Saturday: Q43/Art time.

Artwork appears.

And then didn't bother with the cotton candy cart.

• Art guide.
• My new villager.
• I still need to get the cute deck.
• I hope she can sue them for creating a hostile work environment.

Wednesday: Only half over?

That doesn't sound right.  I'm pretty sure I've been at this conference for forever at this point.  Still interesting, still learning stuff, still using things I've read about to make cool figures:

I can't figure out the transform code to flatten the orbits down into a plane, but I'm probably over looking something.

BBQ for the Team Dinner.  I like BBQ.

The gym.

And then some Codenames, which we lost the first game of because my team overthought.

• Look at me being surprised.
• Squirrels.
• Another game that might be cool.

Tuesday: Ok, solved two other issues. I guess this means I should do the main thing for work tomorrow.

The first was a dumb config error in the spectrum code.  Now it works as intended, and I only had to fight it for like two hours.

The second was stuff I can probably put a PR for at some point into a public library.  I also think that it probably covers most of the stuff I will need for the presentation this Friday.  Which I should probably think more about.

Iao Valley.  Nine years ago.

• Hard drives.
• Today's episode was good, because it resolved the Yukito-Sakura relationship in a satisfying way.
• I kind of want this farming game.
• Maggie Haberman is a shitty "journalist."
• Was anyone going to tell me that Austin has an art museum?
• I need more books.

Monday: I think this technically means I've beaten the game.

Although I think I have to go for 100% completion.  I kind of wish it had a NewGame+, so I could carry over some stuff (like, even just my greenhouse would be nice) and start kind of fresh, but I think I'll just stick with my main game.

Besides, I'd kind of feel weird about marrying someone else now.  On that topic:

I finally got married in SV, beating the end of year two by one week.

I think someone should have told my new wife, however.

"Yeah, sure!" And then I ran off to reorganize the greenhouse and plan out the farm for the next year.  Then: fishing and clearing the quarry.

Oh.  OH.  OOOHHHHHH!  😲

 I wasn't expecting that.  Another thing I wasn't expecting:

WHAT?

WHAT!?!?!  I'm married, Abigail!  I have a purple star when I talk to my wife, which I'm pretty sure means that she's still in to me.

Let's check in on the other main married family in town.

Um

wow.  I somehow don't think Demetrius has the purple star going for him.

JFC, Demetrius!  Does anyone in your family not hate you?

Good to see you're taking things seriously.  Are you even in charge of the trees and rocks in public?  I assume the mayor would make the rules about that.

Then, on the first day of the new year, after giving me that blushing wink face above, Leah ambushed me as I was leaving our house.

The Art Show!

The Art Show!

The Art Show!

I knew she had an art show event that triggers after you reach an N-heart relationship.  I guess the show can only happen when it isn't winter, so if you turn on all the dating things to rush your relationship before the end of year two, you get things out of order, and the Art Show happens after you get married.  Which leads to the weird ambush.  And this letter:

"Leah!" I shouted from outside.  "I was right there!  You couldn't have told me this while we were having breakfast?"

Nope.  Because the game assumes we didn't just have breakfast.  In any case, I then went on my way to do some fishing at the river.

Where I was again ambushed by my wife into a surprise picnic.

Where her ex showed up, telling her she should leave town and go back to the city.  Excuse me, Jerkface, but we're married now, and I'm committed to keeping that purple star.  I punched Jerkface out, and then Leah said we should flee the scene of the crime, but that we should find someplace "more private".

You know we're married, right?

• So Gannett's going to go bankrupt because all their money is going to pay the people who bought them out, isn't it?
• I didn't know that Niven was an awful person.  Guess I'm glad I've never read any of his crap.
• I had the thought today to look up other books that I might like based on the books I've liked so far this year.  Here are three that I should probably look into, once I've burned through my backlog.
• Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh
• The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht
• The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

Monday: Let's not drive to conferences the morning of anymore.

Because it involves getting up super early, and if you don't get to sleep early the night before, then you're super tired all day long, no matter how much caffeine you stick in your face.

