Whatever, a second post just because I accumulated two links, and then added more from my saved RSS stuff.

• Pokemon.
• People are really stupid about this update.
• Here's a video about playing in rural areas.  The insight comes at about 14 minutes, when he realizes that if they did use a different metric than cell activity, then rural areas would be populated with Pokemon instances on the server that would never get used by any of the clients.  That's inefficient.
• Guitar Solo.
• Not Pokemon.
• The link that prompted this post.  Facebook sucks, and this is a shitty excuse for their hiring practices.
• Cantina theme.
• Ghost outfit.

Sunday: Nothing sounded good.

Until I smelled someone grilling in the neighborhood.  That made me want chicken.

Even though that meant driving back to Kailua.

I got a half chicken this time, but only ate half of it.  I'm probably going to finish it off after this blog post.  It was better than last time, but they were also not rushed as much today.  It was super rainy on the other side of the island, and the tunnel on the Pali was inside a cloud, making it super foggy.  I had planned on going to the lookout to see if there are any cool Pokemon there, but due to the rain and general crappy conditions, I missed the exit.  Oops.

I'm also happy that they updated Pokemon Go.  I don't have any major issues with the changes, and it was nice to see what options there are in the trainer customization (since somebody else designed my trainer and clicked to finalize it before I could see any of the details).  I also discovered that if you switch styles, it totally resets everything, so I had to put it all back the way it was (since I'm used to my trainer now).  

• Pokemon.
• But, of course, some assholes aren't happy if they don't drain all the fun out of the game by mechanizing it.  So you don't know where certain Pokemon are.  Move around.  See new things.  Explore.  It's not Ash had a radar to tell him where all the Pokemon were.  You want a Clefairy?  Better put on those shoes and walk your ass to Mount Moon.
• Ash was never very smart.
• Snorlax.
• Jerk.
• Pikachu.  I kind of assume that Pikachu got thin by travelling around with Ash.  They walk everywhere.  
• Not Pokemon.
• Dog.
• Adventure Time bees.
• The Sweet.
• Panda babies are jerks.
• Necromancy.

Saturday: I was going to get a burger for lunch.

 But then I decided I didn't, so I kept driving until I was in Hawaii Kai.

I got Greek instead.

It wasn't as good as usual.  The lamb was tough, and the pita was a bit stale.  Also there was a dragon that I didn't order.

And then I got ice cream.

 I'm pretty sure I'm going to be using my Twitter sticker images all the time now.

And there's a Pokemon gym here, but battling a gym is super hard.

• Pokemon.
• Really?  Come on, Russia.
• Walking.
• Team leaders.
• Not Pokemon.
• Magical thinking.
• More comics should be like this.  This is good Spider-Man.
• The best part is that that is literally the title of the episode.

Friday: I wasted a bunch of time trying to get data out of a inconvenient database, but it doesn't matter because Twitter has stickers for android now.

I got a burrito for dinner in Kailua, because I was frustrated with that database.

It was also raining when I left work, which sucked, so I brought my umbrella.

Pirate kitty pop doesn't understand why a program that claims to interface to this stupid online database wouldn't be able to conveniently join a local table with the remote one.

"Can't you upload your table to the remote server?" asks Pharaoh Speaker.  "No, because the remote server doesn't support that," replies Random Snail.  "Is there a way to loop over the local table and generate a series of queries?"  Random Snail looks up sadly and says simply, "That idea never seems to have occurred to them.  The query is even using an indexed field.  It'd be fast to do."

Super fast.  So I guess I'm writing something to flood the web interface to download the values next week.

There were two Pokestops to bounce between at the burrito place, too.  I completely filled my bag, dumped a bunch of potions, and got my first Great Ball.

• Pokemon.
• Psyduck.
• These are good names.
• I had a stupid Pidgey today while eating my burrito that had like 26 CP, and after I threw one Pokeball, he broke out and ran away.  Like, fuck you too, Pidgey.  I just wanted the 100 XP and the stardust.  You mean nothing to me.
• Explicitly.
• My current problem (which you can see above), is the spinny white Pokeball symbol seem to always be on.
• Not Pokemon.
• That's just stupid, Harley.
• A Oregon Trail card game.
• Crows.
• Dog.
• Sad bears.
• Good things that have happened this year.

