Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A Big Empty Room 📦️

    I got my medical discharge a couple of days ago and can now roam freely in the Outpost now! Should I say it's like a second start here? Maybe, that's how it feels anyway!

    Something was waiting for me at the address 1027! Something big I shall say!... A big emptyness. I have been briefed on my first few tasks in the ship transiting between earth and here, but wow. It's bright, it's clean but it feels lifeless. Welp, I guess that's where I chime in! I am no architect, but those walls are sound enough that I don't have to worry about the roof falling down on me!

  • waning

    The full moon passed, the energy is calming down. My daughter is back in the country, my home retreat is coming to an end.

    The high of last weekend is still lingering in me. I didn't party, but the making of and the sweat lodge ceremony was intense, different, aligned with what I want to be. Coming back to day to day work isn't easy.

    My emotional body is calm, dreams have been comforting and soothing. While driving yesterday, I realized, I don't want to be in a relationship right now. I was trying to convince myself, it's going to be great, my next girlfriend will be awesome, all fun!

  • Charming afternoon

    I got to the ferry and an old friend was there, offered me a pear cider. Ciders give me headache so I refused. She seemed judgmental about my choice, and I refuted with the fact that I can be "Oh so trashy" when I party.

    "Right you smoke hashish sometime with home grown tobacco."

    I gave up trying to explain how trashy I can be sometime. The conversation continued toward me being alone, and single without anyone in mind for the first time in so long. To which she answered she was also single.

    I've never been interested in her, although she is a beautiful woman. But I felt that everything I was saying was interpreted in a different way that I said it.

  • Klara and The Sun, a book by Kazuo Ishiguro

    Reading Klara and The Sun. I like Kazuo Ishiguro's style and pace of narrative: slow, at times repetitive, verbosely analytical. It feels like Klara and The Sun is sort of an (auto-?)biography of sorts, really cool. I'm at about the quarter of the book at this point and enjoying it thoroughly

    It must be a rather old book, I think, but I don't care. It's just past the stage where it was (as far as I remember) fairly popular and past the stage where it was popular to say that it was popular, and now I'm late to the party, and all the loudmouth guests with an opinion have left, and it just makes me feel very good, reading a book that I know no one will jump at me and start talking about

  • Coffee Problem

    Actually, I don't drink coffee. I tried black coffee a few months ago, but I just didn't like it. I had decided that, if I didn't like coffee black, I wasn't going to drink it at all. None of this wimpy creamer nonsense.

    Nonetheless, I was presented with a related arithmetic problem a few weeks back. There was a big crew of pilots coming in for a training class, and I needed to make a pot of coffee in the pilots lounge. Sounds straightforward enough. But there were a few little quirks in this particular case. The coffee on hand was a container of Maxwell coffee, which looks like it had been there since 1987.

• Politics and World Events

  • The US military and its war crimes

    What good have they ever accomplished after the second World War. Vietnam? Afghanistan? Iraq? Iraq again? Remember the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse? I do. Remember the Guantanamo Bay detention camp? I do. Whenever I hear about the US military going somewhere, I think of that. And if the US military isn't going there in person, I think of how they think killing a whole wedding gathering is OK. Like the Wech Baghtu wedding party airstrike. Or now: Killing kids going to school. And double tapping! Waiting for civilians and medics rushing to the rescuee and killing them, too. How much human sacrifice is deemed acceptable?

• Science

  • How people learn

    I enjoy mentoring, teaching, and giving talks. I always try to be aware of my audience, especially when giving a talk to multiple people. I try to do this so that we can make better use of everyone's time — there's no point in giving a talk that's too advanced or too simple, for example. (I think Richard Feynman has a story about this in his book Surely You're Joking, where he was upset that people would show up for his talks just to see a Nobel prize winner speaking, so he started giving talks under a fake name with a boring-sounding title to ensure only people really interested in the subject would show up!)

    In addition to the experience level, one thing I realized over time is that people learn in different ways. Some people are visual thinkers, others are more logical. And while I do have a small sample size, I think that the way people acknowledge new information reflects that. Someone who says "I can see that!" or "that's clear to me!" is probably a visual thinker, so when I explain something to them I try to use charts and diagrams. Someone who is more narrative and contextual is more likely to say "now I know where this is going!", so when explaining something I try to make sure I explain the why and how.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Marchintosh: Three days in... (gopher log post 1 of x)

    ....and what do I have to show for my best laid plans? Two non-booting Macs! My IIsi is making noises that are both electrically and mechanically bad and my trusty Mac LC doesn't make any noise at all.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Notes on blocking requests based on the HTTP protocol used

      I'm still clearing out some links from last month, just so you know.

      “Selectively Disabling HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 [1]” (via Lobsters [2]) describes an experiment with disabling (or redirecting) requests made via HTTP/1.1, as most of the traffic the author saw via HTTP/1.1 they classified as “bad.”

      I decided to check that against my own server—in fact, I'm checking it against my blog [3] specifically, since it's the only dynamic site I'm serving up (the rest are all static sites). So, how do requests to my blog stack up?