Friday: Spending a day reworking my work environment.

Because everyone yesterday was bragging about their fancy editors, with all kinds of built in junk.  So I looked into things, and updated how I do things too.

1. First up: the work cluster only has emacs 23.  This is old.  Building from scratch didn't work, because there are library incompatibilities.  However, you can install it from conda.  Which seems like overkill, but whatever.
2. This gave me ElDoc mode automatically, which gives argument list help.
3. And then anaconda-mode, which gives completion, help, and reference/definition jumping.
4. Also a cool auto insert/remove debugger statement shortcut.
5. Which led to me adding snippets, particularly one like this, so I could get automatic docstring support on new functions.
6. And I switched from screen to tmux for things, because tmux cooperates better with the work environment, and gives me easy terminal naming.
1. But donks up the shift-pgup scrolling.

We'll see how nice this all plays together next week.  It also makes me want to update all my computers so I can use the same neat tricks everywhere.

Then video games.  Mostly the usual stuff.

Standing on statues.

Standing next to statues.

Then, I'm minding my own business stealing stuff, when some jerk face hires an assassin to back-assassinate me.  Me!  So I killed the other assassin, then:

"Oh, look at me, I'm on a different island, I'm SOOOO safe."

 Fuck you, jerk.  Like that's going to stop me.

I can swim underwater.

I can swim on top of the water.

I can run on land.

And I can jump into the middle of your camp and stab you in your stupid "out to get me" face.

And then I'm right back to standing on statues.

It's a theme.

• New Deadpool with Elsa Bloodstone?
• Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Oh yeah, this was supposed to be in today's post:

You couldn't just charge me $26.94?  That's not possible?

If I'm not mistaken, this is the end.  I owe $2.09 that will be auto-deducted on July 7th, 2018.  When that happens, I should have completely paid off my student loans, only seventeen years after graduating.  A decade of paying plus six years of grad school and some number of grace months before I had to start paying, and the timeline largely makes sense.

It'll be nice to be essentially debt free.

Thursday: A Good Day.

It didn't start out that way, as I had to get up early for a dentist appointment.  Ugh.  But then I got a good email, and the thing I've been fighting for like two months looks like it might be working finally.  A Good Day.

So I got celebration pancakes.

With requisite carnival kalbi.

There was also a legendary raid battle there, but it was dead by the time I got there. :(

But I saw Julie while fishing today.

I think I like Dr. Frog.

• I think the path forward is clear: I need to find some way to sneak this into the holiday music playlist.
• Wendy's time.
• RWBY.
• Honestly, Mick Rory should be in every CW/DC show.

Wednesday: Fancy dinner.

I discovered that they have kids shows in France.

This was the Jordanian version of Sesame Street, with Cookie Monster doing a La Miserable parody.

I guess.

Woo.

But really, fancy conference dinner.

A nice big chunk of veal.

Full menu.

 Then I had too wait for the bus home.  I had just missed the previous one.

So I waited.

Saturday: A pretty good day.

I woke up basically when I was planning on, which is always good.

There was an update that changed the splashscreen.  That's good, because I was thinking earlier this week that the old one had been there since like New Years.

I decided to check the mail before heading out for the day, and I was confused because there were two things from Chase, and something from the state, which I assumed was some other reminder about renewing my registration (which I have to do before the end of the month).

So I was sitting in the car, opening the mail, and I see this:

My car is paid off.

"Shouldn't you have known that was going to happen?"  Probably.  It was set up to auto-pay, so I just checked that the money had gone out each month, and considered that done.  The second thing from Chase was a check, because somehow I overpaid $135.  How?  I have no idea.  I assumed my bill was calculated to be an integer fraction of the total amount I would have to pay, and that they would have known what that amount is.  Whatever.  The thing from the state was the title to my car, which is cool, because I think I need to have that if I ever want to ship my car to the mainland.

In any case, that was a good start to the day.  Then I went to the movies, because that was the plan for today.

Unfortunately the plan for the day also had a hot dog scheduled here.  I guess they had a run on hot dogs at the theater, because they weren't going to have any for fifteen minutes.

 So nachos, then.  Theater nachos are not as good as theater hot dogs.

Your Name.

It was the highest grossing movie in Japan of all time when it came out.  It is amazingly good.  The art is beautiful, the story is excellent, the characters feel realistic, and there's a comet.  There is a 75-90% chance I will go back to see it again tomorrow.

And then after movie sushi.