Thursday: I am glad this week is almost over.

I need a good weekend.  Preferably one without a giant storm threatening everything.

It turns out that if you bin data in two dimensions, and then calculate seven statistics for each bin, you're not doing a good job making it something easy to visualize.

• Pokemon.
• I don't know.  I kind of like the Johto theme better.
• Sure, ok.
• Fucking Pidgies.
• Click for cops playing Pokemon Go, stay to read how this improves policing.
• Weedle.
• Snek.
• Not Pokemon.
• I don't remember Gary the Horse, but that last line is why John Allison is one of the greatest writers alive.
• That's just stupid.
• Squirrel based weather data.
• That's super impressive.

Wednesday: I now have a reasonably functioning desktop environment.

I am using fvwm, which was ancient when I first used it way back in 1997.  One benefit of being ancient, is that it just fucking works, with a minimum of bullshit.  I installed a bunch of window managers, one of which had no virtual desktop ability that I could find, and one that had it, but forced switching to be handled by buttons on the unremovable bottom "information" bar.  My gathering from this is that "modern desktops" should consume as much screen space as possible for useless waste, and should ensure no way to manage large numbers of windows.  I know everyone who uses my setup gets confused why they move the mouse near the edge of the screen, and have it flip over to the next desktop.  I don't understand this, as the cursor clearly indicates where it is.  FVWM supports this, giving me a chunky four point torus, down from the nine I have in enlightenment.  I know I can change this, but it's not a sufficient issue to sort out now.

I also got my crown installed on the tooth I had a root canal in during grad school.  It feels weird to have a super smooth fake tooth.  They said I could eat on it normally after only a half hour, but I didn't want to be too hard on it.  Plus the bakery was out of most of the bakery stuff I usually cobble into a lunch.

I got a chocolate/lemon/blackberry mousse.  Quarter for scale.

Also some cookies.

• Pokemon.
• I was correct, Tottori Dunes are covered in Pokestops.
• Team Blue.
• Gyrados.
• Poor Magikarp.
• Comic book stuff.
• She-Hulk.
• Chris Evans.
• Spider-Pig.
• Other stuff.
• Squirrels.
• So here's a data set I'm curious about.  The worst part is that it's subjective, so I'm thinking "pro/con", "color", and "theme" to try and simplify it.

Tuesday: Never update software.

I upgraded everything that seemed reasonable today, and that didn't stop enlightenment from crashing.  So I upgraded X, and now enlightenment won't even start.  Wonderful.  I also love how every other window manager in existence has a default configuration of "be absolutely useless."  Great design decision.

I also discovered after debugging a program all day that that program doesn't even do what I want it to do.  It doesn't matter why it doesn't work if it's never going to generate the model I want.  As far as I can tell, the model that I want has only ever been generated once, ever, and has only been updated through a somewhat opaque process that uses the old model to generate the new one.

In any case, I've wasted two days on that program, and now two evenings on trying to make my laptop work.  Great.  Maybe I should just do a fresh install this weekend.  Not like that's going to be super annoying or anything.

• Not Pokemon.
• This is fine.
• One weirdness at a time.
• I've heard bad things, so even though it's the best voice cast, I'll probably skip it.
• Deadpool.
• Pokemon.
• I wonder how accurate this is.
• All I got today was a garbage zubat.
• Zoo.

Monday: I should know better than to ever update software.

Because it didn't fix the problem with chrome at all, forcing me to install firefox (which works fine, but has a billion pop-ups asking if I want to configure something or if I want to know about X or if I want to run the plug in that I just clicked on to say "Yes, just run the stupid thing, and always run it on this page, always, forever.").  And now something isn't correct, because enlightenment now spontaneously crashes with a SIGABRT error, due to some memory corruption issue.  It seems to be some issue instantiating windows.  It does occasionally recover if I click the "Recover" button three or four times, so that's better than permanently being broken.  I think this means that tomorrow I'm going to try to fix this by updating even more software.  TOTALLY A GREAT PLAN!