I do have some ideas on how to convert bits of code to match the different api.  I also suspect that if I really want the compressed table support I want, that I might need to just write it myself.  I have mixed feelings about this.

At least the hotel comes with a cookie?

• Pokemon personality thing.
• Donking Diglett?  Are you kidding me?
• Is this useful?  I'm too tired to sort it out.
• I'm pretty sure this is useful, but it's another "only if you have an implementation" thing.

Thursday: When you spend more than an hour debugging someone else's code so your computer will do what you want it to.

Sadface.

Stinky jerk.

Probably should have evolved sooner jerk.

First new jerk?

• I finally started reading this, and it is every bit as good as the reviews that convinced me to buy it said.
• I should probably get more of her translations.
• A good mascot.
• Apparently all these books are free, because they're out of print.
• This was my first Superman comic.
• Colors in git diff.  Finally.
• I still don't know if my license is ok or sucks, so I guess I'm taking a passport next month.

Wednesday: Four boxes.

At this rate, I have about a week's worth of unpacking left to do.  Except I can't keep doing that, since I leave for Arizona this weekend.  And tomorrow I have to do computer stuff because I really want to decommission my big old computer as soon as possible, so I spent $700 on new computer stuff today.

Because no matter what, a brand new computer is always going to be "like $1000".  At least now I'm switching to a more distributed, cluster-like system.

Anyway, this is basically what four boxes of books looks like.

I think I need to shim one of my bookcases to keep it from tipping over before I load it up with more books.  It should also go faster now.  I think all of my books have been inserted into the catalog at this point, and although I still have some that are missing LOC numbers, the majority do.

• Squirrels.
• I'm going to need to do this at some point, so I need to get vinegar.
• Hopefully I'll be able to rip all my DVDs with this new system, so I can have always-available video without having to get off the couch.
• Instructions.

Sunday: I legitimately didn't do anything today.

I did take two different naps, though.  Today just felt like a nap day.

• This looks like a decent recipe to reproduce the garlic noodles I always got at that place in Alameda.

Thursday: when you go to see if a package has arrived, and time it and catch the mail being delivered.

Squirrel.

• Well that's disturbing.  Men are awful.
• I'll have to remember to order something from them when I can buy books again.
• YES.

Thursday: Sure, Pokemon Go. "High surf warning" is totally extreme weather.

If I was playing the game in the ocean.

Nine years ago, I was returning a rental car in Santa Barbara.

• I have thoughts, but I will save them for a future date.
• Pretty much this.
• I would be happy if thorn and eth came back into use.

Monday: "What's this jerk doing back?" and "This is Saturn Girl, isn't she?"

I was not a fan of the mid-season finale for Supergirl.  Mon-El apparently came back while I was in California, and he's all "moved on" and "married" and "able to not die in the lead-filled atmosphere" and "still a jerk."  Saturn Girl seems nice, but is totally in the middle of a big drama scene she didn't sign up for.

Quiet single mom turned into a bad guy for real today, and she beat up Kara, which I get makes her "strong," but the DBZ style constant stronger person fights are dumb.

And pairing up Lena and Olsen is dumb, and I'm sure the Supercorp people are furious.

We did art today.

• Supercorp is number six on this list.
• So not only evil, but also utterly incompetent.
• Inequality is a problem.
• I should finish reading this paper on mixture models, but I have too many pinned tabs to start with.

Monday: And that was when I realized that I'd left my wallet at home today.

Unfortunately, it was while ordering two slices of crappy pizza from the slightly less crappy pizza place by work for lunch.  I did a quick search to make sure it hadn't just fallen out of my pocket, but after not finding it, went back home, opened the door to see it sitting happily on my couch, went back to work, and ordered different two slices of crappy pizza, because they'd sold the last meatball one to the lady right in front of me.

So it's been that kind of day today.  At least it's Indictment Day, so that's good.  Another actor turned Milkshake Duck, but at least people are starting to name these people.

