Sigh, my intonation is already a few more cents off as I go higher up the neck. I sense another setup in my future.

They call me Thyme and a Half because I'm a seasoned traveler.

We were just how having a conversation about a breakfast place that could be described as simultaneously ostentatious and gaudy with a bit of ironic genteel thrown in. I was reminded of the adjective meretricious, which shares a root with the Latin meretrix "prostitute."

The average American kidnaps one person per year. Everyone connected to DHS, and the executive more broadly, kidnapped 68,000 people (and one president of a sovereign state) and should not have been counted.

Somehow, I never realized until just now that the cover of Deep Purple's "Highway Star" from the Expanse was in Belter creole. 🎶 🎵 Namang gonya take my ship Mi gonya race it till im kush Namang gonya beat my ship Im gonya bek da fash da lush Oh, im wa killing machine Im teng' kowlting 🎵 🎶

Current catus

Man, if only the cello were tuned in fourths instead of fifths…

A guads Neis, etc. Griaß di, 2026.

Current catus Valérian is snoring very loudly.

Current catus

The 2006 Alfonso Cuarón film Children of Men, as interrogated through a distinctly Unitedstatian lens, is a commentary on how prevailing policy aims in the English-speaking world will lead to the wider world—through colonialism—becoming unsafe for, if not actively hostile toward, children.

Apropos the musical connection, di Bartolo's obsession over one finger per fret in first position on electric bass is wild. He does acknowledge that most folks would have to work up to it, but if your bass is 35-inch scale like mine, Simandl's method likely works better below, like, fourth position.

A redeeming quality of Stewart's calculus text is the tacit acknowledgment, via the appearance of a stringed instrument's f-hole on the cover, that this level of mathematics is mostly about playing one's scales and getting the intonation right. It also helps that the f-hole looks like an integral.

How to scare an actuary with advanced credentials from the SOA who works in life and health insurance: "Your FSA expires tomorrow." Yes, there is irony here.

I appreciate that the relationship between Garak and Bashir is some semblance of canon.

Current catus (among other things) I'm sitting on the toilet, and Valérian paces around some. After my having ignored him, he chirps at me. I immediately know where this is going, so I sit up. He jumps in my lap and then onto my back. Welcome to when you have cats who only talk to you for uppies.

What everyone calls a maned wolf's mustache is just powdered doughnut lips.

Man, I played some utterly gnarly hammer-on exercises almost two days ago now, and I am still feeling them.

From "Smolenskij gusačok" (the Smolyanin gosling) to "Ievan polkka" (Ieva's polka): How Savo Finns Harnessed the Chaos of the Goose to Celebrate a Good Dance in Contravention of a Parent's Wishes

I'm always sort of surprised what my arcane knowledge of VMS internals lets me infer about systems both older (RSX-11 and TOPS-20) and newer (Windows NT) than it. In fact, about the only thing that NT has that VMS doesn't is the Object Manager. IRPs, etc. are all lifted more or less wholesale.

Terraforming Mars also implies enabling it to have the joy of total eclipses. Neither Phobos nor Deimos are big enough.

One of the reasons why I put the bass down a long time ago is that I stopped having enough feeling in my left hand to be able to play many of the workout-type practice exercises without seriously injuring myself. So, uh, here I am, 10 years later, with feeling finally (mostly) back.

Current catus Valérian has been on my feet nonstop since sunrise today.

With my having dumped my shitty practice amp in favor of just using a high-Z audio interface and an effects stack cobbled together in Pd to color the tone a little, I made the mistake of looking at MIDI pedalboard controllers. Then, I made the mistake of looking at DIY MIDI pedalboard controllers.

I've been idly working off-and-on on a backup/archival system for Windows. I think I finally chased down every API call for getting at everything on NTFS and ReFS volumes and hammered out an archive format for storing versioned snapshots of full NTFS and ReFS volumes with high fidelity.

Leica did a sort of Adventskalender this year on YouTube, and there's one detail that has me kind of spinning. Where the fuck did they find a tape measure in Germany, let alone one with imperial measurements?

Current catus Laureline is padding around the house, chattering to anyone who will listen. (Importantly, without carrying a toy. That's different.) She's funny. Her only goal in doing this is to get someone to say, "Hello!" Once that happens, she shuts up and runs right over to hang out for a bit.

The 1954 Michael Curtiz film White Christmas features Mary Wickes playing the role of Emma Allen, General Waverly's housekeeper at his, as she put it, "Tyrolean haunted house" in Vermont. You may recognize her as Sister Mary Lazarus from the 1992 Emile Ardolino film Sister Act.

Oh, huh. How did I not know that Sheldon Axler was at SFSU? His "Linear Algebra Done Right" was a good adjunct to Friedberg/Insel/Spence when a little more exposition on a topic would have been nice.

Huh. Pd-programmable pedal? That's enticing. clevelandmusicco.com/hothouse-diy...

The cassgender urge to typeset your math notes from this past quarter and pull out your favorite vector art program to draw figures. The genderfucked urge to do precisely none of that and instead look at really nice mechanical pencils and lead holders all day.

Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil is a Christmas movie. It's also free to watch on YouTube right now, albeit with ads, which honestly enhances the dystopian effect.

"Then, uh, what programming language do you use?" "Ada mostly. C or assembly from time to time. Possibly also Smalltalk."

While I'm here: Paul Verhoeven's 1987 film RoboCop is a Christmas movie.

It wouldn't be entirely out of the question to interpret RoboCop as a western through the lens of Reagan-era austerity policy (and the Cold War-era containment policy that largely preceded it). We even see the culmination of Nancy Reagan's life work through the course of the series.

Consider: „Datenschleppdienst“

Current catus Skitter skitter skitter skitter.

Man, if there's anything I'm happy about having (from my vantage point at least) changed in information security, it's that social engineering is considered serious. 20 years ago, it was kinda laughed at, and I feel a little like it's bitten us in the ass.

Current catus I really should have named him Commander Shepard so I could crack the joke that I am his favorite place on the Citadel.

If you don't hear a praise break in the special stage soundtrack from Sonic 2, I don't know what to tell you.

I spent some of today putting together a computation expression in F# that lets me more or less write shell scripts there, in much the same manner as Haskell's Data.Conduit and friends. I wrote another CE a while back for pipelines in PowerShell RunSpaces that I intend to bolt onto it.

My manifestation of 積ん読 is an album dedicated to covers of books I take photos of as I wander the stacks at whatever library. "Oh, that looks interesting." I sometimes wind up reading these! Hao's "Empire of AI" and Mollick's "Co-Intelligence" ended up this way.

Current catus Usually, it's Laureline who engages in sock crimes, but sometimes, Valérian sees fit to partake too, complete with singing the song of victory as he walks toward me.

There's a strange sort of irony in not having a love for tech anymore but having a draw to going back to running Plan 9.

Current catus This is the face of a boy who apparently does not want to be fed. I wouldn't mind giving him dinner, but his lying here is making it difficult.

I’m tired of people saying “fuck Nazis” and not even being able to identify them. Because, in their mind, a Nazi is an obvious villain, and those same beliefs couldn’t POSSIBLY be in their elderly neighbor or childhood friend.

Consider: Satan Claus riding his sleigh over a Teufelsbrücke

As it turns out, I was reading shitty transcriptions. youtu.be/udXvDLYoMaw This is downright pleasant for counting! It's almost like I'm reading for the snare again; I can definitely see myself leaning a little on this for rhythm practice.

LazyTown's "We Are Number One" is actually a gateway to introduce kids to ska, and we should stop pretending it isn't.