And it crashed while writing this blog post.  :(

And here, this is the image for today because I don't have anything else.

• Pokemon.
• If I understand correctly, the Tottori Sand Dunes is the best place to play Pokemon Go because it's covered in Pokestops.
• Smad.
• Pidgey.
• Baman Piderman.
• Not Pokemon.
• I still need to watch Michelle's speech.
• Curry-pan.
• Lucifer and Delirium.

H-1 is closed.

Like for realsies closed.

Sunday: The storm finally arrived.

But not when they said it would.  They were predicting the heavy rain would start last night, so I wasn't sure if things would be open today.

The ramen place was open, which is good, as that was the plan before this storm happened.

But they didn't have chicken available, and I think they were a bit light with the broth today.  I suspect that they weren't expecting to be that open today, either.

I also got a nice shot of Diamond Head with a bird.

It was kind of rainy all day, although nothing really serious until nearly seven.

So much so that a lot of buildings disappeared.

And the corner nearby started to flood.

A lot.

It'll probably be all done by tomorrow.

• Pokemon.
• The Team Leaders.
• My trainer does this all the time.
• Ok, Mimikyu is pretty cute.  I like the tape on the second one.
• Team Rocket.
• Not Pokemon
• "“I don’t have a phone,” Thor says. “Send a raven.”"  I really want to see that short.
• "Lunches or punches" is my new favorite phrase.
• This was a good scene.
• I already know that Jen gets better, so she'll be back to having adventures with Patsy soon.  What I didn't know is that Jubilee has apparently been through shitty writing hell in the past two decades and so she's now a vampire.  What?

Saturday: Now the stupid storm track is suggesting that it's going south of the islands.

Which kind of sucks, since I'm on the south side of the islands.  This means that my original plan of "ignore the storm and go get ramen tomorrow" might not work.  Stupid jerk storm being all "puff puff rain rain."

Today I got sushi.

I had originally thought about getting a burger, but sushi is more modular.  This was important, because I was also

seeing Ghostbusters today.

This review basically sums up my thoughts as well.  It's good, the cameos were great, fake science phrases never sound good, I look forward to watching the sequel.

Also I caught a Machop today.

• Pokemon.
• I got "fire/fairy".  According to this table, there are no Pokemon with that type combination.
• I generally like these "growing up/evolutions" comics.
• Halping.
• Dog.
• Comic book stuff.
• Batman.
• A) I'm sure DC will fuck this up somehow.  B) Did they not know or just not care that there's already a Young Animal comic?
• The second Dr. Strange trailer looks even better.
• Other stuff.
• I feel bad for this lost bird.
• So.  That's one franchise done, I guess.
• Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff.
• Rebecca Sugar is wonderful, and I really hope she makes cartoons forever.
• Let's just call this "fascist bullshit," even though that somewhat oversimplifies the many variations on bullshit in these links.  Also two of these are just tweets, because that was the best way to get the point across.
• "Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Presidential candidate, doesn't know who Harriet Tubman was."
• But seriously.  He's not a maniac.  What.
• Julian Assange is an anti-Semitic rapist bag of shit.  Allegedly.

Friday: Solving problems.

Problem 1: It turns out I had poor data sampling in one thing, resulting in a bunch of low signal-to-noise points corrupting a lot of measurements.  Culling those down to a more reasonable number helps a lot.  It also allows me to see that for one population of points, the comparison paper is probably wrong.

Problem 2: The annoying problem that is supposed to be solved by an eight year old program (that doesn't work anymore because it hasn't been used in eight years) is probably not as hard as I initially thought.  Because the distortion solution I want probably has to be continuous (and differentiable), I can probably write something reasonably quick to do iterative solutions starting from the center of the frame and working outwards.