Supergirl was better this week, mostly because she just got to be awesome, and her enemy was "Cult who worships Supergirl."  She defeated them with the power of "you're a terrorist who is trying to kill a bunch of people, also you brought kryptonite, which is literally my only kryptonite.  IT'S THE THING THAT DEFINED THE WORD!  DUMMY!"  Alex and the cultist had to push the bomb into an explosion hole to save the day.  Then he went to jail.

I've been reading Yotsuba& again.

• This article is a mess.  Unreasonable faculty shouldn't be accepted as "just how it is," and pointing out that only 2/50 faculty members are women and that that means they have to be unreasonable ignores the obvious alternate solution.  The counter letter is far better.
• Conservatives are dumb, and honestly believe stupid Nazi propaganda because of that.  There are more and better points, but it's a long read.
• Also: just regular dumb, as shown here.
• This sucks.  I've been reading them since they were part of Gawker, which wikipedia tells me stopped being true in 2008, so almost a decade, and now I feel old.  At least there will be a new RSS feed, so it probably won't be a noticable change for me.
• This is cute.  Almost unreasonably so.

Monday: It's like madness designed this thing.

There are two main classes in the script, and they do similar things.  They both encode the model as a series of polynomials.  The first one uses a dict of arrays, and packs the two polynomials is uses as [a0, a1, a2, b0, b1, b2].  Fine.  The second one packs the two polynomials into a dict of array arrays, such that there is [ [a7, a6, a5, a4, a3, a2, a1, a0], [b7, b6, b5, b4, b3, b2, b1, b0] ].  First up, I'm pretty sure that you could constrain this model with a far lower order curve.  Second, why use such different formats?  Third, the second model uses millimeters for the first polynomial, and micrometers for the second.  Why be so difficult?

It was also super rainy this evening, and this is the sky lit up by a lightning bolt out of frame.

• This was a good episode of Supergirl, and I liked Supergirl driving in to the white martian base in a car while doing the Bugs Bunny thing.
• This is kind of a cool thing, and I might steal this implementation (without the shiny interface, because I don't need that).  The syuzhet library it uses for sentiment analysis looks interesting.
• I had the exact same thought watching the first new Star Wars movie.  These are big complicated machines, and even though they're designed for "wars around stars", all the things they have are important parts of those machines.  You can't just have something not work.  If you don't need that thing to work, then it probably isn't going to be in the design.

Thursday: I'd be happy when this week is over, since it's been kind of garbage, but I have to give a talk next week.

So.

So here are some individual panels that explain why I've been binging the Ms. Marvel trades on my tablet:

Kamala and Lockjaw.

Kamala after the science fair.

Zoe and Nakia.

This is seriously one of the best series I've read.

• Absolute garbage.  I assume this will be immediately locked up in court, but the stunning meanness of this is indescribable.  Some of the quick reviews I saw indicate that this will cost the government more money anyway.  He kills people, makes others poorer, and it costs more money to do it.
• Yes.
• I saw this on tumblr, and immediately assumed you could only get them on etsy.
• Symphony of the Night + roomba.

Tuesday: I'm obviously biased

Today we had an hour and a half full department meeting, and when it was over, I checked Twitter to discover that the entire world was freaking out because now some people can make tweets 280 characters long.  Things seemed to divide cleanly into three categories:

1. "Twitter is now even more the hell site."  First up, that's false.  Tumblr is the hell site.  Twitter functions, does not remove functionality, and does not require a third party extension to be usable.  This is the same complaint that happened when Twitter switched to circle icons, and when stars became hearts.  None of these changes matter.
2. "Twitter should fight bots and racists."  Yes, obviously.  And I'm sure they redirected the entire "fight bots and racists" team to make one column of the database twice as big.  That's how companies work.  Everybody works on one thing.
3. "Why even have Twitter if it's not short?"  It's still short, it just means people don't need to edit to make things fit.  I've not made tweets before because I couldn't figure out a way to abbreviate and truncate things enough to make it fit, and a stupid joke or pun isn't worth two tweets.  It sounds like that was a big part of the reasoning for the change.  I do like writing "perfect" 140 character tweets, and that's harder to do with twice the space, but whatever.

