Friday: I finished that poster, but it took all evening.

Since I spent all day at work doing the million other things that had to be done.

I did see this mantis on the ledge outside my boss's office.

• Owl.
• Centaurs.
• Fuck you, Jeff Smisek.  You make me want to fly with a different company.

Thursday: I finally started working on the poster that I need to put up on Monday.

I had this fundraising thing from the Democrats in my mailbox today.  It pretends to be a poll asking me what I'm concerned about.  I just thought question 3 was kind of funny.

• Chopping penguin.
• Tiny bunny.
• Trains.
• Pikachu.

Wednesday: I have too much crap to get done.

The salad place was out of chicken, so they substituted turkey.  This was awful, as the turkey is shredded, and formed a matted mess with the cheese and dressing.

Cat.

Different cat.

• Dogs are not good at optics.
• Good, for obvious reasons.
• Marcelline.

Tuesday: Cookie Sampler.

Cookie sampler.

• Cats are dumb.
• Wait, what?  During WW1, Germany took out ads telling people that they were totally not responsible if they took an ocean liner trip and ended up blown up?  "Sorry, folks.  We're doing a war today.  We warned you, so you know.  Up to you."
• Copyright is broken that we are having this discussion at all.

Monday: Bird friends.

Bird friends.

• Cats are dumb.
• Big duck disappointment.
• Bugs Bunny.
• Marnie.

Sunday: How did I forget to take a picture?

I'll just reuse this one from a previous ramen trip.

• Julie tweeted this earlier today, but that's not the entire story.  This has been in my RSS saved items for a month or so.  The problem is that marketing people don't want good shows or representation.  They want an easy pitch to sell ads and toys, which means that a lot of very good shows get cancelled, and stupid shit lives on.
• This is a good prank.
• Wonder Woman.  Annoyed that you're making her actually punch you in the face instead of just understanding that she's willing to punch you in the face.
• Wow.  Way to be dicks, Team Rocket grunts.  I suspect though, that Slowking is going to solve things.

Saturday: I did the minimum amount of work necessary today.

Carrots, lettuce blend, smoked gouda, oven baked tomatoes, sauteed mushrooms, onion confit.  Image packing all that together, and then adding a bomb so it is scattered all over.  That's pretty much what eating this burger was like.  Nothing stayed together, which is unfortunate, because it could have been very good.  The cabernet mustard (the grey stuff in the middle) is good too.

• Whatever, goat.  You're always saying that.
• "Angry pterodactyl."
• This is the important point:  it doesn't matter what fancy technology you're using, if the basic business plan is "reduce worker protections by claiming they're not really workers to keep more money," then that's a serious problem.  This is also what led me to switching to a different local cab service, which seems to better address these issues.
• Wonder Woman.  I finally cracked the secret behind the old TV show:
• Bad guy comes up with a plan.  That plan always involves "kill Diana Prince" or "capture Diana Prince."  Occasionally it's "kill/capture a friend of Diana Prince."  These are all bad ideas.
• Bad guys show up to do that part of the plan, causing Diana Prince to look at them like she's really disappointed that they would try to pull this shit again.
• Diana Prince turns into Wonder Woman.
• Wonder Woman doesn't punch the stuffing out of the bad guys, mostly because she's just so amused by how much they think they can "punch her" or "shoot her with stuff" or "not immediately lose."
• The bad guys are arrested.
• The bad guys/Diana Prince repeat all these actions as she systematically dismantles their operation from low-level thug to top level CEO-bad guy.
• Marnie.

Friday: Fuck it.

I have no picture, and only one link.  Today has been a bad day.

• Yeah.  That makes sense.  

Thursday: Pastrami

I discovered that there's an "extra meat" option at the sandwich place by work.  I went with that instead of onion rings, and ended up with too much sandwich, so I brought the second half home for dinner.  This was a good plan.