Also, there's a tropical storm coming this weekend, so it's probably going to be impossible to do any shopping until it's over, because everyone panic buys and then the storm turns out to not be a big deal.

This screenshot is relevant when you read the links.

• Pokemon
• People are installing Magikarps in gyms they take over.
• This would be my plan as well, but I never seem to get Magikarps.
• It is possible to hatch eggs using nothing by the power of inaccurate GPS.  I proved that this evening by sitting on my couch while my trainer ran all over the neighborhood.  I got a Spearow, though, not Onix.
• Gastly.
• This is definitely worth clicking on, given the horror of the second image.
• I don't like the game that much.
• Raticate.
• Not Pokemon, which today is apparently "Russia" and "how fucking stupid Wikileaks is."
• Donald Trump is working with people who have a strong interest in Russia.  Why this doesn't disqualify him in the eyes of his lunatic supports is less clear.
• This is a bit more speculative, so I don't fully buy it, but this quote sums up my thoughts, "The leaks really only hit Western countries. You mean to tell me that 1.7 million documents were obtained from an intelligence agency, and there was no dirt on the Russians or Chinese? Come on."  Yeah.  Wikileaks is clearly not doing what they claim.  They're selectively publishing things to further some nebulous goal of their delusional rapist leader.  Allegedly.
• And today they decided they're going to "expose" the DNC, and successfully dumped a bunch of credit card and social security numbers.  Great job, guys.  Way to "fight for freedom" and "transparency" on the same side as a fucking fascist and a murdering dictator.  Allegedly.

Thursday: Ugh.

I think the tooth I just got fixed two months ago is donked up again.  It felt sharp after lunch, and I think the filling shifted.  I'll have the dentist look at it next week, and hopefully it's not a big deal.  Annoying that it is being this difficult though.

Also, I decided this week that there needs to be an extension that converts all instances of "provocateur" to "douchebag", because that's really what people mean.

I almost sat down to sort out that census data issue.  It's not super hard, as it's just interpolating missing values or taking a "85+" number and converting it to plausible 85, 86, etc. values.  In any case, I pulled some of the data out, based on a bunch of stories I saw noting that most Republicans at the convention are in the 65+ category.  So, normalizing to a by-eye 2000 population number:

For decade spaced populations that are 65, 75, 85.  Ish.

The takeaway being that about half of the people that voted in 2000 election and were born in 1930 have died since then, and the same will be true of people born in 1940 by the end of Hillary's terms.

• Pokemon.
• This seems to be the best Poke-mapper I've seen yet.
• Pokemon Go was released in Japan today.  According to the rarity chart, my Pikachu and Snorlax are pretty rare.
• You can name them with html.
• I now want to see the third set.
• Except I seem to be the only person playing here who isn't a kid.
• Not Pokemon.
• I heard about this Zara/art theft thing, and it's good that it's getting sufficient coverage to get the right outcome.
• The Captain.  A different set of scans.  New Nextwave would be great.
• If you read nothing else, at least read the "Cracker Barrel" review.
• Marnie.
• I saw the archived streams on my youtube subscription page, but didn't know I missed Brett Baier being a loon.
• Squirrel.

Wednesday: My Congressman died today.

Which really sucks.  Bye, Mark.  You will always be the coolest Member of Congress ever.

It's unfortunate that this is blurry, but I was trying not to take a picture of the people standing next to it.  Cat samurai riding horse at the base of Mt. Fuji.

• Not Pokemon.
• Looks like it's based on the second view here by Hokusai.
• Ape.
• This is fine.
• Doggo.
• I want more things like this.
• Pokemon.
• Ok, I can see a Detective Pikachu movie.
• Pokemon Go is making the world a better place.
• I assume he is doing something with them.  I do not want to speculate what.

How have I never heard of this?

What?

How does that even work?

"The sauce is then spray-dried into a powder that can be used in applications where a liquid sauce won't work."

What?

So this is new, right?

"2014/07/28"!

This has been around for at least two years?!

I'm...I'm done with today.

