Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Emulation Layers in Time, Temperature and Language

    I find that for Temperature and Time, converting from 'murican to European is necessary because of a kind of "emulation layer" effect. I don't really conceptualize 32C as having particular meaning, so I have to do the translation to understand "oh, that's 90 degrees, pretty hot." I have to do the same thing with time - dinner time is 6:00 PM, bedtime is 10:00 PM. If I want to understand 24 hour time, I have to translate; 19:00? oh, that's 7:00 PM, so in the evening, after dinner.

  • The Jays Aren't Great, But It Could Be A Lot, Lot Worse

    Stop me if you've heard this before: the Toronto Blue Jays target a generational, transformational player in free agency. After some time, and, we're told, consideration, that player does not pick the Toronto Blue Jays. Meanwhile, free agency has been progressing. The team scrambles to find a player who can replicate some of what they're looking for. They start the season slow. It's early, we're told. The season progresses. The team never starts winning.

    This is how it went last year, when, after trying to land Shohei Ohtani (the most singular player since Babe Ruth, and maybe more so), they settled for some players via free agency and trades: Brendon Little, Kevin Kiermaier, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Daniel Vogelbach, and a number of lesser players. To some extent, these worked out: Little was an effective reliever, Kiermaier provided his usual incredible defense (though his hitting declined rapidly), and Kiner-Falefa was maybe the biggest surprise, providing a couple WAR by mid-season before being dealt for an outfielding prospect.

  • adventures in library inventory

    Let me preface this by saying: When I started working in libraries, I had to do inventory with a card catalog. This required me to pull out each drawer, carry it to the corresponding place in the stacks, and flip through each book and card by hand. It was heavy, slow, cuticle-shredding work and I do not miss it.

    That said: There are right ways and wrong ways to do library inventory barcodes. And Reader, some of the people responsible for this collection before me did it the wrongest way possible.

    The location of the barcode on the book doesn't matter terribly much day to day. It's not hard to flip a book over to run it under the barcode scanner.

    The location of the barcode on the book matters VERY MUCH during inventory, however. Uniform barcode placement - ideally on either the fronts or backs alongside the spine, and always at the same distance from the top - allows one to scan very quickly. You just tip the book enough to reveal the barcode, beep, go on to the next book. An ideal collection could be scanned in less than 30 seconds per shelf.

  • Discomfort: good or bad

    I was doing physical work today, and it so happened that for a long while I was forced to work mainly with my left hand, while the right hand was only a helper. As a right-handed person, I am not used to such situations. It soon became apparent that I reflexively wanted to give my left hand a rest. “Let the right one take over its duties, the left one already wants to rest, since it is uncomfortable, I need to relieve it.”

    However, when I realized this, it turned out that the left one could without a problem do the job, and I even realized that it would get stronger as a result, so I would still profit in the long run.

• Technology and Free Software

  • fzf

    I’m not sure if I’ll be able to remember “fdf” and “fdfg” when typing `bbedit (` will start the completion and `bbedit (fd -e gmi | fzf)` shows up in my scrollback, but I suppose writing it down nicely both in my config.fish and typing it up here will help.