Thursday: New Year's Eve.

Today was a whirlwind of shopping for groceries and converting those groceries into food.

Also, today was the day that they repainted the balcony.  I don't they're called lanais here.

 I also failed to take pictures of most of the food.  The only thing that I did remember to snap was the cheese plate:

Goat cheese, blue cheese, some third cheese that I don't remember.

And then more cooking continued, with the only major problem being a burn.  I guess the fact that we've gone something like seven years doing these NYE things with this being the first casualty is pretty good.

Here are the recipes that I didn't take pictures of.

• Corn pudding.  This ended up too eggy for me.
• Potatoes.
• Butternut squash soup.  After spending a lot of time yesterday working on this, I completely forgot about it and never had any.

Also there was pork in a delicious mushroom sauce and some green beans.

• Christmas baking.
• Dog, no.  Stop that, dog.
• Star Wars fan theories.  I can read and link to these now.
• BB-8.
• New level.
• And just a final reminder that tomorrow is the Day of Third Impact, so I hope everyone is ready for the conclusion of the Human Instrumentality Project.

And this link has been sitting lonely in my saved RSS feeds since last year.

• The artwork of La Vie Parisienne should really be collected and anthologized.

Wednesday: I no longer need to avoid all the spoilers.

Today's plan was to go see the new Star Wars movie.

With lunch.  We ended up at Lola's, and I ordered too much chicken and too few not-chicken.

But then we discovered that the movie was not playing when expected, but rather an hour later.  So we got coffee.

And saw this very cold dog waiting for someone to get coffee and come back outside.  I have enough images to do a gif, but I'm lazy today.

And coffee cups have squirrels on them for the holidays.

But yeah.  Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Ticket fun!

We saw it at the Alameda Theater, which as the CGI food kept mentioning, was built in 1932.  This means that it's very old and highly decorated.

Lobby.

Gilt detail above the theater entrance.

Poorly illuminated interior shot.

Reasonably exposed exterior shot.

I'll do links, and keep with the "no Star Wars spoilers" bit by putting those after the cut.

• This is a mistake.  The last Indiana Jones movie wasn't very good, so making more bad movies isn't a great idea.
• Cosplay.
• I'll have to keep an eye out for this movie.
• Disguise. 

Tuesday: Today was a good day.

First up, this is technically unrelated and from yesterday.  Why do they have Valentine's day stuff out at Target?  That's more than a month and a half away.  That's just silly.

Just silly.

Here's why today was a good day.

I saw a dog.  I pet the dog too, and both the dog and I were happy with the situation.

And then:

I had mac and cheese for lunch.  Fancy mac and cheese with bacon, mushrooms, and caramelized onions.  Both the m&c and I were happy with the situation.

I found another silly Target label thing today.

And this game of pictionary wasn't really even close.  Note the second "1" rolled there in the corner of the table.  Yes, that's my team two spaces from the end of the board.

• Numerical analysis.
• This just happened to show up in the RSS today.  Convenient.
• CS Lewis.
• Facing fears.

Monday: So my flight was cancelled.

That's not really the kind of news to get just before going to bed the night before a big travel day.  It was even worse when I clicked through to rebook, and it came back with "no flights are available today."  The good thing is that this was for the night before the trip, as that's when I was rebooking.  I'm fine with them not having any flights at 11pm.  In any case, instead of going through O'hare (which sounds like it was a disaster), I went through Dulles (which is just generically crappy).

The other nice thing is that my long flight was basically empty, so I was able to get an upgrade to business class.  With no one next to me.

And I had breakfast.  The fruit and cinnamon bun were good.  Blueberry Greek yogurt not so much.

Apple blintz.  I'm glad it came with ham, as that was really what I was looking to eat that early/late in my sleep schedule.

Also a cookie.

It's not that the airplane food was the only thing I ate, though.

I had a pretzel before the first flight.  They weren't ready for pretzels that early, so I had to wait for it.

And then mexican food for lunch after landing.

And Burma Superstar for dinner.

• Latte art.
• No, Ted Cruz.  No.  Stop it.  You're not cool, and that doesn't mean what you think it does.  Unless you do know what it means, and then, seriously, no.
• Squirrel.
• Brock.

Sunday: I did nothing today, but I travel early tomorrow.

So I'll backdate a post of links tomorrow after travel has completed.  Maybe I'll even find a picture to post.  Woo.

Saturday: Lazy days are the best days.

Mostly because there's no pressure to do anything.

• Bunny.
• Dog.
• Fake titles.
• George Washington.

Friday: Christmas.