(22:13:05) Julie: I am trying to figure out what to put it on
(22:13:11) me: everything?

Tuesday: Today I was surprised by an email.

And I caught a Pidgey and a Spearow.  Because of course that's what is always around.

• Pokemon.
• Yeah, I had a Kakuna do that today.
• Pikachu.
• Still isn't released in Japan yet.
• Because nothing can just be fun anymore.
• So Bewear is now my favorite in the new generation.
• I didn't know that Snorlax was strong.  I just like how lazy it is.
• Not Pokemon.
• Garry Marshall died.  I really need to work on that simulation project.
• Squirrel.
• Bird.
• I would like to see this reboot of Scooby-Doo instead of the last two.

Monday: I totally had a good title earlier today, and I've forgotten it since then.

Today was a good day for Pokemon catching.

These are all Pokemon I caught today, starting with the CP 169 Clefairy.

These are the rest of the Pokemon I caught today.

 Which is great, because now I have my three favorite Pokemon:

Snorlax, Psyduck, and Jigglypuff.  I really like the Orange Islands episodes.

This is also one reason why I wouldn't be the best trainer ever.  I like the ones I like, and I don't really care how powerful they are.  See, there's that CP 428 whatever that didn't get a fave.  Pidgeot and Seadra snuck in the favorite list because they are my top two ranked ones, so I wanted to make sure they were marked.  The rest are just "I like these Pokemon for reasons."

And then I spent an hour and a half working on something based solely on a dumb question based on the reports of the Republican convention being half empty.  This was before we all discovered that Melania Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama's speech.

• Pokemon.
• I did finally get this map to load, but it wasn't very stable.  Zoom level X results in a bunch overlapping, and zooming in results in most of them vanishing.
• Is St. Clair Shores where jerks live?
• "I wonder when this will get fanart."  Now.  It's done.
• This isn't that big of a surprise.
• I enjoy that Pokemon themed signs are now common.
• Larry Wall.
• This is a good set of answers.  The factorial example is really cool.
• This is a nice slide.  I believe the combination of these things is why I like perl so much.  It just does stuff, without being all fussy about how.
• Not Pokemon, not Larry Wall.
• I have a lot of the single issues, but a Jingle Belle Omnibus would be great to ensure I have everything.
• Harry Potter.
• Polls.
• Good.

Sunday: Rainy day.

I woke up to this:

Blah and rainy.

That meant that I wasn't likely to go out and play Pokemon today.  It did eventually clear up a bit, but I'd rather not get surprised.

And then I got curry.  I almost got gyoza with it.  But I don't think they have gyoza sauce, and that's like 70% of the fun of gyoza.

And this is what "Pokestop nearby" looks like, yelp.

I also realized today that I forgot to add the pictures I took while walking yesterday to yesterday's post.  This led to me thinking if it would be possible to update my alias to give me the ability to pull those out.  The previous alias was:

alias phone2blog        'qview.pl ~/motox/Camera/IMG_`date +%Y%m%d`*'

This calls my image viewer program, and supplies it with a list of files cross mounted from the storage box that's auto-synced with files from my phone.  This list has the date appended so I only get files from that day.  That's great most of the time, but makes finding yesterday's files annoying and manual.  The trick is to use date's --date option:

alias phone2blog        'qview.pl ~/motox/Camera/IMG_`date +%Y%m%d --date=\!:*`*'

This does the same thing, but appends all options passed to the alias to the --date modifier, or appends nothing if there aren't any.  date knows that an empty --date is equal to today, and can understand things like 'yesterday' and '-32 days'.  Yay!

So now I can show this gecko I saw yesterday.

And the cemetery where the one gym I battled at is.

That gym has gone from a level 6 red gym yesterday to a level 10 blue gym today.  I also have sorted out based on videos and articles that I was probably battling wrong.  Whoops.  Guess not having instructions means I don't know how to use special attacks.