• Germany.
• Princess Kaguya.
• Ok, Leviticus has what, nine letters in it?  If you get to the midpoint of your canvas, and you're only at the "v", then you've clearly fucked up.  So, just go ahead and cram in six letters in an illegible mess.  And here's a tip: if you're going to be right-justified, like in the word "burn" there, why not start with the "n", and work backwards?  Then you can control the kerning a lot easier.  "Lies" almost works, but it looks like the "s" is too far away to keep the same letter size.  Finally, if you're going to be a bigoted jackass, at least try to plan your vandalism better.  Otherwise, your message gets lost in the fact that you're clearly a moron.

Wednesday: Too many things.

"No, see, I'm cosplaying.  I'm Pyramid Head, from Silent Hill 2."

• Mulan.
• Pikachu.
• Birds.

Tuesday: Book report.

The fact that it took me so long to finish it kind of says something.  The movie is better.  Part of it is that the movie flows better.  There's an overlap between the "Marnie" section and the "new family at the Marsh House" section.  That's not here in the book, so there's less of a "Marnie is a ghost" feel, leaving just "Anna is only remembering things from her childhood/is crazy."  I also don't understand the family dynamic in the book, either.  Auntie sends Anna to stay with friends on the coast, but when the new family moves into the Marsh House, Auntie gets a "visited and talked and went back home" and the friends get a "here's your toothbrush" bit, and then it's all assumed that Anna will just live with that family now.  WTF?  The movie also slimmed that family down.  There are five children in the book, only two of which have any distinguishing characteristics: the girl who finds the diary, and the baby.  All the other children blur together.  Finally, it's unclear to me why Anna's birth father and mother have to divorce, so her mother can marry someone new before she dies.  It doesn't serve any purpose for her to be married twice, unless this is some 1950s moralizing.  

• Punching bag.
• When birds walk.
• I noticed this Monday, but couldn't find any information about it.  I don't see how not displaying background images is going to make twitter more money.

Monday: I hate meetings.

These pidgins are from last week.  I had no pictures from today.

• Bunnies.
• Galadriel.
• I don't have a third link.

Sunday: Sure. Why not? Let's drive over the mountains again.

The problem is that something I watched last night mentioned ribs.  I haven't had ribs in some time period measured in years.  This led to a search through yelp to try and find a place that does ribs.  Not so surprisingly, most places that list ribs on yelp here are talking about Korean style.  This was not the kind of ribs I wanted.

Eventually I found someone complaining that the ribs they had weren't that great, and that Ruby Tuesday's (of all places) had better ones.  The RT that was at Ala Moana is gone now (according to yelp), so I decided to go to the one in Kaneohe.  Because why not.

Fact I didn't know: there is a little kid train that drives through Windward Mall.

They're very proud of their salad bar at RT.  Disturbingly so.  It's a salad bar, RT.  Also: I have no clue how to use a salad bar.  Do you just accept that everything is going to spill all over?

I forgot to take a picture of my strawberry lemonade.  It was served in one of those super tall beer glasses that I don't think I've ever used before.

I went with the full rack, so I'd have leftovers for tomorrow.  I also have leftover green beans.  There were no survivors of the mac&cheese party.

Good thing:  the ribs were cooked to the point where the bone comes out cleanly.  Not good thing:  somehow, they were still dry.  Not excessively so, just enough to make me a bit sad.

• I didn't know we had a comet up in the southern hemisphere.  We find quite a few, so it's hard to keep track.
• Maneki neko.
• Nine page paper that largely explains the underlying economics that fuel the current Greek crisis, based on the underlying fact that the Euro zone is not in fact an optimal currency area.

Saturday: Adventures!

A week and a half ago, I did the eye test and chose new glasses, and was told that it would take three weeks to get them in.  That was a lie, as they called me yesterday to tell me that they were in.  They're only open until noon on Saturdays, so I had to get up early.