Soaking roast beef in au jus before making a sandwich means the sandwich is going to end up soggy.  Delicious, but soggy.

• It's been an entire year, and I just now saw this pun.
• Josephine Baker.
• Holiday Baking.
• Pikachu.
• Snorlax emoji.
• The idea being that if you're lazy or late, you can just mark up the card, and be correct for whichever year/Chinese zodiac animal is appropriate.
• Wonder Woman, stealing a Christmas tree.
• I don't have enough art deco stuff here today, I guess.
• Santa sushi.
• Santy Claus.

Thursday: Christmas Eve.

• Christmas Squirrel.
• It's a wonderful life.
• Is that a fur trimmed outfit, Wonder Woman?  You know that makes like zero sense, right?  Just as confusing as can be.
• The seventeenth angel.

Wednesday: Sloppy joe is basically American bao.

I'm sure lots of things qualify as "_____ bao," but still.

• Marnie.
• This is bullshit.  The stupid scanners don't even work correctly, so making people use them is only useful if you don't expect to find anything.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• I didn't know Lalique did graphic art as well as glass work.
• Christmas squirrel.
• Christmas Adam.

Tuesday: Hibernate occasionally resumes right, but suspend is more efficient than I thought.

So I've just been using that recently.

• Red squirrel.
• Pancake the cat.
• Bear.
• Moderate to severe joint pain.
• Neko atsume.
• Rainbow cat.

Monday: I had to have my computer rebooted, and I'm not happy about that.

At least it's running again, so I can do a set of links.

• Batgirl and Supergirl.
• Just in case I forget that next Friday is the Day of Third Impact.
• Is this the same Marnie/Mushroom set I've linked to before?
• Wishbone the dog.
• Fox.
• Cats vs. trees.
• Bunny.

People I've seen today

1) Racist old lady.  "Where the heck are they from?" They're from go-fuck-yourself-ville. Christ, lady, you were visiting Hawaii. 

2) Person playing 2048 all wrong.  Just so wrong. 

3) This guy I'm looking at right now wearing leather pants.  People actually wear leather pants. In public.

4) For realsies side pony. Like Misty level shit.

5) Girl with jack-o-lantern socks and ukulele who was asking about a gate change.  You were right, our gate changed.

6) A cute ass kitty:

It was not a happy kitty.

Saturday: I am not a fan of travel anymore.

But ramen was had, everything packed, pre-checked through security, and auto tweeting security cam enabled.   Let's do Christmas.

Friday: I should not get so stressed out about going on vacation.

I'm mostly packed, I have 24 hours to sort any last packing out, I have my poster done and printed, I'm using my replacement suitcase for the first time in a year and a half, I have nothing really to worry about for work for the first time in forever, and the biggest problem is that I don't like my seat on the first flight.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And the nice plate lunch place lady screwed up my chicken katsu curry order.  Their katsu isn't very good without the curry.  They use thighs, and so it's fattier than I really like.  The curry cuts that down somewhat.

I would get curry tomorrow, but I kind of feel more like getting ramen.  Which I just had.  Maybe this is my current biggest problem.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Finally, while checking pockets before doing laundry, I discovered seven dollars in my coat.  I think this means that the taxi I took from the airport gave me the wrong change.  I'm pretty sure I only asked for six back.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I also just realized that by the middle of next year, I'll have been doing the daily blog thing for five years.  Weird.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Cat vs. hat.
• Cat vs. Jedi master.  I saw the video elsewhere, but didn't watch in favor of waiting for the gifs.
• Best President.
• I don't know.  Points for trying to be diverse.  Minus points for Harley. 

Thursday: I finally have my poster largely complete.

So I had a tasty dinner.

Tomorrow I can do the last little edits, and then print it out and be done with work for the year.  I also have to do a bunch of laundry, since I need to pack so many clothes for this trip.

• Ha ha ha good.
• I couldn't get the original link I was going to post to play the video, so I clicked this link on the page to this story about Pikachu.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• Machida Squirrel Garden.

Wednesday: Writing is hard.

I also decided that the cardboard in my trash at work looks like a face.

Also, for future reference, `amixer -q set Capture,0 cap` seems to toggle the mute on my new laptop.

• Danbo.  Since I was talking about cardboard people.
• This is the story about how one very crazy person got banned from the Silent Hill wikia page.
• These are good questions about Star Wars.
• Lion is the best character.

Tuesday: I spend a lot of time debugging things that are broken in completely different places.

I also got another of these fun nonsense messages about my data usage.