• Not Pokemon.
• It's just great that they let old racists fuck everything up.
• What?
• Fun fact: I had never seen Mulan until watching it at Julie's during this trip for Thanksgiving.  Second fun fact: Mike Pence is a fucking idiot.
• Aliens.
• These games kind of look fun.
• Ah, I see.  Things have been fucked up since before I was born.  Great.  Thanks, old racists.
• Pokemon.
• I hope this jackass goes to jail.  I would also hope that Florida is consumed by the sea, but that seems less likely.
• That describes my Charmander.
• Bulbasaurs.
• Poor Jessie.
• Ceiling cat.
• Yes.  Yes I can.

Disasters.

Within the past week, there's been a jerk running over people in Nice, France, and a coup in Turkey.  Both of these are "I would rather not be there" kind of situations, which can easily be generalized to "some places become suddenly dangerous, and we should be able to help with technology."

This thought came to me this weekend while thinking about all of these events in combination with Pokemon Go, and then through the filter of "doesn't Twitter have a lot of information?"  I'm sure they have a similar level of information as PKMNGo, so it seems like they could set up a fairly robust "Emergency Mode."  Here's kind of a rough outline of things.

1. Twitter detects a disaster.  Although this could be a top level decision "Nice is in trouble.  Flag it!" it could also be something that you let be detected from the tweet stream.  It should immediately start trending in an unexpected way, which might trigger things.
2. A region of the globe where the disaster is happening is defined.  Every user in that region has the following things happen automatically.
1. Their tweets no longer contain location information.  This information is collected, but it is not released publicly.  There are many of these disaster scenarios where you have antagonists who might benefit from knowing where people are, so it's best to keep that private.
2. All users are presented with a pre-defined tweet screen.  They don't get to add to the tweets, but select from a menu:  "I am fine, and I am in a safe location."  "I am fine, but do not think my location is safe."  "I am not fine, and need emergency help."  These go out to the user's followers, so they don't need to use further communication resources contacting people.
3. From the known location information and the responses, narrow the disaster region to define safe and unsafe areas.  Share emergency information with authorities so they can move resources.  This can also be shared with users who do not think they're in a safe location.  "Shelter in place if you are secure.  If not, this map has been auto-generated, but shows the areas currently believed safe."
4. Pre-defined lists of "Emergency Users" are added to the users' following for a temporary period.  This might include news sources, but also things like the State Department's travel twitter.  I already follow them, and during the coup, they were spreading the information they had (largely "shelter in place").  I'm sure other countries have similar things, and can be added to lists for users from those countries (which twitter can easily sort out from location information, in addition to the user supplied location field).  The National Weather Service would be another option, for tornadoes, hurricanes, etc.
5. One option could be to add prompts for tweets/periscopes/etc. so that people who are in a place where reporters aren't could get information out.  This might add a lot of liability, though, because some people aren't smart enough to not put themselves into danger.
3. Once the disaster is resolved, everything goes back to normal, and the temporary following lists are deactivated.

I'm sure a similar thing could be set up with Google or Facebook, but since I use Twitter for pretty much all of my news, that's my obvious source.  Plus, they could make it a selling point: "even if you don't care in general, why not get Twitter so you can be on top of emergency situations."  I'm also pretty sure that news agencies would be interested in getting marked as an "Emergency User".  Fold in some after-the-fact "was this source useful?" polling, and they could check that those users actually help.

Saturday: So many things trying to be jerks.

I had a nice plan for the day.  It was going to be a great day.  It turned out to be just blah at best.  Here's what happened.

First step of the day: get lunch.  Since the new Five Guys opened in Mililani, I figured that would be a good place.  I also figured that since they've been open for a few weeks, that they wouldn't be super busy at 2pm.

I was wrong.

It was full of people, most of whom were just standing around.  I got in line, and three orders later, had my order in:

Good old number 35.

I got my drink, milled about as is the fashion, and when the big table finally cleared out (including the one lady who decided she wanted the sushi from next door), I sat down to wait.  That's when I heard the guy at the counter calling out an order.  "Eight!"