Finally, I went to work to print out the stupid tax stuff I forgot to print yesterday.  Which means I need to finish my state taxes.  Tomorrow.  Let's do that tomorrow.

And I may have bought an ice tray at the Thinkerthings because now I can make squirrel shaped ice cubes.

• And Your Name seems to be doing well here too.  Good.  This is the best movie I've seen since Marnie.
• I don't have any good thoughts on this.  So it's just pictures of rotting houses, mostly.
• Gitaroo Man.
• At first, I thought, "why bother with ebay.  It's a PS2 game, can't you just get a used copy from Amazon?"  Yes, but it's $60.  Which made me think if I had any games that might be considered rare.  I liked Klonoa, and bought pretty much all those games, but I think it was like me and five other people in the US.  The first one is $90.  That's insane.
• Nice to see the CAH guy doing good things.
• I really should see if there are more episodes of Sun&Moon on youtube.
• A Pokemon.
• OMEN.

Sunday: Chicken, I guess.

I didn't know what I wanted to eat today, so I decided to drive to Kailua and get some chicken.

And there are Pokemon stickers now.  I don't know how it displays which stickers are available, since I know the Dr. Strange ones changed as I used them.

The breast meat deal isn't that great, mostly because it has a larger meat to outside ratio, and all the flavor is on the outside.

I liked the sunset when I got home, too.

Blogger has a new "insert special characters" button.  I am about to insert some special characters.  ⟰ℜ👹🐼🔑𓁤ぽカ山.  So they added unicode support.  Cool.

• A good doge.
• It's a thing you do.
• I like the idea of helpful horrors.
• Baseball dinosaur.
• Eevee.
• Rupert Giles.

Saturday: Burgers and Elder Evil.

I woke up hungry, and then made the mistake of looking through last month's blog posts.  I clicked on this one, and decided it was worth giving the Five Guys in Mililani another try.  It was far less busy this time, with no crazy line out the door.

Five guys.

They were also setting up to do some sort of photo shoot.  For the food, I guess?  It didn't make much sense, and they didn't seem to have a plan.  The manager had to get a menu for them, which means either the manager didn't plan what to shoot, or that the photographers didn't do much research.

They didn't mess up my order this time, which improves their score a lot.

I don't know.  It tasted fine, but seemed to have something missing still.  The burgers aren't quite as juicy as the ones in Alameda.  Maybe the true burgers are the friends we made along the way.

And this arrived in the mail, and is possibly the greatest thing ever.  Julie has condensed my true essence into one piece.  Thanks, Julie!

I'm also not sure if it's appropriate to take to my office to put with my other squirrel stuff.

Now to start this month's tldr Lovecraft/Drawlloween with the obvious choice:

• Title:  The Call of Cthulhu
• Date:  1926
• Summary:  Cthulhu half wakes up and kills like six dudes, but it's ok, because he has legions of cultists to kill everyone else who talks about it.  Honestly, the concept of a global network of conspiracy in the 1920s is the thing that's least believable to me.
• Real Villain:  Cthulhu. Duh.
• Last line in italics?  No.
• Writer writes instead of fleeing?  No.
• Rating:  7/10.  I'm not a big fan of the "staple a bunch of accounts together and call it a story" style of stories.  It's why I've never been able to get through Dracula, either.
• Read it:  Here.

Cthulhu.  Duh.

• Pokemon.
• Ghost Pokemon.
• Ampharos.
• Not Pokemon.
• Speaking of embroidery.
• Adventure Time.
• Speaking of Dracula.
• Wow.  I did not know this.
• Yeah.  I saw some dogs today.
• I need some free-as-hell bread.  I have jam now, and you can only eat it with a spoon for so long before you start feeling like maybe you should get some bread.

This post has a lot of appropriate labels.

Thursday: Fuck you, google.

I'm looking at something in google maps, and I accidentally zoomed out, and what did I see?

Google maps does space now?

 Oh, and what happened when I zoomed back in?

"There's no fucking way those are the actual right-now clouds."

How long have you been doing this, google?

• Prince died.
• I saw this place on yelp over the weekend.  The problem is it looks like they have very little parking, so if it's this busy, that's going to be tricky.
• Dogs.
• Cats.
• It's like some fuckhead at fox news sat down and thought, "how can we look more out of touch and designed for old people?"
• I guess it's good that I don't care about DC comics anymore, since they willingly employ garbage.

Friday: No theme.