• I know which movie I would want to win.
• A yule log video.  Starring "Chuck."
• Squirrel Girl.
• Fancy food.
• The point is that the Fed appears to be set to make a mistake tomorrow.
• I saw this Onion article, and immediately thought, "Isn't that just Five Counties?"
• Symbolic algebra software.

I forgot these two links, and was then going to color something, but instead of collected trash to be productive.

• Well this sucks.  Mostly because I generally like shrimp and hate slavery.  As-you-do. Also because reading this story made me really want shrimp cocktail, and that just made me feel bad.
• This also sucks, but isn't that surprising.  The main quote that gets to the point is this one: "And like many other areas of the economy, YouTube has a basic supply and demand problem. Everybody wants to be there, so fledgling performers put up with a lot because they want to be famous."  Let's do a bit of math.

I'm subscribed to 391 channels, and it looks like in the past day, 83 new videos have been produced by those channels.  Here's the CDF of the video lengths:

With linear fit that I could convert to a power law index if I wasn't so lazy.

The median video is about five minutes long, but the sum of all of them is more than 16 hours.  Even watching at double speed, watching everything I'm subscribed to on youtube would be a full time job.  It's just not possible to watch everything.

And this is the point where I admit I was going to do a more thorough analysis, but remembered I need to do laundry tonight, so fuck it.

Monday: I hate when I have my task list planned for the week, and it suddenly doubles in length.

I mean, it's not like I'm going on vacation soon.  And I don't have any pictures for today.

• The prairie dog dressed as Pikachu.
• The cat/cucumber meme.
• I had the exact same thought when I saw the first picture.  Also a meme.
• It appears to be nearly impossible to find my old GRE scores.  In any case, this makes sense.  Most of the things I didn't get right on the physics GRE are completely useless for astronomy.
• Because pastrami.  My understanding is that there's a place just down the block that's supposed to be as good or better.
• Dumb people can't understand why people would be willing to lie to them for money.
• This is stupid, and I'm glad the writer points out how stupid it is to stuff Metron's giant chair into tiny rooms.
• This is also stupid, because for regular people, it's going to look like DC is just copying Thanos with Darkseid, even if Darkseid was actually first.
• It was kind of interesting to skip through this video and see how the six Star Wars movies synced up.

Sunday: Every time I do an early post, I end up with cool links later in the evening.

Oh well.

Today was the Honolulu Marathon, and even though it started super early in the morning, I still wanted to avoid the route:

Which kind of covers most of my usual places.

So up and over the Pali to get a burrito in Kailua:

It was a tasty burrito, but getting the chips and salsa was a bit of overkill, even if I ended up bringing most of them home with me.

They're were super salty too.

 I figure I'll have them with the WF pizza slice I got for dinner later.

Two things about this photo.  First, the Kailua WF has an entire bar of gross water you can get.  Second, that asshole in the white shirt in the upper right corner.

I had my slice of pizza and a Izze, and that's the express lane.  That asshole decided that he had questions about the nougat being sold, and chose that lane to ask those questions.  The checkout person had to call someone to get answers about it, which given the only questions I can think of are "how much is it?" ($12.99 or something) and "what's in it?" (I don't know, probably some sugar and shit.  Read the fucking box, dumbass), I have no idea what he could be wondering about.  Then, after getting his answer about the stupid nougat, he wandered away.  He wasn't buying anything, he didn't want the nougat, he just decided to be a jackass and slow down the express lane with his bullshit.

• This is the best online quiz ever.
• Owls.
• Good, or Don't Be.
• The original version.
• More details.
• Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
• More details.

Saturday: Today I got ramen and gas in my car.

This is the least blurry photo of my leftover karaage.

• Ha ha ha, fuck the Republicans.
• Jubilation Lee.  And the tag about the slippers is exactly the comment I was going to put here.
• Teacup bunny.
• Assortment of bunnies.
• So, I'm not saying that I would murder all those bunnies for this sandwich, but I'm really interested in this sandwich.

Friday: Next week I should be able to just work on my poster.

This was a tasty lunch, but it unsettled my tummy all day.  :(

• Education and poverty.
• Comic books.
• Bear.
• Squirrel Girl.
• Cinnamon bun.
• Doesn't this kind of not make any sense?

Thursday: Tomorrow is going to be debugging day.

A guy came in to look in my office ceiling today.  Apparently AO is 90 inches up.

I saw this bird today.

And then at the end of the day, my boss told me to think about applying the iteratively reweighted least squares to fitting a static data set.  So it's not really least squares so much as iteratively reweighted weighted means.  And in the single dimension test case I knocked together in about ten minutes, it converges in about five iterations to the correct solution for basically all contamination rates up to the point where the contaminated sample is 100% the size of the real sample.  This makes it switch over to fitting the contaminating sample.  Makes sense.

