Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Sinking or Swimming in the Sea of the Sun

    The vision: sitting at a small, humble gazebo in a loosely-kept field of grass, led to by a humble dirt path veering off from between the well-manicured bushes of the canal-gardens. It's some ways out from any trees to the left or the right, and a good few dozen yards away from the proper garden behind, but an equal distance before is a narrow strip of sand and smooth stone forming a shore of an immense river-sea. The brightness of the golden sky and the ever-suffused light obscures the far shore, and the calm water itself glows like oil lit from a blessed olive tree. Dipping your hands into the water, you can catch little flakes of gold suspended among the waves.

    It's a dangerous thing to cross, this river. Those who do are those lost in the light, blinded in radiance as a blessing, but one hard to bear by most. They're the ones who become immersed in Apollonian frenzy, in the mania of beauty, who live out their lives serving a greater vision and are taken care of by the same; they become immersed in the phenomenon of divinity, and become eternal children thereof. These people do not try to swim over the water, but are guided there, accompanied and shepherded there to the other shore, borne across the water as they bear their own burdens of their own Sun.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CHKMOYU Wordo: LUNCH

  • Wide Technology

    About three weeks ago, I stopped regularly wearing my quartz wristwatches and switched to a hand-wound mechanical pocket watch. It isn't as accurate as electronic timepieces--it gains about 15 seconds per day--but for a device that relies entirely on mechanical principles, I won't complain. It suffices to simply wind the watch once a day and re-calibrate the time once a week.

    From the pocket watch to my typewriter, from my bicycle to a good old-fashioned backyard fire pit, I try to include a lot of off-grid tools in my life. These tools are all forms of technology, and we as humans have benefit ted from their invention. And just because they don't use electricy doesn't mean they're useless today. After all, not everything requires computerization--and not everything improves with computerization either.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I think people may be taking the LinkedIn questions not as serious as LinkedIn would like

    I'm posting my previous entry [1] to LinkedIn [2] when this time I'm asked “You're **one of the few experts** invited to answer: Your team is hesitant about new web app technologies. How can you overcome their resistance to change?” And the **first** response from one of the “experts” that answered is: “Threaten to fire them.”

  • RetroChallenge 2024 entry: Days IX - XVI

  • Rebirth—why the best board game since 1980 sucks

    Rebirth is the new Knizia tile layer that just came out. It's a tile laying game in the vein of Samurai, Through the Desert, Blue Lagoon, and Havalandi—I've also seen comparisons to Kingdom Builder, Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne.

  • Programming

    • Unit testing from inside an assembler, part V

      I've made some major changes to my 6809 assembler [1], mostly to how the unit testing works. The first change was to assemble the test code elsewhere far in memory from the code being tested (there's a default value that can be changed via an .OPT directive). This separation makes it easier to keep the test code out of the final assembled artifact. The next change was to remove the “unit test feature” as a distinct output type and make it work the rest of the output formats (like the flat binary format, the Color Computer executable format, or the Motorola SREC format [2]). But aside from the internal changes, no changes were required of any existing 6809 assembly code with tests.