The continuing saga of "they're doing stuff in my office for the new fire (?) alarms":

It's not in use yet.

The clouds looked cool when I left work, as well.

I should have taken a few more pictures to fill in the horizon a bit better.  I also need to remember when I do these that I should take a "straight up" shot.  Also, you can see the moon as a tiny dot on the right.

This would be a link, but I played with the bot using a variety of blog images I still have in /tmp/.  I think this is far more impressive than the "guess your age" thing Microsoft had a while back.  If they can get this working correctly, it'll be great.  Write a quick bot to push a bunch of images through it, and I can finally put together a database of reasonable guesses at what all the pictures I've saved over the years are without having to do it myself.  It clearly still has problems:

You did badly, CaptionBot.

 To be fair though, it did correctly identify this Kimchi picture as "a small dog", despite that being a super blurry photo.  The research paper is kind of an interesting read.  Hopefully they'll be able to get the accuracy higher than 50%.

• It seems a bit odd that the Obamas paid an 18.7% tax rate, when I calculate I paid 14.8%.  We should have a more progressive tax system.
• Yes.  I'm sure Rick Fucking Snyder is now a beacon of environmentalism.  "Snyder said work at the federal level on changing the rule is proceeding too slowly and could take years. "How much harm will happen in that time frame?" he asked. "That's unacceptable.""  Fuck you, asshole.  Which party do you think is the one who would be holding that up?
• TL;DR: this means that if Garland gets on the court, he's likely to be less happy with mergers that create monopolies.
• Basically, eat things that seem good, and don't get too concerned with labels, because you're probably being lied to.
• Ok.  Sure, China.  Sure.
• What are you doing, Dog?  You can't cook!  You didn't even wash your paws!
• Wonder Woman.
• Never install auto-text edit extensions on a browser you do work on.

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.

Adventures in NFC.

My Clipper Card arrived this week, and after getting it out of the envelope today, I realized that it probably uses the same NFC tech that my phone has.  After checking this with a simple reader, I found an app designed to decode information from fare cards.

So, with card ids blacked out:

Yep.  I have to collect the money on one of their machines.  This makes sense that they don't mail active cards.

No, card, I haven't taken any trips.

Except, I have a Suica card from when I went to Tokyo too:

Although I should probably throw out the HK chapstick by now.

How much does that have on it?

About $2.  $1.81 with the yen's continuing slide against the dollar.

But this has a history.  I think it's limited by when I recharged it?

In any case, this covers Monday and Tuesday of that trip.

Cool.


Also, because I was curious, what has the yen done since then?

So I paid about $2.25 for the 220¥ that are now worth about $1.81.  Clearly, investing in Suica fare cards has been a poor investment strategy.

Monday: It's annoying hot and humid again.

I thought about doing something fancier, but I had so much trouble just drawing a circle that I went with the two color scribble version.  Drawlloween theme: Moon.

Also, when I posted yesterday's Raven picture to tumblr, I discovered that the official Small-Butera tumblr liked the Pumkin I posted last week.  Sure, they probably like all the fanart they see, but that's still kind of cool.

• I'm going to claim it's because the theme today was moon.
• There's a Sailor Chibi Chibi Moon?  That last season is just crazy, isn't it?
• To be fair, nothing Tuxedo Mask ever said made much sense.
• This is why Clickhole is one of the best sites around.  Important journalism like this.
• This is Gawker's important journalism.
• This looks good, and I'm still waiting for my Howard the Duck trade to arrive after seeing it sitting on a shelf in California.  That way I'll be somewhat up to date.
• "Damn it kid, you didn't carry the two from the tens column!  How are you going to help me lead a world revolution of communism if you can't do simple arithmetic?"

I accuse Mr. Green of committing the crime in the Ballroom with the Lead Pipe!

Or, more to the actual topic of this post, I accuse old people of opposing progress with their not dying.

Confused yet?

So I came across something today that pointed me to this survey of gay marriage polling tracks over time.  I then noticed that this page also includes historical trends for interracial marriage as well.

My obvious question to myself was, "how much of that trend can you explain simply by assuming things are improving because old people die?"

That led to a search for detailed cohort data, because I need to know when people are dying.  Google google google, and I find this page, which claims the image is from the Census people, although they've since rearranged their webpage so the link doesn't work anymore.  I'm accepting that, because who lies about cohort data?  Crazy statisticians, I guess.

Here's the cohort image, copied in case that link disappears too.

