Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Municipal light industries

    I write these notes on the future of Kentucky think- ing about how to go from a rich country with the globally dominant financial and military protection racket to a middle-income country with a regional sphere of influence, in a world of physical limits.

    Can states and municipalities weather this change in a managed way for the good of their citizens and denizens, instead of collapsing due to denial or panic? Of course they can!

    The presidential tariff authority is being seriously challenged in court. It has a good chance of being revoked. It has been a primary tool of foreign policy by this administration, allowing direct presidential shakedowns, as opposed to my country's older shakedowns by funding opposition groups, arming those groups, sending military advisors, using predatory lending during crises to dictate internal affairs, etc.

  • Poetry

    I was talking to my friend called Case about the people of Iceland up north where they read and write so many books or so they say, and make music, too "Let's blog as poetry," I proposed and here I am, feeling the faint words as they flow and the ripples they make "Is this poetry?" I wonder

• Technology and Free Software

  • fish

    I started using Linux in the 90s, and it was my everyday OS for a while, maybe a decade. Since then I've mostly used Windows, with Linux VMs. And given the general disposability of VMs, I've stopped caring about the intricacies of my setup, and have mostly taken the defaults. At home I mostly use a VM for cross-compilation testing, and use Fedora, and GNOME. When I was younger, I used WindowMaker, BlackBox, and other "clean"-looking WMs. Apart from a brief dalliance with zsh, and tcsh, I always just fell back on my default, which was bash (except at my last job, on AIX, where the default was ksh, but that, and IBM, really feel like relics of the last century).

  • Slide Rules, Electronics Studies

    I'm continuing, as spare time allows, to work through electronics practice problems in some various electronics lesson books and handbooks I have access to. I'm finding the most satisfying way of learning is to work through the practice problems, working through the mathematics with a slide rule close at hand.

    I am also working on exploring more of the scales on my Pickett N-16-ES, which was designed for electronics applications. I was a bit confused at first by the TH, SH1, and SH2 scales, but eventually figured out that they are for hyperbolic trig functions. Not having an application for those at the moment, I moved on. As far as the main scales go (C, D, etc.) the N-16-ES is mostly similar to the other slide rules I have, except that there is no inverted folding scale (CIF).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Christina's Five Questions, November 2025

      I went to a party thrown by a colleague who is also a friend; not yet a super close one but I'd kind of be open to things moving in that direction, and that is mostly the reason I went. I did need this additional motivating factor, and probably wouldn't have gone without it. I don't really enjoy dressing up (which I make extra difficult for myself by refusing to buy anything I'm never going to wear again for the purpose of a party) and am a little surprised by Halloween's rapid recent conquering of seemingly the entire Western world. Well, I guess I'm not really surprised, it's clearly Good For The Economy and probably also fun if you're not a turbo-grinch. I had an okay time. It wasn't really the kind of party where you talk a lot and level up friendships, which probably should have been obvious in advance...

      [...]

      The entirely autonomous and unassisted self-perpetuation of plants and animals over staggeringly long spans of time through unbroken generational chains. It is at once mundane by its ubiquity but also, when you reflect on it, just absolutely friggin' bonkers.

    • Christina's Five Questions, November 2025