They're clearly better at the "things glasses are supposed to do," but I haven't completely gotten used to them, so things often look weird.  This is especially true at the far periphery, as they're slightly wider, so there's more not-fuzzy area than before.  I'm also thinking that next time I should get the more expensive thinner lens material.  These are a bit thicker than I was expecting.

And the case is this weird triangle prism thing that magnets shut.  Also I went to the movies.

Mr. Holmes opened here this weekend, so I wanted to go see that.  It's not a bad movie, and does avoid many of the "modern Holmes story tropes" that plague many of these kind of things.  There are a few issues that didn't make sense, but it holds together pretty well.

And then I thought about getting stuff at WF, but decided not to.  I started driving home, decided that I wasn't quite hungry enough to get a late lunch, and then decided that I probably should have gotten something at WF for dinner.  So I went to WF.  In Kailua.  Because I wanted to drive over the mountains again, I guess.  I took the Likelike, but then couldn't get over into the lane I needed to get on to Kamehameha.  While driving I saw Mokulele Drive, and I know that that connects.  It is also the street that has one of the best views of the Koolaus:

Stolen from street view because there was too much traffic to try taking my own image.  Which is unfortunate, because street view doesn't have a sunny sky.  The mountain on the left has a nice flatter area halfway down that you can kind of see.  That was super bright.  The range on the right has a bunch of ridges (that you can again kind of see), that were alternating with shadows today.

These are older links, but they check out.

• Bunnies.
• Kumamon.
• Marnie.  Still best movie of the year.

Friday: I think I'm getting sick.

Also, I forgot that I cleaned a frowny face in my window, but that's because you can only see it when the sun is in the right position.

• More banana.
• Grant Morrison is just awful.
• Baby bunnies.
• According to the translation, these are called "American dogs" in Japanese.  The point of the tweet is that Mom forgot the chopsticks, but not really because two corn dogs.

Thursday: Ugh.

I have too much stuff to get done.

I think this bird ran into my window.

• Merkel is just the worst.
• Deer is plural.
• Jake the Brick was wonderful.
• Marnie.

Wednesday: Banana bread.

Banana bread.

There was a really nice rainbow at Foodland this evening.  And then it started raining.

• I saw this bear on the "Wednesday PBS show about animals that's not Nature for some reason."  I had to find a picture of the post surgery half-shaved look when I saw it on the show.
• The Demon.
• I think this is my favorite Pluto/sketch/overlay image.
• Oshawott.

Tuesday: It is generally true that dumping the SQL results and doing it in perl is easier than trying to craft the sufficient set of JOINs.

This is a picture of the sky being a jerk.  See the rain?  See the bright sunshine?

• I guess it's good that the IMF has finally stood up and said the grown up thing.
• When this story came out a few days ago, I looked her up to see why she was driving up to the MK summit after the rules limiting access were passed.  It turns out she ran for lieutenant governor (and lost badly) in the last election.  As a libertarian.  I'm guessing her argument is that property rights are absolute and must always be respected, except when the state owns the property, in which case you're not bound to follow the property owner's rules.  Because libertarianism?  Also she was arrested last night for doing the exact same thing.  Because if you're going to be dumb, you might as well go all out.
• "Let's glue him on the rocket so hard."
• Pikachu.
• This is worth watching at least the first five seconds of.  It has dinosaurs.  It auto-loops, though.  So caution there.

Monday: Eh.

I forgot that this happened on Saturday.  I have not searched for petco, pet supplies, pets, animals in general, or return policies.  This isn't helping me in any way, google.  "Look!  Shops exist!  There's one now!"  Good job, google.  Way to AI.

• I saw something about this on twitter, that took the insane other view.  You're at a place to advertise.  Now you're upset that people who are there being advertised to are sharing your advertisement with people online.  This is misunderstanding the concept of advertising.
• This is pretty funny, but probably only if you watched enough DBZ.  
• I don't see how Greece isn't basically trapped in a payday lender situation.
• Cats are dumb.
• Kat Leth + Kat Leyh.

