2019 JOURNAL MAY 9th: Officially became a septuagenarian today. Jeez... JUN 11th: Helped a fellow apartment-dweller apply for a job on a broken website. Can't believe the level of access and technical ability required for a simple bar/restaurant position. But then again, this is Austin... JUN 12th: Everyone seems replete with notions of what we should or shouldn't do. I think it would be much more valuable to know what we will or won't do and to plan accordingly... JUL 5th: I have a neighbor across the commons who has a number of medical problems, not the least of which is being on dialysis. I try to keep both of us entertained by playing The Weirdo Across the Way, sometimes much to her amusement. A small nod to humanity... JUL 12th: Quite a long journey from watching a powderpuff flag football game in high school to the USWNT kicking the butts of every traditional European soccer power they encountered in the World Cup. The planets may be properly aligned for this thing to really catch on in a lucrative fashion. While the political gestures might be a slight misstep, the equal pay message should resonate nicely with the +50% of the population with XX chromosomes... AUG 1st: 39th wedding and 41st relationship anniversaries, respectively. Decided to stick with the close and familiar: peel y'own shrimp, oysters on the half shell in a month with no 'r' in it and few rounds at the latest incarnation of the Shining Moon. And a good time was had by all... AUG 10th: A balmy day in Texas with a 108F/42C heat index and still rising. Nasty, but we are somewhat prepared for it. Central air everywhere and the sense to stay in the shade or, better yet, indoors in the cool until the sun goes down... AUG 13th: I have a weird but surprisingly functional mix of technologies cobbled together here. Back in 2010 I was one of the initial beta testers for Chrome OS and have used it ever since. For almost as long, I have also used sdf.org as my terminal environment. And since Chrome OS uses the Linux kernel, I have also played around with crouton (required unsafe developers mode) and, more recently, crostini (far too big for my little ThinkPad) but now am back at sdf. I ssh in and out, back up to my Google Drive and use alt+tab like screen or tmux. And I'm having a ball... AUG 26th: Dodged a bullet today: not chosen for jury duty. They had called over 500 prospective jurors but only wound up with one case going to trial, so I skated. Did have to suffer a 50 mile round trip in morning rush hour traffic to make it to the county seat by 9AM though. But, better than having to make that run every weekday for who knows how long. Also made a whopping $6.00 for my trouble... SEP 10th: Finally figured out how to automatically generate a website that is merely directories and plain text files by using "tree". Had long known it could generate directory trees but never knew html was an optional format. It now takes me about 2 seconds to update my entire site... SEP 11th: I spent this day 18 years ago working right across the street from the US Federal Building in Austin, Texas. A building much like the one in Oklahoma City, also a state capital. And flying around somewhere on Air Force One was a US President from Texas. That day definitely sharpened the senses... SEP 14th: One interesting side effect of an all plain text site is that there isn't a single hypertext link leading anywhere externally. What little html there is is all generated automatically by tree and apache. Somewhat of a neolithic cul de sac... SEP 20th: Spent two days importing and configuring. This included converting The Jacksonian Tradition by Walter Russell Mead from pdf to plain text and culling through almost 2000 comments on Metafilter extending back over a decade. Don't ask... SEP 30th: Walmart Great Value Vanilla Wafers are exactly like the baked disks you found inserted into your elementary school banana pudding, which of course makes them perfect... OCT 3rd: Another glut of imports, the classic nethack 3.4.3 spoilers. A bit out of date but still an important resource I like to have available. Left out the stuff on variants and compiling your own though. Also reorganized the directory structure some and reworked the welcome.txt to be a bit simpler and reflect the changes... OCT 9th: For anyone who might be interested, here is the tree command I run to generate a new index.html file in the website root directory: tree -P *.txt -FC -H http://every.sdf.org -T 'plain text' -o index.html OCT 12th: "No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor." -- Theodore Roosevelt OCT 28th: "Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence." -- John Kenneth Galbraith NOV 14th: Karen and I have been involved in The November Nethack Tournament this month on hardfought.org. She is a lot more dedicated about it than me. I play slowly and often become bored with a game. We cryptically named our clan The Elder Ones... NOV 15th: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." -- Antoine de Saint Exupery NOV 19th: "As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron." -- H.L. Mencken (1920) DEC 11th: KMFA is serving up the double-dose of a fund raiser paired with seasonal holiday music. This too shall pass... DEC 23rd: Back on gopher. The combination of treating myself to a buggy MetaARPA membership upgrade and the mysterious swapping around of servers as an Xmas surprise has left my website dead and unreachable. Should the mess ever get fixed I'll probably just leave a stub that redirects to gopher. Good ole reliable, simple as a worm, always there for three decades gopher. Apparently I'm home for the holidays... DEC 25th: An interesting holiday. Sdf managed to get most of the kinks out but too late for me. I've decided to stick with gopher. It's too simple and functional to ignore. And in the spirit of The Christmas Story, we went and ate Chinese this evening. The place was packed and the staff, top to bottom, were hopping. Even the owner/manager was bussing tables and filling glasses. Had to be their biggest day of the year. And fascinating to watch... DEC 31st: Hats & horns and maybe some football but definitely no driving on Amateur Night... every@ma.sdf.org