Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • so on friday i walk into the drum section at my local guitar center

    as you might imagine, it is full of drums, drumheads, drumsticks, drum hardware, percussion instruments, percussion implements, cymbals, and so on; and it's devoid of people, save for me and one teenager who is playing on one of the electronic drum kits in the middle of the floor

    i grab a pair of vic firth 5A barrel tips off the drumstick rack and test them out on the test pad. i always test out my new pair of sticks; what for, i'm not sure. i guess to make sure that one of them isn't misshapen or dramatically heavier than the other. it's never happened to me before but you never know

    [...]

    so i'm looking at the stick bags and i hear a voice over my shoulder say, abruptly and with no salutation, "how long you been playing?"

  • spring...again

    Today was the first really warm, springlike day here this year. The first "really springlike" day is always hard.

    It was on the first "really springlike" day of 2021 that my spouse and I decided to take advantage of the weather and ride his motorcycle for a couple hours before dinner.

    I didn't come home for a month, and when I did, it was in a wheelchair with only one load-bearing limb. I spent the next six months relearning how to walk.

    He came home in an urn.

    I love spring, because I love weather and cool bugs and flowers and gardening, and spring is all those things. But my survival brain has also learned that spring is That Season When You (Nearly) Die. So I can't shake this low-grade, intense anxiety, like death is going to get me around any corner.

    I don't blame my survival brain for this. Its job is to survive, and I very nearly didn't in 2021. But it assumes that everything it remembers from that event is now a threat. Not only does the first "really springlike" day make me nervous, but I also cannot wear black leather jackets anymore. (shrug emoji)

  • Pwetty flowers 🌷

    Spring is the colourful time in my garden. Things come and go rapidly. Snowdrops come first, and now they're looking tired. The crocuses are next, but they look like something sat on them. Some narcissi (baby daffodils) are opening now. We should get actual daffodils and tulips soon. The camelia is another early starter already giving its blowsy pink display. Soon we'll get lilac and an orange-y thing that might be azalea.

  • That Time I Was Cheering for Team Tsunami

    Remember a few months ago when a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck in the waters near northern California? This was in mid-late December, I think. For a brief time, no more than thirty minutes to an hour, there was a tsunami warning for the area. Care to guess what was going through my head? "Please, please, please let it take out Silicon Valley."

  • Return of the Pen and Paper

    Those who have been following this phlog for a long time, know that pen and paper cryptography is one of the topics left a bit behind the others. Well, I think it's time to return to it with several new ideas and re-evaluations of my old approaches. First, I'd like to mention that my main emphasis has shifted on the ease of operation and the minimum (if any) amount of intermediate steps necessary to be written down. Second, some of my earlier "no-no" techniques are now acceptable, but with some important modifications and precautions. Third, there are several new approaches that I hadn't considered before for some reason.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Ten Thousand Typewriters part 2

    Blessed be the fallen machines, for they shall not know the dataflow.

  • Re: Considering Getting Rid of My Misfin Server

    Misfin's original author had a key insight about how to relate email-like addresses, hostnames and X509 certificates. The resulting protocol had its flaws, which the community tried to fix.

    I am a little flattered to see that long after my involvement, my name still stands as the supposed author of the Misfin(C) specification's last draft. But I had to withdraw from involvement in Misfin as it was not possible to get an agreed way forward on anything further than that draft because people had conflicting assumptions about what the protocol was and what it shoud do.

  • Steven universe: vCJD edition. / Enrtry for side 1 of vCJD

    I am here to write down, some commentary about a collection of albums that I watching at this current moment. It is called “ vCJD” by “the patients.” It explores how vCJD works. Im gonna document side by side. Before we begin we must have context about what vCJD and what CJD is.

    vCJD is not like a bacterial infection, it is far worse than that. vCJD is a prion. A protein disease that can be contracted by eating infected meat, more particularly on cows. CJD is an umbrella term of many forms of transmission. All of them linked to the missfolding of the PrPc protein. It is not entirely unknown what is the purpose of the PrPc gene. However, if folding is not done correctly for this protein, the it will form the PrPsc Prion. This prion was found in sheep. There are many names for this prion. When the prion infects sheep called Scrapie. For deer, it’s chronic wasting disease for deer, and our focus CJD is for humans. This protein in super stable, and is resistant to our modern technology. This is what the crux of how CJD progresses. Due to its superstability, if a PrPsc prion finds a PrPc, it will refold the protein and turn it into the prion. This cascade will overwhelm efforts to combat the prions, and will lead to neuronal death. Eventually leading, to death in a few months. This album examens the how vCJD progress in four parts. With many Sides in total.