“A study by German scientists showed that 10 minutes a day of ogling women’s breasts by men was as good at warding off heart disease, high blood pressure and stress as 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.”
— Phony science news that should have been true...Senate Theme Song
Dear Democrats, you chose poorly.
Pretty accurate, actually...
In common use, “woke” seems to be a term like “trans” that basically means “the opposite of normal”, and has the same virtue-signaling purpose, as most recently demonstrated in this pathetic example of a Stanford application essay.
So it was amusing to see the top definition on Urban Dictionary is:
"A state of perceived intellectual superiority one gains by reading The Huffington Post."
The Apocralypse
(via)
We were all-hands-on-deck for Y2K at WebTV, with Operations, devs, and management all waiting for a scramble signal from QA if something went wrong. Since, like most businesses, we’d fixed everything we could think of well in advance, I was hanging out in a conference room with my 4x5 view camera taking pictures of whisky bottles (and a mildly-cute girl from another group who wandered in at some point; portraits only!).
Turned out there was exactly one thing that had been missed: trying to add a credit card that didn’t start being valid until 1/1/2000. This produced a legendary flaming email from Steve Perlman, which was preserved for posterity because it was a reply-all that CC’d the Remedy ticket system.
Cheesecake: hug from behind
This search was a real trip down memory lane, and we even got a sighting of the rare double half-rims:
Thoroughly Random Blogging
More than usual, I mean. I’ve been playing with the static site generator Hugo as a way to move this blog and its comments out of Movable Type.
After clearing the initial hurdle of incomplete and inconsistent Open Source documentation (pro tip: if a project starts numbering versions from 0.1 instead of 1.0, it’s safe to assume that there’s no tech writer on the team), the next step is adding a theme to render your site. There’s no default theme, and half a dozen different recommended ones of varying complexity and compatibility. Short version: I’m not sure Hugo currently has layout functionality equivalent to Movable Type 2.x from 2003, much less any of the modern tools; it might, it’s just that hard to find out.
There’s some support for basic pagination, something that’s always been missing here (and which is partially responsible for the long delay when adding comments), but the built-in paginator includes a link for every page, which is pretty painful when you have 200+ pages. If I get the time, I’ll have to dust off my Go and send them a patch to make it behave sensibly with large numbers.
Rendering all ~3,800 entries (counting quotes and sidebar microblogs) and ~3,500 comments takes about 12 seconds on my laptop, but that’s still too long for iterative testing, and the OS open-file limit makes it impossible to test with the live-rebuild feature of the built-in web server.
So I wrote a quick Bash script to retrieve N random articles from Wikipedia and format them the way Hugo expects, as Markdown with TOML metadata. Why Bash? Because the official Wikipedia API for efficiently retrieving articles and their metadata using generators and continues is either broken or incomprehensible to me, since I spent two hours at it and got a never-ending list of complete and partial articles. So I just looped over the “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random” URL and piped the output through Pandoc. Rather than pulling in the real metadata, I just generate dates and categories in Bash. Now I can quickly generate a small site with multiple sections and simple categorization, and it’s trivial to add more features like series, tags, authors, etc. [in fact, I did!]
(relevant only to Hugo users after the jump…)
Caturday Morning Breakfast Serial
It’s been a while since I’ve seen someone use footage from Hyper Police and DearS. The extensive use of AsoIku came as no surprise, of course.
I don’t care for the music, but… catgirls!
Neko Atsume Live
Ever since I first got the back yard landscaped with lots of plants and ground cover, it’s been a popular daytime hangout for the neighborhood cats. After I had the front porch extended and put some chairs out there, I discovered a group of young cats who liked that even better than the back yard.
Some of them still come by occasionally, and I’ve gotten used to the sound of disappearing cats when I open the front door.
Recently I decided to install some cameras outside the house, mostly to watch for package deliveries and solicitors, but also to keep track of porch cats. I went with the Arlo Pro kit based on a friend’s recommendation (actually, he has the older Arlo; I went with the Pro because it adds local USB storage). Good hardware, easy set up, usually-quick notification of events (~5 seconds), iOS app is a little flaky and sometimes falsely claims that my system is offline. I like it enough that I’m probably going to add some more of the first-gen cameras for the garage and rear entrances after I’ve had it for a month or two.
To reliably detect cats, I had to set the porch cam to the highest sensitivity, which unfortunately generates occasional false positives due to wind hitting my bamboo, but I’ve caught two of them so far, one of whom I hadn’t seen before.
Orange cat has been a regular daytime visitor since he was half-grown, and always sits in the left chair, which gets plenty of sun. He used to sit in the bamboo pots, but gave that up after I added them to the drip system:
New cat comes mostly at night, always sits on the right chair, and vanishes instantly when I open the door. I’ve got some low-res night-vision shots of him, but the best picture I’ve managed so far was a quick out-of-focus snap through two panes of glass as he was making his escape through the back yard.
Clearly I need to hide a camera in the bamboo, so I can get close-up shots with better focus.
