Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The Terminator Trilogy

    I love the Terminator movies. The real ones, not the parody ones. The Terminator, Terminator: Judgement Day, and Terminator: Dark Fate. That's the real trilogy.

    I saw an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger where he said that he called James Cameron after being asked to play in Terminator 3. He said he felt that the script was sub par and he didn't want to disappoint Cameron. James had laughed and said "take the money and run".

  • The Other Terminator Trilogy

    This is a "kids these days" story, so if you do not like those, move along!

    Anyways the trilogy for terminators runs something like:

    * Does one use a SCSI terminator, or not?

    * Does the drive have to be rotated into a particular position for the SCSI chain to work?

    * What totem should be used to bless the SCSI chain? Rubber chicken, something made from pipe cleaners, etc.

  • Rest Day

    I'm a little under the weather today. I'd normally just work through this in my basement office, but since my organization has started sending us back to the office 3 days/week (with 4 days/week announced for the summer), I'm going to use what my sick days are meant for and just take one. No point making others unwell, and God knows I have enough sick days built up.

    This morning I let my dogs down to the basement (they like to lie on the old sofa there), made myself a cup of green/black tea, and sat down to work on one of my projects for a couple of hours. It's otherworldly outside: the trees covered in hoarfrost, a heavy fog everywhere. It's like the world's gone white. And inside I sipped my tea, worked on my forever-project, implementing a couple of features, debugging an issue, adding a few unit tests, just slowly adding to it, as I've been doing for the last fifteen years.

  • Quick Album Rec: Two Airships/Exploder Falls - Candy Claws

    _Two Airships/Exploder Falls_ is a glitch/post-rock album by Candy Claws, who also made that really good dream pop album _Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time_. _Two Airships/Exploder Falls_ is actually an alternative soundtrack to the documentary film "The White Diamond" directed by Werner Herzog. I haven't ever heard of anyone else doing this before... I'm aware of the wizard of oz/pink floyd thing, maybe that's where they got their inspiration.

  • Do not apologize for replying late to my email

    You don’t need to apologize for taking hours, days, or years to reply to one of my emails.

    If we are not close collaborators, and if I didn’t explicitly tell you I was waiting for your answer within a specific timeframe, then please stop apologizing for replying late!

    This is a trend I’m witnessing, probably caused by the addiction to instant messaging. Most of the emails I receive these days contain some sort of apology. I received an apology from someone who took five hours to reply to what was a cold and unimportant email. I received apologies in what was a reply to a reply I had sent only a couple of days earlier.

  • When the Emperor called you a NIMBY before he killed you

    There are situations where the word “NIMBY” applies. It’s short for “Not in my backyard”, like someone might think needle exchanges and refugee housing are great but don’t want them in their own neighborhoods (FWIW, I used to live in a neighborhood that had both and it was great). When something is good for everyone including the people who live there but the people who live there are squeamish for bad-faith reasons, NIMBY has been a pretty appropriate slag on them.

    But it can also be completely misapplied. If the Galactic Empire wants to excavate your entire planet to death in search of kalkite for its Death Star, and you protest that, it’s not really fair to trot out the old “NIMBY” slag as you’re under the boot.

• Diet

  • The Myth of “The Myth of Complementary Protein”

    In the seventies Frappé popularized an idea that vegetarians should combine protein sources, i.e. eating grains with beans, just like traditional food cultures have done for longer than recorded history, is a complete amino acid profile as opposed to just eating grains with more grains or eating beans with more beans.

    In just a few years this was “debunked” with scientists (correctly) pointing out that the body can easily store up amino acids way longer and combine all kinds of protein even if you don’t take extra care at every meal. You can eat all grains one day and all beans the next and you’ll be fine and you won’t get protein deficiency.

    True.

• Jobs

  • Still go a job? 💸

    I've lost my job several times. One company closed down; one project got outsourced to Belarus (when it was only a dodgy dictatorship, not a political pariah); one company ran out of work, cut my pay, and sent me on a project far from home, then was surprised that I left, but it felt like constructive dismissal. There was only one time when I was got rid of for being useless (don't make me do admin work).

• Technology and Free Software

  • When the EU regulated means instead of ends

    Let’s say a land wanted to make burglary illegal. They notice that a lot of people who do breaking and entering wear shoes when doing so. So they make wearing shoes illegal.

    That’s sort of how many EU laws are.

    I’m getting a li’l frustrated with how my particular headphones and DAC and app combo I can’t hear anything except at the highest volumes. But every once in a while the audio will cut out entirely and I have to fish out the LP3 from deep inside the bag and fiddle with the volumes and up pops the legally mandated volume warning dialog. This is really frustrating and also pretty dangerous if it happens when I’m outside. I don’t want to stop and fiddle with this stuff on the sidewalk or an escalator. I get that it’s well-intentioned to not have people blast their own ears off but the phone can’t know the decibels from a particular DAC/headphone combo so this isn’t really a vector of regulation that works in real life.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Lagrange in the Apple App Store

      Lagrange is now available in the App Store. This is the same build that has been in TestFlight for a while, with a couple of finishing touches like a Help page tailored for iOS.

      The TestFlight will continue with beta builds. I expect this public version to be updated pretty infrequently.