Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Kygura

    So many lonely nights
    Writing, stuttering words
    Under a dying and daring light
    My only company; the erratic songs of crows
    And the recurring visions of people long dead
    Whose trail left on this world was not to prevail
    
    
    Looking for answers I yet cannot comprehend
    Still I write
    Hoping for these words to unveil the truth
    Light up the darkness
    Show me there's a greater fate in store
    Than this bottle of vermouth
    

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CEFSLNK Wordo: FANNY

  • Historical Artifacts

    Back on the bike again, now that we're seeing some good weather. Yesterday was perfect for cycling (sunny, high of 18), so I took the day off work to bike the Lochside trail. I've done the ride many times; it is for me a Peak Cycling Experience.

    The ride starts near downtown Victoria, at an old trestle bridge that spans an inlet called the Gorge, and mostly follows the bed of an old railway line converted some time ago into a trail, part paved and part gravel. Initially, it traverses a part of town best described as light-industrial, intersecting a few side roads here and there but mostly walled in on either side by the windowless backsides of auto-repair shops, warehouses, and equipment suppliers of various sorts.

    Technically, that part of the trail is called the "Galloping Goose". After crossing a bridge over the Trans-Canada Highway, the trail splits and you can choose to proceed east, following the highway, or continue north up the peninsula. North we go, and it is here the Lochside begins.

• Rambles

  • not a garden blog 4: murdering everything in my path

    I like my monarda. I also use my monarda. A lot. So do the pollinators around here. But if I leave the quackgrass, it will eventually choke out the monarda plants anyway.

    So I killed everything in that square meter of side garden. Then I transplanted some creeping thyme and oregano into the space - two species that will colonize that patch of garden like Puritans handing out smallpox blankets.

    "Molly, is gardening just a war crime to you?" I hear no one asking. "Are all these gardening posts going to be about how you committed atrocities, but in plant form?"

    Yes. As a direct descendant of William Bradford, gardening is how I expend my epigenetic lust for colonial violence.

    (I'm joking. William Bradford was a bad man and somehow my branch of the family descended from him ONLY GOT WORSE until my great-grandmother, who used gardening to punch Nazis. It's not the tendency toward violence, it's how you use it.)

    In CHICKEN NEWS, I ordered a brooder and a mama plate today. A "mama plate," for the uninitiated, is an adjustable heating plate the chicks can sit under, sort of like sitting underneath their mama. I also picked up some bedding and chick feed. The chicks won't even start incubating for another couple weeks, but I am going to be SO READY for them.

  • 03 May 2025

    Busy times! The unusual warm weather - as nice as it is after a grey winter - has its own challenges: The work required around the house to keep it from being completely overgrown skyrocketed and now after leaving winter hibernation there are also a few urgent projects that needed our attention. Very high on the list was one of our bathrooms: Most of its installation is over 80 years old, and while it has been renovated over times the hardware itself was rotting away... in a literal sense. There must have been tiny leaks in the plumbing fittings for ages so that a main spar under the floor was constantly wet.

    After opening the floor up we saw the extend of the damage and could only take it on by generously cutting away anything around the rotten parts and adding in a new spar and floor construction. We also renewed nearly everything of the plumbing and after tons of careful testing we are now somewhat sure that everything is sealed correctly and will stay dry. Yesterday in the evening we finally finished the necessary parts and have now a functioning bathroom again... albeit without walls for now, but at least this will not be a big problem for long. Junior really liked to live on a construction site: So many possibilities to play and cause havoc!

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/UNIX

    • Date Calculations in POSIX Shell

      I recently implemented a feature in my offline microjournaling script to print statistics about the user's posts. Some stats are simple, such as post and attachment counts, while others give some interesting insights into one's posting habits, such as which day of the week posts are made most frequently.

      Several of these statistics require date calculations. As a rule of thumb, I want my script to use as few dependencies as possible--and that means I had to implement everything in POSIX shell.

      All of the duration calculations below assume the ending date is concurrent with or after the starting date.