Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Flutter, 2

    At a social gathering for the band the other night, I got talking with the young woman in my section, the cute one who reminds of another horn player I used to know many years ago.

    And as I was getting ready to leave, packing up my collapsable chair and putting it away in its bag, she came over to see me off. And as we both confirmed we'd be back for the fall concert, she very lightly touched my arm, and we said our goodbyes.

  • 3 weeks on a Caribbean island every year

    As I told you in some previous post[1], I retired early some years ago because of some health issues. And it bothers me a little, that some people might think I'm just a lazy fuck! I don't know if this is really the case, but I really suffered hard the longest time of my life.

    I also wrote an article about my "alcohol self therapy"[2] and how I (I believe miraculously) have overcome it (which didn't tell the whole story though).

  • Book review: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

    Lots to love in this book. Plenty of bad things too.

    I might or I mightn’t read more books from this guy. Reading over his bibliography, he sure has a lot of interesting pitches that makes me really curious.

    The main story here, I liked. It’s an adventure story that does feel like an adventure story but also has a somber, heartbreaking Tove Jansson vibe.

    But just like some of her books (looking at Sun City for example) he doesn’t use quotation marks nor dialogue dashes. People just say things and it’s not offset in anyway That gets annoying real fast. I first heard of this guy maybe twenty years ago and how he hates quotation marks, how he replaces a lot of commas with “and” and how he likes to run sentences together also with “and”. “Oh, that’s interesting”, I thought, “I’d like to read one of his books and see whether I’d like that style.” Now I have and now I know I don’t. I did enjoy the read but I would’ve liked it much more if it was just formatted normally.

  • Deplaned

    Landed. I gather my bags from the overhead. I didn't check anything - just carry-ons. My tee-shirt stretches upwards as I do, to fetch my bags, revealing more of my fat gut than I'd like. But my embarrassment doesn't prevent me from helping those around me fetch their bags - it's the responsibility of the tall to become height for the altitudinally less-fortunate. Sometimes, anyway.

    Kind of crazy, making this trip. Can't believe I'm this smitten only a few months into talking. As if it only started now - I've been smitten since mere days talking. She's not really my usual type, visually... but the smile in her photo shines, and there's a spark in her soul that I always strain to seek, but so seldom find. The spark that sparks my own soul.

  • supportive habits - updated august 2nd

    this is still going and serving me well! i definitely feel supported and more active and alive, but it did take a while to get here. even though summer is still hard, i am happy to initiate activities and accept others' initiating them, including basketball?? very out of character, but exercise is part of the habits, so why not!

    i did another little tweak on this 11th week that i'll carry forward. i'm keeping my two columns of trackers and tasks (must and want), but only drawing in as many squares as there are tasks, only adding them on as needed. otherwise a column of un-checked squares makes me feel like there's so much i haven't done, even with no tasks penned in next to them.

    because of the autistic brain, i don't think i can actually maintain habits that i'm not tracking? like, there are no habits really, only what i actively, consciously remember to do. so i'm going to keep these trackers/reminders in my planner going forward after these 12 weeks, i think. since they really are supportive they weren't all that hard to keep up with. now i hope they can help me stay on track during a different sort of challenge. maybe finally trying to get off the internet so much? i keep talking about it and keep trying but there aren't reminders to keep me on track. i'll try to brainstorm some sort of schedule, maybe. or levels of internetting that i could gradually decrease. with the current project it definitely helped to have it right up there at the top of my weekly journal spread: week 11/12. maybe a similar counter or title would help keep things top of mind. and with the trackers right there underneath there's plenty to be getting on with. so more like... unlearning a bad habit (i guess i do actually have some!) instead of instilling a good one. or is that the same thing?to do less of something you need to do more of something else, is that a better way to get it to stick? i unintentionally started the brainstorm, stopping now.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Drift

    The girl I had a big crush on at the end of university has just bought a very large, very expensive boat. One of my high school friends, the most brilliant of us by a mile, has become an AI-poster on LinkedIn. His job titles have been very impressive, but it doesn't seem to have saved him from the brain rot.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Crawlers in Gopher space

      They have arrived. Mindless drones grabbing my entire Gopher hole. They're not just making a map of our Gopher space, i.e. they don't just request menu selectors -- no, they're grabbing everything, every file.

      My website is already offline because I don't want to act as a provider for free AI training data anymore. I guess it's now time to take the Go- pher server offline as well.

    • Purpose, intention, action

      This post is written in response to Chris Shaw's August 2026 IndieWeb Carnival prompt, Purpose.[1]

      [...]

      Purpose is an interesting construct. It can be assigned externally, as a concrete statement of utility ("the purpose of a hammer is to pound nails"); or internally, as a guiding principal of behavior ("my purpose in life is to provide for my family").

      Purpose can be highly subjective and situational. You and I may have different views on the utility of a hammer, and that utility may depend on context. A hammer can be useful when building a cabinet, or useful in defending oneself from an attacker. We could try to generalize by saying that the purpose of a hammer is to hit something, but this doesn't always ring true.

      Groups of humans may align in purpose. A nonprofit organization is created to feed the hungry. A community library is built to share knowledge. Groups may have many purposes, and they don't always harmonize. What is the purpose of government? Survey ten people, you may get ten different answers. There's that subjectivity again; it gets messy, fast.

• Programming

  • Instead of “write-only memory” assembly support, how about floating point support?

    You might think it odd to add support for floating point constants for an 8-bit CPU, but Motorola did development on the MC6839 floating point firmware for the MC6809, an 8K ROM (Read-Only Memory) of thread-safe, position-independent 6809 code that implements the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic [1]. It was never formally released by Motorola as a product, but from what I understand, it was released later under a public domain license. At the very least, it's quite easy to MC6839 find both the ROM image and the source code [2] on the Intarwebs. So that's one reason.

  • Got the Python itch

    In the last few months I've been doing less and less programming at work. Being the technical lead meant I was doing more meetings than coding but with big changes in the company I've been almost all meetings, design, and story writing. Think that might be why I've suddenly gotten more active in programming for my capsule. Once everyone goes to bed I spend an hour or two this week creating CGI scripts for doing a lot of different things. Maybe others will find them useful, maybe not.

  • The precedence of the factorial operator

    Back when I added a factorial operator to my assembler [1], the code only applied it to numeric literals because the code that implemented it appeared in the same function as parsing a numeric literal. I only found the bug when I tried to apply a factorial to a subexpression in parenthesis, for example, -(2+1)!.

    The fix was easy, just move the code out of the numberic literal parsing routine rvalue() to rfactor() where the unary + and - occur, as well as handing subexpressions. But the fix lead to another issue—how to handle a sequence like -3!. Should it error out since negative values aren't defined for factorial? Or should it apply the factorial to “3” and then the unary minus sign?