Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Make Tea Not War, Season 1 Retrospective

    During the Spring I ran a multiplayer game of OpenTTD for a couple of hours every other Friday. The idea was to run from 1950-2050 without any specific goal or competition, for anyone who wanted to join.

    A year in default game mode is about 12 minutes. Subsequently 100 years would be 1,200 minutes, i.e. around 20 hours. I scheduled 2 hours per session and planned for it to span 20 weeks.

  • Goodbye, Kiermaier

    Their star shortstop (Bo Bichette) is hurt, not to mention playing terribly; their top prospect (Ricky Tiedemann) is hurt, their closer's probably out for the year, their last good pitching prospect is definitely done for the year. The problem is so acute it's affecting more than just the players: last night, their third base coach had to leave the game due to a knee problem.

    The season from hell marches ever on, and today the Blue Jays put Kevin Kiermaier, re-signed to a one-year, $10M USD contract before the season, on waivers. Kiermaier has always been a glove-first player, providing incredible defense at the most difficult defensive position, centre field. But this year, he's been more like all glove, batting (as of right now) at around .183, his power gone (10 XBH so far this season), his ability to catch up to a fastball less and less sure.

  • Laying back after a satisfying day

    Glorious day with kids and grandchild, spending most of it at a farm-themed destination, then in the pool.

    Had more fun experimenting with bash jobs as sort of a tmux substitute. Need practice to develop muscle memory, and the habit of Ctrl-Z'ing terminal apps instead of quitting them. It's rather wonderful to be able to pick up where I left off with them without having them in separate tmux windows/panes. I'm thinking perhaps the only time I really need tmux is for panes when side-by-side is truly relevant to accomplishing something.

• Technology and Free Software

  • My problem with scaffolding

    I enjoy using Guix System. There's a part of me that just *loves* the ability to tinker with your operating system, configuring exactly to your liking and have that configuration be replicable easily, and it has saved me more than once from wasting hours getting my laptop back on track after disk upgrades or failures.

    But lately I've grown more and more hateful of the idea of spending time doing this tinkering phase, endlessly editing configuration files, waiting for the system definition to get compiled and applied, check your changes, be content with them for a bit, something happens or there's something you'd like to add and back to square one.