• Marnie.  I really should go through and find all these links and see how much of the movie I can reconstruct.
• Evangelion.
• Owl.
• Squirrel.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• I'm really hoping for a schism in the Republicans.

Wednesday: I have a telecon tomorrow, and I'm not looking forward to it.

I also had a bunch of new things added to my task list at work.  I am not happy about that either.

I didn't have any photos for today, but then I remembered I can create photos of things.

This is the one my camera decided was best.

I kind of liked this one a bit better, but I'm not sure why.

All the links are source pairs today.

• Marnie.
• Marnie.
• Kissing a shark.
• Bad decisions.
• Those snacks sound like shit, United.  This isn't what people are pissed about.
• No, this is dumb.  Do you remember Service Merchandise, Target?  You'd go there to buy things, and you'd fill out a form for everything you wanted to buy, and that'd be sent into the warehouse in back, and they'd collect all your purchases.  It was kind of weird and awkward, and it always seemed to take forever to get your stuff.  This "Wonderland" shit is the same thing with RFID tags.  Last time I was at Target, there were about infinity people shopping.  If each person is buying on average N items, at a rate of r items per minute, then everyone can shop in (N / r) minutes.  See how that infinity cancels out?  Now assume Target has 100 people in the back picking items that are being bought.  This makes the shopping time (infinity / 100) * (N/ r) minutes, and I'm pretty sure Target isn't even open 24 hours a day.

Agents of Shield: The show where no one does the smart thing and shoot the bad guy so he stays dead.

Bad guys: "Let's send a bunch of baddies to Planet Blue to recruit Ancient Evil Dude!  We'll send this kidnapped good guy!"
Good guys: "Fuck that!  Let's send our leader to crash the Planet Blue mission.  By himself.  For funsies!"

Jerk Ass Badguy: "I'm a bully!  Look at me bully you!  LOL!"
Kidnapped good guy: "Hey, I found the astronaut dude who's been living on Planet Blue."
Sandstorm: "I am a natural event, or maybe magical.  Whatever.  I shouldn't be talking, is the point here."
Astronaut dude: "Let's get stabby on the baddies!  Does that rhyme?"
Kidnapped good guy: "Not really, but sure, let's stab a couple and then run away to the portal home."

Unnamed bad guys: "Huh.  Well that got fucked up pretty quick.  Oh, wait, we shouldn't be talking now because we're dead."
Leader good guy: "Because I shot them.  Now I'm going to make you walk with me, Jerk Ass Badguy."
Jerk Ass Badguy: "Blah blah blah blah blah.  Pseudo religious bullshit."
Leader good guy: "Blammo.  That's not me talking, I just shot you, non-fatally, because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

Astronaut dude: "Cool, portal.  Let's get out of here.  Also, let me mention details that I probably shouldn't know."
Kidnapped good guy: "You're not really Astronaut dude, are you."
Astronaut dude: "Nope.  What tipped you off?"
Kidnapped good guy: "Well, you're kind of missing like, a pretty big chunk of your leg.  So...Ancient Evil Dude?"
Ancient Evil Dude: "Yep.  I'm going to fight you."
Leader good guy: "Blammo.  Again, not me talking.  This time I shot the Ancient Evil Dude."

Jerk Ass Badguy: "Even I'm confused why you haven't shot me yet.  Like, there's your buddy.  How do you need me around still?"
Leader good guy: "Shut up and fight me!"

Ancient Evil Dude: "Ok, guns hurt, right, but I'm going to keep walking towards the portal."
Kidnapped good guy: "So I can't kill you with this gun?"
Ancient Evil Dude: "No, not really."
Kidnapped good guy: "Even a flare gun?"
Ancient Evil Dude: "Huh.  No, I'm actually pretty vulnerable to burning up completely.  That sucks."

Leader good guy: "I'm going to slowly crush your ribcage, Jerk Ass Badguy, because that's my best plan.  I could just leave you here to die, but no.  I'm going to kill you now, when it's really not convenient."
Jerk Ass Badguy: "Crunch."
Good guys: "Yay!  We all made it home, except for Astronaut dude, but he died like months ago, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯."

Me: "Well, at least they killed that fucker."

Old Man Badguy Leader: "Crap.  Well, time to catch a plane home.  Why didn't the good guys stay around to blow up any cars leaving the scene of that stuff?  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  Good for me, though."
Chauffeur: "I don't really say this, but me explaining that there's a guy standing in the road blocking the car is probably the easiest way for this recap to work."
Old Man Badguy Leader: "Evil smile time."
Guy Standing in the Road: "I'm actually Zombie Jerk Ass Badguy, and Ancient Evil Dude, because Ancient Evil Dude is really just like a slug or something, and before he/I burned up completely, I/he puked it up.  As you do with zombie slugs."