Sunday: "Sidewalk sale"

Which means Hello Kitty vomits her wares out of her store.

And I had sushi, but it was super busy, so I didn't take any pictures.  One thing I noticed is that the okonomiyaki is gone from the menu.  I guess other people had the same impression I did.

• If the actual deal is anything like the leaks, then Angela Merkel is possibly the most evil leader of a modern democracy.
• Pockets.
• I hate reboots.  How is this going to be indexed in the trade paperback?  "Squirrel Girl 2015a" and "Squirrel Girl 2015b"?

Saturday: Because it seemed like a good idea.

There's a crappy tropical storm that broke up north of the islands, and is basically being a jerk with the weather.

Stupid jerk weather.

I decided (probably partially due to the fact that Greece has been in the news all this week), that I'd drive out to the Greek place.

It's at the marina.

Not the best ever saganaki, but it was still tasty.

Mix souvlaki plate.  Chicken/lamb/shrimp.  Lamb is super yummy.

The clouds always look good over the marina.

 This was the point I decided to go home the long way.

At the Lanai lookout.

Looking the right way.  And if you look super closely, you can't see it because I had to rescale the image, but

These people were taking wedding photos in the "place those signs on the left of the panorama clearly state is super dangerous."

Then a series of "I'm pretty sure if I just stay on this road, it hooks up to H-3" thoughts, after which:

I found H-3 and stopped to take this at the scenic lookout.

And then I drove through the coolest thing ever: clouds pushed up against the Ko'olaus so H-3 is super foggy until you get to the tunnel and it magically clears.

• Trump your cat.  This is wonderful.
• Birds, you don't belong in that jar.  Stop it.
• Elijah Wood.

Friday: No I did not spend an hour on this.

Somewhere today I found a link to this spirograph simulator.  I never had a spirograph as a kid, and all the people I knew who did thought they were boring.  Because they were dumb, I guess.

Wobbly orbit-like things.

The inside.

Adding the outside.

This one nearly looks 3-d.

This one I really like.  The plank had 150 pins, and the gear had 50, so there's a nice small number of repeats.  Unfortunately, there's no "reflect gear" option, so there's no way to make the pattern completely symmetric.  Still, I really like the dispersion pattern that comes out.

• Steven Universe.
• Squirrels.
• Yeah, Star Wars would have been far better with this kind of writing.
• It probably wasn't the best idea to let all the airlines merge in the first place.
• Dr. Isis is pretty much wrong on this one.  Or, as the one comment suggests, "becoming evil."  Why?
• She basically suggests that strikes can't be done by postdocs, because they'll be fired and replaced with someone else.  Sure there is a general excess of postdoc candidates, but this isn't the same as firing the cashier at McDonalds.  Those kind of jobs usually don't have to do a candidate search as intensive as is done for postdocs.
• She explicitly suggests that not working overtime would result in bad recommendations, and that because some postdocs would work overtime without added pay, it would force everyone to do so.
• The "I have to work overtime, so why shouldn't you?" comment completely ignores the concept of an exempt worker.  Are you in a managerial position, making more than the salary threshold, and doing work requiring advanced knowledge?  Then you are exempt, because you theoretically have control over your time.  The proposed rule will increase the salary threshold, making postdocs no longer exempt.  This reflects the fact that they generally don't.  Since, you know, they're not the boss.
• "Blah blah, there's only so much money."  Yes.  That's the underlying problem: science is insufficiently funded.  This problem means that PIs put in requests for grants that assume everyone works 80 hours a week while being paid for 40, because even though the job really requires two FTEs, that would make it uncompetitive against those grant requests that are underpaying workers.  To claim that trying to fix things on one end is somehow wrong doesn't make sense.
• It really doesn't matter much to me personally, as I'd be above the proposed threshold anyway.  It also doesn't change the fact that this year, like I have for the past three years, I will point out during my performance review that we really should have about twice the number of people on our project than we do.

Thursday: Action birds.

