Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Against competitive parenting

    I dropped first daughter at daycare, which we call school, a shorter word. She goes to an ordinary daycare, the closest to our house. Lots of foster kids go there, and they let us just pay for the days we take her. She usually goes twice a week.

    Probably half our friends have toddler or preschool kids, and none go to the closest daycare. They stay at home or go to the "best" the parents can afford, sometimes the best in town, sometimes the best in the county.

    They have different valuations of best. The Child Development Lab, Ms. Bridget's Montessouri, or the Forest School are where they end up.

• Politics and Depression

  • What does it mean to like your name?

    I've been exploring the possibility of changing my name. I'm a bit more trans than I was giving myself credit for; I had a funny moment involving some dysphoria that I hadn't experienced before, but don't want to go too far into detail about. And now, my deadname, derived from the greek root meaning "manly," has not been sparking joy.

    I've thought about my name in various forms over the years. During a formative moment in my gender journey, I was reading YA lesbian fiction, and Nancy Farmer's "Annie on my Mind" had me thinking of taking the name Annie as a first step. I have journal entries from a decade ago referring to myself by that name; if you visited this gemlog in April (I think?) I even introduced myself by that before switching to the pseudonymous 'hush.'

• Science

  • Stargazing 2025-02-08: Hydra

    Yesterday evening (2025-02-08) the temperature dropped some — I think it was around -15 ℉ — and the skies appeared strikingly clear and crisp. It was getting too late to keep the boys up any longer, but as soon as I had them tucked in, I suited up in my best winter gear and headed out, around 9:15pm AKST.

    In the darkest part of the sky, I had a nice view of Taurus. The Hyades looked beautiful and rich in my binoculars, but I felt the urge to explore something new that night, and decided to sketch something else.

    To the SE, the sky was much brighter — Fairbanks lays mostly to the east — and the stars more difficult to see, but there was also a lot of the celestial sphere that I was not familiar with, east of Orion. Exploring with my 12x60 binocs, I found an interesting pattern of stars in an oval of the sky around six or seven degrees wide. With my naked eyes, I could only just barely see two of the stars. I did a sketch of this area with the 12x60 binocs. At the time I had no idea what I was sketching, but later I identified it as the head of Hydra. Here is the sketch:

• Technology and Free Software

  • I prefer NeoVim

    And Emacs can really be fun to configure and use: OrgMode, Org-Roam, Elpher, mu4e and all the other plugins. But I always had problems (sometimes strange ones) with Emacs. And for me as a long time Vim/NeoVim user, Emacs just seems to cumbersome and a little odd, so I always went back to Vim. And as a commandline enthusiast I don't like my editor being a Wayland/X application. I don't want to run my terminal *in* my editor, I want my terminal applications work seamlessly with my terminal editor (eg. tut for mastodon or NeoMutt for email).

  • Programming

    • Deploying Other Peoples Code

      I've been working with kubernetes a lot. It's been a lot of fun! writing helm charts to quickly deploy and update my own apps is super rewarding. I'm able to write my applications in such a way where the charts are very simple, easy to read, and low maintenence.

      I also like helping other people on my team create charts for their apps. we have a ton of control over the apps, and seeing them light up when deployments have 0 downtime and are done with a few commands is great.

      I've also, however, been deploying 3rd party apps to our k8s cluster. Sometimes this is very simple, and the 3rd party chart is easy to follow. Other times, however, getting their application deployed in our chart format is an excercise in patience.