Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • I'm excited to start eating healthier

    Cooking and eating has been difficult these past few years, and I've been having trouble keeping on enough weight to be healthy.

    I've been replacing too many meals with basic foods like eggs on toast or ramen or Soylent. Even when I do cook a proper meal, it's usually one of the same few recipes, optimized to be easy to prepare with ingredients I can get within walking distance of my apartment.

    A few weeks ago I got really sick and didn't eat solid food for a week. It made me realize how much I take food for granted, and so I decided that once I was better I was going to turn things around, start cooking more, start eating healthier, and start putting some weight back on.

  • Academiology I: Ritual

    I have this one professor for two of my classes this semester. Both on the same day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

    The first class is pretty straightforward. Most of the stuff we're learning at this point is very conceptual. there's some math that's a bit confusing, but otherwise, it's just a matter of taking the notes and studying them later. It's okay, as far as lectures I've had go.

  • Putting the Building Before the Occupant

    Yesterday my wife and I visited a part of the city that is already fairly developed but is still building up rapidly. Among the many piles of dirt and construction fences, one particular site caught our attention. The land will be home to a new office building, but an advertisement posted in front of the fence revealed that the owners are seeking lessees. Later, as we headed home from our errands, we saw several warehouses under construction in a different part of town. These also advertised open commercial space for rent or lease.

    We found this quite confusing. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and especially in this area, telecommuting is quite common. We don't see many businesses expanding their physical presence in the city, and indeed many companies are increasingly being priced out of competitive areas. So why are construction companies creating a glut of supply and building buildings before anyone chooses to occupy them--and if there is such a glut, why aren't commercial rental prices going down?

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CGYORUH Wordo: CASTS

  • Bread/Quote

    I have been baking bread a lot lately. A few loaves a week. I am struggling to keep it fresh long enough to eat all that I bake, which is a bummer. I am thinking of buying or building a bread box, as I hear that can extend the life of an uncut loaf well. We'll see.

  • Stargazing: Perseus, NGC 2244: Fairbanks, AK, USA: 2024-02-07 (publ. 2024-02-08)

    I went stargazing yesterday evening, at the boat launch. NWS forecast had predicted 25% cloud coverage, but I'm finding I can't afford to be too picky and wait around for perfectly clear nights. I had prayer meeting and some other errands, but was able to make it out to the boat launch around 9:15pm AKST. In my hurry, I brought just the 12x60 binocs, my field guide, and a few other accessories, but not the tripod.

• Technology and Free Software

  • new hire

    This week I hired a second guy for my team. The company is now about 30 full time employees so it was time to have a second person in the tech department. I got really lucky. I've got some really awesome guys that help us out with contract work but they're happy with that setup. They have full time gigs that leave them some room to dabble, so freelance brings in a sweet bonus. If they came on full time they'd be eating their own bonus money. No me gusta.

  • building phetch in a FreeBSD VM

    I found I could download a premade VM image for FreeBSD. figured I'd get qcow because I like to use qemu.

  • I’m Impressed By Poudriere

    When I add new software to my digital workflow, the first thing I do is learn how to customize it. This usually means scouring the internet for blog posts written by people who have successfully configured this software in a non-trivial way and implemented it into their long-running systems with stable uptimes. Recently, I came across a blog post by “vermaden” detailing a FreeBSD concept called “PkgBase”.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: The state of gopher

      So, I saw Mr_Tea's post on "The state of gopher"[00], read tomasino's reply[01] and tfurrows' reply[02], and I have to say, it felt a lot nicer to see this sort of actual discussion, instead of what I've become accustomed to elsewhere. That said, I have a few thoughts on what's been written.

    • Hello, World!

      I'm honestly just posting this to populate the "posts" section of this website with SOMETHING at the very least. More content to come soon!

  • Programming

    • Instead of “write-only memory” assembly support, how about floating point support?

      You might think it odd to add support for floating point constants for an 8-bit CPU, but Motorola did development on the MC6839 floating point firmware for the MC6809, an 8K ROM (Read-Only Memory) of thread-safe, position-independent 6809 code that implements the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic [1]. It was never formally released by Motorola as a product, but from what I understand, it was released later under a public domain license. At the very least, it's quite easy to MC6839 find both the ROM image and the source code [2] on the Intarwebs. So that's one reason.