There were three birds sitting here to get out of the rain, but they flew away when I turned around to look at them.

• Bird.
• You're always fucking things up, Reed Richards.
• Hillary's plot is really the best response.
• Pikachu.
• "Black and Garbett’s ongoing “Lucifer” series will find God dead and the erstwhile lord-of-Hell-turned-nightclub-impresario accused of the murder by no less than his own angelic brother, Gabriel. If Lucifer can prove his innocence, not only will his sins be forgotten – but he’ll be welcomed back into the Silver City."  That sounds fucking stupid.
• Isn't the whole point of God that you can't kill him?
• Wouldn't someone notice is Lucifer killed God?  I mean, that's probably going to leave a mark.
• Gabriel doesn't really have the ability to do much to Lucifer.  I believe that was made rather clear during the war.
• Why would Lucifer have to prove his innocence?  How does that make sense?
• "Oh, sure, you fell with a third of the host, but at least you didn't kill God last week.  So we're just going to call it squaresies."
• Why would Lucifer want to go back, anyway?  That's was kind of the point of A Season of Mists.  He's done with it.
• Also Lucifer left creation at the end of his good series.  As did God.  So.  You know.  
• ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wednesday: Seeing is important.

• It's not all about you, Harry Potter.
• Cats are jerks.
• Poison Ivy.

Tuesday: Just choose a notation, stick with it, and then just write the damn covariance out.

Otherwise I have to read through nine papers with nine notations, all of which are mutually conflicting in symbol usage.  Only two (or three?) of those actually discuss the covariance at all.  The rest are like, "well, we gave you a solution to the problem.  Isn't that good enough?  You want limits on how accurate that solution is?  Picky!"

"Gettin Cool!"

Chocolate chip melon-pan wasn't as good as I'd hoped.

• The President.
• I also did not know about this new book.
• Green hair.
• Pikachu.
• More Adventure Time.

Monday: I am grumpy because every day I don't give this stupid make-up talk is a day that I make the current slides out of date.

I'm quickly reaching the point where I'll have to throw out every slide and replace it with a new one.  I generated three plots today that probably should go in the increasingly dominant "Updates" slide.  

I was going to take a picture of a bird, but it flew away, but I already had the phone out, so I took a picture of the tree.

• Spider-Man.
• Bernie Sanders.
• Turkey Town.
• Angry Roomba.

Sunday: I mostly just wanted to go someplace.

So I went to get curry.

And surprisingly enough, my Korean import version of the Marnie not-soundtrack was in my mailbox.

• These two links have a theme.  That theme is "people who argue based on moral reasons are often full of shit.
• Piketty kind of shuts down the entire German argument on debt.
• Colorado does something sane, despite jackasses in their legislature, and the author of this story somehow has to stick "startling success" in the title.
• These two links have a theme as well.
• Cats.
• Dogs.
• Not really a theme.  Just one line that made me laugh.
• "A second Dance gem."
• "Lenin closet."

Saturday: Fourth of July

Wonky city panorama.  I didn't care to do it manually or to try and fix it.  The cool thing is you can see Jupiter and Venus above downtown.  The brighter spot in the sky is a helicopter that was circling.

Then the fireworks started:

And then I realized it would make more sense to zoom in.

You can see a green dot above the fireworks.

It's moved in this one.

 I'm pretty sure it's a drone.

If I had to guess, it's the guy who made this video last year.

I like this one.

It's hard to see, but it's turned red here.  That's why I'm pretty sure it's a drone.  If it's like the one I've seen on youtube, there are green lights on the front, and red on the back.

Green again.

And then it was over.

• Seanbaby vs. the Fourth.
• You probably don't know who Arthur Suydam is.  The important thing to know is that he's an asshole.
• Pikachu.
• Greece.
• Miss Victory appears to hate doors.  Also bad guys.
• I love unagi.  I still think this is probably a bad idea.
• Bunny surprise.

And now I'm going to go eat some hot dogs.