embarrassing truth of how their marriage occurred and have stirred up a storm. I’ve been entertained well enough that towards the end, I had to exercise Amazon’s button for buying the remaining books in the series thus far.
I love stories that turn the expected on its head and that build upon the characters and situations. Good science fiction rarely has anything to do with science directly, so much as the technology is a backdrop that enables the story.
Well, it looks like at 10% off on the most expensive of my short term projects, means I’ll be experimenting with a planned lifestyle shift: having a dedicated reading spot. That, or a chair that proves suitably uncomfortable enough to be repurposed elsewhere, lol.
I’ve done well with my goal to read a little bit every day. Typically, this works out as being before bed. Working off the same concept as why you shouldn’t use a laptop in bed because of its effects on your sleep, I’ve for a while now, thought about having a dedicated place to read. My vision for the next phase of bedroom development is a pair of bookshelves, a chair, and maybe a comfortable rug to help zone it off from the rest of the room. The dogs bequeathed me enough blankets not to have to worry about details, and a place to rest a book and a drink is easily solved.
My theory is that it would be better to sit and read, put up my kindle for the night, and then cross the room and crash into bed than it is to toss and turn alight with a kindle in hand. How well this works in practice, I think will depend on a suitably cozy place. It’s also a better incentive to read earlier and not stay up so late.
And of course there’s the issue of shelving. Most of my books are still in the garage, as I opted to convert my old shelves (about 15 and 25 years old, respectively, or older) into storage shelving in the garage, leaving me with know place to store them other than how I packed them. Bookshelves are cheap though, so that’s less a concern. The downside of sorts is that Really Cheap shelves are now better than my old shelves for weight capacity without falling apart, and are almost cheap enough to turn the spare room into a library by papering the walls with bookshelves. I must resist this temptation.
For the most part, the high point that Windows NT has achieved for me is “Not pissing me off by default” and becoming a fairly decent shell upon which to use the Linux things that I care about without needing a second machine or dual boot, thanks to WSL. The era of Windows 10 also brought iterative improvements to system components I care about like the command line environment. But versus native Linux, the main win for me is better access to DirectX games and Microsoft’s office apps.
But truth is, there are certain parts of Windows that are likely to always piss me off. Namely Bluetooth support, and to a somewhat lesser extent anything related to USB or networking will inevitably drive me nuts given enough time around NT.
Thinking about this as I finish up a few things before bed, I realize I typically like using MacOS. The aspects that piss me off tend to revolve around muscle memory, like how some common PC shortcuts are cmd+key and others are ctrl+key. Which are shell level uniquenesses not systemic design. On that note, I’ll add that I tend to find iOS/iPadOS rather more meh, or average than pleasant.
By contrast things that irk me so about using modern Linux as a desktop are the quality of mail clients, lol.
“Damn it, Kindle, stop giving me interesting ideas to read!” — how I spent my rewards points.