And yes, I'm certainly biased because I have a pleasant Twitter experience.  I follow people I find interesting, I block people I find offensive (and wish more people would just ignore assholes instead of retweeting their nonsense), I report as many accounts as I can if I see in a reply something that seems obviously reportable.  Based on a quick scrolling through my phone, I have 24 "we received your report" and 8 "there's an update on an account" notices.  If I understand how this works correctly, that suggests I have a 33% success rate.  Not awful.

I also understand that I have a small, private account, so I have to deal with less direct harassment.  I hope things will get better for everyone, but I suspect automatically suspending accounts would lead to a massive backlash.  I also would argue that asking a company to police the speech of the president of a country is completely missing where the real problem lies.

Again, I'm certainly biased.  I was so stunned, I didn't know what to put in my extra 140 characters.  I was going to add a picture and "look at this tweeter", but the jerk bird I was looking at flew away.

• Oh hey cool!  The drug I used to take is number three, and the one I take now is number one!  Hahaha!  I love how our healthcare system works!  That totally isn't extractive rent seeking by soulless monsters!
• This is kind of the line of thinking I've been trying to switch to.  I'm not going to say I always stick to it, but having a goal seems like a good thing.
• I should finish watch RWBY.
• This strikes me as the same humor as "Yard Sard", but maybe it's just me.
• I should probably be ashamed that I am thinking seriously about buying a $60 shower curtain now.  Perhaps Truth has something to say about that.

Monday: Waking up early is no fun.

We should all agree that mornings are bad, and that we should ignore them.

I didn't take any pictures today, but looking though my history tells me that six years ago I made a very fall veggie/beef soup, four years ago I had a Mexican Coke in Austin, and two years ago I had a Mexican Coke in Alameda.

And eleven years ago, I took a picture of my rose bush.

That was rotated correctly when I previewed it, and I'm too tired to bother sorting it out.

• It's probably dead again, so millions of people get to not die or go bankrupt.
• Taxes should be higher on the rich, and that money should be used to subsidize poor people.  I know this seems obvious, but.
• I really want to buy this book, but I'm also still trying to stick to my "stop buying every book" thing.

Wednesday: Things continue to work, and I suspect some sort of conspiracy.

And I got carne asada fries for lunch, because Julie had delicious looking fries, and I wanted to remember why I hate this place's guacamole.

It's full of cilantro and giant chunks of white onion.  Learn to mince.  Also learn not to put shit weeds in food.

There was also a Murder Team Five special on tonight.  I think it was the same as this one I watched last year, but I didn't remember most of the details from that one.  Absolutely ridiculous.

• This might be interesting to watch.  It has a double speed, so that's good.  Maybe this weekend.
• Poverty.
• And yes, wages should be higher if companies want workers.
• Usagi is tired of dealing with crap.
• I should watch Nichijou.  This one deals with coffee.

Thursday: The thing I've been fighting for months might actually be done.

I can't tell, because I filled up the disk it lives on, and didn't want to wait on the rsyncs to finish to a less full disk before going home.  I'll figure it out tomorrow.

Today I went to get my eyes checked, but I didn't get glasses.

Apparently my eyes are "basically the same" with "worse astigmatism" and it looks like I need to get "singular value decomposition" lenses.

There's a gym at the doctor's office now.

So I did the team-friendly thing of sticking my Cloyster in the open spot, and then fed everybody until they were full.

But I still got kicked out.

• The good news is that the Republicans again failed.  I wonder if there will be a revolt to get rid of McConnell.
• And despite McCain voting not to be awful, he's still awful, and Paul Krugman lays it out.
• I knew this because she's my senator, but it never hurts pointing out that Mazie Hirono is a wonderful person.
• This is worth reading in its entirety.  Why we have Russian sanctions.
• If this can kill paywalled journal articles, then it's a good thing.
• A Make-A-Wish kid wrote what is likely the best line in the new Thor movie.
• "JUNE FORAY: It was born in me. A woman can do anything. It was never a question."