Yes.  Fucking 8.  So I had lots of time.  Thirty minutes of time.  If I hadn't driven across the island, I wouldn't have stayed.  Also note that the prices are a bit insane, especially given how long it took to get my food.

I also saw a kid with a horrible mohawk.  Kid, you need better parents, or at least parents who have a concept of a straight line.  It's not stylish to have bumps and wiggles.

Anyway, the food arrived.

"Wait, what?  Where's the top bun?"

Oh.  Yeah.

It's in this pile with the gob of mayo, the pale tomatoes, and the crappy looking lettuce.

Despite my burger being the super simple "bacon + mushrooms," they fucked it up by putting all the shit on it.  Since you can't unmayo a bun, I had to just ditch it, and accept that I was eating a badly made burger.  With like two mushrooms, one of which was outside the bun.  There was also a bunch of grilled onions, which, whatever, I like grilled onions, but they were also about 50% on the outside of the burger.  Just a fucking mess of a badly made burger.

Also, I get the "we put extra fries in the bag" idea.  I don't get "we put so many extra fries in the bag that you have to rip it apart to get to the burger we buried at the bottom."  I don't need a pound of fries.  I got a small fries.  I want a small amount of fries.  They're there to space out the bites of burger so you don't just eat it all in one go.  They should ideally not be soggy messes.  I wonder if they thought "a bunch of soggy fries will make up for us taking 30 minutes to fuck up your burger."  No.  And there should have been a quorum of Guys there to make that decision.

I mean, the burger wasn't bad, once I threw out the shit I didn't want.  Some of the fries were crispy, and were salted well.

But, I also had lots of time to ponder the receipt while waiting, so I saw that there was an online survey.

Sorry, but fuck this place.  I can get ok-ish burgers closer, for less money, and without them being all fucked up.

Another reason I had lots of time is that my RSS app on my phone was telling me it couldn't connect to the server at home.  I could ssh to the server, so the obvious solution was "the database got corrupted."  Wonderful.  This hasn't happened in like eight months, so I assumed we were past this fault case.  I really need to rebuild a new server, and make it a cluster for reliability.

But that wasn't something I could fix until I got home, and although I considered driving the long way around the north side of the island, that seemed excessive.

So I took H-3 to Kaneohe and back.  It's greener than last time I went.  There was also not a sky anomaly, I just didn't take all the images I needed of the clouds.  I also didn't want to bother fixing the wave.

Partially because this is the second attempt at the mosaic.  The first one failed when it ate up all 16+ GB of memory on my laptop.  I scaled the inputs by a factor of two to make this one.

After failing to make the mosaic, fixing the RSS database, and discovering that pretty much all of the books I'm reading on a topic are disturbingly vague about syntax (also, "warning: there was one deprecation warning; re-run with -deprecation for details" could be rewritten as "I'm a jerk.  Here I am, being a jerk to you.  Fuck you." and retain the same level of utility), I decided to go on a Pokemon (Go) journey.  This was partly fueled by the fact that I remembered this morning that I have Pokemon album in my amazon music library, and listened to it while driving for lunch.

Also, hey yelp!  This is not my definition of "Pokestop nearby."

Anyway, here's my path:

The odd jag onto Heulu was to get a Pokestop without going into a church parking lot.

How did it go?

My neighborhood is junk.

I did get two Oddish, which I didn't have.  I also battled two gyms, and I either am doing something wrong, or gyms just suck and aren't fun.  I get that you have to tap to make your Pokemon attack, and that getting type advantages is a good thing.  I don't get how the fuck I'm supposed to beat a seemingly never ending stream of enemies with one of my Pokemon (if it's a friendly gym), or how I'm supposed to use six of mine to beat impossibly strong enemies (if it's not).  Was it fun to be level 10 for twenty minutes on the 8th of July, and that's it?  I've been trying to build my Pokemon up (my Pidgeot is nearly CP 600), but when I end up fighting four CP 1200 Flareons followed by at least one CP 1000 Jolteon, what's the fucking point?

Also, fuck your Eeveelutions.