I digitized that image, and then write a perl script to calculate the fraction of the population on a given date that were born before a certain year.  This number subtracted from 100 gives the fraction born after that date.  What does that look like?

Due to the five-year blocking of the cohorts, there's a stair-step effect.  Interpolate a best fit line through that data, basically through the midpoints of each step.

Huh.  That worked far better than I expected.  Basically, ignoring all other factors, you can pretty much explain the entire trend if you just assume that everyone born after 1960 (who would have been kids during the Civil Rights Movement) is cool with interracial marriage, and that everyone born after 1980 (I'm going to use the Simpsons as my cultural shift here, because I don't want to go with "people my age") is cool with gay marriage.

Friday: Valentine's day

I've been saving this for a week.

 But it's also Julie's birthday, so I can't just say we should blot the day out of history.  And now I want cake.

I decided last weekend that I was bored with lunch sandwiches, and decided to try lunch salads:

Like this.

 I haven't sorted out the best way to do this.  This one has baby lettuce, sundried tomatoes, slivered carrots, croutons, ham, and that really tasty gouda that WF always has presliced like that.  The problem is the balance between dressing and not having soggy croutons.  I made a quick red wine vinaigrette, but it doesn't coat things very well, and putting the box's lid back on and shaking it around magically does three things:

1. all ham immediately finds the closest ham, and they stick together into a chunk.
2. all carrots and sundried tomatoes flee to the bottom of the box, so once you eat that last bit of lettuce, you find a secret pile of both of those.
3. the dressing vanishes, no matter how much you put in, only to appear again later in a puddle around the edge of the box.

I clearly have some work to do.  I've also thought this would work for a chicken caesar idea as well.  I do need to get better croutons, as the ones I have were designed by an idiot, so they crunch perfectly fine, unless you get one with the solid grains in it, which cannot be crushed by a molar, and exist only to break teeth.

Plus, I've done seafood the past two days:

This soy-honey salmon recipe was a lie.  The sauce did not in any way "form a glaze," and I shortchanged your cooking times and still ended up with overcooked fish.  I guess that's what I get for not marinating it overnight.

WF fish counter crab cake.  I kind of want to do slider week again, and put this in as one of the sliders.

I also came up with a brilliant idea today for a product that doesn't exist but totally should.  I have lots of books.  Like think of some books, and I have like twice that.  Maybe more if you thought small.  However, I have insufficient shelf space for all of these books.  This means, I lot of my library is in stacks on the floor, or in double-packed shelves (one layer of books, with another layer of books in front).  The problem is that I have a limited amount of wall space, and you have to put shelves against a wall.

Instead of doing things like this, they should make filing cabinets that are designed for books.  This stores the books like a normal shelf, but it's perpendicular to the wall. This makes is stick out further than a regular shelf, but you usually don't put things in front of a bookshelf anyway.  Instead of just pulling a book off the shelf, you open the drawer, and then pull the book off of that shelf.  Here, have a quick doodle-y sketch:

It's nearly legible.

The important thing is that the sides have to be kept as hollow as possible, so my quick idea uses a set of six rails to support an open drawer:  each side has a top and bottom one, plus there are two tracks on the bottom.  Since regular filing cabinets don't fall over (due to the trick that opening one drawer locks the others closed), this would be similarly stable.  The slidey bookend doodle isn't something I've made up, my filing cabinet has that, so I assume it's a standard filing cabinet thing.

This would be significantly more expensive than the cheap flat pack shelves that are common, but I think the storage density would help mitigate that.  The other benefit would be that since the books are isolated, there'd be less chance of dust/light/bug damage, so the books would be safer.  In conclusion, I really want to have a filing cabinet style bookcase.

• I read Paul Krugman, so I saw this.  Then I did a search on twitter (assuming this was something recent), and discovered this and this.  The WSJ has had grammatically incorrect advertisements out for two months.  Holy unprofessionalism, Batman.
• Pika-jollnir?
• This title is completely accurate.  There's using technology for good purposes (like cool filing cabinet bookcases) and then there's using it for bad purposes (like building eyesores that inevitably leak because you don't understand what you're doing).  I'm not kidding.  Like all of his buildings leak.  Or try to set LA on fire.  I can't come up with more fundamental purpose of architecture than a) don't let the rain in; and b) don't burn down the fucking town.  You suck, Frank Gehry, and I don't care how many rich assholes you fool into paying for your shit.