Monday: History.

Since none of the palaces were open yesterday, seeing them was the plan for the day.

Iolani Palace.

Except we probably should have planned a bit more, as arriving at the palace at 11:30 meant we had to wait for the 12:15 tour.  I'm not totally sure why they have strict times for the tours, as they're entirely self guided, but I guess they probably have a reason other than crowd control.

So, side plan:

Aliiolani Hale.

Which is directly across the street from the palace, and is still the location of the Supreme Court of Hawaii.  They also have a small museum about the history of the judicial system in Hawaii.  It's pretty cool.

A courtroom as it was in 1913.

A super cool clock.

A tiny model of downtown in the late 1800s.

I liked the center sign.

So yeah, I thought it was pretty cool.  I didn't read everything, but that's how it goes sometimes.

Hale Koa, where you buy tickets for the palace, with downtown in the background.

The tour has changed since last time, if I remember correctly.  I just went back to check my blog, and I never put together a proper post for any of my previous visits.  I have sorted out the parking situation, which is good (that pink-ish building on the left in the previous picture).  In any case, when it's time for your tour, you go and pick up headphones and a player (which is basically a phone in a case), and they make you put on booties to cover your shoes so everything stays clean.  Not a problem.  Also no gum.  Whoops.

The player shows you where to go, and tells the story, and beeps when it's time to pay attention so you can see where to go again.  It also has some picture galleries to help identify portraits and things, given the room.

The staircase.

It was the first royal residence to have electric lights.  There are no switches anywhere in the palace, as the king would simply tell the lighting and electricity engineer what time he wanted particular rooms turned on or off.  Simple.

Crowns.

I took a lot of pictures to make mosaics, and then decided I didn't feel like making mosaics today.

The king's library.

The story turns upstairs, as that's where Liliuokalani was imprisoned after the overthrow.

The statehouse from the second floor windows.

I should probably visit more often than "almost never."

Touching harms artifacts.

The tour continues into the basement, but without the booties or headphones.  That's mostly jewelry and photos of the restoration process.  I didn't realize they basically had to rebuild the entire place after the state moved out in the 1960s.  I also didn't realize that some moron back then thought that putting temporary offices on the veranda was a good idea.  That was kind of a horrifying picture.

Then lunch, again at Nico's, although I didn't take any pictures.  I should remember that when I get the ahi catch of the day that I should specify "super rare," because anything else is dry and not so great.

The last thing to accomplish today was to go to Queen Emma's Summer Palace.  This has also changed tours since last time I visited.  The new docents are different than before, and apparently are doing tours based more on research than in the past.  They also have a somewhat different view of King Kalakaua than is present at Iolani Palace.  They've also switched to booties, and I think they probably need to come up with a headset tour as well.  Doing so would allow them to present a clear story based tour, as this tour was not exactly what I would call "clear" or "story based."  That's not necessarily strictly required, but being thrown a bunch of facts and dates and lineages seemingly at random isn't the best way to teach things.

This was the only picture I took.

Then we went back to Waikiki, I played Pokemon Go with the Plus for an hour or so, used up all my regular Pokeballs and caught 54 largely trash Pokemon.  After that, I returned home to watch a decent enough episode of Supergirl that ended with Mr. Mxyzptlk showing up, so I guess the writers know exactly what I'm not expecting and how to supply it.  Let me now explicitly state that I am not expecting Streaky the Supercat or Comet the Superhorse.

• Dog doesn't quite get security.
• This is a great photo, and the explanation behind it is equally great.
• Pretty Dang Weasel.
• I did not know Atsuko Nishida designed Pikachu.
• These are only available in size "S", and that explains why I have not ordered a pair of Gengar glasses from Japan.
• OMG this tonkatsu place looks delicious.  I don't think this is the same restaurant as the one I ate at the Skytree, but the setup and style look the same.
• For future easy searching, the Alameda police blotter to see what crime is happening there.  That's probably a sufficient set of words so I can find this again with the search box.

Oh, it's been twenty four days before the first person had to resign in shame from the current disaster.