Me: "FFS.  I wish TV and movie sides of this thing cooperated so this show would make more sense in the context of the larger world."

Tuesday: I forgot that there's a stupid mismatch thing because of a typo I made 18 months ago.

Which is going to delay something stupid into taking even longer.  I wonder if we can all just agree that this is something to finish after New Year's.  It doesn't help that today turned into kind of a waste because the water was off at work, which caused the A/C to be off as well.  I eventually gave up trying to work as my office got warmer and warmer and came home to edit my paper instead.

I did wander around Long's while waiting for my lunch sandwich to be panini-fied, which I completely forgot about until I saw I had photos from my phone.  That would have been a shame, because cute lunch boxes are cute.

"I was there to give you a hug on your special day."

"I will give you a hug on your special day."

"We enjoy every day."

I had this image planned instead, since I saw it online today:

Which I didn't immediately know what it was until I saved it and it said it was a baked brie.

But what I thought it was was even better.  You know how beef wellington works, right?  You know how delicious all the Thanksgiving food is, right?  Smoosh them together.  Pre-roast a turkey breast, let it cool (I think this would work best), wrap turkey in stuffing, maybe add other stuff here, wrap stuffing in puff pastry.  Bake until puffed and cooked through.  You could even put in gravy so it bleeds like the brie does.

• This is stupid.  Stop making twitter not useful, twitter.
• Blah blah something something Supergirl, blah blah.
• Now I want waffles.
• Marnie.

Monday: So the good news is I don't have tuberculosis.

Not that I thought that I did, but I had to get a test to continue taking my magic drugs.  Since tuberculosis is bad and all.

And I got this in the mail today, because this company apparently thinks I have money to order custom eclipse glasses in large quantities.  I'm sorry that I don't, but thanks for the free eclipse glasses.  Also: heads up that there's an eclipse in August 2017.  

 I also needed to get stuff at Target, so I went to check out the story I saw yesterday.

A lot of things didn't have funny names, but everything in the cotton-stuff department did.  "Handy dandies" is my favorite.

I have a lot of things to pack into the links today.

• Things like this are why I stopped reading comics.
• Ok, Supergirl TV show.  You fooled me.  To be fair, though, you did use Hank Henshaw's name, and he's totally Cyborg Superman.  New question, though: what's J'onn been doing?  He's almost exactly the same as Regular Superman except he's weak against fire-type Pokemon.  He's been filling out paperwork and running a crap version of Shield instead of doing superhero stuff?
• Important Pokemon information.
• And this is why Jesse and James are the best villains ever.  They have depth that is usually lacking.
• Another article explaining why Uber is bad.
• The important thing that people keep forgetting.  Terrorists do not create an existential threat to modern nations.
• Today is the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.
• Huh.  Nicely done, Coke.
• I guess that's the end of Rush, then.
• Dog.

Sunday: I wanted a burger.

Mushrooms, oven roasted tomatoes, blue cheese, grilled onions?  Maybe?  I forgot if I got those.  Plus carrots and mixed greens.  They also forgot my regular bbq sauce, but it turns out that the Korean bbq sauce goes well with sweet potato fries.

• Yes.  All of this.  Fuck Elmo for ruining everything.
• Short read about the middle east.
• Ok, I like Pikachu as much as anybody, but I'd never pay $365 for a toy.
• Wait, what?  How long has Target been doing this?  Do I have anything from Target labeled like this?  If not, I may need to take a trip to Target this week.
• Ha ha.
• Trash peasants.
• Did I post this Superman thing?  Anti-racist Superman is best.

Saturday: I wanted a sandwich.

So I got one.

And then got another one to have for dinner.

And I did pretty much nothing else today.  I watched part of the football game because I was too lazy to change the channel.

• Today during that football game they were advertising for diamond rings.  At the end, they were like, "find this wonky ass ring at any of these stores."  Which makes sense, since most of them are owned by the same company.
• Or, owned by a wholly owned subsidiary of that same company.
• Man, fuck Manzoku.
• Jerk ass cat.
• Again, this is what happens when one party decides that being dumb and racist is just fine.
• Hopefully this becomes a legal standard, and that will do some to fix the problem.
• Cured meats.
• Bears hate Christmas.
• I saw this, and assumed it was regular tumblr not doing research stuff.
• But.
• I guess not.