Everyone started playing WoW again, and while I had left my accounts lapsed for the past two years, on discovering that I didn’t have to buy the previous expansion, I reactivated an account and started playing Mists of Pandaria. Maybe when the next expansion comes out, I’ll play Warlords of Draenor. :-)

The Surface Pro 2 handles the game just fine, although the small high-DPI display takes some getting used to, and the keyboard has a tendency to treat the “w” key as a toggle (only in this sort of game; some firmware limitation on really long keypresses, I suppose).

I still have the Asus gaming laptop I bought a few years ago, and while it’s not an everyday portable, it’s ideal for our weekend food/gaming parties. However, when I transferred the updated client over and started playing, I was reminded that load times exist. Asus shipped a nice pair of 7200 RPM drives in it, but everything starts up so slowly compared to the Surface.

So I bought a pair of Crucial MX100 512GB SSDs; I could have bought smaller ones, but $190? Sold! They even come with an Acronis license to do the data transfers.

Why the Crucial, besides the price? I’ve had a 960GB M500 in my Mac for a year and a half, and it’s been fast and trouble-free. The Amazon ratings agree.

[Update: oh, yes, that’s much nicer. Also significantly faster for video editing in Premiere]

I’m guessing that after a few more muggings, this little snowflake won’t be quite as sympathetic:

"Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as 'thugs?'" asks Friedfeld. "It's precisely this kind of 'otherization' that fuels the problem."

Police also aren't the solution to the problem, Friedfeld argues.

"If we ever want opportunistic crime to end, we should look at ourselves first. Simply amplifying police presence will not solve the issue. Police protect us by keeping those 'bad people' out of our neighborhood, and I'm grateful for it. And yet, I realize it's self-serving and doesn't actually fix anything."

Friedfeld suggests that the "privileged" adapt to normalized crime, until the wrongs of the past are righted.

I suggest to Friedfield that it will be my privilege to respond to “normalized crime” with 230-grain hollowpoints, because his blaming criminal acts on the “wrongs of the past” makes him a bigoted racist idiot.

Having no real interest in hunting down an out-of-print, limited edition handmade book containing computer printouts, I wanted an alternative to Rosalie Nelson’s set of patterns for Edo Yattsu (often written “Edo Yatsu”, which really sounds more like “Tokyo Punk” than a braiding sequence).

So I wrote a script to generate them. Except that even after finding and excluding the color inversions, I had 26 compared to her 24. I’m pretty sure she excluded the two 180° rotations that are not also color inversions. If you’re braiding directly onto a loop, you may want the alternative versions.

Large collection of pattern GIFs below the fold, using the standard Carey diagram. When I get a chance, I’ll change the script to generate PDFs as well as GIFs.

more...

There are a lot of accusations surfacing. It’s still all hearsay, and much of it is decades-old and can never be substantiated, but now that a friend of mine has come forward as a victim, I believe it to be true. I have no doubts about Victoria Valentino’s integrity.

Of course, the people who gleefully latched onto it as an excuse to undercut his advice to the black community are also despicable, just not criminal.

Upstate New York:

8.5 miles from my house:

I only felt two of the little quakes they had in San Juan Bautista over the past day, and both of them were short, sharp shocks. Generally, anything on the other side of the hills goes unfelt in my area, so it was more surprising than anything else, especially since it felt more like the pressure wave from an explosion than the usual ground effects.

Well, I suppose they’re both covers…

Found on Amazon Japan. I can’t imagine why they recommend these things to me…

Well, free 30-day trial, anyway, of the Paperwhite, the HD 7”, or the HDX 7”.

I haven’t used them myself (I kind of lost interest in Android/iOS tablets after I bought the Surface Pro 2), but I like the fact that you can download a lot of the Prime video collection for offline viewing. That would be handy.