And then the servers crashed so I didn't get ~1/2 km of my journey applied to my eggs.  New server crash screen, though, so I guess that's an improvement?

 Links.

• Not Pokemon.
• Did you know Jill Stein is either a garbage person, or is pandering to idiots in such a way as to impersonate a garbage person?  I'm all for preventing corporations from using power to ensure their own profits, but I'm also for people not dying from preventable diseases because "conspiracy."  Also, the correct response to "what about homeopathy," is "fuck that shit, what are you, some sort of goddamn moron?"
• This comic looks kind of interesting, but it doesn't seem to be completely out.  I should make a tag for things that I should check back on in the future.
• Katy Beary.
• Hilary Clinton.
• Pokemon.
• I believe the answer is "yes."  Everyone should see the same types of Pokemon nearby, but they are not identical instances of those Pokemon.  This is why I was able to catch the Snorlax yesterday after those kids did.  We each play in a separate realization of the global Go world.
• Fuck these guys.
• I didn't know you could tap on them.  I want a Psyduck.
• Meme relevance.
• Everyone is Team Blue.
• Rattata.

Friday: Today was kind of a waste of meetings.

Talk with person A about new task A, talk with person B about best options for running old program B, talk with person C about new task that's probably easy-ish C.  

But I did capture a Snorlax today, so that was good.

And I tried out this pop that isn't super orange-y.

Also the moon was out, so I took a picture.

•  Not Pokemon.
• Oh, yeah.  Turkey had an attempted coup today.  The consensus seems to be that even though Erdogan is basically setting himself up as a dictator, this probably wasn't a helpful way to solve that problem.  The fact that it doesn't seem to have worked isn't helpful, either.
• The state also rejected the merger of NextEra and HECO.  This is a good thing.  I can see no way in which adding an out-of-state entity to pull profits out of the local power grid helps in any way.  The fact that they have a shitty record of fucking up solar wasn't good, either.
• Squirrel.
• Not that surprising, given how cowardly most police organizations seem to be.
• I kind of want a hot dog now.
• Pokemon.
• This is cool, but probably overkill for me.  I kind of just want the hat.
• Fucking pidgeys.
• I need to do more gym battles.  I think I've done like four total.
• Everyone cool is on my team.
• Thanks, yelp.  This is a feature I am interested in.

Thursday: I do not like insurance companies.

Mostly because today when I went to pick up a refill, I discovered what was previously a $15 prescription is now a $75 prescription.  Apparently shit changed on July 1st, and instead of all drugs being $15, there are four tiers.  Generic drugs are $5, name brand are $10, name brand but not preferred drugs are $45, and specialty drugs are $75.  Why?  Because they can, probably.  Why not raise prices just for funsies?

And looking now, it seems that the other plan I could have chosen has the same bullshit pricing structure, but, in an additional "fuck you," doesn't actually cover the drug at all.  So yeah.  Health insurance should be nationalized, and everything covered for everyone.


Other than that, I was wondering something about how extreme you could expect a normally distributed population to go.  Assume mean zero, sigma one, and then calculate the inverse normal CDF for a range of population sizes.  Then, note that doing it analytically would require a call to the inverse complementary error function, so do it numerically by guessing a value and doing an inefficient binary search tree until the calculated and target values differ by less than 1e-15.  Because 1e-12 isn't sufficient apparently, and gives far larger errors than I would have expected.

That increases far slower than I would have expected.

• I was thinking about gjetost last night, and grilled cheeses, and then found this.
• A good read.
• Ha-ha.
• Eh, I have an emulator that can play those if I really need to.  Odd choice not to include Castlevania 3, but if I remember correctly, that used a special chip in the cartridge to do sound, so that may be why.
• Wonder Woman.
• Frank Cho sounds like kind of an asshole.
• And I'm just going to put this link here, just for fun.  No other reason.
• Coloring book.
• Dog.
• Ko Takeuchi.
• Pokemon.
• I still don't think the gadget is a good idea.
• Interest.
• Ash Ketchum.